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Mountain News: Intrawest investments welcomed in Steamboat

STEAMBOAT SPRINGS, Colo. – Ten months after the Steamboat ski area was purchased by Intrawest and its corporate parent, Fortress, things are going swimmingly, says the Steamboat Pilot & Today.

STEAMBOAT SPRINGS, Colo. – Ten months after the Steamboat ski area was purchased by Intrawest and its corporate parent, Fortress, things are going swimmingly, says the Steamboat Pilot & Today.

“We think Intrawest’s first 10 months of ownership paint a rather rosy picture for the future of the ski area,” said the paper. “For years, the biggest complaint about (former owner) American Skiing Co. was that it didn’t have the capital to invest in the ski area. While other ski resorts made significant on-mountain improvements, Steamboat got by with Band-Aids.”

Intrawest has invested $16 million in upgrades, including many such to-dos as a new gondola haul rope. That investment, in turn, has triggered new base-area development.

Plans are moving ahead for one million square-feet of redevelopment at Ski Time Square and Thunderhead Lodge, a 1970s-style component of the base area. The plans “represent the kind of investment developers are making in Steamboat’s base area — long considered the resort’s Achilles heel,” says the newspaper.

 

New jets will fly in spring

DENVER, Colo. – The new chief executive officer of Frontier Airlines is now saying that it will be March or April before it can begin flying its new Bombardier Q400 turboprop planes to Aspen, Jackson Hole, and Ketchum.

The Denver-based company last year created a new subsidiary, called Lynx Aviation, with the goal of expanding service to the smaller markets, many of them resort areas, from Denver. Among the other markets expected to be serviced by the new planes are Eagle County/Vail, Montrose/Telluride, and Yampa Valley/Steamboat.

The Q-400 is one-third more energy efficient, allowing costs to be discounted. Even in Aspen, that discount is considered a major plus for tourism. As well, Ketchum is eagerly awaiting the link to Denver, with the expectation it will make Sun Valley a more attractive destination for people in the East.

 

December to remember in Colorado

TELLURIDE, Colo. – If not necessarily a record, it was a December to remember in Telluride, Aspen and a lot of other mountain towns.

The Telluride Ski Resort reported 82 inches, which it claimed was the largest in the ski area history. Operations there date to 1973.

There were some doubts as to the accuracy of that report, said The Telluride Watch, although there were no doubts that the snowfall gave the previous December of record, 1983, a run for its money.

A new record was also established atop the Snowmass ski area, where the 119 inches of snowfall edged the 117 inches recorded in December 1983. That’s three times the average.

Aspen Skiing Co. playfully called it DEEPcember, because of the prodigious powder. However, on Aspen Mountain, the snowfall was just shy of the 1983 record.

At the Steamboat ski area, the 126 inches was the third highest total in the ski area’s 46 years of operations. However, that fell far short of the 165.5 inches that fell in 1983, reports The Steamboat Pilot.

What to make of all this snow — besides fun? Jim Markalunas, an Aspen native who has been measuring temperatures and snowfalls since 1951, says don’t assume more of the same. “One month doesn’t make a trend,” he tells The Aspen Times. He recalls that the 72 inches that fell at the municipal water plant in December 1983 was followed in January by a miserly 10 inches.

 

‘Sustainable’ better than ‘green’

OURAY, Colo. – A new Colorado law nudges cities and towns into adopting regulations that demand greater energy efficiency in new and renovated buildings, but leaves some latitude to the local jurisdictions.

And so it came to pass that the Ouray County commissioners faced a fork in the road — and took it. The new building code is to be called “sustainable,” which is perceived as a more politically neutral term than “green.”

“Green turns other people off,” said County Commissioner Keith Mineert.

The county, located on the northern flanks of the San Juan Mountains, across the Sneffels Range from Telluride, is struggling about how to sell the greater emphasis on energy efficiency to builders.

As well, reports The Ouray County Watch, the officials are considering what to do with language in homeowner covenants that ban solar panels, exterior clotheslines, and wind turbines. There is some thought to telling homeowner groups that these things must be allowed.

 

Photogs spoiling Aspen

ASPEN, Colo. – Goldie Hawn, the actress, mostly stayed out of Aspen during Christmas week because of all the celebrity-seeking photographers. “They follow you wherever you go. It’s an insult to your being,” she told The Aspen Times.

She has visited Aspen for 25 years, and with companion Kurt Russell, who is also an actor, has an exurban escape in rural Pitkin County. But this year, she went shopping in Aspen only twice. She was followed down the highway as she drove home, and photographers even staked out the house. They also pursued her daughter, the actress Kate Hudson.

