Around the mountains: Tongues wag about Obama visit to Utah

PARK CITY, Utah — A wisp of conversation from September of 2007, when Barack Obama gave a stump speech in the Park City area, has local tongues speculating about whether the president-elect will return to vacation once he has been installed in the White House.

An aide in the Obama team told Summit County, Utah, Sheriff Dave Edmunds that he could expect to see Obama again.

If he does return, points out the Park Record, Obama will follow in the footsteps of former President Bill Clinton, who took two skiing vacations to Park City in the late 1990s, and President George W. Bush, who was there in May. As well, former Vice President Al Gorge has been a sporadic visitor, while Mitt Romney, the unsuccessful candidate for the Republican nomination in 2008, has a home inPark City.

Happy backcountry life ends in snowslide

CRESTED BUTTE — The sad work of finding the body of avalanche victim Mike Bowen was completed three days after he died on Mount Emmons. He was 36.

He had been reared in Iowa, but sloshed coffee at a local beanery and was described as a person with a great sense of humor and an avid fan of the backcountry.

His body, reports the Crested Butte News, was buried under four feet of snow.

He had used a bicycle to get to the base of the mountain, which is a short distance from Crested Butte. At least six medium-sized avalanches had run in the immediate area around the avalanche that killed him.

Rare in-bounds slide kills skier at Jackson Hole

JACKSON, Wyo. — For the second time this season, an in-bounds skier has been killed at a ski area.

The first, in mid-December, occurred at Utah’s Snowbird ski area. Then, two days after Christmas, a 31-year-old skier died after being buried under eight feet of snow at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort.

Avalanches on ski trails within ski areas are relatively rare, and fatalities resulting from them are even rare.

At Jackson Hole, the slope where the avalanche occurred had just been opened a few hours prior. However, it has been skied quite a bit, resort spokeswoman Anna Olson told the Jackson Hole News & Guide, and other “normal precautions” had been taken. Those precautions normally include the use of explosives to trigger avalanches.

The skier had been wearing a transceiver, and so ski patrollers were able to pinpoint the location of his body within six months, and then recover the body another four minutes later.

Patrollers administered cardio-pulmonary resuscitation and then a defibrillation device, but without success.

The slab avalanche broke a crown six to eight feet deep, patrollers said. Up to 30 inches of snow had fell on the mountain, with a total depth of snow of 138 inches at mid-mountain.

On the same day, at about the same time, two snowmobilers were killed by an avalanche in the Rabbit Ears Range west of Grand Lake. One snowmobile who was with them was partially buried and was able to dig himself out. When rescue personnel arrived, cardio-pulmonary resuscitation was being performed on one of the victims.

It took rescuers an hour and 45 minutes to find and dig out the second snowmobiler. Both victims, one aged 38 and the other 19, were declared decade at the scene.

“We hate it when this kind of thing happens,” search leader Mark Foley told the Sky-Hi Daily News, “but they were in a bad place at a bad time, and they had no beacons (transceivers) on. If they had beacons on, it’s possible they could have been saved.”

Snowguns crucial for opening Whistler trails

WHISTLER, B.C. — Snow arrived late in British Columbia, which mean that the snowmaking guns had to do all the heavy lifting in anticipation of Christmas crowds at the twin ski areas, Whistler and Blackcomb.

The two ski areas have a lot of snow guns. When temperatures were opportune early in the winter, they produced the equivalent of a football field of snow up to 44 feet deep.

However, snowmaking has a cost, points out Whistler’s Pique Newsmagazine.

Of all the electricity used during the year at the two ski areas, one-fourth is devoted to making snow.