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A dry February, but now the fun starts

ASPEN – Winter got off to a good start in the Rocky Mountains, but mid-winter was sluggish. Ketchum, for example, got just 1 inch of snow in February.

Meteorologists last autumn had warned to expect just this sort of El Niño pattern. They also said to expect lots of moisture beginning in March and continuing until May.

That’s still the prediction of Aspen-based Ryan Boudreau and his partner, Cory Gates, who own a micro-forecasting service called Aspen Weather. They told The Aspen Times they expect another 125 to 130 inches of snowfall on local ski slopes through the third week of April. The precedent Boudreau recalls is 1983, another El Niño year.

That 1982-83 winter had also started strong, then turned ho-hum after Christmas. As the ski slopes began closing, the storms arrived one after another in Winter Park and other mountain towns. There was so much spring snow that Vail reopened for Memorial Day Weekend in late May.

Then it got hot in June – and the snow vanished. Rivers roared. Downstream in the desert of Utah, managers of Glen Canyon Dam began to worry. Lake Powell, the second largest reservoir in the United States, can hold nearly one and a half times the annual average flow of the Colorado River.

This was not a normal year, though. Spillways were opened, but the volume was greater than ever seen. The whole dam began to shake violently. Plywood was installed atop the dam, so that the reservoir could hold more water. It looked to be a lost cause, but then in mid-July the volume of inflow began to slow.

A relatively new and highly regarded book called The Emerald Mile tells the story of that calamitous summer and a thrilling dory ride on the crest of that flood through the Grand Canyon.

Can we expect that again? Not likely, as Lake Powell was only 46 percent full as of Sunday, so there’s lots of room. Too, El Niño appears to be weakening, says Nolan Doesken, the Colorado state climatologist. Still, it is likely to be a cold, wet spring, which is “always a boon for (water) supplies and sometimes an indicator of flood potential.”

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Jackson revises sidecountry warnings

JACKSON, Wyo. – Sidecountry has become a common term to describe the terrain located adjacent to ski areas. You can use the lifts to get your vertical, then slip through a backcountry gate to catch powder long after the slopes have been skied off.

But the sidecountry slopes adjacent to Jackson Hole Mountain Resort are not the same as those inside the ski area. Two people died after going through those backcountry gates in January, the Jackson Hole News&Guide explains, while a trio of snowboarders fell hundreds of feet over a cliff, although they survived.

The ski area operator and the local search and rescue team have teamed up to see if they can more effectively communicate the dangers that lie in the canyons, cliffs and other avalanche-prone slopes. The News&Guide explains that photos of the terrain will be posted at two of the six gates.

Skull-and-crossbones symbols already exist to warn the community of the danger, but they don’t always work, explained Jon Bishop, the resort’s risk manager. “They think the warnings don’t mean what the warnings say. Or they go out once and have a good experience.”

During the last two ski seasons, incidents in one sidecountry area, called Rock Springs, have accounted for a quarter of all winter rescue calls in Teton County.

Writing in the same issue of the News& Guide, backcountry columnist Molly Absolon – whose husband was killed in a climbing accident – continues to puzzle over how the human brain assesses risk. She focuses especially on the brains of people in their early 20s.

“It’s hard for kids who grew up in Jackson Hole not to be aware of avalanches. With Sunday’s avalanche fatality outside Grand Targhee Resort, the Tetons have seen 16 deaths from avalanches in the last four years. That’s a lot of death.”

Still, a local high school science instructor who teaches an avalanche unit reports not all of his students understand the risks. Instruction starts in a middle school after-school club. When one of the instructors, a member of the Jackson Hole Ski Patrol, asked the kids if they had ever skied past the resort’s gates, the majority said they had.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Tetons at Grand Targhee, the Jackson News&Guide reports that a broken cornice sent a 30-year-old man falling down a slope, which in turn triggered an avalanche that swept him over a steep cliff. He was buried under 2 feet of snow and died.

The paper says the man, an immigrant from Mexico, was well liked in the Jackson Hole community and left a wife and two children.

A similar incident a year ago banged up a 28-year-old from Australia but he survived.

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A 7-year itch for high-end real estate?

ASPEN – After six straight years of upward momentum, is Aspen’s real estate market ready to slip-slide downward? In the last 40 years, six years has been the longest period before there’s a market correction, said Randy Gold at a recent meeting of the Aspen Board of Realtors that was covered by The Aspen Times.

Gold, a partner in the Aspen Appraisal Group, had issued the same cautionary note about the six-year cycle last year, but this year said he felt more certain about an impending slide.

January and February numbers have been sliding compared to those of 2015. At more than $2 billion in volume, it was the biggest year in the Aspen area since 2005. “I think 2015 was the market peak,” he said.

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Mountain coaster to debut at Vail

BROOMFIELD – Five years after Congress passed a law allowing expanded year-round use of ski areas on federal lands, Vail Resorts will debut canopy tours, alpine coasters and other amusements at Vail and Heavenly resorts beginning in June.

