Sneak Peek of the Week
Paddlers cheer the return of the fabled Gore Race
$2 million
Liability insurance policy required for the whitewater race through Gore Canyon, south of Kremmling
Last weekend, the 68 rafters and kayakers who raced down 9 miles of Class V rapids in the Colorado River’s daunting Gore Canyon were not just paddling for their lives, they were reviving one of the nation’s most storied whitewater races.
“It’s a meeting of the minds of everyone who is really into whitewater,” said Conrad Niven, whose Whitewater Racing LLC resuscitated the Gore Fest race this year after two years of no racing in the steepest stretch of the Colorado River. “People were so stoked. So many people were coming up to me and saying thanks. That’s such a nice pay off.”
The revival of the Gore Fest race — one of the the first Class V whitewater races in the country — bodes well for the country’s top whitewater paddlers. The future of racing in difficult whitewater has been clouded in recent years as acclaimed competitions fade away, mostly due to the challenge of securing liability insurance.
American Whitewater, which took over organizing the Gore Fest race in 2017, was forced to cancel the 2022 and 2023 races after the longtime insurer of the event, the American Canoe Association, announced its underwriter would no longer provide liability for the race. The insurer was willing to write policies for whitewater events on rivers classified as Class IV or lower.
A series of expert-only whitewater races soon followed the Gore Fest race into a terminal hole.
The famous Class V Tobin Downriver Race at California’s annual Feather River Festival was canceled in 2022 due to insurer concerns. The Steep Creek Championships on the plummeting Homestake Creek above Red Cliff has drawn the world’s top kayakers since its founding in the early 2000s but has not been part of the GoPro Mountain Games in the last two years.
The North Fork Championships on Idaho’s North Fork of the Payette River first took place in 2012 and the Class V race quickly grew into the nation’s largest whitewater kayak race, with paddlers navigating through slalom gates in churning Class V rapids. But the family-owned race was canceled in 2023 when operators were unable to find insurance for the race.
The Green River Narrows Race was created in 1996 and regularly draws more than 150 kayakers who race through Class V rapids lined with hundreds of spectators.
The Great Falls Race on the Potomac River in the Park Service’s Great Falls Park just outside Washington, D.C., started in 1988 with kayakers racing for less than a minute down a stretch of daunting waterfalls. The Great Falls Foundation formed in 2015 to help manage the race, and last year started hosting the Little White Salmon Race on Forest Service land in Washington state, one of the most prestigious kayak races in the world.
The Great Falls Foundation — which now organizes Class V whitewater races in Kentucky, Maine, New York and Mexico — has worked with an insurance provider to craft a policy covering Class V whitewater races and the foundation helped Niven secure a $2 million liability policy for the Gore Fest race.
It was more expensive than the American Canoe Association policy but it covered everything and it enabled Niven and American Whitewater to secure a permit for the race from the Bureau of Land Management, which requires insurance for event permits. Niven signed a deal to take over the race from American Whitewater earlier this year.
“I was like well I want to race and I know my friends want to race so I really put my neck on the line,” said Niven, who competes on the U.S. Open Men’s National Rafting Team and teaches snowboarding in the winter for Aspen Snowmass.
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In Their Words
Montana offers lessons for trapping and relocating wolves
18
Number of livestock killed by Montana wolves so far this year, compared with 24 in Colorado
1,096
Number of wolves in Montana, compared to an estimated 14 in Colorado
In the 1990s, as wolves stalked livestock in Montana, wildlife officials used traps and helicopters to capture the predators and move them to other locations.
“It did not go well,” said Carter Niemeyer, a wildlife biologist who worked with wolves for decades, helping capture wolves in Canada and relocate them to Montana and Idaho in the 1980s and was in charge of trapping and relocating dozens of problematic wolves around Glacier National Park in Montana in the 1990s. “They were all done as politically expedient relocations … and what we learned was that the adults did not stay together and pups were abandoned and left to die.”
Colorado Parks and Wildlife on Tuesday announced it was going to try the trap-and-move strategy for a pack of wolves in Grand County. The so-called Cooper Creek pack — two adults who were among the 10 from Oregon who were introduced to Colorado last year and at least three of their pups — have been killing cattle and sheep near Kremmling for several weeks.
CPW recently denied a request by ranchers to kill the wolves, which include the first pups bred by the reintroduced predators from Oregon. It’s unclear if CPW plans to move the Copper Creek pups.
“Our options in this unique case were very limited, and this action is by no means a precedent for how CPW will resolve wolf-livestock conflict moving forward,” CPW director Jeff Davis wrote in a statement announcing the trapping and relocation plan Tuesday night.
“Being able to access areas to change behaviors with a suite of non-lethal tools and range riders will be key to keeping depredations low as the wolf reintroduction effort moves forward,” CPW spokesman Travis Duncan told The Colorado Sun in an email.
Montana stopped moving problem wolves in the 1990s, not long after the strategy proved unsuccessful. A majority of the relocated wolves died. And the survivors tended to keep killing livestock in their new region.
“It’s hard to break them of that behavior,” Niemeyer said. “I would urge Colorado state folks to consider the political fallout of what they do where you release them next.”
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Breaking Trail
Front Range water managers hint at challenges to heralded $99 million deal for one of the Colorado River’s oldest water rights
1 million acre-feet of water a year
The equivalent of a year’s worth of historic water rights owned by the Shoshone Hydropower Plant in Glenwood Canyon, one of the largest and oldest rights on the Colorado River
There are some storms brewing above the $99 million deal to acquire one of the oldest and most coveted water rights on the Colorado River.
