Sneak Peek of the Week

Steamboat Springs paddleboard pioneer sells Hala, Colorado Kayak Supply to longtime friends

Steamboat entrepreneur Peter Hall was among the first to design an inflatable paddleboard specifically made for navigating whitewater.

With a $30,000 initial investment in 2011, Hall’s Hala boards — with catchy names like the Hala Atcha, Hala Peno and the Hala Nass — helped create a new way to play in rivers and creeks.

“We set people up with a board that could tackle all kinds of whitewater. We were doing R&D and designing stuff for a cohort of paddlers that didn’t exist back then but we helped bring the sport to life,” said 41-year-old Hall.

The pandemic broke Hall. Shops canceled orders in the summer of 2020 but then doubled up heading into the next year as outdoor recreation soared. He tried to recover using a loan from the Small Business Administration, but then the federal government’s interest rate hikes added $135,000 in debt service to Hall’s bottom line. And then shops with overflowing shelves started canceling orders as the post-pandemic boom in outdoor recreation ebbed.

“Consumer behavior before, during and after the pandemic caused businesses to need to move faster than was possible and that friction is expensive,” Hall said. “Now there are prices being driven down by the oversupply of paddleboards and all these pool-toy paddleboards that sell for $199 and people are selling them for less than cost just to stop paying for storage. The bottom has just been swiped out of the whole paddlesports market.”

And Hall has filed for bankruptcy protection. He helped his creditors sell Hala Gear to a longtime employee, Colleen King. Colorado Kayak Supply — an online paddlesports retailer founded in Buena Vista that Hall acquired in 2019 from a seller who was struggling — sold to Jon Kahn, the longtime owner of Denver’s Confluence Kayak and Ski shop.

“Oh yes, I’m keenly aware that the previous owners have not been able to figure it out,” said Kahn, who opened Confluence Kayak in 1995 on Platte Street “when there were five, six other paddle shops in Denver and Boulder. Now there’s just two of us.”

Kahn hopes operating Colorado Kayak Supply — it’s often called CKS, which conveniently matches the initials of Kahn’s shop — in Denver with his existing warehouse space will help the company. The previous operators rented storage space in the Upper Arkansas River Valley and Steamboat Springs. And Kahn has a vibrant winter business that will help him weather the seasonal flow of paddlesports.

>> Click over to The Sun on Monday to read this story

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The Playground

Spot sues Gates over millions in unpaid royalties for bike frame invention that fits belts, not chains

When Denver’s Gates Corp. in 2008 debuted a belt-drive system to replace century-old chains on bikes, the company promised a “game changer” for the cycling industry.

But the chainless revolution — which the company helped launch for motorcycles in the 1980s — needed big help from bike-makers. While traditional bike chains can easily separate to slide into a bike frame, the belt-drive system needed a frame that could separate to accommodate the carbon belt.

One of the first bike companies to step up with a new frame to accommodate the Gates belts was the family-owned Spot Brand in Golden. The company designed a frame with what it called “Drop-Out” technology that fit the Gates “Carbon Drive” belt system.

In 2008, Spot Brands and Gates Corp. inked a licensing and royalty agreement that gave half of the Drop-Out invention to Gates so it could license the technology to other bike-makers. Gates said it would protect the patent on the design and pay Spot 8% of its net sales of any products sold by bike-makers who licensed the Drop-Out design.

A couple weeks ago Spot sued Gates Corp., saying the Denver-based company has not paid any royalties while the company has expanded its belt technology into more than 1,000 bike models. The lawsuit says Spot is owed “millions of dollars in unpaid royalties.”

“Gates’s benefit was achieved at Spot’s expense because Gates deprived Spot of the economic benefits of the Drop-Out while keeping for Gates alone the economic benefits of the growth of the belt-drive bicycle market,” reads the lawsuit filed in Denver District Court, which claims Gates owes Spot millions in unpaid royalties.

By 2011, Gates had 54 bike brands using the belt drive on 92 models and the company said the number of Gates belt-driven bikes was growing by 50% a year. The Gates Carbon Drive is now available on 135 brands of bikes offering 1,000 models. The belt-drive system has proven very popular among e-bike brands.

>> Click over to The Sun on Friday to read this story

The Guide

Colorado gets $5.8 million from the Land and Water Conservation Fund

The Land and Water Conservation Fund last week delivered $325 million to all 50 states, the largest distribution from the fund’s state program since 1979.

Colorado got $5.8 million that will be distributed in the next grant cycle by Colorado Parks and Wildlife.

Last year, Colorado received five grants from the Land and Water Conservation Fund for $5.5 million for parks, trails, recreation programs and open space in Boulder, Erie, Idaho Springs, Jefferson County and Rifle. Colorado Parks and Wildlife submitted 11 grant applications for projects seeking a total of $10.3 million in LWCF funding.

Applications from Colorado communities seeking a portion of the $5.8 million in LWCF Colorado funds are due in October and will be announced next spring. Local, county, state and tribal governments can apply for $100,000 to $1.25 million in grants for recreation projects on government-owned land.

Since 1965, the LWCF’s state program has distributed $86 million for 976 projects in Colorado. Combined with distributions through the Bureau of Land Management, the Forest Service, the National Park Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the LWCF has sent $357.1 million to 1,691 projects in Colorado since 1966.

The fund gets $900 million a year from royalties paid by companies drilling off-shore for oil and gas in U.S. managed waters. Last year, the Land and Water Conservation Fund delivered $3.4 million for the Pike and San Isabel National Forests to support the acquisition of 289 acres atop the 14er Mount Democrat. In 2021, the fund delivered $8.5 million to the White River National Forest for the acquisition of Sweetwater Lake.

“The Lost Mountaineers” documentary — screening in Vail, Leadville and Denver this week — details the 10th Mountain Division finals days of WWII

At the bottom of Italy’s deepest lake lies a mystery. The amphibious vehicle that carried 25 10th Mountain Division soldiers in the final days of WWII sits upright on the bottom of Lake Garda. All but one of the soldiers are listed as missing in action. Their remains were not found after their amphibious vehicle sank in the alpine lake on the night of April 30, 1945.

Volunteer divers found the wreckage in 2012. A submarine searched the lake bottom in 2013 and found no evidence of the 24 men who drowned that night. (There was a sole survivor, who worked as a lifeguard before joining the 10th Mountain.) German forces surrendered a week later and the deaths of the 24 10th Mountain soldiers — some of the war’s last casualties — were eclipsed by the Allied forces victory.

An Italian nonprofit in 2023 made a documentary — “The Lost Mountaineers” — about the deaths of the 10th Mountain Division soldiers, chronicling the division’s role in the final chapter of the war as well as recent recovery efforts. “The Lost Mountaineers” is screening Aug. 14 at the Colorado Snowsports Museum in Vail, on Aug. 16 at The Old Church in Leadville and Aug.19 at the History Colorado Center in Denver. A Q&A session with the documentary’s production team will follow all three screenings.

— j

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Sneak Peek of the Week

Sliver of the Carbondale to Crested Butte Trail approved after years of review with promise of more intense study ahead

For the past decade or so, recreation in Colorado was the solution. Closing mines? How about a national monument? Logging fading? Try trails. Power plants shutting down? Consider a whitewater park.

But as participation in outdoor recreation grows, more land managers and counties are more closely studying not just recreational opportunities but their impacts on wildlife and habitat. As adventuring campers, hikers, paddlers, bikers and skiers push deeper in remote areas, federal, state and local officials are scrutinizing recreational development.

“Land managers like the Forest Service are increasingly recognizing the importance of reducing the ecological impacts of recreation. It’s not an easy task,” said Will Roush, the director of the Wilderness Workshop. “Our land management agencies still have a long way to go regarding crafting policy and implementing management decisions and practices to ensure our decreasing wildlife populations are protected from ever-increasing recreational use and development of public lands.”

In 2023, the Carbondale-based Wilderness Workshop commissioned a study to analyze the ecological impacts of recreation in western Colorado’s wild places as participation in outdoor activities exploded. The study detailed how trails can disturb soil and vegetation in wildlife habitat and suggested new trails should be built only after “thorough consideration of the ecological consequences” and a better management strategy would be to “concentrate use on existing trails.”

The impacts of recreation are becoming more evident in the 2.3 million-acre White River National Forest, where an estimated 17 million annual visitors inject $1.6 billion into rural Western Slope communities, making it the busiest, most economically vibrant national forest in the country.

Roush said the underway update to the 2002 White River National Forest Management Plan is a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” for wild lands and wildlife advocates to work with the Forest Service “to ensure our public lands are not loved to death.”

“The science is clear: The most important piece of that is increasing protections for large, unfragmented landscapes,” Roush said.

The most recent example of the extra study of recreation came in the past couple months as the White River National Forest and Pitkin County approved 7 miles of new trail along an old pass road between Redstone and McClure Pass. The trail is part of the proposed 83-mile Carbondale to Crested Butte Trail, which was part of former Gov. John Hickenlooper’s “Colorado The Beautiful” plan to hasten construction of 16 high priority trails.

Both the approvals from the county and Forest Service said any further approval of new segments of the trail would be weighed with a study of impacts of the entire length along the Crystal River. A new amendment to a 2018 approval of the trail in Pitkin County between Carbondale and the top of McClure Pass said any more approvals for the trail would follow “a comprehensive environmental analysis of the potential direct, indirect, and cumulative impacts and connected actions” of the trail in the Crystal River drainage.

>> Click over to The Sun next week to read this story

The Outsider now has a podcast! Veteran reporter Jason Blevins covers the industry from the inside out, plus indulges in the fun side of being outdoors in our beautiful state.

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The Playground

Limited access at Colorado’s newest state wildlife area is one of several options for pristine landscapes changing hands in Colorado

A coalition of advocacy groups sued Colorado Parks and Wildlife last fall over new rules governing state wildlife areas, arguing the agency was favoring hunters and anglers over other types of users, like hikers and bird watchers.

Hook and bullet access access was the deal a decade ago, when the state’s 350-plus state wildlife areas were supported almost exclusively with revenue generated by hunters and anglers. Now, Colorado Parks and Wildlife has more diverse revenue tools — like the Keep Colorado Wild Pass — that are supported by a much broader contingency than the hook-and-bullet crowd.

That case is ongoing. But the state’s newest state wildlife area — about 1,860 acres of prime elk habitat along 5 miles of the trout-rich Tarryall Creek south of Fairplay — is definitely catering to hunters and anglers. Access to the new Collard Ranch State Wildlife Area will require a hunting or fishing license or a state wildlife areas pass.

The $8.5 million deal involved Colorado Parks and Wildlife, Great Outdoors Colorado and the Western River Conservancy, which bought the land a couple years ago with a plan to sell it to the state for protection.

Access reserved for a limited number of specifically licensed visitors will certainly conserve the former Collard Ranch. This won’t be a state park with big crowds and packed parking lots. And it won’t be a gated, privately owned playground for the wealthy.

There are lots of paths to pursue when pristine parcels change hands, and the plan for Collard Ranch is one of four avenues unfolding right now in Colorado.

There’s Stagecoach, the long closed ski area in southern Routt County where a private developer is planning a private ski and golf resort for the very rich. There’s Fishers Peak, a new state park on the border of Trinidad that promises to support a growing outdoor recreation economy in southern Colorado. Or Sweetwater Lake above the Colorado River in Garfield County, which the Forest Service acquired after years of plans from developers and partnered with the state with plans for a new state park or recreation area. Locals in Sweetwater are irked at the park plan. Folks in Routt County are wary of a gated community with outdoor amenities reserved for members.

There likely will be some grousing in Park County as access to the state’s newest recreation area will be tightly controlled. But maybe the crowd-limiting measures and focus on conservation will help better protect the natural resources in the headwaters of the South Platte River.

“Western Rivers’ motto is ‘Sometimes to save a river, you have to buy it’ and that’s exactly what we did at Collard Ranch,” Allen Law with the Western Rivers Conservancy, told Sun reporter Tracy Ross.

>> Click over to The Sun on Friday to read Tracy’s story

The Guide

Denver is Colorado’s top tourist destination but traveler dollars in mountain towns have an outsized impact

Colorado is the epicenter of U.S. skiing, accounting for nearly a quarter of the nation’s visits to ski resorts.

