Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Mountain News

Park City drops ski races, but others may want them Compiled by Allen Best PARK CITY, Utah - The value of ski racing was put into question when Park City Mountain Resort announced it would not continue to open the World Cup circuit in November.

Park City drops ski races, but others may want them

Compiled by Allen Best

PARK CITY, Utah - The value of ski racing was put into question when Park City Mountain Resort announced it would not continue to open the World Cup circuit in November.

The event, resort CEO Vern Greco told The Park Record, was just too expensive and too much trouble for what was gained. The event costs $1 million to put on, of which the ski company put up $150,000. And instead of making snow for paying customers, the resort was making snow for downhill racers. Finally, other events - including the Grand Prix snowboard event in December - attracts more spectators and costs less to put on.

But that's another problem - making snow in November has been iffy, and the publicity of having to give up the races to resorts in Colorado at the last minute may outweigh the good publicity when Park City did host the races.

In fact, there is little evidence that the World Cup attracted people directly to Park City. Bill Malone, executive director of the local chamber, estimated lodging occupancy during the World Cup weekend, called America's Opening, ranged from 20 to 30 per cent. But those rooms will probably be filled without the event. While the event was once valuable in establishing Park City as a "big leagues" resort with good snowmaking, both those images are firmly established in the wake of the Olympics.

Park City would still love to host the event in January or February, but returning the skiers from Europe is unlikely, reports The Park Record.

In an editorial, The Park Record pointed to another value of World Cup racing - as a venue for training Olympians. Too, the newspaper pointed to another resort, Aspen, that had dropped the races, but has since then been trying to get back on the schedule. "Apparently they missed the international attention drawn by the races."

Beaver Creek, the only other American stop currently on the World Cup circuit for alpine skiers, said it was interested in picking up the events being vacated by Park City. Aspen is also interested. Copper Mountain, which had picked up for Park City in the past, had not pursued any direct dialogue with World Cup organizers, reported The Summit Daily.

Vail hospital vies to get Summit County patients

SUMMIT COUNTY, Colo. - The medical scene in Summit County is getting more competitive. Shortly after county officials sealed a pact with Denver-based Centura Health to build a hospital near Frisco, Vail Valley Medical Center - located 25 miles in the other direction - announced expansion of services into Summit County.

"In response to Summit County's rapid growth, we are looking at possible expansion in the Silverthorne-Dillon area," said Tom Zellers, CEO of Vail Valley Medical. "At the same time, we want to improve our services in Keystone, Breckenridge, and Frisco."

Crested Butte boasts of the 'best corduroy'

CRESTED BUTTE, Colo. - If you get a bit of whiplash trying to keep up with Crested Butte's marketing message, you're not alone. Four years ago the resort was hosting the X Games. Last year it was boasting of being the UnVail. This year, reports the Crested Butte News, it has "Colorado's best corduroy."

Gina Kroft, the resort's spokeswoman, said the focus on the groomed product is in keeping with the ski area's growing emphasis on the family market. The amount of grooming doesn't seem to be changing, but the advertising of it is. The six or seven snow groomers have a collective 150 years of experience and, says slope maintenance director Dale Massey, the slogan is "not something they're afraid to try to live up to."

Defenders of Wildlife opens Canmore office

CANMORE, Alberta - Defenders of Wildlife, a leading American conservation group, has opened an office in Canmore, its first office in Canada. While the organization has 450,000 members in the U.S., it has 3,000 members in its new branch in Canada, called Defenders Canada.

Defenders and other groups hope to protect linkages of habitat and wildlife corridors. A key interruption to those linkages is the Trans-Canada Highway, where three wolves have recently died despite probably the best system of highway overpasses for wildlife in North America. The Defender's Jim Pisott tells the Rocky Mountain Outlook that wildlife crossings may not be the only answer. Reduction in speed, he suggests, is the only way that cars and wildlife can co-exist.

Killer in love triangle has one more lawsuit

EAGLE, Colo. - Kathy Denson, the owner of fur stores in Vail and Aspen who was acquitted last summer of murdering her boyfriend, has won again in court.

Her employee of 18 years, Monica "Monique" Seebacher, had sued her, claiming wrongful termination and also "outrageous conduct." But Seebacher withdrew her claims and also her demand for $200,000, reports the Vail Daily.

