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Mountain News: Fresh snow putting butts in beds

ASPEN, Colo. - With the snows finally arriving, bookings in Aspen have been picking up. It's still not going to be a traditional Aspen Christmas, with nary a spare bed to be found.

ASPEN, Colo. - With the snows finally arriving, bookings in Aspen have been picking up. It's still not going to be a traditional Aspen Christmas, with nary a spare bed to be found. But lodging occupancy should surpass 80 per cent during Christmas week, experts tell the Aspen Times.

A couple of months ago, 80 per cent occupancy was "looking like a distant fantasy," said Bill Tomcich, the president of Stay Aspen Snowmass, a reservations agency. He credited the uptick to lots of swell deals on lodging but also that traditional marketing genius: snow.

Vail Resorts last week had less encouraging news. Advance bookings for the season at its five resorts were down 13 per cent through November. However, sales of season passes were up 11 per cent.

 

Telluride hopes attract Euros

TELLURIDE, Colo. - Telluride ski area continues to see dividends ahead for its latest investment in the adventure component of the skiing market. Its Palmyra Peak and Revelation Bowl additions of recent years have plenty of that outback, big bowl skiing.

"While not all skiers can ski that terrain, they may aspire to ski it, and it has that sex appeal people like to see in adventure vacations," said Dave Riley, chief executive of the Telluride Ski & Golf.

"There's an old saying in the ski business: 'It takes about three years before people realize you've built a new lift.'" He predicts that Europeans and Australians will be flocking to Telluride once they recognize its new skiing dimensions.

 

Ski towns tighten carbon belts

REVELSTOKE, B.C. - Ski towns across the North American West continue to plot their strategies for tightening their carbon belts.

Revelstoke, B.C., which was the focus of a spread about ski resorts in the Sunday New York Times, plans to meet in February to hash out targets for reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and strategies for achieving it. Any reductions will necessarily come at the expense of cars and trucks, notes the Revelstoke Times Review , as two-thirds of greenhouse gas emissions come from road transportation. Another quarter of pollutants are produced by heating, cooling, or electrifying buildings.

In Wyoming, town officials in Jackson are hoping to secure $10 million in grants as seed money for their plans to introduce energy efficiency on a neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood basis.

The town and county had committed to carbon reduction in 2006, but had contained efforts to government operations, such as police cars and sewer plants.

"We're going into uncharted waters," said Wendy Koelfgen, energy affairs coordinator for the Town of Jackson and Teton County. "There just isn't any cookie-cutter model out there for this kind of thing."

Koelfgen told the Jackson Hole News & Guide that town officials hope to get 80 per cent of the property owners in each targeted neighbourhood to participate.

Did he or didn't he cave?

FRISCO, Colo. - Undisputed in the fray revolving around the Summit Daily News is that Vail Resorts was unhappy with what former reporter Bob Berwyn wrote in a Nov. 19 column. The question is whether the newspaper caved into pressure from the company.

The story begins in October, when the Front Range of Colorado was hit by an extremely hard snowstorm. As reporter Berwyn, in a column published in the Nov. 19 issue of the Summit Daily News, told the story, an industry PR person (not specifically identified with Vail Resorts) posed on the Weather Channel just west of Denver in the furious snowstorm - but made no mention that in Keystone and Breckenridge, on the other side of the Continental Divide, it was mild and dry.

However, elsewhere in the column he did mention Broomfield - the suburb of Boulder, Colo., that is headquarters for Vail Resorts Inc.

Berwyn ended the column this way: "I sometimes wonder whether the ski industry wouldn't benefit more from being completely transparent about weather and snowfall with its customers, but when snow=money, perhaps that's expecting too much."

This is a decades-old complaint and it might well have blended in with all the others - except that Rob Katz, the chief executive of Vail Resorts called the newspaper to complain. And, says Berwyn, Vail Resorts threatened to remove its advertising from the newspaper - a point that is disputed by the company.

What happened next is also disputed and it might have been ignored - except that Susan Greene, a columnist for The Denver Post , wrote a column about the affair, calling the newspaper "spineless."

Berwyn told her that he was instructed by the newspaper's publisher, Jim Morgan, to "grovel."

Morgan, the publisher, says not true. "The Summit Daily News , at least so far as I know in my six-year tenure, has never terminated an employee over a column or a story - and never will. We have, in fact, many, many times defended our writers in the face of significant pressure."

In that column, he did not directly address the alleged command to "grovel," but strongly suggests a broader context. He wrote that Berwyn's firing was due to "circumstances symptomatic of a pattern of behavior documented in reviews over the course of time... That's what occurred here."

