Sneak Peek of the Week
10th Mountain soldiers gather in Colorado to honor the past, train for war
14,000
Peak number of 10th Mountain Division soldiers training at Camp Hale in 1943
CAMP HALE — Staff Sgt. Cameron Daniels is taking a break in the middle of a grueling 26-mile traverse from Camp Hale to Vail.
The 10th Mountain Division soldier is wondering if maybe his great-grandfather ever made the same trek. It’s Daniel’s first time to Colorado and he’s training for war while connecting with his fellow 10th Mountain soldiers and the veterans like his great-grandfather who were America’s first ski troopers.
“He trained right here at Camp Hale,” Daniels said Wednesday during the 16-hour traverse from Camp Hale to Vail. “I’m super excited about this whole thing, not only to continue the legacy with all these guys, of the 10th Mountain Division, but also continue my family’s legacy. What my great-grandfather did here is just unbelievable.”
His great-grandfather, Wayne Peters, was killed in northern Italy’s Poe Valley in February 1945, after the division had stormed Riva Ridge and secured Mount Belvedere, marking a pivotal victory in the war. The division would go on to take Mussolini’s villa and by May 1945, Germany would surrender to Allied Forces.
On his trip to the Rocky Mountains this month, Daniels visited the Denver Public Library. He connected with a historian there and they accessed a hard-to-find file. They found his great-grandfather’s Bronze Star citation.
“Which my entire family has never seen,” he said. “We’ve all known he’s had a Bronze Star, but no one knows how he got it.”
Daniels, who is from upstate New York north of Fort Drum, also found photos of Peters training at Camp Hale.
“Just being able to be here and climb on the same routes he’s probably climbed and ski the same tracks, it’s just great,” he says.
Every year, 10th Mountain Division soldiers from Fort Drum travel to Colorado for winter training and to celebrate the American ski troopers whose preparation at Camp Hale helped them topple German strongholds in the mountains of northern Italy.
Known as Legacy Days, the mid-February event celebrates the division’s pivotal 1945 battles, including the February 1945 attack on Riva Ridge that required soldiers to ascend a 2,000-foot, icy cliff at night to reach a critical German observation post and the subsequent siege on Mount Belvedere.
The open-to-the-public Legacy Days events start with current 10th Mountain Division members joining WWII veterans and their descendants at a ski parade at 1 p.m. Friday at Ski Cooper near Leadville and the 10th Mountain Memorial ceremony outside the ski area at 3:30 p.m.
The Colorado Snowsports Museum in Vail is hosting a talk with the authors of the book “10th Mountain Division at Camp Hale” at 5:15 p.m. Friday. A Black Hawk helicopter will land atop Vail ski area’s Avanti Express lift at noon Saturday and the 10th Mountain Legacy parade in Vail Village begins that night at 6:30 p.m. The Ski Trooper Cup at Vail begins at 1 p.m. Sunday.
>> Click over to The Sun on Friday to read this story
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In Their Words
Legislation amending the Colorado Recreational Use Statute nears final approval
Lawmakers in the Colorado House on Thursday gave an early nod to legislation that would amend the Colorado Recreational Use Statute and ease growing concerns among landowners fearing lawsuits from recreational visitors on private land.
Senate Bill 58 was approved by the Colorado Senate earlier this month and the House approved the legislation on first reading Thursday. A final vote could come as early as Friday.
The bill requires landowners to warn visitors of hazards on their property. If they erect signs — at least 8 inches by 10 inches — warning of dangerous conditions, structures and activities, they cannot be sued by an injured visitor for “a willful or malicious failure to guard against a known condition.” The bill also expands the list of possible recreational activities on private land to include more modern pursuits, like trail running, paragliding, backcountry skiing and kayaking.
The legislation is designed to help landowners who have been limiting free recreational access to their property following a 2019 federal appeals court decision that awarded an injured cyclist $7.3 million after a crash on a washed-out trail at the Air Force Academy. Since that decision, landowners have been closing trails, requiring visitors to sign liability waivers and even donating their land, saying their attorneys were advising them to limit access.
