There’s news this spring from Copper Mountain Resort, which has always been a polite, respectful ski area, clearly reared in a good home. But then Copper fell in with the wrong crowd and turned tragically wrong.

Copper Mountain recently unveiled plans to expand its operation footprint by 500 acres for skiing while also upgrading trails, facilities and more. The Summit Daily News also wrote a story about how traffic is often a problem in that area on high-use days and storms.

The wrongness of it all is the unquenchable thirst for the mega-many additional skiers that Copper hopes to lure to Summit County because corporate math makes it seem like it’s not possible to have too many customers. In the language of corporate skiing, there are many words for more — but none for enough.

Copper wants its landlord, the White River National Forest, to allow it to build six more lifts. White River is the putative regulatory agency intended to protect us from the Goths, Visigoths and miscellaneous Vandals who love us to death and want to wrap us in a tender embrace as they suck our blood. Too melodramatic? OK — you’re right. But have you ever watched the snaking, unbroken line of headlights writhing down from the Eisenhower-Johnson Memorial Tunnels on a Friday night during ski season?

I don’t know that Copper is worse than any other ski area. Every year there’s another ski resort ready to announce more — more lifts and terrain and more snow cowboys. I may have missed it, but I don’t ever recall a headline describing how White River National Forest denied an expansion. I begin to suspect the U.S. Forest Service is not very good at saying no, and a new ski area CEO can make his or her reputation through more lifts, more terrain, more parking lots.