Mountain Town News
By Allen Best
Limbaugh skewered over calories
VAIL, Colo. – Rush Limbaugh and other conservative commentators got a chance to chew on Michelle Obama a bit after her visit to Vail in the company of her two daughters. After a day of skiing, the Obamas – minus the president, who stayed in Washington – dined at a local restaurant, enjoying a meal of short ribs.
“The problem – and dare I say this? – it doesn’t look like Michelle Obama follows her own nutritionary dietary advice,” said Limbaugh on his radio show while reporting that the ribs consisted of 1,575 calories per serving with 141 grams of fat.
Not so, said restaurateur Kelly Liken, who told the Vail Daily, that in fact, most of the fat on the braised ribs had been cooked off, leaving the serving at just 600 calories – and far short of the 6,000 calories that a skier can burn off during a day.
Not all readers were persuaded. “Yeah, right, 600 calories. And I just heard the Pope converted to Buddhism,” wrote one reader from New York City. And another reader, from Wyoming, found it incredulous that somebody skiing would consume 6,000 calories while he burned fewer than 500 calories while on the treadmill for three miles.
The Vail Daily, whose reporting on the subject was cited in The Washington Post, also noted that the meal consisted of a pickled pumpkin salad with arugula and wild mushrooms and sautéed kale – the latter grown in a greenhouse at an elementary school in nearby Eagle.
Locovoristic thinking was also in the news in Telluride. Thirty miles west at Norwood, a meeting was held to discuss the potential for creating a food hub for distribution of beef, vegetables and other locally originated food. “I want to reduce how far our food has to travel,” said organizer Ken Haynes. “The more food travels, the less nutritious it is.”
High-marking claims 3 sledders
REVELSTOKE, B.C. – In reporting the death of three more snowmobilers caught in an avalanche triggered by high-marking, the Revelstoke Times Review hints at puzzlement. Less than a year ago, two people were killed and dozens partially buried near Revelstoke as the result of high-marking on a nearby peak. This time, the deaths occurred north of Golden. Two fathers and sons had been caught in the slide, and three of them died.
Out of bounds skiers lose passes
WHISTLER, B.C. – La Niña has blessed Whistler this winter, giving it as much snow by mid-February as it usually gets in an entire season and setting up what could yet be a record winter for snowfall.
But all that snowfall has had a downside. The Whistler Blackcomb Ski Patrol has seized the passes of 32 skiers and boarders for venturing into terrains closed while avalanche potential is mitigated.
Because people are venturing into avalanche terrain, the ski patrollers must then follow their tracks, to ensure they don’t get into harm’s way when the avalanches are set off. All of this is causing a more tedious opening of the ski area, reports Pique Newsmagazine.
There’s precedent justifying the caution of ski patrollers. Two people have died in recent years because of avalanches at Whistler after venturing into areas closed because of the risk.
The seizures are effective for one year.
Sun Valley airport: $189 million
KETCHUM, Idaho – A consultant has reported that cost of a new airport to deliver skiers to the Sun Valley market will run around $189 million, or $40 million more than what was previously estimated. Although not without dissent, a portion of the resort community has been pushing for a new airport for the last decade. The existing airport, while relatively close to Ketchum and Sun Valley, has restrictions that preclude the sort of air traffic enjoyed by airports serving Aspen, Vail and Jackson Hole. A new airport would, however, be farther away, about a 45-minute drive.
Colo towns white, more Hispanic
BRECKENRIDGE, Colo. – The Census Bureau numbers are out, and Summit County has tilted slightly from being a lily white guysville.
The Summit Daily News reports that during the last decade the ranks of women swelled from 41.8 percent of the total population to 43 percent. But while the number of people who identified themselves as Hispanic or Latino has grown, more than 90 percent of the total population identifies itself as white.
Across Vail Pass in Eagle County, however, there has been a much larger Hispanic population for nearly a century, owing to an influx of miners from New Mexico. But those who identify as Hispanic or Latino now compose 30 percent of the population, although almost exactly half of school children in local public schools are Hispanic.
Aspen also remained overwhelmingly white, although Mayor Mick Ireland observed that local Latinos were likely undercounted. Downvalley at Carbondale they were found to constitute 39 percent of the population, reported The Aspen Times.
Aspen Times editor dies at 87
ASPEN, Colo. – Bil Dunaway, the long-time owner and publisher of The Aspen Times, died recently at the age of 87.
He led a colorful life, and his experience with the 10th Mountain Division during World War II was not necessarily the most exotic. He did, however, receive a bronze star for his duty on the famous Riva Ridge, resisting a German counterattack.
He was born in Persia (now Iran), the son of a Lebanese-American woman and an economist from Missouri. When Dunaway was in ninth grade, the family moved to Switzerland, where he learned to ski, and then to New Jersey.
But while in the 10th Mountain, he was actually stationed in West Virginia, where he taught rock climbing. After the war he earned a master’s degree in sociology from Harvard, learned French, skied on Mont Blanc, the first ever ski-descent of Europe’s highest peak, and then edited a new magazine called Skiing for a couple of years.
After being fired from that job – many others were, as well – he landed in Aspen, where he broke his leg in a ski race. That resulted in him wandering into the office of The Aspen Times, then and now located next to the Hotel Jerome, which he purchased in 1956 and owned until 1994.
The Aspen Times, in telling his story, recalls that he supported a strike by ski patrollers, crusaded against the Vietnam War, and editorialized in favor of affordable housing for employees – something that he did as a business owner. He also editorialized against serving food on cold plates.
