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Mountain News: Redevelopments stalled by slow sales

VAIL, Colo. – Vail proper is mostly built out, but redevelopment is in full force. Some $1 billion has been logged in the last five years, mostly at the base of the ski area on Vail Mountain, with $2 billion more in the development pipeline.

VAIL, Colo. – Vail proper is mostly built out, but redevelopment is in full force. Some $1 billion has been logged in the last five years, mostly at the base of the ski area on Vail Mountain, with $2 billion more in the development pipeline.

But the slowed economy is also slowing, although not yet stopping, those new projects, reports the Vail Daily.

One project, the Roost Lodge, a low-cost relic of the late 1960s, is slated to become a condo-hotel operated by Marriott. Lack of sales, however, has delayed construction, scheduled to start this spring, for at least a year.

Another project, Cascade Residences, has only a 50-50 chance of starting construction this year, as the last sale necessary for the work to go-ahead is now being wrapped up.

Vail Resorts, the ski area operator, has also pushed back the projected construction start for its $1 billion Ever Vail to the winter of 2009-2010. Rob Katz, the chief executive officer told the newspaper that buyers of luxury real estate offered by his company are “somewhat” insulated from the country’s economic downturn, and he expects a rebound within a year or two.

“Buyers are taking their time and being picky,” he said. “But plenty of people are still buying real estate.”

Sales statistics compiled for the Eagle Valley and Vail say the same thing. Sales through March were down 42 per cent compared to last year, but average sales prices were up 40 per cent.

Projects coming through the pipeline in future years, however, will face new rules for employee housing. Rules adopted by the town last year require 10 per cent of new residential projects be set aside for employees. A new law being adopted by the town goes on to mandate that one-half of that requirement be met with on-site housing.

That will cut profit margins, but some of the large projects of the last decade had begun to do so anyway. Ever Vail, for example, planned to integrate 123 employee housing units into its base-area project.

 

Layoffs at Mammoth

MAMMOTH LAKES, Calif. – Mammoth Mountain has laid off 15 year-round employees, most of them in middle management. They collectively were paid about $1 million in salaries and benefits and were about 5 per cent of the year-round workforce, reports The Sheet.

“The company is stable,” said Rusty Gregory, the chief executive officer at Mammoth Mountain Ski Area, “but the current credit environment is difficult, and we need to be in a position to service our credit line.” He added: “Demand for our products and services is down, and looks like it will be down for the foreseeable future.”

 

Winter’s excesses, excrement

JACKSON HOLE, Wyo. – Somebody in Winter Park long ago described spring as the afterbirth of winter. That metaphor is now fully in your face in many ski towns as melting snowbanks reveal the excesses — and excrement — of winter.

In Crested Butte, that excrement has provoked an annual event called Poofest. It was scheduled for what the Crested Butte News called SaTURDay. Organizers of the event suggested that it was a civic “doodie” to seek out the dog-doos lying in alleys, streets, and parks — everywhere dogs have roamed through the winter.

In Jackson Hole, Noah Brenner of the Jackson Hole News & Guide reported in April that discovery of a razor peeking out of a snowbank while walking one day prompted him to behave like his dog on walks through Jackson, his nose and eyes to the ground. Among his finds: lots of gloves, and all of them for right hands.

 

Condi Rice to play Dvorak

ASPEN, Colo. – Condoleezza Rice, the U.S. secretary of state, has agreed to perform a Dvorak piece along with four other piano players who are current students at the Aspen Music Festival. She is also scheduled to speak during her summer visit on a yet-unspecified topic.

Rice, who once aspired to be a concert pianist, was a piano student at Aspen’s summer music camp in the early 1970s, when her family was living in Denver. Her first name is derived from the Italian musical expression, con dolcezza, which means “with sweetness.”

A sweet, warm welcome will not be extended her by all Roaring Fork Valley residents.

“No member of the Bush-Cheney war-crime family should be welcome here,” says James Breasted, in a letter published in The Aspen Times. “Because our lawmakers have refused to hold these criminals accountable for their crimes, we the people should simply refuse to welcome them among us. It is our moral, ethical and patriotic duty.”

 

Forest thinning disrupts biking

DURANGO, Colo. – Thinning of the ponderosa pine forest has begun in an area near Durango called Log Chutes. The area is frequented by mountain bikers, who have appropriated the old logging roads from more than a century ago into single-track trails.

But the U.S. Forest Service, which administers the area, says the forest is unnaturally thick, and to make it less susceptible to major fires, has begun to thin it. Still vivid in local minds is the 71,000-acre Missionary Ridge Fire of 2002. That fire in the same area burned 57 homes in the wildland-urban interface.