But Colorado’s largest tourism draw isn’t skiing. It’s the city of Denver, which harvests more than one-third of tourist dollars spent in the state.

The latest economic impact reports on Colorado’s tourist economy — released this week by the Colorado Tourism Office — show yet another banner year for the state’s bustling tourism industry. The 93.3 million visitors who spent $28.3 billion in the state in 2023 marked an all-time high for Colorado tourist businesses.

Almost half of those traveler dollars were spent in the six-county metro Denver area.

In the city of Denver, spending in 2023 reached an all-time high of $10.1 billion, up from $9.7 billion in 2022. Tourist dollars supported 44,750 jobs in Denver in 2023, up from 41,400 jobs in 2022.

The Colorado Tourism Office-commissioned report by Dean Runyan and Associates breaks down spending in each Colorado county. We crunched some numbers for seven counties with 15 ski areas that account for more than 90% of the state’s annual 14 million skier visits: Eagle, Grand, Gunnison, Routt, Pitkin, San Miguel and Summit counties.

The seven resort-reliant counties saw $5.67 billion in visitor spending in 2023, up from $5 billion in 2022. Tourist dollars supported 41,555 jobs in those counties in 2023, up from 36,790 the previous year.

The visitor spending in Colorado’s mountain towns is much smaller than in Denver, but those visitors have an outsized impact in small communities. In the Mile High City, tourism jobs make up about 6.2% of the city’s population. In the seven resort counties, tourism jobs account for 25% of the population.

>> Click here to read this story

The Project 2025 roadmap for Colorado’s public lands under a Trump administration

Colorado is often on the backburner of presidential election campaigning. But Colorado could see changes if Donald Trump wins a second term. While the Trump campaign has been light on details for how a Trump administration might impact Colorado, the 922-page Project 2025 “Mandate for Leadership” presidential transition proposal promises some changes for the state’s public lands under a new administration.

The Project 2025 plan for the Interior Department was penned by William Perry Pendley, an Evergreen-based conservative lawyer who served briefly as the head of the Bureau of Land Management under Trump in 2020.

Perhaps the most impactful proposal in Pendley’s plan is calling for a new president to repeal the Biden administration’s withdrawal of mineral and energy leases on 221,000 acres in the Thompson Divide.

The Project 2025 plan urges the Interior Department to escalate drilling and mining across public lands while scaling back Biden administration protections for wildlife and habitat, which would be a big shift for Colorado.

Pendley, who has consistently advocated for the federal government to sell public lands, said a new administration should work to repeal the Antiquities Act of 1906, which has been used by 18 of the country’s 21 presidents since 1906 to establish or enlarge 163 national monuments.

“As has every Democratic president before him beginning with Jimmy Carter, Joe Biden has abused his authority under the Antiquities Act of 1906,” Pendley wrote, who pointed to Biden’s creation of the Camp Hale-Continental Divide National Monument in 2022 as an example of “the outrageous, unilateral withdrawals from public use of multiple-use federal land.”

“In the days before the 2024 election, Biden will likely designate more western monuments,” Pendley wrote. (River and environmental advocates are urging Biden to use the Antiquities Act to protect more than 390,000 acres of land around the Dolores River as a national monument, which has stirred emotional opposition in rural parts of Mesa and Montrose counties.)

Pendley played a role in the Trump administration’s relocation of the BLM’s headquarters to Grand Junction from Washington, D.C., in 2020. His Project 2025 contribution also urges a reversal of the Biden administration’s plan to move the headquarters back to the nation’s capital.

— j

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Sneak Peek of the Week

Colorado resort towns lining up plans for a tax on vacant homes

There are very few short-term rental homes that do not pay special lodging taxes in Colorado. Most communities have limits and regulations governing vacation homes. State lawmakers have considered quadrupling property taxes on the state’s 24,000-plus short-term rental homes.

Across Colorado, dozens of cities, towns and counties are working to slow the explosion of vacation rentals while simultaneously squeezing more tax revenue from them. This year, a coalition of resort communities is planning to lobby lawmakers to help ease the process for taxing vacant homes. The Colorado Association of Ski Towns, or CAST, also hopes to secure legislation enabling local governments to impose a fee on every real estate sale.

There are no communities in Colorado that tax empty homes, but the growing challenge of building affordable housing for workers in mountain communities where real estate prices are soaring and as many as 40% of homes are unoccupied is fueling creative thinking around new revenue sources.

“We are not asking the legislature to make it so. This just clears some potential land mines for communities who might want to do this,” said Jonathan Godes, a councilman in Glenwood Springs and president of CAST, which is promoting the legislation for the coming session.

There are other vacant-home taxes under consideration outside the state as destinations grapple with a housing crisis in areas with large numbers of vacation homes.

In South Lake Tahoe, voters this fall will weigh a tax on homeowners whose properties are empty more than 182 days a year. The tax — $3,000 per unit for the first year of vacancy and $6,000 for subsequent years — would support building more housing for working locals. In Hawaii, lawmakers have spent two years debating legislation that would impose a 3% tax on the assessed value of homes that are vacant for more than 180 days a year. The legislation is meant to deter real estate speculation in a state where investors from afar now spend as much as $5 billion a year on homes, up from $500 million in 2008.

Most vacancy tax proposals point to Vancouver in British Columbia, where a 3% annual tax rate based on the assessed value of empty homes that launched in 2017 has raised $142 million in revenue for affordable housing in the city while reducing the number of vacant homes in the city by 54%.

The proposal from CAST says the vacancy fee legislation would authorize local governments “to disincentivize those vacancies with local taxes.”

>> Click over to The Sun next week to read this story

In Their Words

Thousands of dead fish in Sloan’s Lake ignites calls for action at the shallow, warm lake

It’s not uncommon to see dead crappie bobbing along the shores of Sloan’s Lake. Last weekend, there were about 2,000 rotting fish in the lake as temperatures neared 100 degrees for several days in a row.

Park officials blame a toxic algae bloom in Denver’s largest body of water for the fish die-off. Same as they did in 2020. And 2015. And 2007.

Sloan’s may be large, but it’s shallow. So when temperatures get hot, so does the lake water.

Park officials try to cool the lake with water from the Rocky Mountain Ditch, which stretches 19 miles across the metro area from its origins on the banks of Clear Creek below the Coors brewery. That ditch traverses Lakewood and Wheat Ridge and, along with 23 storm drains, it’s filling Sloan’s Lake with sediment. And probably a lot of other stuff as it drains the metro area.

The solution for Sloan’s Lake is digging, says the Sloan’s Lake Park Foundation, a group of citizens working to restore the watery gem in Denver’s park system.

Filling it with irrigation water or water from Rocky Mountain Ditch is “fighting a losing battle,” the foundation’s spokesman Kurt Weaver told Sun reporter Tracy Ross.

“The lake’s demise is imminent if we do not act to dredge it back to a healthy depth and improve the water flow,” Weaver said.

>> Click here to read Tracy’s story

The Outsider now has a podcast! Veteran reporter Jason Blevins covers the industry from the inside out, plus indulges in the fun side of being outdoors in our beautiful state.

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Breaking Trail

A place to play for everyone

“Something for everyone.” That’s the mission of a growing movement to develop more parks, playgrounds and programs for kids with disabilities.

The National Park and Recreation Association’s theme for its annual monthlong celebration of parks is “Where You Belong” and champions recreation that can foster community.

“A lot don’t feel they do belong,” Kara Kish, the director of parks for Loveland told Sun freelancer Dan England. “But in the last five years, universal access has been the new standard. The primary drive is the commitment to be in service to everyone.”

A new park under construction in Berthoud, for example, will offer a smooth surface, swings, monkey bars and a merry-go-round that will work for Miles Bowling, a 7-year-old with cerebral palsy who uses a wheelchair. His parents, Lauren and Richard Bowling, helped raise funds to develop Berthoud’s first inclusive playground.

“Miles will be able to play on monkey bars with other boys,” Lauren said.

Denver park builders now infuse inclusive access into all new parks.

“It’s a conversation we are going to have every time a park is in the planning stage,” said Owen Wells, the district park planning supervisor for Denver Parks and Recreation.

It isn’t about a single piece of adaptive playground equipment as much as incorporating inclusive and accessible features across the entirety of the park.

“The idea is we want people to be together,” Wells said. “It doesn’t meet that goal if a kid is playing on a piece of equipment in a section of the park by himself.”

After years of work by parents and advocates, more towns, big and small, are weighing accessibility and inclusivity when developing parks, recreation programs and playgrounds.

“I think we are in a moment where the industry is evolving a little bit,” Wells said.

>> Click over to The Sun next week to read Dan’s story

The Playground

Historic Cozens Meadow is battlefield pitting residents against community developer in Fraser

The sheriff of Central City, Billy Cozens, was ready to settle someplace quiet. The idyllic home he and his new wife, Mary Cozens, built in the late 1800s was among the first homesteads in the Fraser River Valley. It became a popular stagecoach stop and ended up on the National Register of Historic Places.

Now the meadow along Highway 40 that was once the Cozens’ backyard is a battlefield pitting Fraser residents against a developer. That developer, Clark Lipscomb, has plans for homes and hotel rooms there. The residents say a 2003 agreement promised that Cozens Meadows would be forever protected in a conservation easement.

The fiery fight over the historic meadow is headed to a jury trial as Lipscomb pushes proposals for more development in his Grand Park community in Fraser, just outside Winter Park.

When Amanda Erath moved to Grand Park in 2019, she would go cross-country skiing in the winter in Cozens Meadow. In the summer her neighbors play Frisbee golf there.

Now Lipscomb has fenced and gated the area and filled the meadow with grazing cows. The latest proposals for homes and hotels in the meadow pushed Erath — and about two dozen of her neighbors — to publicly plead with town planners to better protect Cozens Meadow.

“He is, piece by piece, destroying one of the most beautiful areas in our community,” Erath said in an interview. “We shouldn’t have this level of development without also thinking about how it will impact the community and addressing that at the same time.”

Trail sabotage near Telluride

It’s been almost three weeks since dirt bikers on Forest Service singletrack near Telluride found two wires strung across Wilson Mesa Trail.

“It’s an irrational act so it’s probably an irrational motivation,” said San Miguel County Sheriff Bill Masters, who bumped a $500 reward for information to $1,000 after dirt bikers reported a second wire.

Masters and Forest Service rangers said dirt bikers reported the wires in different locations on the Wilson Mesa Trail on July 2 and July 10. Deputies closed the trail briefly to search for clues between Forest Service Roads 645 and 623.

The trail is one of the few in eastern San Miguel County that are multiple use, open to hikers, mountain bikers, dirt bikers and horse riders.

“Is it someone who doesn’t like motorcycles? Is it someone who knows someone who rides that trail everyday and the guy ran off with his girlfriend? We don’t know much right now,” said Masters, who has been the sheriff of San Miguel County for 45 years. In social media statements seeking information and warning trail travelers, Masters called the wires “an act of indiscriminate violence” by a “malicious individual.”

Trail sabotage pops up in Colorado every few years. In 2016, mountain bikers found boards with protruding nails on Bureau of Land Management bike trails outside Eagle. That year, mountain bikers also found spike-embedded bricks on mountain bike trails in the Pike National Forest. In 2014, there were spiked boards buried on the Prince Creek trails outside Carbondale.

A British Columbia woman was arrested in 2015 after mountain bikers set up trail cameras to capture the avid hiker dragging tree limbs across trails near her home. In 2013, a 57-year-old Oregon psychiatrist went to jail for booby-trapping mountain bike trails on Forest Service land.

“People get upset with different trail users. Hikers with dogs, ATVs, Jeeps, bikers, people riding their horses and motorcycles. They definitely come into conflict with each other,” Masters said. “Since I moved to Colorado 51 years ago the population has tripled. There are a lot more people out here and we are getting more and more in each other’s way.”

— j

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Sneak Peek of the Week

Surf Salida

SALIDA — Sarina Perret takes a seat on a concrete block next to the tall, glassy wave on the Arkansas River. A friend holds the nose of her surfboard as she positions her feet and begins to stand up. She glides across the wave, carving smooth turns on the flowing wedge of green water. The line of waiting surfers cheer.

