by JAMES BROOKE
GEORGETOWN, Colo. -- Next weekend, skiers here are to inaugurate the world's highest chair lift. Whisking 1,200 skiers an hour to a 12,700-foot ridge, the lift will offer sweeping views of the Rockies and challenging runs down the Continental Divide.
But in a sign of changing times in the nation's most popular skiing state, a Colorado environmentalist is suing, charging that Loveland Ski Area, the owner of the lift, has violated its federal permit for building on National Forest Service land.
After fighting logging, mining and cattle grazing on National Forest lands, environmentalists declared open season this winter on ski areas, once a seemingly wholesome presence in the landscape. The expansion of ski areas, mostly on public land, that once aroused little opposition is now being fought by groups that are angry over growing real-estate development on adjacent private land.
Increasingly run by publicly traded corporations, ski areas are turning to mountain real estate as a source for big profits in the future. In contrast, the number of lift tickets sold nationwide each winter has been stagnant for a decade, at around 53 million. In that period, ticket sales in Colorado increased by about 20 percent, but the state has seen its ski ticket sales drop 11 percent this season as some resorts endured their scantiest Christmas season snow in 40 years.
"It is not about skiing, it is about real-estate development," said Jonathan Staufer, a shop owner in Vail who is chairman of the Ski Area Citizens Coalition, a new environmental group. "Industrial tourism is posing the next major threat to wild places in Colorado and America."
Here in the High Rockies, signs of growth abound.
Directly below Loveland's new Continental Divide chair lift, but muffled by a quarter mile of granite, traffic on Interstate 70 regularly slows to a crawl in the Eisenhower Tunnel, a major link between Colorado's busiest ski areas and greater Denver's 2 million people. In 25 years, traffic has quadrupled in the tunnel, 60 miles west of Denver.
In the 75 miles between here and Eagle-Vail Airport, enough home construction is planned to double the populations of several towns in five years. A rural airstrip in 1990, the airport is Colorado's second busiest this winter, offering direct jet service to 13 cities, including New York and San Francisco.
On public lands, recreation is shaping up as the new battleground. In the last decade, while the volume of timber cut in National Forests fell by two-thirds, the number of recreational visitors jumped by 40 percent. The U.S. Forest Service predicts it will record 1 billion recreational visits a year by 2010.
"Now we see lawsuits, not only against oil, gas and mining, but also to stop recreational use," the chief of the Forest Service, Mike Dombeck, said in Denver recently, after encountering protesters objecting to a 2,000-acre expansion of Vail into National Forest land.
In Colorado, where most skiing is done on National Forest land, the conflict flared into the public eye in October when an amorphous group, the Environmental Liberation Front, protested the expansion of Vail's ski slopes by burning three buildings and damaging four lifts.
But in less dramatic fights, Colorado environmentalists are lobbying federal agencies to block new ski trails at Keystone Resort and Breckenridge Ski Resort. Nearby, at Arapahoe Basin, they are trying to block the installation of a snow-making system that would fulfill that area's dream of becoming the nation's first to offer skiing year round.
Elsewhere in the West, environmentalists are fighting construction of a new ski area, Pelican Butte, in southern Oregon, and the expansion of Snowbasin in Utah. In recent months, the Forest Service overrode objections to the expansion of Santa Fe ski area in New Mexico, but rejected a proposed ski area for Mount Shasta in Northern California.
Last week in Colorado, in the face of strong local opposition, a consortium of Vermont and Colorado developers abandoned plans to build a ski area 10 miles south of Steamboat Springs, which would have been called Catamount. In addition to the ski slopes, the developers planned 3,700 new homes and 1,000 hotel rooms.
"They had the resources and they had the permits," said Susan Otis, executive director of the Yampa Valley Land Trust. "But they knew that in the community there no longer was a desire to have a new ski area."
The developers gave the Yampa Valley trust conservation easements preserving 3,296 acres of pasture and announced plans to build 40 luxury houses and a lodge at the site.
Census figures show that Colorado has the third-fastest growing population in the nation, after Nevada and Arizona. Now, defenders of the fragile lands in the Rockies are also worried that out-of-state demographic pressures will result in a proliferation of second-home developments and swelling crowds at ski areas.
On one end, the average age of a second-home buyer in the United States is 51. Over the next 18 years, 78 million Americans are to turn 51. Their children number 72 million and are expected to pack ski areas again. The intermediate group now in their 20's and 30's numbered only 44 million.