Vail Resorts emphasizes the marriage of learning and play in its new venues, which it is branding under the name Epic Discovery. “Epic Discovery offers families the opportunity to learn through play together in the national forest,” said Chris Jarnot, chief operating office of Vail Mountain. “For kids, it will be the ultimate playground in an alpine setting.”

Adventurers will be able to partake of a guided tour called the Game Creek Canopy Tour. It will have an array of zip lines and aerial bridges. In a press release, Vail explains that participants will learn about the mountain environment from interpretive guides while working their way through the course.

Also planned is an alpine coaster, trade-marked by Vail as a Forest Flyer. It allows riders to control their speed on an elevated track.

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Pikas can hang on for a while longer

BANFF, Alberta – Might the future among the high mountains of Alberta be just a little less precarious for those noisy little rodents called picas? That’s the latest evidence, according to speakers at a recent program in the Bow Valley covered by the Rocky Mountain Outlook.

Wildlife biologist Chris Shank said pikas are vulnerable, but climate change seems unlikely to place them at risk of extirpation in Alberta by the end of the 21st century. But then again, if we can’t figure out how to curtail planetary emissions of greenhouse gases, the pikas might have a sorry story ahead.

In the United States, some research has indicated the pika is suffering because global warming has brought higher temperatures to their western mountain homes. Pikas have already disappeared from more than one-third of their previously known habitat in Oregon and Nevada.

– A different view came from David Hik, a biologist in the department of biological sciences at the University of Alberta. He said emerging research shows pikas seem adaptable to different elevations, diets and environmental conditions.

“My feeling is they are pretty resilient and, within the range of variation we expect in the next century, they’ll probably be fine and be able to move upslope,” said Hik.

“They can actually cope with pretty wide ranging conditions and variability. They’ve been around for a long time, through multiple glacial cycles, and yet are fairly widely distributed.”

Hik said what seems to be causing declines in populations in the short-term is the absence of snow, compounded by increasing rain-on-snow events.

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Binge drinking but otherwise good health

TELLURIDE – A study released a year ago on the healthiness of counties is drawing attention in Colorado ski towns. The study by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation shows that the resort counties tend to have among the healthiest people in the land.

Past studies, such as by the Harvard Medical School, have also picked out mountain towns as a place of great health and longevity, although why exactly this is hasn’t been particularly well explained.

Part of it could be that people in ill health tend to move to lower elevations. People of greater wealth – and hence access to better health care – are drawn to mountain resorts. Plus – and this is important – mountain resorts tend to foster good health through greater emphasis on exercise and other good habits of healthy living.

This newest study finds some of the same patterns. Pitkin County (Aspen) leads Colorado, but two of Colorado’s wealthiest, best-educated counties, Douglas and Boulder, both located at the foot of the mountains, are close behind. Of the top-10 counties, seven are primarily what you would call mountain counties. Only one, located on Colorado’s eastern plains, is in the top 10 despite the fact that about half of Colorado’s land is on the Great Plains.

In contrast, nearly all of the counties with poor health rankings are located in southeast and south-central Colorado, primarily in places of lower incomes and high Latino populations.

Newspapers that parsed the results note that even the generally healthy mountain communities have their unhealthy activities. Binge drinking is a big one in ski communities.

San Miguel County, home to Telluride, ranked sixth healthiest among Colorado’s 64 counties. But the report found 27 percent of adults in San Miguel County had engaged in binge drinking from 2002-12. This is defined as consuming five or more drinks on one occasion for men or four or more drinks on a single occasional for women.

The Daily Planet talked to Lynn Borup, executive director of the Tri-County Health Network. She said the town’s status as a resort community and festival venue likely contributes to excessive drinking.

Statistics also show above-average use of tobacco, alcohol and marijuana. In 2013, between 6.7 and 8.1 percent of students in grades 6 through 12 reported using all three substances within the prior month, compared to the Colorado average of 5.7 percent.

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Pot outsells hootch in Aspen some months

ASPEN – You think cannabis isn’t a big thing? Consider this: last year, according to city records, the seven stores that sold marijuana for either medical or recreational purposes racked up $8.3 million in sales.

For three months of the year – March, July and December – cannabis revenues were greater than for beer and liquor stores. However, that excludes liquor sales at bars and restaurants. By the same measure, cannabis sales lagged that of beer and liquor for the year, but not by much, reports The Aspen Times.

For the city, sales produced $200,000 in tax revenues last year. This compares with $135 million in tax revenues and fees across Colorado levied against $1 billion in sales in 2015.

But what can be said about the effect of marijuana legalization? The Times talked with Bill Linn, the city’s assistant police chief. If anything, he said, legalization has lightened the load of police officers, who no longer feel compelled to seize the substance and then complete the paperwork.

Too, as compared to alcohol, it has a milder impact on civic order. “Marijuana doesn’t exactly whip people into a frenzy to act out or go to a bar and pick a fight,” he said.

However, the jury is still out, at least in the mind of police. “I think 10 years is a good time to look back and make that determination,” Linn said. “Now, it’s working out fine.”

– Allen Best

For more, go to mountaintownnews.net