The O. Zone: Quick hits on fed funding for Shoshone drying up, bighorn bummer, Epic Pass ruination or democratization?

Time for another O. Zone quick-hits column on a variety of topics I’d love to see more coverage of if any media outlets out there have the resources or the staff to dive in. Again, check back in throughout the day as I’ll be adding more items of interest:

• First, there was widespread celebration in the streets last month (OK, at least in nerdy water-wonk circles) when the federal government committed $40 million to Western Slope stakeholders such as Eagle County acquiring Xcel Energy’s coveted Shoshone water rights associated with the hydroelectric dam on the Colorado River in Glenwood Canyon. From a health-of-the-river perspective, this would be huge for the endangered aquatic lifeline for 40 million people living in the Southwest.
• Now, I have it on very good insider sourcing that President Donald Trump and his broligarch gang of unelected tech billionaire buddies may renege on the Biden administration commitment to Shoshone, which would basically kill it. And why not? They don’t care about sustainable flows in the Colorado. This pack of self-dealing scumbags has no doubt already promised the rest of the river to alfalfa farmers feeding Saudi cattle (screw all the local ranchers who voted for Trump in the seven river states). Hope my source is wrong on all of that, or at least collective outrage can stop them.
• Speaking of outrage: I know the Town of Vail is finally doing a great deal on the affordable/workforce housing front, but thanks to the squeaky wheel efforts of former town council member Mark Gordon, we finally have an accounting of how much the whole Booth Heights debacle is costing Vail taxpayers: $19,833,339. That’s the price of stopping a badly needed Vail Resorts’ workforce housing project right next to I-70 and a North Frontage Road bus stop. The ski company could have pulled a permit and turned dirt on the previously approved project but balked during the chaos of COVID. That allowed a neighborhood group to form to derail the project in the name of a dwindling nearby herd of bighorn sheep.
• Set aside the fact that neighborhood activists since the 90s have stopped U.S. Forest Service wildfire/habitat mitigation projects in East Vail (which are finally happening a bit late in the game) – deadfall clearing projects that could have bolstered the herd that ranges all the way to West Vail — but the neighborhood group called the Vail Bighorn Initiative in 2023 said it had raised $900,000 from 525 individuals. In the town’s most recent accounting, that award-winning fundraising effort has thus far contributed a mere $48,000 to the nearly $20 million total for the town acquiring the Booth Heights parcel from Vail Resorts in order to not building housing during a housing crisis. Bear in mind, the ski company, which despite its initial glitch later came back ready, willing and able to build Booth Heights, is facing labor strife across the country because it lacks affordable beds for its workers. Side note, I believe the 42-resort company can (and should) do much more across all of its communities on the housing/public transportation front.
• So either the Vail Bighorn Initiative, which strangely got off the ground with seed money from the very town that initially approved the housing project, rescinded that approval and wound up in legal action with the ski company, didn’t raise close to its promised total of more than $900,000. Or they raised it but haven’t yet contributed it to the town’s anti-human-housing, pro-sheep (at least recently) efforts. You be the judge at tonight’s council meeting.
• Now one might ask how I know bighorn sheep range all the way to West Vail on the north side of the highway, and my answer is simple: I was very nearly trampled by a ram while Nordic skiing up Davos Road just a couple of winters ago. Also, duh, the Eagles Nest Wilderness in the Gore Range is on that side of the Berlin Wall for wildlife known as I-70.
• On the topic of Nordic skiing, we’re about halfway through the ski season if you’re someone like me who prays for late April snow to keep the golf courses closed for as long as possible and the wildfire danger at bay. So far, I’ve skied 64 days this season (45 Nordic with my dogs, five alpine touring (AT skinning) with my dogs, and 14 just plain Alpine days at lift-served ski areas without my dogs (11 of those on my Epic Pass so I’m now down below $100 a day on my home mountains). You can see a clear preference for how I ski, where I ski and with whom I ski. I’ve written about his fairly recently.
• Part of that is my calculus of what the “affordable” multi-resort season ski passes have brought to ski towns in the form of overcrowding on the slopes, lack of parking, lack of housing for workers etc. – something I’ve written about even more recently.
• I will not go so far as to say Kaye Ferry was right about riff-raff when Vail Resorts first introduced the Epic Pass (please, she said exactly what I reported), but I will say the passes have wreaked havoc on ski towns, along with massive population growth, remote workers buying up local homes, and national conglomerates also purchasing homes and running them like mini-hotels without the financial ramifications of hefty STR fees.
• I tried to go beyond the headlines we’ve seen since Christmas about ski-patrol strikes, vacationers suing and shareholders demanding heads roll by looking at the sustainability of the ski industry given the issues associated with the business model Vail Resorts pioneered. Check out my stories in the weekend editions of the Denver Gazette and the Colorado Springs Gazette.
• Finally, how about an O. Zone column quick hit on … ozone? Both oil-drilling powerhouses Colorado (No. 4 in the nation) and Utah (No. 9) have an ozone pollution problem that new studies show can be very harmful for residents of impacted areas such as Colorado’s northern Front Range and Utah’s Uinta Basin, especially for prenatal and infant brain development. Air-quality advocates are sharply critical of both state’s efforts to curtail ozone pollution. Read more about the problem in my story for the Colorado Times Recorder.
• That’s if for now. Hopefully some more rants a little later this week. Oh, and let me just conclude by saying our unseasonably warm and dry weather of late (feels like April) should be giving way to some snowpack-bolstering snow starting Wednesday. Right now, it’s way too warm, thanks in part to carbon pollution, and our snowpack is below average. That being said, I’m still having fun sliding on snow so far this season. Cheers.

