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Mountain News: Vacation homes friction heats up in Banff

Compiled by Allen Best BANFF, Alberta — The disagreement about second-home ownership in Banff National Park continues to become more heated.

Compiled by Allen Best

BANFF, Alberta — The disagreement about second-home ownership in Banff National Park continues to become more heated. A group with egalitarian and environmental goals is now threatening to expose people it claims are living in the resort town without legally valid reasons.

Banff, the town, is unusual in that it is located within a national park and hence subject to special rules governing the national park. Among those rules is one, called the need-to-reside clause, that says people who own homes there must be involved in the local, tourism economy. That theoretically precludes vacation homes.

Not everybody likes this policy, of course, and an organization is being formed that intends to legally challenge it.

Those that support the policy believe that it’s not being enforced. A new Web site created by the environmentalists, www. banffresidency.com, alleges that an executive for a financial services company illegally lives in Banff National Park. The Web site also encourages people to volunteer information about others who live in Banff in violation of the need-to-reside clause.

An unidentified spokesman for the environmental group contacted by the Banff Crag & Canyon said the rule is commonly flouted to the incremental stress of the environment. "There’s only one Banff and it shouldn’t be for elite people to enjoy," the spokesman said.

The accused property owner retorted that his legal right to live there had been established. A local lawyer, Eric Harvie, characterized the Web site as "tattletale vigilantism." He said the environmental group does not understand the laws relevant in this case.

Grandpa-on-Ice strangest festival

NEDERLAND, Colo. — Colorado mountain towns have their fare share of off-beat festivals.

Crested Butte has Flauschink, which seems to be something of an off-beat bar crawl. Heeney, located in Summit County, has a festival that pays homage to ticks. And Fruita – it’s not a mountain town, but a lot of mountain bike riders go there – has a Mike the Headless Chicken Days, a celebration of the life of a chicken that survived for 18 months without a head.

Rivaling any of these for strangeness, however, is the Frozen Dead Guy Days festival, which is held in Nederland, located west of Boulder. Although there’s a ski area nearby, Eldora, Nederland is not really a ski town. There is only one hotel. However, it abounds with eccentricity.

In 1989, one Bredo Morstøl, a Norwegian, died of a heart attack. His grandson, Trygve Bauge, decided to freeze "Grandpa" in hopes that someday he could be returned to life. Such science is called cryogenics.

Town officials banned such attempts, but "grandfathered in this attempt," notes the Rocky Mountain News. Lately, they have made light of it all with a late-winter festival that last year attracted 5,000 people.

There’s a Grandpa look-alike contest, Grandpa’s crawl of the bars, and Tuff Shed coffin races, in which teams carry makeshift coffins and a rider around a frozen obstacle course.

As for Grandpa, his body remains in a hermetically sealed aluminum container that is kept at a temperature of 90 below zero. It requires a fresh supply of dry ice every month.

Second summer flight from Texas to Vail

EAGLE, Colo. — Last year promoters in Vail and others in the Eagle Valley initiated daily direct flights during summer months to Dallas.

The flights were a $475,000 risk, a third of the money put up by the county government. In the end, the hotels, developers, and government paid a collective $20,000. About half of passengers were second-home owners.

This year, those fights will continue, but various businesses and governments are pulling together $250,000 to guarantee flights from Houston, another primary source for tourists and second-home owners in the Vail area.

A key question is whether flights from Houston will take away from the Dallas market. The answer: mostly no. An official at Beaver Creek, Tony O’Rourke, estimates 10 per cent of the customers for the Dallas flights will go to the Houston flights.

Gate to community

down

CANMORE, Alberta — A gate erected at the entrance to Canmore’s most expensive real estate project, called the Cairns on the Bow, has been removed.

The gate, the first of its kind in Canmore, an old mining town, had been denounced by the town’s politicians, as well as the newspaper, the Rocky Mountain Outlook. However, municipal authorities have no legislative authority to deny the gate, as it is located on private property, even though there is a municipal park within the 19-home neighbourhood.

A representative of the developer said the gate was intended as a way of controlling traffic, but that option will be left to the people who move there. He professed to believe that as such, the gate would be different from gated communities in the United States.

