Recession’s end? Wealthiest Americans buying more Vail, Aspen real estate

VAIL – One sign the economy may be recovering is the recent resurgence of Colorado’s high-end mountain real estate market.

Eagle County, home to Vail and Beaver Creek ski areas, saw the dollar volume of real estate sales more than double in the first five months of 2010 compared to the same period in 2009, according to Land Title Guarantee Company.

Vail official questions constitutionality of ban on marijuana dispensaries

VAIL – Vail Town Council member Margaret Rogers, an attorney, told the Colorado Independent Monday she doesn’t expect a new Colorado law allowing local governments to ban medical marijuana dispensaries to survive legal challenges.

McInnis money trail leads to 1990s mountain resort, real estate deals

During his first few years in Congress representing the sprawling 3rd Congressional District on Colorado’s Western Slope, Republican Scott McInnis was a strong voice for the state’s ski industry, advocating for the interests of the nation’s most popular destination resorts…

Colorado 2022 Olympics, because elevation matters

A game a lot of the jaded journalists covering the Olympic Winter Games like to engage in is coining the most derogatory nickname describing the shortcomings of the host city or venue. In Italy in 2006, for example, the purpose-built (by Fiat) and frankly quite hideous ski town of Sestriere became “Sewerstriere” or “Disastriere.”

Biomass power production takes step back in N.M., forward in Colorado

One of the potential silver linings in the dark cloud of the ongoing mountain pine bark beetle epidemic – which has ravaged more then 2 million acres of lodgepole pine trees in Colorado and Wyoming – is the possibility of…

What a bear! Gazette publisher grapples with Colorado Springs homelessness

In Vail, where Colorado Springs Gazette publisher Steve Pope once published the Vail Daily, homelessness merely referred to ski bums evicted for hosting too many keggers and couch surfing until they landed another condo.

Apparently shocked to encounter actual homelessness…

Guster’s Gardner looks to green the music industry, one tour at a time

If there’s any industry as environmentally conflicted as the Colorado ski business, it’s the music industry. The carbon-spewing luxury hotels and sidewalk snowmelt systems that characterize the ski business here depend entirely on Colorado continuing to be cold and snowy place. And enormously wasteful plastic-cup concert venues and gas-guzzling tour buses mock the politics of green-minded musicians.

Adam Gardner of Guster is out to impact the carbon footprint of both industries this weekend when he brings his Reverb music-industry-greening organization to Vail for the annual Snow Daze music festival, which officially kicks off the new ski season.

Passing the bud in the high country: Vail council bans pot dispensaries

Vail police last week successfully lobbied the town council to temporarily ban medical marijuana dispensaries, essentially passing the bud to the next council to be seated after the Nov. 3 election.

Police chief Dwight Henninger said 40 years of…

Right-wingers go for gold medal in hypocrisy over Obama Chicago bid

As conservatives continue to gleefully hurl javelins Barack Obama’s way for his failed bid to even get his adopted hometown of Chicago on the podium for the 2016 Summer Olympics, it’s worth noting Colorado had a viable Plan B…

Clean-energy improvement districts cropping up on Nov. ski county ballots

Voters in both Pitkin and Eagle counties – homes to Aspen and Vail ski areas, respectively – will be asked to approve special clean-energy improvement districts Nov. 3, nudging the two increasingly progressive ski towns ever closer to total Boulder-ization.…