Colorado's central mountains. (Image via www.WhiteRiverWild.org)

“Business support for this initiative will be critical to its success. Coloradans have long understood the link between a healthy environment and a healthy economy,” Elise Jones, executive director of the Colorado Environmental Coalition, said in a prepared statement.

Udall and Polis have asked the public to help them craft a pair of public-lands bills: The Central Mountains Outdoor Heritage Act, which considers 32 pockets in Eagle, Pitkin and Summit counties for wilderness protection, and the Arkansas River Canyon National Monument and Browns Canyon Wilderness proposal between Salida and Buena Vista in south-central Colorado.

The areas under consideration in Eagle and Summit counties have been identified as important ecological areas that provide wildlife habitat and serve as invaluable watersheds for the region. The legislation would protect Hoosier Ridge near Breckenridge and West Lake Creek outside of Edwards.

“The special nature of the economies in Colorado’s resort communities relies on the successful balance of offering thoughtfully developed recreation opportunities on our public lands with the preservation of pristine wilderness areas,” said Beth Ganz, Vail’s vice president of public affairs and sustainability. “Vail Resorts is proud to support this effort to strike that important balance.”

Vail’s backing of additional wilderness protection is shared by other businesses, elected officials, residents and conservation groups who previously endorsed Polis’s and Udall’s public lands bills.

“It’s the right thing that Vail Resorts is stepping in with their support as this proposal takes into consideration the collaboration among many key stakeholders,” Town of Breckenridge Mayor John Warner, who attended Udall’s unveiling of the bills in February, said in a prepared statement. “The proponents of the identified additional wilderness areas really listened to the mountain bike community and preserved trails for them. They also listened to the municipal community so that watersheds could be adequately protected. These wilderness areas are a great addition for Summit County.”

Udall has said he is soliciting feedback and there is no deadline for the bills to be formally introduced.

Vail Resorts joins a growing list of businesses and economists that have come out in favor of public lands protection, noting the synergy between Colorado’s environment and economy.

Vail Resorts operates ski and snowboard areas in Colorado, California and Nevada.

“Vail Resorts has to weigh the interests of its customers and employees, as well as the communities it partners with, before backing any type of public lands initiative,” added Michael Carroll, associate director at The Wilderness Society. “This endorsement shows yet again that Sen. Udall’s proposal is good for the environment and the economy.”

Residents here aren’t sure whether to ski or golf.

But most of them are certain of one thing: Climate change is not a hoax.

The Aspen Skiing Co., the mayor, a pair of county commissioners and many residents in town are pressuring the Aspen Chamber Resort Association to quit paying dues and divorce itself from the U.S. Chamber, which has aggressively lobbied against climate legislation over the years. The 680-member local chamber wrote a letter to the national group in 2010 delineating its political differences, but the debate this ski season — the driest one here since 1976-1977 — has become far more heated.

A skier negotiates Corkscrew run on Aspen Mountain over the weekend. The run is one of many to close this week due to a lack of snow. (Photo by Troy Hooper)

Other small chambers have left the national chamber but none in Colorado or with Aspen’s profile.

For now, the Aspen chamber won’t be defecting. Officials say that while they fundamentally disagree with the U.S. Chamber’s stance on climate legislation, they still value the group’s administrative services.

Winter didn’t stick around long in these parts. It arrived late and left early.

Colorado’s snowpack is 59 percent of the average, according to a Denver-based National Resources Conservation Service report on Wednesday. Grass has overtaken the lower sections of many slopes, forcing ski patrollers to rope off much of the terrain earlier than usual this year. It’s T-shirt weather.

Record temperatures east of the Continental Divide are shuttering resorts across the country. Several ski areas in Vermont, New Hampshire, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, North Dakota, Illinois, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin have already closed for the season.

This year’s snow-starved winter in Colorado was preceded by one of the better ski seasons on record. Last year’s massive snowpack allowed skiers in Aspen to schuss all the way into June, even as downstream communities — Basalt, Carbondale and Glenwood Springs — braced for flooding.

Climatologists say wild swings in weather are to be expected as the earth warms. Floods, fires, hurricanes, droughts and snow dumps are indicators of this brave, new world of climate disruption.

What it means for skiers and snowboarders is there could be more winters like this one. But there could also be epic winters like last year, too. Climate change’s broader effects cause more worry.