Trails 2000, a local mountain bike trails advocacy group, tells the Durango Telegraph that the logging will interfere with mountain biking for years to come, but concedes it is necessary to mitigate risk of fire to nearby homes.

 

Coyote attacks Canmore boy

CANMORE, Alberta – An 11-year-old boy playing in the snow in the backyard of his home in Canmore was bitten by a coyote. He had closed his eyes, and thought his brother was tickling him, but open his eyes to see a coyote, its teeth clamped on his leg, shaking it.

The boy kicked loose from the coyote, which scampered off, but the bite was sufficient to break through the snowsuit and pants he was wearing and draw blood.

Wildlife officers found and killed the coyote, which they say was bold enough later that day to enter a person’s home. They told the Rocky Mountain Outlook that the coyote was totally habituated to people, because it had been fed by people.

In December, three other children were bitten by coyotes in Canmore, two of them during a Christmas ice-skating event.

 

Tahoe getting clearer

LAKE TAHOE, Calif. – Instead of becoming more sullied, Lake Tahoe may be regaining the clarity that Mark Twain 136 years ago described as “a noble sheet of blue... not merely transparent, but dazzlingly, brilliantly so.”

Scientists say the lake’s clarity has actually improved since 2001 — possibly because land-use restrictions and erosion controls legislated several decades ago have been having an impact, reports the Sacramento Bee.

The findings mark the most encouraging development in 40 years of monitoring the clouding of Lake Tahoe, according to Charles Goldman, a professor at the University of California, Davis, who in the 1960s was the first to foresee Tahoe’s troubles, and then take action on its behalf.

“There’s promise in these data that we’ve crossed the line,” Goldman told the Bee.

Tahoe still dazzles as when Mark Twain visited it, notes the Bee, but erosion, construction runoff and air pollution have caused clarity to decline by nearly one-third since 1968, or an average loss of a foot a year.

The $500 million in federal, state and lake funds designated for cleanup in recent years has paid for roadside basins to capture runoff from lakeside highways, a major source of lake pollution.

Scientists were unwilling to say absolutely that the pollution had been reversed. But the seven-year trend is enough to raise hopes of a bluer Tahoe.

 

Cutoff from outside world

MAMMOTH LAKES, Calif. – It was, reports The Sheet, the day that the Internet stood still in Mammoth. A construction crew cut a fibre-optic cable somewhere outside of town, but nobody knew that — because, of course, we now communicate and get our information from the Internet.

“For around six hours, no one could order anything on Amazon.com, students could not access Wikipedia or MySpace, and local government officials couldn’t replay the latest Obama Girl video on YouTube,” says the reporter, William Wiggins.

Phones had limited use, lines at the bank were slow, and ATM and credit cards were practically worthless.

“Many in our cashless society had to resort to using paper and coin money. Weird, huh?”

 

Sno-cat skiing considered

EISENHOWER TUNNEL, Colo. – To keep up with the Jones down the I-70 street, Loveland Ski Area is investigating expansion of snow coach-aided skiing.

Two nearby ski areas, Keystone and Copper Mountain, already offer skiing with the aid of snow coaches. Loveland, which is located around the eastern portal of the Eisenhower Tunnel, has changed little since 1999, when a lift was installed to the Continental Divide.

The land in question, Forest Service officials tell the Summit Daily News, has been identified since 1997 as suitable for guided skiing. Such backcountry-with-help skiing is sometimes called “backcountry lite” and in various ways has been a major theme in ski area expansions during the last decade.

The newspaper reports sharply worded conversations on forums such as that hosted by Teton Gravity Research, as backcountry skiers react to incursions of motorized users into the area, called Dry Gulch.

 

Hailey examines carbon footprint

HAILEY, Idaho – Hailey has started work toward reducing its carbon footprint. The city, located about 10 miles down-valley from Ketchum and Sun Valley, signed the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement last year. That agreement says participating towns should strive to achieve the principles of the Kyoto Protocol, reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 10 per cent below 1990 levels by the year 2012.

Hailey’s town government has first focused on its internal operations, retrofitting lights at city hall, installing programmable thermostats in all city buildings, and encouraging more car-pooling and mass transit by employees. An emissions inventory conducted by the city finds a 3.3 per cent decrease from 2005 to 2007.

The inventory showed that a major user of electricity is the wastewater treatment plan. Pumping of water is also a major consumer of electricity. The Idaho Mountain Express says town officials hope that limiting lawn irrigation to two days a week will reduce pumping costs and hence the community’s carbon footprint.

