Tourism
REal estate & development in the northern rockies
Partnerships and Profitability in Rural MontanaAs more and more of the rural West is consumed by development what are the biggest challenges to maintaining traditional uses and providing opportunities for the next generation of farmers and ranchers?
This was the difficult question posed to a panel of farmers, ranchers and land managers Friday at the second annual Real Estate and Development in the Northern Rockies conference in Missoula.
“I see the biggest challenge as trying to maintain the working landscapes in the valley,” said Hank Goetz of the pioneering land management cooperative the Blackfoot Challenge. “The other factor that we really haven’t begun to deal with is the affordable housing part of it -- for the young people and the young families in the valley.”
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Monday Business Roundup
Ski Resorts Invest Millions in Improvements
This weekend saw the first significant snowfall of the winter, with Vail getting eight inches overnight on Saturday-Sunday and Beaver Creek nine. In an effort to set a third consecutive record for total skier visits this season, Colorado's ski resorts are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in improvements to ski slopes and to base-village amenities this year.
Last season 12.5 million people skied or boarded at Colorado's snowsports resort, setting a new record for the second year in a row. Officials are hoping to near the 13 million mark for 2007-08. They could be helped by early snow during TV broadcasts of the Colorado Rockies in the World Series, which begins Wednesday.
In other business news: venture funding in Colorado hits new highs; new Nordstrom opens at Cherry Creek; and Colorado's casino revenue climbs.
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Tourism Boom
New Economy: Will Success Spoil Washington’s Walla Walla?
Editor's note: The delicate balance a community has to strike when it becomes a tourism hot spot is a plight Rocky Mountain communities know well and we've all seen what happens when the scales tip, in either direction. In this piece from Crosscut.com, Knute Berger shows us what our neighbors in Washington's Willamette Valley are struggling with as the region begins to boom, or as he puts it: As Walla Wall begins to bing bang.
Much has already been written about the Walla Walla miracle, how an old, insular small town in the farm country of southeastern Washington emerged as a major wine center with all the accoutrements that go with it: tourism, fine food, and lots of newcomers looking for all-American livability.
Call it the new Willamette Valley, the new Napa, or simply the new Walla Walla — for anyone who remembers the old city, it's an amazing transformation to behold.
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Spade & Spoon: Localizing the Way Westerners Eat
Agritourism May Be Growing, But Is It Sustainable?
The Rocky Mountain West’s tourism industry is worth billions of dollars. In 2006, Montana raked in $3 billion from non-resident vacationers, Wyoming $2 billion and Utah $5 billion. An increasing number of these visitors are leaving behind their jobs and worries for a few days not only to fish blue ribbon streams or ski the perfect powder. They are coming West to don a pair of spurs, rustle some livestock and sleep in a farmhouse on working farms and ranches.
From 2000 to 2001, 62 million adults visited farms and ranches across America according to the United States Department of Agriculture. This agricultural tourism, better known as agritourism, includes farm tours, you-pick operations or country stores as well as farms that provide accommodations. From New Mexico's El Rancho Nido de las Golondrinas to Brush Creek Ranch in Wyoming, places of work are becoming places of play and respite.
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Weekend Feature From DailyYonder
Controversy Builds Over New American Indian Museum Director
At the first National Rural Assembly, held in July, members honored six “rural heroes,” including Elouise Cobell, the former treasurer of Montana-based Blackfeet tribe, a founder of the first Native American Bank, director of a Native American community development corporation, and a member of the board of trustees of the National Museum of the American Indian.
The Assembly especially highlighted Elouise Cobell’s role as the lead plaintiff in the nation’s largest class action law suit, Cobell v. Kempthorne, which asks the government to account for billions of dollars owed to 500,000 Indians and tribes. For her role in the litigation, Cobell may be a hero to rural America and the recipient, in 1997, of one of the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius awards,” but she does not appear to be quite so admired by the Smithsonian Institution, which recently hired Kevin Gover as the new director of the National Museum of the American Indian without consulting Cobell or most of the museum board’s other trustees.
Kevin Gover, a member of the Pawnee tribe, just so happens to be the federal official who fought Cobell for years in court, earning a contempt citation in the process.
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Guest Column
Getting Out of the Way: Respecting Ranchers, Habitat and Bison
Recently the Gallatin Wildlife Association was allowed to present our bison management suggestions to the Montana Board of Livestock, an opportunity for which we are immensely grateful.
We’ve long felt we have a unique opportunity for a true win-win when it comes to wild bison in Montana. Our suggestions completely support private property rights, protect our brucellosis-free status, embrace the situation as an asset, harvest a whole lot more buffalo, and require very little to no change in current livestock practices in areas adjacent to Yellowstone.
