The massive Hayman Fire near Denver in 2002 (Forest Service).

Vail saw eight inches of new snow on Saturday, but it still wasn’t enough to open the vast majority of the mountain. Ski industry woes aside, state water watchers and firefighters are nervously eyeing the miniscule mountain snowpack, which supplies so much of the water used by Front Range cities. As of Dec. 30, snowpack in the Colorado River basin was 44 percent of last year’s record level and just 63 percent of the annual average.

“[The drought] will make the beetle epidemic even more severe,” said state Sen. Gail Schwartz, a Snowmass Democrat who’s introducing a bill in the legislative session starting Wednesday that’s aimed at reducing the fire danger from a mountain pine bark beetle epidemic that has killed millions of acres of Colorado lodgepole pines. “What doesn’t burn down will blow down.”

But just as it lacked scientific validity to point to Vail’s record 525 inches of snowfall last season as proof that climate change is a hoax (which many conservatives gleefully did), ski industry experts say it’s wrong to totally blame the current drought (just 88 inches so far at Vail) on human-caused heating of the planet.

“You can’t take weather, which is what we’re experiencing, and make deductions about climate, which is the long-term trend,” said Auden Schendler, vice president of sustainability at Aspen Skiing Company, which is suffering through an equally dry season. “But you don’t need to, really. All you need to do is look up the GISS (Goddard Institute for Space Studies) NASA global temperature anomaly maps of the world and look at December. It’s insane, and each decade gets hotter.”

Still, it’s turned into the kind of summer-like ski season in the Rocky Mountain West that the new Mitt Romney – the front-running GOP presidential nominee Romney – should love. Not the 2002 version who turned a profit with the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics and as recently as June said, “I think it’s important for us to reduce our emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases that may well be significant contributors to the climate change and the global warming that you’re seeing.”

Despite snowfall Saturday, this chairlift into Vail's Back Bowls hasn't run all season (David O. Williams).

But as far as the current conditions, Aspen’s Schendler again emphasizes climate change should not be blamed for the current drought but instead is behind longer term trends like a generally drier American West – one that is more susceptible to water shortages and wildfire.

“It’s key to remember that warming might actually bring bigger storms to the Rockies due to there being more moisture in the air,” Schendler said. “At the same time, because the atmosphere can hold more water, it can suck the land dry of more water than before.”

Schendler says the biggest impact of climate change for the ski industry may be significantly shorter ski seasons.

“The thing to look at — and we’re seeing this trend — is when runoff happens,” he said. “When spring comes, both are happening much earlier, because Colorado has warmed, and warmed disproportionately to the rest of the U.S.”

The last time Colorado’s high country was even close to this dry in mid-winter was during the 2001-02 ski season, which was followed by the worst wildfire season in the state’s history. June of 2002 saw the massive Hayman Fire scorch nearly 138,000 acres of land in the mountains southwest of Denver, darkening Front Range skies and loading key water storage facilities with debris from subsequent erosion.

NASA’s James Hansen, one of the world’s leading climatologists, recently issued a report tying last summer’s massive wildfires in Texas and the 2010 wildfires in Russia to global warming.

“Hansen argues that climate ‘loads the dice,’” Schendler said. “So in an average year you might have a one in six chance of extraordinarily hot weather or a super-violent storm. But in the climate-changed world in which we live, the odds change to something new — perhaps two in six.”

Dueling articles by guys named “Chad” and “Chadwick” in the competing Aspen Daily News and Aspen Times newspapers, painted a picture of a small, fun-loving group of protesters trying to replicate the national Occupy Wall Street and regional Occupy Denver movements in Aspen’s Wagner Park.

Private jets in Aspen (Troy Hooper photo).

“While Aspen may be a playground to the 1 percent, it’s the home and workplace for the rest of us,” organizer Jeannie Perry said, according to the Daily News. And she may be onto something. Hit the rich where they live – or at least own a third or fourth McMansion.

Frieda Wallison, chairwoman of the Pitkin County Republicans, told the Aspen Times: “I don’t think that (protesters) should try to identify one organization or group of organizations such as Wall Street to blame,” surprisingly not singling out President Barack Obama.

Organizer Perry recounted to the Daily News how one well-heeled woman on Monday wrote ‘Tax private jet owners!!’ on the protest board, probably wanting to stick it to her ex-husband. The Aspen protesters generally decried corporatism in a place that thrives on catering to CEOs, politicians from both sides of the aisle and Hollywood elite.

