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Vail and Beaver Creek History

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It’s Story Time for Vail’s Originals

imagesPeople want Vail’s stories, and that’s what they’ll get Thursday.  History is stories and the thing about a place like Vail is that those stories are told by people who lived them.  And that’s why, during Vail’s 50th anniversary, we begin to understand that there’s no place quite like it.

The Vail Symposium is hosting a Founders of Vail panel. Rod Slifer, Elaine Kelton, Merv Lapin and Terry Minger will tell most of the stories fit to tell.  For example, in May 1962, before there was a Vail, Rod Slifer moved here from Aspen to help Morrie Shepard start the ski school. Slifer was to be paid the princely sum of $500 a month for his efforts, which did not begin or end with the ski school.  There were no job descriptions. Everyone did everything.

Slifer, you’ll be interested to know, was not only Vail’s first Realtor and mayor for 16 years, he took Vail’s first pay cut. In May 1962 before he even arrived, on that original, short Vail Associates corporate roster, someone erased Slifer’s $600 monthly salary and penciled in $500.“It was still the most money I’d ever made,” Slifer said.

Click here to read the entire article.

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A Milestone for Water Diversions in Colorado

If 1962 was a big year for skiing, with the opening of Vail, in Colorado it was also notable for benchmarks in diversion of water. One project was completed and another was started, the two of them substantially enlarging the unnatural flow of water from the Colorado River Basin to the Front Range of Colorado.

Colorado is an unbalanced state. Nearly 80 per cent of precipitation in the state falls west of the Continental Divide, where nearly all of Colorado’s ski areas are located, mostly in the form of snow. But 80 per cent of its population and an even higher percentage of its farms and ranches live on the eastern side.

Diversions across the Continental Divide began in 1911 and accelerated in 1936 when dewatering of creeks around Winter Park began. But 1962 was a huge year for this export of water. That year, Denver finished a new tunnel that is three metres in diameter and 37.5 kilometres long. The tunnel diverts water from Dillon Reservoir into the South Platte River, upstream from Denver.

Also in 1962, President John F. Kennedy gave a speech kicking off construction of the Fryingpan-Arkansas Project. The project diverts water from the Fryingpan and Roaring Fork Rivers, both located in the Aspen area, to cantaloupe and other farms in the Arkansas River Valley. Some of that water has now found its way to metropolitan Denver.

Now, Colorado faces a new issue. Instead of figuring out how to develop its water, the key question is how much water it has left to develop — if any. The Colorado River Compact of 1922 apportions water among the seven states from Wyoming to California. It also requires Colorado and other upper-basin states to deliver 7.5 million acre-feet of water to the lower-basin states on a rolling 10-year average.

During the last 30 years, Colorado and other upper-basin states have delivered an average of 10.8 million acre-feet. But that average has been exceeded only three times out of the last 12, reports John McClow of Gunnison, writing in the Grand Junction Free Press. 2012 was particularly bad: just a little over 2 million acre-feet of water flowed into Lake Powell from April through July, the prime runoff months, reports Jim Pokrandt of the Colorado River Water Conservation District.

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More Golf Courses Than Golfers at Vail

Is the Vail resort complex oversupplied with golf courses? You could make that argument, as several of the valley’s 17 public and private clubs have struggled enormously in the wake of the Great Recession.

But don’t paint with too broad a brush, warn several resort leaders in the Vail Valley.

“They’re not all the same,” said Johannes Faessler, owner of the Sonnenalp Resort of Vail and a companion golf club downvalley at Edwards. “There are different reasons why things happen to different clubs,” he told the Vail Daily’s Lauren Glendenning.

Even in the 1980s, a columnist for a now-defunct newspaper in Vail joked that someday it would be possible to golf continuously from Vail to Glenwood Canyon, a distance of nearly 80 kilometres.

During the 1990s and early 2000s, developers seemed determined to make that come true. There was even a proposal to build a golf course atop an abandoned landfill. At another location, a developer proposed to cap an old pile of mine tailings and create a golf course, as was done at Anaconda, Mont.

Then golfing, as had happened with tennis in the 1970s and skiing in the 1980s, started losing its luster. The growth flattened, nationally as well as at mountain resorts.

Those golf courses that suffered most substantially in the Vail area were those farthest from the ski slopes and resort centers of Vail and Beaver Creek. Brightwater, a project located south of Gypsum, about 72 kilometres from Vail, is now in bankruptcy. A beautiful course called Adam’s Rib, south of Eagle, reportedly sold very few memberships and has revised its fees.

Then came news that only one of four courses at Cordillera, a resort about 16 kilometres from Beaver Creek, would remain open. There are countersuits between the owner of the golf courses, David Wilhelm, and club members, who own property adjacent to the courses.

“Don’t let the Cordillera fiasco overshadow the fact that each one of these courses is doing better,” said Harry Frampton, managing partner of East West Partners. The Avon-based company most typically has built golf course-based higher-end real estate.

Frampton, an avid golfer, says there’s no better place to play golf in the United States than the Vail area. But there are two problems. First, the season lasts only three or four months. And second, he thinks too many of the golf courses are too hard for the average golfer, taking four to five hours to play, too much commitment when there are dozens of other things to do.

He also told the Vail Daily that in a survey of his company’s high-end real estate buyers, 20 per cent had been driven by golf. It’s still important, he said, but golf does not drive the economy of the Vail Valley.

What does during summer? Unlike winter, there is no dominant driver. The Vail Daily sites research done for the Vail municipal government that showed hiking was the top activity of summer visitors.

The percentage of summer visitors who had or planned to golf while in Vail had declined from 32 per cent in 2005 to less than 12 per cent in 2012.

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50 Ways To Enjoy Vail

The US resort is celebrating its 50th birthday this year and has drawn up a list of 50 must-see events, activities, sights and more during the resorts 50th anniversary season. So, which one would you like to do most?

It was in 1962 than the early pioneers started skiing in Vail. It is now one of the largest ski resorts in the USA with more than 5,000 acres of skiable terrain.

There are seven back bowls that cover seven miles. It claims to have more groomed terrain than anywhere else in North America.

As its 50th birthday celebrations get underway there is a brand new state of the art gondola and a whole host of activities to get people in the mood.

And 50 experiences to enjoy…