“Killington’s base lodge was destroyed by flooding from Hurricane Irene,” Schendler said. “The roads in Vermont were flooded away. Wait a minute — nobody said climate change would physically destroy ski resorts! We were worried about snow going away! In fact, the concern for the industry is deeper than that. What if, as a result of fires and floods, storms and droughts, we become a kind of survival society — where we are always responding to disaster, fixing bridges and roads, sumping the basement — and as a result we don’t have the time, or the money, to go ski. Well, you could say ‘boo hoo, I’m so sorry for you!’ but in fact leisure, fun and other ancillary aspects of society are what make societies vibrant and successful. They are the cutting edge of creativity and thought.”

Changing temperatures don’t just affect ski resorts in the winter. The forests that engulf them in the summers have been ravaged by bark beetles that thrive in warmer environs. The insects are sucking the life out of forests, leaving them more vulnerable to wildfires and changing them from green to brown. Foresters are having to devote more resources to combat climate change.

In 2008, the Aspen Skiing Co. and Vail Resorts announced ambitious plans to cut their resorts’ carbon emissions using a wide range of inventive energy measures designed to prolong their survival.

Now, the first returns on those pledges are coming to light.

Vail Resorts says it was able to reduce its electricity and natural gas usage by 10.75 percent in three years through more efficient operations. The company’s goal was to cut emissions 10 percent.

“Vail Resorts remains committed to reducing our energy use further both because it’s the right thing to do for the environment and also because it’s the right thing to do for our company,” Rob Katz, chairman and chief executive officer of Broomfield-based Vail Resorts, said in a prepared statement.

Vail Resorts says its energy savings so far are equivalent to the annual energy usage of 1,400 average U.S. homes and has allowed the company to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by 22,801 metric tons a year. The company didn’t adjust its baseline to include its recent acquisitions of resorts in Lake Tahoe, Calif., but Vail is aiming to reduce its energy consumption another 10 percent by 2020 and a spokeswoman said the company will include its new properties in that effort.

In Aspen, where the company has adjusted its baseline to include a new lodging property and new chairlifts, it is looking less likely resort officials will reach their goal to cut emissions 10 percent by the end of the year. A preliminary estimate of 2011 saw emissions reduced by 1,093 tons, or 3.5 percent.

“I think the next step, for Vail, and for the industry, is to become activists on climate,” Schendler said. “It’s uncomfortable, seems outside the scope of the organizational mission, irritates people, and isn’t all that much fun. But it is essential for the survival of the industry.”

An industry that flies customers in from around the world to ride coal-powered lifts faces a complex and difficult challenge when trying to balance business with climate-conscious behavior.

“We can’t just wave a magic wand and make energy intensive industry go away, (nor would we necessarily want to do that — Aspen’s economy would go away and I wouldn’t be able to send my kids to college) so we might as well try to reduce our emissions along with the Microsofts, Starbucks, and GEs that also are very energy intensive,” Schendler said. “The key point is that a ski resort’s lever on climate and energy issues isn’t reducing their own emissions, though that is good and necessary, but instead using the platform of the ski industry to lobby for policy change that will help move us forward. A carbon tax, for example, will make efficiency more profitable and help us deal with the huge energy intensity of our business model, airplanes included. We lobby for a price on carbon and so should the rest of the industry. And, by the way, the rest of the [ski] industry will.”

A-list winter athletes such as Aspen’s Chris Davenport and Gretchen Bleiler have taken it upon themselves to ask Congress for climate legislation. They say their careers depend on it. Keeping up with World Cup ski racing in recent years has meant keeping up with which resorts have any snow.

Smaller events, which drive business to local economies, also suffer. Officials recently called off the Colorado Freeride Championships at Snowmass because there isn’t enough snow to huck cliffs.

The Elk Mountains Grand Traverse, a race that starts in Crested Butte and ends in Aspen, is set to begin Friday but the starting line was moved from historic old town to Crested Butte Mountain Resort, where there is a higher elevation. Contestants have been warned there will be sections of the course where they’ll have to click out of their skis and walk across miles of snow-barren backcountry.

But canceled sporting events pale in comparison to the region’s bigger climate consequences.

An increasingly warmer Rocky Mountain West has already led to prolonged drought, a widespread mountain pine bark beetle epidemic and more susceptibility to large wildfires.

Aspenites are worried. But they are also keeping their sense of humor.

“The warmest summer I ever spent,” joked longtime local John Fray, “was this winter in Aspen.”

