First introduced in 2008 and then revived last summer, the bill is not without controversy. It seeks to revamp a 1986 law governing ski-area permits on U.S. Forest Service so that the federal agency has more latitude to allow recreation other than skiing.

“Ski areas are a critical part of our state’s recreational and tourist economy – but many struggle to provide jobs during the summer months,” Udall said in a release after the bill was approved by the Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

“My bill would help provide some stability by making it clear that biking, concerts, and other recreational activities are welcome where the Forest Service finds them appropriate. I’m very pleased we were able to get committee approval, and I urge my colleagues in the full Senate to approve it quickly.”

When Udall first introduced the bill in 2008, Ryan Bidwell, executive director of the ski-area watchdog group Colorado Wild, joined 15 other environmental groups to oppose inappropriate uses: “Basically urbanized activities like roller coasters, water parks, concert amphitheaters, mini-golf — facilities that don’t depend on a natural setting at all, that aren’t dependent on the resources that national forest lands offer.”

Udall contends it will be up to the Forest Service to determine what those appropriate uses are. Many ski areas already allow biking, concerts and other activities, but some mountain homeowners are concerned the new law would allow amusement-park-style rides and other urbanized activities.

Sens Mark Udall and Michael Bennet

The act, if passed by both houses of Congress, would designate 33,383 acres as wilderness – mostly expanding existing wilderness areas – and 21,697 acres as a special management area. It would also take 6,596 acres of the Naturita Canyon area out consideration for mineral exploration or extraction.

Overall, more than 61,000 acres would be protected in the Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre, San Juan and Gunnison national forests and the San Juan Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Resource Area in San Juan, Ouray and San Miguel counties.

Senate support is seen as critical to the passage of wilderness protection, and the San Juan bill is said to also have widespread local support, but before proponents of two other wilderness proposals in Colorado – Hidden Gems and Colorado’s Canyon Country Wilderness Area – get too excited, they should consider Udall’s support for recreation access.

Udall last spring introduced a bill that would make possible more activities on public lands leased by ski areas, where the current definition of what can take place under ski-area special use permits is pretty narrow. But environmentalists worry that opening the door to more mountain biking, concerts and alpine coasters could lead to the wholesale Disney-fication of public lands.

Off-road enthusiasts and mountain bikers are concerned they would be shut out of public lands, especially in the extremely popular White River National Forest, where Hidden Gems would designate up to 400,000 as wilderness and therefore block wheeled access. Backcountry conservationists argue the White River, home to the state’s most popular ski areas, is being used to death.

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But at the state level, an anti-immigration law from 2006 has ratcheted up the level of fear among immigrant laborers in many communities, including the luxe resort region of the central Rockies, where tourism and real estate development are king and cheap labor is desperately needed in order to stoke the twin engines of construction and hospitality.

A dwindling number of work visas nationwide has sent resort operators scrambling outside of their usual hunting grounds of Australia, New Zealand and Eastern Europe and into South America in search of student workers from countries like Argentina. And now they’re getting even more creative, mining places like Puerto Rico for workers unencumbered by visa restrictions.

In Eagle County, home to Vail and Beaver Creek ski areas and with a Hispanic population of 27.5 percent compared with 19.7 statewide, legal and illegal Latino immigrants remain a critical part of the local labor pool – particularly in Vail, where a billion-dollar-plus construction boom has been underway for several years.

A booming resort economy that for years has relied heavily on the wealthiest upper crust of Latin American society as both tourists during the holiday seasons of Christmas and Easter and also as second-home owners, Eagle County conversely is deeply dependent on Latino workers who are now being aggressively targeted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids.

Labor and housing shortages came to a critical head this past ski season, forcing some businesses to cut back hours of operation, delaying construction projects and even preventing the local ski areas from staying open longer despite record snowfall amounts.

Vail ski area shut down April 13, and resort operators said a lack of workers prevented them from extending the season. Vail’s famed Sweet Basil restaurant had to cut lunch service for the same reason, and Vail Valley employers have complained for years about acute labor shortages.

“These people are not a threat to our pool of available jobs; they’re absorbing jobs that truly no one else wants to fill,” said Don Cohen, a Republican who heads up the Economic Council of Eagle County. “The combination of raids and tightening up on the borders will have a very felt effect here in the county. We’re just going to feel it in the construction trades and in hospitality. It’s going to be harder to take up the slack as we lose some of these workers, and you can feel the pressure. It’s going to be uncomfortable.”

