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Mountain News: Granby still living with Marv’s rampage

By Allen Best GRANBY, Colo.

By Allen Best

GRANBY, Colo. – It’s been more than three years since Marvin Heemeyer drove a bulldozer from the muffler shop he owned, the driver’s seat concealed in a fortress of concrete and steel, guns protruding, and proceeded to terrorize Granby for the better part of an afternoon.

Heemeyer damaged or gutted 13 buildings during what instantly was labeled a “rampage” before his contraption stalled in the partially crumbled basement of a Gambles store. There, his behemoth smoking, he turned the gun on himself, taking no questions as to why.

A taped recording that had been mailed beforehand answered some of the questions. Heemeyer had felt wronged in a zoning dispute. He believed the town had incorrectly permitted a neighbouring landowner to erect a noisy, dusty batch plant for gravel operations.

Among those sent fleeing for their lives that afternoon in 2004 was Patrick Brower, editor and publisher of the Sky-Hi News. Heemeyer’s grunting bulldozer crashed into the newspaper office only moments after Brower and another editor from nearby Winter Park fled out the back door.

Brower says that Granby has recovered physically. He admits that Granby needed a touching up. It now has a brand new town hall and library, both bigger and better than what preceded them. The commercial buildings are mostly rebuilt.

But a legacy of sourness lingers, he says. Somebody with a project before the planning commission or town board will take umbrage at the first sign of evaluation. “Now I know how Marv felt,” they may say. Or, “Don’t make me pull another Marv.” And, “Maybe Marv wasn’t so crazy after all.”

Brower says government should not roll over and play dead. Small-town government is not “oppressive.” Town government, he says, had given Heemeyer some, but not all, of what he asked. Heemeyer was not wronged — merely wrong.

“I hope people will think twice in the future about invoking Marv’s legacy of recklessness and costly revenge all in the name of pride and anger.”

End of story?

No. The next week the newspaper published a letter from Lenny Brooks “and everyone else that is sick of your tirade.” Like Heemeyer, Brooks lives in nearby Grand Lake at the entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park. He claims everyone he has talked with agrees that, had they walked in Heemeyer’s shoes, they, too, would have felt wronged.

“Everyone has limits, and when you’re pushed into a corner, you fight. Everyone fights with the weapons at hand,” he says.

“The law is not always black and white,” he adds. “Abuse of power can be subtle.”

But Brooks then concedes that Heemeyer was somehow different. He suggests that town officials should have realized they were dealing with a “perhaps unstable and passionate man, who had nothing left to lose.”

 

California skier numbers down

LAKE TAHOE, Calif. – Skier numbers in California ended the season 20 per cent down from the previous years. More than half of California’s 6.2 million skiers this year were recorded in the Lake Tahoe area.

“This was not a good year, as you can well understand,” said Bob Roberts, executive of the California Ski Industry Association. “It happens. If it happens three times in a row, call me. This is all attributable to the snow conditions.”

For several years Roberts has said the ski industry must address global warming. Still, in an interview with the Tahoe Daily Tribune, he seemed unwilling to pin blame on this winter’s warm weather on global warming.

A similar response was elicited by the newspaper from Carl Ribaudo, director of Ski Lake Tahoe, a marketing association of seven of the largest ski resorts in the Tahoe-Truckee region.

“It was a pretty soft season, obviously weather related,” he said. “But whether it’s a single event or part of a pattern, we’ll have to take a look at the longer term.”

 

Grizzly family killed by train

BANFF, Alberta – Three grizzly bears — a 12- to 15-year-old sow and her two yearling cubs — have died near Banff after the mother was killed by a train. The two cubs survived, although at least one had also been hit, but later died.

“There’s nothing more heart-wrenching than 100 metres of guts and gravel between the rails,” said Jim Pissot, the executive director of Defenders of Wildlife Canada. “I was just heartsick once again.”

The Rocky Mountain Outlook explains that 12 grizzlies have been killed by Canadian Pacific Railways trains in Banff National Park since 2000. The total population in Canada’s flagship national park is estimated at 50 to 60.