A Denver 2022 Winter Olympic bid may face a much stiffer challenge than the ongoing squabble between U.S. and international Olympic officials over revenue sharing. The Reno-Lake Tahoe region on the California-Nevada border suddenly became a lot more attractive.

Tahoe’s Squaw Valley, the legendary ski area that hosted the Winter Games in 1960, announced on Monday that it’s merging with adjacent Alpine Meadows, creating a ski complex encompassing 6,000 acres, which makes it larger than Vail.

The new Squaw Valley Ski Holdings LLC has no immediate plans to connect the two ski areas by chairlifts because of separate ownership of the connecting ridgeline, but Squaw Valley President and CEO Andy Wirth, a former Steamboat executive, says “that vision doesn’t escape us,” according to the Associated Press.

The move escalates the snow sports arms race in the Lake Tahoe region, where last year Broomfield, Colo.-based Vail Resorts bought Northstar-at-Tahoe to add to its massive Heavenly ski area in South Lake Tahoe. Vail Resorts recently signed Olympic and X Games gold medalist Shaun White to serve as a spokesman and train at Northstar.

Squaw Valley was bought late last year by Denver-based KSL Capital Partners, which is spending $50 million on the resort over the next five years.

The merger also increases domestic competition for the next available Winter Olympic Games in 2022. Denver Mayor Michael Hancock and Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper last month expressed serious interest in going after those Games, but U.S. Olympic Committee (USOC) officials say they won’t submit a bid until a revenue sharing dispute with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is resolved. Colorado U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet earlier this month fired off a letter urging a quick resolution to that dispute.

USOC CEO Scott Blackmun, speaking in Colorado Springs recently, said it’s high time for the United States to host another Olympic Games (the last time was Salt Lake City in 2002). Bid books for 2022 would be due in 2013, with the IOC set to make a decision in 2015. Colorado and Reno-Lake Tahoe are considered the two U.S. frontrunners.

“I think 20 years is long enough,” Blackmun said, according to the Colorado Springs Gazette. “It’s important that we host the Games in the United States as a way to keep Americans connected to the team … I don’t think there are limitations on our ability to participate in a 2022 bid right now.”

Tahoe may have an advantage in that it previously hosted the Winter Olympics in 1960 and did not reject the Games after being awarded them by IOC the way Denver voters did in the early 1970s.

California hosts the second most skier days per year in the United States, according to AP, at a little over 12 percent. Colorado is the most skied state in the nation at more than 20 percent of the skier days in the nation every year.

Even if the IOC does decide to submit a 2022 bid and Tahoe wins, Colorado connections would abound. Squaw Valley is owned by the Denver-based private equity firm KSL Capital Partners, a company founded by former Vail executives Mike Shannon and the late Larry Lichliter.

Vail and Beaver Creek would likely play a prominent role in any 2022 bid for Colorado, with work already under way to add a women’s alpine skiing downhill course next to the existing Birds of Prey downhill course at Beaver Creek. All of the alpine skiing events for the 2015 World Alpine Ski Championships will be held in Beaver Creek, where the men’s course has become one of the most famous on the World Cup circuit since it was built in 1997.

Follow David O. Williams on Twitter. ]]> http://coloradoindependent.com/100770/squaw-valley-ski-deal-ups-ante-in-denver-tahoe-race-for-2022-winter-olympics/feed 2 http://coloradoindependent.com/72379/colorado-ski-industry-surging-as-national-economic-optimism-rises http://coloradoindependent.com/72379/colorado-ski-industry-surging-as-national-economic-optimism-rises#comments Thu, 20 Jan 2011 16:21:20 +0000 David O. Williams http://coloradoindependent.com/?p=72379 President Barack Obama’s approval ratings this month climbed to 2009 levels based on renewed economic optimism, hope in Colorado’s high country – and to some degree the state’s overall economy – has been literally falling from the heavens. The ski industry lobbying group Colorado Ski Country USA (CSCUSA) recently reported its 22 member resorts saw a 10 percent increase in skier visits for the first part of the ski season (October to the end of December), largely because of abundant early snowfall. ]]> As President Barack Obama’s approval ratings this month climbed to 2009 levels based on renewed economic optimism, hope in Colorado’s high country – and to some degree the state’s overall economy – has been literally falling from the heavens.

