Ski towns read the economic tea leaves
KETCHUM, Idaho – It’s the season for business conferences as ski town officials huddle to plot their competitive advantages and strategies in the changing world.

In Ketchum and Sun Valley, an economic development group called Sustain Blaine is planning to hear a panel talk about location-neutral companies. Group officials say they get two calls a month from companies interested in relocating their businesses to the Sun Valley area, but only two companies per year end up doing so. What are the barriers to relocation of such businesses? That’s what panel members may explain, organizers tell the Idaho Mountain Express.

Also on the agenda in Sun Valley is a talk by Joseph Kasputys, founder of HIS Global Insight, which will probe global and national economies.
In Colorado, something similar is under way in Steamboat Springs. The community already has a more diverse economic base than most. It has 1,000 employees in location-neutral businesses. Among them is SmartWool, the maker of socks for rugged activities, and The Industrial Co. (TIC), an international construction company, which both began operations in Steamboat and retains corporate headquarters. Outdoor recreation manufacturing employs more than 400.

Tom Kern, director of the local chamber, points out that health care has 1,000 full-time employees, energy and mining another 1,000.
“What the economic summit is trying to do is have the community devise a strategic plan regarding its future direction as it relates to economic development. Obviously, tourism will have a large part in that strategy but what are this community’s priorities as it relates to these other industrial clusters that presently reside here?” Kern tells Mountain Town News.

And in Whistler, a high-level brain trust of representatives from the municipal, hotel, ski area and other sectors has been summoned to help spend $6.35 million in provincial money.

While doing so, members of the Economic Partnership Initative are expected to pool information about the impact of the global financial crisis, changing visitor travel and demographic patterns, exchange rate fluctuations, resort competition, revenue uncertainty, new emerging markets like China, increased global awareness of Whistler in the wake of the 2010 Olympics, and social media and other marketing shifts.

Vail courts health-related tourism
VAIL – Vail continues to explore how it can make a better income through what is broadly called medical tourism.

It’s a rubber-band expression that can, depending upon who is speaking, refer to such traditional things as spa treatments and wellness seminars. Also traditional has been the hosting of conferences and seminars to attract medical practioners.

In the early 1990s, Vail gained another revenue stream when Tahoe-based orthopedic surgeon J. Richard Steadman set up business. The clinic continues to draw the rich and famous, including professional athletes, to have their shoulders and knees worked on, but more ordinary people, too. Now, a third of the hospital nights at the adjacent hospital are because of the clinic.

Now, Vail is ramping up efforts to draw visitors for health reasons. One aspect is to draw conferences and other such meetings. The Vail Valley Partnership has added a staff member to specifically recruit medical groups and meetings. Chris Romer, the partnership’s president, reports that this has grown to more than one-fourth of the group business.

Altogether, the hospital and medical groups could account for as much as 6 percent of the towns’ economic base, according to Stan Zemler, the town manager, who spoke recently at a forum covered by the Vail Daily.

Another initiative is to promote seminars and activities appealing to people interested in physical fitness. That’s always been Vail’s forte, but this has a different tact.

Another effort involves special event programming. Last weekend,  an event called “Living at Your Peak” was held in Vail. There were sessions titled, “Stress and Biological Aging: What’s LifestyleGot to do With it?” and “Nutrition Translated.”

Participants had the opportunity to road bike through Vail with Freddie Rodriguez, who promised to tell stories from the Tour de France. Also, Mount Everest climber Ellen Miller explained how interval training and heart-rate monitors can be used to the best advantage. And professional tennis legend Martina Natrilova gave the keynote.

Presidential elections slow real estate
ASPEN – Real estate sales in Aspen have been sluggish this year, dropping 16 percent from last year.  A reason to get worried?

Not according to representatives of the real estate community, reports the Aspen Daily News. The realty agents point to national figures that show more hesitancy in sales during election years over the last 40 years. In White House election years, home prices gained an average 4.5 percent, compared to 5.8 percent otherwise.

