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More bones from ice age uncovered

SNOWMASS VILLAGE, Colo. - Bones of ice-age behemoths continue to emerge from layers of peat and silt at a small reservoir being constructed near Snowmass Village.

SNOWMASS VILLAGE, Colo. - Bones of ice-age behemoths continue to emerge from layers of peat and silt at a small reservoir being constructed near Snowmass Village.

As of last weekend, bones and tusks from at least four different mammoths had been identified after a bulldozer operator first noticed something unusual on Oct. 15. The tooth of a mastodon has also been recovered.

Both are rare. Just 103 bones of mammoths had been recovered in Colorado prior to the Snowmass discovery, and just three of those belonged to mastodons. Also rare is the elevation: 8,960 feet, the highest ever for the extinct ice-age species in Colorado. The Aspen Times described the find as a "treasure trove."

The mammoths weighed up to 11 tons and stood 13 feet tall, or about 2 feet taller than elephants in Africa, and had pairs of spiraled tusks. All have been Columbian mammoths, which were somewhat taller than wooly mammoths, according to the Wikipedia entry. They were herbivores, eating grasses.

Mastodons looked somewhat similar, but were identified by teeth made for chewing leaves, twigs, and roots.

Both species largely disappeared from North America when the last ice age ended 10,000 years ago, although a few mammoths persisted in colder, isolated places as recently as 2,000 years ago. Scientists think the warmer climate plus hunting by humans, who are thought to have arrived in North America 14,000 years ago, caused the extinctions. Camels, horses, giant ground sloths and beavers the size of today's bears also became extinct about the same time.

So far, no evidence of human activity has turned up at the ice-age cemetery.

Curators from the Denver Museum of Nature and Science took ownership of the bones, but agreed with the local water and sewer district to create a cast replica of each of the bones. If there is a full skeleton, it is to be displayed in Snowmass Village.

Because of the unusual soil composition - a deep layer of peat, sandwiched between silt and clay - the bones have not fossilized.

 

Vail creating critical mass

TRUCKEE, Calif. - Vail Resorts has added another ski area, Northstar-at-Tahoe, to its portfolio, paying $63 million. With this ski area, Vail now has four in Colorado, two in California, plus a lodging operation in Wyoming.

The purchase gives Vail Resorts an operating synergy in the Truckee-Lake Tahoe area in appealing to the 18 million residents of the Bay Area, located only three hours away.

As it has done in Colorado, Vail Resorts offers its Epic Pass for the two California resorts it owns plus another one, Sierra-at-Tahoe. The primary competition for these new linked arms is Squaw Valley.

In all this, California almost seems a colony of Vail. Northstar-at-Tahoe was previously operated by Booth Creek Ski Holdings, a company based in Vail, Colo. Sierra-at-Tahoe still is.

The largest real estate developer also comes from the Vail area. East West Partners has 1,000 housing units planned, and after finding a new financing partner, managing director Harry Frampton tells the Vail Daily that he believes that the partnership with Vail Resorts will now take Northstar to a higher level.

Despite the economy, Northstar had a substantial increase in business last winter.

 

House sold at 50 per cent off

ASPEN, Colo. - Prices may be down considerably, but some very high-end real estate continues to be sold in Aspen and Pitkin County. The Aspen Daily News reports a house has been sold for $31.5 million. That's well below the list price of $60 million when it was completed in 2008 and also below the more recent list price of $47.5 million.

Still, that makes it the most expensive single-family home sales in Pitkin County this year, and one of the highest ever. In past years, sales of $43 million, $37.5 million and $37.3 million have been recorded, while earlier this year a $24.5 million sale was documented.

The house being sold has nearly 15,000 square feet, not including a guest house and the eight-stall horse barn.

 

Park City pays well for advice

PARK CITY, Utah - Municipal officials in Park City have hired a part-time attorney to deal with soil and water issues. The Park Record raises an eye at the pay for the attorney, who will get $95 per hour for 32 hours per week, but doesn't say specifically the catalyst for her six-month appointment. However, the newspaper does note that Park City has spent more than 20 years attempting to clean up the contaminating residue from its silver-mining era.

 

Telluride pushes new terrain

TELLURIDE, Colo. - Remember the fire at Vail Mountain in 1998 and the protests about the ski area expansion? At about the same time, Telluride was preparing to do the same thing, if in somewhat smaller increments during the last decade.

