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Political football over highest peak

TALKEETNA, Alaska – Peter Hackett climbed North America’s highest peak 10 times and, as a physician specializing in high-altitude medicine, spent weeks at a time ministering to climbers from a camp located on the side of the 20,237-foot mountain in the Alaska Range.

What does he call the mountain? “It’s always been Denali to the climbers and the locals,” says Hackett, now semi-retired in Ridgway.

And so it shall be Denali on U.S. government maps in the future, replacing the name McKinley. The Obama administration announced in August that it supports changing the name of the mountain, as Alaska has asked since 1975. The name comes from the Athabascan languages of the local native Americans.

To Aspen’s Auden Schendler, who climbed the mountain in 2001, the name makes practical sense. “No one ever called it McKinley,” he said. President Barack Obama’s executive order “just puts in place the reality.”

But to Republicans from Ohio, this order from a Democratic president is deeply distressing. William McKinley, the U.S. president from 1897 until his assassination in 1901, came from Ohio. “..yet another example of the President going around Congress,” tweeted Rob Portman, a congressman from Ohio. House Speaker John Boehner, also of Ohio, was “deeply disappointed in this decision.”

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Candidates pass the hat in ski towns

JACKSON, Wyo. – Presidential hopefuls have been stopping by ski towns of the West, shaking the local money trees.

In Jackson, Republican aspirant Ted Cruz stopped by the library for a free public talk and then pressed the flesh at a fundraiser where the going rate for a 30-minute session hosted by a Texas oilman was $2,700. Cruz, a senator from Texas, called for transfer of public lands to states. “There’s no reason for the federal government to own the vast majority of land in the West,” he said.

Ben Carson, the retired pediatric neurosurgeon, also was in Jackson, where he raised more than $75,000. This was part of a swing that included a stop in Durango. There, after taking a flight over the Gold King Mine portal, he railed against the Environmental Protection Agency as a “bunch of bureaucrats who don’t know a bunch of anything,” and that the purpose of the agency is “not to make businesses miserable.”

He also said that if he were president, marijuana would be illegal across the country, including Colorado. (Actually it is illegal under federal law in Colorado and every other state; the law just is not enforced). He said as a neurosurgeon, he knows all too well the “deleterious effects on the developing brain.”

Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton has also been to both Park City and Aspen this summer to pass the hat.

As for Vail? None of the candidates have shown up since 2008, when John McCain turned out for a fund-raiser that generated $1.25 million. For whatever reason, the well-heeled crowd at Vail and Beaver Creek tend to be slower to get out their checkbooks.

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Business as usual, but questions linger

DURANGO – Durango last Friday looked like it had returned to normal. Motel rooms filled as parents arrived to enroll their sons and daughters at Fort Lewis College. Main Avenue’s restaurants were crowded. Three men on inflatable loungers lazily floated down the Animas River as a dog chased a stick.

Rocks in the river, however, retained stains from the 3 million gallons of mustard-colored water released by the Gold King Mine.

Upstream at Silverton, the Town Board and county commissioners adopted resolutions seeking federal aid, but there was no mention of supporting a Superfund designation. In an interview in the Pickle Barrel Restaurant, Steve Fearn explained why.

Fearn, a member of the Animas River Stakeholders Group, said that the group had identified 34 waste piles and 32 mine portals, and if those could be taken care of, 85 percent of the man-made problems with acid-mine runoff could be addressed.

More nettlesome are the complex of mines, including the Gold King, located about a mile upstream from Silverton Mountain. Instead of a conventional water treatment plant, which would cost $1 million a year to operate, the group had been considering several other treatment technologies, including bacteria.

The plume of orange-colored water was, if colorful, not toxic, he said.

What is needed, he concluded, is Good Samaritan legislation, allowing third parties to attempt to find solutions for the 1,500 mines in the West with acid-mine drainage without taking on liability.

Such a law has evaded a compromise acceptable to all in the halls of Congress for 25 years. But hope is now renewed that the Animas pollution will yield a law mining companies and environmental groups can agree on.

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Respecting fences and property lines

CRESTED BUTTE – Crested Butte was jammin’ on Saturday, all the parking spaces filled and diners lining up at restaurant doors. Five miles away at Gothic, it was busy, too, a steady procession of high-clearance cars making their way past the cluster of cabins and the traffic cones warning of a 15 mph speed limit.

