The O. Zone: Quick hits on pavement paralysis, powder in paradise, patrollers

O. in the zone on Seldom at Vail on Saturday (KKW iPhone pic).

Once in a while I do a bullet points O. Zone to highlight a bunch of things you may have missed recently, in the ongoing holiday haze, that I deem worthy of commentary but am too lazy to go too in-depth on. What’s different this time around is I’ll keep adding items as they occur to me, so keep checking back in on this piece for added bits of outrage throughout the day.

• For starters, if you’re trying to head eastbound on I-70 Tuesday morning, don’t. Because of the simply god-awful driving (I hope no one was hurt) of a semi-tractor-trailer operator — the kind of absolutely terrible navigation of our mountain highways we see on a daily basis by not just commercial drivers but also enraged idiots in SUVs — eastbound I-70 will be closed at East Vail most of the day Tuesday for a crashed vehicle recovery, bringing our communities to another seemingly endless standstill.
• Not to sound like a broken record (OK, to absolutely be a broken record) on the topic, but this is exactly why we should be exploring any and all alternatives to continuing to pile commercial and private vehicle traffic on I-70 with no real ability to expand the highway other than a few added, Band-Aid-fix lane additions that will never truly address the issues of population grow, bad driving, inclement weather, mountain terrain and (I repeat) absolute dumb assery behind the wheel — and cost insane and unsustainable amounts of taxpayer money to boot.
• For more on the Western Rail Coalition’s proposal to revive rail service on the out-of-service-but-never-abandoned Tennessee Pass rail line between Glenwood Springs and Leadville (and right through Eagle County, connecting to our airport), see my latest over the weekend in the Colorado Springs Gazette newspaper and on its sister Denver Gazette website.
• Saturday was yet another frontage road parking day in Vail, meaning we had so many folks enjoying a foot plus of powder that fell overnight Friday and into the day Saturday that vehicles spilled out of our two municipal parking garages (sorry, structures). That’s the good/bad news.
• The very good news is that by the time my wife and I got into the Back Bowls as part of the Crack of Noon Ski Club, it was still snowing incredibly hard, virtually impossible to see, and utterly untracked and uncrowded. There will never be anything like a few runs in those conditions in Vail’s Back Bowls to make everything right in your world.
• This is even better news for me because on a powder day a couple of weeks ago, while floating through one of my favorite stashes deep in the woods (you will never learn where), I blissfully skied right into some sort of declivity (I’m calling it that because my son who was right on my tails said it was not a creek bed), I watched in horror as my left ski shot through the air and my right failed to release – all resulting in a queasifying “pop” in my right calf muscle. Days of elevating and icing but not really taking time off skiing and I appear to be back to my previous 59-year-old form.
• However, that little incident shows you should never head into the trees without a partner and in a worst-case-scenario (I was able to ski down gingerly), you might really need a professional, well-paid ski patroller to come dig you out of said declivity.
• That, of course, brings me around to the horrifying headlines out of Park City over the holidays, from Newsweek to the Financial Times to the Atlantic to Business Insider. Let me sum it all up: Park City’s ski patrollers went on strike over the holidays, grinding the largest ski area in the nation (and a top Vail Resorts’ destination) to a halt that was exacerbated by a lack of early-season snow. VR tried unsuccessfully to blame the patrollers, who ultimately settled for an additional four bucks an hour. News flash, that still won’t be enough salary to buy a home in Park City, but at least there are cheaper housing options just 30 minutes away in Salt Lake City. No such geographic luck here in Colorado, where VR’s Keystone is now staring down a similar situation.
• Poorly handled by the 42-resort ski factory based in Broomfield, to be sure, but the roots of this issue date back to Vail’s founding in the early 1960s when the U.S. ski industry decided every ski instructor and patroller should be a licensed realtor in the off season so they could pedal McMansions that leave most ski towns hollowed-out husks “occupied” by upwards of 90% second, third, fourth (and in some cases institutional) homeowners. Now, without a fat trust fund, none of us can afford to live in ski towns anymore, including critical first responders like ski patrollers.
• The proliferation of “affordable” season ski passes has democratized skiing by providing snow riders with access to, in VR’s case, 42 mountains around the globe for a fraction of what it cost in the 1990s, but our population has ballooned since then, ski condos are short-term-rental mini-hotels, everyone and their dog can now work remotely, and the populations of small cities can move around very quickly on six-pack detachable quad chairlifts, making mountains more crowded (and we’re not building more ski areas), more dangerous, and more desperately in need of professional mountain operations staff, who have nowhere to live and don’t want to bunk in dorm-style housing as they age and become more responsible.
• These are choices we’ve all participated in as a skiing society. But throw on top of that the publicly and privately traded ski monopolies continuing to gobble up smaller resorts, and you get what Park City got over the holidays and what Vail has seen in recent seasons during incidents such as the powder day Snowpocalypse five years ago.
• Hard to pin all of that on the ski companies themselves, but the same shareholder-first mentality permeates skiing the way it does most of America in both the private and public sectors, whether it’s the auto/oil industry perpetuating a broken road system, the carbon-based energy industry foisting off the worst effects of climate change on us, or the housing industry driving up home prices to the point our kids can no longer dream the American Dream.
• Now we see the lawsuits, and that’s ultimately what it may take for companies to start putting people over profits, whether it’s the L.A. wildfires or something far less troubling such as a vacation ruined.

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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