Other resort towns of the West had less bounce after the free fall of 2008-09, as compared to Aspen, but are now generally reporting a more clear upward movement in sales activity.

Gravity wins with tragic consequences
LAKE LOUISE, Alberta – There’s so much pleasure in the great outdoors during these late days of summer – and so many things that can go wrong. Mountain newspapers this past week told of disaster narrowly averted, a shoe that slipped above a river, and a boulder that gave way.

The miracle survival occurred near Lake Louise. A woman slipped off the glacier ridge on Mount Victoria, then cart-wheeled for about 50 meters before managing to stick her ax into the ice. Few in that situation manage to accomplish that

 

She managed to climb up the steep, 50-degree slope of ice, but fell again. Amazingly, reports the Rocky Mountain Outlook, she stopped her fall a second time.

“Normally, if you fall of the ridge, you go the whole way, like thousands of feet,” said Marc Ledwidge, from Parks Canada.

The miracles continued. She clung desperately to the ice for six hours before being rescued, but was uninjured save for minor frostbite.

To the north, in Jasper National Park, a 25-year-old man was not so lucky. While hiking on a trail adjacent to the Athabasca River in early evening, he slipped and fell into the water above Athabascan Falls. He was swept down the river and over the 70-foot falls. A search revealed nothing, so rescuers assumed they would be recovering a body.

Above Aspen, another hiker died near the summit of North Maroon Peak. The Aspen Daily News reported the hiker was 300 feet from the 14,014-foot summit when a boulder gave way. He fell 800 feet and, although wearing a helmet, died of a head injury, according to the deputy county coroner.

Last smoking holdout snubs out butts
JACKSON, Wyo. – The Virginian, the last bar in Jackson Hole to allow smoking, has done a 180. The Jackson Hole News&Guide reports smoking was banned four months ago to enable managers to evaluate the effect on business, and the ban will continue for at least several months. General Manager Mike Kraft did acknowledge that the bar’s clientele has changed.

Wildfires cause residents to pack bags
JACKSON, Wyo. – Some residents in Jackson were packing their bags and making plans to evacuate as a fire in Horsethief Canyon smoked up the skies and cast an eerie orange glow last week.

By Monday, the direct threat to Jackson had abated, reported the Jackson Hole Daily, although hiking on Snow King, the in-town ski area, was prohibited, as were forays into nearby drainages favored by Jackson residents for recreation. Some 300 firefighters were dispatched to the scene.

The danger was sufficient that 500 or so people attended a public meeting, most of them from an area where fire officials had warned evacuation might be necessary.

The fire nearest Jackson had covered more than 3,000 acres, while another fire north of Jackson, near the entrance to Yellowstone National Park, had covered 20,000 acres. A great many blazes in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming were burning.

Putting dying forest to beneficial use
BRECKENRIDGE – Entrepreneurs for the last decade have been trying to figure out how to convert Colorado’s dying forests into electricity, heat, or both.

Burning wood to heat buildings, in lieu of fossil fuels, has been the easier proposition. Wood heats a recreation center in Fairplay, south of Breckenridge; a public-works facility near the gambling towns of Central City and Blackhawk; and a school in Oak Creek, near Steamboat Springs.
Electrical production is a more difficult nut to crack. A plant approved for biomass electrical production at Gypsum has permits and the promise of a subsidy from an electrical utility and now appears ready to move forward into construction. Plans for electrical production are also moving forward in Southwest Colorado, near Pagosa Springs.

But in Summit County, near the epicenter of the beetle epidemic, people see the dead forests and wonder “what if?” Entrepreneurs tell Mountain Town News that they are exploring different financial and technology models, especially those that allow more mobile units. It seems to be a long, slow process that may well see fruition after the current beetle epidemic has passed.

In other words, the current story is what could-be, not what has-been.

– Allen Best