The Fix CRUS Coalition has 46 outdoor industry members and helped lobby lawmakers for the amendment to the Colorado Outdoor Recreational Statute. This is the third time Colorado legislators have tried to adjust the statute, but the efforts in 2019 and 2022 did not make it out of committee, facing fierce opposition from the Colorado Trial Lawyers Association.
Breaking Trail
Forest Service’s historical decision greenlights Monarch plan to expand beyond its special-use permit boundary
377 acres
Size of planned expansion into No Name Basin at Monarch ski area
The Forest Service is ready to approve a 377-acre expansion and new chairlift at Monarch ski area after an environmental review of the ski area’s boundary-expanding plan found “adverse effects are expected to be short-term and not significant.”
Expansions to ski area special-use permit boundaries are uncommon in Colorado. Most terrain expansions are within existing permit boundaries. A decision by the Forest Service that an expanded boundary would have “no significant impact” is even more rare.
The 43-page Draft Environmental Assessment published Thursday by Pike-San Isabel National Forests Supervisor Ryan Nehl greenlights Monarch’s plan to develop 62 acres of runs, 75 acres of gladed tree runs on 377 acres served by a new 2,700-foot, fixed-grip, four-pack chairlift.
The ski area’s No Name Basin project — first formally proposed to the Forest Service in October 2023 but included in the ski area’s 2011 Master Development Plan —will add mostly intermediate terrain to the ski area, growing the Chaffee County hill to 1,146 acres.
The plan includes an access road, a warming hut, restroom and patrol building as well as a 700-foot realignment of the Continental Divide National Scenic Trail. Perhaps the most challenging issue facing ski area expansions these days involves impacts to habitat for the Canada lynx, which the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service considers threatened under the Endangered Species Act.
The Forest Service’s environmental study of the expansion, which is commonly skied as part of Monarch’s snowcat skiing operation, found that lynx likely avoid the open, beetle-impacted glades inside Monarch ski area, opting for more suitable habitat around the ski runs.
“Monarch’s ski area does not present an impediment to lynx travels, and lynx can shift their movements to avoid the ski area if preferred,” reads the Forest Service’s assessment.
Monarch has seen visitation climb to record highs, reaching 210,000 in the 2022-23 ski season. The ski area’s longtime owners in 2022 bought the Monarch Crest tram and restaurant atop Monarch Pass near the ski area to help alleviate parking problems. The expansion will help the independent ski hill better manage crowds.
The Monarch plan is the second in 15 years to seek Forest Service approval beyond its special-use permit boundary. The White River National Forest in 2019 issued a “Finding of No Significant Impact” for the Aspen Mountain plan to add 153 new acres to the ski area’s operational boundary, which opened this winter. Before that, the last time a Colorado resort sought a permit boundary expansion was in the mid-2000s, when Crested Butte Mountain Resort proposed adding 276 acres on nearby Snodgrass Mountain. The Forest Service, after five years of rigorous environmental review, rejected the Crested Butte plan, sending ripples throughout the resort industry.
In the last 15 years, most ski area expansions at Colorado ski resorts — including at Steamboat, Keystone, Arapahoe Basin, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge, Copper Mountain, Crested Butte, Eldora, Loveland, Purgatory, Ski Cooper, Snowmass, Sunlight, Vail and Winter Park — have been inside permitted boundaries.
Don Dressler, the mountain resort program manager for the Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Region said the expansion plan at Monarch is consistent with the Gunnison National Forest Plan, which details any and all uses on the forest. (The Monarch expansion crosses into both the Grand Mesa Uncompahgre Gunnison National Forests and the Pike-San Isabel National Forests.)
“An amendment to the Forest Plan is not required with this decision,” Dressler said.
The Forest Service opened a 45-day objection period Thursday, available to anyone who filed a written comment on the proposed plan when the agency began its review in September 2023. Click here for more information.
The Playground
A new plan for taxing short-term rental properties offers options for lawmakers
Colorado Rep. Shannon Bird hopes her plan for commercial taxation of Colorado’s short-term rentals does not rile property owners as much as a proposal to quadruple property taxes on all homes that rent for more than 90 nights a year.