The sexual ménage å trois was also triangle of drugs, money and sometimes guns. Denson, now 46, had a boyfriend, "Gerald "Cody" Boyd, 45, and the two of them along with Seebacher had been involved in an occasional love triangle, as well as common cocaine use. In 2002, Boyd and Seebacher took up, and it was during that time that Denson shot Boyd, a greedy and boastful man, according to court testimony, to death with a black-powder pistol. A jury in Eagle, where Denson has a small horse ranch, agreed that there was insufficient evidence to disprove Denson's claim of self-defense.

The only lawsuit remaining is a civil claim by Boyd's ex-wife on behalf of his child. An attorney for the ex-wife says the case is similar to that of O.J. Simpson. While Simpson was acquitted in criminal court, evidence allowed in the civil trial resulted in a settlement against Simpson and on behalf of his ex-wife's family.

Bullets and words fly in case of loose moose

SUMMIT COUNTY, Utah - Jack Fenton was gladdened to discover a yearling moose was munching on a wreath hanging from his front door in a rural subdivision near Park City. About an hour later he was anything but glad when a neighbour across the street shot the moose, but also sent an errant bullet thudding into Fenton's house.

"This is a town that practically worships moose," Fenton told The Park Record. One of Fenton's neighbours, Genaro Aremendariz, disagreed, saying that that the moose was a threat to children and property.

The shooter, who wasn't identified in the story, could face charges of killing protected wildlife and shooting in a subdivision.

Banff hot springs runs dry for the fifth winter

BANFF, Alberta - Ongoing drought appears to be what has caused Banff's famous Upper Hot Springs to run dry for the fifth consecutive winter. Municipal tap water is being used to top up the popular tourist attraction. The flow of mineral water is expected to resume in the spring with snowmelt, reports the Rocky Mountain Outlook.

One gets the gold mine, the other gets the shaft

TRUCKEE, Calif. - Does this story sound familiar? One county government approves a plan that will result in lots of big, expensive houses, but the people who service those houses - the carpenters, maids, and so on - will live in another county.

That's largely the story in the Sierra Nevada, where the Placer County Board of Supervisors - a long, skinny county that begins in the foothills near Sacramento but extends to the Nevada border near Reno - approved the Martis Valley plan. In typical 1970s do-what-you plan permissiveness, the plan originally contemplated 12,000 housing units. As recently revised, it allows 6,000 units, but the lead local environmental group, Sierra Watch, wants only 3,000 units, and may sue to force the issue.

But the rub of this plan is that most of the lower-end housing needed to service the expensive homes is likely to be in Truckee, which is located a few miles away but in another jurisdiction, Nevada County. "One county paid absolutely no attention to the wailing of its neighbouring county or town," moaned Barbara Green, a supervisor in that neighbouring county of Nevada in an interview with the Grass Valley Union, a newspaper. "This should have been a regional plan."

Ron Florian, a Truckee Town Council member, said he believes "each project in each county needs to take care of affordable housing in their county."

"They need to put affordable housing on the ground instead of in-lieu fees," he said. "We feel very strongly about that.

Tom Moores, executive director of Sierra Watch, criticized the Truckee council for not being vocal enough in its opposition to the project. "This was an opportunity to do some really great regional planning. Now, Truckee gets stuck with traffic and demand for workforce housing."

Skiers, boarders quarrel in the Teton backcountry

JACKSON HOLE, Wyo. - This quarrel between skiers and others is along the lines of whether you put the toilet seat up or down, let the toilet roll wind over the top or under the bottom. But at Teton Pass, the gap between Jackson, Wyo., and Driggs, Idaho, it's obviously getting tense.

Backcountry skiers get annoyed with post-holing hikers, even snowshoers, creating lumpy trails, because it reduces the ability of skins to get traction and hence avoiding sliding backward. To encourage separate trails, one skier posted a trailhead sign that said, "PLEASE! Keep the boot prints separate from the skin track. This'll make travel easier for everyone!"

A few weeks later, the sign was gone, replaced by another: "Nobody here owns the snow! It's a temporary medium! Walk or ski where you like! If you have a problem move to a new location or town!! Your elitist attitude is not needed!!!!?"

One hiking snowboarder told the Jackson Hole News that he is annoyed by the attitudes of backcountry skiers. "Get out of your ski-Nazi mentality," he said.

As for the sign that replaced the original, it proved to be a temporary medium, too. A week after being posted, it was removed.

Yellowstone quiet once again in wake of ruling

OLD FAITHFUL, Wyo. - Instead of snowmobile engines, guide Betsy Robinson says that her clients at Yellowstone National Park during recent trips took in the squeak of snow underfoot, the snorting of bison, and of wind whistling through trees.