Wildlife advocates like Pissot say the railroad allows grains of corn to spill from the passing trains, drawing the grizzly bears. In response, the railroad has been vacuuming the tracks to remove the corn, spending $20 million to improve equipment. It’s apparently not enough.

“Even a diligent vacuuming of the tracks still leaves enough grain to attract bears, including grain that has fallen into the ballast and is either sprouting or fermenting and attracting bears,” Pissot told the newspaper.

Something similar happened in 2005 when a grizzly sow was killed by a train near Banff. Two of her three orphaned cubs were later struck and killed by cars on the Trans-Canada Highway.

But it’s not all ghastly news from The Canadian Rockies. The Outlook also tells the story of three black bear cubs that have been hitching rides on trains through Yoho National Park. The bears were similarly drawn to the easy meal of grain. But the bears haven’t been seen in recent weeks, and their fate is unknown.

 

Food & Wine ain’t cheap

ASPEN, Colo. – The success of Aspen’s Food & Wine Magazine Classic is reflected in these simple facts. Although the attendance has been capped since 1995 at 5,000 people, with ticket prices this year costing roughly $1,000, organizers this year scheduled a reserve tasting of Screaming Eagle wines on a Friday morning. Even at an extra $750, it sold out quickly.

The Aspen Times explains that the event began in 1983 as a wine-tasting festival. It drew 300 people. Food & Wind Magazine began running it in 1986, changing it from a wine-tasting event into a full-on foodie smorgasbord. The festival hit its stride in 1990 when Julia Child was the featured speaker. In 1995, The New York Times called it the “granddaddy of them all,” and the next year the festival sold out for the first time.

As everything this year, the festival had green edges to it, says the Times. Some tents this year used compostable plates and glasses. Also, organizers set a goal of raising $1 million for Farm to Table, an organization that supports local farmers and sustainable practices.

Telluride’s Mountainfilm Festival also had an eat-local angle this year, with a lunch using locally produced food items. The most distant source for a food item, bison meat, was Hotchkiss, 91.5 miles away. American food travels an average of 2,000 miles from farm to table.

 

Ogden as centre of extremists?

OGDEN, Utah – Is Ogden, Utah, located along the Wasatch Front about 30 miles north of Salt Lake City, the coming centre for extreme sports? The New York Times dangles that proposition.

The best evidence is that Jeff Lowe, once one of the world’s top mountaineers, has returned to Ogden after 30 years in Boulder. He has established a series of climbing routes using bolted ladder rungs, and is now planning a tower of ice — suspended from steel cables — to be used for ice climbing .

The 2002 Olympic downhills were held in the Wasatch Range to the east, and now several ski companies have established operations in Ogden. Another plan is to build a gondola from Ogden to a proposed ski and resort community in the Wasatch Range.

The Times says Ogden’s commitment to outdoor recreation and adventure-based economy — coupled with low prices — is attracting young professionals. The average price of a three-bedroom home runs $160,000. Among those buyers is graphic designer, Delanie Hill, 32, formerly of Jackson Hole. “I can’t afford to live in Jackson,” she said, “but I can here.”

It’s not all boom and bustle. The newspaper describes still-empty buildings and a handful of dank bars. Such things, says Lowe, keep Ogden from being “too cool.”

 

Restrictions on offices protested

CRESTED BUTTE, Colo. – The town council in Crested Butte is still getting plenty of kick from people who don’t like the proposed zoning that would restrict new real-estate and other such offices from ground-floor along the town’s main tourist-oriented business strip, called Elk Avenue.

Existing uses would be grandfathered, explains the Crested Butte News.

Crested Butte officials are worried about a sluggish retail environment, which results in fewer sales and hence fewer sales tax revenues, the primary sources for municipal operations in Colorado.

“To tell people you can’t rent to a real-estate office — I think that’s so terribly unrealistic and unfair to dictate to the people that have invested in this community,” said Judy McGill, a property owner on the strip, called Elk Avenue. A business owner on the strip, Steven Ein, said restricting the use might decrease the value of property by 10 to 30 per cent.