Recent ICE raids in Avon, at the base of Beaver Creek ski area, and April 30 in Aspen, where eight people were arrested, are creating an environment of fear in the immigrant community, both legal and illegal, activists say.

“It’s almost like it’s become militant against the immigrant in our state,” said Debbie Marquez, a local restaurant owner and a Democratic National Convention Committee member, who laments 2006 state legislation aimed at cracking down on illegal immigration by requiring papers to receive certain state services, as well as heightened cooperation between local police and federal enforcement agents. “If we had some leadership from our state Legislature, then we could change the tone.”

Danielle Short, human rights program director for the American Friends Service Committee and a founding member of the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition, agreed that the state’s anti-illegal immigration laws have increased the level of fear and that the state-level debate needs to be toned down.

“The situation in employment has been a really big issue, the fact that as a state we feel pressured by the rhetoric of a very small minority to pass this package of bills (in 2006) that really tied up the state’s economy,” Short said. “It’s all trying to make a point and show the small minority that we’re doing something, when the real issue is at the federal level, where we need comprehensive immigration reform.”

Short said her organization has been carefully monitoring the current push in the Legislature for a guest-worker program, which she said is not a good long-term solution for labor shortages in places like Eagle County.

“We have grave concerns about that as a solution because historically guest-worker programs have created the conditions for terrible exploitation,” Short said of the bill that prompted Republican Rep. Douglas Bruce’s now-infamous “illiterate peasants” comment on the House floor.

The border and internal enforcement crackdown and the flagging U.S. economy have dampened the morale of immigrant workers, reducing the amount of monetary remittances back home and simply making crossing the border no longer worth the effort. And that’s not easing labor shortages in mountain-resort areas or reducing the level of anti-immigrant rhetoric, Marquez said.

She cites the success of a new Human Rights Commission established by the Portland, Ore., city council in January as the type of model some Colorado communities may want to explore.

“Instead of ignoring or condemning the issue, come up with ways to create a welcoming environment for the immigrant community,” Marquez said. “How can we make them feel part of our neighborhoods and society and not be hiding and afraid? It may not fly where Doug Bruce lives, but it may work elsewhere.”

“It’s funny to walk along the streets in Innsbruck any day of the winter and see people with ski boots on and skis over their shoulders, and you think, ‘Where the heck are they going?’” Kurz said of the city of about 120,000 in western Austria. “It would be like walking down the 16th Street Mall and seeing someone with goggles on and fully ready to ski. In Europe you would think, ‘Of course, he’s going skiing.’”

Congestion on I-70 and soaring fuel costs have conspired to give renewed impetus for some sort of mass transit system along the corridor that connects Denver and the entire Front Range to Colorado’s most popular mountain resorts. Previous efforts to pursue mountain rail in the state have been shot down by voters.

But on a continent where gas costs more than $7 a gallon in some places — and up to 70 percent of that goes to taxes that in many cases are then pumped into mass transit — driving to the slopes in Europe is increasingly a luxury that many can’t afford, or prefer, Kurz said.

“In Europe, the upper crust of the resorts like Lech [Austria] and St. Moritz [Switzerland] draw the clientele that is used to the Mercedes and the BMW and that’s how they arrive, and some of the younger, more vibrant resorts you get more people coming by train.”

And in Europe, train service to major mountain resorts is more than merely an option. It’s marketed as a greener, more efficient, more relaxing way than flying to get from major metropolitan areas to world-famous ski resorts such as St. Anton, Austria; Courchevel, France; and Davos, Switzlerland.

Rail Europe even offers its Eurostar ski train between London and France starting as low as 55 pounds (about $108 roundtrip). Using the Chunnel, a trip that used to take eight hours by boat and train has been sliced to a little over three hours, and the Eurostar also offers sleeper cars.

“In Europe, a lot of the people who arrive by train are used to having a beer or two or six and they can keep their [driver's] license that way,”  Kurz said.

He added that there is a major cultural impediment to train travel in the United States.

“The major difference between Europe and here is that that Europeans have grown up with trains and we haven’t necessarily grown up with trains here. Beyond that, it obviously works very well in Europe,” Kurz said.