Vail, a place even more renowned for coddling modern robber barons – Alberto Vilar, Tyco’s Dennis Kozlowski, Adelphia’s John and Timothy Rigas, and WorldCom’s Bernie Ebbers – even has its own Wall Street. So far no occupiers – just skiers waiting for the lifts to start running.

But even an article Tuesday in the Salt Lake Tribune reporting that the swank Utah ski resort of Deer Valley once again won top honors in a Ski Magazine reader survey saw some comments calling for protest in the nation’s posh powder playgrounds.

“Ski’s readers are a discriminating crowd. They can go anywhere they want, and they’re not influenced by price as much as most,” Ski Utah’s Nathan Rafferty said.

Several comments on the article alluded to Deer Valley’s elitism:

“This would be an excellent place for the ‘Occupy’ protesters to congregate!!!! You heard it here first folks – Occupy Deer Valley!!!!”

Another wrote: “I can go to Deer Valley if I want; I just don’t want to subsidize a Deer Valley vacation through corporate welfare.”

Audio smuggled out of the right-wing billionaire benefactor Koch Brothers’ secret meeting in Beaver Creek last month has made headlines for the red-meat rhetoric it captured and for identifying the high-profile attendees who sneaked in and out of the event. The fact that Charles Koch welcomed the crowd by referring to the coming presidential election as a Saddam Hussein-style “mother of all wars” is unsurprising but also unsettling– and not just because it’s an aggressive overstatement. It’s unsettling because there’s a mystery tied to it. The vehemence of the call to action– the high-intensity language and the plea for round after round of million-dollar donations– seems poorly matched with the threat to the Kochs and their friends posed by the nation’s conservative Democratic president.

Three years after Obama’s inauguration, the Kochs and all of their Beaver Creek friends are still winning the class war by a long shot. Their interests and ideologies dominate Washington.

“Regulation” remains an evil word even in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, record Big Oil profits, and a finance industry spree of gambling and fraud born on Alan Greenspan’s unfettered Wall Street– a spree that brought the world economy to its knees and dealt out rewards to the high-flying architects of the disaster and jobless penury and loss to working class people all over the world.

Obama’s cabinet has been stacked with as many Wall Street beneficiaries and protectors as has been any recent administration. Longtime deregualtion champ Larry Summers stayed on board as chief economic adviser for two years, which he spent working mainly to reward the unrepentant finance industry. This month it has become clear that New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who is seeking to wring real cash for the victims of the great securitizations ponzi scheme, doesn’t stand a chance up against the Obama administration and the banks.

On larger economic questions, Obama’s priorities have dovetailed with the priorities of the right. The national policy now in effect is one of deficit-reduction austerity measures that will cut programs for the middle class while continuing to hand out tax breaks to corporations and to the billionaires looking to wage the mother of all wars against him from places like Beaver Creek.

Is there some major environment and energy policy Obama plans to take up?

This week Obama decided to pull back new national smog standards proposed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The decision bewildered medical and environmental experts.

Cap and trade? The chances of any version of that legislation becoming law in the United States under Obama, should he win another term, are negligible. Obama proved unable to bring the force of public opinion to bear on that matter when Americans still loved him. Republican officeholders who want to continue in their political careers are not allowed to believe in climate change and those men and women now hold a majority in Congress and will likely continue to do so for some time with or without the Kochs waging their mother of all wars.

So where comes the great threat to the Koch brothers and their fellow travelers?

Obama has continued or expanded nearly all of the controversial hawkish homeland security policies of the Bush era, refused to hold anyone in the government accountable for abuses of power, and won no significant reductions in the country’s out-of-control but nonetheless par-for-the-course military budget.

Is the threat for the oil-tycoon Kochs tied to the fact that the fossil fuel age has reached its peak? Is it that climate change is real? Is it that wind and solar and hydrogen power are becoming more efficient and more attractive to growing numbers of people? If so, none of that will change, even if another Texas governor becomes president and, in a mass rally of fasting and prayer on the National Mall, asks Jesus to bestow special blessings on the fuel sources of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Does the great threat the Kochs fear stem from social change? Is it that gay people can now get married in New York or that abortion remains legal in the United States? Obama was no champion of the former and has had no effect in stemming the historic legislative attack Republicans have waged on women’s health and privacy rights connected to family planning in Congress and in state capitals from coast to coast. Meantime, the military is lifting Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell once and forever, and the fate of the unconstitutional Defense of Marriage Act now lies with the courts.

What do the Kochs hope to win with their mother of all wars?

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Here’s a sentence you don’t see much these days: A new newspaper will hit the streets Thursday.

Erin Chavez, former Associate Publisher of the Vail Mountaineer, which closed in June along with the Denver Daily News, will launch a weekly called “Sneak Peak Vail.”

