Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Aspen seeks additional lodging tax

ASPEN, Colo.-The Aspen Chamber Resort Association plans to ask for a 1 per cent lodging tax that would be devoted to primarily summer marketing.

ASPEN, Colo.-The Aspen Chamber Resort Association plans to ask for a 1 per cent lodging tax that would be devoted to primarily summer marketing. The city council would have to accept the proposal to take the matter before voters, which it has not yet done, although Mayor Mick Ireland has agreed to lead the community campaign.

The Aspen Skiing Co. bankrolls winter marketing efforts. But summer marketing is more restrained. The existing lodging tax generates $450,000 annually for marketing. The additional tax would bring the total to nearly $1.5 million, explains the Aspen Times .

 

Crested Butte looks for lifeline

CRESTED BUTTE, Colo. - Crested Butte continues to reel economically, not quite sure how to right itself.

The local economy depends upon people willing to deliver pots of money. Getting there isn't the easiest thing, though - a four-hour drive from Denver or, for that matter, a four-hour drive from Aspen, just 30 miles away but hundreds of miles away by mostly two-lane road during winter.

Next winter, getting to Crested Butte will become more difficult yet. The community intends to bankroll fewer direct flights from Houston and other cities and connecting flights from Denver.

To induce the airlines to offer flights, the local community guarantees revenues. Part of that money comes from sales tax revenues. With the economy already depressed, revenues have decreased, and the Gunnison Valley Regional Transit Authority assumes 15 per cent further declines in coming months.

The impact of fewer airline seats? Joe Fitzpatrick, town manager of Mt. Crested Butte, imagines the opposite of Kevin Costner's build-it-and-they-will come baseball field.

"If we continue to reduce airline seats, I guarantee Mt. Crested Butte sales tax revenues will continue to decline. It becomes a spiral."

The Crested Butte News reports that the local agency is crimping more on local bus service, but still plans to contribute only $325,000 next winter to direct flights, as compared to $600,000 this winter.

The ski area, meanwhile, continues to make its case for expansion onto nearby Snodgrass Mountain. The proposal goes back at least 30 years. During the last decade the ski company has consistently argued that it needs the expansion to survive profitably in the still flat ski market.

The problem is that Crested Butte, if thrilling to expert skiers, intimidates intermediate skiers, the bread-and-butter of the destination skiing market. All the big ski areas have oodles of intermediate terrain. And what little intermediate terrain Crested Butte has tends to bore visitors after a couple of days. More than places like Aspen and Vail, visitors to Crested Butte don't return for a second year. That boosts advertising costs.

What we need is just a little more terrain, Crested Butte has pleaded - although not convincingly to some of the locals. Noting that dissent, the Forest Service in November seemingly reversed its prior position and announced it would not entertain the proposed expansion.

While Mt. Crested Butte, the slope-side municipality, has endorsed the expansion, the old mining town of Crested Butte, two miles distant, has been more tepid, reflective of a local split within that community.

At issue is whether the proposed ski area gets reviewed under the relevant National Environmental Protection Act, under which impact statements are conducted. The Forest Service has almost never rejected a proposal that it has taken on for review. As such, it is very leery about taking on ski area expansions when there is significant community opposition.

 

$54 for breakfast in Telluride?

MOUNTAIN VILLAGE, Colo. - The über-high end Capella Telluride opened last year to fanfare. "There's not enough stars in the constellation to describe this place," one local said. It's so swank that instead of concierges, guests get personal assistants.

All of this comes at a price, of course. A correspondent for the New York Times on Sunday noted getting room service delivery of oatmeal, a bagel and coffee at a cost of $54. That does include the tip.

Less ridiculous are room rates: $295 during winter high season for standard doubles; $195 during low season.

 

Food composting envy

ASPEN, Colo. - Aspen and Pitkin County have been looking into the idea of expanding a composting program, similar to what Whistler and other Canadian mountain towns have done.

The local landfill near Aspen already composts grass, leaves and other such materials, mixing them with biosolids from the local sewage-treatment plant, to product a nutrient-rich loam that it sells for $32.50 per cubic foot.

To add food waste from restaurants into the mix would require something described as a huge blender, to grind paper plates, napkins and other assorted cellulose materials and blend them into the mix.

"The food waste is probably the largest component of what's being buried in the landfill now that's recyclable," said Chris Hoofnagle, the Pitkin County solid waste manger.

Key to forward movement on this idea, explains The Aspen Times, is securing a $94,000 grant from Colorado, plus participation by a half-dozen of Aspen's largest eateries.


Frantic friend saves life of visitor

WINTER PARK, Colo. - Frantic and repeated phone calls of a girlfriend were probably the reason that a man lived through his vacation in Winter Park to ski another day.

The Sky-Hi Daily News reports that police got a phone call from a woman who said her boyfriend was at Winter Park to participate in the National Brotherhood of Skiers gathering.

The woman said she hadn't heard from her boyfriend, so two cops went to the condominium where she said he was registered. No one answered when they knocked, so they left.

That might have been the end of it except she called again, this time frantic. The cops got a door key this time and found the man, near death, suffering from a severe case of acute mountain sickness. He was given oxygen and taken to Denver, almost 4,000 feet lower.

Glenn Trainor, the police chief of Winter Park and Fraser, said he was told that the man would have died in a few more hours if not for the discovery.