He said he hopes there is more political will for a rail solution in Colorado than the last time the question was put to voters in 2001.

“If you look at what has happened in the last seven or eight years, such as the obvious congestion on I-70 — although it’s not all skier traffic — the oil prices, the cost of getting up here, the congestion and the aggravation alone that is caused by some of these long rides, we will have more and more people say there has to be a solution, and it looks like it would have to be in mass transit,” Kurz said.

The Rocky Mountain Rail Authority, a coalition of public and private stakeholders along the I-70 corridor, is in the process of launching a study to look at the type of trains, costs, possible funding mechanisms and potential ridership for high-speed rail along I-70 and I-25. And a recent verbal agreement between the Colorado Department of Transportation and key stakeholders put a rail solution back on the front burner.

Jim Merlino, a political strategist for Struble Eichenbaum Media Consultants, worked on the unsuccessful 2001 ballot initiative that asked state voters to approve $50 million for a pilot project in Pueblo to test high-speed train technology for a mountain monorail. He said times have definitely changed.

“With what’s happening to diesel and gas prices, people are reframing how they think about transportation, and I-70 is going to fall into that new framework,” Merlino said. “The technology is changing all the time. Things that were wildly expensive in 2001 are getting less expensive all the time, and the cost factor of doing nothing keeps rising as well because of the cost of fuel.”

Merlino said that 2001 effort failed because it was difficult to convince voters in other parts of the state to back something that didn’t impact them on a daily basis, but now he thinks voters might take a broader view of the potential negative economic impacts of gridlock along the state’s main east-west interstate.

“There are leaders in both parties that are looking for a solution,” Merlino said of the current political environment. “There’s a chance for some very creative solutions on a bipartisan basis. The old coalitions are sort of reforming, and all of that is connected to this broad rise in energy costs.”

For local jurisdictions along the corridor, the do-nothing plan for I-70 — or keeping it four lanes in order to limit growth in the mountains, as some critics have advocated – is simply not viable.

“What’s the option to ‘bringing more growth and visitors’? Closing I-70? I didn’t know that was an option,” said Avon Town Councilwoman Tamra Underwood. “The point is, do we want the same people [who are already coming], and new, transient people — none of whom are riff-raff — continually running around the valley on obsolete, individualized, rubber-tired, fossil-fuel-guzzling, carbon-footprint-growing vehicles, or mass transit?”

Underwood’s council has pushed through a new pedestrian mall in downtown Avon, at the base of Beaver Creek ski area, that connects to a new public transit center currently served only by buses, vans and a new gondola that travels on up the mountain to the ski area.

The land for the transit center was donated by the nearby Westin Hotel, and is purposefully situated along the dormant Union Pacific train tracks in the hopes that mass transit will someday run to the Eagle County Airport.

“Whatever [rail] technology is chosen in the future, and there should be quite a few options when we really look, clearly the right-of-way for that technology needs to be set aside now,” Underwood said. “The congested I-70 corridor needs a sustainable solution.”

The goal of McElhany’s bill, which passed out of the Senate Appropriations Committee April 11 and is now before the full state Senate, is to raise $3.5 billion for improvements on the four-lane highway west of Denver, including possibly expanding it by two lanes. Clear Creek, Summit and Gilpin county residents would be exempt from the toll.

But two groups that have actively worked for years to come up with alternatives to the six-lane approach want the state to put the brakes on the toll proposal until more studies can be conducted. One group, the I-70 Coalition — composed of representatives from 30 political jurisdictions along the corridor — expects to release its transit planning study by the end of the year.

“We can’t just talk about adding more asphalt,” the group’s Web site states. “Solutions to the I-70 problem must include transit.”

The group’s director, Florine P. Raitano, said the coalition came together in 2004 as a result of the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) calling for the expansion of I-70 between Denver and the tunnel.

“That created a lot of frustration and consternation for the communities along the interstate,” Raitano said, adding that the state has taken a more collaborative and inclusive approach since Gov. Bill Ritter was elected in 2006 and last year appointed Russell George to head the CDOT.