"The fight over land use is really just starting, because you are talking of a burgeoning population of residents and visitors," said Diane Gansauer, executive director of the Colorado Wildlife Federation, a conservation group composed largely of hunters and anglers. "I don't buy the view of wildlife that accepts deer as lawn ornaments."
At public hearings in Vail last spring, one resident drew applause when he said, "We want to look at trophy elk, not trophy homes." At the hearings, most speakers spoke against the expansion plans of Vail, the nation's largest ski area.
Critics noted that within 40 miles of Vail, eight ski areas are already operating, with 126 lifts and 850 trails covering almost 15,000 acres. Vail Resorts is expanding its ski terrain by 19 percent, even though lift ticket sales dropped 5 percent last winter, to 1.6 million.
Two weeks ago, a company close to Vail Resorts, Turkey Creek LLC, successfully bid $42 million for a 2,900-acre parcel of private land that is a mile from the resort's new expanded area. The ski company has an option to buy half of Turkey Creek.
And Vail Resorts and Intrawest Corp., a Canadian company, are partners in the construction of 4,600 housing units at the Keystone ski area. Intrawest has a total $1 billion in construction planned at the nine ski areas it owns in the United States and Canada.
"The trend is to focus on real estate, while quietly selling some ski tickets on the side," said Sandy Shea, a director of High Country Citizens' Alliance, a group that opposes a 300-home development planned for private land next to Crested Butte Mountain Resort.
Noting that Crested Butte offers free skiing early in the season to fill company-owned hotel rooms, Shea added: "I don't think any ski area is making money off tickets. Most of the money is made from real estate."
When the Forest Service approves ski slopes near private land, the value of the private land jumps. Looking at ski lifts that serve mediocre slopes near vacation homes, some Colorado environmentalists derisively call them "real estate lifts."
"Ski-in, ski-out real estate commands a 25 percent premium," said Neil Adams, a real-estate broker in Crested Butte. "When you, your wife and your five kids decide to go skiing, do you want to play taxi driver? Your kids can come home for lunch, no problem. Just ski right up to the door."
The ski industry describes as minuscule the 20,000 acres of ski area expansions planned on National Forest lands around the nation. About one-quarter of the nation's 525 ski areas operate on Forest Service land, leasing about 190,000 acres out of total National Forest holdings of 190 million acres.
"That means that on one-tenth of one percent of Forest Service land, 30 million people enjoy a winter recreation experience," said Michael Berry, president of the National Ski Areas Association, an industry group based outside of Denver.
Partly because of a Forest Service policy in Colorado to favor expansion of existing ski areas over the construction of new ones, and fights waged by environmentalists against new ski areas, the last one to open on National Forest land in the state was Beaver Creek, in 1980.
While ski areas are magnets for growth, not all of the growth in second homes in the Colorado high country is tied to skiing.
"You can go to other areas of Colorado, where there are no ski areas, and trophy homes are being built," said Lyle Laverty, the Forest Service's top official for Colorado. "Part of the attraction is being close to a National Forest."
In the lawsuit against Loveland, the environmentalist, Steven Hannon, asserts that the Forest Service awarded permit for a 1,700-foot surface lift and then allowed the ski area to nearly triple the length of the lift and to change it to a chair lift.
Ken Abrahamson, the general manager of the ski area, which is fighting the suit in Federal District Court in Denver, said: "The Forest Service approved putting skiers on top of the ridge. We followed the process from A to Z."
While ski area operators say they can work with mainstream environmentalists, they say they are worried that the fight is being escalated by fringe elements.
The current issue of Earth First Journal, a radical publication, applauds the arsons at Vail as "a rational, overtly political and defensive act undertaken by Mother Earth's freedom fighters, not terrorists, in face of overwhelming odds." The newspaper also devoted a full page to instructing readers how to make the kind of Molotov cocktails that caused $12 million in fire damages at Vail.
Greg Walcher, Colorado's newly appointed director of the state Department of Natural Resources, has watched the Rocky Mountain economy shift dramatically to tourism from mining, grazing and logging, partly because of environmental opposition to extractive industries on public lands. Now he worries, he said, that: "Some people want to slow tourism down, then shut it down. It would be a horrible mistake not to take them seriously."
This article first appeared in the NY Times
Scott Silver, Executive Director,
Wild Wilderness
248 NW Wilmington Avenue, Bend OR 97701
Phone (541) 385-5261 E-mail: ssilver@wildwilderness.org