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Vail hoping to host three World Championships in 2009

Compiled by Allen Best VAIL, Colo. — It’s Vail against the world in a meeting of the International Ski Federation Congress being held in Miami during early June.

Compiled by Allen Best

VAIL, Colo. — It’s Vail against the world in a meeting of the International Ski Federation Congress being held in Miami during early June. Vail, as it did in 1989 and 1999, wants to host the World Alpine Ski Championships again in 2009. It will be vying against mountains in Austria, Germany, and France.

This time Vail proposes to also host the Snowboard World Championships plus the Freestyle World Ski Championships. Korea is gunning for the former, and Japan the latter.

Invermere opposes Jumbo

INVERMERE, B.C. — A sharply divided Invermere council has voted to oppose the proposed ski resort at Jumbo Glacier. There is some doubt whether the municipality has the legal authority to take such a stance, notes the Invermere Valley Echo, but those supporting the stance say that public input from the residents of Invermere has been overwhelmingly in opposition to the proposed $450 million resort.

Skier deaths decline

SUMMIT COUNTY, Colo. — Only six skier deaths were recorded in Colorado this year due to collisions, hitting trees, and falling into tree wells. That compares with 15 skier deaths the previous season, reports the Summit Daily News.

Why the sharp decline? Representatives from Vail Resorts say they were trying to see if there was a cause, including evidence that safety promotions had worked, but could not verify any connections.

Summit nearing buildout

SUMMIT COUNTY, Colo. — Given current zoning, Summit County is at about 69 per cent of buildout for residential and 61 per cent for commercial. Planners say that 25 per cent of building capacity was absorbed by the market during 1992-2002, and believe another 25 per cent will be absorbed by the year 2012. Buildout – assuming no change in zoning – is expected by the year 2013 under a business-as-usual scenario, but planners expect buildout by 2024 even if growth slows, reports the Summit Daily News.

But will zoning remain as it is? One of the major issues before the county commissioners currently is a proposal to upzone Copper Mountain. Both Intrawest and Vail Resorts have benefited from major base-area rezonings during the last decade.

Building permits on rise

PARK CITY, Utah — The economic lull is over. Building activity is returning to more robust levels once again in many resort towns across the West.

For example, Park City reports building permits worth nearly $21 million through April this year, compared to about $12 million for the same months last year. In Mountain Village, the on-mountain town at Telluride, construction levels have nearly tripled this year as compared to last.

Soft economy has project in red

ASPEN, Colo. — There is too much shoulder in the shoulder season for a new 101-unit seasonal housing project in Aspen. The Burlingame/MAA was created to house music students at the Aspen Music Festival for three months every summer and then ski resort workers for six months in winter. That left three months of shoulder season vacancies.

But since the project opened in 2000, Colorado winters have been more soft economically, with workers not brought on until December and then released in March. The result is that the project has hemorrhaged about $40,000. City officials are, according to The Aspen Times, tinkering with solutions.

Aspen immortalizing Max Marolt

ASPEN, Colo. — Aspen has had a good many skiers of extraordinary ability, and among the best-known was Max Marolt, a native of the town who competed in the 1960 Olympic Games. He died last year while skiing in Chile, and now the hat is being passed to pay for a three-quarter-scale statue that is to show Marolt in racing form, circa 1955.

The statue costs $20,000, and the city council is chipping in $5,000. "I think Max represents the epitome of a local hero," said Councilman Tim Semrau. The statue could eventually be placed on Dean Street, which town officials think will become something of a pedestrian thoroughfare and Ski Walk of Fame.

Vail has something similar, a statue of Pete Seibert, who was the visionary for the resort, but it is located near the Vista Bahn, the resort’s most important ski lift.

Elk & bears like Banff

BANFF, Alberta — It’s springtime in the Canadian Rockies, when grizzly bears are hungry. The higher slopes remain covered by snow, and besides, there are new-born elk claves to snack on. The elk, thinking they are more secure in town, tend to loiter close to houses and golf courses and the like. Which means there are bears thereabouts.

