MT. CRESTED BUTTE, Colo. — Improved recycling of construction materials seems to be moving into the mainstream, as witnessed by a story from the base of the Crested Butte ski area.
There, a bank building and transportation centre have been removed to make way for a new project. John N. Norton, a consultant for the ski area, reports that virtually every thing in the deconstruction was saved. The toilets, sinks, and windows were saved. The sheetrock is being mulched and used for fill. The asphalt and concrete, except for that with rebar, will be ground up and used again.
In their place will be buildings that will have far more wall and roof insulation than required by code. Evaporative cooling will be used in place of air conditioning. High-efficiency light fixtures, and light fixtures that limit light trespass and pollution. And so on down the line.
Yet the building will not be LEED certified, due to the cost. Norton says he asked the project architect John Ashworth, who designs buildings of the National Park Service, how this building compared with others his firm does in the mountain West. "In the top 5 per cent," he said.
Nazi comparison outrageous
CANMORE, Alberta — Recently, a swastika was spray-painted on a van bearing U.S. license plates in the Canmore area. Elsewhere, in letters published in newspapers, others have more explicitly equated the United States wars in the Middle East with the actions of Nazi Germany during World War II.
The Rocky Mountain Outlook says the I-hate-everything-American contingent has gone over the top in equating U.S. actions with those of a German regime that was directly responsible for the murder of more than 12 million innocent civilians.
Even CNN, which the Outlook believes is a propagandist for George W. Bush, would have noted the corralling of Iraqi-Americans into cramped slums deprived of food, water or medical supplies were they occurring, says the newspaper. Nor has America’s alternative media reported a Bush doctrine to wipe out all other nations on earth while singling out one particular race as the equivalent of rats. Nor, unlike the brownshirts of 1930s Germany, have police in U.S. cities pistol-whipped homosexuals who refuse to wear pink armbands everywhere they go.
"Much like Canadians would be outraged to find a hammer and sickle spray painted on their vehicles while traveling south of the border, U.S. travelers should not have to accept being subjected to anti-American radicalism while traveling abroad," concludes the Outlook. "Such expression is uncivilized, hateful, and inappropriate."
Intrawest sells Moguls
PARK CITY, Utah — Intrawest has sold its vacation wholesaler division, called Moguls Mountain Travel, to Park City-based Lespri Property Management Co. However, the headquarters for Mogul will remain in Boulder, Colo.
The Park Record notes that the versatility of the Internet, in which prospective customers can see the rooms they might rent, is causing wholesalers to become a much larger part in the business of renting rooms and creating vacations.
Gonzo Elementary in Aspen?
ASPEN, Colo. — The big day came and went. Actors Bill Murray, Sean Penn, and Johnny Depp were all there, as were presidential candidates George McGovern and John Kerry, and former 60 Minutes newsman Ed Bradley and 300 to 400 other close friends and acquaintances of the writer Hunter S. Thompson.
Thompson, described by a Denver Post columnist as perhaps the most influential journalist of the late 20 th century, was canonized – literally – in a big party and funeral at his ranchette near Aspen. As per his wishes of nearly 30 years, half of his cremated remains were fired from a 153-foot canon as Bob Dylan’s Mr. Tambourine Man played and guests sipped champagne.
The canon was absurd – steel cylinders covered with gray cloth to resemble a clothed arm, with a fiberglass clenched fist featuring two thumbs holding something meant to resemble a peyote button. All of this was 153 feet high, about two feet higher than the Statute of Liberty in the harbor at New York City. It was in accordance with what Mr. Thompson, in a 1978 interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation, said he hoped would happen once he had died. In February, he committed suicide much in the fashion of one of his heroes, Ernest Hemingway, who killed himself with a shotgun in Ketchum in 1961.
The press was not invited because, said the writer’s son, Juan Thompson, people like McGovern and Kerry would not have felt comfortable in the presence of so many reporters. And those reporters who were there as friends were not supposed to write about it. Exceptions seem to have been made, as there was plenty of seeming first-hand descriptions from the Aspen Daily News to the New York Times.
