Sneak Peek of the Week
“It’s absolutely terrifying what is happening at some of these ski areas.” A look at resort ski injuries.
1,330
Average number of skiers and snowboarders admitted to trauma centers in Colorado following an on-slope accident
BRECKENRIDGE — Silas Luckett doesn’t really remember anything. The skiers behind him on the blue run at Breckenridge called ski patrol when they saw the 13-year-old skier veer into the trees at a high speed. When patrollers reached him, Silas was unconscious and not breathing well.
Patrollers bundled him up in a sled and raced him down to the emergency clinic at the base of the ski area. Dr. Paul Leccese directed a busy team of nurses and techs as they cared for Silas, one of as many as 100 patients the clinic sees in a day.
Robby Luckett was there, his hands trembling as he filled out paperwork while the team scrambled around his son.
Soon, Silas is talking. He’s shaking amid the commotion. EMTs switch him onto another gurney and roll him into a waiting ambulance. It’s been barely a half hour since he arrived at the clinic.
A couple hours later at the St. Anthony’s Medical Center in Frisco, after more scans show no fractures or damage to internal organs, Silas is sitting up, chatting and sipping water. Emergency department Dr. Marc Doucette tells him he likely will be able to go home soon.
“I think you had them pretty scared over there,” says Doucette, a veteran of the Summit County emergency department that handles skiers transported from Level 1 trauma centers at the base of Breckenridge, Copper Mountain and Keystone, three of the busiest ski areas in the country.
“Holy cow you scared me, man,” says Robby, his hand on his boy’s shoulder. “When I finally saw him for the first time, he wasn’t conscious. It was terrifying. If he gets out of this with just a concussion, it will be a miracle.”
“I guess I have a hard head,” says Silas, drawing a laugh from his dad that resonates with relief.
The Lucketts, on the final day of a weeklong ski holiday with grandparents, are lucky. A couple weeks earlier a 14-year-old snowboarder at Keystone died after careening into trees, one of six ski resort deaths this winter in Summit County.
Silas is one of thousands of people injured on Colorado ski slopes every winter. With the state’s ski hills posting record visitation in the last two seasons — reaching 14.8 million in 2022-23 — it would appear that the increasing frequency of injuries coincides with rising visits. We say “appear” because, unlike just about every other industry in the country, the resort industry does not disclose injury data.
Skiing is dangerous. Everyone knows that. And anyone who has lived in a ski town in the past several years knows the chatter about injuries is increasing. It’s likely the second-most talked about topic behind housing. But it’s nearly impossible to track because the insular industry does not release any information about the thousands of people injured on the slopes every season.
The Colorado Sun has spent two years gathering trauma center admission data from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment that detail skier and snowboarder emergency room visits in 25 Colorado ZIP codes from 2017 to 2022. We sent open records requests to five sheriffs, asking for details on 10 years of on-mountain hit-and-run investigations. The Sun analyzed ambulance trips transporting skiers and snowboarders from resorts to trauma centers. We visited two of the busiest emergency departments in the state this season — one at the base of Breckenridge, the busiest ski area in the country, and one in Frisco in Summit County, home to four ski areas that host close to 5 million visits a season.
And we spoke with nearly a dozen skiers who have been involved in accidents and collisions. All the information gathered shows an increasing concern about collisions on ski slopes as visits reach record levels.
>> Click over to The Sun next week to read this report
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Breaking Trail
A new plan for the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park: Sell it to Colorado
$169 million
Estimated cost of the Stanley Hotel in a proposed sale
The deal to sell the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park to an Arizona nonprofit has faded, so the State of Colorado is stepping in with a plan to buy the hotel.
The Colorado Educational and Cultural Facilities Authority, which helps nonprofit educational and arts groups fund capital projects, is planning to take over ownership of the historic Stanley Hotel.
The authority will take the role as owner after the plan to sell the hotel to Arizona’s Community Finance Corp. fell through. Instead of selling to the Arizona group and taking ownership after as much as $450 million in bonds for renovating and upgrading the hotel are paid back, the Colorado Educational and Cultural Facilities Authority, or CECFA, will create a subsidiary and become the borrower of those bonds.
It’s a more simplified plan, said the district’s executive director Mark Heller.