The ski industry lobbying group Colorado Ski Country USA (CSCUSA) recently reported its 22 member resorts saw a 10 percent increase in skier visits for the first part of the ski season (October to the end of December), largely because of abundant early snowfall.

Chris Ewart in Vail's Back Bowls Tuesday. Photo by Patrick Orton/Vail Resorts

The success of the state’s multi-billion-dollar ski and winter tourism industry is tied directly to the amount of snowfall and public perception in key domestic destination markets such as New York, Texas and Illinois, as well as overseas markets in Europe and Latin America.

The 10-percent statewide increase also tracks with Vail Resorts, the state’s largest ski company and owner of Vail, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge and Keystone. Those resorts are not members of CSCUSA, but earlier this month reported a similar 10-percent jump in business.

Vail Resorts CEO Rob Katz said in a news release that not only are skier visits up, but people are spending more once they get to Colorado.

“Importantly, we observed strong ancillary spending, yielding gains in all categories that outpaced lift ticket revenue growth and marked a continuation of the improving consumer spending trends we first reported in the spring of 2010,” Katz said in a release.

International destinations like Vail and Aspen have seen sustained business from traditional markets like Mexico and South America, and European visitation has been solid as well – particularly among Russian snow riders.

Long-range weather forecasts are calling for continued above-average snowfall throughout January. Vail has had almost three feet of new snow since Martin Luther King Day, and Breckenridge — in Summit County – has had well over three feet of new snow, with 26 inches reported on Tuesday alone.

Denver is getting in on the economic action with Mile High Snow Week next week, featuring a Big Air Challenge freestyle competition on 100-foot-high snow ramp in downtown Civic Center Park. Sponsored by Denver Sports, the international competition features top pros Tuesday and Wednesday on a massive structure that’s 300 feet long and 80 feet wide.

Natural snow fell in abundance during rush hour Wednesday in Denver, but event organizers still cranked up snow guns in downtown Denver as the massive SnowSports Industries America Snow Show kicks off next week in the Denver Convention Center.

Reportedly on a short list of projects being eyed for Department of Energy funding, the Vail project – which would produce up to 28 megawatts of hot-water heat and eight megawatts of electricity by gasifying beetle-killed pine trees – came up short last week in its bid for a DOE grant to offset $46 million in startup costs.

The town of Vail Friday issued a release saying six projects using natural gas as a fuel source were awarded $21 million in grants under the DOE’s “Combined Heat and Power Systems Technology Development and Demonstration” program, leaving the Vail project unfunded.

Some saw the Vail project as a way to start coping with the mountain pine bark beetle that has ravaged area forests, killing millions of acres of lodgepole pine trees and presenting significant wildfire risks for mountain dwellers, ski resorts and water storage facilities for Front Range cities.

Efforts to mitigate the wildfire risk by creating defensible space for firefighters around mountain communities have led to enormous amounts of slash and dead wood clogging local landfills. European countries such as Austria, where national forests are managed more intensively, have been utilizing woody biomass for power and heat for years.

But in Colorado there have been questions about access to the fuel source, how long it will last and whether the plant in East Vail would create a steady stream of trucks hauling trees to a wood chipping facility and back to the power plant. In other parts of the country, there has been a rising tide of protest over using trees to produce power and just how much carbon is produced by the process.

Proponents argue the emissions, which are lowered by the high-heat gasification process, more than offset either the amount of carbon that would be spewed into the atmosphere by a wildfire or even natural biodegrading of a forest ravaged by pine beetles.

Vail Town Manager Stan Zemler said in the release that the U.S. Forest Service is conducting a biomass supply study to determine if there is enough beetle-killed wood in the area to sustain a Vail-sized power plant over the long haul. Results of that study are expected in September.

Meanwhile, Andrew King of Hayden, Cary, & King, who submitted the grant request, said he will keep working with the Forest Service, town and Holy Cross Energy – the local electric co-op – to find different funding sources, including other federal grants and U.S. Department of Agriculture guaranteed loans.

In the original grant application, Zemler talked about offsetting the costs of mitigating wildfire risks by creating a market for regional waste wood and positioning Vail as an eco-tourism destination. Vail Resorts, which operates several local ski areas, including Vail and Beaver Creek, was mentioned as a potential buyer for the power that would be produced.

Last week, Vail Resorts, which has positioned itself as a ski industry leader in purchasing renewable energy offsets, restoring watersheds impacted by wildfire and promoting conservation and green building, announced a new website to market those achievements. The new site is called “Echo.”

