Septuagenarians eye Everest summit

SNOWBIRD, Utah – The height of Mt. Everest, the world’s tallest peak, has increased only a few feet, topping out at 29,035, according to the latest survey. Not so for the age of the climbers.

The record for the oldest person to climb Everest has been broken six times during the last seven years, with Katsusuke Yanagisawa, now owning the title at the age of 71 years and 63 days.

It may not last long. One of the earlier record holders, Yuichiro Miura, who summited at the age of 70, is aiming to reclaim the record next spring, when he is 75. Others, including Utah’s Dick Bass, are considering bids at even older ages.

“It feels like the goddess of Everest is beckoning me to come back,” Miura told the Associated Press’ Chisaki Watanabe. Estimated cost for the expedition is $1.7 million

Miura is blessed with good genes. His father skied down France’s Mont Blanc at the age of 99. Japanese have among the greatest longevity in the world, owing to a diet heavy in vegetables and fish, superb medical care and trim physiques.

For Miura, it would be at least his third Everest ascent. In 1970, he became the first person to ski from the summit down the mountain. He was then 37, or four years older than Sir Edmund Hillary when he, with Tenzing Norgay, first climbed the mountain.

Others may also be in the hunt for the oldest-climber record. Bass, the owner of Utah’s Snowbird ski area and an early investor in Vail, is also thinking of giving Everest another shot. He’s now 78.

He became the first person in the world to climb the highest peak on each of the seven continents, capping it with his climb of Everest in 1985. At the time, he was 55 years old – then the oldest person by five years to summit. He held the record for the oldest summit for nine years.

Experts debate avalanche survival

JACKSON HOLE, Wyo. – Few people would expect to ever need to know what to do if caught in an avalanche. But in Jackson Hole, where avalanche deaths among backcountry skiers and sledders are a staple of winter news in theJackson Hole News&Guide, it’s no academic subject.

Since at least 1864, reports the newspaper, the conventional wisdom for the hapless person has been to mimic a swimming motion, in an effort to stay atop the snow or even get out of the current.

That convention has been challenged in recent years by Colorado-based avalanche expert Dale Atkins. At a meeting of 300 skiing professionals in Jackson Hole recently, he again explained why he believes it’s better to keep your hands around your face, so you can create an air pocket when the movement of snow begins to slow.

Slab avalanches move extremely fast, Atkins points out, but then stop rapidly. In a flash of time survivors found that slides ceass to move like a liquid, setting up like concrete. At that point, the person no longer can move. If swimming, arms akimbo, the victim will be unable to get a hand around his or her face and an arm to the surface.

Atkins said that human bodies are likely to end up closer to the surface anyway. He illustrated this principle by shaking a bowl of mixed nuts. The large Brazil nuts come to the surface.

He was challenged at the meeting by Martin Radwin, who argued that waving and kicking, as if in swimming, makes a person larger, and hence increases the chance of the that person rising like a Brazil nut.

There seems to be no empirical evidence to support either hypothesis.

Winter Park paper retired after 30 +

WINTER PARK – After 30 years and spare change, theWinter Park Manifesthas published its final issue. The newspaper name has been retired in a new publishing regime of theSky-Hi News, which is now putting out five issues a week. Swift, the media chain that also owns daily newspapers in Aspen, Vail and Summit County, bought the papers.

The Manifest was started in March 1977 by Jim Davidson, who later started another newspaper in Telluride and now lives in Southern Colorado. In a story headlined “Bittersweet Goodbye,” Davidson recalled the primitive printing technology of the time. Production started on Wednesday afternoons and didn’t finish until midnight or later on Thursday.

“We were much younger then and incredibly idealistic – we

felt we were doing a great thing for the community,” Davidson said. “And they felt the same way. And so, it was well worth it. It really was.”

Marianne Klancke, who has done cartoons for the paper for nearly all those 30 years, confessed that she has read no other newspaper over these years, instead being “content to concern myself with the small, mountain view from this personal, pertinent pisser of a paper.”

The rich keep getting richer

NEW YORK, N.Y. – Who’s buying up all the real estate in ski towns? Everybody knows it’s people from cities, and obviously some very wealthy ones.

In fact, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans earned 21.2 percent of all income in 2005, reportsThe Wall Street Journal, citing data from the Internal Revenue Service. That’s higher than the previous mark of 20.8 percent set in 2000.

By comparison, the bottom 50 percent of Americans earned 12.8 percent of all income.

The Journal says IRS data goes back only to 1986, but academic research suggests the rich last had this high a share of total income in the 1920s.

Jason Furman, a scholar at the Brookings Institution, said the inequality of wealth is a 30-year trend.

The source of the increased income for the affluent isn’t reported by the IRS, but theJournal says that, until this summer, soaring stock prices and buoyant credit markets produced spectacular payouts for private-equity and hedge-fund managers, and investment bankers.

A 2004 study by University of Chicago academic Steve Kaplan and Joshua Rauch found that the highest-earning hedge-fund manager earned double in 2005 what the top earner made in 2003.

New park sanitizes Denver’s lyrics

ASPEN – If you want an authoritative guide to the lyrics and life of the late singer John Denver, who died 10 years ago this month in a plane crash, don’t go to the park bearing his name in his adopted hometown of Aspen.

The Aspen Times says the lyrics etched into stone obelisks at the riverside park were bowdlerized. The last verse of his signature “Rocky Mountain High” included the line “Friends around the campfire and everybody’s high.” But it’s not on the rock.

Another song, “Poems, Prayers and Promises,” had a line about “my friends and my old lady sit and pass a pipe around.” Not in the park. There, it’s “my friends and my old lady sit and watch the sun go down.”

The creators of the park said they consulted the family for lyrics, but his brother, Ron Deutschendorf, said he wasn’t consulted – and he’s sure John Denver would have been unhappy. “He’d be pissed like I’m pissed. It’s just not right.”

The newspaper says that it tried to contact Denver’s ex-wife, Annie Denver, but was unable to reach her.

Bark beetles enjoy successful summer

SUMMIT COUNTY – It’s the same old story. The bark beetles that favor lodgepole pine had another successful summer, leaving behind their old host trees and spreading wildly to new hosts. Foresters tell theSummit Daily News that nearly all the pine forests in the northern portions of the Blue River Valley, north of Silverthorne, are likely to be dead or dying next year. A few paces back are the forests near Breckenridge, but they could catch up by next year. Some pine beetles have bored into spruce trees, inoculating them with the deadly blue-stain fungus, but the pine beetles can’t reproduce in spruce trees.

County considers smaller homes

CRESTED BUTTE – Some places have enacted limits on size of homes, sometimes to great protest. In Gunnison County, the proposal is going in the opposite direction – to allow smaller houses.

The current limit there is 600 square feet, but county planners recommend 400 square feet. A smaller home will accommodate people who are constrained by budgets, they say.

Can a house be built so small and still have enough insulation? That was the concern voiced by the county building inspector, reports theCrested Butte News. Maybe not, but it will be up to the builder to figure out how to meet building codes, says a county commissioner.

– Allen Best