The Rocky Mountain Outlook explains that this situation has wildlife wardens in Banff National Park up at all hours of the day and night, preventing elk from getting too comfortable being inside the town and discouraging bears from entering. Because if there are troubles, then the bears will be shot, and there aren’t that many of them left.

A grizzly sow called Bear No. 66 was in the region near Banff on a mid-May Sunday morning when several horseback riders came upon her. Usually, horses and bears are fine together, but for some reason the bear got startled and lit out, which spooked the horses. Two riders were treated for minor injuries.

Gas prices unlikely to slow crowds

JACKSON HOLE, Wyo. — Businesses in Jackson Hole are expecting no dampening of visitors as a result of gas prices surging past $2 a gallon. Call volume to the chamber office there is actually up, and reservations supervisors say that gas prices are not a major concern – at least at this point – among potential visitors. At the Grand Teton Lodge Co., chief operating officer John Rutter reports busy phones and a summer business that looks "pretty solid."

Lawyers, guns and money

EAGLE, Colo. — The strange and sordid story of Kathy Denson is about to be removed from court dockets not quite two years after she shot her former boyfriend in a weird triangle of personalities framed by sex and drugs, guns and money.

Denson, who owns fur shops in Aspen and Vail as well as a small horse ranch near Eagle, had been the central figure in the triangle of her boyfriend, Gerald "Cody" Boyd, and an employee at her fur shop in Vail, Monica "Monique" Seebacher.

According to testimony at Denson’s trial, the three had been involved in an occasional triangular relationship of sex and cocaine use. As well, there were suggestions that Cody and Seebacher were trying to get Denson’s money. In the end, jurors were not persuaded that Denson shot Boyd in a pique of jealousy, but instead found the evidence at least plausible that she shot him in self-defense.

Meanwhile, Seebacher filed suit, claiming she was wrongfully fired by Denson and asking for $200,000. She lost that case. And then, Boyd’s ex-wife sued Denson on behalf of the child that Boyd had fathered, asking for $366,000, the maximum amount allowed under Colorado law. That case has now been settled, but terms were confidential, reports the Vail Daily.

Fat lady of winter sings

DILLON RESERVOIR, Colo. — The fat lady of winter officially sings in Summit County when a clock placed on the melting ice of Dillon Reservoir falls into the water. This year ice time ended on April 29, say local Rotarians and Dillon town officials, who run the contest.

That’s not the earliest melt-off ever. Two years ago it occurred a day earlier. But for those convinced that spring is coming more rapidly to mountain towns, the numbers from this contest lend general support. The tick-tock sunk on average on May 13 for the first nine years of the contest, but in the last nine years the big hand went down by May 7.

Call it spring

CRESTED BUTTE, Colo. — If you change the name of it, will it somehow become different? Writing in the Crested Butte News, Matthew Scalad suggested scrapping the name "off-season" or "shoulder season" and instead using the more traditional "spring" when describing that bridge between winter and full-blown summer.

And spring, agrees John Norton, president and CEO of the ski mountain, isn’t such a bad time to be in the mountains even at 9,000 feet and above. It’s all there except fly-fishing, he notes.

For a fact, there wasn’t much mud in mud-season even in those places where asphalt and concrete haven’t totally replaced dirt. At Winter Park, among the least gussied up of the ski towns, dust was making inroads by late April.

Lodge must be removed

BERTHOUD PASS, Colo. — The Forest Service says the building atop Berthoud Pass that served as the base for the now defunct ski area must tumble – and soon.

The building, says the agency, does not meet Forest Service standards for image, aesthetics, and overall quality. The building needs $200,000 in repairs.

The ski area, which opened in 1939 with Colorado’s first lift, has been open only four of the last 11 years. Last year, after another missed winter, the Forest Service said it is time to admit that times have changed. Several smaller and older ski areas in the area along I-70 have closed as skiers from Denver have bypassed them while driving to larger resorts on the Western Slope that have more reliable snow.