Another speaker, Gordon Reeves, wondered at the logic that assumes a real estate office is bad and a medical office is good.

Mayor Alan Bernholtz said the issue is one of balance. Real estate offices currently represent an imbalance on the street.

Reeves said the ordinances treat a symptom rather than the ailment. “We don’t have a viable tourism industry. If you want to cure what’s going on downtown, bring more people here,” he said.

Similar zoning is nothing new in ski towns. Vail adopted the zoning 34 years ago and has never looked back.

 

‘Second homers’ they are

REHOBOTH BEACH, Del. – A simpler phrase has long been needed. They have been called second-home owners and, more commonly if ungrammatically, second homeowners.

In some places they are weekenders, in other places part-timers. For those with residencies fully divided, they can be called splitters.

Legalistically, they are called non-resident property owners.

In a story about all of the above, The New York Times adopts a simpler label: second homers.

The story is based in a Delaware resort, Rehoboth Beach, where the second homers make up three-quarters of the population. The town, says the Times, is among the few municipalities in the nation that explicitly permits both second homers and renters to vote and hold office.

It does have a ring to it, this expression of “second homers.”

 

Telluride thick with physicists

TELLURIDE, Colo. – Aspen would seem to have the franchise on both Nobel laureates and physicists strolling around town. But, at least for this week, Telluride is holding its own.

Some 180 physicists, three Nobel Prize-winners among them, were scheduled to be in town for the 18 th International Conference on Laser Spectroscopy. Previous meetings of the group have been held in Jasper, Vail and Jackson Hole.

An article in The Telluride Watch notes a long association between physicists and mountains. For example, the creation of quantum mechanics in 1927 is attributed to Werner Heisenberg’s walks in the mountains, his way of escaping hectic city life to find time for contemplation. For his discovery, he earned the Nobel Prize in physics in 1932.

This week in Telluride, quite a lot of attention will be given to the new, quantum-based generation of supercomputers. At present, the world has two quantum computers: one in Boulder, Colo. and the other in Innsbruck, Austria.

 

I-70 transit cannot wait

I-70 CORRIDOR, Colo. – Russell George, who took over as director of the Colorado Department of Transportation this year, seems to be carving a new path for Interstate 70.

While George’s predecessor, Tom Norton, had talked about mass transit in the congested corridor being perhaps 30 years away, George is talking as though it’s the solution now. “The future for transportation in Colorado,” he said at a conference in Glenwood Springs, is “more than a highway.”

Although the funding source is unknown, “we have to have an honest-to-God irrevocable start on the transit piece. I don’t think we can afford not to,” George said.

State transportation planners have talked about a rail-based bus guideway system, but ruled out other forms of rail-based transportation, including kinds that are found in Switzerland as well as futuristic monorail systems, as intolerably expensive.

Earlier this year, George announced that he was postponing release of the programmatic environmental statement, which has been in the making since 1999. He said six extra months will be needed to revamp the study to give rail-based transit options a fair shake in the eyes of residents along the corridor in the mountain communities.

Among those communities are Summit County, Vail, and the Eagle Valley.

The conference, reported the Glenwood Post Independent, had the twin themes of the concept called peak oil, in which it is believed that oil supplies have or will soon begin to decline, and global warming.

The present time, George said, is a “moment of challenge” to find creative solutions to forge a new energy economy less dependent on carbon-emitting cars.

But while that future looks uncertain, so does the source of money to create the new transportation infrastructure, he said. In that, George and his predecessor do not disagree.

George lives in Rifle, where he once was a water attorney and Republican legislator, while commuting to Denver, about 200 miles away. Along the way, he passes through the Eagle Valley and Vail. There, officials have been contemplating for some time the potential for a valley railroad.

Transportation officials are talking about local railroad service in the Eagle to Vail area being implemented no sooner than 2030, when Eagle County’s population is projected to reach 87,000. That does not include 30,000 people commuting on a daily basis to jobs in the county. In 2000, there were only 1,000 commuters.

