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Mountain News: Telluride brings in big guns

TELLURIDE, Colo. – Telluride’s new ski terrain in Prospect Bowl is so big and steep that the U.S. Forest Service has authorized a pair of 105-mm howitzer cannons to provoke avalanches before skiers get there.

TELLURIDE, Colo. – Telluride’s new ski terrain in Prospect Bowl is so big and steep that the U.S. Forest Service has authorized a pair of 105-mm howitzer cannons to provoke avalanches before skiers get there. Only a handful of ski areas in the United States are permitted such howitzers.

“Not every ski area needs them,” says Doug Abromeit, of the U.S. Forest Service National Avalanche Center, which is located in Ketchum, Idaho. “They’re expensive, and the U.S. Army and Forest Service require extensive gunner training and adherence to security procedures.”

For most ski areas, he added, using the howitzers for avalanche control would be like taking an 18-wheeler to the grocery store.

But howitzers do have range, precision, and military punch, making them effective in certain terrain conditions. Those ski areas that use them are: Aleyeska; in Alaska; Taos, in New Mexico; Jackson Hole, in Wyoming; Mammoth Mountain and Alpine Meadows, in California; and Snowbird, in Utah.

Oregon’s Mt. Hood Meadows also got permission to use howitzers this winter, to reduce the danger to ski patrollers.

Avalaunchers are a common tool for controlling avalanches at ski areas. A device patterned after baseball pitching machines, it uses pressurized nitrogen to propel projectiles onto snow-laden slopes.

However, Avalaunchers are notoriously imprecise, especially in storms, precisely when they are most needed. “They get blown around in the wind,” says Ken Kowynia, the Forest Service winter sports program manager in Colorado, speaking of the projectiles.

Also, their range is only a few hundred metres. As such they’re more useful for smaller areas.

The 105-mm howitzers, in contrast, can be fired up to 10 miles with enough accuracy that holes could be dug into the mountainside with repeat shelling. That makes them effective in targeting the “sweet spot” of slopes most likely to result in avalanches.

In addition, less than 1 per cent of howitzer shells are duds, compared to 38 per cent for Avalauncher projectiles.

Another common technique for abating avalanche threat is to dispatch ski patrollers to throw explosives by hand from ridges and other areas near the starting zones of snow slides.

Hand-delivery of explosives can be dangerous, says Kowynia. He has experience with avalanche control at Colorado’s Arapahoe Basin, where the throwing of charges on the resort’s rocky and steep East Wall sometimes took six hours. That terrain is also exposed, he says, and the work is cold and dangerous.

Because of similar threats to ski patrollers at Telluride, the Forest Service decided, the new terrain warrants the use of howitzers. The howitzers also give ski area managers a higher confidence that they have reduced the threat of avalanches to an acceptable level.

“It’s really what Telluride needed,” said Kowynia. “Because the terrain has so many starting zones, with so many slide paths, we concluded that the most efficient system is a military weapons program.”

The U.S. Army controls howitzers, limiting their use to ski areas administered by the U.S. Forest Service or to programs administered by state governments. For example, Colorado uses howitzers to control avalanches on Berthoud, Loveland, and Red Mountain, among other passes.

The 105mm howitzers were manufactured beginning in 1941, with most now in use built in the 1950s. Several other ski areas use 105 mm and 75 mm recoilless rifles, which are different but still large ammo. They are: Alpenthal, in Washington, Kirkwood in California, and Alta, in Utah. Montana’s Bridger Bowl also continues to use the 75 mm recoilless, but is ending use in January.

 

Explosive discovery under porch

CRESTED BUTTE, Colo. – One Crested Butte neighbourhood had a brief scare after police learned that an explosive used for avalanche control had been stashed by a renter under the front porch of a house.

“The police were freaking out. They were yelling to stay away from the porch and get out the back of the house,” Ryan Hoynacki told the Crested Butte News. “There must have been six or seven cops there.”

Hoynacki moved into the house recently, and was told by the departing tenant that he had left the explosive under the porch.

Police found a round of explosives such as was used at the Crested Butte Mountain Resort until the 1970s. The explosive was used in a 75-mm recoilless, a cannon-like rifle originally developed as an anti-tank weapon. It has since been largely replaced by the Avalauncher, which creates a concussive blast of air to trigger avalanches. The older weapon created explosive fragments upon detonation.

Forest Service officials said they thought the recovered explosive was a partial dud, meaning it had only partially blasted. Whatever remained, whether partial or full, was removed by technicians from the U.S. Army, who detonated it at Fort Carson, near Fountain, Colo.

This isn’t the first time an explosive device has been found at a Crested Butte home. Unstable powder, such as was used in mining, was discovered several years ago by the new owner of a house within an old outbuilding.

