My Page: Tim Sprinkle

New West Q&A

Even in the increasingly diverse Western states, it’s still rare to find established Islamic communities, either in cities like Denver or in more isolated mountain towns. It would seem that followers of Islam, for one reason or the other, have simply bypassed the West.

And that’s exactly the kind of misconception that Dr. Nabil Echchaibi, assistant professor of journalism and media studies at the University of Colorado and associate director of the University’s Center for Media, Religion and Culture, is out to correct. Muslims have a rich history in the Mountain West, he says, and he has spent the last two years researching and documenting this legacy as part of a cultural history project co-funded by the Social Science Research Council and CU.

New West Feature

“Right now, we figure that we’re undersupplying the market by about 20 percent,” says Dave Carter, executive director of the National Bison Association based in Westminster, Colorado, “and that gap is widening.” The problem, he says, can be boiled down to three converging forces: a renewed interest in healthy meats, a new consumer focus on sustainable foods, and the simple fact that bison tastes better than a lot of meat eaters ever really expected it to. The growing industry just wasn’t prepared to meet the recent explosion in the demand and has been stuck playing catch-up.

“We always say that the best way to save bison is to eat it,” Carter says. “The customers have been doing their part; now it’s up to us to keep up our end.”

On the ground, all this growth spells trouble for people like Andrew Bardwell, who raises bison on his Deep Creek Ranch in Choteau, Montana, and serves as president of the Montana Bison Association. Bardwell worries that in the three to five years that it is expected to take bison production to catch up to demand, the “buffalo boom” might well be over, leaving many of today’s producers out in the cold.

“It’s a great thing to have a ready market any time you need to move animals,” he says, “but folks are talking this [shortfall] pretty seriously right now and retailers are getting frustrated. We know we need to grow the herds, but it takes time.”

SNOWBLOG

Despite all of the travel delays and highway hazards that come along with winter weather this time of year, it’s very hard for snow sports fans to look at what has been happening in the High Country this week and feel anything other than excitement.

More than 15 feet of snow is currently on the ground in the Sierras. Some 50 inches have fallen in Utah’s mountain areas. Colorado’s ski areas are bracing for up to four feet of new snow by the end of the week.

In a word: wow.

NEW WEST FEATURE

First, consider the numbers.

According to the latest census data, there are about 285 million people living in the U.S., every single one of whom has to eat (and most of us do that several times a day).

On the flipside, the country is currently home to some 960,000 full-time “agricultural professionals” operating about 2 million farms (including part-time facilities). That’s almost 300 Americans for each full-time U.S. farmer to feed (though, granted, a lot of the food that we eat these days does come from overseas, but that’s another story). And if that figure isn’t scary enough, consider the fact that the average American farmer right now is 57 years old, most likely looking forward to a comfortable retirement sometime in the next decade or so.

Now the push to encourage the next generation of farmers makes a lot more sense.

Early Season

Early-season skiing in Colorado these days is starting to feel like a sort of arms race.

Which resort is opening first?

Who has the most acreage available?

Where can you find the most vertical drop?

It’s almost like the numbers are all that matter anymore, with the focus increasingly turning toward early openings. November is not longer “early;” October is (apparently) no longer “fall.

New West Feature

The battle over backcountry access is back on.

This time, the Winter Wildlands Alliance, a nonprofit organization dedicated to human-powered snow sports, has taken the lead, filing a petition with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Forest Service related to the way snowmobiles are regulated on National Forest lands. Their argument? That over-snow vehicles (aka snowmobiles) should fall under the same oversight rules that govern off-road use in the summer.

In other words, they feel it is time to close the so-called “snowmobile loophole.”

“This is really about saying, ‘Listen, snowmobiles are off-road vehicles.’ Let’s get rid of this clause that deals with them differently and just manage them like all other off-road vehicles,” says Mark Menlove, executive director of the Winter Wildlands Alliance. “We’re going to be proactive and design areas where snowmobile use is appropriate, but there will be areas of the winter forest that are closed to motorized use just as they are in the summer.”

New West Feature

Colorado’s high mountain peaks are a study in contrasts.

On the one hand, they’re desolate, rocky places, pummeled by storms and blanketed by snow for more than half the year. On the other, they’re home to a wide variety of plant and animal species, all uniquely adapted to life on the tundra.

As if that weren’t enough, the highest of these peaks – those over 14,000 feet above sea level, a.k.a. “fourteeners” – are also some of Colorado’s most popular recreation destinations, attracting thousands of hikers and climbers every year. With those crowds come problems, of course, including trampled vegetation, erosion and other overuse damage.

And that’s exactly why the U.S. Forest Service wants to start charging hikers a fee to access several fourteeners in the southern part of the state.

A proposal issued in May of this year seeks to charge $10 per hiker and $20 per camper for access to the South Colony Basin area, a trailhead that serves four 14,000-foot climbs in Custer Country – Humboldt Peak, Kit Carson Peak, Crestone Peak and the Crestone Needle. The proposal would not place a limit on the total number of visitors allowed into the area and, if approved, wouldn’t go into effect until 2011 at the earliest.

“Managing recreational use and protecting the environment in South Colony Basin presents the USFS with many challenges not found in other backcountry locations,” the agency wrote in a statement when the proposal was introduced, “such as maintaining costly summit trails, restoring degraded alpine ecosystems, supporting search and rescue operations, and dealing with human waste. Revenue from the proposed recreation use fees will help to sustain the recreational facilities and environmental protections in the basin.”