Anti-smoking bandwagon rolls on

CANMORE, Alberta — The anti-smoking bandwagon keeps getting more members. Even as Banff considered a sweeping limitation on smoking in all public places, smoking foes were strategizing in the down-valley town of Canmore.

Canmore already bans smoking in businesses where kids would be exposed to it, but permits smoking in liquor-dispensing establishments. Crusaders hope to eliminate that prerogative.

A trickier dilemma is at the other end of the age spectrum, at the Bow River Seniors’ Lodge. There, about 20 per cent of the residents continue their life-time habits of smoking. A health organization has reservations about nurses working in so much smoke. But authorities aren’t sure they want to get tough with old men and women.

"It’s a tough decision to make, because these people have been smoking all their lives. A lot of them can’t go outside because they’re too frail," said Gailen Neville, a Canmore town councillor.

In fact, there is some concern that forcing the senior citizens to not smoke may imperil their health. "On the surface we have people that are not in the best of health, and they’ve been smokers all their lives, and any major change in their routine might not be good for them," said Don Golding, a member of the housing board. "We have to be careful not to place an undue stress on them."

Receding snow produces problems

CRESTED BUTTE, Colo. — March is, by the record book, the snowiest month at mountain towns in Colorado. Most of the first three weeks, however, has been as balmy as an ocean beach.

At Crested Butte, this balminess has had several repercussions First, a film crew showed up to create a commercial that extols the ability of Lincoln Mercury’s new sport utility vehicle to handle snow.

"The film crew has been challenged slightly by the fact that the substance that drew them to this area has recently melted into dirty piles of mush," reported the Crested Butte News dryly. "They will be hiring locals to truck snow into the set locations over the course of the week."

Meanwhile, as the snow rapidly melted, it just as rapidly revealed the sins of winter. "Copious amounts of dog poop are emerging with the spring thaw, spreading a distinctive, unsavory aroma," reported the paper. Do-gooders following behind the dog-poopers have a bright idea, called PooFest 2004. They hope to get volunteers to scour the streets. As for incentives, they dangle prizes and perhaps a title: PooFest Champion.

Wouldn’t that be something to hang on your wall?

John Kerry a man of all boards

KETCHUM, Idaho — A major rap against John Kerry, the presumed Democratic Party’s candidate for president, is that he’s indecisive. The New York Times, accompanying Kerry on a vacation to his second home at Sun Valley, indicated that indecisiveness was evident as he was flying to Idaho.

Would it be skis or a snowboard? He wasn’t sure.

Well, on the first day at least, it was a snowboarding, although a later photograph showed Kerry on skis. As well, he took along a top-flight racing bicycle on his vacation.

The Times found Ketchum and the Wood River Valley a haven for Democrats, despite another part-time resident who is a Republican, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Many stop signs in the valley have "Bush 2004" spray-painted underneath. One teen-ager said the particularly rebellious among her contemporaries were hard-core vegans.

Avalanches falling on Big Sky?

BIG SKY, Mont. — To the dangers of skiing, reports The Wall Street Journal, add the possibility of getting hit by shrapnel.

The story was a dispute between two ski areas, Big Sky and the recently opened Moonlight Basin Ranch, which are separated by a knife-edge ridge. Big Sky has filed a lawsuit against Moonlight, asking for judicial intervention to alter Moonlight’s avalanche-control program. Moonlight, like many ski areas, uses a device called an Avalaucher to help trigger avalanches on ski slopes. Although Moonlight alerts Big Sky to the impending bombs, the work sometimes causes Big Sky to postpone its promised 9 a.m. lift service.

The story is mostly an interesting peek into what it takes to prevent ski areas from having significant avalanche problems. Indeed, the article points out that while avalanche fatalities in the United States are rising, there has only been one instance of an avalanche fatality within an opened ski area since 1987.

And as far as the business of dodging shrapnel, the Journal’s story makes it somewhat clear that the reporter’s warning was mostly poetic license. At most, Big Sky was concerned about opening late.