He even won the Chairman’s Award for Leadership in the ski industry, given by Colorado Ski Country USA – a statewide ski-area lobbying group based in Denver.

When redistricting put Eagle and Summit counties – home to Vail, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge, Keystone, Copper Mountain and Arapahoe Basin – into the 2nd Congressional District under future Democratic Sen. Mark Udall, McInnis’s connections to ski country didn’t come to an end.

Scott McInnis

McInnis is listed on the board of strategic advisers for KSL Capital Partners, formed in 2005 by former Vail executives Michael Shannon and Eric Resnick. But the former congressman and current gubernatorial candidate is refusing to release tax returns indicating how much the KSL job pays.

Shannon worked for former Vail owner George Gillett, who was forced to sell the company in a bankruptcy settlement in the early 1990s, and then went on to found KSL Recreation Corporation in 1992. With Resnick as CFO, that company acquired some of the top hotel and golf destinations in the world, including the Doral in Miami. KSL Recreation sold for $2.4 billion in 2004.

Gillett, Shannon and Resnick all maintain connections and properties in Vail, where rumors have swirled for years that one or more of them might be interested in reacquiring the publicly held ski, real estate and recreation conglomerate.

McInnis, meanwhile, is a native of Glenwood Springs in neighboring Garfield County, which he represented his entire 12 years in Congress. Garfield County is home to some of the state’s most intensive oil and gas drilling and also includes many of the bedroom communities for the Pitkin County ski resorts belonging to the Aspen Skiing Company.

According to the Denver Post, McInnis during his congressional years listed investments in a number of companies with strong financial ties to the mountain resort and real estate industries, including Alpine Bank and FirstBank. He also listed revenues from investment groups with stakes in oil and gas, real estate and water.

And he had a direct interest in Natural Gas Investors LLC, the Post reported. That company was formed by Bill Vollbracht, chairman of the board of Land Title Guarantee Co., which does significant business in mountain real estate markets and was listed by The Center for Responsive Politics as the fifth-largest contributor to McInnis throughout his congressional career.

Other past mountain money connections, according to the Post, include a $150,000 fellowship McInnis received from The Hasan Family Foundation, founded by Malik and Seeme Hasan, who own a home in Beaver Creek and are philanthropically and politically active throughout the state.

The father of Republican state treasurer candidate and former state House candidate Ali Hasan, Malik Hasan is a former Pueblo neurologist turned managed-care mogul. Seeme Hasan is a heavy-hitting GOP fund-raiser who crossed the aisle to contribute to current CD2 U.S. Rep. Jared Polis (D-Boulder), who now represents Eagle County and also has a family home in Vail.

As a private-sector attorney for the Denver-based Hogan & Hartson law firm, McInnis’s bio states: “Scott McInnis’ practice focuses on state and federal regulatory and legislative matters in a wide range of areas, including natural resources, public lands, energy, agriculture, tax, and business matters.”

Recent revenues from oil and gas investments would be particularly telling given McInnis’s frequently stated campaign promise to take a hard look at Gov. Bill Ritter’s environmentally tougher drilling regulations with an eye toward rolling them back and making things easier for the state’s natural gas industry.

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The largely symbolic Nov. 3 vote that decriminalized possession of less than an ounce of marijuana by a whopping 71 to 29 percent margin has made Breck the de facto kind capital of Colorado ski country, which has some visitors canceling trips and some business owners freaking out.

The New York Times, the news source for one of Colorado’s top domestic destination markets, last week took note of the refer madness, quoting Breckenridge Resort Chamber of Commerce spokeswoman Carly Grimes trying to quell the anxieties of vacationing families. Grimes promised, “This is not going to become a little Amsterdam.”

Yeah, too high and dry for all those canals.

Vail Resorts, which owns and operates Breckenridge ski area, chimed in by assuring guests that the ski company reserves the right to test lift operators if they appear stoned, and that employees are trained to be “hyper-vigilant” to watch for people skiing stoned or drunk.

At one time, back before the Great Recession, Vail Resorts even had a mandatory drug-testing policy for new hires, as well as a grooming policy (for hair, not snow) to keep things neat around the edges. Both were dropped when the Great American Ski Bum became extinct during the economic boom of the 1990s and resorts were having a hard time finding lifties from the U.S.

