The Best & Worst of the Valley
Best way to break a stalemate: actually negotiate
For years now it’s appeared as if it takes at least three to tango. Redevelopment of key components of Vail’s Lionshead area proceeded at a snail’s pace while the rest of Vail’s multi-billion-dollar rebuilding renaissance roared ahead all around it. Vail Resorts did get its Arrabelle condominium/hotel/retail complex and public plaza off the ground, but little else was happening at Vail’s western ski portal surrounding the Eagle Bahn Gondola.
Now things finally appear to be happening, with Texas developers Hillwood and Open Hospitality in talks last fall with Vail Resorts to lift a deed restriction on the Lionshead parking garage, which the Dallas companies want to replace with more parking, condos, shops, restaurants, two high-end hotels and a conference center (to the tune of $900 million).
The holdup has been the ski company’s reluctance to let Open/Hillwood proceed before Vail Resorts’ own $1.5 billion green-built Ever Vail project, which would include a new hotel, more parking, a gondola, shopping, dining and condos in West Lionshead, is up and running.
The town, which owns the Lionshead parking garage land and is the third party in the complicated development dance, is desperate for more day skier parking and has been trying to bring the issue to a head. However, the national recession and a slowing real estate market may conspire for the ultimate say in how fast anything proceeds.
Best time to put a sock, blanket on it
Given the ongoing energy crisis, anything that saves a few watts (and bucks) has to be a good thing, right? Vail, Aspen and Telluride over the summer tested a giant synthetic blanket designed to be thrown over massive snow mounds in hopes of preserving them for the following ski season.
Preliminary results, in areas such as snowboarding half-pipes and terrain parks that require huge amounts of snowmaking (and therefore coal-fired electricity), looked positive, which is good news for Vail Resorts, a company that’s trying to reduce its overall energy consumption by ten percent this season.
In other synthetic covering news, a new tire sock – from Europe, of course – was expected to improve things dramatically on Vail Pass this winter. Much easier to slip onto the tires of big rigs, which have a tendency to jackknife and close the highway down for hours, the new tire socks reportedly provide better traction than unwieldy traditional tire chains.
Worst way to provide more tree skiing
Vail Resorts officials over the summer began tramping around in the woods with U.S. Forest Service experts, eying all the dead and dying lodgepole pines being hit hard by a massive mountain pine bark beetle epidemic in the western United States.
The ski company for years has been taking out dead trees that pose a threat to chairlifts and buildings, but now the resort is actively thinning key pockets of trees, hoping to preserve whole islands of lodgepoles between ski runs. Town, county and Forest Service officials for the past several years have been cutting a “defensible space” zone around both Vail and Beaver Creek, in hopes of preventing massive wildfires.
Worst time to bid on the Worlds
At an International Ski Federation (FIS) Congress in Cape Town, South Africa, in May, the Vail Valley Foundation’s bid to host the 2013 World Alpine Ski Championships fell short in a vote that went to Schladming, Austria.
Foundation officials said they detected no anti-American sentiment in the vote, although the Canadian delegation voted against the Vail bid because of an American lawsuit over the rejection of women’s ski jumping for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.
But the good news is Vail and Beaver Creek, which have twice hosted the Worlds (1989 and 99) but lost out in a controversial 2009 bid, appear to be the frontrunners for hosting the 2015 Worlds.
Worst time to go on trial for fraud
Is there every really a good time? Certainly not, but for former venture capitalist and philanthropist extraordinaire Alberto Vilar, whose name is on the Vilar Performing Arts Center in Beaver Creek, the collapse of the credit market and overall national disgust with Wall Street excesses made for an inauspicious time for his fraud trial to commence in New York.
Vilar was accused of misappropriating funds from investors such as Lily Cates, the mother of actress Phoebe Cates, and continuing to make lavish contributions to the arts, including the Metropolitan Opera in New York and facilities in his former second home of Beaver Creek.
A verdict had not been handed down as of press time in mid-November.
Best way to be remembered
A trio of Vail Valley pioneers and true adventurers – Earl Eaton, Bill “Sarge” Brown and Bill Whiteford – died over the summer, all of them leaving a lasting legacy as visionaries who saw the great potential of Vail as a ski area and town did all they could to make that vision a reality.
Eaton, whose family ranched the Squaw Creek Valley above Edwards, was an Army veteran who returned from World War II to hike and prospect most of the mountains and valleys in and around what would eventually become Vail. He showed Vail founder Pete Seibert the Back Bowls after an endless slog up the mountain in 1957. It opened for skiing five years later. Eaton died in May at the age of 85.
Brown, a wounded and highly decorated veteran of both World War II and the Korean War, was Vail’s longtime and legendary mountain manager from 1970 until the resort hosted its first World Alpine Ski Championships in 1989.
He died in September, also at the age of 85.
Whiteford, one of the original 20 investors in Vail, was renowned in its early days for the wild parties at his Casino disco in Vail Village.
He helped put Vail on the map as not just a great ski resort but also the great party town that it still is to this day. Whiteford died in September at the age of 80.