“You are a surfer!” someone yells as she returns to the line of wetsuited board riders at the Scout Wave on the Arkansas River.

It’s Perret’s first day on the Scout Wave. This is her first season river surfing.

“I grew up in Colorado so it’s not like I grew up saying ‘I want to be a surfer.’ I mean I watched surfing on movies but that was it,” says Perret, a physical therapist in Evergreen. “It’s so cool to be part of the river surfing culture that has exploded in Colorado in the last few years. Everyone is so supportive. It’s such a great sport.”

There are about a dozen surfers in line at the Scout Wave on this Monday morning. Over the weekend, several dozen waited for their turn. Many surfers haul battery-operated lights to the banks of the Salida whitewater park and carve the Scout Wave through the night.

“It is the best river wave in the world. Period,” says Denver musician Eric Halborg, who has spent several weeks camping and staying in hotels this summer so he can spend a few hours a day surfing Salida. His favorite time: 5 a.m., under the lights “when the line is shortest.”

The Salida Whitewater Park was conceived in 1999 by locals Mike Harvey, Ray Kitson, Larry Lowry and Jerry Mallet, who eventually recruited Recreation Engineering and Planning, the pioneer of Colorado river park designs, to build a river park that has transformed Salida and inspired dozens of other communities.

“When they decided to turn and face the river instead of turning our backs to it like everyone had done for the last 100 years, that’s when everything changed,” said Mike “Diesel” Post, the head of Salida’s parks and recreation department and former principal at the high school in Buena Vista.

Post is standing amid the wave riders, whose sharp heel-side carves throw water high up the banks. He’s with Recreation Engineering and Planning’s design engineers Harvey and Spencer Lacy, whose father Gary started the company in the 1980s.

Post is getting a debrief about the season so far. Last year, Harvey and Lacy scrambled through June and July to adjust the Scout Wave as the Arkansas River flows peaked. They used a crane to plop 4,000-pound sacks of sand into the river as their wave turned into a violent, boat-flipping hole when the river peaked above 1,000 cubic feet per second.

This year, high flows on the Arkansas River in Salida were well above 4,000 cfs. After an offseason of adjustments with giant concrete blocks and rocks — and the reworking of a river-left boat chute for smaller rafts and paddlers in kayakers and duckies who want to avoid the turbulent high-water hole, the Scout Wave was not nearly as risky.

Last year, when no one surfed the Scout Wave for two months during peak flows, the city counted 9,000 people with mobile phones on the banks of the surf feature. So far this summer, there have been 20,000 cellphone pings from the banks. On a Monday morning before 10 a.m., guided anglers and commercial rafters floated through the wave. Upstream, very young kids on boogie boards surfed the Kindergarten Wave under the watchful eye of moms standing on shore. Visitors donned life jackets from a riverside loaner station and swam near the kayak hole.

And a growing crowd of board-riders flocked to the Scout Wave 2.0. The wave is the equivalent of a ski area for a mountain town, with people coming from far away to play. It was only a few decades ago that Riverside Park had a long, high wall that kept people away from the rushing Arkansas.

“We are a river town now. We are about as OG of a river town as it gets. This has been a whitewater park for 25 years … kind of a kayaker surf spot we called a whitewater park,” Post said. “But eight years ago we started seeing people on tubes, people in little boats and stand-up paddle boards and all of the sudden it became a park. And now with this wave, it’s all coming together in such a beautiful way that everyone can see and recognize.”

In Their Words

Boulder courts Sundance Film Festival

No one is really talking publicly right now as Boulder ramps up its bid to host the Sundance Festival starting in 2027.

That’s to be expected as the city competes against five others — Atlanta, Cincinnati, Santa Fe, and Louisville, Kentucky, and a combined bid from the festival’s 40-year host Park City and Salt Lake City, Utah.

We do know that the city of Boulder, the Boulder Convention and Visitors Bureau, the Boulder Chamber, the University of Colorado and the Stanley Hotel’s planned film center in Estes Park are part of the bid. All the accommodations in Boulder are on the table for the festival, a representative from the chamber said, including the new 250-room Limelight hotel and conference center under construction by Aspen One, the new name for the Aspen Skiing Co.

Boulder is expecting a tour of the city with festival organizers from the Sundance Institute in the next few weeks. The chamber representative said the city plans to tout sustainability, open spaces and accessibility, with an emphasis on easy travel on paths and public transit.

The Colorado Economic Development Commission in June gave the Boulder group $1.5 million to help craft its proposal to host the Sundance Festival for 10 years starting in 2027. In May, the Stanley Hotel hosted the Sundance Institute’s Directors Lab, which was landed with about $300,000 in state funding. Colorado lawmakers in May modified a grant program that would allow the Colorado Educational and Cultural Facilities Authority to buy the Stanley Hotel and shepherd the construction of the Stanley Film Center, which the state has approved for as much as $46.4 million in sales tax incentives over 30 years.

All this maneuvering by Colorado comes as Park City businesses and locals grumble about traffic from the 10-day, 87,000-attendee Sundance Film Festival in the middle of ski season in a Utah county that hosts 2.8 million skier visits a year.

Colorado is losing ground in the national fight to land movie-makers. Gov. Jared Polis in June signed legislation that expands funding for film, television and commercial productions in the state. But the $5 million a year in refundable tax credits from Colorado pales in comparison to massive incentives dangled by neighboring states.

The hope is that hosting the Sundance Festival could spark the state’s film industry and elevate Colorado as a viable host for media makers.

“It’s been unfortunate to watch over the years other states like New Mexico, Georgia and several other states develop incentives and really work hard to entice the film industry to come shoot in their states while Colorado has done very little,” said Kent Harvey, a 30-year cinematographer based in Denver who goes to New Mexico and Georgia to work on big-budget Hollywood films like “Logan” and “Guardians of the Galaxy.”

When Harvey tells high-profile actors and producers that he lives in Colorado, they always ask him, “Why don’t we make these films in Colorado? I would much rather be doing this in Colorado,” he said. “We could actually enjoy our time off in the mountains and be able to get back to LA in less time.”

Harvey is frustrated to see tax incentives and credits given to other industries that do not accurately reflect Colorado. He points to the Colorado Economic Development Commission’s recent approval of $4.6 million in tax incentives for tobacco company Philip Morris International to open a $600 million facility in Aurora that makes nicotine pouches.

“Is this in the best interest of Coloradans and especially our youth?” Harvey said. “Let’s bring an industry that will employ thousands of film crew members, generate billions in tax revenue dollars just as Georgia and New Mexico have done over the last several years and help continue to drive tourism to the state.”

The Outsider now has a podcast! Veteran reporter Jason Blevins covers the industry from the inside out, plus indulges in the fun side of being outdoors in our beautiful state.

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Breaking Trail

Three Durango mountain bikers competing in Paris Summer Games

Three of the four U.S. mountain bikers competing in the Paris Olympics on Sunday — Christopher Blevins, Riley Amos and Savilia Blunk — are from Durango, a town of 19,000 that has fielded a knobby-tired bike racer in every Olympic contest since the sport was added in 1996.

“It means a lot to carry on that legacy,” Blevins told Sun freelancer Ryan Simonovich. (Bummed about this, but Chris is no relation to this Sun reporter.)

Counting Fort Collins’ Olivia Cummins in the women’s Team Pursuit and Boulder’s Taylor Knibb competing in the women’s time trial cycling race, Colorado’s five cyclists number the same as Colorado runners among the 26 Centennial State athletes competing in Paris.

The rich cycling history in Durango — where nearby Purgatory ski area hosted the first mountain bike World Championships in 1990 — fosters exceptional pedalers.

The 26-year-old Blevins began racking up national titles as a BMX racer before the age of 10. When he switched to mountain bikes with the esteemed Durango Devo program, the crowns kept coming. In April, a dramatic last-lap attack led him to a World Cup victory in Brazil, setting the stage for his second Olympics.

“Durango has meant everything to my success and trajectory on the bike,” Blevins told Simonovich as he made his final preparations for the Games. “Result-wise and where I am as an Olympian but also just how much I love the bike. I think that’s what I’m most proud of and what Durango’s provided.”

The 25-year-old Blunk launched her cycling career with the Fort Lewis College Cycling Team.

“Coming from a small town where mountain biking wasn’t an everyday sport, to Durango, where overnight I was surrounded by talented riders and people pushing me to become better, I improved so much as a rider just by having people to train and ride with that both challenged me and gave me confidence,” Blunk said.

Amos, 22, has been dominating the World Cup U23 category for several years and, like Blevins and Blunk, credits Durango’s fiery cycling community for his trajectory on the bike.

“My community is the reason I’m here,” Amos wrote in a recent Instagram post. “The amount of fun I’ve had growing up exploring the outdoors on my bike with my best friends showed me what life is about. I had so many cycling mentors growing up, and I constantly strive to take a small piece from their process and incorporate it into myself. I’ve always had a stronger wheel to chase, and I’ve always lived to surprise those better than me.”

And speaking of the Olympics, did everyone see that Utah is getting the Winter Games in 2034? Not a surprising announcement, of course, considering the state was the only contender for the winter show a decade from now. Alterra Mountain Co. will have its $3.2 billion expansion at Deer Valley online in time for moguls and aerials contests. Vail Resorts will be hosting slopestyle and halfpipe events at Park City Mountain Resort. And the Holding family will have ski racing at its Snowbasin hill in Ogden. Salt Lake City will be the hub. We have a decade to go, but those last five years will be a frenzy of marketing mayhem pitting skiing’s largest resort operators and Colorado likely angling to keep its winter scene in the limelight as Utah glows Olympic.

>> Click over to The Sun on Friday to read Ryan’s story

The Guide

Mesa County counters 400,000-acre Dolores River national monument plan with plan to protect 30,000 acres around the river

Mesa County has countered the call for a national monument around the Dolores River with plans for a much smaller national conservation area.

The Dolores Canyons National Conservation Area would increase protections on 29,806 acres around the Dolores River in both Mesa and Montrose counties. The proposal for a national monument around the river in the two counties calls for increased protection on 391,000 acres along the river.

Mesa County commissioners in May adopted a resolution opposing the national monument plan, which was crafted by river and environmental advocates asking President Joe Biden to use the Antiquities Act to create the Dolores Canyons National Monument. The commissioners in May pointed to existing protections on federally managed land around the river and questioned how additional layers of protection might impact mining, logging and grazing as well the region’s ability to handle increased visitation.

The national conservation area proposal released Tuesday by Mesa County maintains existing water, and grazing rights while protecting access to “critical minerals necessary for meeting energy, carbon and national security goals.” Environmental and river advocacy groups blasted the conservation area plan as “grossly inadequate.”

>> Click over to The Sun on Friday to read this story

Mountain Village voters in June 2025 will decide whether LLCs or trusts get a voice in local elections

The Mountain Village town council last week approved a ballot measure that could allow limited liability companies and trusts to vote in local elections.

The ballot question in the June 2025 election would allow owners holding properties in LLCs or trusts to designate a person who can vote in Mountain Village elections. LLCs or trusts with evenly shared ownership will get two votes. The town is the only municipality in Colorado that allows non-resident property owners to vote in municipal elections choosing candidates for council, tax regulations and charter amendments.

The council’s referral of the question to voters is not an endorsement of the proposal.

There are 1,100 full-time residents in Mountain Village and 562 registered voters. There are 1,264 properties in the town owned LLCs and 199 owned by trusts. The hope of the ballot measure is to expand voter engagement in local issues as more property owners transfer homes into LLCs and trusts that better protect the asset and smooth estate planning. Right now, only owners of properties who list their homes in their names can vote in Mountain Village elections, regardless of their residency. If voters pass the measure, owners with residential properties in LLCs and trusts will be able to designate a person to vote in local elections.

Mayor Marti Prohaska, during discussion of the ballot measure at last week’s second reading of the proposal, agreed with locals who worried their voices would be overwhelmed by absentee property owners.

Prohaska said the ballot question could make it “possible that our voices will not be heard anymore. She worried that the measure would discourage more working locals from engaging in the town’s politics and leadership.

“We have to have better diversity up here,” she said of the council. “I think it is extremely critical that everyone who is concerned about this and everyone who is passionate continues to engage. At the end of the day, we all need to vote. We need to get our neighbors to vote. We need to talk to our neighbors about running for council.”