Breck – an old mining town with a reputation as one of the best snowboarding and freestyle venues in Colorado – is no stranger to controversy over keeping the party going off the slopes. In 2002, Vail Resorts eventually had to pull a national ad campaign that told snow riders, “The hill may dominate you. But the town will still be your bitch.”

Blood-bucket (slang term for a ski patrol toboggan) chasing Denver attorney James H. Chalat, told the New York Times that marijuana had only been a factor in one skier-on-skier collision out of the hundreds of cases he’s litigated over nearly 30 years. Alcohol, perfectly legal to quaff at any mid-mountain restaurant, has been a factor many times, he told the Times.

“If somebody is stoned, that’s not helpful,” Chalat said. “It’s a dumb thing.”

Look for things to get a lot more dumb in Colorado’s high country, though, if a grass-roots group called Sensible Colorado gets its way in coming elections. The group, which backed the Breck vote, knows where its base of support lies.

According to the Aspen Daily News, 12 counties along the Continental Divide (plus Denver and Boulder) with some of the state’s more liberal ski towns supported Amendment 44 in 2006 – an unsuccessful statewide bid to decriminalize possession of less than an ounce of pot for anyone over 21.

Sensible Colorado is now targeting many of those communities for Breck-style “Legalize It” campaigns.

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The 2002 Hayman fire. (Photo courtesy U.S. Forest Service)

Speaking at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science during the announcement of a public-private partnership to restore public lands scorched in the 2002 Hayman fire, Vilsack told The Colorado Independent in an interview that the Centennial State’s efforts to lift federal restrictions on building forest roads in order to better contain fires make sense.

“Our first priority is to protect the roadless areas,” Vilsack said of the ongoing odyssey to maintain the roadless integrity of more than 58 million acres of national forest land nationwide. “But I appreciate that Gov. [Bill] Ritter has started a process to build consensus around the issue.”

In 2001, the Clinton administration pushed through a roadless rule that was quickly set aside by the Bush administration, which later allowed states to petition for individual roadless rules based on state agendas. Only Idaho and Colorado went down that route, with Idaho successfully passing its own roadless rule last year.

“As you probably know, the Idaho process developed consensus and has been successful,” Vilsack said. “It’s important to recognize the uniqueness of each situation, that each state is unique and to go forward from that stand point.”

That is more of a nod to the Colorado rule than Vilsack has previously given, and to some degree validates the ongoing efforts of the Ritter administration to protect approximately 4.2 million acres of roadless national forest in the state. Environmentalists have charged that the Colorado rule contains far too many exceptions for logging, water and energy infrastructure, ski resort expansion and energy development.

Colorado Department of Natural Resources officials argue that the 2001 Clinton roadless rule, which is reportedly closer in its protective scope to what the Obama administration prefers, was put in place before the ongoing mountain pine bark beetle epidemic, which has killed nearly 2 million acres of lodgepole pines statewide. They say there needs to be much more road-building leeway in order to thin national forests around ski resorts and other mountain communities.

The Obama administration has indicated a preference for the more restrictive Clinton rule by challenging two previous 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rulings against the Clinton rule.

Vilsack made his comments to The Colorado Independent while standing amid posters of blown-up photos of the Hayman fire and its devastation.

The largest blaze in recorded Colorado history at nearly 138,000 acres, Hayman wasset by federal forestry officer Terry Barton, who was convicted and spent six years in prison. The fire denuded the land, sterilized the soil and filled streams with ash and sediment.

Monday night, some of the state’s top political leaders, together with representatives from Vail Resorts, the U.S. Forest Service, the National Forest Foundation and the Nature Conservancy, announced the launch of a three-year, $4 million project to restore the South Platte River corridor scorched by the 2002 fire.

Besides Vilsack, other speakers included U.S. Sen. Mark Udall, Ritter and Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, all of whom praised the restoration project as an innovative private-public partnership that, in endlessly budget-strapped Colorado and across the recession-wracked country, may signal the future of national forest stewardship.

The event was hosted by Vail Resorts, which committed $750,000 to the project over the next three years. CEO Rob Katz told The Colorado Independent that the company was in the business of bringing people to enjoy the beautiful Colorado landscape and so has “a real stake in the environment.”

“We thought, ‘What is the signature program that we can take up and make a difference?’” Katz said. “The Hayman project is just total habitat. This is about forest health and water quality and it serves the broader Colorado community. We could not find a more impactful project to be a part of anywhere in the state.”