They described sex dolls in a convertible, a Richard Nixon mask, and what the Times described as Thompson’s personal literary solar system, his own photo surrounded by his literary heroes, Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Conrad, and Mark Twain among them. As well, they reported some of the two hours of eulogizing. The writer’s widow, Anita Thompson, read Thompson’s favorite poem, "Kubla Khan," by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Outside the gates, making sure the affair remained private, were a large group of paid enforcers dressed in black. One of Thompson’s long-time friends and neighbors, George Stranahan, the scion of the Champion sparkplug fortune, conceded to an Associated Press reporter that this wasn’t exactly in keeping with Thompson’s more populist leanings as a journalist.
Thompson had assuredly touched a great many people through the years, many of them too young to have read his rants when they were first published. A great flood of these admirers had been expected, and indeed, some of them showed up. But the mayhem predicted by The Aspen Times failed to materialize.
While there were throngs outside of Thompson’s gate, it was a peaceful assembly. Only one arrest was reported, and the upper Roaring Fork Valley had what the Aspen Times suggested was an uncommonly peaceful weekend.
As for the future, The Aspen Times surveyed Ketchum for precedent. There, several memorials to commemorate Hemingway’s long association with Ketchum exist, including the Ernest Hemingway Elementary School. Noting this, the Times wondered whether Aspen might someday have a Gonzo Elementary School.
Summit County aims for zero
SUMMIT COUNTY, Colo. — Like Whistler, Colorado’s Summit County has set a goal of reducing waste to zero.
"We want to be on the side of the angels," Commissioner Bob French said. "Zero waste is a goal you shoot for – we’re not going to get there this year or the next, but no matter how far we get, we can always do a little better."
Last year, an estimated 15 per cent of trash was diverted from the landfill through recycling efforts, reports the Summit Daily News. That compares with 3 per cent overall in Colorado. Still, Summit County’s landfill received 51,250 tons of trash. Can that possibly be reduced to zero?
County officials are pinning their hopes on a new project, called the materials recovery facility, that they hope will double the recycling rate or more. One of the gains is that both the landfill and the facility will be operated at the same location and by the same entity, the county.
Six weeks for $1.75 million
ASPEN, Colo. — The Aspen Times reports a new record for a fractional ownership. A six-week share in a four-bedroom suite at a slope-side project called Residences at The Little Nell has sold for $1.75 million. Such shares, when sales started in early July, were priced at $1.35 million.
"Residences at The Little Nell is now the highest-priced private residence club in the world," said Wally Hobson, of Hobson Real Estate Advisors, a consulting and development firm based in Portland, Ore.
The hotel has 24 suites available for fractional ownership. Some 75 shares have been sold at a total cost of $84 million since sales began less than two months ago. Prices for a six-week share of a three-bedroom suite started at $1 million but have already ratcheted up to $1.3 million.
The new record eclipses the $1.49 million paid for the single most expensive share of a three-bedroom suite at the St. Regis Residence Club in Aspen. That price is for four weeks per year: Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s and July 4h.
Housing getting tigher
VAIL, Colo. — Evidence is trickling in that the housing situation in Vail and the Eagle Valley is back to the situation that existed previous to 9/11 and the bust in speculation on tech stocks.
"Tight as a drum" was the usual aphorism back in that day. Statistically, tight was defined as a vacancy rate of less than 1 per cent.
Then came the economic slow-down, when vacancy rates approached 20 per cent. As the construction of speculative trophy homes slowed, hundreds of new housing units were constructed in the Vail, Avon and Eagle areas – to the protests of some who warned of a glut.
The glut is clearly gone. One property manager of several affordable housing complexes told the Vail Daily that even in mid-August, his projects in the upper and mid-Eagle Valley are completely full. Also, there is evidence that prices for affordable housing will likely rise, because of a general increase in wages.
Housing lessons shared
STEAMBOAT SPRINGS, Colo. — Compared to Aspen, Vail, and Telluride, market forces were years behind in driving up housing prices in Steamboat Springs. As such, the community is just now exploring how to ensure a component of housing remains affordable to lower-income workers.
The experience from Telluride is that local governments must get land. Since 1980, Telluride has built more than 1,000 units of affordable housing. A half-cent sales tax was levied, developers were offered density bonuses if they provided more affordable housing, and all new development was required to mitigate for affordable housing.
The Steamboat Pilot reports that planners were told not to expect much outside help. Federal help is declining and state coffers are empty. However, local governments in Colorado have the option of levying taxes.