Hawn told the newspaper that she believes there’s a new, more amped-up aggression among photographers. In the past, when she wandered Aspen, the few celebrity-spotters and photographers were discreet. But no more. “You find yourself running and dodging and jumping in your car.”

Can anything be done to quell the paparazzi? Mayor Mick Ireland suggests she carry a camera, to photograph the photographers. “Anything we would do would just make it worse,” he said, rejecting any ordinances that would limit First Amendment rights.

“There’s no safe haven,” he said. At least not in Aspen.

 

New airport considered

McCALL, Idaho – Now that the Tamarack ski area is up and running, drawing a well-heeled crowd that includes the likes of tennis stars Steffi Graf and Andre Agassi, can an improved regional airport be far behind?

Currently, it’s at least 90 minutes via the twisty and icy road to Boise. The existing airport in Long Valley is at McCall, about a half-hour north. But one McCall resident, Roy Wagner, argues that instead of spending money to expand the McCall airport, where conflicts with existing residences are likely, it would better to create a new, larger, and better airport between the two resort areas.

 

Sundance house offer illegal

PARK CITY, Utah – With the Sundance Film Festival soon to be held, many people in Park City are looking to make some quick money with high-end rentals. But no bonanza will be had at one home, for which an advertisement was placed on craigslist, the free on-line classified listings.

The house, located near the town’s film-crowd hopping Main Street, was advertised for $5,000 per night, with a minimum five-night stay. However, the homeowners association that includes the house specifically precludes anything less than monthly rentals, reports The Park Record. Now that the story is out, you know the law-abiding neighbours will be watching the comings and goings like hawks.

 

Bulldozer rampage goes to TV

GRANBY, Colo. – The bulldozer rampage through Granby of June 2004 will be re-enacted on an episode of “Shockwave,” a television program on the History Channel. An aggrieved muffler-shop owner, Marvin Heemeyer, plunged his blade into 13 buildings in the business district. “Shockwave” takes raw footage from headline-making events and dissects the video using the latest in graphic technology, explains the Sky-Hi Daily News.

 

Aspen utility may jack up rates

ASPEN, Colo. – Aspen continues to struggle with how to walk its loud talk of the Canary Initiative, the town’s effort to reduce its role in emissions of climate-changing greenhouse gases. One key challenge is what it takes to dampen energy consumption among a group of people for whom money is essentially no barrier.

Electricity is the rubric for this conversation. The municipality has its own utility department, and about 75 per cent of the electricity comes from renewable sources, primarily dams and wind turbines. But the rest comes from burning coal, a major cause for emissions of carbon dioxide.

In 2006, the city ceased charging a flat-rate and instead began charging a higher rate per kilowatt for those who used larger quantities. Those customers using less than 700 kilowatt hours ­— the average of a single-family household in Colorado — were charged 6.25 cents per kWh, while those in the middle bracket were charged 7.8 cents per kWh, and above 2,000 the charge was 11.7 cents.

About half of Aspen’s customers are in the lowest-consumption group, and about one-fifth are in the highest consumption bracket.

But the tiered approach didn’t have the intended effect of causing users to moderate their use, said Phil Overeynder, the public works director. The city is now considering a rate hike for larger consumers, to provide greater incentive to reduce consumption. Mayor Mick Ireland said the rate increase is a high priority, because it is a simple action.

The municipality provides electricity to about 60 per cent of the city’s residents. The remainder is supplied by Holy Cross Energy, an electrical cooperative.

 

Mountain bikers upset

DURANGO, Colo. – Mountain bikers are disturbed by a recommendation from the U.S. Forest Service to create a new wilderness area between Durango and Silverton that would close 20 miles of the Colorado Trail to wheels.

The recommendation, if adopted by Congress, would also make at least six other trails off-limits to biking, reports the Durango Telegraph.

“It’s definitely a conundrum for mountain bikers,” said Mark Richey, a mountain biking advocate. “We all love wilderness areas, but we feel like we’re excluded by their (recommendation) designation. It’s not a comfortable place to be in.”

While the Forest Service cites comparatively little use by mountain bikers in the area in question, mountain bikers disagree. Bill Manning, director of the Colorado Trail Foundation, also noted that the wilderness designated would eliminate the ride from Molas Divide to Durango, a 75-mile grunt considered one of the nation’s epic rides.

 

Helmets cut injuries, not fatalities

WOLF CREEK PASS, Colo. – Helmets were supposed to make skiing and snowboarding safer. In fact there has been no significant reduction in ski area fatalities in the last nine seasons, even though the use of helmets has increased to more than 33 per cent. However, helmets have reduced the number of head injuries, according to a study cited by the National Ski Areas Association.