Meanwhile, the Rocky Mountain Rail Authority — a multi-jurisdictional government body created through an intergovernmental agreement and funded in part by a CDOT grant — hopes to have a firm under contract by next month to begin conducting a feasibility study for high-speed passenger train service along the I-70 and I-25 corridors, as well as a few other spur lines.

That study will look at funding mechanisms, potential ridership, train technology, fares, rail alignments and station stops. As the study looks at the mountain route, it will piggyback on the I-70 Coalition study. Clear Creek County Commissioner Harry Dale chairs the authority and is personally dead set against a toll to expand the highway, although the rail authority has not taken an official position.

“The senators are trying to accomplish something, and that’s good, but we need a comprehensive solution for the entire state,” Dale said, referring also to an earlier toll proposal put forth by Sen. Chris Romer, D-Denver, that died in committee. “Not just one toll on one county on one specific roadway.”

Dale said expanding the interstate will cost $4 billion to $6 billion and take 15 years, with massive disruptions all along the corridor and slowdowns caused by the toll booths to pay for it — and then, he adds, it still won’t be able to handle the traffic demand between Denver and the mountain resorts.

“Colorado’s general public is way out in front of this in terms of looking at high-speed rail in both corridors. I think the decision-makers and elected officials are further behind the curve in this case,” Dale said. “The public wants options. They’ve seen how successful rail has been in the RTD system (Regional Transportation District in the Denver metro area). They are much more apt to vote for a tax increase for a rail solution in the corridor than the same old highway expansion.”

The rail authority has yet to pinpoint costs for a rail line along the I-70 corridor and will try to do so in its feasibility study, but the price tag is expected to be in the hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars. Eagle County Commissioner Peter Runyon, a member of the I-70 Coalition, is frustrated that a mountain rail system isn’t already under way.

“Mass transit is so disheartening,” Runyon said. “Sometimes it just seems to be a wish and prayer on the horizon instead of moving forward and saying we need to make this happen. It’s all funding, and I don’t know how to get around that.”

Runyon said he had hoped McElhany’s proposal would simply die in committee, but if it moves forward, he wants Eagle County residents to be added to the list of exempt drivers.

“The thing McElhany is trying to do is get some money generated, and there’s a lot of value to that, because all the planning in the world will mean nothing if we don’t have a funding source,” Runyon said. “If we do go with the toll, it should be used as a toll to manage travel demand.” This would mean that fees would be lower at midweek and during off-peak hours.

Originally from New Jersey, Runyon said, “I’ve never seen a toll plaza I like, and I’ve never seen one I didn’t have to slow down for.”

Runyon said a quicker way to get commuter rail going in Eagle County, home to Vail and Beaver Creek ski areas, would be to use existing Union Pacific rail lines between Dotsero on the west end of the county and Avon at the east end. That rail line, known as the Tennessee Pass Line, has been dormant for more than a decade. It continues on up and over Tennessee Pass to Leadville, where many resort workers live in lower-cost housing.

Hurdles to making that happen include getting UP to sign off on the use of the line, and then getting the Federal Railroad Administration to allow lighter rail cars on a line that still could be used by heavier freight trains if UP ever re-activates the line.

Dale said such a line might be an early action item considered in the authority’s feasibility study. Another option, he said, would be using the existing rail corridor but putting in another set of tracks to avoid conflicting types of rail cars on the same line.

Most of that line is relatively flat and would allow for passenger train service between the Eagle County Airport — the state’s second busiest during ski season — and a transit center being built in Avon at the base of Beaver Creek ski area.

The new Westin Riverfront Resort and Spa in Avon, which will be open next ski season, donated land to the town in order to build a transit center that includes a rail hub as well as buses and a parking garage. It’s within walking distance of the Westin’s new gondola, which connects to Beaver Creek ski area.

“It would be so nice to be able to just jump on the rail from (the Eagle County Airport) and come into downtown Avon,” said Chuck Madison, the Westin project manager for East West Partners, the same developer transforming Denver’s Union Station into a multi-modal residential and commercial hub. “Whenever I’m in Europe, I always prefer going by rail (to ski resorts) because it’s just so relaxing.”

But Runyon said the European ski-train model is a long way from becoming a reality in Colorado ski country.

“Europe evolved around the horse; we evolved around the automobile, and in Europe in general distances are much less,” Runyon said. “Here we have these vast expanses, and the design of their cities tends to be concentrated, so they don’t have the suburbs we have because of the automobile.”

