Mountain Town News
By Allen Best
Town needs heart transplant
DILLON, Colo. – The town of Dillon got moved in the late 1950s, to avoid getting covered by Dillon Reservoir. Located on a lovely hill since, it has nonetheless always seemed to lack something.
“It’s missing a heart,” Matt Lit, a gallery owner, told the Summit Daily News. “Dillon really doesn’t have a town center.”
Dillon was re-created in the age of automobiles and laid out without a typical main street. And some businesses that draw people, such as a movie theater, have fled to other locations, out near Interstate 70.
Some residents want to scrap it and start over. “The vast majority of buildings in the town center should be torn down,” said Eddie O’Brien, owner of a real estate firm called Prudential O’Brien & Associates. “Right now you could fire a cannon down any street in Dillon’s town core, and no one would get hit. There’s nobody there, no reason to go into the town area.”
O’Brien told the Daily News that housing in the town’s heart should be built. Town-owned land could be used. He thinks other property owners could be enlisted.
Mayor Barbara Davis also wants change. “We have a ‘60s-style, shag-rug architecturally indifferent town core,” she said. “I really feel that we need to do something significantly different than what we have now.”
But not all agree. Geoffrey Stacey, who owns an accounting firm, thinks the area is best left as a professional district. Other towns in the area have the retail base already covered, he says. “Believe it or not, some places in the world are best left unchanged, as they are already perfect.”
Ski run renamed for Lindsey Vonn
VAIL, Colo. – A prominent run on the face of Vail Mountain that was long called International now has a new name: Lindsey’s, after Olympic gold-medal downhiller Lindsey Vonn. Vail Resorts, the ski area operator at Vail, announced the name change at a reception in Whistler, B.C. Although born in Burnsville, Minn., Vonn began trekking to Vail with her family after showing early signs of promise. She moved to Vail in the late 1990s to better be able to train. Obviously, it paid off.
Bookings down, income too
ASPEN, Colo. – Average occupancy at hotels, lodges and condos in Aspen was about 68 percent – just 1.6 percent less than the same month in 2009. But the average daily room rate was down 6.4 percent, reports Bill Tomcich, president of a local reservations agency called Stay Aspen Snowmass.
Visitors are also presumably leaving fewer tips with bellhops and front-desk clerks. And the more tight-fisted spending patterns are having ripple effects across the board, including the coffers of local governments. “The occupancy report doesn’t mean what it used to mean,” said Hilary Fletcher, the Pitkin County manager, during a recent review of the county’s financial outlook.
Whistler survives Olympics
WHISTLER, B.C. – After seven years of planning, the Olympics are now history in Whistler. From the outset, one of the greatest worries was whether the transportation plans were workable.
They were, reports Bob Barnett, publisher of Pique Newsmagazine, particularly in Whistler. Despite some inconveniences, people left their cars at home and used public transportation.
“As a temporary measure in extraordinary circumstances, it worked,” he wrote. Similar to what is common in congested Manhattan and London, daytime commercial deliveries were prohibited and instead confined to the middle of the night. Again, it worked.
Perhaps the greatest surprise during the Olympics, he says, was the atmosphere in Whistler Village, the community’s commercial hub. “We’ve learned that thousands of people streaming through the village day and night don’t have to be wild or scary. Sure, it helps when there is a $900 million security budget, but it isn’t the police presence that kept people from causing trouble. People came to celebrate.”
Whistlerites, many of them, had been skeptical or even cynical about the Olympics beforehand. But Barnett seemed to say that the spirit of the moment prevailed. He says: “New standards have been set for ‘fun’ and ‘busy’ in Whistler.”
Climbing bolts banned
ASPEN, Colo. – Pitkin County officials have declared a moratorium on putting bolts into rock faces in two open space areas owned by the county. “Bolting may or may not be appropriate, but we need time to study it,” said John Armstrong, open space and trails ranger. The Aspen Times reports that climbers have installed bolts into the sandstone to aid them on a popular formation called The Drool, which is located near the town of Redstone.
A decade later, lights still shining
KETCHUM, Idaho – It’s been 10 years since the city of Ketchum approved a so-called dark sky law to limit pollution from lighting. At the same time, the broader Blaine County talked about following suit. It hasn’t.
“The concept of dark-sky lighting has been on the county’s list of priorities for 10 years,” County Commissioner Larry Schoen told the Idaho Mountain Express. “We either have to finally get it off or change the name of the list.”
Later in March, the commissioners will get a better picture of how such an ordinance might be enforced and how much it would cost residents to comply.
