DENVER, Colo. – The New Yorker, in a recent article, examined the politics of Colorado. The article argued that if Barack Obama hopes to win the West, he needs to understood how Democrats came to control Colorado. The ski towns were mentioned as what political operatives called a “blue strip.”
For most of the last 60 years, Republicans have controlled the Rocky Mountain West. They still do in those areas where ranching prevails.
But in 2004, a noteworthy trend became evident in Colorado — and, for that matter, in other parts of the recreation-dominated West. Places like Gunnison, Grand and Routt counties — homes respectively to Crested Butte, Winter Park and Steamboat Springs — bucked their Republican traditions and voted for a Democrat — John Kerry — for president.
Some ski-anchored mountain counties — notably Aspen-dominated Pitkin County and Telluride-dominated San Miguel County — have consistently voted for Democrats for decades. But this new “blue strip” of resort communities in formerly rural, traditional Republican ranch countries is “now full of second homes and growing,” observed Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter’s chief of staff, Jim Carpenter.
Carpenter has observed that change closely, as he grew up in Granby, located near Winter Park and within Grand County. For decades it was so Republican that the only local elections that mattered occurred in the primary. Everybody from county coroner to surveyer was registered a Republican, whatever his or her true leanings may have been. In 2004, however, Grand County crossed the aisle to Kerry.
This resort blue-strip, however, alone does not explain why Colorado became a swing state. Also important, noted the New Yorker, were the growing number of Hispanics and, most important of all, the shift in Denver’s suburbs.
“Democrats often pay homage to the symbols of the American frontier,” concluded the magazine. “But the iconography of their Western strategy is not so much about mountains, cowboys, and tumbleweed as it is about tract houses, research labs, and wind farms.”
Vail looking for drivers
VAIL, Colo. – Vail town officials last year had 35 Australians with H-2B visas driving buses. With none of them coming back, the town is scrambling to recruit drivers, going to Yosemite and other national parks to see if summer-time bus drivers want winter jobs. Although the town isn’t ready to cut back service, if that happens, the evening schedule will be hit first. Some routes to outlying neighbourhoods currently get buses every 15 minutes, notes the Vail Daily.
Aspen continues green ads
ASPEN, Colo. – For the third straight year the Aspen Skiing Co. is running advertisements in skiing and snowboarding magazines that speak about its environmental concerns, not its wonderful snow.
Steve Metcalf, the company’s director of brand development, told the Aspen Times that the advertising campaign accomplishes two goals: It informs readers that the company is addressing bigger issues, and it differentiates it from 50 major competitors.
One ad shows a ski patroller clearing snow off the solar panels that help power the ski patrol headquarters at Aspen Highlands, one of four ski areas operated by the company. The advertisement urges readers to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and directs them to the company website at www.savesnow.org. The website has been visited 25,000 times in the last three years.
Another advertisement reports that Aspen Skiing’s sports shops will use the first all-natural wax, while another ad features the company’s microhydro generating plant at the Snowmass ski area.
Uphill migration documented
YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK, Calif.— For several years now scientists have known that species within mountain ecosystems are reacting to the changing climate. Pika, for example, are moving up in elevation.
But few places have such a strong empirical record for comparison as Yosemite National Park. There, a museum director named Joseph Grinnell set out nearly a century ago to seek specimens for his museum in Berkeley, Calif. Unlike other collectors, however, he and his assistants took elaborate notes on everything.
The Sacramento Bee’s Tom Knudson explains that because of those elaborate notes, researchers today can trace Grinnell’s footsteps to study what is different. Much has changed.
For example, during his traipsing in Yosemite, Grinnell found a species called the piñon mouse in the forests at around 7,000 feet. But when retired zoology professor Jim Patton went looking in 2003, he found the same species at 10,240 feet.
Rodent populations do expand and contract dramatically, but researchers think that global climate change has pushed the mouse up the mountain.
“Historic records for Yosemite indicate there’s been about a five degree Fahrenheit increase in the maximum summer temperature for any given elevation,” said Les Chow, a data manager for the National Park Service.
Some species, such as bushy-tailed wood rats and water shrews, have also become uncommon. Another species, the alpine chipmunk, is virtually non-existent.
Other species, such as the golden-mantled ground squirrel, remain but are moving upward. However, few species are migrating upward as rapidly as the alpine chipmunk. In 1915, the small chipmunk was omnipresent at Tuolumne Meadows. Now, it has retreated 2,000 feet upward.
“Maybe it’s the warming temperatures that it does not like,” reports Knudson. “Or perhaps it is the landscape changes that follow climate change — such as the creep of conifers up the mountain — that are pushing it higher onto the talus slopes. Alpine chipmunks prefer open areas, not shadow forests.”
