The newest frontier for 14-er bagging

ASPEN – By now, thousands of people have climbed each and every one of the 14,000-foot peaks in Colorado. Some have climbed them all five, 10 and even 15 times over.

By conventional measurements, Colorado has 53 such mountains, although some lists reach a higher number by including subpeaks that are over 14,000 feet but separated by ridges.

With the novelty of climbing them all long ago diminished, adventurers in recent years have set out to climb them in very different ways. Some have set out for simple speed. Instead of years, as is common, some have run down the list and up the mountains in weeks, even days.

In the 1990s, Lou Dawson set out to ski all the 14ers. Later, Bart Miller used a bicycle to get from one peak to another, forsaking motorized vehicles entirely. And then Jon Kedrowski slept on top of all of them.

Now come Junaid Dawud and Luke DeMuth, 33 and 27, respectively, who decided to renounce even simple mechanization. To get from one peak to another, they will walk. That simple exercise adds enormously to the challenge, as some of these peaks are scattered across hundreds of miles.

Walking those roads has been more difficult than the climbs, Dawud told The Aspen Times, and constitutes a “special kind of brutality” that “wears on you psychologically.”

Dawud, who works at a restaurant in Boulder, had this gem of advice: “Place your passion as your priority; everything else will fall in line.”

 

Yellowstone scorched areas came back quick

OLD FAITHFUL INN, Wyo. – For a time in 1988, it looked like the historic and much-venerated Old Faithful Inn in the heart of Yellowstone National Park would go up in smoke, as eventually was the case with trees in 36 percent of the park.

Working through the old forests of lodgepole pine, the fire stubbornly nibbled away and, pushed by strong winds, twice sprinted. Some Americans wondered about the “loss” of this national treasure and the incompetence of the National Park Service, which was supposed to protect it.

Even then, it was clear that the story wasn’t all that simple. The evidence now continues to arrive, 25 years after the giant blaze, that fire has actually been good for Yellowstone.

Park officials tell the Jackson Hole News&Guide some areas in 1988 were believed to be too scorched and devoid of nutrients to allow for any regrowth for decades, if not for centuries. Instead, those that burned hottest have bounced back even more rapidly than other areas.

In one area of blow-down trees, the fire left nothing but ashes. “But it’s coming back, so much so that you can’t even tell today that the area looked like the bottom of your barbecue 25 years ago,” said park ecologist Roy Rankin.

While trees aren’t dense, they have grown prodigiously: some 18 to 20 feet tall.

“We really didn’t know as much as we’d like to think we know about fire,” he said.

Make no mistake: blackened stumps and other residue of the great fire remain, and so do patterns that, to the trained idea, reveal the path of that fire. The expectation is that these patterns of fire will remain evident to practiced eyes for centuries.

The fire was considered to be of a severity and scale that occur only once every 200 to 250 years.

 

Town seeks to expand carbon work to homes

MOUNTAIN VILLAGE – The Telluride area continues to explore how to transition its energy consumption to non-carbon sources. To that end, the town of Mountain Village has appropriated $30,000 for local residents to subscribe to panels in a solar farm 80 miles to the west in the Paradox Valley.

The grants are equal to 13 percent of the purchase price of the panels. If the program is popular, the Town Council might augment funds next year.

An array of solar panels is also being erected in Mountain Village at the terminus of the gondola. Town officials admit the array will produce only a negligible amount of electricity but is considered important in that it shows the town leading by example.

The purpose is to reduce the town’s responsibility for emissions of greenhouse gases. So far, those efforts have been mostly restricted to town operations. Mayor Dan Jansen said the effort must now expand to the private sector, which is responsible for 95 percent of emissions.

“We pledged to reduce our footprint 20 percent by 2020, and we’re on track to hit that. But to really move the needle in Mountain Village, we need full participation from the community,” he tells The Telluride Watch. “We’re trying to use carrots, not sticks.”

But voters in Mountain Village, Telluride and the broader San Miguel County will be asked to approve a stick, a 1 percent tax on utilities. The revenues, an estimated $150,000 in 2014, would be used for building improvements and other greenhouse gas reduction efforts.