Those statistics were cited by the Durango Herald after a 14-year-old boy died after hitting a tree along an intermediate ski trail at Wolf Creek Ski area.

Nationally, about 37 skiers and snowboarders have died per year during the last decade. Jasper Shealy, a professor emeritus at the Rochester Institute of Technology, found that fatalities are more likely to occur along wide, smooth and well-groomed intermediate-level trails.

 

$1 million gift for medical centre

KETCHUM, Idaho – Emergency services operations at St. Luke’s Wood River Medical Center have been bolstered with a $1 million gift by Julia and George Argyros. He is chairman and chief executive of a real estate company in California called Arnel & Affiliates, and he also owns the Seattle Mariners baseball team. As well, the Idaho Mountain Express notes that he is a former ambassador to Spain.

 

Minimum wage rises

CRESTED BUTTE, Colo. – Minimum wage has increased in Colorado, and is now at $7.02. That compares with the federal minimum of $5.85.

But the new law has no real effect in Crested Butte — or, for that matter, probably any other mountain town. At Crested Butte Mountain Resort, for example, the basic entry-level wage for non-tipped jobs is $8.16 per hour.

“I don’t know that it will really affect us,” says Christi Matthews, director of the local chamber of commerce. “Minimum wage is not really a livable wage in Crested Butte,” she further tells the Crested Butte News.

 

Avalanche was deadly

VAIL, Colo. – When somebody dies in an avalanche adjacent to a ski area, what do you call that area?

That was the quandary of reporters last week after a 27-year-old man from Boston, working his first winter in Vail, died in the East Vail Chutes. While many deaths have occurred in that area through the years, the precise area is notorious enough to be called Charlie’s Death Chutes. The slide carried Chet Brigham 500 feet past his companions, over a cliff and into trees. Although he was reached in 10 to 20 minutes, thanks to avalanche transceivers, he had died of asphyxiation.

Most skiers access the chutes by taking the lifts up Vail Mountain, then hiking up to a backcountry gate.

However, from reading Denver’s Rocky Mountain News, you’d have thought that the avalanche was miles away. The site, said the newspaper, was near Vail Pass. The Vail Daily correctly called it the “backcountry.”

However, it could also be called the front country. It gets a lot of use — the Forest Service estimates as many as 300 people per day. “A lot of people think of it is an extension of the (Vail) Mountain,” avalanche expert Mike Duffy told the Vail Daily. “But it’s a whole different world.”

“At times, it can have some of the best powder skiing you can have in your life,” stated Scott Toepfer, of the Colorado Avalanche Information Center. “There are times when it would be the worst day of your life. It’s steep, and it’s avalanche prone.”

 

Lion in waiting for plumber

CRESTED BUTTE, Colo. -- Crawling under a rural cabin to look at some frozen pipes, plumber Josh Pierce decided he wasn’t getting paid nearly enough. About 20 feet into his crawling into just a two-foot space, with not even a wrench in his hand, he encountered what he quickly realized was a young mountain lion.

“After it hissed and spit at me, I realized I was looking into the eyes of a lion not more than five feet away,” he told the Crested Butte News.

The News notes that when facing mountain lions, the rule of thumb is to make yourself look large. “Unfortunately, since Pierce was on his stomach, he didn’t have that luxury,” the newspaper explained dryly.

The lion was in pounce mode, its fangs bared. So Pierce did what seemed like the only thing possible: He backed away, as best he could. It was good enough for the big cat.

At some point, the cat was rousted out of his wintertime refuge in the crawl space and killed.

 

Carbondale becoming more like Aspen

CARBONDALE, Colo. – A town trustee in Carbondale has resigned from the town board, explaining that he just doesn’t have the time to devote to town business given how much trustees are paid, $600 per month.

Increased living expenses in Carbondale will make that increasingly the case for anybody who must actually try to make mortgage payments, warned Trustee Scott Chaplin.

“The financial tide has already turned on Carbondale’s working class, and it is only a matter of time, 7 to 10 years according to some housing turnover statistics, when the majority of our community will be replaced by very wealthy households,” he observed in a letter published in the Valley Journal.

Carbondale is located 30 miles downvalley from Aspen, but in most respects is a bedroom community for Aspen. In the last decade, the valley has become increasingly upscale, with higher-end real estate projects proliferating in what once was a potato-farming and coal-mining town.

 

Rescuers make deadline

CRESTED BUTTE, Colo. – A rescue squad in Crested Butte had a tight window of opportunity in late December when learning that a man staying in a cabin about six miles from a trailhead was suffering a stroke. It was 20 degrees below zero, and the wind was blowing. The location of the cabin was in Dead Man’s Gulch.

