Sneak Peek of the Week
Road opens in Sangre de Cristos after 2022 blowdown
800
Acres of forest in the Sangre de Cristos impacted by a wind event in 2022
Powerful winds in early 2022 toppled thousands of spruce and fir across 800 acres in the southern Colorado Sangre de Cristo Range south of Cuchara.
For two years the entire Trinchera Road — Forest Service Road 436 — above Blue Lakes west of Cuchara has been closed to the public, preventing access to popular lakes, campgrounds and the Blue Lake Trailhead, as well as the eastern flank of Trinchera Peak.
The San Isabel National Forest and Colorado State Forest Service last year partnered on a project that removed downed timber from a 94-acre area in the blowdown area. Specialized logging equipment that cuts trees on steep slopes cleared a fuel break that provided 196 truckloads of timber to the Blanca Forest Products sawmill in Blanca. The effort also produced 100 cords of firewood the Forest Service is selling.
On Aug. 1, the San Carlos Ranger District lifted the road closure with an order that opens Trinchera Road to hikers, motorcycles and ATVs but no vehicles wider than 50 inches. The Forest Service is planning work in 2025 to clear the road for full-sized vehicles.
Blowdowns are rare but they happen in Colorado. In October 1997, hurricane-force winds downed some 6 million mature Engelmann spruce and subalpine fir across a 25-mile swath covering 20,000 acres in the Routt National Forest near Steamboat Springs. The Routt Divide Blowdown ranks as the largest ever recorded in the Rocky Mountains.
Wind blowdown events tend to kill the tallest trees. Research by Colorado forest ecologists shows that blowdowns can shift forest dynamics for decades, with new species of trees — like aspens — growing in areas that were once crowded with conifers.
But areas with wind-killed trees can be “yet another avenue for forest pests to take hold,” reads a report from the Colorado State Forest Service.
“Spruce beetle is currently active in the vicinity of these wind-driven, uprooted trees, setting the stage for heightened potential of spruce and other bark beetles to increase populations in the coming years,” a 2022 forest health report from the Colorado State Forest Service at Colorado State University reads.
Colorado Sun freelance photographer Mike Sweeney ventured into the Cuchara blowdown last week to capture some captivating pictures that reveal the devastation of the wind event. Click over to The Sun on Friday to see Mike’s photos.
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In Their Words
Gunnison entrepreneur’s innovative Gnara finds footing after pandemic setback
$50,000
Funding in the first half of a Kickstarter campaign launching Gnara’s new Go Free leggings and shorts
Georgia Grace Edwards was a guide on Alaska’s Mendenhall Glacier in the summer of 2016 when she dreamed up a discrete zipper that allows women to pee without removing clothing … or backpacks, climbing harnesses and warm layers. She founded the company — along with her pals Charlotte Massey and Bianca Gonzalez — they called SheFly from a dorm room at Middlebury College in Vermont in 2018.
The company is now called Gnara and it’s headquartered in Gunnison offering pants, shorts and a recent collaboration with LIVSN Designs that has the GoFly Pee Zipper in outdoor overalls.
Earlier this month, Edwards, who is CEO of Gnara, started a Kickstarter campaign – her first – to launch her company’s new Go Free Leggings and shorts, both with her patented zipper that makes it quick and easy to pee in the wild. Halfway through the Kickstarter campaign, Gnara has raised nearly $50,000 from more than 350 backers.
“This has been a big year for us,” said Edwards, who rebuilt the company in 2020 after the pandemic shut down her fair-trade, zero-waste manufacturer in India, leaving her unable to sell any products for a year. “From the start we wanted to get this technology into as many hands as possible, and I’ve always known as a small brand we would need licensing to do that.”
The licensing deal with Bentonville, Arkansas-based LIVSN Designs — with the GoFly zipper in its all-weather Ecotrek Overalls — was another first for Gnara. The LIVSN launch on Kickstarter this summer raised $100,000 on the first day.