Chavez said she saw a hole in the advertising market after the Mountaineer closed, and she developed a business model to meet the demand and make a new newspaper sustainable.

“We’re partnering with core businesses that had supported the Vail Mountaineer,” she says. “We offered them a preferred advertising rate that provides a base for us and stable and inexpensive advertising source for them for years to come.”

After the Mountaineer shut down, Chavez said that local businesses told her that if they had an affordable and guaranteed advertising rate, they’d sign a longer term contract.

She’s got 27 contracts as of Monday, which, she says, is enough to cover the main cost of printing the newspaper. She figures she can offer the reduced rate to a limited number of advertisers before her business will lose money.

The advertisers will have no input on the paper’s editorial content, which will be “more lifestyle-oriented, not based on news in the Vail valley, but more of what is going on and applying it to second home owners and locals,” she said.

Chavez has hired seven staffers and seems excited to give the business model a shot. “I’ve been lucky to have the resources up here to try this,” she said.

She said of the Mountaineer, “The model wasn’t unsuccessful. On paper it makes sense. But when the economy is hurting, and people aren’t paying, cash flow is a big problem.”

She’s hoping her new model, with ongoing support from advertisers, will fix that problem.

Boulder Democrat Jared Polis ranks No. 6 on Roll Call’s list of the wealthiest members of Congress, with $65.91 million in assets.

Polis, who built on his family’s Boulder-based greeting card and publishing business and expanded into wildly successful Internet service companies, represents Colorado’s 2nd Congressional District.

Roll Call used this formula to calculate overall worth: “To determine the richest lawmakers, Roll Call adds up the minimum value of total assets reported by each Member on their annual financial disclosures and subtracts the minimum liabilities. Percent change refers to the change since last year’s disclosure forms.”
Polis’s worth dropped 16.7 percent from last year’s $67.94 million mark.

Democrats account for 7 of the top 10 on Roll Call’s list, but Republican Reps. Michael McCaul, Texas ($294.21 million), and Darrell Issa, California ($220.4 million), top the list by a wide margin over No. 3 Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., at $193.07 million and No. 4 Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., ($81.63 million).

Colorado Republican Attorney General John Suthers appeared to take a mild swipe at Polis on Wednesday night in Vail, the tony ski resort where the congressman’s family owns property.

During a debate on the legalization of marijuana (Polis is for, Suthers is against), the AG said: “Almost without exception, the people on these panels advocating the legalization of drugs have either been academics, paid affiliates of public policy institutes, editorialists or law enforcement officers or politicians in ski resorts and areas of great affluence.”

Polis replied that he has had real-world experience with drug abuse, although he added he’s never smoked marijuana and rarely drinks.

The No. 7 lawmaker on the list – Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J. ($55.07 million) – also has a tenuous Colorado and Vail connection. His son Josh is a Vail realtor and ski instructor who is occasionally mentioned for various local and statewide political offices.

Michelle Obama

In the 1990s, Vail saw a series of high-profile leaders either on its slope during the winter months or for summer vacations. The late Princess Diana skied Vail in the early 1990s, setting off a skiing paparazzi frenzy, and President Bill Clinton also visited Vail during that same time period – but to play golf.

Vice President Dan Quayle learned to snowboard at Vail during the first Bush administration, and Clinton Vice President Al Gore made several trips to the Vail Valley, including to ski. Gore was in Aspen Friday evening, discussing the connection between global climate change and the mountain pine bark beetle epidemic that has killed millions of acres of pines trees in Colorado.

George W. Bush Vice President Dick Cheney frequently visited Beaver Creek during the summer for the conservative think tank the AEI World Forum, started by Ford. Cheney several years ago was accosted there by a Denver man angered by the Iraq war. Obama Vice President Joe Biden visited Vail for a skiing vacation last ski season.

According to the Vail Daily, Michelle Obama took her daughters to Ski Liberty in Pennsylvania last season. That was Malia and Sasha’s first ski trip. President Obama reportedly is not a skier.

A lot of formerly more wealthy Coloradans are watching with interest recent revelations stemming from numerous lawsuits trying to recover the ill-gotten gains of Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff. Thursday’s New York Times blockbuster was that JPMorgan Chase officials allegedly ignored clear signs of Madoff’s fraud despite their own deep suspicions. Bank officials deny any wrongdoing.

Now today’s revelation in The Times – also stemming from lawsuit documents — that New York Mets’ owners Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz were so “enamored of the enormous profits they earned while investing over decades with Mr. Madoff that they ignored repeated and specific warnings that he might have been operating a fraud.”