“Once the bonds are repaid, CECFA will own the property for the foreseeable future,” Heller said. “That will create a private source of funding that we could use to fulfill our mission in support of educational and cultural facilities across the state.”
It’s an unusual and complicated plan. The authority, which, since 1981, has helped 300 organizations across Colorado secure $7.6 billion in bonds for schools, student housing, performance halls, museums and Olympic training facilities, does not own any of the buildings it has helped fund.
The original plan was even more complicated, involving the Community Finance Corp. as the owner of the Stanley Hotel that would pay off the bonds and then transfer the property over to CECFA.
The new plan removes the middle man. The hotel will continue to be operated by the Grand Heritage Hotel Group, which has owned the Stanley Hotel since the 1990s.
The plan to raise as much as $450 million from selling bonds would help fund the acquisition of the hotel for $169 million, $40 million for the Grand Heritage Group’s nearly 89-unit Fall River Village Resort and $54 million for a new film center at the Stanley Hotel, according to documents outlining the previous proposal with the Arizona buyer. The film center project is meant to capitalize on the thousands of movie buffs who flock to the hotel every year to visit the historic building that inspired Stephen King’s “The Shining.”
The Colorado Economic Development Commission in 2015 designated the Stanley Film Center a Regional Tourism Act project, qualifying it for $46.4 million in state sales tax incentives over 30 years.
There are some hurdles ahead as the Stanley plan unfolds. CECFA will seek approval from the legislature this session to expand its operational roles to include things like contracting with a management company to run properties it owns. Then it needs to sell the bonds.
Jeff Kraft, the deputy director of the state office of economic development, said the proposed legislation “will enable the organization to engage in a wider range of community revitalization projects.”
“That’s a win for the Colorado communities that will benefit from its important work, and OEDIT looks forward to working with CECFA on future projects,” said Kraft in an email to The Sun.
>> Click over to The Sun next week to read this story
The Guide
Calling on presidents to protect landscapes
{{221,898 acres}}{Swath of the Thompson Divide where drilling and mining are banned for 20 years}}
Since 2009, a group of cowboys and conservationists in the Crystal River Valley have worked together to block oil and gas development in the Thompson Divide, a sprawl of wildlands stretching from south of Glenwood Springs to Crested Butte. And over in Crested Butte, a crew of conservationists and community leaders have labored for nearly 50 years to block molybdenum mining on the peak above town everyone calls the Red Lady.
The two groups, working on both sides of the Raggeds and West Elk wilderness areas, have notched some wins. The Forest Service suspended oil and gas leases in the Thompson Divide in 2015. Crested Butte locals have worked with the owner of the moly mine on the Red Lady to protect the watershed above town.
The decades of aligned work reached a monumental moment this week as the Biden administration installed a 20-year ban on extractive uses in the Thompson Divide.
“This is part of a continuous drumbeat from a community that is absolutely unified around protection of this special place,” said Peter Hart, the attorney for the Carbondale-based Wilderness Workshop, which has led the battle to protect the Thompson Divide.
Colorado U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet worked for more than a decade to build local support for his Colorado Outdoor Recreation and Economy Act, which includes a permanent halt to all new mining and oil and gas drilling on more than 220,000 acres in the Thompson Divide. The CORE Act hasn’t found traction in Congress since Bennet first proposed it in 2019, but he’s making progress with President Joe Biden. The president protected Camp Hale in 2022 as a national monument, a plan first floated in the CORE Act.
So now half of the largest land bill proposed for Colorado since the early 1990s has been handled by presidential proposals. U.S. House Republicans earlier this month considered several new land management bills to hobble executive land conservation actions that bypass Congress.
As Congress delays consideration of public land conservation bills in Colorado — Colorado Rep. Diana DeGette has been trying to get her Colorado Wilderness Act passed since 1999 — it’s no wonder advocacy groups are turning their calls to presidents, like those behind the campaign to create a national monument around the Dolores River.
The Playground
Remember this name: Summit Lynch. The 12-year-old snowboarding prodigy is on his way to the 2030 Olympics
Did you catch Colin Bane’s story on Summit Lynch, the 12-year-old snowboarding phenom who competed in all six snowboarding disciplines at the amateur nationals this week at Copper Mountain?
