SUN VALLEY, Idaho — Resort communities across the West responded to the Indian Ocean tsunami in a variety of ways, with some shelling out money privately, other communities digging into city and county coffers, while Whistler and adjacent communities explored "adopting" a Third World community just as many ski towns already have embraced other, more affluent ski towns in developed countries.
In Sun Valley, city leaders donated $10,000 altogether to four different relief organizations, although understanding that some of the money could go to relief in the war-torn and famine-plagued African nation of Sudan. Blaine County, where Sun Valley and Ketchum are located, also pledged $10,000.
In Crested Butte, the town council rejected a municipal donation, concluding that donations should be private. "As terrible as it is, I don’t think it’s our role to give local funds for international issues like this," said Councilman Bill Coburn in arguing against the proposal by Mayor Jim Schmidt.
In well-heeled Jackson Hole, there was no report of governmental aid to tsunami victims, but one anonymous donor gave $100,000 to the local Community Foundation, while local Rotarians chipped in $2,000, in addition to sundry other donations.
Canadian newspapers reported broad tsunami relief efforts. In Lake Louise, ski technicians donated their tips, while a community lunch in Canmore that last year raised $5,000 for children in Afghanistan this year is being geared toward South Asia.
As well, a Canmore store owner is seeking to raise $336,000 Cdn. for restoration of boats in Railay, Thailand. "There’s no point in setting a low goal," explained Cameron Baty, owner of a local store. "There’s a lot of rich people in this town." He told the Rocky Mountain Outlook that he was skeptical of larger relief organizations, because of the amount of money that goes into administration.
In Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley, the Ute Mountaineer donated water purification kits while Aspen Valley Hospital gave sterile gloves and other medical supplies. Down-valley from Aspen, children in the Basalt United Methodist Church were assembled to stuff hygienic items into plastic bags to be shipped to refugee camps. The cost of the items wasn’t much, $250, but the message is much bigger, said the Rev. Marie Gasau.
"Every faith teaches concern and compassion, so there’s our opportunity to express (those feelings) as Christians, obviously, but also as just members of the human race," she told The Aspen Times. "It’s more than just responding to the disaster: I think that what we’re doing is creating a bridge between people no matter what our culture or religion is."
New winter weather?
ASPEN, Colo. — Snowfall during December was stingy in large parts of the West. In Avon, at the foot of Beaver Creek, devoted weather watcher Frank Doll reported the month was as dry as any since 1976, a notorious drought winter.
But the new year began extravagantly. In Aspen, the first big snowfall was sufficiently heavy that classes at public schools were called off, something that happens about once a year. "Our buses can handle most anything," said Fred Brooks, the school district’s transportation director. "This was a rare exception."
The Aspen Times reported that by midmorning all four Aspen Skiing Co. mountains were littered with snow-silly children, eager to cram in some unexpected fun.
In the Sun Valley-Ketchum area, the airport crew worked round-the-clock for five days to keep the airport runway cleared. "It was nip and tuck at times," reported the Idaho Mountain Express. The work was so incessant that it provoked a complaint form a neighbour of the airport, who wondered whether the big airport plows needed to beep-beep-beep through the night as they backed up.
In Silverton, the Standard observed that winter was beginning to be just like the winters of old. Roofs were sagging under the weight of 16 inches of heavy, wet snow, the newspaper reported, even as the highway north to Ouray was closed because of avalanche danger. It is not, reported the newspaper "expected to happen anytime soon."
But is this really a winter like the winters of old? While rain happened occasionally in past decades, it has rained twice now in Vail during January. The warm temperatures also made slush of previous snow, creating the sort of mudluscious puddles not usually found until the normal late-February thaw.
While the Vail Daily had gleefully announced more powder days were ahead, the powder that materialized was decidedly on the droopy, wet side. Champagne powder is turning into Pepsi Powder in the Colorado Rockies.
Former porn actor rebounds
PARK CITY, Utah — In 1972, a pornographic movie abut a woman with a misplaced clitoris was released. Called Deep Throat, the movie was arguably a signal cultural artefact in what has been called the sexual revolution in the United States.
