Sneak Peek of the Week
Snowboarding artist says mountain instinct kicked in as his truck slid off Red Mountain Pass
14 miles
Stretch of U.S. 550 atop Red Mountain Pass where the Colorado State Patrol has recorded all 38 injury car accidents and all 8 fatal accidents on the precarious stretch of highway between Ouray and Silverton since 2013
The hurricane-like gust blinded Pat Milbery. He couldn’t see anything out the windshield of his Toyota.
Then he felt his tires slip off the pavement. He was crawling, maybe only 7 mph, but suddenly “both of my driver’s-side tires are off the road and I’m, like, teetering on the edge of the road,” the pro snowboarder turned artist said.
Milbery was not on a road for teetering. U.S. 550 between Ouray and Silverton is the sketchiest stretch of pavement in Colorado. It was dark and blizzarding on Jan. 13. The canyon below the road is an abyss, plummeting hundreds of feet.
He was about to roll his rig into that canyon. Cars that leave the so-called Million Dollar Highway often tumble for hundreds of feet. Few survive that.
Milbery knew all this. The Eagle River Valley native has driven the pass many times over the past few decades. As the truck tipped, he said, “my instinct as a snowboarder kicked in.” He knew he shouldn’t hesitate and fight to get the truck back on the road. That would likely roll the 2006 4Runner and once that started, his chance for survival would drop significantly.
“As if I was on a cliff or in an avalanche and that slide is about to take me down the slope …so I just decided to drop in,”he said. “I jerk my wheels as hard as I can and … it literally drops me into about a 30-degree pitch. So I aired off the side of the road.”
After a blink in the air, he bounced into deep snow and started gaining speed. “Super fast,” he said. He smashed into trees. Glass shattered from all his side windows. The truck pinballed and spun, heading toward a cliff. He was going faster.
“The snow is so deep, it comes up over my windshield. I cannot see a thing. I’m just like literally holding on for my life,” he said. “I get caught in … this little weird highway of trees and they’re almost like bowling pins. And they keep bouncing me back and forth. Boom, boom, they’re impacting the side of the car. I’m just like holding on. Finally, the snow comes off my windshield. I can see again. And I’m just like, oh God, I don’t even wanna see cause it seems like I’m in a Hollywood movie thriller or something like that. I still can’t believe I’m driving down off of a mountain and I just hold on. I tried pumping my brakes. They’re not really doing anything. I see like two big trees in front of me — probably a hundred feet away — and I’m like, all right, just aim for these trees, dude, you need to stop this car.”
Milbery is one of those guys who fills your cup every time you see him. He gives long and strong hugs. He’s always ready for a good talk. His energy is radiant, which is reflected in his art. He paints vibrant murals across the state that fill streetscapes with bursts of color. He was on his way to Silverton with a giant painting he was giving to his favorite charity, the Snowboard Outreach Society.
“I’m extremely, extremely thankful to be here right now,” he said after his narrow escape on Red Mountain Pass last month. “And I probably should not be here right now.”
The Colorado Sun asked the Colorado State Patrol for its reports from U.S. 550. State troopers investigated 143 car crashes on U.S. 550 from 2013 through 2023. Eight of those accidents resulted in fatalities and 38 involved injuries. All of those fatal and injury accidents were on a 14-mile stretch of the highway between mile markers 78 and 92.
Milbery left the road at mile marker 82.
The fatal accident reports are horrifying. In May 2013, a car that left the road at mile marker 79 spent 51 feet in the air. In April 2015, a fatal crash at mile marker 89 was not discovered for six days. In November 2015, troopers measured a car traveling 202 feet in the air after slipping off the pavement at mile marker 89. A driver was ejected after their car rolled for 458 feet at mile marker 90 in December 2018. All the fatal accident reports show cars rolling down the canyon.
Milbery gleans a lot of lessons from his life. He’s constantly adjusting as he navigates, making sure he is absorbing all the messages that surround us on every step of our journey.
He pursues “situations that develop and force you to become so much of a greater person than yourself, than you thought you could ever be, and it really elevates you to achieving new things and becoming a better version of yourself.”
The ordeal on Red Mountain Pass was one of those lessons. A big one. And he’s got plans to tap that experience to make his light shine even brighter.
>> Tune in Monday and Tuesday to the Colorado Sun’s Daily Sun-Up podcast to hear a two-part conversation between Pat and Jason
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In Their Words
Opposition grows to SB33, which would quadruple property taxes on short-term rental homes
$1.36 billion
Estimated decline in tourist spending if short-term rental property owners sell or reduce available nights to meet the requirements of Senate Bill 33
The fight over Senate Bill 33 is about to get noisy.