Gothic was a mining town with a fleeting existence in the 1880s. Since 1928, though, it’s been home to the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory. Scientists from California to Maryland arrive in summer to study butterflies, biology and climate change at 9,485 feet.

For years, both scientists and ranchers have complained that it’s difficult to do their work when so many people are hanging around, crossing fence lines and so forth. This year, the annoyance picked up as the sidecountry and backcountry around Crested Butte have become increasingly busy.

“People were literally defecating in the woods. Traffic on the old dirt Gothic Road at times looked like a work commute in Denver,” writes Mark Reaman in the Crested Butte News. “Campsites and fire rings were every 50 feet in spots in July and attitudes were less respectful than we here in the valley are used to.”

At a forum last week in Gothic, local rancher Curtis Allen said trespassers have been incrementally creating pressures for years, but this year is different.

“It felt like a flood,” he said, according to a report in the News. “We’ve got pressures on private land, where people are just wandering around, and we’ve got people poaching trails that were cow trails to start with. And they’re taking pictures from these scenic places then posting them on Facebook, and that’s an instant draw. People instantly want to visit there.”

The News and the Gunnison Country Times report that the assembly discussed several options, including limiting access. A precedent is the base area for the Maroon Bells, northwest of Aspen, the setting for a thousand calendar pictures. There, motorized access is limited from 8 a.m. - 5 p.m. daily and by bus only.

For now, however, that’s off the table, but other options are being discussed: more backcountry privies next summer, stepped up enforcement and so on.

“I was originally hoping for a bold, grand solution,” wrote Reaman. “It was evident there is no magic wand.”

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Take your skis and raincoat this winter

WHISTLER, B.C. – Whistler can expect a warm winter. A strengthening El Niño combined with a continued Pacific Decadal Oscillation could conspire to produce temperatures 2 to 3 degrees Centigrade (or 3.6 to 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) above average.

In other words, bring your raincoat – even when skiing.

“The snowline is going to be really high,” Simon Donner, associate professor of climatology at the University of British Columbia, told Whistler’s Pique Newsmagazine. “You’re looking at rain pretty much all the way close to the peak, I would imagine,” he added.

Arthur De Jong, the mountain planner for Whistler Blackcomb, said El Niño winters can produce plenty of snow – even at lower elevations. Just the same, he notes how much of WB’s ski terrain is above treeline, roughly half. “If you’ve followed us over the last 10, 15 years, we continue to add more lift capacity, more skiing capacity, up high,” he said.

– Allen Best

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Glaciers on Mount Baker melting fast

MOUNT BAKER, Wash. – Last winter’s snow is almost gone from glaciers on Mount Baker, the most heavily glaciated peak in the Cascade Range, and the ice is melting at nearly 3 inches a day.

“At the rate it’s losing mass, it won’t make it 50 years,” glaciologist Mauri Pelto told the Associated Press.

The news service says that seven glaciers have disappeared over the last three decades and glaciers in the North Cascades have lost about one-fifth of their overall volume.

Of course, the same thing is happening in Montana at Glacier National Park. “These glaciers are, from a geological standpoint, rapidly disappearing from the landscape,” said Dan Fagre, a research ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. “They’re so small and vulnerable that they could be gone in a matter of decades.”

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Steamboat says show me the money

STEAMBOAT SPRINGS – The USA Pro Challenge against visited Steamboat Springs in August, the third time in the five-year history of the event. What does Steamboat get out of helping throw the party?

“At the risk of sounding like cynics, we think it’s time to have a candid conversation about the tangible results Steamboat Springs can expect to see from this tremendous expenditure of funds and energy,” says Steamboat Today in an editorial.

Television is key to why any town wants to spend big chunks of cash and donate hotel rooms for a major sporting event. In the case of the bicycling event, Steamboat Today isn’t convinced television coverage gets enough eyeballs in Colorado, the United States or Europe.

The newspaper credited the event with excitement, but added this: “Like any marketing professional, we want to see the measurables. And we think the entire community of Steamboat Springs is entitled to that knowledge.”

– Allen Best

For more, go to www.mountaintownnews.net