That’s the argument of a new movie, called Inside Deep Throat, which will be premiered soon at the Sundance Music Festival in Park City. And it seems that Harry Reems, the actor who played the lead in that movie, has lived since 1980 in Park City, where he sells real estate.
With the movie about to be released, Reems consented to an interview with The Park Record after 18 years of declining to answer questions about his past except at church groups and in support groups for other recovering alcoholics.
"It is a story of recovery, of success, of redemption," he told the newspaper’s Nan Cholat Noaker from his home along the Park City Municipal Golf Course.
After high school, Reems enlisted in the Marine Corps, and then used his stipend from the GI bill to fulfil a dream – to go to acting school. He took bit parts in pornography movies, and in fact, was paid only $100 for his role in Deep Throat opposite that of Linda Lovelace (who died several years ago in suburban Denver).
The movie became a cult classic, even the stuff of Johnny Carson jokes. Reems, meanwhile, went on to make gobs of culture. "I’d make a movie and with the money I’d rent a private jet, I’d grab a bunch of girls, a couple of guys, we’d go to a private island and party."
In the process, Reems became alcoholic, which continued even after he moved to Park City in 1986. "I was basically a blackout drinker. I would start drinking in Park City and wake up in L.A. with no idea how I got there," he said.
He finally sobered up for good, he says, when he was in the back of a police officer’s patrol car in Park City. The policeman said, "Harry, you have no idea of how much of a help you could be to others," Reems recalls. "It was the first time anyone suggested I could help anyone… I thought maybe I wasn’t the absolute loser I thought I was."
Soon afterward, he joined the Park City Community Church, where he was guided by the church’s pastor. He has spoken several times about alcoholism and substance abuse. He also married his wife, with whom he shares an interest in maintaining a level of spirituality.
Reems told The Record that he does not regret his part in making Deep Throat, as it began his tortured road to his greater spirituality. Nor does he regret the sexual revolution that he was part of. "Our sexuality, our bodies, should be discussed. There are gays who are scared to come out of the closet. The more dialogue we have the better chance we have of abandoning those feelings of fear," he said. "What’s better than the truth, the truth about your sexuality, about who you are."
A new mystery in Aspen
ASPEN, Colo. — Ski towns of the West, from Telluride to Vail, have been the setting for several novels. Now comes a new mystery by part-time Aspen resident Patrick Hasburgh.
Called "Aspen Pulp," it features Jack Wheeler, a former TV writer turned private eye, who is hired to find a local high school cheerleader, a bimbette-in-training, who has disappeared. The search uncovers a complex crime ring that lies deep within the old mine shafts of Aspen Mountain.
"There’s enough raunchiness to put off readers who prefer their mysteries on the mild side, but through it all, Jake spouts a cynical line of humor that will have the rest laughing out loud," says reviewer Jane Dickinson, writing in the Rocky Mountain News. She says Hasbaugh provides "lots of funny insights on the town and its denizens, from the trustafarians to the ski bums."
Grad business school pitched
JACKSON HOLE, Wyo. — Two state lawmakers propose to establish a graduate business school in Jackson Hole. The idea of a college in Jackson Hole has been bandied about for decades, and two institutions – the University of Wyoming and Central Wyoming College – already have outreach programs.
The new plan would use existing state land near the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort as well as Wyoming’s state budget surplus (the result of stepped up energy extraction) to create a "breeding ground for investment bankers and venture capitalist," a brochure for the idea explains.
"An awful lot of details have to be worked out, but it’s the right concept, I think," Wyoming Gov. Dave Freudenthal told the Jackson Hole News & Guide. The proposal envisions a "core group of world-class thinkers" that would include "two or three renowned professors."
Ride leads to slide, death
STEAMBOAT SPRINGS, Colo. — Routt County, which is where Steamboat is located, had no avalanche fatalities for 30 years until 2001. Now it has had two, and both avalanches involved skiers who used snowmobiles to gain backcountry terrain.
"They are going to more and more places into the backcountry, slopes we never touched 30 years ago," said Jeff Hirschboeck, who is the avalanche team leader at the Steamboat Ski Area.