Several local residents expressed concern with the measure at recent meetings.

“It doesn’t make sense. It’s wrong. It’s un-American,” local resident Leslie Browning told the council.

Local resident Paul Savage said the council should be talking about changes to the town charter that would prohibit non-residents from voting.

“It’s ridiculous that we allow people who don’t live here to vote,” Savage said. “It’s a sacred right and our vote should not be watered down by people who don’t live here.”

If you were going to pick a community in Colorado that might be closest to the issue of non-resident voting, it would be the Town of Keystone, which last year became the state’s newest incorporated municipality.

As a local committee spent many months of public meetings hammering out a town charter for the community at the base of the busy Summit County ski area, voting by nonresident homeowners was “the most contentious issue,” said Keystone Mayor Ken Riley, a first-timer to political office.

The Keystone charter committee studied Mountain Village’s formation in 1995 as a home-rule municipality that grew from a homeowners association. The difference between the two communities is that Keystone had a community of full-time residents who voted in March 2023 to incorporate into a town. Mountain Village was largely a community of second homeowners who were part of an association in the 1990s.

Keystone has about 3,500 property owners and about 900 active voters in a pool of about 1,200 full-time residents. The town charter allows only people who are permanent residents of Keystone to vote in town elections. That’s the same rule for every municipality in Colorado except Mountain Village.

“I guarantee you if we had provided the opportunity for second-home owners to have a vote, there is no way our charter would have passed,” Riley said. “But we did have some significant debates about it.”

Stay tuned for some heated debates and campaigning as Mountain Village considers becoming one of the very few communities in the country that allow LLCs and trusts to vote.

— j

The Colorado Sun is part of The Trust Project. Read our policies.

Corrections & Clarifications

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Sneak Peek of the Week

Stagecoach locals wary of plans for private ski, golf resort for uber-wealthy

The Stagecoach ski area operated three lifts for three years in the early ’70s before shutting down. Since then, a bustling community of about 2,400 property owners has grown around the dormant slopes above the 3-mile long Stagecoach Reservoir and Stagecoach State Park.

For nearly 50 years, a local family who bought 6,600 acres around the old ski hill in the late 1970s has pondered what could be at Stagecoach.

Now, there’s a plan.

Discovery Land Co., the Arizona operator of 35 high-end private resorts including Montana’s Yellowstone Club, wants to turn the property into a private ski area and golf course with about 700 homes for the extremely wealthy.

Residents are worried.

“They are going to change the very fabric of what Stagecoach is,” Stagecoach homeowner Jennifer Fernley told Sun freelancer Kari Harden. “It’s just going to suck. It’s not going to feel like our place. It’s going to feel like their place.”

There could be hundreds of residents living next to a ski area and golf course they cannot access. Discovery executives recently hosted their first meeting with locals, laying out brief details of what they are considering at the so-called Stagecoach Mountain Ranch. They got an earful.

Which really is not surprising for a development proposal at a property that has been largely empty and untouched for half a century while a community has grown around the property. It’s easy to draw parallels to another quiet lakeside community in a busy valley, where residents have spent decades dealing with developers.

Residents around the much smaller Sweetwater Lake have seen deep-pocketed investors come and go, with plans for private golf and luxury homes and even a proposal for a high-end water bottling operation. The latest plan involves the U.S. Forest Service, which acquired 488 acres around Sweetwater Lake in 2021, and Colorado Parks and Wildlife turning the property into a state-managed park or recreation area.

Residents around Sweetwater share the same concerns about how visitors and development will shift the quiet culture and vibe in their community. They worry how new plans will fit with traditional uses and existing homes. They wonder if their concerns will be heard as powerful forces push new designs.

“Any similar community that sees this kind of real estate development, especially for higher end development, there is unavoidable impact upon the culture of the community,” Routt County Commissioner Tim Corrigan told Harden. “And land use regulations are not very well equipped to address the cultural impact.”

>> Click over to The Sun next week to read Kari’s story

In Their Words

Argo Mill gondola project back on track after losing millions in alleged title company scam

The investors behind a planned gondola-anchored resort and village at the Argo Mill in Idaho Springs have revived their project after losing $4.5 million in an alleged scam by an escrow company.

“Can you believe it? We have the most amazing team in the world,” said Mary Jane Loevlie, an Idaho Springs entrepreneur who is guiding the Argo Mill project.

It’s been a long and tortuous road for the 50-plus investors in the Mighty Argo Cable Car Group, who in 2019 proposed a sweeping resort project that would spark a revived economy in Idaho Springs. Their initial investment disappeared in an alleged scam by a title company. They had to scrape up new funds and new investors, while federal officials accused the title company of stealing close to $15 million in escrow deposits from 10 businesses.

Nearly five years after initially planning to break ground, the Might Argo project is underway. The investors are joined by a European investment group — the Funis Fund — that supports urban cable car projects. It’s the group’s first investment in North America.

“We will be part of an elite group of global gondolas that this group is invested in,” Loevlie said. “We are sort of on the cusp of this kind of development in North America.”

In 2019, the Argo investors planned to spend more than $32 million to start construction of a 1.2-mile gondola and commercial village around the dormant Argo Mill on the banks of Clear Creek in Idaho Springs. In 2020, the group deposited $4.5 million into an escrow account with Virginia-based First Title Inc. as an equity deposit to secure a construction loan.

But the money disappeared. The Argo investors in 2021 sued the owners of the title company, arguing Sandra Bacon and Chrisheena McGee stole the deposit and distributed it to personal accounts.

A U.S. District Court judge awarded the Mighty Argo investment group $8.7 million in damages in 2022 after the two women failed to respond to the civil lawsuit other than arguing they were protected against self-incrimination under the Fifth Amendment.

McGee and Bacon were each indicted by a federal grand jury on 12 counts of wire fraud in November last year. They pleaded not guilty and a trial is set for April.

The recovery of the Argo Mill project “has got to be one of the biggest surprises of my life,” Idaho Springs Mayor Chuck Harmon said. “I realize it’s only an indictment right now, but it was such a crime. Since these thieves took off with their money, the interest rates have doubled and construction costs have gone through the roof. They stole so many opportunities. But don’t ever count Mary Jane out.”

The project has changed a bit in the past five years but every one of the original 50-plus local investors is still on board.

“That just warms my heart,” Loevlie said. “It will be a longer haul, but they will get their returns. They all invested for the project, not the returns. It’s pretty stunning that we have managed to come through all this with all our original investors and supporters.”

>> Click over to The Sun next week to read this story

The Outsider now has a podcast! Veteran reporter Jason Blevins covers the industry from the inside out, plus indulges in the fun side of being outdoors in our beautiful state.

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Breaking Trail

Home prices continue to set records as mountain real estate market slows

From the “whoa” file:

The average price for a single-family Aspen home in the first half of 2024 hit $22.1 million. Not a typo.That’s an average price of $3,427 a square foot. Both those numbers are all-time highs for Aspen.

Averages are a challenge in Aspen real estate. Buyers have spent more than $20 million on 11 Aspen homes so far in 2024. There’s been one sale for a home for $108 million and three sales over $50 million. There have been 11 Aspen sales for more than $20 million in the first half of 2024.

The deals this year include a $17 million sale of a former 815-square-foot miners shack built in 1888 on a small lot in the city’s West End, which builders transformed into a luxury four-bedroom, 3,900-square-foot home. The home was valued by Pitkin County at $3.2 million in 2021 before the remodel.

It’s hard not to skew averages when buyers pay more than $4,300 a square foot in Aspen.

(The big spending on the high end warps average prices in every community, not just Aspen, but the numbers from the headwaters of the Roaring Fork River are astronomical.)

This is the peak buying and selling season for mountain homes. Sales volume in most resort communities remains high, but less than the record-setting frenzy in 2021 and 2022.

Sales volume through May in Eagle County topped $1.1 billion for 2024, pacing ahead of 2023 but not 2021 or 2022. And the number of transactions in Eagle County through May is above 2023 but well below the frothy pace in 2021 and 2022. That means the average price in Eagle County is a record high at more than $2 million, according to sales tracked by Land Title Guarantee Co.

Sales volume through May in Summit County is $808.1 million for 2024, up 34% from 2023 but well below 2021 and 2022. And like Eagle County, the number of Summit County transactions through May are down, even below the numbers from 2014 through 2019. High volume with fewer transactions means Summit County prices are sky-high, with an average single-family home selling for $2.4 million, according to Land Title Guarantee Co.

Stay tuned for a quick story on high country real estate sales as the mountain market settles after the frenzied buying and selling of recent years.

The Playground

Colorado is well represented in the Summer Olympics

The Olympics kick off July 26, and 26 Colorado athletes will be there ready to bring home the Oly bling.

Colorado ranks sixth among states sending Olympians to Paris. That’s down a bit from the pandemic-delayed Summer Games in Tokyo in 2021.

By a per-capita measurement, Colorado ranks second for sourcing Olympians.

Colorado is a winter playground, so it’s not surprising that the state consistently sends the first or second largest contingent of skaters, skiers, sledders and snowboarders to the Winter Games. (Colorado sent 24 to the 2022 Winter Olympics in China, down from 36 for the 2018 Winter Games in South Korea.)

The Colorado Sun’s John Ingold crunched some numbers on Colorado’s contribution to Team USA in Paris and has some fun facts ready for readers to wow their pals on trivia night.

>> Click over to The Sun on Friday to read John’s story

The Guide

Federal courts dismiss two lawsuits filed by homeowners challenging Summit County short-term rental regulations

Federal judges have dismissed two lawsuits filed by property owners in Summit County challenging both the county’s and the town of Breckenridge’s recent regulations on short-term rentals.

A coalition of more than 100 property owners in Summit County in September 2023 sued the county, calling rules that limit short-term rental property owners to 35 bookings a year and a 2% tax “a blunderbuss response” of “successively more severe, wide-ranging, misguided and unlawful regulations.”

Residents and property owners in Breckenridge in October 2023 sued the town over a town-wide cap of 2,200 short-term rental licenses, arguing the cap was a form of rent control prohibited by state law.

The Colorado Property Owners for Property Rights Group also argued that the town’s 2021 and 2022 ordinances that created zones that allowed for varying levels of short-term rentals were “arbitrary and irrational, discriminatory, lacking support from study or data, (and) there is no reasonable relation between the ordinances and the town’s stated objective of providing employee housing, and ultimately, unlawful.”

U.S. District Court Judge Nina Wang on July 9 dismissed the Breckenridge property owners’ lawsuit, ruling the town’s limits on short-term rentals “are at least rationally related to controlling associated noise, parking and waste disposal” and the the town’s “desire to limit perceived ill effects of STRs is a legitimate purpose and the ordinances are rationally related to this end.”

“Second-guessing by a court is not allowed,” Wang wrote, citing legal precedent.

U.S. District Court Judge Gordon Gallagher on June 25 dismissed the county owners’ lawsuit, ruling that Summit County is allowed to treat properties in various zones differently, including occupancy requirements for obtaining short-term rental licenses. Gallagher also dismissed the owners’ challenge to a county limit of 35 bookings a year — which the owners argued violated their property rights — ruling that owners failed to prove they have a fundamental right to a short-term rental license.

Both judges dismissed the notion that the regulations created different rules for Colorado residents and nonresidents. The property owners in both lawsuits argued the recent crackdown on short-term rentals by county and town policymakers violated the Equal Protection Clause in the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which prevents local laws that discriminate between U.S. residents.

Gallagher wrote in his June 25 ruling that the court was “aware of the significant consequences” of Summit County’s short-term rental regulations and his ruling for property owners, residents and visitors to Summit County “and perhaps in similar communities across Colorado.”

>> Click over to The Sun next week to read this story

Carrie Hauser taking rural lessons of Colorado to the national conservation stage

For 25 years, I’ve been visiting — and tuning into — town council meetings across the Western Slope. The one thing I’ve heard most from residents during public comments: “We don’t want to be the next Aspen.” (Sometimes it’s “Moab,” or “Breckenridge” or “Vail.”)

But in the past four years or so, the most common refrain I’ve heard in small town meetings is “We are not being heard. We are being listened to.”

As metro area voters and policymakers influence big decisions about water, wolves, land protection, housing and more, rural residents are feeling left out. The urban-rural divide is not shrinking.