But just how reliable is the Avalauncher and other ski area missilery? Big Sky’s position is summarized in this statement from general manager Taylor Middleton: "It’s human beings operating machines, and mistakes happen." Moonlight’s position is summarized by co-owner Lee Poole. Pointing to the top of Lone Cone Peak, he asks: "Could we (inadvertently) launch a round over the top of that? It’s about as possible as getting hit by a meteor."

Telluride owners burned out

TELLURIDE, Colo. — The new owners of the Telluride Ski and Golf Co. aren’t exactly off to a wonderful start. The Horning family’s 7,300-square-foot home burned down shortly after being extensively remodeled. Officials, reported The Telluride Watch, found no evidence of arson. The house is worth $7 million.

Ashes-only in Vail

VAIL, Colo. — Vail is close to getting a cemetery, of sorts. Although a few plots remain in the town from the early ranching days, a majority of town residents have steadfastly opposed using land for a cemetery.

Now, however, a memorial park is being planed for 11 acres in East Vail. No caskets would be allowed, but ashes could be spread there or even buried if in biodegradable urns. Headstones will also be banned, but the departed might be memorialized by having their names carved in a natural rock wall or on boulders or paving stones, reports the Vail Daily.

The Rev. Carl Walker, pastor of the Mount of the Holy Cross Lutheran Church, said cremation is chosen more than 50 per cent of the time in Colorado. Creation rates could be even higher in Vail, where Walker has officiated at only one casket burial during the last 11 years.

Sister city’s Nazi ties trouble Aspen

ASPEN, Colo. — Aspen now has five sister-cities across the globe, and it turns out that the most recently acquired sibling, Bariloche, Argentina, was a haven for high-ranking German Nazis after World War II.

This news, reports The Aspen Times, is causing concern among Aspen’s Jewish leaders, particularly because the residents of the Argentine town seemingly won’t condemn the Nazis. "If a community is refusing to acknowledge that it allowed Nazis to elude responsibility then it’s totally inappropriate for any American city to maintain a relationship with it," said David Elcott, from the American Jewish Committee.

But in the Argentine town, even a Jewish resident born there in 1945 of German expatriates is willing to overlook past misdeeds. "There were German Jews and German Nazis all working to build a community here. There were never any anti-Semitic problems or anti-Nazi problems," said Nicolas Spagat, a member of Bariloche’s sister cities committee. "It was a small town. What were you going to do, shoot the Nazis?"

Don Sheeley, president of Aspen’s Sister Cities program, argued that every country has a checkered past. For example one of Aspen’s sister cities is in Japan, which attacked the United States in 1941.

Although not mentioned in The Aspen Times, Aspen itself has shadows. Founded as a mining town, it was a centre for a movement to remove the Ute Indians from Colorado. The county in which Aspen is located, Pitkin County, is named after Frederick Pitkin, a governor at the time who was known for his "Utes Must Go" declarations.

Foundation seeks to integrate Hispanics

TELLURIDE, Colo. — The Telluride Foundation has set out to help integrate Hispanics into the Telluride community. "The foundation’s mission is about the quality of life in Telluride, and Hispanics are clearly a part of the community," explained Paul Major, president of the organization.

"We just want to lower the barriers so Hispanics can be a part of the community," he told The Telluride Watch. "If we don’t think about it intentionally, we will probably discover too late that there are a lot of problems out here."

How the foundation intends to do this seems a little fuzzy, but involves identifying for the broader community how important Hispanics are. This importance is most easily identified economically. "These people are a huge economic engine," he said. "Not only are they working critical jobs, but they affect the economy. Why wouldn’t we embrace them.

Among the specific steps the foundation plans during the next year are a focus on childcare, a translating resource, and youth activity outreach.

Hispanics are assimilating slowly for several reasons, among them language and cultural differences. Also, there’s the fear of deportation. Many – although not all – immigrants, particularly from Mexico, gained access to the United States illegally, and hence fear deportation.

Library criticized for its pot-growing book

JACKSON HOLE, Wyo. — The Teton County Library has been drawing fire from a patron for having a book, Marijuana Growers Handbook. Library patron Robert Gathercole argues the book is a misuse of public funds.

