Bear spray worked, perhaps too well

JASPER, Alberta – Etienne Cardinal was mountain biking near Jasper in late May when he heard a roar. It was just like in the movies. It was a grizzly bear.

This might have turned out very badly. While Cardinal is unclear how he got off his bicycle, he tells the Jasper Fitzhugh he remembers exactly what happened next: “I had a big round face looking at me, and I was still screaming and kind of backing up, and then he just stood up and came down on me, mouth wide open.”

Then the bear ran off. What happened?

Cardinal had turned his back and crouched down to protect himself. The bear bit into his hydration pack on his back, which included a can of bear spray. In that manner, the bruin got a mouthful of pure capsaicin, the active component in chili peppers and the vital component in bear spray.

The grizzly disappeared, but Cardinal by then was blind and choking. As he turned his pack around to search for his cell phone, the canister sprayed capsaicin all over his chest and arms.

“I was blind for almost 20 minutes, and it was burning all over my body. It burned like hell,” he recalled.

Despite his great torment, Cardinal was able to call for help. Help soon arrived, but relief was long in coming. His injuries were relatively minimal. A single blow to his back had left claw marks from his shoulder to his hip.

As for the capsaicin, he was put into a shower of cold water at the hospital for an hour and a half. Still, at times he had to run outside, to catch his breath. Nurses could not stand to assist him. But they eventually gave him milk to neutralize the pepper, while he used soap to wash the oil base spray away.

A former grizzly bear researcher, Cardinal works for Parks Canada and lives in the boonies near Mount Edith Cavell, says the Fitzhugh.

Bear attacks have been extremely rare, park officials tell the Fitzhugh. The last one occurred in 2006, and before that it was in the 1980s. Bluff charges are more common, occurring every two to three years.

Cardinal said he intended to get back on his bike again soon. “Lots of people run into bears on the trails and nothing happens,” he said. “It was just bad timing.”

Epic Pass is big winner in Utah decision

PARK CITY, Utah – By now, everybody in the ski world knows that Powdr Corp. screwed up, virtually mailing the key to its operations at Park City Mountain Resort to its landlord, the Canada-based real-estate development firm Talisker Corp, who in turn has given the key to Vail Resorts.

A district court judge in Utah made the ruling before Memorial Day, finding that Powder had failed to renew the lease that entitled it to use 3,500 acres of Talisker-owned land for the bargain-basement price of $150,000 a year.

That slip-up occurred in 2011, and it’s been easy enough to slap Powdr for the omission.

“It’s unfathomable that PCMR let the deadline pass,” writes Tom Clyde in The Park Record. “The landlord, United Park City Mines and now Talisker, has been trying to get out of a below-market lease for better than 20 years. It’s just baffling that PCMR didn’t give notice every morning, for 20 years when they turned the office lights on.”

Writing in Outside Online, Marc Peruzzi further draws attention to the arrangement between Vail Resorts and Talisker. Powdr’s failure occurred before Vail Resorts inked a contract with Talisker to manage The Canyons, the nearby resort. Peruzzi says that by all accounts, Vail Resorts overpaid for Canyons’ lease ($25 million plus a percentage of revenue), knowing that after some legal wrangling on behalf of Talisker, it would soon be in control of both the PCMR property and Canyons, which when combined would result in a megaresort of 7,500-plus acres.

Powdr still owns the lifts as well as land at the base. Peruzzi says the company can “deploy a nuclear option and remove the lifts and disallow access from the private land it owns at the base … Or sell its infrastructure and base-area operating rights to Vail Resorts.”

The Park Record tried to get John Cumming, chief executive of Powdr, to tip his hand, given that he doesn’t have many cards to play. For the time being, Cumming isn’t giving any public signs of being open to a deal. What he has offered to first Talisker and then Vail Resorts has been met with silence, he said. And he reiterated Powdr’s position: “Park City and its base area aren’t for sale.”

Powdr will be appealing, of course, although no observers seem to think the company has much of a legal case.

Clyde, the Park Record columnist, wrote that he is sure a deal will get struck soon enough. “Everybody loses if the operation is splintered up,” he writes. “To put it another way, if two farmers are arguing over the ownership of a cow, you can bet that the cow will be fed.”

He offered another metaphor for what lies ahead: a shotgun wedding. “There’s too much value there to break it apart. So in the end, some kind of deal will happen. They will walk down the aisle, black eyes and fat lips, and say, ‘I do – because I have to.’”

But Peruzzi identifies the bigger story with impacts beyond Park City. It allows Vail to further expand its brand, the “insanely affordable” Epic Pass, making it the largest ski area operator in Utah, as it already is in Colorado, where it has a third of all skier visits. It also has a sizable presence in Tahoe.

A long time ago, Vail Resorts left Colorado Ski Country USA, to go it alone on marketing efforts. Peruzzi sees the Wasatch ski area interlink idea flailing with The Canyons already pulled out and Park City probably gone.

“The undisputed leader in the season pass war, their strategy is to brand, promote, and ultimately sell the Epic Pass,” he writes. “It’s difficult to see how pushing the One Wasatch agenda helps that cause.”

Jackson tries to curb phone book blight

JACKSON, Wyo. – Those telephone books that keep getting dumped on your doorstep? Jackson elected officials have decided it’s time to rein them in. The Jackson Hole News&Guide reports that town councilors have decided to draft a law to discourage the unfettered deliveries. For example, one idea is to require all mass-distributed publications to be picked up within 14 days of being delivered.

Phone book companies point to an opt-out program, but Councilor Jim Stanford said he had signed up and phone books continued to be sent to him anyway.

Whether this can pass legal protection of free speech is another matter. Seattle attempted to ban phone book distributions, but at least one court has found that in violation of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment protection of free speech.

In Jackson Hole, local recyclers estimate they have received 200 tons of phone books during the past six years. As the books are printed on low-quality paper, they have little to no recycling value.

Colorado reservoir may fill this year

GRANBY – In Rocky Mountain National Park last week, snow bordering Trail Ridge Road was still 10 feet high. That’s where the Colorado River starts, and the river is now heavy with runoff.

It’s been an above-average year for water in the northern parts of Colorado. Above Granby Reservoir, a major dam on the Colorado River, the snowpack in early May was 132 percent of the 30-year average.

The reservoir was 57 percent of capacity and expected to fill this year. The dam was built to detain water for export under the Continental Divide to cities and farms in northern Colorado. But because of so much snow and rain east of the Continental Divide, little runoff is being taken.

West of the Continental Divide, newspapers reported that bike paths and other paths along rivers were swamped, but the runoff was not considered to be extraordinary. At Glenwood Springs, the peak runoff was thought to have occurred last weekend. The peak was earlier than the long-term average, but not so terribly early as compared with recent years.

– Allen Best
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