Edwards is a 2021 graduate of the Innovation, Creativity and Entrepreneurship Lab — or ICELab — at Western Colorado University, where the lab’s Moosejaw Business Accelerator program has fostered a growing numbe of outdoor businesses and entrepreneurs.
Today, Gnara’s stretchy Go There pants are sold by major chains like Moosejaw Mountaineering and REI. Cole Brauer, the first American woman to sail nonstop around the world alone, wore the Gnara Go There Pants during her record-setting journey.
“Peeing out of our GoFly zipper for 120 days straight,” the 28-year-old Edwards said. “It’s so encouraging to see women achieving these huge goals with our technology. It’s really a great equalizer out there. Not just in terms of need. It just makes everyone have a better time.”
The Outsider now has a podcast! Veteran reporter Jason Blevins covers the industry from the inside out, plus indulges in the fun side of being outdoors in our beautiful state.
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Breaking Trail
The end of free skiing for seniors
2
Number of Colorado ski resorts that offer free season passes to senior skiers
Baby boomers seeded the ski resort industry. They built ski towns. Skiing would not look like it does without their skinny-ski wiggling throughout the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s.
So what does skiing owe those boomers when they hit their 70s, 80s and 90s?
A deal! But not a handout.
The 70-plus set used to get free ski passes. But as hordes of graying skiers — enabled by modern medicine, healthy living and knee replacement surgeries — age into senior status, resorts have phased out the freebies. Since the early 2000s, almost all Colorado ski areas have nixed free skiing for the old-timers. It was not a smooth process.
“I feel like we should be celebrating people in their 80s and 90s who still want to get up on the hill,” said Corina Gordon, who this week launched a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for skiers in her hometown of Telluride who recently learned the local ski hill had ended discounted free passes for the 70-plus crowd. Now only two Colorado ski areas give free passes to skiers over 80 — Sunlight and Purgatory — while Ski Cooper and Powderhorn offer octogenarian passes for less than $30.
The owner of Telluride Ski & Golf on Wednesday spoke with hosts at the KOTO radio station and amended the company’s new pricing program. Chad Horning told the radio station that any 80-plus skiers enduring financial hardships could call him and he’d hook them up with a free ski pass.
Horning, noting aging infrastructure costs at Telluride, said that while the resort’s owners “have a hard time subsidizing lift access to this mountain for people who can afford it,” the new pass prices were meant to include a note for people 80 or older who are struggling financially: “We do not want you paying for that pass.”
Seniors do not schuss silently when they lose their free-skiing perks. Keystone and Breckenridge’s legendary boss John Rutter tried to nix free skiing for seniors in the 1990s and weathered all kinds of heat before reversing course. In 2000, Aspen Skiing Co. bosses noticed 15% of the visits at their four Roaring Fork Valley ski hills were from skiers using the company’s elder-friendly passes.
“God bless ’em, they were good customers and so faithful, but it was just too big of a number for us to ignore,” said John Norton, the former head of operations at Aspen Skiing Co. who shepherded the decision to end free access for 70+ skiers in 2000. “The crowd just erupted on us. I was taking dozens of calls a day. I wanted to listen to everyone who was calling and they were all similar: ‘I’ve waited all my life to get a free ticket out of you guys.’”
The tactic at Aspen Skiing Co. was to replace the free pass with a $99 season pass for the 70-plus crowd, back when the full season pass for the company cost around $1,500.
“We priced it there so it would be embarrassing to complain about,” Norton said. “One guy called me a sneaky little bastard. He said you’re gonna raise that price next season and it’s the end of an era. I laughed because that was exactly our plan.”
It was definitely the end of an era. Months after Aspen skiing’s decision, Vail Resorts followed suit with a $99 pass for seniors and the free-for-old-timers dominoes started to fall.