Granted, Telluride has edgier terrain, while Vail has been more accommodating to intermediate skiers. But taken together, they represent bookends of the commercial skiing experience that for a while was being called "backcountry lite."

Now, Telluride continues to gently push for another expansion, this one into an area called Delta Bowl, in the Bear Creek drainage. The Telluride Watch reports that the ski area operator, Telluride Ski and Golf Co., has included a thumbs-up, thumbs-down type question in its online survey.

There's a fly in the ointment of this expansion plan, however, in the form of an old mining claim. Thomas Chapman bought the claim earlier this year and made it known that he wasn't going to allow skiing on his property.

Chapman emphasized his point again, insisting that lift-aided skiing operations will inevitably cause people to cross his property, creating a liability issue.

A well-known figure in Colorado, Chapman has been playing this private property rights game for about 20 years.

 

Banff tries to bring back bison

BANFF, Alberta - A new initiative called Bison Belong has been launched to help lend support for reintroduction of bison to Banff National Park.

Bison, also known as buffalo, were last documented in Banff in 1858. But Parks Canada believes that the southern part of the park could accommodate a herd of 100 bison reintroduced from the plains of Canada.

"We are creating some excitement, and we want people to know that Parks is getting closer to doing this," Julia Lynx, outreach coordinator for Eleanor Luxton Foundation, told the Rocky Mountain Outlook . "It is not a guarantee, but it is pretty close."

 

Energy upgrades pushed

HAILEY, Idaho - Communities in ski towns and mountain valleys across the West continue to ratchet up expectations for energy efficiency and renewable energy.

Hailey, located down-valley from the Idaho resort towns of Sun Valley and Ketchum, has adopted voluntary green-building codes for new homes and remodels.

The recommended upgrades in Hailey would advance conservation and other efficiencies by 10 per cent beyond those mandated by the new 2009 International Building Code now being adopted by municipalities and counties.

Hewing to the recommendations would increase the cost of a $300,000 home by $12,000, planners say. But that investment can be recouped within nine years because of lower energy costs.

Is adhering to this recommended code practical? The Idaho Mountain Express consulted one architect, who sees it as cumbersome. But another local architect described it as just a "small baby step" that still falls far short of what needs to be done.

In British Columbia, each resident of Revelstoke pays $3,000 per year in energy costs, according to a consultant's study. The community has started looking into the idea of providing biomass, ground-source geoexchange or other types of renewable fuels for what is called district heating in denser neighbourhoods, eliminating the need for each building to have its own heating unit.

And in Durango, Colo., leaders of the local electrical co-operative report that local co-op members have been purchasing renewable energy at a high rate, the Telegraph notes.

 

Upscale hotel opens

CANMORE, B.C. - A hotel that boasts of a higher level of accommodation than Canmore has known previously has now opened. Grande Rockies Resort has 125 one- and two-bedroom suites plus 15 penthouses. The owner also has two hotels in Toronto and one in Vancouver, notes the Rocky Mountain Outlook.

 

Locator devices gain acceptance

VAIL, Colo. - When is technology appropriate in wilderness settings? That question has been asked for decades and in various contexts. Bikes - yes or no?

But how about communication with the outside world. A backpacker from Chicago named James Nelson chose to forego any possible communication when he set out on a 31-mile circumnavigation of Mount of the Holy Cross. From conversations with other backpackers in Chicago, he seems to have deliberately chosen not to carry a device called a personal locator beacon, or PLB.

Whatever happened to him, nobody knows. Possibly, had he carried a PLB, the story might have been different.

The devices, first authorized in the United States in 2003, have started to become more popular among outdoorsmen, reports the Denver Post.

One outdoorsman compares the devices to the compass. "That not only allowed people to be able to navigate where they couldn't, but probably also caused a lot of people to get lost because they overstepped their bounds," author Mark Scott-Nash, author of Colorado 14er Disasters , tells the newspaper. "You could draw a similar analogy here."

But indicative of the trend is the thinking of Andrew Skurka, a solo adventurer who was named one of National Geographic's Adventurers of the Year. "Originally, I wanted nothing to do with it," he says. But now, he seems to have changed his mind. "You want to get home," he said.