---

Connecting the ski town dots

by Allen Best

You probably think your mountain town is special. It is, but what is happening there is often happening in other mountains towns and valleys, too. This is how I linked the dots of individual mountain towns during 2015.

-  Cold? Not so much

El Niño and snow have returned, but what a crummy winter it was last year for the Sierra Nevada. Washington state got plenty of rain, but it was too warm for snow. At Mount Baker, the ski area closed March 8.

Droughts come and go, but warmer temperatures overall seem to be here to stay. In Wyoming, the in-town ski area at Jackson, Snow King Resort, has held an event called the World Championships Snowmobile Hill Climb for 40 years. In 2015, the event in late March was cancelled, disappointing 300 competitors and 10,000 fans. Organizers were riding a chairlift up the mountain when they noticed a wet-snow avalanche. It was too hot – and too risky.

Ten miles away, at Jackson Hole, ski area president Jerry Blann told Mountain Town News that many customers used to dismiss Jackson Hole as too cold. That’s less and less of a problem, he said.

In British Columbia, Whistler Blackcomb last fall began making snow to augment Horstman Glacier. Whistler has been getting as much snow as ever, at least up high, but summer temperatures have been eroding the glacier.

The weather can still get downright cold. In Gunnison, it got to 33 below on Jan. 1, 2016. Deep freezes like that used to happen most winters; now they’re rare.

- Gaga over ganja

In 2014, it became legal in Colorado to sell marijuana to customers interested in the simple pleasure of getting high, but 2015 was the year when we started to get a glimpse of what this looks like in practice.

In practice, you can carry on your life with little notice. Even in those places, including Aspen and Telluride, that chose to treat cannabis little differently than liquor, legalization has not changed life greatly. Before, marijuana was illegal and abundant. Now, it’s legal and abundant. In Nederland, west of Boulder, you can consume it in a bar-type setting.

Vail decided not to allow it, at least for now, although in practice, the THC-infused goods can be had on the edge of town, in an area of unincorporated Eagle County called the Green Mile. Other mountain towns have also kept their distance.

The most interesting story was Breckenridge, where residents had a history of embracing legalization. However, as in Vail, residents decided cannabis shops were best out on the edge, away from T-shirt shops and disapproving eyes.

CNN has shown – repeatedly – a documentary about the money, the politics and the culture of cannabis, using the Breckenridge Cannabis Club as its focus. Clearly, the public is interested in Colorado’s great social experiment. But questions remain. What, for example, is the effect on driving? Will cannabis continue to be like the craft brewery sector, the province of mostly small standalone companies. Or will it become, like tobacco and liquor, dominated by just a few monoliths. Any clear conclusions will likely be tentative for years to come.

- Investing millions in ski areas

Those who control purse strings voted with great confidence in the ski industry last year.

Park City, the streamlined name adopted by Vail Resorts after it began consolidating operations of Canyons Resort and Park City Mountain Resort, is enjoying $50 million in investment, including the new Quicksilver Gondola, which began operating just before Christmas. The gondola links the two ski areas and their 7,300 combined acres, making Park City the largest ski area in the United States.

Jackson Hole debuted the new Teton lift in December and plans a new gondola. The Kemmerer family, owners of the resort since 1992, have now invested $175 million, most of that in the last decade. Pointedly, the new lift serves primarily intermediate terrain – which, by the way, makes it more like Vail, Snowmass and Deer Valley, magnets for intermediate and advanced-intermediate skiers.

In New Mexico, hedge fund manager Louis Bacon began doling out the $300 million in investments he pledged for Taos Ski Valley, which he bought in 2013 from the family of ski area founder Ernie Blake. Gordon Briner, chief executive, talks about major decline in the last 20 years: fewer beds, no major new lifts and, as a consequence, a roughly 35 percent decline in visitors. Bacon told the New York Times that his goal was to upgrade the infrastructure and experience, safeguard Taos’s unique character, and to earn a return on the investment. “Any two of these are doable, but accomplishing all three will be a challenge,” he said.

