Colorado - to Ski or Not to Ski by Rupert Isaacson

How many of us have come in from a day of wet snow skiing in the Alps (or worse, a day of no-snow), day-dreaming about other places, other mountains, where the powder is always perfect, and the skies are always blue? For many skiers and snowboarders, the Rocky Mountains provide exactly this allure. Of course, conditions aren’t always better than in Europe, although they often are, and the prices are cheaper too.

Partly in response to this, British Airways has, for the past few seasons, been running daily scheduled flights from London to Denver, gateway to the best-known of the Rocky Mountain ski areas: central Colorado. Vail, Aspen, Keystone, Arapahoe Basin: these are names to conjure with, and people have been flocking in their thousands. However, all is not well with Colorado’s ski resorts.

The problem is expansion, although not, as we might like to think, for reasons of accommodating the British skiers. Most of the major Colorado ski areas are huge and can easily absorb the foreigners. Instead, the expansion seems to be in order to compete for what has become a static number of skiers and boarders. According to industry studies, the number of snowsport devotees has been static for several years now. Skiing is no longer a growth sport, and the resorts are having to come up with more creative ways to make money, rather than just packing in more people, because the ‘more people’ aren’t there.

The key to success in this seems, during the 1990s, to have been Real Estate Development. Although industry studies showed that the number of skiers was not growing, it also showed that the existing skiers are becoming richer, which means that they can afford second homes in ski resorts. That means that ski resorts, if they build condominiums and sell them successfully to those richer skiers, stand to make an awful lot of money.

If you want to sell your resort to the second-home market, you have to offer bigger and better facilities, so one trend of thinking goes. Expanded runs, condominiums way up the mountainsides into which one can ski, more restaurants, more shops. More developed area. Vail has been the major proponent of this approach, having expanded into several satellite resorts close to the original mountain (notably the exclusive, highly chic Beaver Creek), and whose upcoming Category III Development (to be called Blue Sky Basin) will include some of the largest on-mountain shopping and eating facilities to be found anywhere in the world. One would expect that residents of the town of Vail and the other nearby communities of Eagle County would be excited about this, but they aren’t; neither are the environmentalists.

Most local residents are unhappy because the endless development, and the attraction of big ‘outside money’, forces local living costs so high that only the rich can now afford to live in Vail itself. The service workers who keep both town and resort going are forced further and further out, causing traffic problems on the mountain roads and producing a knock-on effect of development elsewhere as the other towns have to build more houses to accommodate the refugee commuters. The environmentalists are unhappy because the endless development eats into already threatened wildernesses and endangers species that cannot tolerate such widespread human disturbance.

Vail’s expansions have been fought tooth and nail over the past two years by both local environmental groups [such as Colorado Wild], and national organizations [like the Sierra Club], because their Category III expansion is destroying part of Colorado’s last known habitat for the Canadian lynx, which is on the endangered list in the USA. In November 1998, eco-terrorists became so incensed that the development was going ahead, despite warnings from the state’s Fish and Wildlife Service, that they set fire to a large part of the development while it was still under construction. In 1999, the federal government approved a re-introduction of lynx in Colorado, but so far the project has not been successful, with many of the cats (mostly brought from Canada) dying, and few, if any, breeding. Still Vail decided to go ahead with its Blue Sky Basin plans. Demonstrations and protests followed last summer that resulted in several arrests. A public opinion poll run by the US Forest Service stated that 93% of Colorado residents were against the Category III expansion. Moreover, the US Fish and Wildlife Service stated clearly that the development must stop if the lynx is to have a chance of survival in Colorado.

So why has the Forest Service, which has the ultimate say in these matters (most of Colorado’s major ski resorts lie within the state’s White River National Forest), allowed Vail Resorts to continue with Category III? Moreover, why were the above-mentioned findings of the Fish and Wildlife Service not made public? Why did they have to be leaked instead to the environmental organization Colorado Wild in order to be made available? Jeff Berman, head of the group writes that, “not once, but twice, they (Fish and Wildlife) were told by officials, appearing to reach the top of the Clinton administration, that under no circumstances were they to issue such an opinion.” Something seems to be up.