In the most recent case, on Jan. 3, Michael Gebhart, died of suffocation after lying for eight minutes under three feet of snow. The avalanche was relatively small, only 30 feet wide and with 200 vertical feet, but the more pertinent figure is 38 degrees. That’s the slope on which the avalanche occurred. Anything over 25 degrees is suspect, and 30 decidedly so.
While Gebhart, 26, was described as both knowledgeable about avalanches and well equipped, no press reports have indicated he or his skiing partners dug pits into the snowpack to study its stability.
"If you don’t do these tests, to say, ‘I think the slope is stable,’ it is no different than taking a coin and flipping it," Hirschboek told The Steamboat Pilot.
Deconstructing the dozer
GRANBY, Colo. — Even in death, Marvin Heemeyer continues to afflict Granby. Heemeyer spent months fortifying a Komatsu bulldozer with a fortress of steel and concrete that he then used for a 90-minute rampage of revenge in Granby last June before killing himself.
Local authorities since then have kept the bulldozer under wraps. The question, reports the Sky-Hi News, which was among the businesses who incurred Heemeyer’s wrath, is how to get rid of it?
It can be taken apart piece by piece, but that could be an expensive proposition. Moreover, there are fears that Heemeyer impregnated the concrete with explosives.
Authorities in Grand County, where Granby is located, also reject giving away the bulldozer to somebody who would take it apart for the value of the scrap metal. In the wrong hands, they say, the pieces could become objects that glorify Heemeyer and his armed assault. While Heemeyer seems to have been detested by most locals, others – with fans across the nation – have portrayed him as a martyr who was oppressed in a zoning dispute by a heavy-handed town government.
Town officials in Granby also want no part of the beast.
Do you think maybe this is what landfills were built for?
Ski ranch imitating Timberline Lodge
TABERNASH, Colo. — A cross-country centre at Devil’s Thumb Ranch in Colorado is looking to Oregon for inspiration.
A 53-unit lodge is being planned, and the owner wants to create a building patterned after Mount Hood’s Timberline Lodge. Timberline Lodge was constructed in the 1930s in a style called the Appalachian design. It is best known for its hexagon "headhouse," which includes a central stone chimney rising through the centre, with openings on all floors.
Something similar will be done at Devil’s Thumb, with an unusual twist, reports the Winter Park Manifest. The newspaper says a circular hot tub will be assembled around the chimney at the third-floor level.
Already constructed is a 25,000-square-foot activity centre called the Broadax Barn, which in fact was a 125-year-old barn from a farm in Indiana that was taken apart piece by piece and reassembled in Colorado.
Devil’s Thumb already ranked No. 7 in the U.S. among cross-country ski areas, expects to move up in the rankings with the completion of that and other projects, perhaps to No. 1.
Chilly Silverton heating up with town brouhaha
SILVERTON, Colo. — Those who rhapsodize too lustily about the virtues of small towns probably haven’t lived in one for any length of time. They can be mean, vindictive places where something seemingly as innocent as a snow pile – pushed from one person’s driveway to another – can create a feud of Hatfield and McCoy intensity.
And that’s before March, when the cabin fever really sets in.
Such a bonfire of the inanities has now been lit in Silverton, reports a dismayed Jonathan Thompson, editor and publisher of the Silverton Standard. The dispute involves the local ambulance district, which Thompson identifies as perhaps the most important government body in a small town.
The complaint, although serious enough, isn’t nearly as interesting as the tsunami-type of wave created when the dissident ambulance district volunteer went public with his complaint. He mailed a letter to most all of the town residents, not hard when considering that San Juan County has well less than 1,000 residents.
"As the letter and its contents hit the streets, waves of anger, fear, and dismay rippled throughout the town," reported Thompson.
He traces the dispute in part to personality clashes: "It’s probably the tense nature of the work, and the strong personalities that it attracts, that cause the organization occasionally to be plagued by conflicts amongst some of its individuals. (The letter-writer’s) accusations deal with more than personalities, but it is clear that at least part of the current problems – or at least the intensity they’ve reached – are rooted in personal differences. Dragging these differences into the public arena is hardly productive. It threatens to form even deeper schisms in the organization, which could lead to the loss of more volunteers. That prospect is a threat to Silverton’s well being."