A recent court decision halves the number of snowmobiles this winter, and bans them entirely next winter. Instead, they must arrive as Robinson's clients do, by snowcoach, skis, or on foot.

Robinson told the Jackson Hole News & Guide that on a similar trip into the heart of Yellowstone last year she and her clients were unable to escape snowmobile noise, even on a three-mile walk from Old Faithful to Morning Glory Pool.

"It's a long way for you not to be able to escape engine noise in that whole distance in the centre of one of the wildest places in North America," she said. "But this year, "it was just beautiful," she added. "You could hear the geysers going off, which at times in the past you could not."

Also visiting Old Faithful was BlueRibbon Coalition president Jack Welch, who was forced to take a commercially guided trip - the first since he began snowmobiling into Yellowstone in 1969. Welch's group is fighting the phase out of snowmobiles, and argues that the arrival of four-stroke engines eliminates most of the noise and air pollution that caused many people to object to snowmobiles in the first place.

Steamboat jury acquits Senegalese man of rape

STEAMBOAT SPRINGS, Colo. - A key question in the Kobe Bryant case, at least among journalists from outside the area of the alleged rape, has been whether Bryant, a black man, can get a fair trial in the Vail-Eagle-Aspen area, where few black people live.

While the jury, so to speak, remains out on a trial in Eagle, the jury in a somewhat parallel case in Steamboat Springs has returned its verdict. In that Steamboat case a 26-year-old woman accused a 35-year-old man of rape. The man, although not identified by the Steamboat Pilot as black, grew up in the African country of Senegal.

Both the woman and the man, who has lived in Steamboat for 11 years, agreed that they met at a party last May, that they danced and talked, then later walked on a trail. Along the way they held hands, talked, and kissed. They paused once, and the man - who has a wife and children in Senegal - then touched the woman in a sexual way, but stopped when she told him to stop. Then, lingering in a dugout at a ball diamond, they talked and kissed.

What happened next is where the stories diverged. The woman says the man pushed her onto the bench and raped her, despite her repeated commands of "No." The man's side of the story was that they had sex until she told him no, at which point he complied with her wishes.

Collateral evidence went both way. Two witnesses, one a friend and the other a police detective, testified that the woman was "very scared" and "uptight" later that night. But the woman conceded that she didn't scream or cry for help, she wasn't physically injured, and that her clothes were not ripped or dirtied.

The jury - eight men and four women - were not convinced of the woman's story "beyond a reasonable doubt," and acquitted the Senegalese man. While the ethnicity of the jurors was not identified, the Steamboat area is even more predominantly Caucasian than the Vail area.

Mechanic argues mag chloride a ball buster

FRISCO, Colo. - Along the I-70 corridor in Colorado, those critical of magnesium chloride continue to cite evidence that the chemical deicer is more trouble than it's worth. Among the latest arguments is that the chemical, while making highways safer, is making automobiles themselves less safe.

Gary Bergman, who owns a tire store, blames magnesium chloride, a naturally corrosive agent, with causing the deteriorating of a ball joint on Honda. "If the ball joint goes, you have no control; the ball goes wherever it wants to go," he told the Summit Daily News. And that, he explained is a grave safety issue.

"You can kiss your rear end goodbye. There's only one person in control of that car, and it ain't you," he explained.

Other mechanics, such as "Jungle" Furhman, who works out of Eagle, agree to the corrosive nature of magnesium chloride. "If you are working on a bolt, you'd better have a backup bolt, because magnesium chloride causes bolts to break," Fuhrman told Mountain Town News.

Colorado transportation authorities agree that mag chloride, as it is commonly called, is corrosive, and urge drivers to wash their vehicles' undercarriages.

In Aspen, the Roaring Fork Transit Authority says that mag chloride is causing corrosion to buses, necessitating their premature replacement.

TV hunk Sutter returns to being Vail firefighter

VAIL, Colo. - The Vail Daily reports that the "deliciously sweet" Ryan Sutter, who recently got married to bachelorette Trista Rehn in front of something like three million people, is back at work as a firefighter in Vail. He told the newspaper that he was not only rusty in his duties, but woefully out of shape.

Just the same, after he responded to a medical call several hours into his first shift after the six-month hiatus, fellow firefighters had kind words. "He did an awesome job," said Craig Davis.

For Sutter, it's one emergency or another. "Everything is so last minute in the entertainment world. They tell you how badly they need you somewhere, and it's on such short notice. Everything is an emergency in that business . It definitely was exhausting and more stressful than I thought."