 

Canmore hosts wellness festival

CANMORE, B.C. – Canmore has hosted an event called Lifefest for the second time. It brings together chiropractors, reiki therapists and other health-care professionals from both the traditional and alternative realms.

The event, says Teresa Mullen, executive director of the Canmore Economic Development Association, is part of the community’s effort to diversify its economy. “If it’s just tourism, we can’t just rely on that,” she told the Rocky Mountain Outlook.

But then, it hasn’t been just tourism for a long time in Canmore. As has been noted in the newspaper, an amenity-based real-estate development has become the major driver of the former mining town’s economy.

 

It’s a wrap for two papers

KETCHUM, Idaho – It has been a rough season for old newspapers in ski towns. Newspapers in both Ketchum and Vail have ceased publication.

In Ketchum, the Wood River Journal died in October. The Idaho Mountain Express purchased the assets, which seemed to consist mostly of bound volumes of old newspapers.

The Journal was founded in 1881, when Ketchum was a mining town. The newspaper’s assets at the time of its demise included the bound volumes of several other newspapers that had come and gone in the Wood River Valley.

The Vail Trail’s life was far more brief. It began publishing in 1965, three years after the ski area was established. The founder, George Knox Sr., called “The Skipper,” aimed to promote Vail, which then was struggling to survive, while also providing a clearing house of information to replace the less reliable rumor mill.

Knox declared it “Vail’s greatest newspaper,” a title that remained on the newspaper’s front-page flag for decades. Weather, circulation and all else were similarly “great,” according to a front-page box that later managing editors scorned but had to accept.

As Vail boomed, so did the Vail Trail, and by the 1980s it was routinely running more than 100 pages per week.

But even then, a couple of new kids on the block were looking to upset the king of the hill in Vail. One of them, a daily newspaper, did so by delivering bite-sized news and free newspapers hither and thither in Vail and the Eagle Valley. In 1998, the Knox family tried to start a daily newspaper, but without a printer of their own. The Vail Daily, by then owned by deep-pocketed Swift Communications, instantly started a second daily for afternoon distribution, to confuse advertisers and readers. This third daily survived just long enough to muddle the splash of the new paper, called the Daily Trail.

The Daily Trail expired after two or three years, leaving once again the weekly Vail Trail, which was sold in 2003 to the rival Vail Daily. It was continued, but with a staff that came and went rapidly and with little editorial consistency.

Allen Best, managing editor of The Vail Trail from 1987 to 1993, said he’s finding it increasingly difficult to explain his resume. “I spent 13 years of my life as managing editor at three ski-town newspapers, and all three are defunct,” he says. The Vail Valley Times and the Winter Park Manifest have also died, as has a newspaper in Denver that he helped start.

Scot Kersgaard, who worked at The Vail Trail in the late 1980s and before that was a part-owner of the Wood River Journal, said he has no problem with his resume. “When I was there, both those papers were vital in their communities,” he said.

 

Fortress gets help from Vancouver

VANCOUVER, B.C. – It was almost certain that at some point prior to the 2010 Winter Olympics, life for the hosts, Vancouver and Whistler, would get tense. Adding to that tenseness now are uncertainties about the financial stability of Fortress Investment Group, the parent of Whistler-Blackcomb operator Intrawest.

Fortress was also chosen to finance development of Vancouver’s $1 billion athletes’ village. The company was chosen, at least in part, based on its perceived strength.

Instead, Fortress has been shaky. In October, it got last-minute refinancing of $1.668 billion in debt related to its 2006 purchase of Intrawest. More recently, news has been leaked that the Vancouver City Council agreed to advance up to $100 million to cover cost overruns at the athletes’ village. This was in addition to $193 million, in loan guarantees to Fortress.

The New York Times says this news highlighted insecurities in Vancouver about the advisability of seeking the Olympics. It recalls that Montreal, in agreeing to host the 1976 Olympics, had been promised that a deficit would be no more likely than of a man having a baby. But, in fact, Montreal incurred a debt of $1.5 billion that was not paid off until 2006.

 

Not much work for architects

VAIL, Colo. – While the construction cranes remain busy in Vail, the pipeline of work for future years seems to be empty. All around are mutters about real estate companies closing their outlying offices and of architectural and engineering firms preparing to pink-slip their employees.

Jim Morter, one of the town’s most tenured architects, says so many projects are on hold he has been forced to put all employees, except for his receptionist, on contract basis. “I’ve been talking to clients,” Morter told the Vail Daily. “They’re optimistic, but there’s nothing brewing right now.”

He expects that will change, as he’s been through several ups and downs since he arrived in Vail in 1972.

More of a glass half-full report was delivered by a rival newspaper, the Vail Mountaineer, which has several architectural firms saying they’re staying plenty busy, thank you.