In Telluride, reported city planner Lance McDonald, the goal has been to house 60 per cent of the work force locally, to help strengthen the bonds of community. The Telluride area – which includes both towns of Telluride and Mountain Village – is now at 55 per cent, and to get it to 60 per cent will require 500 more affordable housing. Those last 500 units will be much harder than the first 1,000, McDonald said.
In retrospect, McDonald told Steamboat residents, Telluride should have taken more land and less cash. It should have also tried to keep more of its affordable housing stock permanently affordable.
Helping guide the efforts in Steamboat is Elizabeth Black, director of the Yampa Valley Housing Authority. For years, she directed the metro district at Copper Mountain.
Man stabbed to death
TRUCKEE, Calif. — One Truckee man is dead and another in jail as the result of what police say was road rage.
The incident occurred near Squaw Valley, on the highway between Truckee and Lake Tahoe. What exactly happened was not reported, but the Tahoe World says that the offended driver, Timothy George Brooks, 25, was so angry that he searched for a half-hour for his protagonist, Robert Lawrence Ash, 48. He found him in a bagel shop in Tahoe City, eating breakfast and reading a book. Words led to fists to a knife as Brooks stabbed Ash. Brooks had no record of previous arrests, nor were either drugs or alcohol involved.
Response in the Truckee-Tahoe area was swift. "A local is used to being cut off by flatlanders and the like," wrote Jennifer Nelson of Reno in the Sierra Sun. "Please remember that a ‘local’ address does not make you a local. Locals let things like that go, that's why we live here."
Still breaking ground
ASPEN, Colo. — With the possible exception of Banff, Aspen remains the model for four-season resorts in the West. It came by this reputation early but, as The New York Times noted in a review recently, continues to break ground.
A Chicago manufacturer, Walter Paepcke, arrived in the decaying mining town immediately after World War II along with a bunch of skiers, most of them from the 10 th Mountain Division. Paepcke had in mind a summertime haven devoted to intellectual discourse and high-brow cultural attainment.
Aspen, if occasionally distracted by drugs, greed, and arrogance, would seem to have lived up to Paepcke’s dream. Physicists gather there to hike and talk theory. A design conference every summer draws international attention. And, not least, there’s the renowned Aspen Music Festival, now in its 56 th year and, says the New York newspaper in a recent review, still breaking new ground on old routines.
The cause of The Times pleasing review was a production of a 1649 opera, "Giasone," updated to something of a "Saturday Night Live" romp of the late 1970s. The festival is held in the Benedict Music Tent, named after Fritz Benedict, a war veteran who returned afterward to create the 10 th Mountain Trail from Vail to Aspen, among other achievements.
From primal to high tech
TELLURIDE, Colo. — From film festivals on Memorial Day to Labor Day, Telluride’s summer schedule is notoriously crowded with festivals. Perhaps the most unusual, however, occur during mid-August.
First in creation, was the Telluride Mushroom Festival. It is rooted in a celebration of fungi as a form of life with still unrealized good, beginning with eating but also continued to medicinal and even hallucinogenic values. Speakers tend to be brilliant, but are always zealous as they advise how to grow mushrooms, describe psychedelic mushrooms in the Andes, and extol use of mushrooms in cleaning up toxic waste dumps.
Highlight of the weekend, at least for on-lookers, is a parade down Telluride’s main street on Saturday evening with people wearing mushroom-looking hats and other clothing that suggests mushrooms, carrying signs praising mushrooms, all of this accompanied by steady beating of a bass drum. It’s primal and joyous and even perhaps a little erotic, if you consider the phallic shapes of some fungi.
During the last two years, the festival has been expanded to include mushroom-laden dinners – thereby engaging the local chefs. Still, the event remains more Mother Earth News than the Food and Wine Classic.
At the other end of natural is the Telluride Tech Festival, which pays homage to past innovators of technology and probing current technology such as the future of space travel and the World Wide Web.
Inspiring the festival is the fact that Telluride was the site where the principle of alternating current was first harnessed. Like so many inventions, it was a response to a need. Mines have extensive needs for power, often including the need to pump them free of water. However, the mines in the Telluride area, which are generally near timberline, had quickly been stripped of trees, eliminating that fuel. Hauling wood or coal to the mines was very expensive. But if the power of falling water could be converted into electricity in a state that was usable, then the mines could continue to operate.
