Bear Creek gates open once again

TELLURIDE, Colo. – The U.S. Forest Service has reopened two of four gates between the Telluride ski area and a popular sidecountry valley called Bear Creek. The gates had been closed since 2010.

Bear Creek is located adjacent to the ski area, flushing out in the town of Telluride not far from the park where the big bluegrass festival is held every June. It offers wonderful skiing, but also great dangers. Avalanche deaths have been frequent during the last several decades. In just one year during the late 1980s, four people died in avalanches. At some point, the forest service closed access, but with little effect. People ducked the ropes, so the forest service opened it from the ski area into Bear Creek.

Then came Tom Chapman. He’s an attorney in Colorado who, for more than 20 years, has bought private land within the broader fabric of federal lands, what is called an inholding, or worked with others who have such holdings.

In the early 1990s, Chapman started building a home in the West Elk Wilderness, west of Aspen and near Crested Butte. Construction materials had to be helicoptered into the site and at some point the forest service capitulated, agreeing to give Chapman land near Telluride in exchange for his wilderness inholding.

Mike Rozycki, planning director for San Miguel County, says two or three homes have been built on the private property near Telluride formerly administered by the forest service.

In the late 1990s, Chapman tried again. This time, he unveiled a number of inholdings in wilderness areas in Colorado, including a former mining site at timberline located in the heart of the Holy Cross Wilderness Area, south of Beaver Creek. Buyers of the rarified real estate could helicopter to their homes. But nothing came of that.

The Telluride case has been ongoing and again involves inholdings, this time in Bear Creek. Chapman accused the forest service of not taking efforts to prevent trespassers from crossing the property. That provoked the forest service to close access from the ski area once again. In deciding to reopen the gates, officials said that people were ducking the ropes at will.

“We’ve had (four) skiing seasons to observe it, and we don’t think skier behavior has really changed,” Judy Schutza, local district ranger for the forest service, told The Telluride Watch. “So we might as well have an access point where we can convey some information to skiers.”

Bill Masters, the long-time sheriff of San Miguel County, would like to have more authority other than to dispatch search and rescue crews to aid skiers and riders who get stranded on cliffs or who have been caught in avalanches.

“I’ve got a responsibility to manage what I consider to be a ski area because we have up to 300 people a day skiing there,” he told the Daily Planet. “I don’t get any revenue from it and I don’t have the authority to manage it or designate routes.”

Because Bear Creek is outside the ski area, it is not managed for avalanche safety or patrolled.

Utah ski areas are looking to link up

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah – The Wasatch Range of Utah has a number of ski areas located along the spine of the narrow range, all within a few miles of each other. Last week, the general managers of the seven ski areas gathered in one room to share a common vision of being connected via lifts with one pass good for all.

The vision is not particularly new. It has been, noted the Salt Lake Tribune, talked about for 50 years or about as long as some of the ski areas have existed. What was remarkable was that the ski areas have united around one vision.

“You couldn’t get resort operators to talk to each other at a cocktail party in the (old) days, let alone agree on a master concept,” Mike Korologos, a Utah ski historian, told the Tribune.

The vision is called OneWasatch, and it would allow skiers to access more than 18,000 acres of terrain, three times the size of Vail Mountain and twice as much as at Whistler Blackcomb. The operators say that just a few new lifts, strategically located on private land between the ski areas, could knit them together, providing customers access to a total of 100 ski lifts. Cost is estimated at $30 million.

Included are Park City Mountain Resort, Deer Valley and Canyons Resort, all based on the east side of the range with Alta, Brighton, Snowbird, and Solitude, all on the west.

This new plan, if implemented, would give the Utah resorts something else unrivaled in North America, the interconnections found in resorts of the Alps. “You combine that with our accessibility and the airport, and there’s not a ski community in this country that can beat us,” said Jenni Smith, general manager of Park City Mountain Resort.

Uphillers at Whitefish cause concerns

WHITEFISH, Mont. – With the increase in people using groomed ski trails for uphilling, Whitefish Mountain Resort and the U.S. Forest Service instituted a new policy - to restrict use of times and places.

But the restrictions aren’t being honored. In February two skiers who hiked up Big Mountain before the lifts opened were in Helloroaring Basin when ski patrollers were about to deploy explosives to control avalanches.

That and other incidents have prompted the resort to consider changing the uphill ski policy, reports the Whitefish Pilot.

Swiss banker gaining control of resort

TAMARACK, Idaho – Credit Suisse, the major creditor for Tamarack, the new resort in Idaho that went belly-up with the recession, has applied a total of $80 million in credit to gain control of three properties in a series of sheriff’s auctions.

The Idaho Statesmen reports that Credit Suisse gained control of the ski area, a chunk of platted but undeveloped land, plus a lease agreement with the state of Idaho. The bank had already gained control of 15 homes in a previous auction. Still up for grabs is the undeveloped shopping and residential plaza.

Goal to make tourists feel like locals

TURTLE BAY, Hawaii – Several former key figures in Intrawest, the real estate and ski area developer, have regrouped in Hawaii in a business venture called Replay Resorts. There, they are at work on a Hawaiian resort called Turtle Bay, reports a correspondent for Whistler’s Pique Newsmagazine.

Michael Coyle, the chief executive, said the team is applying what it learned in mountain resorts to the beach. “We cut our teeth building Intrawest and spending a lot of time at Whistler,” Coyle told Pique. “We got an understanding there of what the customer wants, and how the customer is evolving, and how connected that experience needs to be to the local. The highest compliment you can pay a guest in a destination like this is to mistake them for a local.”

Skip Taylor, one of the founders of Crankworx, the renowned mountain biking event, has been hired by Replay to be part of the “experience creation” aspect of the resort. “We are taking our learning from the mountain-resort world and bringing it here to the North Shore,” says Taylor.

Still in play is an 800-acre swath of undeveloped land, most if it only steps from the ocean. The state government wants to pay $40 million to the resort to preserve a large parcel of undeveloped land while also agreeing to ongoing development that would yield hundreds of new homes and up to two new hotels.

Bears awake; wolf sightings tested

CODY, Wyo. – Animals are out and about in many places. In Yellowstone National Park and adjoining areas, the first black bear of the year was observed Feb. 11 and the first grizzly was noted on March 4, according to the Wyoming Game & Fish in mid-March.  Don’t they know that it’s still cold and snowy?

As for wolves, they make cows very, very nervous. Researchers from Oregon State University note that wolves have spread into ranching areas of the West after being reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park. The university researchers estimated that wolves in northeastern Oregon could cost ranchers up to $261 per head of cattle, including $55 for weight loss and $67 for lower pregnancy rates.

– Allen Best

More Mountain Town News can be found at www.mountaintownnews.net