Heat alone may not be driving the creatures upward. For example, in this case scientists speculate that snow deposition may have changed, causing a different distribution of plants. That could impact the diet of the chipmunks, which feed primarily on seeds. Whatever the reason, if the current pace continues, the chipmunk will start running out of real estate in 35 to 40 years.
What does this matter?
Patton, the retired zoology professor, says it’s not known whether loss of the chipmunk from the High Sierra “will have any incredible detrimental effect to human welfare, but it’s possible that it would. The big concern is that these changes are happening so fast that we don’t have a chance to understand both why they are happening and what the potential effects might be until it’s too late.”
Real estate market half of 2007
STEAMBOAT SPRINGS, Colo.—Still whooping with exuberance a year ago, the real estate market in Steamboat Springs and Routt County this year is slumbering. The Steamboat Pilot & Today reports $501 million in sales through July, compared with $1 billion during the same time period in 2006.
Not easy flying green
AIRPORTS EVERYWHERE – Can flying ever be green? So asks Ecologist, a magazine from the United Kingdom, and it’s a question in which ski towns should be vitally interested as they go about measuring their carbon footprints.
The magazine says it’s fair to say that the airline industry has been trying. The fuel efficiency of airlines has increased steadily at around 1.2 per cent a year, and is continuing to rise. Airlines have reasons to fly planes carrying more passengers. And Richard Branson, the entrepreneur and owner of Virgin Airlines, recently flew one of his planes with one engine operating on a weak blend of biofuel.
But these gains are dwarfed by the growth in airline use, up 8 per cent a year in the UK.
“The simple fact is that if aviation continues to grow as predicted, then even with projected increases in efficiency it will use the UK’s entire allocation of carbon dioxide by 2050, were we to accept an 80 per cent reduction target,” the Ecologist observes.
The magazine does note the return of turboprop aircraft. One such plane, the Q400, is being used by Frontier for its flights from Denver to resort towns in the Rocky Mountains, and for shuttles between Los Angeles to Mammoth.
“Although they are both slower and noisier (for passengers) than jets, turboprops use between a quarter and a third less fuel, and offer considerably better economy on short-haul flights,” the Ecologist notes.
How about hydrogen? So far, it’s no real answer. It emits only water, but water is itself is a powerful greenhouse gas when in the atmosphere.
The magazine also notes emissions at altitude are roughly twice as damaging in terms of global warming. Partly because of this, aviation is responsible for at least 13 per cent of emissions by the UK.
Scott USA seeking new bike team
KETCHUM, Idaho – Scott USA is looking for a new bicycling team. The Ketchum-based manufacturer of ski equipment also has a bike division, and in 2004 it began sponsoring Saunier Duval, which became Scott-American Beef.
But one of the team’s riders, Riccardo Ricco, tested positive after the fourth stage of this year’s Tour de France for a variant of a banned substance commonly known as EPO, for erythropoietin. When injected into a racer’s body, the hormone helps stimulate red blood cell production, which allows more oxygen to be delivered to muscles.
Adrian Montgomery, the marketing and public relations director for Scott USA, told the Idaho Mountain Express that his company is actively looking for another team — and that the team must be in on the big tours of Europe. “We’re in the business of selling bikes,” he said. “If you can’t be in the Grand tours, we can’t be part of your team.”
Aspen partners for non-Vail shuttles
ASPEN, Colo. – The Aspen Skiing Co. isn’t about to share its mailing list with rival Vail Resorts Inc., and so it has thrown its business for transporting people from airports to a company called Gray Line Worldwide.
A company called Colorado Mountain Express for the last decade had cornered the business of transporting people from Denver International Airport, as well as from Eagle County Regional Airport, to ski resorts along and near Interstate 70. The company was owned by East West Partners, the land-development company.
But East West earlier this year decided to sell CME to Vail for $40.5 million. The deal is expected to be completed this fall.
Chuck Murphy, the managing member of Gray Line of Colorado, asked Aspen whether it was a concern that Aspen’s guests would be transported by Vail. After all, that would open up the database of a larger chunk of Aspen’s customers to Vail. Murphy told the Aspen Times that 20,000 to 30,000 destination travelers go to Aspen each winter from either DIA or Eagle County Regional Airport. Murphy’s firm hopes to get at least a quarter of that business.
Whereas CME exclusively uses vans, the new company has an array of vehicles, from 10-passenger vans to 56-passenger buses, also called motorcoaches. The proposed fare from DIA to Aspen will be $105 one-way, and from Eagle County it will be $60.
Spencer joins Sultan
SILVERTON, Colo. – Two mountains west of Silverton have memorable names: Grand Turk and Sultan. A mountain newly named, Spencer, has a more prosaic name, but the individual for whom it was named, Donald C. Spencer, was anything but.