Carrie Hauser knows this. She chaired the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission as it toured the state to plan wolf reintroduction. She guided Colorado Mountain College for 11 years as the school honed programs at 11 campuses that better met the needs of mountain communities.

And now she’s taking the reins at the Trust for Public Land, one of the nation’s top land conservation groups with 32 diverse offices spread across the country. The Trust for Public Land works in urban and rural communities to protect open, green spaces. Hauser, who lives on the Western Slope, deftly navigates both rural and urban concerns, with experience at Denver’s Metropolitan State University and the Daniels Fund.

Few people are better suited to help fill the growing chasm that separates rural and urban citizens. And she’s shepherding one of the few issues that galvanize all Americans: protecting land and water.

“I think we need to think about not just protecting land or opening a park. It’s also, ‘What are the long-term impacts?’” she said. “How do you think about these things in the way of systems and not just sort of one project and move to the next project. How do they also connect together?”

>> Click here to read this story and here to listen to the Daily Sun-Up podcast with Hauser

— j

The Colorado Sun is part of The Trust Project. Read our policies.

Corrections & Clarifications

Notice something wrong? The Colorado Sun has an ethical responsibility to fix all factual errors. Request a correction by emailing corrections@coloradosun.com.

Sneak Peek of the Week

Growing community of amateur radio operators ready to serve in crises

JEFFERSON — Far from pavement, in a craggy South Park meadow of sagebrush and granite, a die-hard group has established a high-tech command post.

They’ve circled their camper trailers. Long-retired satellite news vans — their dishes teetering 40 feet up — line the perimeter. Generators hum next to banks of solar panels.

Willem Schreüder climbs into his trailer, where towers of computer equipment blink and whir. He taps on a laptop, scrolling through 239 fixed and mobile radio relay sites across the Rocky Mountains, showing off customized software that can remotely control and repair remote radio signal transmitters.

“A lot of what we do is backup for public safety and even though we are volunteers, we take our work very seriously,” said Schreüder, a long-bearded professor of computer science at the University of Colorado who has been involved with amateur radio for more than 40 years. “Really we are amateurs in name only.”

There is nothing amateur about the gathering in the remote corner of South Park. Part of the National Association for Amateur Radio’s annual Field Day — a nationwide rally of licensed ham radio hobbyists that started in 1933 — the circled collection of high-tech camper trailers and vans is bustling with technical wizards training for that day when they are called into service.

It could be a tornado, flood, hailstorm or wildfire. Maybe an earthquake or solar storm has knocked out satellite communication. Maybe rural emergency service folks need help with a big event, like a mountain bike or running race. Whatever the reason, there are 19,629 licensed amateur radio operators in Colorado — almost 750,000 in the U.S. — who are trained and ready to keep critical communications flowing.

“For most amateur radio groups, it’s about serving our communities,” said Desiree Baccus — call sign N3DEZ — with the Rocky Mountain HAM Radio club, a nonprofit that maintains a network of radio-transmitting equipment across Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming. “There is only so much local sheriffs can do in small towns and you will see amateur radio operators stepping in to fill the gaps as volunteers to help as a second service to our emergency management professionals.”

A visit to the meadow for the national field day reveals a vibrant ham radio community still communicating over radio waves — just like their predecessors more than a century ago — but infusing the antiquated technology with new-school digital tools. They are forging new roles for their growing community while honing skills that are critical in crises.

Radio operators have helped with evacuations around recent fires in California and Hawaii and helped support police radio transmissions in 2019 when a shooter opened fire at the annual garlic festival in Gilroy, California.

“It’s so cool when you think about how all amateur radio operators are volunteers, ready to step in and help at a moment’s notice,” said Tom Kephart — KC0GDM — from Firestone, who has been licensed since 1988. “These are people who really love this hobby and want to serve. And they are always trying to find ways to improve and serve better.”

>> Click over to The Colorado Sun on Sunday to read this story

In Their Words

At least 32 people have died in Colorado reservoirs and rivers this summer

{430}}{{Number of citations issued by CPW rangers for PFD violations this year, compared with 244 for the same span in 2023}}

The park ranger on the trail around Sylvan Lake was hollering.

“Paddleboarders! Meet me by the dock!” he said.

Maray Lindley, 17, and her friend paddled back to the shoreline, where the ranger asked why the two girls didn’t have life jackets.

“I just completely forgot. We came up through the side and missed the signs,” said the Eagle high-school student.

Lindley got a $102.50 ticket from the Colorado Parks and Wildlife ranger.

“It was a lot. I was surprised,” she said. “He was talking about all the drownings.”

Since March 28, at least 32 people have died in Colorado’s reservoirs and rivers. Not even halfway through July, that’s pacing ahead of the record 42 deaths Colorado Parks and Wildlife tracked in 2022. A Colorado Sun accounting of water deaths this year includes 17 deaths in reservoirs and 15 deaths in moving water.

Of the people who died while recreating on a watercraft, six were not wearing a personal floatation device, or PFD, and two slipped from improperly worn PFDs.

Colorado Parks and Wildlife is hammering on its life jacket messaging, emphasizing Colorado laws that require PFDs.

“Many people are just unaware of the law so education is a great option,” CPW spokesman Joey Livingston said.

On top of the educational campaign, CPW is issuing tickets.

Through July 9, CPW officials have written 430 citations for PFD violations. For the same period in 2023 the agency issued 244 tickets. In all of 2023, CPW officers issued 497 tickets to PFD rule-breakers.

>> Click over to The Sun next week to read this story

The Outsider now has a podcast! Veteran reporter Jason Blevins covers the industry from the inside out, plus indulges in the fun side of being outdoors in our beautiful state.

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Breaking Trail

A 50-year fight in Crested Butte ends as Forest Service approves land swap that will forever block mining on Red Lady

Crested Buttians do not need many reasons for a party. A legendary mailman. A bike race without pedaling. Skiing through downtown alleys. The arrival of fall. Or spring. Just about any breeze in Crested Butte warrants a parade.

So imagine the spectacle in September when Crested Butte celebrates the end of a nearly 50-year, culture-defining battle to squash mining on the beloved peak above town. That is going to be the party of the century on Elk Avenue.

“Heads up for a good day to be in Crested Butte,” said Jon Hare with the High Country Conservation Advocates.

The fight over molybdenum mining on Mount Emmons — the pink-hued peak that Crested Butte locals call their Red Lady — is over. After nearly 50 years of impassioned battle to block hard-rock blasting on the Red Lady, the Forest Service has approved a deal that will forever remove the prospect of mining on thousands of acres in the watersheds above Crested Butte. The deal ends the longest running mine clash in the Lower 48.

The decision by Chad Stewart, the supervisor of the Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre and Gunnison National Forests, still requires deal-closing signatures in September from the Mount Emmons Mining Co., the Crested Butte Land Trust and the Forest Service. The mining company gets 539 acres around the historic Keystone Mine and beneath its water treatment plant on Coal Creek upstream of Crested Butte and the Forest Service gets four parcels of private wetlands and wildlife habitat in Gunnison and Saguache counties. The deal also includes conservation agreements and mineral withdrawals that will end the prospect of mining and allow nonmotorized recreation on more than 1,300 of the mining company’s mining claims above Crested Butte.

The decision marks a final step in a campaign that began in the 1970s as the end-of-the-road community began to transition away from mining and embrace a less impactful appreciation of natural amenities.

“Most mine fights do not end in a collaborative agreement to end mining,” said Julie Nania with High Country Conservation Advocates, or HCCA, who has spent a decade working with the Mount Emmons Mining Co., local leaders and environmental groups on the complex deal to eliminate mining above Crested Butte. “It’s finally here. It is so amazing.”

>> Click over to The Sun on Friday to read this story

The Outdoor Industry Association divorces Outdoor Retailer, ending a 30-year partnership

The Outdoor Industry Association is divorcing the Outdoor Retailer trade shows, ending a 30-year partnership.

The national trade association with more than 4,000 outdoor industry members — manufacturers, suppliers, sales reps and retailers — has ended its exclusive partnership with Emerald Expositions, the trade show operator that owns the biannual Outdoor Retailer trade shows. The separation comes as the outdoor industry matures into a political and economic force and the role of once-essential trade show gatherings evolves.

Kent Ebersole, who took the reins at Boulder-based OIA in 2022 just as Outdoor Retailer decamped from its five-year home in Denver for Salt Lake City, said his group appreciates the “valuable opportunities” Outdoor Retailer provided for OIA members.

“This next chapter enables our organizations to work to unify our industry, foster growth and deep community engagement,” Ebersole said in a statement announcing the split.

Since taking over at OIA, Ebersole has orchestrated a significant shift in the association’s business strategy. For decades, OIA relied heavily on royalty payments from Outdoor Retailer trade show business, with revenue from the trade shows accounting for more than 70% of the association’s annual revenues. A review of the nonprofit association’s tax filings show more than a decade of annual trade show revenue between $4.1 million and $5.2 million.

When trade shows collapsed during the pandemic, that annual revenue for OIA fell to $642,000 in 2021 and never recovered, reaching only $1.69 million in 2022.

But OIA collected a record $3.1 million from membership dues in 2022 and posted an all-time high annual revenue of $8.59 million in 2022, marking a strategic maneuver away from trade show money.

Meanwhile Emerald Expositions has been struggling. The company, which hosts 140 trade show events a year, has slowly been crawling out of the hole created by the pandemic. In 2018, as the company moved Outdoor Retailer to Denver from its longtime home in Salt Lake City, the company’s stock traded for more than $20 a share, with annual revenues hitting $381 million. The company’s stock now trades around $5 a share and revenues reached $383 million in 2023 after cratering in 2020 and 2021.

The most recent Outdoor Retailer business-to-business trade shows in Salt Lake City have not rebounded to previous traffic levels, with fewer high-profile brands that once shaped the annual gatherings taking huge booths and hosting pricey parties. Denver and the Colorado outdoor recreation office last month launched the annual Outside Festival, which hopes to fill the hole left by Outdoor Retailer with music, art and education for businesses and consumers.

The ground is shifting for the outdoor industry. Where trade shows fit in the maturing industry’s landscape remains to be seen as manufacturers and retailers move beyond the need for traditional face-to-face meetings to conduct business.

Since Emerald Expositions and Outdoor Retailer acquired the venerable Snow Show trade show from SnowSports Industries America, or SIA, in 2017 for $16.7 million, SIA has evolved into an educational resource for winter businesses. OIA now must similarly shape its future, but without that pile of new money.

Outdoor policy, education and advocacy remain a critical need for the $1.1 trillion recreation economy. The players in that economy are jostling for position.

The influential Outdoor Recreation Roundtable — led by former OIA policy boss Jessica Wahl Turner — is shepherding industry priorities in Washington, D.C. The Outdoor Recreation Roundtable is making huge gains in D.C. with passage of comprehensive recreation legislative packages.

There are now 23 state outdoor recreation offices. The 3,000 member Sports and Fitness Industry Association is emerging as a potent force. SIA is taking ownership of education work with winter businesses.

That leaves opportunities and challenges for OIA as it writes a new chapter without a role in the industry’s once-signature trade show. OIA’s research into participation trends remains a critical tool for outdoor policymakers, manufacturers and retailers. Its work promoting sustainability and diversity for outdoor businesses is equally important.

Ebersole spent two years working on the divorce from Emerald, which did not want to break the partnership. Now he can focus on the next steps. He’s rebuilding OIA’s government affairs and advocacy team, with a focus on working in areas under-represented by the Outdoor Recreation Roundtable — which has a lot of motorized recreation members. (OIA’s 10-year head of government affairs, Rich Harper, just retired.)

“We will have a new advocacy team in a month and there are lanes that we care about where I think we can have more impact than (the Outdoor Recreation Roundtable),” Ebersole said in an interview with The Sun. “Our members are different from their members. There is space for both of us.”

Ebersole said OIA also plans to “double or even triple down” on data and analysis of trends in the outdoor recreation economy. OIA will remain in the events business, fostering growth of smaller business gatherings and educational work. The association plans to continue working with businesses to grow sustainable operations — lessening impacts through production and the supply chain — as well as helping business owners grow their operations. OIA also hopes to develop a broader outreach program to distribute its research and educational information.