To this need came L.L. Nunn, who was kind of the ski bum of his era. Although a Harvard-trained lawyer, he had shown up in Telluride in 1881 with only what he could carry on his back. By 1891, although Thomas Edison was warning of the dangers of alternating current, Nunn partnered with George Westinghouse to prove it could be done.
The experiment succeeded. The mines were saved. And, as a byproduct, Telluride became the first town on the planet to have electrical street lights.
And so was launched a seemingly endless variety of inventions: radios, ski lifts, and Game Station computer games. Some people have considered the creation of alternating current to be a technological change far more powerful even than the advent of computers.
Honored at this year’s Tech Festival were David Gerrold, a writer known for his science fiction work that includes the script for The Trouble with Tribbles, which is considered the most famous of the Star Trek episodes.
To highlight the festival, organizers take to the streets during the evenings to demonstrate what is called the Tesla coil, using a 220-volt power source and transforming it into a 2 million volt lighting bolt. This white heat is then tamed by the brave sword-yielding Doctor Megawatt.
People prance down main street looking like mushrooms or Star Wars-type tamers of lighting – that every ski town should have such entertainment on a Saturday night free for the observing on main street.
Summer tourism surging
DURANGO, Colo.–Three years ago, Durango was down, down, down. Not only was there that nastiness about the stock market slide and 9/11, but the Missionary Ridge fire seemed to last most of the summer.
That was then. This summer is hot. June sales in the city’s central business district were up almost 10 per cent compared to last year, and lodging taxes were up 9 per cent. All of this far outpaces the 2 per cent growth of the traffic on the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Train, notes the Durango Telegraph,
July sets record for highs in Silverton
SILVERTON, Colo. — The planet is definitely warming, and most climate-change scientists think that there are human fingerprints on at least some of this change. The story is best revealed in averages over long periods of time, not in individual days.
In Silverton, the average high for the month was 77 degrees, a full 4 degrees higher than the historical average, reports the Silverton Standard. However, the high for the month was only 83 degrees – far shy of the historical high of 93.
Men more likely to get HAPE
SUMMIT COUNTY, Colo. — High-altitude pulmonary edema is serious business in the mountains. In Colorado’s Summit County, which is almost entirely above 8,000 feet, with Breckenridge nearing 10,000 feet, one to three visitors die from it each year.
Doctors see hundreds of other cases of edema, a condition caused when pressure in the head and lungs cause fluid to leak into the lungs and build up.
Studying 29 cases, Summit County physician Jim Bachman found that while men and women get a milder case of altitude sickness in equal rates, men suffer from HAPE at 30 times the rate of women. Why?
"My best guess is that the female hormone estrogen helps you, but it could be that the male hormone hurts you," he told the Summit Daily News. "Other research indicates that men play harder (or ignore symptoms) and that women breathe deeper and faster."
Bachman also studied the phenomenon of rising blood pressure, taking a look at what he calls "bi-landers," or people who maintain homes both at sea level and at mountain resorts. In his study of 70 such bi-landers, he found that 30 per cent of the patients experienced an increase in blood pressure.
Elevated blood pressure usually isn’t harmful in the short term, but it’s harmful in the long term, which can mean six months. It can cause heart attacks and strokes, although Bachman makes a distinction between high elevation and high blood pressure causing such events.
"High altitude does not cause heart attacks," he said. "People have more on cruises than on ski vacations. We have the same amount here as everywhere else."
Some of Bachman’s research was published in an on-line journal called High Altitude Medicine & Biology.
Boy survives fall
LEADVILLE, Colo. — This story isn’t quite as wild as the one about a cat falling 10 stories and landing on its feet, but it’s close. It seems that Riley Silva, 17, was tossing rocks off a cliff near Hagerman Pass, in the Leadville-Aspen area, with the goal being to send larger and larger rocks into the abyss.
One rock was too big to bulge, and so the boy jumped on it. He dislodged it – but that was the last bit of good luck he had for a while, explains the Leadville Chronicle. Silva went sailing off the cliff just behind his rock.
Emergency personnel estimate he fell 80 feet before hitting a ledge, then fell 80 more feet before cart-wheeling 400 feet down a slope of talus and scree.
Luckily, a nurse was nearby to give first aid. Rapidly responding rescuers rigged ropes to avoid dislodging more rocks. Capping a tedious and perhaps courageous rescue, a helicopter arrived to ferry him to a hospital just before a deluge.
Said one rescuer, Pat Kaynaroglu, "That young man was meant to be on this earth."