Western Slope water users cheered when the Colorado River Water Conservation District last December inked a deal with Xcel Energy to buy water rights for the Shoshone Hydroelectric Plant. The agreement was the culmination of decades of work to protect sustainable flows for myriad Colorado River users from Glenwood Springs to the Utah border.
The water rights flowing through the historic power plant in Glenwood Canyon are some of the oldest on the Colorado River, allowing the plant operators to divert 1,250 cubic feet per second of the river. It’s one of the oldest, largest and most senior water rights on the river in Colorado.
The Shoshone water is more senior than those controlled by the heavyweight sippers of the Colorado River that have spent more than a century carefully building water rights for a growing and thirsty Front Range. There are 10,000 water users who draw Colorado River water from above Shoshone and their water rights are junior to the power plant. And some of those users are not stoked on the Shoshone deal.
Colorado Sun water reporter Shannon Mullane obtained some internal letters from big Front Range water users expressing concerns about the deal and hinting at challenges ahead.
“If we start messing with what we’ve all gotten used to … who knows if you pull on that string what unravels,” Kyle Whitaker, water rights manager for Northern Water, told Shannon.
The Colorado River Water Conservation District maintains there is no plan at all to change the water right that has been in place for more than a century.
“Our whole point here isn’t to enlarge the right. We’ve said that very clearly, and I’m going to say that right now, we are not trying to enlarge the Shoshone water right beyond what its historic use has been,” said Andy Mueller, general manager for the Colorado River Water Conservation District.
>> Click here to read Shannon’s story
It’s unlikely Vail Resorts or Alterra could step up for Eldora. So who else could buy the Boulder County ski area?
Who could step up to buy Eldora Mountain Resort? The Boulder County ski hill was listed for sale last week but its owner Powdr.
Park City, Utah-based Powdr has a deal to sell Killington ski area in Vermont — the largest ski area on the East Coast — to a group of local investors. Powdr also is selling SilverStar ski area in British Columbia and Mt. Bachelor in Oregon as the “adventure lifestyle company” realigns its assets with a focus on its action sports camps and national park concessions contracts.
It’s not likely a small operator would pick up all three of the scattered ski areas. And it’s also not likely that the resort industry’s dominant and expanding players — Vail Resorts and Alterra Mountain Co. — would buy Eldora, even though both companies have shown interest in ski areas close to major metro areas.
The problem for Alterra and Vail Resorts is the recent Department of Justice interest in Alterra’s plan to buy Arapahoe Basin. If the feds have some antitrust concerns with Alterra picking up its third Colorado resort — the Denver-based company owns Steamboat ski area and has a long term contract to operate Winter Park ski area — then it’s safe to assume antitrust issues could swirl around Vail Resorts acquiring its sixth Colorado ski area. (Vail Resorts owns Beaver Creek, Breckenridge, Crested Butte, Keystone and Vail ski resorts.)
Vail Resorts certainly has the money. The company reported $705 million in cash on hand and $625 million in available credit at the end of its third quarter in June. (It also has $2.7 billion in long-term debt.)
Alterra, which is privately owned, also has the cash to buy Eldora. The company has invested close to $1.5 billion on its portfolio of 16 ski areas and two helicopter skiing outfits since forming in 2018.
The vowel-challenged Powdr is not sharing a listing price for Eldora Mountain Resort, which does not include any developable land for real estate, which tends to attract investors who can offset operational costs with slopeside condo and home sales.
But Vail seems focused on European expansion right now. The Broomfield-based company in May closed on its second ski resort in Switzerland, taking a majority ownership stake of the Crans-Montana Mountain Resort. The company took majority ownership of the Swiss Andermatt-Sedrun ski area in 2022.
Blick, the largest newspaper in Switzerland, reported this week that Vail Resorts is negotiating to buy the Flims Laax Falera ski area in Switzerland. Vail Resorts does not comment on speculation, which would get the company in hot water as a publicly traded company. But the company’s leaders have been clear in recent years that they are interested in expansion in Europe, where more than 1,000 ski areas host nearly 200 million visits a year, accounting for more than half of the world’s ski resort traffic. (Ski areas in the U.S. and Canada host about 80 million skier visits a year.)
So without Vail Resorts and Alterra Mountain Co. in the mix for Eldora, that leaves opportunities for other independent operators that are finding success in the shadow of the dueling giants. Boyne Resorts, the owner of Big Sky in Montana and nine other ski areas, has not added to its portfolio since buying six ski areas from a hedge fund in 2018. Mountain Capital Partners, the Durango-based owner of Purgatory ski area, has invested $78 million into its 10 ski areas in Arizona, Oregon, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Chile since 2015. Mountain Capital acquired the 445-acre Lee Canyon ski hill near Las Vegas from Powdr in 2023.
Stephen Kircher, the head of Boyne Resorts, and James Coleman, the head of Mountain Capital Partners, are not publicly discussing any interest in Eldora. But they are most certainly watching. The Pacific Group Resorts, which manages six resorts in five states and British Columbia, including Powderhorn ski area on the Grand Mesa, could be another player interested in Powdr’s three ski areas.
(One source said the timing of the Powdr sale “is terrible from a systems perspective” with an ownership transition going down in the middle of a ski season, which brings all sorts of challenges.)
“Eldora, Mt. Bachelor and SilverStar are all great properties in their own right and will definitely be sought after for the right buyer,” said Christian Knapp, vice-president marketing for the Park City, Utah-based Pacific Group Resorts, who declined to say if his company would be interested in any of the three ski areas.
— j
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