The agency’s order to demolish the 14,000-square-foot building has been met with some sourness on both sides of the pass. However, those who want to see the lodge preserved have been unable during the last year to come up with a business or plan that would take over responsibility for the building.

The new plan is to seek state gambling money as part of a $4.7 million project that would make the pass a major launching station for the Continental Divide Trail. Included would be construction of a 3,000-square-foot building, notes the Winter Park Manifest.

Can Ketchum learn from Aspen?

KETCHUM, Idaho — Can Idaho’s Wood River Valley learn from Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley as regards traffic congestion? Ex-state highway engineer Ralph Trapani thinks so.

Trapani, after supervising construction of I-70 through Glenwood Canyon, next was responsible for the ongoing four-laning of Highway 82 from Aspen to Basalt, an 18-mile segment. In a lecture in Idaho, Trapani explained that traffic gridlock into Aspen was threatening to paralyze the economy. In response, the various governments in the valley – there are three county governments alone – agreed to both more asphalt and to stepped-up public transportation.

State highway officials almost 40 years ago had been willing to four-lane the highway into Aspen, but reeling from frantic growth in the 1960s and early 1970s, local officials had doggedly resisted making Aspen too easy to get to. Only in the 1990s did they relent.

Trapani, now a consultant, said he particularly favours high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes in busy corridors. He said HOV lanes – if monitored by police – can be combined with buses to reduce overall traffic. Paid parking in downtown Aspen has also encouraged more use of mass transit, he suggested.

Attention devoted to wildfires

PARK CITY, Utah — Count Summit County in Utah among those places concerned enough about the potential of wildfires to put a full-time employee on staff for planning and evaluation.

That fire warden, Bryce Boyer, warned that this year could be as bad as 2002. The major cause is the continuing drought, which in turn has left forests not only more dry, but also more vulnerable to bark beetles, which in turn kill trees and made them more flammable, he told The Park Record. As well, the warmer winters have left beetle populations more often verging on epidemic stage.

Recreation fee on the rocks

ASPEN, Colo. — New fees for recreational use of Forest Service and other public lands are being debated in Washington D.C. The Senate passed a bill that would allow application of such special fees only at national parks and monuments. However, a bill in the U.S. House would reauthorize the recreation fee program for all agencies.

But even if the fee program ends, Forest Service officials think they can find statutory ways to continue levying fees at such places as the portal to the Maroon Bells near Aspen. Maroon Bells, among the most photographed mountains in North America, has been steadily more besieged by crowds. In response, the Forest Service banned private vehicles during mid-day, began charging fees, and created a controversial set of restrooms that critics say are extravagant.

The Aspen Times reports that officials think that an old law, the Granger-Thye Act of 1950, would allow them to farm out maintenance of the site to a private contractor. Critics such as Scott Silver of Wild Wilderness and the Telluride area’s Western Slope No Fee Coalition say these are just steps toward privatization of national resources.

Seizure cause of unusual death

STEAMBOAT SPRINGS, Colo. — It sounds like quite a night. Two restaurant workers from Steamboat Springs went to State Bridge, an itty-bitty place located between Vail and Steamboat, on a recent Sunday to attend a concert. They began drinking at 11 a.m., and at 5 p.m. took psilocybin mushrooms.

The next morning, according to 26-year-old Christopher Mack, he woke up in their tent and found his buddy, Max Knight, was not breathing. He had, he confessed to police, strangled him while fighting.

But the autopsy showed Knight had instead died of a seizure. The Vail Daily and The Steamboat Pilot said Mack isn’t off the hook yet, but authorities are waiting for toxicology results before making a decision.

Construction of Paradise begins

CRESTED BUTTE, Colo. — Construction has begun on an affordable housing project in Crested Butte called Paradise Park. The name comes from a basin of the same name in the nearby Elk Range. A variety of single-family homes, duplexes, and apartments are planned, reports the Crested Butte News.