Bernie Madoff

The auction featured paintings by Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse, Norman Rockwell, Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso and Peter Max, according to a mailer sent to Vail residents. Madoff victimized dozens of wealthy Coloradans, including prominent realtors and developers in Vail. His scheme also pilfered investments from 30 foundations and individuals in Aspen.

And around the state, other prominent Coloradans, including former congressman Tom Tancredo, lost money. Tancredo suggested Madoff should be publicly beaten with a baseball bat.

Next week in Vail, another banking giant linked to recent staggering real estate losses in resort communities across the American West will be in town to talk new energy investment. The Credit Suisse Energy Summit will be held Tuesday at a Vail hotel.

Credit Suisse floated enormous and, critics say, highly risky loans to resort owners and developers of posh retreats catering to the uber-rich, including the private Yellowstone Club in Wyoming, the now-defunct Tamarack Resort in Idaho and a proposed private ski and golf resort off the backside of Vail called the Battle Mountain project. That resort has now changed ownership and is years from ever becoming a reality.

Counties throughout the high country — from Pitkin (Aspen) to Routt (Steamboat) to San Miguel (Telluride) – all set new records for the number of foreclosures, according to the Denver Post, surpassing dubious marks all established in the 1980s.

The Ascent near Beaver Creek just put 26 units under contract by slashing prices nearly 70 percent from the real estate peak in 2007.

Newly built Beaver Creek, launched in 1981 largely with Texas oil millionaires in mind, languished for the better part of a decade until an unprecedented recovery in the early 1990s that resulted in more than 15 years of upward-spiraling mountain real estate prices.

That bubble finally burst starting in 2007, and new construction dropped off a cliff in late 2008. Eagle County set a new foreclosure mark with 618 filings in 2010, breaking the old mark of 599 in 1987, according to the Post. Some experts predict things will only get worse before they get better, but there are signs of a turnaround already.

Eagle County saw more than $113 million in home sales in November compared to $82 million a year ago. Overall, with one more month left to report, sales were up 71 percent in 2010 compared to 2009, and the number of deals was up 37 per year-to-date, with 1,153 transactions compared to 843 in 2009.

According an analysis prepared by Land Title Guarantee Company, the dollar volume dropped from $2.96 billion in 2007, plummeting 25 percent to $2.23 billion in 2008 and a whopping 60 percent to just over $898 million in 2009. Sales in 2010 were closing in on $1.4 billion with December still left to report – a rebound to some degree, but still way down from 2007.

The wealthy are starting to spend again. In November, Eagle County saw six homes sell for more than $4 million each, bringing the total of homes sold in Eagle County for more than $4 million to 41 for the year.

But what seems to be getting the market revved up again is a realization that homeowners need to reset their asking prices to anywhere between 30 and 70 percent of what they were getting before the bust.

In recent release about sales at The Ascent, a 49-unit condo project in Avon at the base of Beaver Creek, the developer noted that in three weeks between mid-December and early January they put 26 of the units under contract. But they also pointed out that, “Prices are approximately 50 percent to 67 percent of the 2008 pricing, with units for sale from the mid-$300,000’s to $1.1 million.”

Those are unheard of prices in a market where, for nearly two decades, homeowners came to expect returns anywhere from 50 percent to a doubling of their money. Now speculation centers and how many years it will take to return to 2007 prices.

On Saturday, just a week after the suicide in SoHo of Mark Madoff, Vail’s Sonnenalp Hotel will host a “Bernie Madoff Auction of fine art, jewelry, rugs, bronzes and more due to losses causes by” the infamous Ponzi schemer now serving 150 years in prison.

Bernie Madoff’s son Mark, 46, a father of four, reportedly hung himself with a dog leash outside his sleeping toddler’s room in his family’s SoHo apartment Saturday, two years to the day since his reviled dad’s arrest in 2008. The New York Post speculates he was despondent about “the fallout of his dad’s scam — and the possibility authorities were going to go after him and his brother, Andrew.”

The New York tabloid also reported Mark Madoff’s family won’t hold a funeral service and that Bernie Madoff, also despised by his remaining family for his multi-billion-dollar swindle, would not have attended anyway.

Saturday’s auction in the posh ski resort of Vail will feature paintings by Marc Chagall, Henry Matisse, Norman Rockwell, Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso and Peter Max, according to a mailer sent to Vail residents. It also promises “armed security on site.”

The mailer indicates the artwork, jewelry and sculptures include “Bernie Madoff personal property purchased at Madoff auctions together with merchandise bought directly from victims of the Ponzi scheme, general order merchandise which constitutes the majority and seized assets obtained from various government auctions.”