Today, seniors get no discounts on Vail Resorts’ $1,025 Epic Pass. Neither do senior skiers buying the rival Ikon Pass, which is $1,359 for 2024-25. Aspen Skiing Co. offers skiers 70 and older its unlimited Premier Pass for $809, seniors 65-69 pay $2,429 and skiers 18 to 65 pay a whopping $3,324.
>> Click here to read this story
The Playground
Bike park backers charging forward despite rejection by Jeffco planning board
70,000
Maximum annual visitors projected at the proposed 230-acre, lift-served Shadow Mountain Bike Park near Conifer
Phil Bouchard and Jason Evans have a big plan for Colorado’s first-ever bike park with a chairlift ferrying mountain bikers 830 vertical feet to reach 16 miles of trails. The neighbors on Shadow Mountain Drive above Conifer are not fans of the pair’s big plan.
In what likely ranks among the most organized opposition groups ever assembled, several dozen members of the Stop The Bike Park group testified across two marathon Jefferson County planning board members this month. In 3-minute bursts, Stop The Bike Park members, all wearing red shirts, carefully detailed myriad issues with the park plan, focusing on traffic, wildlife, wildfire and compatibility with rural character of the community atop Shadow Mountain Drive.
On paper, the group’s coordinated critique of the bike park presented to JeffCo planning commissioners spans 380 pages. It was an impressive display and the culmination of nearly four years of opposition to the bike park.
And it was convincing. The Jeffco planning board — after nearly six hours of final deliberations this week — unanimously rejected the bike park plan, recommending that the county commissioners deny the request for a special use permit. Bouchard and Evans need that permit to build their Shadow Mountain Bike Park in the area zoned for agriculture and homes.
The planning commissioners all agreed it was a well-crafted plan. But just not on Shadow Mountain Drive.
Bouchard and Evans are not giving up. They are taking their team of engineers and consultants to the county commissioners with a hope that they can convince at least two of the three-member board that their bike park plan can work. It is not common, but commissioners have been known to make decisions that do not align with planning boards, Bouchard said.
Stay tuned for more news as the opposition ramps up a second campaign and the on-their-heels bike park backers fight for two yeas. The Jeffco commissioners will hear the bike park plan at their Oct. 1 and Nov. 12 meetings.
>> Click here to read this story
SunFest is tomorrow!
The Sun’s annual SunFest confab, with panels and presentations hosted by all our reporters at the University of Denver Josef Korbel School of International Studies, is like our Christmas. Our most fun day of the year, when we get to mingle with the best news readers in the state.
I’m giddy about my 9 a.m. chat with Dr. Scott Thompson, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, Marty Otañez, a professor of anthology at the University of Colorado Denver and Reilly Capps, one of my favorite Colorado journalists who has spent nearly two decades writing about the underground — and recently quite above ground — world of psychedelics.
It’s going to be such a good conversation. After the Food and Drug Administration last month sent MDMA back to the drawing board after nearly 20 years of study of the medicine as a treatment for Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, states like Colorado and Oregon are taking a leading role in building a framework for psychedelic medicine. This conversation will explore how Colorado’s new regulations can help foster the promise of psychedelic-assisted therapy while protecting patients and including diverse contributors to the suddenly red-hot psychedelic movement.
Then I’m visiting with my friend Drew Petersen at 1:45 p.m. Drew is a pro skier turned mental health advocate who has spent the past several years shining a bright light on the suicide crisis in mountain towns. His story is both heartbreaking and inspiring.
Tracy Ross is planning a lively public lands discussion with a hunter, mountain biker, conservationist, wildlife advocate and energy industry supporter. The diverse group will talk about balancing often unaligned values when it comes to Colorado’s heavily used public lands.
Panels will swirl all day long with topics including innovative ways to eat, recycling, moving toward clean energy while drilling for oil and gas, stopping the next pandemic and housing.
Click over to coloradosun.com/sunfest-2024 for details and ticket information. Hope to see ya there. Hit me up — jason@coloradosun.com — with possible questions for panelists.
— j
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