“Conceptually, this legislation makes more sense to a lot of people and it is less complicated than the alternative,” said Bird, a Westminster Democrat whose House Bill 1299 would impose commercial property tax rates on owners with three or more Colorado homes that are rented short term to vacationers.
The plan arrives as lawmakers amend Senate Bill 33, which proposes taxing short-term rentals properties at commercial rates if they are rented to vacationers for more than 90 days a year. The Colorado residential property tax rate in 2023 was 6.7%, compared with 27.9% for commercial properties.
The Senate Finance Committee was scheduled to hear Senate Bill 33 on Feb. 20 but postponed the hearing as opposition groups lined up to contest the legislation. Sen. Chris Hansen, a Denver Democrat, last month said he planned amendments to Senate Bill 33 that would focus on large hotels that converted from commercial to residential properties, reducing tax revenue for the state.
But there is a simmering opposition to Bird’s plan. House Bill 1299 would ask as many as 50,000 Colorado property owners to file signed affidavits every November with county assessors, said CJ Willey with the Colorado Lodging and Resort Alliance.
Willey said House Bill 1299 would place “an extreme burden” on assessors. And assessors are extraordinarily busy right now as Colorado property values soar and owners file record numbers of protests.
The Colorado Assessors’ Association is watching the new legislation. The association has not taken a formal position but is in contact with Bird, the group’s executive director Corbin Sakdol said.
If any formal opposition takes shape, it will very likely focus on the existing regulation and taxing plans crafted by local communities in the past several years as the number of short-term rental properties increased across the state. There are very few communities that do not tax, license and closely monitor short-term rental properties.
“The application of new statewide policies will have a detrimental impact on local communities,” said Chris Romer, whose Vail Valley Partnership fosters a tourism economy that relies on visitors staying in short-term rentals. “Local towns are able to best manage STRs to meet their individual needs.”
>> Click over to The Sun next week to read this story
New owners, same vibe at Silverton Mountain
For years, I’ve said the coolest thing in Colorado skiing was Silverton Mountain. The experience at the rugged ski area is unlike anything in Colorado’s plush resort landscape. No grooming. Lots of hiking. Daunting and demanding terrain.
Aaron and Jenny Brill spent nearly 25 years building not just the ski area, but a culture. Assembling a strong crew of some 50 workers, they fostered a vibe of self-reliance, asking skiers to be attuned to the hazards of the backcountry while riding a chairlift to reach steep, technical lines.
Silverton Mountain posed a fascinating paradigm, blending backcountry savvy with a tired chairlift in high-consequence terrain. The giant map at the very top of the ski hill encapsulated the Silverton Mountain sentiment well, with the opening words in all-caps type: YOU COULD DIE HERE TODAY! THIS IS NOT A REGULAR SKI AREA.
When the Brills sold Silverton Mountain last fall, there was no gnashing of teeth like when another fiercely independent ski hill, Arapahoe Basin, sold to Alterra Mountain Co. The lack of lamentation probably has a lot to do with the buyers. Andy Culp and Brock Strasbourger, a pair of 30-something expert skiers with a company that markets high-adrenaline holidays, have a deep respect for the Brills’ handiwork. They are peddling tweaks, not overhauls, as they map out the next chapter for Silverton Mountain.
I spent a couple days with Culp and Strasbourger earlier this month, catching a powdery bull’s-eye at Silverton Mountain. With almost three feet of fresh snow, the two skiers attacked the mountain, seeking out cliffs and dense tree runs like any other ripper who visits the frill-free hill up a winding mountain road above one of Colorado’s most remote mountain towns.
Strasbourger says he wants to protect what the Brills built.
“Which is, like, this gritty, soulful, one-of-a-kind experience that just doesn’t exist,” he says, dangling on the slow and lofty double chair. “It’s not just the mountain or the terrain. It’s the vibe and how you feel when you are here and the people that make this place work. That’s the most important thing.”
>> Click over to The Sun on Sunday to read this story
— j
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