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Mountain News: Colorado summer business expanding

TELLURIDE, Colo.— It was another big summer in ski towns of Colorado. Telluride, along with Aspen, Breckenridge and Vail, gathered record retail sales-tax revenues, according to The Denver Post.
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TELLURIDE, Colo.— It was another big summer in ski towns of Colorado. Telluride, along with Aspen, Breckenridge and Vail, gathered record retail sales-tax revenues, according to The Denver Post. Winter Park and Steamboat Springs had their best summers in revenue collection since 2007 and 2008.

The broader story is that business activity, as reflected in sales tax collections, remains more or less flat during winter months. The big gains have been in summer, beginning about three years ago. Shoulder seasons have also grown.

"We are going to try to continue to push people into our shoulder seasons," explained John Warner, mayor of Breckenridge. Breckenridge has done that on a formerly torpid weekend in early October by hosting a new event that drew 800 people to sip the products of various distilleries.

Telluride had a 10 per cent gain this summer, but still had only 50 per cent lodging occupancy, a 2.7 per cent increase over last year.

The Telluride Daily Planet notes that town officials estimate that a 2.7 per cent occupancy increase equals about $685,000 in spending.

Lodging represents about 34 per cent of what people spend on a trip to Telluride, restaurants 40 per cent, and retail and other is 26 per cent.

Hunters take aim

JACKSON, Wyo. — Wolves have been much in the news in Wyoming recently, as they have taken bullets from hunters.

Hunters killed five wolves northwest of Cody that had probably come from the celebrated pack in Yellowstone National Park's Lamar Valley. Others were killed after crossing into Montana.

The wolves had become familiar to a great many of the clan of people called wolf-watchers. In spring and fall, but even during winter, the valley's narrow two-lane highway is often clotted with people, sometimes scores of them, both young and old, men and women. For many, trying to catch sight of the wolves has become part of their annual calendar.

This went down hard enough among wolf lovers. But then came a story from Jackson about a hunter who had parked his SUV outside the Cowboy Bar, a dead wolf strapped to its roof. The hunter insisted that he wasn't trying to show off his kill. His wife just happened to need to go shopping in the stores along the town square, he said.

The hunter further said that he had shot the female black wolf south of Jackson Hole, at Bondurant. Although the wolf retains protected status in some locations of the United States, in Wyoming the wolf can be shot during about half the year in 85 per cent of the state.

Individuals were outraged. The famed wildlife photographer Thomas D. Mangelsen had a column in the The Jackson Hole News&Guide the next week. He called the town square showing a "cowardly display," and added: "We must gather those from all constituencies who will no longer tolerate such hate and arrogance on the streets of Jackson or anywhere else."

He also noted that the guide for the hunter — who had alerted the News&Guide to the parked SUV in the town square — had had his outfitting license revoked some years back for poaching a bald eagle because it was eating trout in his pond.

Columnist Todd Wilkinson used even sharper language while examining what he described as loutish bragging on the part of wolf killers. For example in a Facebook posting, some had donned white sheets that looked ominously similar to the sheets of the racist group KKK as they posed with a dead wolf and clutched an American flag.

"Bragging on social media, they attracted swarms of kindred hate- and expletive-filled rants (punctuated by poor grammar), directed threateningly at the federal government, environmentalists and wolf-loving tourists," he writes. "Implicit were vows that more wolves would be killed by vigilantes."

Wilkinson cited other instances of thuggishness of wolf haters, and added: "Let's be clear: this is not how real sportsmen act. Nor does it reflect the spirit of ethical hunting in which wildlife is respected and valued, a lesson taught to our children who are required to take state hunter safety classes."

Distressed properties now seldom seen

JACKSON, Wyo. — The great real estate distress has ended, reports David Viehman, a real-estate agent and appraiser who documents the real estate market in Teton County, otherwise called Jackson Hole.

The Jackson Hole News&Guide reports that Viehman issued an e-mail announcement that "distressed properties in Jackson Hole are now non-existent in most segments of our market and less than two per cent in the rest."

The News&Guide found one real-estate agent eager to dispute that observation, but the bulk of evidence it scrounged from public records seemed to buttress Viehman's claim.

Meanwhile, in Colorado, construction activity in Summit County has picked up, reports Steve Lipsher in The Denver Post. But while that's good for the economy, he said, there is plenty of flipside to resumed boom times. Among the problems: lack of affordable housing.

In other words, the story line in mountain towns is looking far more familiar these days.

