CRESTED BUTTE - The town council in Crested Butte has adopted an emergency moratorium that places a moratorium on all new development in the town's watershed, but not development within the town itself. Town officials said the existing ordinance governing disturbances in the town's watershed was adopted in 1978 and is inadequate.

Exactly what precipitated the emergency was not clear, although the Crested Butte News reports that the primary objection came from the proponent of a possible molybdenum mine that has been on-and-off again since when the watershed ordinance was first adopted.



Banff closing in on growth limitation

BANFF, Alberta - Banff is now up to 8,770 residents, a 6 percent gain in the last two years, but still short of the cap of 10,000 residents mandated by the federal government. Because it is located within a national park, the townsite of Banff is subject to growth restrictions imposed several years ago on the community.

The census report notes that 46 percent of people live in apartments, and that a majority of people are employed in the service industry. As well, 47 percent of residents walk during summer, compared to 17 percent who use motor vehicles. In winter, the numbers get closer together, but pedestrians still outnumber motorists.



Aspen Skiing Co. lays out winter advertising

ASPEN - Last winter was something less than stellar for the Aspen Skiing Co. A major problem had to do with air transportation, beginning with the Christmas blizzard that bottlenecked traffic at Denver and continuing through the winter.

With that in mind, the company - which operates four ski areas in the Aspen area - is pushing its airport connections this year in advertising materials. It boasts of having the America's only slopeside airport, just five minutes from downtown Aspen.

But the company is also going to keep pushing its climate-change agenda. Last year, it took out alarms that warned of warming that will eventually melt the world's winter playgrounds. David Perry, the senior vice president, conceded that the advertisements taken in several prominent magazines were a bit alarmist.

But it got people's attention, and the ski company plans to press on again this year, using high-profile Aspen athletes Chris Davenport, a skier, and Gretchen Bleiler, a snowboarder. Television commercial and print advertising will focus on the company's environmental efforts during the last 10 years.

In addition, the company this fall is sending 42,000 energy-efficient light bulbs to loyal guests.



Bad bear problem? Just add ammonia to garbage

ASPEN - While Aspen and many other mountain towns continue to fret about how to make their garbage less available and hence attractive to bears, Salida resident Julia Litz says she believes she has the solution.

"While living outside of Breckenridge at 10,600 feet, we had bears in our garbage," she writes in a letter published in the Aspen Daily News. "No matter what we did to discourage this, it didn't happen until I read somewhere to pour household ammonia on top of the garbage can," she reports.

"It worked," she adds. "I did this a couple times a week."



Forest thinning and luck spared Angora fire redux

LAKE TAHOE, Calif. - Another wildland fire has hit the Lake Tahoe Basin, this time destroying six structures. But what could have been a fire similar to the Angora blaze that burned 256 homes earlier this summer was averted.

The difference, a fire district spokesman told the Sierra Sun, was that the 30 mph winds died down, and firefighters responded immediately with a well-executed, no-holds attack. But a key, said Ed Miller, was a forest thinning project on 150 acres completed in 2005.

"If we hadn't treated that area, we'd still be chasing (the fire)," he told the newspaper.

Thinning was also in the news when Bruce Krantz, a county commissioner in Placer County, called for loosening of regulations to allow more thinning of forests near streams in the basin. Existing regulations designed to reduce sedimentation of Lake Tahoe specify that thinning must be done with low-impact vehicles.

Environmental officials told the newspaper that the regulations don't preclude work, although the U.S. Forest Service officials disagreed. Rex Norman, an agency spokesman, said the stream-side forests are some of the most dangerously overgrown in the Tahoe Basin. "They burn very fast and with great intensity."



Old pickups disappear as town gets gussied up

RED CLIFF - An art show was held recently in Red Cliff, a one-time mining town located two ridges and sometimes a world apart from Vail.

The town's artists opened their homes for inspection of photographs from Asia, paintings of mountainsides and creeks, and in one home, several renderings of old, weathered pickups.

Abandoned pickups and cars just a couple of winters ago were common in Red Cliff. Set up on blocks, they would be squeezed in next to houses or behind sheds. At one time, dozens were deposited along the Eagle River.

In most of America, such "dead" pickups are dealt with summarily by homeowner associations and assorted other police of tidiness. This is true, too, of old mountain towns.

But Red Cliff has been an anachronism. Only eight miles aside Interstate 70, that great arterial agent of change, Red Cliff for many years has remained true to its dowdy, blue-collar mining town roots.

Even in its flush times, Red Cliff was never a place of wealth as represented by the gaily painted gingerbread Victorians of Aspen, Telluride or even Breckenridge. The houses, those that remain from this earlier era, cluttered carefully on cliff bands, tend toward a plainness that speak to a more hardscrabble existence.

The town is also distinctive for its cramped geography. The slopes of Battle and Hornsilver Mountains squeeze tightly. By comparison, the valley where Aspen is located seems like the Great Plains. Even the old baseball field, which serves double-duty as a snow storage lot during big-snow winters, is on a tilt. If not for the nearby mines, nothing could have justified a town in such a location.

In fact, mining remained a going concern in Red Cliff just a generation ago. Then the Eagle Mine, located two miles away at Gilman, closed and a few years later, in 1981, the Climax Mine between Leadville and Frisco shut down.

Now well into retirement, only a few miners still live in Red Cliff. In the place of miners have come a new generation, mostly in their 20s and 30s, many with pony tails, and with jobs tied to the resort and construction industries along I-70.

Money is also arriving, and not just from construction jobs. Teetering old buildings are being razed, and new homes and businesses are being erected. It's like seeing a Salvation Army store, its goods dated and worn, being replaced one rack at a time into a store with iPods and fresh Carhartts. Both old and new are all the more striking for the contrast between them.

Amid this new gloss of funky modernity the old pickups are disappearing.

"What happened to them?" the artist was asked.

One by one, they're all being towed away, explained the artist.

What will she paint when the rusty old pickups are all gone?

She didn't say.