“I don’t even remember my first time snowboarding — I mean, I was 1 year old — but there’s videos of my dad first getting me into it and every video I’ve seen is of me loving it from the first time I ever did it,” Lynch told Bane. “I’ve wanted to do it all, ever since.”
Summit is a snowboarding superfan. Not only has he been riding since he first toddled, but he’s a regular in the fan-packed corral at the bottom of halfpipes and slopestyle venues. Colorado, with its stable of the best terrain parks and pipes in the country, offers easy access to the biggest contests in snowboarding and freeskiing — like the X Games, Dew Tour and U.S. Grand Prix — where snowy groupies can cheer their sports’ superstars. So it’s not surprising that Colorado kindles not just amazing athletes, but fans of amazing athletes.
“I’d always had a view of the riders competing on the world stage and immediately knew I wanted to do that for myself,” Lynch said.
That’s where skiing and snowboarding fans differ from the cheering masses at other professional sports. We get to go out and play the same game all the time. And for the talented kids like Summit, they can actually start to compete alongside their idols.
Lynch is chasing Red Gerard, the Silverthorne native who grew up with rope-tow in his backyard and won Olympic gold in the South Korean slopestyle contest in 2018.
“I think Red’s career shows that if you can do well in everything, you’re a great snowboarder,” Lynch said. “I want to be more than just a kid who can huck off a jump or spin onto a rail then spin off of a rail, or just go racing through the gates.”
Lynch competed in every snowboarding contest at Copper’s USASA National Championship this week: halfpipe, slopestyle, rail jam, boardercross, slalom and giant slalom. The preteen didn’t climb any podiums but he will. He’s poised to be a superstar and on track to shine at the 2030 and 2034 Winter Games.
>> Click here to read Colin’s story
Why the viral April Fools bit that Disney was acquiring Vail Resorts was not actually foolish
The April 1 round of news out of the mountain resort world is always fun. The Aspen Daily News and Crested Butte News still do hilarious April Fools Day editions. A few ski and resort companies toss out thigh-slappers as well. (The Tesla-powered J Skis is top-notch.)
One caught my eye this week: Unofficial Networks’ post about the Walt Disney Corp. buying Vail Resorts. “It’s a perfect synergy between storytelling and nature,” the post read, fake-quoting the Disney boss.
While the Disney-fication of skiing is a time-worn narrative for ski bums, the idea of a merger between Disney and skiing is not very April Fools. It already happened.
In the early 1960s, Walt Disney began studying plans to add a Swiss-inspired ski resort village to his company’s wildly successful media and amusement park empire. In 1965 the U.S. Forest Service asked for developers to pitch a ski resort plan in the remote Mineral King Valley of California’s Sequoia National Forest adjacent to the national park created in the late 1800s. In 1969, Walt Disney Enterprises won a permit from the Forest Service to plan a mega resort with a dozen-plus chairlifts, $35 million in new roads and a capability to host 20,000 visitors a day.
Essentially, a resort the size of Vail. Modeled in that faux-Swiss-village motif like Vail.
Walt died and an exceptionally expensive Disney World opened in Florida. A lawsuit protesting the project set a legal precedent that defines today’s environmental activism. Mineral King became part of the Sequoia National Park in the late 1970s, effectively killing the Disney ski resort plan. And the ski resort world has adopted plenty of inspiration from the theme-parked Disney machine with its meticulously planned European villages.
In the 1980s, Vail Associates then-boss Mike Shannon — now the “S” in the multi-billion-dollar private equity KSL Capital Partners firm fueling Alterra Mountain Co. — took cues from Disney’s Mineral King plan, creating on-mountain fun zones for kids’ ski schoolers, with Magic Kingdom-esque mine tunnels, enchanted forests and old-timer forts. The two companies even created Sport Goofy, a skiing version of the buck-toothed Disney hound who served as a Vail mascot in the ’80s and ’90s.
Check out the new book “Disneyland on the Mountain” by Colorado journalists Greg Glasgow and Kathryn Mayer and listen to their interview on our Sun-Up podcast with Kevin Simpson to learn more about Walt Disney’s unrealized dream of a Disney ski hill and the Magic Kingdom’s connection to Vail.
— j
Corrections & Clarifications
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