“We have a lot of areas where we hope to grow,” Ebersole said. “We will be going where our members want to go.”

— j

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Sneak Peek of the Week

Breaking the rules to help a mountain town “get unstuck”

Sometimes the best way to turn a vision into reality is to have a chorus of naysayers screaming you can’t do it.

That chorus reached a fevered pitch when dads and youth cycling advocates Jesse Seavers, Sam Ovett and Rex Madden announced they wanted to build a pump track in Nederland for kids who need more to do in the summer.

Sure, Nederland is an outdoor nexus.

It sits at the base of the Continental Divide just a quick RTD ride up Colorado 119 from Boulder.

Yes, it’s home to Eldora ski area.

And yes, miles of mountain bike trails lace through the woods surrounding the town of around 1,400 residents.

But when it comes to safe outdoor options for kids, some think amenities are lacking. There’s a park with a grassy field where summer soccer camps unfold, a fishing pond for 12-and-unders that they’re not supposed to go in, a skate park Tony Hawk sponsored in 2009 and a teen center that runs field trips to places like Elitch Gardens and Water World for middle schoolers.

A pump track seemed like a perfect addition to the mix. It’s a purpose-built park with dirt features that users can bike ride, skateboard or scooter around using their body weight to “pump” along rather than pedal. Over the years, a few options had been presented. The first would have sat on the opposite side of the skate park at the teen center. But the community didn’t want it. Then Seavers, Ovett and Madden proposed building one at Chipeta Park, where the kids learn soccer and fish for trout using marshmallows as bait.

They gathered 450 signatures from supporters, but when it came time for the residents to vote, it was roundly defeated, says Giblin.

Several Nedites, including him, say that’s indicative of what’s happening to Nederland when it comes to town improvement in general. And it left Seavers, who owns an excavating company, Ovett, a marketing entrepreneur, and Madden, a materials engineer consultant, scratching their heads.

Madden has kids and co-coaches the high school mountain bike team. He also lives in Rollinsville (about 5 miles away) and said he has been coming to Nederland for his “entire life.”

“But I was just sort of seeing, the town, I don’t know, seems stuck.”

As he’s traveled for work and mountain biking, he’s seen many rural towns that have embraced their biking culture with things like purpose-built bike parks and pump tracks that support bike shops and other businesses. Many have done more to establish themselves as tourist hotspots than Nederland, which suffers out the winter watching bumper-to-bumper traffic inch through town on the way to Eldora. Many of those other towns are now also looking around at the tourism monsters they’ve created and are correcting course.

Madden had “been wanting to do what I can to try and encourage the town to embrace that sort of an attitude towards biking.” He thinks promoting Ned as a bike town will be to the benefit of “most of the people.” So he’s all for Ned’s biking community “organizing ourselves” and embracing Ned’s future “in a way that we get a say in the direction of where Ned is going” because if they don’t, the town “will do whatever they want.”

That mindset is what led to the dads taking the construction of a pump track into their own hands after it was defeated on the ballot.

If you want to know how they got the job done, without a permit and with the help of an 84-year-old developer who has a reputation for being bullheaded when it comes to adhering to building codes, tailwhip over to The Sun next Wednesday.

Spoiler alert: It’s about a lot more than just a pump track. It’s about Nederland’s future.

In Their Words

Arapahoe Basin Ikon Pass holders still get 5 to 7 days

Alterra Mountain Co. bosses promised they would listen to Arapahoe Basin skiers and administrators when the company announced plans to acquire The Legend earlier this year. Locals fretted the new owner might open up unrestricted access to its Ikon Pass skiers.

Arapahoe Basin’s longtime manager Al Henceroth said he would push the ski area’s planned new owner to keep Ikon Pass skiers limited. The unrestricted weekend crowds that flocked the ski area during its partnership with the Epic Pass were detrimental to the Arapahoe Basin experience, Henceroth said in 2019 when he pulled the plug on a 10-year Epic Pass partnership with Vail Resorts.

Henceroth this week told his loyal skiers that access would remain unchanged for 2024-25, with Ikon Pass skiers getting seven days and Ikon Base passholders getting five days.

While the final acquisition has yet to be finalized, Henceroth in his blog Tuesday said the holding pattern caused by the prolonged deal — which requires approval by the U.S. Forest Service — “has caused a lot of uncertainty.”

New for 2024-25 is paid parking at Arapahoe Basin, with plans for $20-a-vehicle parking with required reservations from mid-December through early May and a limited number of $150 season parking passes. (The paid parking is part of a two-phase strategy to limit crowding at Arapahoe Basin, which began with a cap on daily lift tickets and a cap both Ikon Pass access and the number of Arapahoe Basin season passes sold.)

Section by Jason Blevins | Outdoors/Business Reporter

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The Guide

An abandoned dump becomes a beautified nature center

While clearing more than 30 tons of trash from 260 acres of Nederland’s Mud Lake open space in the summer of 2020, volunteers found a discarded boot within the clutter of kitchen garbage, mining waste and abandoned cars, washers and refrigerators. Then they found another shoe. And another.

Those leading the cleanup instructed everyone who stumbled upon old shoes to keep them. Now, they’ll become art in a small exhibit planted at a new nature center on five acres of land owned by the nonprofit that neighbors Mud Lake open space — a reminder of both the toll humans take on the environment and the ways they come together to beautify and protect it.

The new center, a $13 million project of longtime Nederland nonprofit Wild Bear Nature Center that will likely open by fall 2025, has been in the works for more than two decades with an ambitious vision: pull people away from their screens and reacquaint them with the outdoors.

Jill Dreves, founder of the nonprofit, and Justin Gold, a driving force behind funding for the new center, told Sun reporter Erica Breunlin they hope to show visitors how they can give back to nature while exploring it. That’s why they have designed the new building to generate more energy than it uses, largely through solar power.

“This nature center is a model for how humans can build ecologically sound buildings in mountain communities into the future,” said Gold, who also founded Justin’s, a Boulder-based brand of natural nut butters and peanut butter cups.

Dreves and Gold see the new center as a gateway to Colorado’s backyard where people can rekindle a relationship with their natural surroundings and overcome their fear of the forested unknown.

Section by Tracy Ross | Reporter

>> Click over to The Sun on Friday to read Erica’s story about the nature center

The Playground

In case you spent last week under a rock: Colorado has its first voter-approved wolf pup

Colorado Parks and Wildlife has confirmed a wolf introduced to the state in December has had at least one puppy, maybe more, in Grand County.

The agency made the announcement last week, after months of observation by biologists who first suspected the wolf was pregnant and establishing a den in April.

They confirmed the birth June 18, during routine wolf monitoring efforts, which included attempted observations from the air and ground, remote cameras and public sightings.

There are no photos or videos at this time but CPW says although biologists were only able to confirm one pup, it is possible that others may be present, as wolf litters commonly consist of four to six pups. CPW staff will monitor the animals to determine how many more pups are in the litter. This is the first confirmed Colorado-born wolf pup since the voter-approved wolf reintroduction in December.

The pup’s birth means its parents, itself and any siblings it may have are officially considered a pack the agency is calling the Copper Creek pack.

Biologists are continuing to monitor the area where the pup was discovered “while exercising extreme caution to avoid inadvertently disturbing the adult wolves, this pup or other pups,” CPW biologist Brenna Cassidy said.

Other cool wolf news we gleaned this week from Rachael Gonzales, CPW’s northwest region public information officer:

Sun: How big is the puppy?

Gonzales: At the age of this pup, wolf pups are 20-25 pounds.

Sun: When was it born?

Gonzales: Likely mid-April, when most wolf pups are born in the Rockies.

Sun: Is the den on private or public land?

Gonzales: The den is on public land. CPW is not providing an exact location of the den.

Sun: Why was it so hard to find them?

Gonzales: The Middle Park den is in an area that is very densely forested with mature conifers, so the ground is not visible. The surrounding area has lots of large willow/riparian areas and mature aspen with significant downfall and brush, making the ground still very difficult to see farther from the den site. Because of this, any actual den hole is nearly impossible to see from the air and ground. In general, when looking for a den from the air you only have 5-10 minutes to look for pups who, if there are any, may not even be in an area open enough to see from the air during that short time period.

Sun: Have they established a rendezvous site?

CPW: CPW has not confirmed whether the wolves remain at the den in which the pup was born or if they have established a so-called “rendezvous site,” to which pups are usually moved and remain, stay with access to resources like water and shelter, while adult wolves take turns watching them while other wolves venture away from the site.

Section by Tracy Ross | Reporter

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Sneak Peek of the Week

Survey shows resort communities want more focus on residents, less emphasis on tourism

The urbanites who swelled mountain communities in 2020 and 2021 are staying put in their high-country hometowns. Real estate prices remain firmly sky-high. Tourists continue to flock and workers struggle to find housing.

A new survey of 4,000 residents in Eagle, Grand, Pitkin, Routt and Summit counties checked the pulse of mountain communities, where residents new and old, renting workers, policymakers and even second homeowners are feeling their quality of life ebb as the amplified cultural and economic shifts of the pandemic linger.

Many people said they are hoping for more of a focus on residents and community priorities — and maybe less emphasis on tourism. The new community survey commissioned by the Northwest Colorado Council of Governments and the Colorado Association of Ski Towns — and conducted by a group of veteran tourism economists known as the Insights Collective — is a benchmark that measures sentiment around the social, political, economic and cultural changes happening in mountain towns. And it delivers a tool to help policymakers craft regulations and measure progress as communities adjust tourism-based economies to better reflect resident concerns.

“We are trying to find that balance between diverse interest groups in the community and recognizing the voice of the community within the tourism economy,” said Insights Collective member Chris Cares, a founding partner and managing director of RRC Associates, which has been measuring and researching resort communities for more than 40 years.

The study showed a surge of new residents and second homeowners in recent years — 27% moved to the area in the past five years and 57% since 2008.

Most of those recent arrivals came from an urban or suburban area, with Denver ranking as the top former home for most new arrivals in mountain towns. Summit and Grand counties have the highest percentage of new residents.

Some of the newcomers do not necessarily have jobs connected to the local economy, making them appear less likely to support policies that lure visitors, which can have consequences for residents who do rely on visitors for their livelihoods. About 40% of respondents were employed by a local business, with 23% saying they were retired, 17% were self-employed and 16% worked for companies outside the region.

Only 36% of the new arrivals own their homes though, which is a sign of the spiking costs of homes since 2019.

The survey asked 29 questions about the quality of life in mountain towns, gauging characteristics that were most important to the community and identifying whether those dynamics were improving or declining.

The results showed that longer-term residents tended to put more value on things like a sense of a community and “a small town atmosphere,” which ranked as the second most important source of a high quality of life in all the counties except for Pitkin and Summit counties, where it ranked first.

Lower income residents tended to count the cost of living and infrastructure — like emergency services, grocery, public transportation and traffic issues — as key components of a higher quality of life.

The survey showed that many mountain town residents see their quality of life in decline. Fewer residents said it was improving. A slight majority of residents said the positives of tourism in mountain towns outweighed the negatives. But most respondents agreed with the statement that “the area is overcrowded because of too many visitors.”

Second homeowners, however, were less likely to see quality of life declining when compared to full-time residents. Second homeowners who rent their properties as short-term rentals have the most positive outlook when it comes to the quality of life in mountain towns. The community assessment differs from previous studies and surveys because it includes second homeowners.

The second-home economy in mountain towns is influential but owners of vacation homes are rarely included in local decision-making.

“We think there’s importance in that second homeowner perspective,” Cares said. “Policymakers would benefit from trying to be clear headed as they try to balance a thriving economy that is dependent on tourism and the quality of life that most second homeowners and full-time residents want and deserve.”

>> Click over to The Sun next week to read this story

The Outsider now has a podcast! Veteran reporter Jason Blevins covers the Western Slope from the inside out with more than a few explorations into the fun side of being outdoors in our beautiful state.

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Breaking Trail

Three years of record participation in outdoor recreation

For so many years, the leaders of the outdoor recreation industry lamented their inability to move the needle on participation in outdoor activities. Year after year, they battled to get more than half of Americans outside to play.