Next week, hundreds of property owners and small business owners — many from mountain towns — are planning to visit the state Capitol to voice opposition to the legislation that would quadruple property taxes for 24,100 short-term rental homes in Colorado.
The legislation — sponsored by Denver Democrat Sen. Chris Hansen and supported by Gov. Jared Polis as a tool for easing the decade-long boom in vacation rentals and possibly converting more homes to longer term rental housing for workers — would classify homes that are rented short-term for more than 90 nights a year as commercial lodging properties, which are taxed at 27.9% compared with the 6.765% residential property tax rate.
The advocates will be championing a new survey of short-term property owners who say, if the legislation passes, they will either sell their homes or reduce their rental nights to meet the legislation’s 90-day threshold. The survey commissioned by the short-term rental advocacy group Colorado Lodging and Resort Alliance estimates a 56% reduction in short-term rentals nights would cost the state $1.36 billion in tourist spending.
“There are a lot of people in this debate who feel their perspective is not being seen,” said CJ Willey, a board member for the alliance who owns a short-term rental property in Steamboat Springs. “There is a belief out there that people in the short-term rental ecosystem — property managers and owners and cleaners and landscapers — are making obscene profits and that does not match up. They play a critical role in mountain economies and they feel that perspective is not being heard in this debate.”
When the legislation was first heard in October by the Legislative Oversight Committee, more than 80 speakers lined up to blast the plan.
The bill, which the Legislative Oversight Committee changed little following that October hearing, has galvanized a growing number of property owners and short-term rental advocates in the past three months. The 550-member alliance commissioned a survey of 2,500 short-term rental owners in late 2023, conducted by Tennessee-based Laffer Associates, a consulting firm led by supply-side economist Arthur Laffer, a national advocate for sweeping tax cuts.
The survey showed 89% of the owners — nearly all of them renting for more than 90 days a year — will either sell their property, stop renting it short-term or reduce their rental days to 90 to keep their property taxes from quadrupling.
The Laffer economists estimated this would reduce short-term rental bookings in Colorado by 56%. Using the Colorado Tourism Office’s annual economic impact reports that show tourists in short-term rental homes in 2022 spending $2.44 billion in Colorado, the Laffer economists estimate Senate Bill 33 will cost the state $1.36 billion in visitor spending. The drop in spending will threaten 8,148 tourism-related jobs in the state, according to the report.
Breaking Trail
Alterra Mountain Co. picks up $3 billion from new investors
$3 billion
New investment in Alterra Mountain Co.
Alterra Mountain Co. is doubling down on its billion-dollar bet to carve out space in the rapidly consolidating resort industry. The privately held Denver-based company this week announced a new investment of $3 billion.
In 2017, a partnership with then-$7.5 billion private equity firm KSL Capital Partners and Chicago’s Henry Crown and Co., which owns Aspen Skiing Co., paid $1.5 billion for struggling Intrawest’s six ski hills and Canadian Mountain Holidays heli-skiing operation. Then the partners bought Mammoth Resorts in California and Utah’s Deer Valley in 2018, creating Alterra Mountain Co. and the Ikon Pass in 2018 as a rival to the industry dominating Vail Resorts and its Epic Pass.
Alterra Mountain Co. has invested $1.4 billion into its now 16 ski resorts and the world’s largest heli-skiing operation The Ikon Pass offers access to more than 50 resorts on five continents. It’s partnering with a New York City developer on a $3.2 billion expansion of Deer Valley.
This week KSL Capital Partners announced it had closed on a “single-asset continuation vehicle” for Alterra Mountain Co. with investors and partners providing $3 billion to the company. The financial tool allows partners to retain longer-than-planned ownership of assets and return capital to initial investors while enrolling new investors. A statement from KSL Capital Partners, which manages $21 billion in assets and 165 travel and leisure companies, said the new investors in Alterra Mountain Co. include “a diverse group of state and county pension funds, corporate pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, endowments, foundations and insurance companies.”
Last year, Alterra Mountain Co. secured two $500 million loans due in 2028 and 2030.
Moody’s Investors Service, which rates debt for investors, reported that Alterra had $1.1 billion in cash in January 2023 and the new loans would bump that to $1.3 billion with access to the $500 million loan due in 2028.
The new investment is a way for the Crown family and KSL Capital Partners to get a bit of cash back from their now 7-year-old investment. It also allows them to keep ownership of Alterra’s resort assets alongside a growing list of investors.