The adjacent map of the Montana portion of the Greater Yellowstone area demonstrates yet again how lucky we are to live in Montana! We have a landscape that lends itself perfectly to a common-sense solution. Although, after reading Bob Jackson's viewpoints on social structures in bison herds, I’m going to have a harder time using the word “management,” and may try to avoid it. All we really have to do is get out of the way.
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Brucellosis, Buffer Zones, Bio Bullets and More
Park County Hosts Roundtable on Schweitzer’s Brucellosis “Buffer Zone”Responding to Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer’s plan to create a “brucellosis-free buffer zone” around Yellowstone National Park, the Park County Commissioners sponsored and hosted a public meeting in Livingston on Friday, August 17.
The meeting came as Montana faces the possibility of being downgraded to a “Brucellosis Class A State” if cattle in any herd in the state test positive for the disease. Brucellosis causes female ungulates to suddenly abort their fetuses and can be carried in most mammals and birds. Last month the U.S. Department of Agriculture discovered brucellosis in six cows on Joe and Sandy Morgan’s ranch near Bridger. The entire herd—569 head of cattle—were subsequently sent to slaughter.
Governor Brian Schweitzer’s buffer zone plan would require all cattle entering or leaving the as-of-yet determined zone around the park to be tested for brucellosis. Schweitzer and others’ fears stem from the possibility of wild Yellowstone National Park bison transmitting the disease to cattle, though no such transmission has ever been recorded.
Park County Commissioner Larry Lahren opened the discussion by saying the meeting was an attempt to “get the facts on the table, which will hopefully result in a resolution about the governor’s plan, which really isn’t a plan at all.”
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Spade & Spoon: Localizing the Way Westerners Eat
Greening Yellowstone: Local Food in National Parks
In 1995 a privately owned company out of Colorado called Xanterra Parks & Resorts took over ownership and management of hotels and restaurants in many state and national parks in the United States. From the Everglades to Yellowstone, the company prides itself on following a tradition of hostelry established by Fred Harvey who made it easier for 1870s travelers to eat well and travel comfortably in the raucous west. But these days, Xanterra also believes that such comfort and tourism should not come at the expense of the environment.
By 2015, Xanterra plans to reduce its fossil fuel use and gas emissions in the 25 parks, resorts and conference centers it is affiliated with by thirty percent while diverting fifty percent of all solid waste away from the landfill. They also plan to increase "sustainable cuisine" purchases to fifty percent of all “companywide food expenditures.” In their 2005 Sustainability Report, the company states that it made $1.4 million in sustainable cuisine purchases in 2004, up from $22,765 in 2001. While most of this money was spent on dairy, about $52,000 went to purchasing bison and elk.
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Monday Business Roundup
Local Moviegoers Await Theater OpeningFor years analysts have considered the movie-theater business overbuilt, as evidenced by the closing of cineplexes across the West that were built in the small-box cinema boom of the 1980s. Try telling that to Boulder residents, though, who have exactly one aging four-screen theater in a town of more than 100,000 and who have been forced to drive south to the Colony Square and Flatirons megaplexes to get a decent choice of new releases.
That will change, finally, in August when the 16-screen movie theater at Boulder's Twenty Ninth Street mall will light up after multiple delays, nearly a year after its original scheduled opening.
The theater was delayed by a change of ownership, when Century Theatres was bought out by Cinemark USA Inc. As it happens, Cinemark USA is one of the parterns in Centennial-based National CineMedia, a digital theater-ads company that beams pre-movie programming via satellite to around 12,000 theaters nationwide. While benefiting from new-theater construction, National CineMedia is also moving into a new line of business: digital programming for health clubs.
In other business news: Denver law firm sinks in personal-injury morass; anti-smoking-ban group broadcasts gloomy and dubious figures; and casino towns get rich off billions in bets.
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Beetle Plague Advances
Time to Consider Controlled Burns
I drove back to Boulder from Steamboat Springs on Sunday and I can tell you that the pine beetle infestation is much, much worse this year than last. It has spread north and west into Rocky Mountain National Park and into Routt County, and while the Yampa River Valley is relatively unscathed, it's clear that it's only a matter of time before the forests around Steamboat die and turn rust-brown just like those around Grand Lake.
The Forest Service calculates that about 44 percent of the state's 1.5 million acres of lodgepole pine forest are now infested by beetles.
Yesterday the entire Colorado delegation introduced a "bark beetle bill" that would allocate $22 million in additional federal funds to help the Forest Service and local communities combat the threat of wildfire.
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