Rescuers hopped on their snowmobiles, and at the cabin bundled the patient in blankets and put him in a toboggan, sandwiched between two of the rescuers.

They knew they had a small window. Ross Orton, coordinator of Emergency Medical Service, told the Crested Butte News that a drug must be administered within three hours of the stroke if the blood clots suffered by the victim of a stroke are to be dissolved. Just getting everybody to the trailhead took 25 minutes.

“We had a very black-and-white window of opportunity,” Orton said, “and we realized were pushing the three-hour window.”

They made the deadline with 13 minutes to spare.

 

Czechs rescue New Mexico ski area

QUESTA, N.M. – The landscape of the West is littered with shuttered ski areas. Some were underfinanced. Others were set in locations with inadequate snow. Yet more suffered from remote locations.

But life may be returning to New Mexico’s Ski Rio. It is located just south of the Colorado border, about 50 miles north of Taos, it has been closed since 2000, mired in Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

The property has now been purchased by a company from the Czech Republic that is called Cimex. The cost was $6.5 million.

The 2,700 acres include 120 building lots, three ski lifts, and two hotels.

“They don’t even know yet what they are going to do,” said Pavel Lukes, a real-estate agent of Czech descent in Taos who brokered the deal. He met the Cimex officials during a social gathering four years ago in Vail.

“They are not in the ski-area development business now. But the place has so much potential. We’re just happy for liberating Ski Rio.”

The company, according to its website, was founded in 1990, and rapidly evolved into the hotel business. It now has 34 hotels in Prague and other Czech locations, but is also expanding into other European countries. It is seeing market demand particularly in the high-end properties, according to a press release on the website.

The company expanded to the United States eight years ago with operations in Naples, Fla., although it also invested in a Colorado project — and got a 100 per cent return, according to the website.

The ski area has a checkered history. A website called coloradoskihistory.com says the resort was developed in 1980 as Rio Costilla Resort by a livestock group with broad land interests in Northern New Mexico. Unlike most ski resorts, it is located entirely on private land.

The resort has had a variety of owners through the years, including the U.S. government, which gained the property when a savings and loan institution failed. It had a few good years along the way, including 70,000 visitors during a particularly snowy year in the mid-1990s. However, during a dry spell in 2000, it closed. Since then, only a handful of homeowners have been able to ski the slopes.

Yet the ski area can still be found on the Internet. One website called “goski,” which claims to offer “real resort info,” offers the following report: Today, Rio has a reputation for being one of the roomiest resorts in the southern Rockies. Its slopes are uncrowded and made for cruising.”

 

Fraser Valley objects to coal dust

WINTER PARK, Colo. – The Fraser Valley has always felt like it got the short end of the Moffat Tunnel. The 6.21-mile tunnel pierces James Peak and the Continental Divide, with trains flushing out near the ski trails of the Winter Park ski area.

Some years ago somebody took note that all the exhaust from the diesel trains was flushed out on the western, or Winter Park, side. Now, reports the Sky-Hi Daily News, there is note of water issuing out of the tunnel polluted by coal particles from the many trains that transport coal from near Steamboat Springs and Paonia, that pass through the tunnel.

The Fraser River can’t handle the pollution, because it is already so severely depleted of water by City of Denver diversions, says Kirk Klancke, a Trout Unlimited member and local water district administrator. He and other officials want the tunnel’s operator, Union Pacific, to install a sediment basin, as is found on the east portal, or otherwise clean up the sullied water.

 

Still smoking in Virginian

JACKSON HOLE, Wyo. – Only one bar in the town of Jackson, the Virginian Saloon, still allows smoking, but that’s still too many for activists who continue to press town officials to ban smoking altogether. They point out that even Rock Springs, a blue-collar mining town located to the south, has banned smoking, reports the Jackson Hole News & Guide.

 

Biomass burner boosted

LAKE TAHOE, Calif. – Although it’s still no sure thing, a plant that produces electricity by burning tree branches, bark and other residue from forest thinning has received a shot-in the-arm in the form of a $500,000 federal grant. The money is to be used to study the potential for such a plant.

Placer County, a vast county that stretches from the exurbs of Sacramento to the Nevada border, including much of Lake Tahoe, has been studying the potential for a couple of years.

Paying a fine of $1 million, Sierra Pacific Industries, earlier paid $1 million for the project. Such a plant is projected to cost $10 million to construct.

If the project goes, it could produce enough electricity for 2,000 homes, Jim Turner, operations manager for the lumber company, told the Sierra Sun. The lumber company also operates a biomass plant near Loyalton, north of Truckee.