Vail is not the only Colorado resort riding roughshod over both community and environment. Keystone (owned by the same company that owns Vail) is planning an expansion into a critical wildlife corridor for lynx and wolverine. Ski Cooper is considering an expansion into the Corske Creek area, another vital lynx corridor. Arapahoe Basin Ski Area wants to divert vast amounts of water from local streams and watersheds to expand its snow-making facilities. The problem is that water will badly deplete tributaries to the Snake River, thereby exacerbating an existing pollution problem in that water system which affects many towns and cities downstream. Colorado Wild is currently suing the Fish and Wildlife Service for approving Arapahoe Basin’s claim that the service already knew what the environmental and human impact would be. To top it all, in June 2000 the National Ski Areas Association produced an environmental charter that refused any discussion of ski area expansion.

What to do? Does this mean that we shouldn’t be booking our tickets to Colorado this season, and that we should resign ourselves to the inferior snow of warm-winter Europe? Fortunately not. Aspen, one of Colorado’s premier ski resorts, appears to have risen to its environmental responsibilities with aplomb. Not only has it accepted (for now at least) that the current boundaries of its ski area should remain fixed, it has also launched several plans aimed at improving its impact on the mountains. In 1998, the resort founded an Environmental Foundation whose mission statement is to be: ‘A model of how corporate America, who takes from the land, can give back - by protecting our natural resources.’

The Environmental Foundation [which raises money for local environmental projects through direct donations from employees which are then matched from company coffers], is but one of several such groups. Aspen has also committed itself to Green Building for all new construction. Its latest attraction - the Sundeck Restaurant - is “fully certified Green,” and has won several awards from both Green Building and environmental groups. Its habitat protection policies are rather more wide-reaching. Aspen now employs a full-time ecologist, one Dr Dan Baharav, who works in conjunction with a wildlife specialist employed by the local town of Snowmass, as well as the state’s Fish and Wildlife Service to deliver an annual report on what the resort should be doing to minimize damage and enhance the existing ecosystem.

So far, the team has persuaded the resort’s management to withdraw all human activity from elk calving and deer fawning areas during the spring, and from certain bird nesting sites during the summer months. Business and skiing hours now run from 10am to 5pm only, to give dawn and dusk back to the wildlife. Tree islands of diverse species are now being left when new runs are made, and are also being planted on the older runs. Debris from any wood clearance is now stacked into ‘habitat piles’ every 50 metres at a safe distance from the runs, so as to create hibernation places for mammals in winter and insect repositories in summer. Hunting has been stopped through the whole mountain area controlled by Aspen, and summer grazing leases in known wildlife corridors have been restricted. Ski runs are being re-vegetated each spring with native grasses and organic fertilizers. No new trails or runs are being created with bulldozers - which scrape the ground bare. Any new construction is being screened with trees. Any tree removal is to be kept to a minimum, and seeds of all the native plants are being collected each summer, so as to create a bank of indigenous plants with which to re-vegetate.

Aspen has even extended its stewardship to its watersheds. There is to be no disturbance of willow stands along mountain streams. Any already-cleared banks are being replanted with trees and shrubs. There is to be minimal grading of slopes [this causes silting]. Use of natural terrain is to be used wherever possible. Silt fences have been installed in areas where there is disturbed soil, and some new watersheds have been developed close to elk calving areas. Add to this an energetic environmental education campaign - both at a corporate and local school level, as well as to clients through a Wildlife Centre, and leaflets distributed at the ski lifts, and you have one eco-friendly resort.

It remains to be seen whether Aspen can keep this up in the face of such wholesale expansion from its competitors, but the odds look good. Aspen’s skiing is regarded by many as the best in the central Rockies, better even than Vail’s, so it already has something of a head start. By adopting an environmental stance when all its competitors seem bent on cynically exploiting every available inch of ground, Aspen has made itself an obvious consumer choice for this season at least, assuming that we want to be responsible consumers, that is. Meanwhile, the prospect of good snow in Colorado - according to the experts - is better than average.