That changed with the pandemic as Americans found the thrills of outdoor recreation. Last year saw a record 57.3% of the U.S. population age 6 and older getting outside for a bit of fun. That’s a 22.2 million increase over 2022, coming to 175.8 million Americans participating in outdoor recreation.

That’s good news. But there are clouds on the horizon. The Outdoor Industry Association’s annual participation report shows a sustained decline in the number of times people get outside for recreation. The frequency of outdoor outings slipped to 62.5 per person a year in 2023, down from a high of 87.4 in 2012.

The most popular activities were hiking, fishing, running, camping and cycling.

The number of core outdoor recreation enthusiasts is also in decline. As is the frequency that those core players get outside. The OIA report calls this sharp drop in frequency “a flashing red warning light for the outdoor industry” that has long relied on the avid outdoor fan to buoy business.

But newcomers to outdoor recreation are getting outside more often than ever before. The challenge for the industry is to get those new arrivals into that core category.

They are increasingly diverse. While most outdoor recreation participants are white (69.7%, which is down from 2022), the percentage of Hispanic and Black participants grew in 2023. The casual outdoor recreation people who get outside 1 to 5 times a year are not interested in the latest and greatest gear and setting speed records.

“Further engagement of new participants requires us to get to know them better and learn more about their motivation for participation in outdoor recreation activities,” the report reads.

The Playground

Both the X Games and Shaun White announce season-long winter sports leagues next year

Action sports is getting an NFL-esque overhaul next year.

After years of one-off events, freeskiing, snowboarding, skateboarding, BMX and freestyle motocross athletes will be competing in global leagues, with winter and summer seasons of events. In the last two weeks, two competing organizations have announced plans to gather athletes into leagues with global events.

The X Games on June 13 announced the most sweeping transformation in its 30-year history, with a new X Games League featuring sponsor-supported teams of athletes competing in four winter and four summer global events a year. Four days later, snowboarding icon Shaun White announced he was launching the first-ever global winter sports competition, with his Snow League featuring men and women skiers and snowboarders competing for a $1.5 million purse in five halfpipe events across the world.

Neither the X Games nor White were too heavy on details about the new plans for revamping action sports. It’s unclear how the two leagues will work together. But it’s evident that winter and summer action sports athletes will have more opportunities to flex their prowess — and make money — in the coming seasons.

Tom Wallisch, a freeskiing legend who now works as a commentator for Olympic and X Games events, said the sponsorship and prize purse dollars flowing to winter athletes has slowed in recent years.

“You can win a gold medal at the X Games and still be in the hole from travel costs,” he said. “There are so many deserving athletes and just a finite amount of money for them.”

Wallisch welcomes more opportunities for athletes to collect more money from teams, sponsors and events.

He appreciates seeing the X Games and White lure new financial backers into winter sports. Spectators could get a chance to see more events if the league plans unfold as expected.

“After so many years, it seems like more people are recognizing this isn’t a bunch of renegade athletes in the X Games. These are legitimate athletes competing in Olympic level competitions that people want to see more often than once a year or once every four years,” he said. “It’s cool to see new money and new interest coming in to create bigger events and give everybody a chance to be a star.”

>> Click over to The Sun on Friday to read this story

The Guide

New HBO doc “Here to Climb” features Boulder climbing icons Sasha DiGiulian and Lynn Hill putting up the first female-bolted route in Boulder Flatirons

It’s apt that pioneering climbers Sasha DiGiulian and Lynn Hill named their new climbing route in the Flatirons above Boulder “The Queen Line.”

“It’s pretty incredible to be the first women to put up a climb in the Flatirons,” Boulder climber DiGiulian told Sun freelancer Colin Bane. “And to do it with my childhood mentor and inspiration was a really cool aspect of the project, just getting to build our friendship together and spend so many big days chatting about life and climbing and learning from each other.”

The Queen Line — a daunting three-pitch 5.13c/d — is featured in a new HBO documentary “Here to Climb,” which traces DiGiulian’s career as a dominating climber. It’s fitting that the film ends with the 32-year-old putting up a new route with 63-year-old climbing legend Hill. DiGiulian grew up with posters of Hill on her bedroom wall. And she is not alone in counting Hill as a mentor. Many of the top female climbers in the world trace inspiration back to the legendary Hill, whose 50-year climbing career includes dozens of first-ascents. Hill has long ranked among the world’s top sport climbers, male or female.

“I knew early on that girls and women were capable of a lot more than they were given credit for in climbing, so it’s not at all surprising to me that there’s a lot of really strong girls and women in the sport now,” Hill told Colin. “Oftentimes, I’ll be at a climbing area and there are more women there than men, or all the women are better climbers than the men. So it’s changed a lot.”

>> Click over to The Sun on Friday to read Colin’s story

Puking in wonderland

Joe Blair was psyched. The Eagle Vail resident and his family landed a hard-to-book reservation for Havasu Falls above the Grand Canyon in Arizona. Four days and three nights in one of the most spectacular desert oases in the world, where Havasu Creek drops over a series of travertine-lined falls on its way to the Colorado River.

Days later his crew was crawling up the 8-mile hike after camping next to the waterfall.

“I’m not gonna make it,” his 15-year-old daughter said, doubled over in 100-degree heat and throwing up after every sip of water. His 18-year-old son was aboard a helicopter taking him to the canyon rim. Nearly everyone on the trail was puking.

“So many sick people,” Blair said. “It was horrible.”

Dozens of hikers fell ill after camping on the Havasupai reservation last week at the aqua-blue waterfalls. The Havasupai Tribe and federal and state including Indian Health Services and the Arizona governor’s office are investigating the outbreak of gastrointestinal illnesses. Officials suspect the issue involves a region beyond the campground at Havasu Falls.

Officials in a statement responding to the outbreak said they are hiring more people to clean bathrooms at the campground and the Supai Village near the campground has a clinic that treats residents and ill visitors. Tribal officials said an early June test of a spring at the campground did not indicate any issues.

Blair said eight of his group of 11 fell ill on the trip.

He doubts it was a contamination in the spring in the campground, where visitors filled their water bottles. He thinks it might have been something in the creek water.

“It was over 100 degrees down there and everyone was swimming. We were in the water all day long. Everyone was,” he said. “It’s not like you want to, but you are getting drops of water in your mouth when you are swimming.”

Or it may have been the campground toilets, Blair said.

“Man, those bathrooms,” he said. “People were using them a lot. And in that heat … it was rough.”

Blair said ailing campers were lining up before 2 a.m. to secure a spot on the helicopter, which carries campers who don’t want to do the hike up and down the canyon. Those who didn’t make it on the helicopter were forced to hike. Some rented mules to carry their packs up the steep trail. The outbreak made national headlines.

Blair said the campground, while crowded, was “absolutely gorgeous.”

“All the waterfalls are amazing. It was one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been,” he said. “But those last 15 hours down there was a bit of a black eye on our trip.”

— j

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Sneak Peek of the Week

Sen. Bennet wades into Dolores River national monument maelstrom

Residents in the West End of Montrose County are not keen on the idea of a national monument around the Dolores River. Many think increased federal protections would limit economic growth from a possible uranium mining revival, restrict cattle grazing, remove motorized access and draw overwhelming hordes of visitors. But supporters say the crowds are coming to the quiet desert canyons around the trickling Dolores and a national monument designation for about 400,000 acres around the river in Mesa and Montrose counties is the best path for managing and protecting the landscape.

The argument around the year-old monument proposal has inflamed rural enclaves like Nucla and Naturita, which are enduring sustained economic challenges since the closure of uranium mines in the 1980s and subsequent Superfund cleanup work.

Colorado U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet leaped into the fray last week, spending several days meeting with local residents, business owners and elected officials. The Democrat does not have a lot of support in Mesa and Montrose counties, which are solidly Republican.

Bennet, Colorado’s longest-serving U.S. senator, has a long history of increasing protections for federal land. He pushed for national monument designations at Chimney Rock, Browns Canyon and Camp Hale. He also secured national historic protections for Camp Amache on the Eastern Plains. He has spent more than six years fighting for passage of his Colorado Outdoor Recreation Economy Act, which would increase conservation protections on about 400,000 acres across the Western Slope. He worked with President Joe Biden to remove energy and mining development from the Thompson Divide.

Bennet has not taken a position on the Dolores River proposal for a national monument around the river’s remote canyons. At a listening session Sunday in Nucla’s brand new K-12 school, he got an earful from residents who are wary of the federal government taking a larger role in their homelands.

“Nobody locks up land better than the federal government,” said former state Rep. Ron Hanks, to thunderous applause from most of the 500 people packed into the school’s gymnasium.

Bennet took his shots in the freshly lacquered room, where opponents in black “Halt The Dolores” T-shirts outnumbered supporters 3-to-1. The comments went well beyond a national monument. The residents have larger concerns, revolving around the increasing power of urban voters in Colorado imposing things like wolves and monuments on rural communities. They said they didn’t feel heard and are being left behind in an economy that continues to direct gains to the wealthy.

In an interview before the meeting, Bennet bemoaned that disparity and how social media is injecting national political fights into local issues.

“I think social media has become a poison in our civic discourse, and in our political discourse,” he said. “In my mind that’s a way of disempowering local people. If you are spinning conspiracy theories that have nothing to do with the local people whose livelihoods really are going to be affected by the decisions that we make — who are actually going to be affected by the decisions you make — and you are reaching out into the vortex of the social media world to make your case, I think that’s a problem for civic debate and discussion. So that, I think, is what we’re grappling with here.”

>> Click over to The Sun on Monday to read this story

In Their Words

Steamboat superstar Charlie Reisman plays all the sports, defying the trend toward specialization

STEAMBOAT SPRINGS – Charlie Reisman is one of those mountain-town kids who makes everyone he meets jealous.

The nationally ranked Steamboat Springs ski jumper is a gifted skier and mountain biker, reflecting the distinctly diverse skill sets of most kids born and raised in mountain towns. But Reisman has taken multisporting to the next level. He graduated in May from Steamboat Springs High School with 15 varsity letters in six sports: soccer, football, golf, basketball, track and lacrosse.

The teenager says playing multiple sports has helped him develop unique strategic perspectives during competitions. He credits his creativity as a reason why he was tapped for three All State teams — including lacrosse, which he just began playing this season — in his senior year.

“It’s a ripple effect,” he told Sun freelancer Kim Beekman. “Golf can help with your mindset strength, and that can help in any other sport you play. Soccer has helped with my vision in basketball and made my passing better than others. Basketball has helped me in lacrosse to be one step ahead of other defenders who just play lacrosse. Being a football kicker, with those clutch moments, helps with any other clutch moments, whether it’s a golf shot, a penalty kick, or a free throw.”

Luke DeWolfe, the athletic director at Steamboat Springs High School, said kids who play multiple sports quickly hone life skills like leadership, cooperation and grit.

“If kids do three sports, they’re probably not going to be exceptional at all of them,” DeWolfe said. “They’ll have to work through adversity. They’ll have to learn what it means to not be a star athlete and to just be a teammate, which prepares them for the real world.”

There are 60 million kids in the U.S. playing organized sports, many in clubs that push early-as-possible specialization. That means kids as young as 5, 6 or 7 are focused year-round on one sport. That also means that nearly 70% of kids quit their sport by the age of 13, according to a 2024 American Academy of Pediatrics study. Of the kids who stay with their chosen sport, fewer than 2% will play at the collegiate level, and only 2% of those will become professional athletes.

According to statistics website Tracking Football, 90% of 2022 NFL draft picks were multisport athletes in high school. Some of the greatest pro athletes of all time — Wayne Gretsky, Alex Morgan, Tom Brady, Abby Wambach, and Steph Curry to name a few — say their multisport backgrounds fueled their single-sport dominance.

Colleges are noticing Reisman. Several have offered the soccer superstar scholarships, but he’s decided to play one more year of club soccer before joining the collegiate ranks.

“I did a reverse of what these specialist kids are doing,” he told Beekman. “I can now narrow down and focus on one sport and get better. These other kids have been spending 10 months a year on soccer, and I’ve been doing it for four months, so when I go to 10 months, I’ll be able to improve so much faster.”

>> Click over to The Sun next week to read Kim’s story

Breaking Trail

A second-best visit count for Colorado ski resorts in 2023-24

Here are a few statistics revealing the sustained strength of Colorado’s resort industry.