Madoff victimized dozens of wealthy Coloradans, reportedly including Josh Lautenberg, a Vail real estate agent and ski instructor who’s the son of New Jersey Sen. Frank Lautenberg. Josh Lautenberg is a co-owner of Sonnenalp Real Estate.

Vail developer Peter Knobel, who recently completed the ultra-luxe Solaris at Vail project, also is among Madoff’s victims, as are 30 foundations and individuals in Aspen.

More prominently, former Republican congressman turned American Constitution Party gubernatorial candidate Tom Tancredo lost a reported $1 million in Madoff’s scam and last year said an appropriate punishment would be publicly beating Madoff with a baseball bat and selling tickets.

“I think I probably would’ve sold tickets and let the highest bidder come beat him up with a baseball bat and then divide up the money among all the people that he stung,” Tancredo said “with a laugh,” according to 9News.

Conservative talk radio host Mike Rosen, another Colorado victim of Madoff, had another idea.

“I would have handled the sentence a little differently, such as waterboarding him in order to have him divulge where the money’s hidden. In exchange for that, they cut his sentence from 150 years to 100 years,” Rosen said.

The “Bernie Madoff Auction” at the Sonnenalp Resort in Vail will be held at 11 a.m. Saturday, with a preview at 10:30 a.m. Call (800) 431-7948 for more information.

“It made me feel incredibly violated and disrespected,” Jessica Gunther said of Anthony Prince’s new book, Bank Robbery for Beginners. “I feel almost like I did the day it happened … as if my own progress has been undone.”

The robbery instantly became a global punch line as Prince and accomplice Luke Carroll, on a working ski holiday in Vail, decided to cap it off by robbing the WestStar Bank in Vail Village. They escaped with $132,000 in cash via chairlift on their snowboards, but left a trail of clues so extensive that police identified them within eight minutes.

Prince and Carroll were later captured at Denver International Airport after tipping a cabdriver $20,000, posing for photos holding up bundles of cash and buying one-way tickets to Mexico. They each spent more than four and half years in federal prison.

“As soon as I saw Jessica, the bank teller … saw her face melt into this horrified shock [during the robbery], that’s what brought home to me that this wasn’t a joke, that there’s gonna be a huge ripple effect on many people,” Prince said in a television interview (see video below).

His Australian literary agent did not return an email requesting an interview with Prince.

Because Prince seemed sincere in his regret, and because she felt genuinely sorry for how much he had to pay for one youthful mistake, Gunther said she reached out to Prince and conveyed her forgiveness when he was released from prison last year. Now she says that sense of closure has been shattered.

“For him to publish such personal details about my horrifying experience in his words — without any warning or my permission — and to share it with the world, is a huge slap in the face for someone who reached out to him and stood up for him,” Gunther said.

She left Vail in 2007, got out of banking and returned to her home state to earn her master’s degree. Having accomplished that last summer, Gunther said she is now “underemployed,” which colors how she feels about Prince continuing to further his dubious global celebrity and possibly profit from the book.

“If he could make money off of his crimes, I think that’s pretty disgusting,” Gunther said on a YouTube video she posted to express her feelings about the book (see below). “You can imagine my concern about Anthony’s profits when I look at my own situation and [the other teller’s] and how all of this has been handled.”

Gunther said the other teller suffered lasting injuries when she was pushed down during the robbery. She added neither of the tellers had any idea Carroll and Prince were only brandishing BB guns.

Gunther had been working in banks since she was 17 but in eight years had never been robbed until that day in 2005. It was “far worse than anything I ever imagined. I can’t even describe the physical manifestations of the fear on my body. I just hope it is something I never have to experience again.”

Gunther said the book’s co-author contacted her recently to say “Prince would be using the money to help pay his parents back for what all of this cost them.”

So-called “Son of Sam” laws in 40 U.S. states, including Colorado, prohibit convicted felons from profiting from their crimes in book or movie deals. The laws are named after David Berkowitz, New York City’s “Son of Sam” serial killer in the 1970s. Australian publisher Rupert Murdoch’s sensational coverage of the crimes in the New York Post helped save that paper from bankruptcy.

A publicist for Prince’s publisher, Pan Macmillan Australia, did not return an email requesting comment.

Prince, who is 25 and living in Byron Bay, New South Wales, is finishing up a business degree, according to his publishers. He said he was forced to join white supremacist gangs inside federal prison in order to stay alive.

“There’s a huge amount of racial segregation and prison politics and gang mentality,” Prince said in a TV interview. “You just need to do what you need to do to survive.”