"Going into somebody's room after receiving a call like that from a girlfriend isn't something we would normally do," Trainor told the Sky-Hi Daily News . "But the girlfriend was insistent that (something) was wrong.

Acute mountain sickness afflicts those who rapidly gain elevation without acclimating for the reduced oxygen content of the air. It's estimated that 15 to 40 per cent of visitors sleeping at 8,000 feet or higher get it, according to a survey reported by Dr. Peter Hackett at the Institute for Altitude Mountain in Telluride.

Winter Park is at an elevation of about 9,000, making it among Colorado's higher ski towns.

Down the road near Grand Lake, at the entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park, there was a similar happy ending to what could have been a dreadful story.

This time the Sky-Hi Daily News reports that two canoeists capsized their craft when 1,000 feet off shore in Shadow Mountain Reservoir. They were wearing lift vests, but the cold almost immediately sapped their energy.

Luckily for them, the dirty paws of a dog had caused a couple who lived nearby to go to the reservoir's shores - and hence hear their screams. Emergency personnel said one of the men was losing consciousness.

 

Land theatrics are back

TELLURIDE, Colo. - Tom Chapman is back. An attorney based on Colorado's Western Slope, he has become the guy that wilderness lovers love to hate. His latest arena for theatrics and commercial is Telluride.

Chapman last week announced that he has purchased old mining claims in the Bear Creek Valley, which is located next to the Telluride ski area.  Henceforth, he said, skiers would be barred from the property. He even contacted San Miguel County Sheriff Bill Masters.

Skiers for many years have delighted in bailing off the lifts at Telluride to access the steep-and-deep treasures of Bear Creek. Last year, the ski area manager, Dave Riley, began talking about the potential for expanding ski area operations into the valley.

Chapman's strategy has by now become well known. He typically buys private parcels located within wilderness areas, national parks or other sensitive places and then announces plans to develop them. His goal all along is to get the U.S. Forest Service to swap land that can more readily be developed.

His strategy succeeded grandly in the early 1990s. Chapman bought a private parcel deep within Colorado's West Elk Wilderness. Then when his desired land exchange was not forthcoming, he had materials helicoptered to the parcel and hired crews to begin assembling a house.

The Forest Service in that case blinked, giving him 110 acres of more easily developed land above the Telluride ski area for the wilderness parcel.  Critics said the Forest Service caved in too quickly and gave him land that was rapidly escalating in price.

Bolstered by that success, Chapman in the late 1990s again tried to engineer land exchanges. He purported to represent owners of parcels located in the Holy Cross Wilderness Area, near Beaver Creek, and at several other locations in Colorado. Nothing seems to have come of those efforts.

Chapman paid $246,000 for the mining claims in Bear Creek, according to public records cited by the Telluride Watch . The general sentiment seemed to be that the parcels can be avoided by skiers, but they present an inconvenience.

Dave Reilly, the ski area manager, whose expansion plans would seem to be the target of this new concern about private property rights, told the local papers that he was trying to digest the news. Just the same, one blogger on the Telluride Planet website seemed to see a conspiracy, with Reilly in cahoots with Chapman.

 

Utah ski area still on the block

BRIAN HEAD, Utah - Brian Head Resort, a ski area in southern Utah, is for sale with the asking price of $34.75 million. The owner died two years ago, notes The Park Record. The ski area averages 140,000 skier days per year and has been in operation since 1965. Officials tell the newspaper the resort made $2 million last year.

 

If only bison stayed within park limits

BANFF, Alberta - Kevin Van Tighem, superintendent of Banff National Park, suggests a look backward in understanding the future.

"If you go back 20 years, it was hard to imagine fire except as a problem," he told the Rocky Mountain Outlook.

Now that fire has been welcomed back to the landscape as a necessary ecosystem process, bison - also known as buffalo - may be next.

Following the reintroduction of bison to Mexico, Canada has been talking about restoring bison to the adjacent Banff and Jasper national parks. Officials say they have no doubt that bison herds can survive there. The challenge, they say, will be whether the public will accept the animals.

"The ecosystem can handle it," Van Tighem says. "We have found ways to manage most of the physical problems on the landscape. But it is mostly social acceptance and that is because of people's fears about what could go wrong, and those fears are legitimate."

He added: "It's mostly a matter of time and conversations."

Officials say that the threat to human safety is not paramount. "You can manage for public safety," says Cormack Gates, a professor of environmental design at the University of Calgary. "We already have people visiting a park (Banff) that is full of elk and grizzly bears." He also notes that those same animals can be found in Yellowstone, Elk Island and other national parks in both Canada and the United States.

The real change, added Gates, is that bison wander - a crucial issue in Yellowstone, where ranchers in adjacent areas have objected to the spread of a disease called brucellosis by the Yellowstone animals.


Towns try to rein in energy use

HAILEY, Idaho - As everywhere across the land, the conversations continue in Idaho's Big Wood River Valley about how to cut energy use.

Hailey and Bellevue, two of Sun Valley's "down-valley" towns, have been looking into installing LED streetlights, reports the Idaho Mountain Express. And in Hailey, a community sustainability committee may propose that all new homes and remodels be required to undergo energy audits.

Such audits typically measure a building's energy use and recommend methods of reducing energy ranging from simple caulking between cracks to more expensive things such as more energy-efficient furnaces. One audit in Hailey revealed a potential energy savings worth $40,000 over the course of 20 years.