"I do not understand why, when so much of our county resources are devoted to dealing with the problem of substance abuse, you have chosen to spend tax dollars to purchase a how-to crime manual," he wrote in an op-ed piece published in the Jackson Hole News & Guide.

"Marijuana, for better or for worse, is an issue of current interest in our community," responds the library director, Betsy Bernfeld. The book, she said, meets the goal of offering "all points of view concerning the problem and issues of our time."

If that’s the case, responds Gathercole, why doesn’t the library have books on the manufacture of illegal automatic weapons and explosives as well as child pornography?

Utah and Colorado seek wolf consensus

SUMMIT COUNTY, Utah — Clearly, the wolves are moving south from Wyoming into both Utah and Colorado. Last year, wolves were sighted within 50 miles of the Colorado border, northwest of Steamboat Springs. And in Utah, two have been sighted, one at the border of Summit County, north of Park City.

Officials in both Colorado and Utah are now trying to create consensus about how to respond to the wolves. The major issue seems to be how to accommodate wolves, unlike a century ago, when wolves were specifically sought out to be killed, while allowing ranchers and others to protect their investments against depredation.

The federal government wants to remove wolves from "threatened" status under the Endangered Species Act and turn control over to the states. That is the process now underway in Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho, where wolves were reintroduced into the Yellowstone ecosystem almost a decade ago. The three states collectively now have 756 wolves.

A Utah wildlife official, Craig McLaughlin, predicts federal protection for wolves found north of I-70 will be removed altogether within one to five years, reports The Park Record. "The federal government wants to get out of the wolf business when they’re no longer needed," he explained at a recent meeting.

Most ranchers fear the return of wolves, and want as much power as they can get to prevent wolves from killing their cattle, sheep, and other animals.

Much the same story is told in Colorado, where polls a decade ago revealed broad public support for wolves, at least as an abstraction. Livestock interests, which have disproportionate influence over the state’s Republican politicians, dissent.

Colorado officials are now meeting with the public to draw up plans. As in Utah, Colorado is roughly split by I-70, and wolves in those two areas are expected to be treated differently. Wolves south of I-70 will continue to enjoy the protection of the Endangered Species Act, as part of a program of reintroduction of wolves into New Mexico and Arizona. Wolves found north of I-70 that come from the Yellowstone reintroduction will be treated differently, but it’s not clear exactly how.

Citizens argue density merits

SUMMIT COUNTY, Utah — In the usual dance between developers and the local citizenry, developers often want more density. But to get it, they must offer community benefits, such as recreation paths, dedicated open space, and all the rest.

In Summit County, the matrix used by the government normally would have allowed 42 housing units when applied to a new project, but the developer came in with a plan for 61. The planning commission, after hearing from a hundred mostly agitated nearby residents, said it wasn’t close to being good enough. One citizens’ group called the proposed one-acre park "laughable." Most of the open space offered by the developer was already off-limits to development because it has been classified as sensitive. Most of the opposition, however, was rooted in increased traffic.

Tourist town turns into something else

DURANGO, Colo. — Durango is often described as a tourist town. Two stories in the Durango Herald during one week strongly suggest otherwise.

In one case in North Durango, the owners of a motel are replacing it with 15 small doctor-sized offices and 17 one- and two-bedroom apartments in a project intended to have an old-town look, with staggered rooflines.

"The tourism business is dying, especially in Durango, explained co-owner Elizabeth Kulesza.

Meanwhile, outside of Durango, another developer is carving up a raw 21 acres in a $20 million combination of duplexes, and triplexes, along with 44,000 square feet of commercial and office space. His target: people in their early 60s, suggesting that grey hairs instead of tourists are the market.

All of the 65 townhomes (target price: $350,000 to $450,000), will be single storey, as the developer, Daniel P. Robinowitz, says they outsell two-storey townhomes by 10 to 1 in Southwest Colorado. Robinowitz hopes to realize $34 million to $35 million in sales.

As for affordable housing, the county has no leverage to require any. Meanwhile, along the I-70 corridor, a study is being done to better understand the needs for service workers of communities that are expected, much like Durango, to be refugees for retiring baby boomers in years ahead.