And in Colorado, Telluride Ski & Golf owner Chuck Horning announced he was hiring Bill Jensen to run the show. In the ski industry, Jensen has solid-gold credentials from California to Vail to Intrawest, which he led out of the darkened forest of oppressive debt. As a part owner of Telluride, can he now elevate Telluride?

One logical question might be why these folks are investing so much when skiing is seeing only modest growth. The answer just might be that those who do ski and snowboard mostly enjoy great affluence.

- Who’s to blame for tight housing?

People have been living in their cars and pitching tents in the forest almost as long as there have been ski areas. But the Great Recession produced a building lull followed by a tightness in the housing market that, according to scattered reports, could well be tighter than ever before.

In Crested Butte’s last spring, not long after the ski area closed, tents started popping up along Cement Creek, just outside town. In summer, it got worse. In Jackson Hole, rents escalated rapidly, outstripping income. There were yowls almost every week. Was there any resort town without cries of housing anguish?

Housing woes are obviously a reflection that something is going right: plentiful jobs and attractive reasons to be in a place. But there’s a new player in the mix: Internet-based vacation rental sites, such as Airbnb. Virtually all mountain towns have been struggling to come to terms with this new market force. Why rent a room to a lift-op or a construction laborer if you can triple your income by renting it out two or three weekends a month?

Aspen began building deed-restricted housing decades ago and didn’t stop during the Great Recession. Even so, housing is as tight as it’s ever been, says Su Lum, a resident who arrived there in the 1960s. “Good snow, good economy, everybody wanting to live here,” says Lum, a columnist in The Aspen Times.

Aspen is different in degree, but not kind, from many other ski towns of the West that cater to the world’s über-wealthy. “The 1 percent either live here in McMansions or come here to be fleeced,” says Lum. “We are prepared with our shears.”

- Traffic jams in July

Summer has overtaken winter as the strongest horse pulling the economic wagon in many mountain towns. That was always the case with Jackson Hole and Banff, with their proximity to iconic national parks, but in recent years both Crested Butte and Telluride have reported larger sales tax revenues in summer than winter.

In Crested Butte, this caused distress as the gravel road through the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, touted as the world’s premiere high altitude research station, became an unceasing procession of high-clearance vehicles in July. In Jackson Hole, a 10-mile traffic jam one summer evening provoked many questions about parking lots in paradise.

Ski areas have typically been only a small part of the summer economy of mountain towns, but increased authority allowing use of ski hills for such activities as ziplines and alpine coasters will probably move the needle. At Vail Mountain, the test case for this new authority, Vail Resorts hopes to someday erase summertime losses. In Jackson Hole, Snow King Resort hopes new summer amusements will offset traditional winter-time losses. Virtually every ski area operating on public land has been putting together plans.

- A river turned orange

The Animas River in Southwest Colorado turned orange in August, putting Durango, as well as the issue of the legacy of hard-rock mining, in the spotlight. The contaminated water came from an abandoned gold mine near Silverton. But the stunning photos only told part of the story. In fact, the polluted water that occurred in three days occurs normally every 10 days or so.

Many ski towns are former mining towns, including Ketchum, Park City, Aspen, Telluride and Crested Butte, and have also dealt with this legacy. Silverton has stewed for decades about what to do with its messes, but at year’s end town and county officials decided to examine the process that would draw federal money for a thorough cleanup, even if it resulted in the word “Superfund.” After all, there have been Superfund sites near Vail, Telluride and other mountain towns that have managed to survive just fine.

But water was an issue in most mountain valleys. In the Sun Valley area, depleting aquifers were in the news, and Steamboat Springs continued to worry about whether the thirsty and rapidly growing cities of Colorado’s Front Range will someday try to wrest flows of the Yampa River. And Vail, located cheek-and-jowl to the Eagles Nest Wilderness Area, continues to debate how to reduce pollution to its gem, Gore Creek.

For more mountain town news, go to www.mountaintownnews.net.