Like nearly every Colorado ski hill, Winter Park needed big money to help fix its employee housing problem. Enter its deep pocketed operator, Alterra, with a blueprint others can follow.
Mountain Village
Posted inEnvironment
The government will pay you $30 an hour to sort through Telluride’s trash in the name of social science
Picking through what’s left behind by high-season tourists will help towns in San Miguel County figure out how to change what people toss and why
Posted inBusiness, COVID, Economy, News, Outdoors
Colorado mountain, resort communities are rebounding — and then some — from coronavirus-scarred 2020
John Norton, Gunnison County’s tourism czar, was talking to his board last April. The ski resort had closed abruptly. Lodging and restaurants were closed. Visitors were being told to leave. The pandemic was triggering a panic in tourist-based economies across the country. A board member asked how much the Gunnison River Valley tourism community could […]
Posted inBusiness, News, Outdoors, Outsider
A busy summer is pulling Colorado’s resort communities out of the coronavirus downturn. But will it last?
High-country resort communities that rely on spending from visitors are seeing a rebound in sales tax collections in June and July, but it’s not likely the crowds will be enough to erase losses in March and April. The declines in March and April were devastating, with most ski-resort anchored communities enduring 50% drops in sales […]
Posted inNews
Why Styrofoam — amid all of Colorado’s recycling struggles — is being targeted for extinction
Styrofoam is the bane of any environmentalist’s leftover lunch. But even as some Colorado cities have tried to ban and food stores — including McDonald’s — have ditched polystyrene foam in favor of more sustainable containers, it hasn’t gone away. It’s time, said Sen. Dominick Moreno, a Democrat in Commerce City who is pushing a […]
Posted inBusiness, Environment, News
Forget plastic bans: Mountain towns try volunteerism, bootcamps as solutions to single-use
The sister towns of Telluride and Mountain Village bagged plans to ban plastic straws after learning about an arcane Colorado law preventing municipalities from doing so. But that hasn’t stopped the resort communities from searching for alternatives to single-use plastics — or even recycling. The two towns, separated by a free gondola ride, feel the […]