 

A giant carbon footprint

KETCHUM, Idaho – A new inventory of greenhouse gas emissions for Blaine County reveals that, like other ski resort-based counties in the West, it has a high per-capita carbon footprint, nearly 20 per cent higher than the national average.

Kyle Livingston, climate protection coordinator for the Environmental Resources Center, speculated that use of electricity to power the ski lifts at Sun Valley skewed the numbers.

“It is amazing how much we use here,” he told the Idaho Mountain Express. Electrical use is 60 per cent more than the U.S. average, he said.

He attributed the spike to use of electricity at Sun Valley Resort, but had no numbers to back up his claim. He also said that the high use of electricity may be due to its low price, which is 4 cents per kilowatt.

In Colorado, as of July 2007, the average price was 7.54 cents per kilowatt hour. Nationally, it was 9.49 cents, and on the Pacific Coast it was 12.51 cents. The highest costs of all are in New England, where prices range up to 18 cents per kilowatt hour.

In the Wood River Valley, where Ketchum and Sun Valley are located, high electricity use was also attributed to irrigation, for both farming and golf courses.

 

Cleanup of tainted water continues

BRECKENRIDGE, Colo. – Decades after they closed, the mines of Colorado mountain towns continue to demand attention.

Breckenridge has begun operating a $1.2 million water-treatment plant that is supposed to remove the zinc, cadmium and lead that contaminate the water coming from the Wellington-Oro Mine. The Wellington, explains the Summit Daily News, was the largest mine in Summit County from the 1980s to the 1930s. Mining there did not finally cease until 1972, or 11 years after the Breckenridge ski area began operating.

Summit County’s government and the Town of Breckenridge purchased the site as part of an 1,800-acre open space parcel. Breckenridge intends to operate the treatment plant at a cost of $90,000 annually. The solid waste is to be delivered to a smelter, which will process the zinc and cadmium into the manufacture of batteries.

Two mountain ridges away at Gilman, located near Vail, the official launch of the Eagle Mine cleanup began 20 years ago. The former zinc, silver and lead mine had contaminated the Eagle River so badly that it killed fish and most other aquatic life. At first, the cleanup was botched, and in the 1990-91 ski season the snow produced at nearby Beaver Creek was orange, because it was drawn from the same river.

Later, fish returned to the Eagle downstream from the mine, but pollution levels remain somewhat elevated. “This was never the kind of site where it’s like, ‘Oh, you’re done,’” the Environmental Protection Agency’s Jennifer Chergo told the Vail Daily.

But the bottom line is that after $80 million and 20 years of cleanup, acid-mine drainage from the old workings within the bowels of Battle Mountain continue to pollute the Eagle River. Even now, the river has no sculpin, the native fish in that segment of the river. There are brown trout, but they are not native.

A water treatment plant along the river near the old mine has been operating since the early 1990s at a cost of more than $1 million a year.

 

Scientists to study crown fires

ESTES PARK, Colo. – With up to 90 per cent of lodgepole pine in Colorado already dead or soon to be dead, thanks to the epidemic of bark beetles, worries continue about the potential for giant forest fires. Lodgepole pine, because of their shallow root systems, typically fall down within three years after they have died. However, in that time, particularly when they still have red needles on their branches, what is the fire potential?

To help answer that and other questions, a fire is being set in Rocky Mountain National Park after there is enough snow or rain to prevent a fire from advancing very far. The project is a joint venture between the national park service and researchers from Colorado State University.

The Park Service says that researchers also hope to learn more about the mechanisms of pine seed dispersal following a beetle attack, and also survival of beetle larvae following burning.

 

Bus fares rise 5%

CARBONDALE, Colo. – Bus riders between Aspen and its outlying communities in the 80-mile-long commutershed will be paying more this winter. A 40-punch pass will increase 5 per cent, to $29.40. As well, voters earlier this month approved a 0.4 per cent increase in sales tax. The money, explains The Aspen Times, is to be used to buy new buses and build better bus stops, part of an effort to make bus service faster and more comfortable.

 

Sabbath to remain on the Q.T.

TELLURIDE, Colo. – It seems like an odd time to ban construction on Sundays. The stories coming from Telluride have been of too much quiet in the economy, including the real estate sector. Nonetheless, Telluride city officials in late October began enforcing a law that prohibits use of heavy equipment such as backhoes, nail guns and other noisy construction equipment.

“We all need it for our sanity. Otherwise, it’s almost like living in a city,” said Bob Saunders, a council member. Construction by homeowners is exempted.

Town officials say building is continuing, despite the slowed economy. Ground was recently broken on a 1,600-square-foot house, and work is also beginning on the biggest lodging property Telluride has seen in several years, the 40-unit Element 5200, according to Chris Dawkins, the town planner.

He said that few contractors work on Sundays but, like everybody else, they will do so during crunch time. A few of those crunches are what provoked complaints from homeowners.