The Durango Telegraph explains that the namesake developed an entire new field called Spencer cohomology, which combines algebra, calculus and geometry. Perhaps more saliently, while teaching at Princeton University in the 1950s, he was mentor to John Nash, the mathematician made famous by the book, “A Beautiful Mind,” and later a movie of the same name. The author, Sylvia Nasar, called Spencer a “brilliant theorist, teacher and mentor, and later, a bearded environmental.”
Retiring to Durango in 1977, Spencer was bitterly opposed to a dam on the Animas River, among other issues. He particularly loved the montane and alpine environments around Silverton.
Urban growth at heart of debate
JACKSON, Wyo. – Jackson, the heart of Jackson Hole, is a stew of cultures, part dusty cowboy boot and part Teva sandals, in some places a beat-up pickup truck and at other times a yellow Hummer.
Originally a ranch headquarters, it acquired much of its current sheen from the post-World War II age of automobile tourism. More recently, it has been changing again. just to what the changes are driving is at the heart of an election challenge this fall.
The mayor, Mark Baron, has held office since 2002, a time of rapid growth. Baron, who owns a laundry and dry cleaning service in the town’s downtown area, has advocated a more densely developed town core. This is necessary, he insists, in order to reduce sprawl into the rural pastures near the town and to continue to make Jackson the vibrant centre of Jackson Hole, which has no other town.
Through successive town votes, the community has argued the merits of growth, whether it can be prevented, or how it can best be channeled. As well, the elections have tilted on whether Jackson will retain the feel of a small town, such as it had 30 years ago, or will it become more urban in nature.
In all cases there have been majority opinions, but no consensus. Nor is there now.
Although Baron appeared to have avoided any opposition in this year’s election, the Jackson Hole News & Guide now reports a challenger has emerged from various write-in candidates. The challenger, Mike Lance, a state highway worker and former city councilman, objects to new regulations that allow four-storey buildings up to 46-feet tall.
This commercial growth, if mixed in with housing, creates more jobs that further strain the housing market. “The more commercial we get, the more people we need,” said Lance. “We’re having a hard time housing the ones we have.”
The News & Guide last year found that town councils have approved 752,000 square feet of commercial development since 2000. No number has been put to the amount of residential development authorized during the same time.
Does climbing 14ers cause brain damage?
TELLURIDE, Colo. – Does climbing 14,000-foot peaks cause you to lose brain cells, because of hypoxia? A study done in Spain came to the conclusion that time spent at high elevations resulted in a significant loss of brain cells, even leading to permanent damage.
But a study conducted by Telluride’s Institute for Altitude Medicine is coming to a different conclusion. Dr. Peter Hackett, the centre’s director and one of the nation’s foremost experts in high-altitude medicine, has spearheaded a study of climbers of Alaska’s 20,320-foot Mt. McKinley, a.k.a. Denali. Brains of the climbers were analyzed by magnetic resonance imaging both before and after their climbs.
Results of the study remain incomplete, but Hackett told The Telluride Watch it appears that climbing the occasional 14er won’t cause irreparable damage.
Campers told to skedaddle
CRESTED BUTTE, Colo. – The U.S. Forest Service has been cracking down on campers who overextend their legal welcome on national forests. The law specifies 14 days, but some campers have stayed much, much longer — in effect, making a home on the public lands. The message that the Forest Service wants to send, Forest Service spokeswoman Leeanne Loupe, tells the Crested Butte News, is that the national forest is a place to visit, not live.
Taos campus to get solar panels
TAOS, N.M. – Taos will become the site of a major installation of solar panels. Work has begun on a solar farm of 2.5 to 3 acres adjacent to the University of New Mexico-Taos. When operational next year, college officials tell The Taos News, the solar farm will provide 160 per cent of electricity consumed by the campus. However, the electricity will not be created precisely when it is needed, as storage media for solar power is still being developed. For those non-sunshiny times, the campus will still be connected to the electrical grid. The Taos area is supplied by Tri-State Generation and Transmission.
Keystone trumps Purgatory
CHEYENNE, Wyo. – It turns out that people won’t have to live in Purgatory, just as nobody officially skis there, either.
That had been the plan in Cheyenne, where the name “Purgatory Drive” had been picked in a subdivision with a street grid whose names came from ski resorts.
The ski area in question is the original name for the Durango Mountain Resort. The name came from Spanish explorers, who lost a member of their party to the waters of a river that they called El Rio de Las Animas Perdidas en Purgatorio, or the “The River of Lost Souls in Purgatory.” Today, it’s better known as just the Animas River, although another river of lost souls elsewhere in Colorado is called the Purgatory.
The Wyoming Tribune Eagle says the developers of Fox Run, a subdivision of rural acreages, were thinking of a scenic ski area when they chose the name Purgatory, but later decided that some prospective homeowners might instead think of a morally complex and ambiguous afterlife.
The streets signs are being changed out with the more prosaic “Keystone Drive.”