It would be interesting to see what he does with his bonus years.
Grand County disagrees
GRAND COUNTY, Colo. — Grand County is considering whether to rein in the sprawl of large-lot rural acreages, what some geographers call exurbia.
Under Colorado law, landowners can subdivide property into 35-acre parcels without government review. Grand County allows further splitting of land parcels into 5- and 10-acre lots. While the exemptions may have been created with the goal of helping ranchers meet the needs of growing families, the process is cumulatively causing fragmentation of wildlife habitat and out-sized impacts to rural roads.
The Sky-Hi News reports that at least some citizen planners disagree with the paid planners, who want to remove these local exemptions, and so a broader public input is being solicited. In the meantime, a moratorium on consideration of new exemptions continues.
Hispanic population growing
KETCHUM, Idaho — The Hispanic population in Blaine County, home of Sun Valley and Ketchum, has jumped more than 50 per cent in the last four years, the largest gain of any count in Idaho. As of last year, Hispanics were almost 15 per cent of the population.
Vail immigrant a war casualty
EAGLE, Colo. — As many parents had feared, the war in Iraq is coming home in the form of caskets. One such sad story comes from the Vail area.
A 22-year-old local man, Lance Cpl. Evenor Herrera, who graduated several years ago from Eagle Valley High School, about the same time as the woman who accused Kobe Bryant of rape, was killed by a bomb in Iraq. A native of Honduras, he had immigrated to the United States in 1991.
The Vail Daily reports that more than 20 family members and friends spoke at his grave-side service. "My brother, he was a brave man who was not scared fighting over there," said the victim’s brother Balmore Herrera, who is also a Marine. A grandmother, Maria Del Carmen Pereria, asked the U.S. government to reevaluate its role in Iraq. The step-father, David Stibbs, said he worked hard to forgive those who planted the bomb.
As New York Times columnist Bob Herbert points out, the Army is targeting minority and low-income groups, talking about the various benefits of military service such as college education, health care, and so on. The risks of military service, however, are not mentioned with equal prominence, if at all.
"The military and its harried recruiters are preying more and more on youngsters who are especially vulnerable and impressionable, and they’re doing it by creating a patently false impression of what life in the wartime military is like," he writes.
Cougar paws woman
DURANGO, Colo. — The physical wounds to Annette Hayes caused by a mountain lion several weeks ago have already healed, but not so the emotional wounds.
She was sitting on the deck of their house near Durango at about sunset with her husband and dog when she felt the paws of the animal on her shoulders. She jumped up, screamed, and ran. The husband looked to see what had happened, and saw the mountain lion saunter away.
Although her wounds were light, she is being injected with a vaccine just in case the lion was rabid.
Wildlife officers told the Durango Herald that the mountain lion was attracted by the dog or, perhaps, confused her hair with that of an animal. "The incident is very unusual," said Pat Dorsey, of the Colorado Division of Wildlife. "If this cat had meant to do harm it could have and would have."
While lion attacks on people remain exceedingly rare in Colorado, they are not totally unknown. Two people have been killed by mountain lions in the last 15 years, one a small boy and the other an 18-year-old jogger.
Man with MS hikes Colorado Trail
DURANGO, Colo. — By now, seven men from Denver will have completed hiking the 471-mile Colorado Trail with a special mission. They are all in their early to mid-20s, but one of them learned two years ago that he has multiple sclerosis.
MS, as it is commonly called, is the No. 1 disabling neurological disease among young adults. The Durango Telegraph explains that is a disease of the brain and spinal chord in which white blood cells attack myelin, the sheathing around nerve fibers, and replace the protective coating with scar tissue. The disease manifests itself in a variety of ways. As such, victims can be affected differently. It affects twice as many women as men, and it is most common among Caucasians.
Although the disease is progressive, a great many people have continued to do athletic adventures, at least while early in their afflictions. The Telegraph tells of a Durango man, Ian Altman, who was diagnosed at age 24. He recently returned from a climbing trip to the Yosemite Valley, and has summitted the challenging Cerro Fitzroy in Patagonia. While he at first tried to treat his MS with homeopathic remedies, after a bad flare-up he availed himself of new MS drugs.
The Durango Herald reports that the group has raised $195,000 toward research into MS while also enjoying the adventure of hiking the trail, which begins near Denver and ends three miles from Durango.