Editor’s note: The O. Zone is a recurring opinion column by RealVail.com publisher David O. Williams. Please read how you can help support this site by considering a donation or signing up for news alerts … or both.

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David O. Williams

Managing Editor at RealVail

David O. Williams is the editor and co-founder of RealVail.com and has had his awarding-winning work (see About Us) published in more than 75 newspapers and magazines around the world, including 5280 Magazine, American Way Magazine (American Airlines), the Anchorage Daily News (Alaska), the Anchorage Daily Press (Alaska), Aspen Daily News, Aspen Journalism, the Aspen Times, Beaver Creek Magazine, the Boulder Daily Camera, the Casper Star Tribune (Wyoming), the Chicago Tribune, Colorado Central Magazine, the Colorado Independent (formerly Colorado Confidential), Colorado Newsline, Colorado Politics (formerly the Colorado Statesman), Colorado Public News, the Colorado Springs Gazette, the Colorado Springs Independent, the Colorado Statesman (now Colorado Politics), the Colorado Times Recorder, the Cortez Journal, the Craig Daily Press, the Curry Coastal Pilot (Oregon), the Daily Trail (Vail), the Del Norte Triplicate (California), the Denver Daily News, the Denver Gazette, the Denver Post, the Durango Herald, the Eagle Valley Enterprise, the Eastside Journal (Bellevue, Washington), ESPN.com, Explore Big Sky (Mont.), the Fort Morgan Times (Colorado), the Glenwood Springs Post-Independent, the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, the Greeley Tribune, the Huffington Post, the King County Journal (Seattle, Washington), the Kingman Daily Miner (Arizona), KUNC.org (northern Colorado), LA Weekly, the Las Vegas Sun, the Leadville Herald-Democrat, the London Daily Mirror, the Moab Times Independent (Utah), the Montgomery Journal (Maryland), the Montrose Daily Press, The New York Times, the Parent’s Handbook, Peaks Magazine (now Epic Life), People Magazine, Powder Magazine, the Pueblo Chieftain, PT Magazine, the Rio Blanco Herald Times (Colorado), Rocky Mountain Golf Magazine, the Rocky Mountain News, RouteFifty.com (formerly Government Executive State and Local), the Salt Lake Tribune, SKI Magazine, Ski Area Management, SKIING Magazine, the Sky-Hi News, the Steamboat Pilot & Today, the Sterling Journal Advocate (Colorado), the Summit Daily News, United Hemispheres (United Airlines), Vail/Beaver Creek Magazine, Vail en Español, Vail Health Magazine, Vail Valley Magazine, the Vail Daily, the Vail Trail, Westword (Denver), Writers on the Range and the Wyoming Tribune Eagle. Williams is also the founder, publisher and editor of RealVail.com and RockyMountainPost.com.

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