Snowmaking efficiency helps save energy

VAIL, Colo. — The snow guns have fired up at both Vail and Beaver Creek, but this year they're doing so with the need for less electricity. Older compressors have been switched out, with a net annual savings that are equivalent to the annual electrical consumption of 300 U.S. homes.

The saved energy will, of course, save money for Vail Resorts. But the savings also fit in with the targets announced in 2008 by Rob Katz, the corporation's chief executive. He said he wanted companywide savings of 10 per cent.

That target was achieved in early 2012. In shooting for another 10 per cent savings, Vail Resorts is examining ways to improve snowmaking, increase building automation, and invest in free cooling and LED lighting upgrades.

Eating local beef or eat grass-fed beef?

CRESTED BUTTE, Colo. — Ah, the menu choices. Schools in Crested Butte and Gunnison decided to offer lunches made of local food last year. In fact, with two seasons — winter and the Fourth of July, as the old saying goes — agriculture in the Gunnison Country is limited largely to production of beef.

And so, last year, students got one meal a month of beef that began as heifers romping around local meadows, then finished off on a diet of corn at a feedlot some place.

This year, according to the Crested Butte News, the winning bid isn't local, but rather a company based near Denver. Not so local, but the company does offer grass-fed beef, along with a variety of other food products from Colorado.

The point of the story? It's probably that in trying to eat right and eat local, it's not always easy to do both. Especially if you live in high-mountain valleys.

High-speed connectivity sought

KETCHUM, Idaho — In the context of the West, Ketchum is an old town, with roots in the mining era of the 1880s. Below the streets and buildings is a network of water and sewer pipes. It once was served by a railroad, which is why it was the Union Pacific in the 1930s that made it the first deliberately planned destination ski resort in North America.

The railroad is now long gone, and Ketchum is now weaving plastic pipe through its downtown subterranean to ensure its share in the 21st century economy. Ketchum chose Magellan, a broadband consulting company, to help figure out how to create the infrastructure for Internet connectivity. It did so by piggybacking on other infrastructure work.

The importance? Nina Jonas, a member of the city council and a committee formed to investigate broadband connectivity, told the Idaho Mountain Express that it's a matter of economic development — and survival.

"The cost of living in this community can only be managed with higher-paying jobs," she said. "That can only happen with location-independent jobs. We have to be able to have what high-tech jobs really need to succeed here. This is an opportunity to succeed and create jobs for younger people."

Ultimately, she said, the city hopes to lower infrastructure costs for Internet providers, driving down prices and making Ketchum more competitive with other locations.

Software aimed at under-the-radar rentals

PARK CITY, Utah – Officials in Park City are looking into software that seeks to catch homeowners who illegally rent their homes for short terms. The software examines properties advertised online, identifying those that are not compliant with the city's building codes applicable to short-term rentals.

In an interview with the Park Record, the city's economic development project manager, Jason Glidden, justified the investigation as a need to ensure safety. But to be certified for business licenses, the homeowners would need inspections and pay fees.

Depositions indicate a frantic spring weekend

PARK CITY, Utah — It was a weekend of terror in Park City in spring 2011, according to depositions taken in the messy lawsuit between Powdr Corp. and Talisker.

Powdr operates Park City Mountain Resort on land leased from Talisker, which owns a competing ski area, Canyon Resort.

But did Powdr forget to renew its lease? That's the damning evidence described in the depositions. Those depositions offered by Talisker say that Powdr Corp was readying to refinance a loan and wanted to use the lease as collateral. Only then did somebody realize that the leases for the land — on which the Park City Mountain Resort operates — would expire the next day.

"That realization precipitated a frantic weekend of activity," says the court filing of the legal firm representing Talisker. A lawyer for Powdr took the first flight from Los Angeles to Salt Lake City on a Sunday morning and then scrounged desperately to find the leases, finally discovering them in a corner of a desk drawer belonging to a former employee.

And so Powdr missed its deadline and Talisker had, according to its side of the story, the right to evict the Park City Mountain Resort. It has served eviction papers, but said that it doesn't intend to disrupt skiing operations there in the year ahead.

Is Talisker's side of the story correct? Not according to Powdr Corp. whose lead attorney told the Park Record that Talisker had provided "very selected samples" from the depositions.

Coyote gets snoot full of dressing

BANFF, Alberta — Salad dressing was the draw for a coyote which stuck its head in a large plastic bucket at the Banff recycling depot. Then, it couldn't get its head out.

The Rocky Mountain Outlook reports that a resource conservation officer used a pair of snips — a cross between scissors and a knife — to open the plastic container to allow the coyote to escape its prison. The canine took shelter amid other recycling debris and then scampered off.