Apparently still unaddressed is the broader community footprint, such as is the focus of inventories conducted in the last several years in Aspen, Jackson Hole and now other ski towns and resort valleys.

 

Mining company determined

CRESTED BUTTE, Colo. – Amid the lingering snow piled to the eaves of some houses in Crested Butte, the red flags continue to flap in the breezes, continued prayerful vigilance regarding what most people consider to be a major threat to the community’s existing lifestyle and tourism-based economy.

The prayer flags were strung this winter as part of the opposition to potential molybdenum mining on Mount Emmons, called the Red Lady in Crested Butte, which is located at the foot of the mountain.

The mountain contains a substantial body of molybdenum ore — described as “world class” — by the owners, U.S. Energy Corp. The company, which is based in Riverton, Wyo., obtained claims to the ore body under the General Mining Act of 1872, and several years ago further obtained title to the Forest Service land above it at a cost of $5 per acre.

U.S. Energy last year enlisted Vancouver-based Kobex Resources Ltd. into an option agreement. The company invested $10 million into the proposed mine, now called Lucky Jack, before abruptly pulling out in April. An analyst had predicted the pullout, explaining that Kobex had not realized the amount of community opposition.

That opposition, through well-connected local residents, has grown to include one of the world’s largest legal firms, DLA Piper, which is said to be a heavy-hitter in Washington D.C.

“(Residents) are concerned about the economy we have built up here, which is tourism," Mayor Alan Bernholtz told the Christian Science Monitor. "I don't think mining and tourism mix too well."

But a press release issued by U.S. Energy says it “stands undeterred in its resolve to advance, permit and develop Lucky Jack into a premier primary molybdenum mine that the United States can be proud of.” The company has allocated $5 million to refine estimates of costs for mining and milling. That information will be used in filing plans to the U.S. Forest Service late this year or early next.

The company remains “confident in its ability to identify and bring on board a highly qualified partner in the future,” according to the press release. An opposition leader, Bill Ronai, president of the Red Lady Coalition, told the Crested Butte News that the circumstances that caused Kobex to withdraw haven’t changed, which makes him skeptical that U.S. Energy will find a suitable partner.

Another key opposition group is the High Country Citizens’ Alliance. Bob Salter, the group’s director of mineral resources, says the proposal is “one very real example” of the “residual desire to perpetuate the consumptive culture” that he says is consuming “vast amounts of currently healthy land, water and air resources.”

The Gunnison Country Times, meanwhile, wonders what will become of the spring corn harvest on the mountain’s southeast-facing bowl, a favorite of backcountry skiers.

“On a sunny day, when you’ve got favorable conditions, you’ve probably got a couple dozen people going up there,” said John Norton, an opponent of the mine.

Perry Anderson, spokesman for the mining company, said no policy on public access to the bowl has been set.

 

Aspen water untainted by drugs

ASPEN, Colo. – In the wake of national news about drugs in municipal water supplies, people wanted to know whether antibiotics, hormones or other drugs are found in Aspen’s drinking water.

There are not many people living upstream of Aspen, but just the same, city officials decided to find out for sure, testing for more than 870 drugs, including DEET, penicillin and prednisone. The tests did reveal chlorine and fluoride, both of which are put into domestic water supplies. Fluoride also occurs naturally in local waters.

The lab tests cost between $1,500 and $2,000, reports The Aspen Times.

 

Carbon tax called unfair

REVELSTOKE, B.C. – British Columbia is instituting new taxes on carbon-based fuels beginning in July as part of its strategy of dampening production of planet-warming greenhouse gases. The rate is $10 per ton of greenhouse gases, but rising $5 a year until it hits $30 per ton.

What this means in practice is that the gasoline tax will rise 2.4 cents per litre, and that has politician Norm MacDonald cranky. Writing in the Revelstoke Times-Review, he charges that the tax will unfairly hurt his constituents in the Columbia River Basin.

Rural residents must drive farther, whether to jobs in the forests or to services in towns, he says. And the tax will achieve only 7 per cent of the reductions being targeted by the plan.

The carbon tax also is being applied to natural gas, propane, coal and home heating oil.

 

Million-dollar houses common

BASALT, Colo. – Despite the slowed economy, a new record has been established in Basalt for real estate with a $3.4 million closing. The Aspen Times says that the 4,184-square-foot house has views, views, views, plus other splendours.

The town, located 18 miles down-valley from Aspen, hadn’t had a $1 million sale until five years ago, but since then, more than four score have been registered. Yalonda Long, a broker with Mason and Morse, a real estate agency, said Basalt has become a destination market, and not just a place where people go because they can’t afford Aspen itself.