"In the great scheme of things, the column in question (about weather) was actually somewhat benign. Threatening to cancel ads is often the way advertisers flex some muscle and make a point. That sort of thing happens with big advertisers and smaller advertisers, frankly, all the time. It's part of the business we're in. Interestingly, we've had advertisers now threaten to cancel ads because of Greene's column."

All this may be true, but one of the anonymous bloggers on the Denver Post website identified only as RickyVail1 seems to believe that Morgan's column missed a key point:

"If Bob had NOT written that column and somehow attracted Vail's inexplicable ire, would he still have his job? No question. You don't fire your most productive, most established and most dependable reporter unless someone like your biggest advertiser comes whining that they weren't held up as the paragon of light."

So, who's telling the full truth here? What was said before and after the "grovel" statement?

We don't know. There may be more to the story. But in no way does Vail Resorts look good and the newspaper doesn't look much better.

 

Lot more shakin' goin' on

GUNNISON, Colo. - Some residents of Gunnison are girding for another summer of disruption. Last year Boeing arrived to test a hybrid helicopter called the Osprey in the thin air of almost 8,000 feet. Another summer of testing is expected, with a payoff of $250,000 into the local economy, reports the Crested Butte News.

Not everybody is pleased. Don Janney spoke at a recent meeting, and he said testing of the aircraft was annoying. It was the vibration, not the noise. "We are being shaken up and disturbed," Janney said.

 

Mammoth talks biomass

MAMMOTH LAKES, Calif. - People in Mammoth Lakes have begun to talk about whether wood from the surrounding forests can be used to create a biomass plant, for heating and potentially the production of electrification. The Sheet notes that the talk is just that, with the next step being a feasibility study.

As was noted in Mammoth Lakes, the key to biomass is securing a long-term supply or at least 20 to 30 years, to justify the capital investment of equipment. A bill introduced by U.S. Sen. Mark Udall of Colorado and U.S. Senator James McClure of Idaho proposes to make it easier for the U.S. Forest Service to offer long-term stewardship contracts.

 

Bear given a death sentence

INCLINE VILLAGE, Nev.-Wildlife officials in Incline Village, located on the north side of Lake Tahoe, continue to look for a 700-pound black bear that they say has caused $70,000 of destruction in the last three years.

The bear, reports the Sierra Sun, has become expert at breaking into garages in pursuit of food. Wildlife officials fear that someday a homeowner will walk into the garage, the bear will feel cornered and will attack the person.

The wildlife officials believe it's impossible to find a sanctuary for the bear, and so they believe their only recourse is to kill the animal. Not everybody agrees, notes the newspaper, even those whose quarters have been pillaged by the bruin.

 

Bison transplant inspires hope

BANFF, Alberta  - Wildlife officials in the Mexican state of Chihuahua recently transplanted 23 genetically pure bison from South Dakota. And if the Mexicans, with not the best of resources, can accomplish that, why can't the same be done in Banff National Park?

That was the question in Banff, where Parks Canada, the agency that administers the national park, had been considering a plan to reintroduce bison. It could be one of several reintroductions in North America, notes the Rocky Mountain Outlook. Other reintroduction efforts are underway in Iowa and Kansas.

Chihuahua had not had bison since the late 19 th century, the same as for most of the rest of North America. The species once numbered in the millions. When the explorer John C. Fremont returned from one of his trips to California in the 1840s, he described following buffalo trails through what is now Colorado's Summit County.

The herd, from the Wind Cave National Park, located in South Dakota, is considered especially valuable, as the animals come from a genetically pure strain of bison, because they have not been bred with cattle. As such, they are free of brucellosis and tuberculosis.

 

Wolf count down in Four Corners

DURANGO, Colo. - Will the Mexico wolf someday resume loping in the canyons and mesas adjacent to the San Juan Mountains of Colorado? That was a distinct possibility some time ago, when reintroduction efforts began in 1998. But the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had expected 102 wolves to be living in New Mexico and Arizona by now, and only half that many do. However, the Durango Telegraph reports that recently the federal government has taken new steps that improve the odds that Mexican gray wolves will increase their populations and expand into other areas.

 

T'ride told to butt out

TELLURIDE, Colo. - Although an old mining town, Telluride has little to no deposits of uranium. West of Telluride about an hour, in the Paradox Valley, the story is very different.

There, on the road to Moab, Utah, itself a uranium boomtown in the 1950s, an energy company wants to build a uranium-processing mill. It has a conditional approval from the Montrose County commissioners.

Uranium hasn't necessarily treated residents of Naturita and Nucla, located west of Telluride, kindly. Many suffered lung cancer and other illnesses resulting from radioactive exposure. Still, in hearings before public officials, residents of the two towns expressed their support - and, notes the Telluride Daily Planet, essentially told Telluride residents who had showed up in opposition to "butt out." Unlike Telluride, they said, they needed some good-paying jobs for a change.