Backcountry beef burrito near the Butte
CRESTED BUTTE – A remarkable story comes out of Gunnison County, where a quartet of backcountry skiers were astonished to find several cattle at 11,400 feet on a ridge northwest of Crested Butte.

The ridge sits 2,500 feet above the valley floor and has a pitch of at least 40 degrees. One of the skiers, Billy Laird, described the ridge as a “gnarly skinner for experienced backcountry skiers. It’s called Heart Attack Ridge for a reason.”

The cattle had apparently avoided detection last fall when cowboys herded cattle from high-country grazing. Something similar happened the year before, when 11 cattle ended up at treeline near Conundrum Hot Springs, near the top of the Elk Range between Aspen and Crested Butte. All of those cattle perished.

In this case, the skiers used a cell phone to inquire if any local ranchers were missing cattle. By the time they had skied down the slope, they had the answer – and the rancher was very appreciative of their offer to try to herd the cattle off the ridge.

Easier said than done, as reported by the Crested Butte News and Gunnison Country Times. Skinning back to the ridge, they found one cow that seemed dead and two buried in snow but still alive. The two living animals, one a yearling bull and the other a heifer – refused to wade through the snow.

Returning the next morning, this time with several more backcountry skiers, they wrangled the bull and heifer, put stuff sacks over their heads, with slits for breathing, hog-tied their legs and rolled them into tarps, which they tightened with ratchet straps, creating what the Times calls a “bovine burrito.”

Because of the steepness of the slope, they were able to slide the cattle, which weighed 300 to 500 pounds, down to the valley floor.
There, the bull breathed his last. He was butchered by the skiers, some of whom are hunters. As for the heifer, she was treated to hay, warm water and supplemental heat and, the rancher hopes, will live to create more cattle.

Another ski area, or just a big hoax?
TELLURIDE – Heartburn has returned to Telluride, this time courtesy of a familiar figure in backcountry land issues.

Tom Chapman, an attorney, has made a career out of buying old mining parcels deep within wilderness areas or other public tracts in Colorado and then threatening to develop them. A few times, he has engineered the cheap land parcels into substantial land exchanges, in one case in the 1990s leveraging land – and a bluff – in the West Elk Wilderness near Paonia into attractive developable land near Telluride.

In 2010, Chapman bought three old mining claims in the Bear Creek drainage, which is adjacent to the Telluride ski area, and long a favorite haunt of Telluride’s backcountry skiers.

Now, Chapman has applied to the U.S. Forest Service for a permit to create a new ski area, Bear Creek at Telluride Ski Resort. The plan calls for 1,300 acres of rugged, expert skiing with hike-to and helicopter access in one of the highest bowls in the Rocky Mountains. The highest elevation would be 13,555 feet, and the lowest 11,562 feet, at the mining claims.

“Deep powder snow, no grooming, no trees, no clear-cut trails,” reads a release from the company. “No lift towers, no permanent structures, no trace of wintertime skiing to the summer use of Bear Creek.”

There will, however, be avalanche control.

As before, he claims that his strategy is to protect his private property interest. But his history is one of trying to leverage money from the relatively inexpensive purchase of the mining claims. Sometimes it has worked, and in other cases, such as near Crested Butte and Beaver Creek, not so well.

Walking naked when it’s below zero
GRAND LAKE – Cabin fever normally can’t be cited as excuse for anything at least until February. So what do you make of the 43-year-old woman who was reported beating on windows and ripping down signs in the pre-dawn light of Grand Lake during one of the coldest weekends in recent years?

After stripping to the waist, she had disrobed entirely and laid down in the street before police arrived to whisk her to a medical clinic at dawn’s early light, reports the Sky-Hi News.

Cold, but not compared with the past
STEAMBOAT SPRINGS – January started cold in the Rocky Mountains, such as hasn’t occurred for several years, sparking some questions whether it had finally gotten chilly enough to nip the epidemic of beetles that have killed broad swaths of lodgepole pines.

Temperatures staggered to 33 below on both sides of the Tetons, in Driggs, Idaho, and Jackson, Wyo. But it wasn’t close to setting a record. “I’ve seen it a whole lot colder than this,” Betty Chambers told the Jackson Hole News&Guide. “I’ve had it clear down to 60 below.”

Peter Dennis, a retired teacher, told the same newspaper that preparation is everything. “There’s no such thing as cold weather; just inappropriate clothing,” he said.

It was a trifle warmer in Crested Butte, 30 below. “It feels like January is supposed to feel in this high-mountain valley,” wrote Mark Reaman from the Crested Butte News. “The snow squeaks, car engines groan, exposed skin stings, and there is no melting going on outside.”