Alterra Mountain Co. has taken a lot of cues from Vail Resorts, including its deeply discounted season pass. If Alterra stays on the Vail Resorts’ path, a public offering is somewhere on the company’s horizon.
And if Alterra Mountain Co. goes public, like Vail Resorts did in 1997, all the company’s initial equity investors will harvest a windfall. Especially if Alterra stock tracks apace Vail Resorts’ stock, which, at $220 a share, has grown 10 times from its IPO nearly 30 years ago.
The Playground
Colorado hockey dads bringing the rinks home
24
Hockey rinks cleared on the ice of Dillon Reservoir for the upcoming PBR Colorado Pond Hockey Tournament
Across Colorado’s mountain towns, the dads are Zambonis.
Every storm they sweep the snow, clearing backyard rinks and ponds so the kids can skate.
The DIY backyard hockey rink is the thing in Colorado’s high country neighborhoods right now, where ambitious parents are flooding yards to create energy-draining venues for their ready-to-play kids.
“It’s been a total game-changer for my 5-year-old,” said Eric Schissler, whose Steamboat Springs front-yard hockey rink has lights, six-inch boards and nets. “He has a huge passion for it now. It’s all he wants to do.”
No one is really counting homespun hockey rinks, but Sun freelancers Eugene Buchanan says the trend is growing as Colorado hockey moms and dads spend long nights sculpting ice playgrounds.
“The kids love them and are on them all the time,” said Michael Campanale, an Eagle County hockey coach who also plays in the local town league. “There’s no better way to instill a passion for the sport.”
In a couple weeks, several hundred hockey players from across the country will slip onto 24 carefully crafted rinks on Dillon Reservoir for the annual PBR Colorado Pond Hockey Tournament. It’s one of the nation’s largest outdoor hockey contests and it sells out in less than a day to 300 teams.
>> Click over to The Sun on Friday to read this story
Colorado Supreme Court to hear challenge to ski resort use of liability waivers
[https://newspack-coloradosun.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/P2271073.jpg]Skiers wait for the Paradise Express chairlift on Presidents Day weekend 2022, at Crested Butte Mountain Resort. (Dean Krakel, Special to The Colorado Sun)]
It was toward the end of the first day of their ski vacation with their church in March 2022 when Mike Miller and his daughter Annie skied up to the Paradise Express lift at Crested Butte Mountain Resort.
The chair spun around and Annie couldn’t settle into the seat. Mike grabbed her. The chair kept climbing out of the lift terminal. He screamed for the lift operator to stop the chair. So did people in the line. The chair kept moving.
Annie tried to hold on to the chair. Mike tried to hold his 16-year-old daughter. The fall from 30 feet onto hard-packed snow shattered her C7 vertebrae, bruised her heart, lacerated her liver and injured her lungs. She will not walk again.
The Miller family claims the lift operators were not standing at the lift controls and “consciously and recklessly disregarded the safety of Annie” when they failed to stop the Paradise chair. In a lawsuit the family filed in December 2022 in Broomfield County District Court, they accused Crested Butte Mountain Resort and its owner, Broomfield-based Vail Resorts, of gross negligence and “willful and wanton conduct.”
Next week the Miller family will take their arguments to the Colorado Supreme Court in a hearing that challenges not just the Colorado Ski Safety Act but the use of liability waivers that are required for nearly every lift ticket and season pass sale. The Millers argue that the waiver that was part of their lift ticket purchase should not immunize resort operators from following state laws regarding chairlift safety. They are asking the state’s highest court “to consider whether a ski area in Colorado can create contractual immunity from statutory duty of care in a contract that is part of a ski lift pass.”
It’s an argument that has been tried before and failed in state and federal courts, but it’s never landed before the Colorado Supreme Court.
A lot of parties are joining the case.
The National Ski Areas Association filed a brief noting that chairlifts are one of the safest modes of transportation created, with only 0.142 deaths for every 100 million miles skiers have traveled on chairlifts since 1973.
Colorado Ski Country, the Colorado Camps Network and the Colorado River Outfitters Association have joined the case in defense of the ski area, arguing that a decision that weakens liability waivers “will result in insurance becoming unaffordable or unavailable” for recreation providers.
The Colorado Trial Lawyers Association argues that liability waivers that protect resort operators from negligent operation of a chairlift are in conflict with the Colorado Ski Safety Act and “violate the public policy of our state.”
“The court’s decision will have wide-ranging implications for the millions of people who visit Colorado ski areas every year,”reads the trial lawyer’s brief to the Colorado Supreme Court.
>> Click over to The Sun next week to read this story
— j
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