The Vail Daily explains that officials from the various towns in the Eagle Valley are discussing the creation of pedestrian-oriented communities. Avon, at the foot of Beaver Creek, is putting together such a plan as it begins plotting its redevelopment.

 

Kayaker loses boat

SILVERTON, Colo. – A happy ending was reported in Silverton after an 18-year-old kayaker lost his boat in No Name Rapid on the Animas River. The man, Will Gordon, hiked 11 miles back up the rugged canyon and eventually to a motel in Silverton. Searchers had been beckoned when the man’s passenger-less boat was noticed sailing down the river. Butch Knowlton, the search leader, told the Durango Telegraph that the rapids in the canyon are “fast, turbulent and unforgiving. If you get into trouble, it is a difficult stretch to swim and survive, and a problematical area to search.”

 

Tougher cans required

MT. CRESTED BUTTE, Colo. – Town officials in Mt. Crested Butte, the slope-side resort town, have adopted a law that mandates wildlife-resistant refuse containers for storage of trash that is not kept inside until the day of trash pickup. Increasing problems with bears have been reported during the last several years.

Nearby Crested Butte, the old mining town, took similar action within the last year. After first requiring resistant containers, towns in the Aspen and Vail areas have upped the ante to the more expensive and sturdy wildlife-proof containers.

 

Market incentive for builders

TELLURIDE, Colo. – Telluride’s town government has taken to using the leverage of free-market real estate to reduce the cost of affordable housing. The Telluride Watch explains that in the case of an 18-unit employee housing project, one unit is being sold at free-market rates, reducing the town’s subsidy for the project by 15 per cent.

 

Pellet plant may lower beetle-kill costs

KREMMLING, Colo. – A plant in Kremmling to process wood into pellets for stoves is moving through the approval process. The Summit Daily News says the $7 million plant is to produce enough pellets to meet the heating needs of 30,000 to 40,000 homes.

The plant will also supply a local market for beetle-killed trees in the Grand Lake, Winter Park, and Summit County areas, which are all located about an hour from Kremmling.

For example, without a local market, tree removal near the new hospital in Summit County cost $1,500 to $1,600 per acre. With a local market for the wood, explains the Summit Daily, the price might have been $500 to $600 per acre.

 

Wolves den near Sun Valley

KETCHUM, Idaho – Biologists have verified the presence of a den established by a breeding pair of wolves in the Wood River Valley. The den is located somewhere south of Galena Summit, or within 30 miles of Ketchum and Sun Valley. The Idaho Mountain Express says local residents have seen both grey- and black-phase wolves. The only immediate effect of the wolves is that a livestock producer has delayed putting sheep on the national forest allotment in that area.

 

Grand County to get first true daily paper

GRANBY, Colo. – Now that the Swift newspaper chain owns the newspapers in the Winter Park-Granby-Kremmling area, what plans do they have?

It’s time for a free-circulation daily newspaper, to be supplemented by a paid-circulation weekly. Or so says an advertisement published in the Eagle Valley Enterprise in soliciting an editor for the new daily.

Does this mean the end of the road for the Middle Park Times, which has been published since 1882? Or the Sky-Hi News, which once proclaimed to serve “God’s country, and his majesty the tourist.” And the Winter Park Manifest, which was founded in 1977 and demands a “lousy dime” for purchase.

In addition to the three weekly papers, all published in mid-week, the previous ownership group published a daily that, in fact, came out only twice a week.

 

Telluride Watch expands regionally and technically

TELLURIDE, Colo. – The Telluride Watch is flexing its muscle. The newspaper opened a bureau on the east side of Dallas Divide last summer, at the town of Ridgway, and last winter began publishing a newspaper called the Ouray County Watch.

“We think that the Western San Juans are functioning more and more like a region, and that the trend will continue,” said publisher Seth Cagin. There is more and more traffic between the towns of Ouray, Ridgway and Telluride, and “we have more and more in common.”

The newspaper has also jumped with both feet into more advanced Internet services. It is posting stories daily, and also offering free classified advertising on the website. Advertisers are urged to supplement that free advertising with a paid advertisement in the printed newspaper.