• Visitation in 2023-24 to the state’s 27 ski areas was 14 million, the second-highest number ever, but down from the record 14.8 million in 2022-23.
• Spending in Colorado ski towns continues to soar, reaching $4.5 billion in 18 mountain communities from November 2023 through March 2024, up from last year’s record. 
• Spending in the 18 Colorado ski towns is up 50% from 2018-19. 
• Eastbound and westbound traffic counts through the Eisenhower and Johnson Memorial Tunnels on Interstate 70 reached 4.4 million from December through March, down slightly from the same period in 2022-23.
• Visits to all U.S. ski areas hit 60.4 million, down from the record 65.4 million in 2022-23. 
• The National Ski Areas Association’s six-state Rocky Mountain region, which includes Colorado, reported 26.7 million visits, down from the record 28.2 million in 2022-23, the first downturn in the Rocky Mountains since 2019.
• Vail Resorts, which reported an 8% decline in visits in  2023-24 across its 37 North American ski areas, including Vail, Breckenridge, Keystone, Beaver Creek and Crested Butte, plans to invest between $219 million and $224 million at its resorts for the 2024-25 ski season.

>> Click over to The Sun next week to read this story

The Playground

“Charting new territory” with LLC voting in Mountain Village

There are two timeless gripes in Colorado mountain towns: locals bitching about tourists and wealthy owners of second (or third, or fourth) vacation homes whining about their lack of voice in their community because only full-time residents get to vote in local elections.

Except in Mountain Village, the town that incorporated in 1995 on the slopes of the ski hill above Telluride. Mountain Village is the only town in Colorado where nonresidents can vote in local elections. Now the town is weighing a proposal to open its voter rolls to LLCs and trusts that own residential property in the high-end community.

“This is something that no other community has done,” Mountain Village Mayor Marti Prohaska said Wednesday at the beginning of a town council session. “So we are sort of charting new territory here and we want to be conscientious of all the questions that may arise and all the concerns that may arise.”

The proposed amendments to the Mountain Village town charter are meant to accommodate owners who have shifted ownership of their resort properties to trusts and LLCs, which is increasingly common as mountain homes increase in value and especially if they are rented as short-term rentals. The amendments would not allow corporations or owners of commercial property to vote. They would allow two evenly split owners of an LLC — like spouses — to have two votes.

“I see this issue as an issue of voter disenfranchisement,” Mountain Village property owner Peter Mitchell said during the work session Wednesday. He added that the number of people putting their homes under LLC ownership has expanded in recent years.

Mountain Village resident Paul Savage told the council that “residents are the people who care most about this community.”

“We could be ruled by absent owners and tourists who will decide how we all will live,” Savage said. “If nonresidents want to vote in municipal elections, they should move here and understand this community first before trying to change it.”

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Talking mountain town economics in Crested Butte

Next week — Tuesday, June 18 — I’m moderating a panel in Crested Butte looking at resort town economics. Justin Farrell, the author of the amazing book “Billionaire Wilderness” and Neal Payton, a consultant working with the town of Crested Butte on its new community plan, will discuss how mountain towns and communities can thrive.

It will be a good chat. Mountain towns are richer than ever right now, with tax coffers overflowing. But at the same time, the pressure on amenity-rich communities has never been greater, with real estate prices and tourism impacts rapidly changing small-town vibes. The fight over how to best balance resident desires to protect local culture with shifting economic sands and growing tourism pressures is underway in small, rad communities across the country. How Colorado’s mountain towns find that balance will become a national model as rural communities grapple with conservation, growth and housing challenges.

Come over to CB and check out the Crested Butte Public Policy Forum event at the Center for the Arts.

— j

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Sneak Peek of the Week

Running across 14ers and tearing down the stigma of mental illness in the mountains

BRECKENRIDGE — Pro skier Drew Petersen was back home in Summit County as the pandemic stalled the world in the spring of 2020.

In a three-week span that spring, two students from Summit High School took their own lives and two others attempted suicide. The deaths rattled Petersen, a skiing luminary who has been haunted by depression and thoughts of suicide since he was a student at Summit High School, where he graduated No. 2 in his class in 2012.

“I saw myself as those kids. I saw myself when I was walking these halls when I felt so low despite my academic success, my success on skis. I saw how that so easily could have been my outcome,” Petersen said with a sob. “And I knew, in that moment — 100% hard stop, no questions asked — I was going to get myself to a place where I can help those kids. The reality is that this happens in mountain towns all across the West.”

The Summit High auditorium is dark when these words pop up on the screen: “While you are watching this film, three people will be die by suicide in the U.S. alone. This film will help change that.”

“Feel It All” — Petersen’s new film — aims big, with the goal of exposing the dark corners of mental illness that haunt mountain communities. Last week the Colorado-born athlete debuted the movie at Summit High School.

Using clips of the lifelong skier carving down Sawatch Range peaks and running the grueling Leadville Trail 100 in less than 24 hours, Petersen weaves a story that illuminates what many are calling the paradox of paradise.

“How is it that we can feel so alone when we live in this paradise?” he asks the crowd of about 300 Summit County residents in the packed auditorium.

Petersen knows that isolation. He was around 9, in fourth grade, when he first thought of killing himself. As a teenager, with sponsors paying him to ski, he was winning big-mountain contests and landing on magazine covers. He talks about climbing remote peaks and, at the summit, pondering a leap to his death.

“I had a lot going on in my life. I was hiding a lot from the world,” he said. “I was sure I was the only one in the whole world who felt the way I did.”

In 2022, when more than 48,000 Americans died by suicide, 1,384 Colorado residents ended their lives. Colorado ranks sixth in the nation for suicide deaths, behind Wyoming, Montana, Alaska, New Mexico and South Dakota.

The mountain communities in the Rocky Mountain states have earned the grim moniker of “suicide belt,” with suicide rates far exceeding national numbers.

Petersen clicks over to slide showing him and his brother skiing Silver Couloir off Buffalo Mountain, a short hike from the home they grew up in Silverthorne.

“We grew up with everything so wonderful about being in Summit County and the ski culture. We also grew up with the other realities,” he said. “My story is the story of our community. The reality is we do live in paradise. But we can also have a paradoxical experience that we can struggle. When we only focus on the fact that we live in paradise, it invalidates that experience that can also be stressful.”

So now, for the past three years, Petersen has been on a mission to share his story and tear down the stigma surrounding mental illness.

“The solution starts with talking about it,” he said.

>> Click over to The Sun next week to read this story

In Their Words

Outside Festival draws 18,000 to Denver in inaugural effort to build first-of-its-kind outdoor industry gathering

The goal for the Outside Festival was to create a first-of-its-kind event that blends music, films, gear demos, panel discussions and an outdoor industry trade show into a gathering that becomes a must-attend annual event for consumers and outdoor industry insiders.

With about 18,000 visitors crowding into Denver’s Civic Center park and the Denver Art Museum last weekend, organizers are calling the festival a glowing success and plans are underway for next year’s early-June gathering.

“I’m over the moon. We are ready to keep building on this momentum,” said Conor Hall, the head of Colorado’s outdoor recreation office, which partnered with Outside Inc. to host the Outside Festival. “Colorado is a leader in so many ways in growing all these different components of the outdoor recreation economy and culture and it’s time for us to wholly own that. This is how Colorado becomes a national leader in outdoor recreation.”

Hall had just stepped into the outdoor recreation office when the owners of the Outdoor Retailer trade shows announced they were moving the twice-a-year gatherings back to Utah, dealing a blow to the Colorado outdoor industry that had lured the influential event to the state in 2017.

Hall, displaying the optimism that abounds in outdoor recreation, said the departure of the trade show was an opportunity to create something better, with events and activities that were not just for businesses but consumers as well. In the last few years, he has promised “a South by Southwest for the outdoors,” suggesting a new event could rival the Austin, Texas, gathering that draws more than 350,000 attendees.

“It was crazy to say that two years ago,” Hall said. “It’s not crazy anymore.”

For years outdoor gear brands have been grousing about the cost of the Outdoor Retailer trade shows. The venerable event has evolved from an essential business-to-business, or B2B, trade show — where brands and retailers inked merchandise deals on the show floor — into a gathering with speakers, panels, education and events. The Outside Festival wanted to accelerate that evolution, with an industry gathering and business trade show joining a consumer-oriented music and film festival.

“It was not just about music or films. It was not just B2B. It was not just about consumers. It was all of it wrapped into one. It felt like we were putting on six festivals at the same time,” said Jon Dorn, the chief entertainment officer at Boulder-based Outside Inc.. “For me, this is a high-water moment and maybe the best thing I’ve been involved in. As someone who has been in this industry for a long time, I’ve never seen anything like this.”

Outside’s early projections — presented to the Colorado Economic Development Commission in 2023 in a plea for funds initially set to support Outdoor Retailer trade shows in Denver — estimated 10,000 attendees in the first year of the festival would generate an economic impact around $4.7 million. By 2027, Outside and the outdoor recreation office estimated 70,000 Outside Festival attendees would generate a $54 million impact.

Early attendance counts show about 18,000 people passed through Civic Center park over the two-day Outside Festival. When snowboarding legend Shaun White spoke at the Denver Art Museum, more than 750 people packed the auditorium, missing a performance by musician Andrew Bird at the festival across the street.

>> Click over to The Sun next week to read this story

The Guide

First drownings of the Colorado whitewater season as rivers swell with snowmelt

The 2024 whitewater season is barely a couple weeks old as the spring snowmelt swells rivers. And the drownings have begun.

One man drowned and another is missing after their raft capsized near Yarmony Rapid on the Upper Colorado River last weekend, a few days after a woman on a commercial rafting trip drowned on the Poudre River. Rescuers say the two men on the Colorado River were not wearing PFDs.

And this week, accomplished kayaker Dylan Wallace died in the Pine Creek stretch of the Arkansas River downstream of Granite. The Class V stretch of whitewater — the steepest section of the Arkansas River in the state — was roiling with high flows around 1,550 cubic-feet-per-second. Wallace, a 27-year-old from Steamboat Springs who was living in Salida, was an avid and accomplished whitewater kayaker. His death marks the first drowning of an expert whitewater kayaker in Colorado since the death of mountain guide Chason Russell in the Crystal River’s Class V Meatgrinder rapid in June 2021.

Last year there were at least 23 deaths in Colorado’s rivers, streams and creeks.

Birds of Prey races extends to two weekends in December with first races for women since 2015

In December, after two days of bluebird training, snowy weather forced the cancellation of three days of ski racing at the Beaver Creek Birds of Prey World Cup, a first in the history of the storied races that debuted in 1997.

The cancellation was a huge setback for the Vail Valley Foundation, the nonprofit that shepherds the Birds of Prey races that draw nearly 300 athletes and coaches from 14 nations to kick off the ski season with an early-December weekend festival that stirs a $14 million economic impact.

This year, the foundation is doubling down, with a 10-day festival that will include, for the first time since the 2015, Alpine Ski World Championship, women’s World Cup ski racing.

The International Federation of Skiing, or FIS, released its race calendar for the 2024-25 ski season Tuesday, with men and women racing over two weekends — Dec. 6-15 — on Beaver Creek’s steep Birds of Prey course. The Vail Valley Foundation is planning a multiday festival with concerts, beer tastings and events in Beaver Creek and Avon around the downhill, super G and, for the men for the first time since 2019, giant slalom races.

The winningest skier of all time, Mikaela Shiffrin, will get to race a few miles from her home in the Vail Valley.

“It’s been inspiring to watch the men ski on one the best speed tracks on the World Cup tour, and I’m excited the women will get a chance to ski on it this year too,” Shiffrin said in a statement. “Plus, we’re on the road for more than half the year, so it’s going to be a treat to be racing so close to home and be able to sleep in my own bed. Can’t wait to see all of the fans out there cheering!”

And Edwards phenom River Radamus, who earned his first World Cup podium last February at Palisades Tahoe, also will race his specialty, giant slalom, in his hometown. In a statement he called the giant slalom racecourse at Beaver Creek “one of the best giant slalom tracks on the circuit.”

— j

Corrections & Clarifications

Notice something wrong? The Colorado Sun has an ethical responsibility to fix all factual errors. Request a correction by emailing corrections@coloradosun.com.