In Steamboat Springs, the average temperature through mid-January was only 4.2 degrees. Should the cold persist, meteorologists told the Steamboat Today, it would be the coldest average January in Steamboat records.

In Aspen, it was sufficiently cold to spur Scott Condon of The Aspen Times to wonder whether the bark beetles that have terrorized lodgepole pine trees since 1996 had been blunted.

Hard to tell, entomologists said. The spread of the bark beetle has already slowed, maybe because of the snowy winter two years ago that left plenty of water for the trees, making them healthier and more able to resist the beetles. Plus, the beetles have already gotten most of the vulnerable trees.

“Time will tell,” said Barbara Bentz, a research entomologist with the Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Center in Utah.

For the record, the last major influx of bark beetles in Colorado, which occurred from roughly 1939 to 1951, was finally stopped by a week-long deep freeze of persistent 30 and 40 below night-time temperatures.

Skis, socks, wallet. Shopping bag?
TRUCKEE, Calif. – Add Truckee to the list of mountain towns of the West investigating limitations of plastic grocery bags.

Telluride started the trend, followed by Aspen and Carbondale. In California, San Francisco and San Jose have also put the kibosh on the freebies that have come to mar the world’s landscape.

The Sierra Sun reports that an online survey revealed nearly 70 percent of respondents in favor of a ban. Some people, however, see trouble ahead.

“This is a tourist community,” Truckee resident Eve Auch told the newspaper. “How many people do you think will come in for the wonders of Truckee and bring their own recyclable bags? It isn’t going to happen.”

But another area resident, Mike Clauss, said he believes that the plastic bans have now become common enough that visitors won’t be ruffled.

If steep doesn’t get you, deep might
MARBLE – It’s always a crapshoot if you get into an avalanche. The random ways of the snowy torrents were revealed in two cases, one in Colorado and one in Montana in recent weeks.

In Colorado, four skiers were descending a chute near Marble, southwest of Aspen, and one of the four got knocked down in a relatively small slide that carried him 250 feet and left him under three feet of snow.

All of his companions were equipped with beacons and other gear, allowing the survivors to reach his body within 10 to 15 minutes. But already, there was no pulse, according to a report of the Colorado Avalanche Information Center. The victim was 37 and, according to the Summit Daily News, a highly regarded employee in the Summit County government.

In Montana, a skier survived an avalanche in Glacier National Park, but was badly beaten up. His helmet was smashed, he suffered a broken arm, six broken ribs and also had head injuries, reports the Whitefish Pilot. He was also buried up to his neck, but his companion was able to dig him out and they both lived to tell the story.

North of the border, Whistler has had two fatalities in recent weeks, in both cases steep being the principal cause of death. In the first case, a Texan fell 70 feet to his death after skiing off a cliff in an area called Tiger’s Terrace, reports Pique. Then another man from Australia slid into trees after trying to walk down a slope that he had discovered was steeper than he could handle on his snowboard.

Many ski towns vie to be X-rated
ASPEN – With snowmobiles doing flips and up to 20,000 younger people at the base of the Buttermilk ski area, Aspen this weekend is opposite to its image as a slightly stodgy resort for the worlds’ über-elite.

But then that’s the point of the X Games. To stay current and not slip too far into stodginess, Aspen has been willing to invest in hosting an event that may not truly pay dividends for some years to come.

So are other resorts. ESPN, the owner of the event, announced this past week that Park City, Quebec City and Heavenly and Squaw Valley were all in the running to host the event after Aspen’s contract runs out in 2014.

Aspen last year upped the ante, with local governments and other organizations boosting their contributions to $545,000. Aspen Skiing Co. remains the primary host, but has not publicly disclosed its full package.

One curious footnote from the Lake Tahoe bid is that two ski company rivals, Vail Resorts, which owns Heavenly, and KSL Capital Partners, which owns Squaw Valley, are teaming up.

China ski world is like U.S. in the ’60s
ASPEN – It’s been a tough year for merchants of ski clothes and other accessories. Klaus Obermeyer, the patriarch of the sector, tells The Aspen Times that sales for his company, Sport Obermeyer, were down 7 percent, but it could have been worse. Because of the drought last year, the skiwear industry overall was down about 20 percent.

Obermeyer started his business in 1947, while teaching skiing on Aspen Mountain. He remains active running the company and tells the Times that the hard times have made his company better. As for the future, he sees China evolving into an emerging market because of ski areas being developed there.

“Skiing there is like it was here in the ‘60s,” he said.

Many of Colorado’s ski areas – including Breckenridge, Crested Butte, Vail and Steamboat – opened in the 1960s, as did Jackson Hole and Grand Targhee in the Tetons and dozens more ski areas across the West. Further, many of them enjoyed 10 percent or more growth rates for 10 to 20 years.

– Allen Best