Go to Rocky Mountain Rail.org or I-70 Solutions.orgs for more information.

This is an ongoing series on the transit problems facing travelers along the Interstate 70 corridor between Denver and Colorado’s major mountain resorts.

It’s unusual to see wildfires in mountainous areas in April, Mulson said, especially given the above-average snowpack in the high country, but she adds that a few days of warm temperatures coupled with high winds is all it takes.

“It doesn’t happen very often, but then we have an incident like Carbondale that smacks us in the face and reminds us that actually it can happen at any time of the year,” said Mulson, who adds that a good snowpack and wet spring will aid firefighters but those factors also increase the amount of vegetation and therefore fuel loads heading into the summer.

Mulson urges homeowners to start clearing vegetation away from homes as soon as possible given the potentially explosive condition of the national forests surrounding many Colorado mountain towns. The mountain pine beetle killed 500,000 acres of lodgepole pines last year, and 1.5 million acres overall since the mid- to late-1990s.

“We don’t encourage clear cutting, which can lead to mudslide and drainage issues,” Mulson said of fire mitigation efforts in and around mountain towns surrounded by dense and dying lodgepole forests. “There’s a smart way to manage it that doesn’t create other problems.”

Mulson said her district is highly supportive of collaborative efforts to thin beetle-killed forests near mountains towns (known as the wildland urban interface) and to promote re-vegetation with more fire-resistant species of trees such as spruce and aspen. She also said fire districts across the state need to work closely to share resources.

State Sen. Dan Gibbs (D-Silverthorne), a certified wildland firefighter, is once again pushing legislation aimed at providing more funds for thinning projects as well as offering financial incentives for businesses to manufacture and use bark beetle-killed wood products such as pellets for stoves, wood chips and furniture. A third bill he sponsored would allow water boards to bond for fire mitigation projects.

Last year Gibbs was able to procure $1 million for thinning projects in critical areas, and this year’s Colorado Forest Restoration Act, currently working its way through committee, seeks the same amount – which can then be coupled with state and federal money. And the other piece of legislation he’s a primary sponsor of, HB 1269, would grant a sales tax exemption on beetle-kill timber or wood products and therefore create more of market for the millions of dead trees.

“I’m very optimistic that we can turns a negative into a positive, but my greatest concern is that we’re going to have a catastrophic wildfire,” said Gibbs, who also serves on Gov. Bill Ritter’s Forest Health Advisory Board. “The sooner we can do these thinning projects to protect where people live and protect where they get their water from, then it becomes a win-win for everyone.”

In Washington, Rep. Mark Udall (D-Colo.), a U.S. Senate candidate whose current 2nd Congressional District includes some of the hardest hit mountain counties, has sponsored three separate pieces of pending legislation aimed at battling the bark-beetle epidemic and the resulting fire risk.

The Fire Safe Communities Act would provide funds for creating defensible spaces around homes by reducing hazardous fuels through thinning projects. It also would create new federal grants to introduce fire safety to local communities and would increase reimbursement from FEMA to local communities hit by wildfires from 75 to 90 percent.

Udall in January introduced an amendment to an energy bill passed in December that would have forest fuels deemed eligible as a renewable energy source in the form of biomass. That bill is called the Wildfire Risk Reduction and Renewable Biomass Utilization Act.

And finally, Udall sponsored the Colorado Forest Insect Emergency Response Act, which would cut through some of the regulatory barriers and allow stepped-up thinning in some of the hardest hit areas. It would let the Forest Service forgo the NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) in categorical exclusions in areas near towns where the threat of fire is deemed an emergency.

“I think a lot of people living up in the mountains and surrounded by these all of these insect-killed trees are feeling a little powerless,” said Udall spokeswoman Tara Trujillo. “At this point, (this bill) would allow us to streamline some of those regulations so we can help save some lives up in those communities and protect homes.”

Among the reasons Vail received the low grade: for cutting down old-growth trees when upgrading chairlifts, pushing to expand artificial snowmaking, and opposing the Clinton Administration’s proposal to protect roadless areas.

Earlier this year, Colorado Wild and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service expressed concern that a recent expansion plan for the resort approved by the U.S. Forest Service would harm 103 acres of lynx habitat.