County Commissioner Art Goodtimes, although a member of the Green Party, tells the Telluride Daily Planet that he favors the provision but is unsure of the timing. Many people in the ranching communities around Norwood who comprise his district still aren’t flush.

 

Banff also leading by example in solar array

BANFF, Alberta – Banff town officials are also undertaking erection of solar panels on the town hall in an effort to provide an example to the community. Chad Townsend, the town’s environmental coordinator, tells the Rocky Mountain Outlook that the installation will be “by far the largest (array) in the Bow Valley.” Typically, such installations pay for themselves in 10 years, not considering the environmental benefits, he said.

 

Banff officials take new look at rickshaw

BANFF, Alberta – Banff town officials are reviewing their previous ban on rickshaws and pedi-cabs. The council in 2007 had ordered the ban because of how much they were slowing and disrupting traffic. But the town agreed to review the ban at the request of an operator, James Barkley of Rocky Mountain Pedicabs, who has been working in the shopping and entertainment district of Calgary since 2005.

Barkley told the Rocky Mountain Outlook that traffic congestion was not an issue during the trial. Banff Mayor Karen Sorenson was more reserved in her enthusiasm, but did admit to the goal of enhancing the “sense of animation and vibrancy in Banff.”

 

Bold coyote is now a dead coyote in Banff

BANFF, Alberta – A bold coyote in Banff is now a dead coyote. The Rocky Mountain Outlook reports that the coyote approached a groundskeeper at a condo complex and made strange, hissing sounds and then bit a hose the groundskeeper was carrying.

The groundskeeper kicked the canine away. Soon after, it was seen in proximity to a child playing in a back yard.

Then came a report that the animal had bit an electric cord and had been electrocuted. “It’s shocking to get a call like that,” a spokesperson for Parks Canada said with no seeming intention of irony.

 

Rooms full, stores busy in many places

WHISTLER, B.C. – Is there any destination mountain resort that hasn't been doing well this summer? That just might be the man-bites-dog story – if any could be found.

Whistler certainly isn’t complaining. The number of room nights for June and July were both records. But it didn’t take giving away those rooms to set a record. Room rates were also up, reports Pique. The business is coming from regional markets, meaning Vancouver and Seattle.

From Truckee, Calif., and Aspen also come reports of commercial glad tidings. And in Vail, the festivals have outperformed themselves, starting with the early summer GoPro Mountain Games, formerly sponsored by Teva. The three-day event drew 53,000 spectators, a 20 percent gain from last year, reports the Vail Daily. Kelli McDonald, the town’s economic development director, explains that mountain resorts all over Colorado have had successful summers. But again, the story is in the regional market, in this case Denver and other Front Range cities.

 

Ski employees asked to expand language skills

ASPEN – Employees of the Aspen Skiing Co. are being encouraged to pick up second languages, particularly Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese and Russian.

“If you’re from Brazil, and you’re dropping your kid off at ski school, you feel a lot better if someone there speaks Portuguese,” says Jeff Hanle, spokesman for the Aspen Skiing Co. “As the international business has become more important for us, so has this.”

Some employees are allowed to take time out from their normal work chores to study languages using Rosetta Stone software provided by the company.

Each participant has a unique agreement based on job, time at a computer and other considerations, says Hanle. A typical language-learning program would be six months or a year depending upon previous skill with that language. Employees, their supervisors and the administrator track progress and adjust as needed.

Rental and retail shop crews, ski patrollers and salaried ski instructors are eligible, as is the sales staff. The latter reports setting a goal of 15 to 30 minutes per day, seven days a week.

Kristi Kavanagh, the company’s director of worldwide sales, said gaining skills in the native tongues of visitors is particularly important. Those first-time tourists will likely return to their home countries and spread the word about their experience, so it had better be a good one.

“As that market begins to develop, we will look at potentially hiring people with those language skills to begin with, but developing China is in its infancy for us,” she told the Daily News. The Chinese are visiting Aspen, if in still small numbers. In spending, however, they easily outpace Americans and Europeans.

How important is the international market to Aspen? It’s big, and at one point the company said 20 percent of its skier days came from outside the United States.

– Allen Best

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