Around the mountains: Great strides in wake of '69 gay riots

TELLURIDE — Peter Shelton, the well-known journalist of ski magazines and books, didn't always live near the ski slopes. In his column in The Telluride Watch, he explains that in 1971, a newly-minted college graduate, he arrived in Gotham, to figure out what the big city was all about. There, he met a lot of gay men.

“Some of them tried to pick me up,” Shelton explains. “Some were shy, and some were bold as you please.”

This was, he explains, something new. Homosexuality had been a crime in most states, and psychiatrists described it as a “sociopathic personality disturbance.” But then in June 1969, homosexuals in New York City revolted in what came to be called the Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village.

Shelton said he didn't want the attention from his gay friends, but it showed him something of the way that women have felt for eons.

Much has changed. Shelton relates a recent incident during a backyard party in Montrose, a Republican-voting and conservative-leaning town about 65 miles from Telluride.

“I overheard a lesbian friend introduce herself to a stranger,” he reports. “Somehow marriage came up, and she had to explain: ‘I don't have a husband, I have a wife.”

Mayor wants gun training

SUN VALLEY, Idaho — The mayor of Sun Valley has encouraged city staff members to take a handgun safety course. Wayne Willich, the mayor, told the Idaho Mountain Express he isn't encouraging people to own or carry weapons. Rather, he seems to want them to set an example. As is, the Blaine County Sheriff's Office has issued permits for 1,500 people to carry concealed weapons.

End of supersized homes in ski towns?

KETCHUM, Idaho — Has the end arrived in the era of 13,000-square-foot mansions? Gene Dallago, writing in the Idaho Mountain Express, argues that big and especially energy-consuming houses that were the hallmark of the economic boom from 1988 to 2008 are already being seen as white elephants.

Dallago points to an auction of an estate near Ketchum as evidence of changing economic realities. “As the nation becomes more indebted to China and the emerging markets continue to grow,” he writes, “America is experiencing an economic paradigm shift that will gradually transform our way of life.”

Although the United States certainly won't become a Third World nation, “reduced consumption for most Americans will be a matter of necessity, and even the rich will express their wealth in more subdued ways,” he argues.

“The excess of a log home six times larger than the national average just isn't right,” he insists.

Some readers objected to Dallago's comments. “Thank God this country was built on free enterprise, and to the victor go the spoils,” wrote one blogger on the newspaper's website. “Not everyone, like you, believes in the direction our socialistic president is taking us.”

Silver lining in dark clouds of real estate

WHISTLER, B.C. — Real estate sales have been down 35 to 60 percent in Whistler this year, and those sales that have occurred typically have been for less than last year. For example, prices of chalets declined 9.5 percent and townhomes 32 percent.

But agents tell Pique newsmagazine that they find room for optimism. “Things are starting to improve,” said Drew Meredith, a former mayor.

Part of the optimism comes from the real estate scene in Vancouver, 115 kilometers (71 miles) to the south. There, sales volume has been up, even if housing prices have come down.