The launch of the Hayman restoration project comes on the heels of news that Vail Resorts is pulling out of its wind credits offset program. The company has been a leader in buying wind-credits for the last three years.

“We’re proud of our commitment to the wind-credits program, but when we took that up it was 2006 and climate change was not on the agenda in the same way it is now,” Katz said. “We’re proud of our leadership on the issue. We were number two in the nation in buying wind credits. I think we’re No. 27 now. Vail Resorts doesn’t like to ever fall in rankings, but in this case we think it’s a good thing.”

Vail ski area recently fell to number three in the annual resort rankings issue of Ski Magazine, behind Deer Valley in Utah, and Whistler in British Columbia. Vail typically occupies the top spot in the annual reader survey.

Katz also said that Vail Resorts draws most of its visitors from the greater Denver area and the Hayman restoration project serves that community in a very immediate way because it will restore the watershed in a drainage that supplies water to much of the Denver metro area.

“The [Hayman restoration] protects the climate but it’s also a local project,” Katz said. He acknowledged the PR benefits among green watchers, but added that the environmentalist community would continue to “hold our feet to the fire. And that’s what they should do. We expect that.”

Environmentalists have also been critical of the state’s efforts to build more roads for fire mitigation despite the very real threat of another Hayman fire. Critics say trees should only be thinned near communities and not any deeper into the national forest.

But Vilsack on Monday was commended for taking an “all lands” approach to his job.

“The Forest Service is usually a step child” when compared to farmland in the eyes of the Department of Agriculture, said Bill Possiel, president of the National Forest Foundation. “Tom Vilsack is different.”

“Usually these private-public partnerships are about bringing recreation to Americans,” Possiel added. “This time it’s about restoration, and that’s just awesome.”

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According to Gov. Bill Ritter’s office, the project partners Vail Resorts – owners and operators of Beaver Creek, Breckenridge, Keystone, Heavenly (Calif.), and Vail – with the U.S. Forest Service, the National Forest Foundation and the Nature Conservancy “to restore forest land, repair riparian habitat and protect watersheds within the massive burn area from the 2002 Hayman fire.”

The announcement, scheduled for this evening at 6:30 at the west atrium of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, will include Ritter, Vail Resorts CEO Rob Katz, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, Sen. Mark Udall and U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.

The Hayman fire, sparked by a disgruntled former Forest Service employee, is held up as a prime example of the need for better forest management practices to avoid future catastrophic wildfires, particularly in areas of Colorado’s national forests ravaged by an ongoing pine bark beetle epidemic that has killed upwards of 2 million acres of trees in the heart of ski country.

The Ritter administration has been pushing for a Colorado roadless rule that would allow for more road building on the state’s largely undeveloped national forests in order to thin out dead and dying trees near ski resorts, Front Range water supplies and other mountain communities.

At the very least, if the Obama administration adopts a national roadless rule closer to the 2001 Clinton roadless rule, Colorado officials would like to see it include provisions of the state’s rule.

Vail Resorts also announced on Monday that the company is dropping its three-year commitment to wind power because of the Hayman project. Its purchase of wind credits had made Vail Resorts one of the largest corporate buyers of wind energy in the nation, but not all conservationists are convinced renewable energy credits, or RECs, do much to bolster the nation’s clean-energy supply.

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The state’s biggest ski company — owner of Beaver Creek, Breckenridge, Heavenly (Calif.), Keystone and Vail — has been on a major enviro-tear the last few years, becoming the 25th largest buyer of wind energy credits in the nation, announcing a billion-dollar green-built (LEED-certified) base village called Ever Vail and dramatically chopping its power consumption.

Aspen Skiing Company officials have been more vocal and politically active on the global-warming front, testifying before Congress and backing green candidates in local rural electric co-op board of directors elections, but Vail has been making major strides under the fairly recent tenure of CEO Rob Katz.

Last year Katz announced “energy layoffs” aimed at reducing by 10 percent the $25 million per year the company spends on energy. Monday he announced the company cut energy consumption by 6.1 percent in the previous year and was on track to meet the 10-percent goal in the coming year. That initiative is far more meaningful than buying wind credits, according to Aspen-based energy consultant Randy Udall.

Vail Resorts did make somewhat of a political statement last year by contributing $500,000 to the Democratic National Convention in Denver but nothing to the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis.