The Outsider | Fresh powder stacking up spikes avalanche danger heading into holiday weekend

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Heads up backcountry skiers: Avalanche danger is spiking

An avalanche on Marble Peak on Nov. 25 caught four backcountry skiers, three of whom were partially buried. (Colorado Avalanche Information Center)

“There’s not going to be many places in the state that are going to be safe this weekend.”

— Brian Lazar with the Colorado Avalanche Information Center

Number of years with fatal avalanche accidents in the past 12 Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekends

Last week we toured up to some steep, north-facing terrain south of Eagle and skied through finger-sized facets that tinkled like shards of glass under our skis.

“This is going to be our nightmare for the next storm,” we lamented, snapping a photo of the angular fragments on our way out.

Those frozen, faceted flakes are now buried, creating a weak layer beneath a growing load of snow coming from the most significant series of storms so far this season.

While resorts are celebrating, the storm cycle is troubling for avalanche forecasters who are projecting a significant spike in avalanche danger heading into the holiday weekend.

New snow on top of a weak layer that developed after several weeks of dry weather will soon build into dangerous slabs. High winds Friday and Saturday could make those slabs even more dangerous.

“There are going to be dangerous areas in almost all mountain ranges throughout Colorado this week,” said Brian Lazar, the deputy director of the Colorado Avalanche Information Center. “People have been really jonesing for the return of snowfall and the return of winter and now we’ve got the most dangerous avalanche conditions we’ve probably seen all season coinciding with some people having some time off and that makes us really nervous. There’s not going to be many places in the state that are going to be safe this weekend.”

There have been fatal avalanche accidents in Colorado on four of the last 12 Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekends. December and early January were unusually dry this season and there have been no fatalities so far this season.

Colorado Avalanche Information Center forecasters this week are on a mission to keep that number at zero. It’s a daunting task trying to reach backcountry skiers who have enjoyed several weeks of low danger and been able to ski and snowmobile just about anywhere without exposing themselves to excessive avalanche threats.

“Making the shift for people can sometimes be challenging,” said Ethan Greene, the director of the avalanche center. “What we really want people to do is check the forecast and look at what conditions are for the day wherever they are planning to recreate and make sure they make a plan that’s appropriate for that forecast. So that stuff you were eyeing last week, probably is not going to be on the menu anymore.”

>> Click over to The Sun on Friday to read this story

The Playground#

Colorado Parks and Wildlife commissioners cut April mountain lion hunting season, ban electronic calls

A ranger found a mountain lion in a cottonwood tree in Garden of the Gods about 6 a.m. April 29. (Cody Bear Sutton, Special to The Colorado Sun)

“The body count is disturbing.”

— Julie Marshall with the Cats Aren’t Trophies campaign

305

Number of mountain lions killed by hunters so far this season

Big-cat advocates are outraged by the number of mountain lions harvested during the first month of the Colorado hunting season, saying they are especially alarmed by the number of females among the 305 animals killed.

“The body count is disturbing, given that all of these felines were randomly targeted for no good reason,” read an email blast from Julie Marshall, with the Cats Aren’t Trophies campaign, which will soon begin collecting signatures for two proposed ballot measures that in November will ask voters to ban or limit mountain lion hunting in Colorado.

On Thursday at Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s monthly commissioner board meeting in Denver, Mark Vieira, the manager of the agency’s Carnivore and Furbearer Program, said recent density studies of mountain lions across the state were accurate and the season’s hunting harvest limits were appropriate.

Vieira made an important distinction in the mountain lion anti-hunting campaign message: Only about 17% of the lions killed by hunters in the past five years have been adult females, which is below the threshold set by wildlife biologists to maintain a healthy population of mountain lions.

On Thursday, commissioners voted to eliminate the April 1-30 hunting season starting this year and they made it illegal to use electronic calls to lure lions starting March 1.

>> Click over to The Sun on Friday to read this story by Tracy Ross

Mountain town real estate settles after pandemic frenzy with one caveat: prices remain sky-high

Townhomes for sale in a Frisco neighborhood Sept. 11 in Summit County. (Hugh Carey, The Colorado Sun)

“It’s basic supply and demand economics.”

— Chris Klug, Aspen broker

$1.73 million

Average price for a single-family home in Steamboat Springs in 2023, compared with $935,000 in 2019

The pandemic wreaked havoc on home prices in mountain towns as urbanites fled to less congested areas. The cost of homes in resort communities doubled from 2019 to 2021.

Months shy of the four-year anniversary of the pandemic, it looks like the buying frenzy has waned. Mountain town brokers are reporting big drops in the number of transactions and sales volume in 2023, compared to the highs set in 2021 and 2022.

But two critical metrics have yet to budge from the pandemic boom: mountain home prices remain at all-time highs and the number of homes for sale remains at historic lows.

“I look at all this and it’s so interesting. We’ve got higher interest rates and increased cost of ownership with higher taxes and higher insurance rates. All these things you would think would bring the prices down,” said Dana Cottrell, a longtime Summit County broker and president-elect of the Colorado Association of Realtors. “I mean, look at all the things conspiring to bring these prices down yet the supply and demand factor is stronger than everything else.”

Around Steamboat, the average price for a single-family home hit $1.73 million in 2023, an 85% increase from the pre-pandemic average of $935,000. Home prices are up 12% in Telluride in 2023 and up nearly20% in Mountain Village, compared with previous highs set in 2022.

And around Aspen, where prices are always mind-boggling, there were just as many homes sold for more than $10 million and more than $20 million in 2023 as the previous, record-setting year. A Florida car dealership owner set a record for Aspen in September when he paid $76 million for a slopeside manse.

“The upper end of the market is still very much driving volume and driving activity,” said Aspen broker Chris Klug, whose Klug Properties team has close to $60 million in sales under contract in the first week of January. “People still want to be here and there’s strong demand and the inventory is constrained. It’s basic supply and demand economics.”

Brokers are still crunching numbers but 2023 home sales in most high-country communities will be down 20% to 30% in total sales volume compared with 2022. The number of transactions is down roughly the same percentage. But these numbers remain 20% to 30% above 2019.

COVID lured a lot of newcomers into mountain towns, creating a wave of buyers that more than doubled home prices by 2021. The urban exodus of deep-pocketed pandemic buyers may be waning, but the prices they paid are not. And those new arrivals are not selling their mountain homes and returning to cities.

“We haven’t had this post-COVID gap,” said Jon Wade, a longtime Steamboat Springs broker who estimates he helped about 500 newcomers find homes in the Yampa River Valley during the pandemic “and I can think of only two who have left town.” He added: “You would think we would have been slow after those big years.”

>> Click over to The Sun next week to read this story

Granby Ranch owners ban locally elected officials from the ski resort, golf course and “sidewalks”

The ski and golf community of Granby Ranch is financed by 10 metro districts. (Nina Riggio, Special to The Colorado Sun)

“My 4- and 6-year-old grandchildren behave more maturely than this.”

— John Henderson with Coloradans for Metro District Reform

The owners of Granby Ranch are again banning elected members of the homeowner metro district from accessing the ski area, the golf course, trails, fishing areas and all restaurants.

In letters sent by the lawyer who represents Granby Ranch owners Bob and David Glarner, the homeowners — members of the homeowner-run Granby Ranch Metro District and their spouses — were told they could not access any of the resort’s amenities, including “sidewalks, patios and lawns.”

It’s the second year in a row that Granby Ranch homeowner Natascha O’Flaherty and her husband have received the letters from David Richardson, the attorney with Husch Blackwell who has represented the Glarners for many years. Richardson sends a lot of letters to homeowners and media who are critical of his clients.

“Hold on, I’ll read you the letters. I have a whole folder filled with Husch Blackwell letters,” O’Flaherty said. “This is their M.O. — to harass and intimidate. It appears to have a chilling effect on getting owners to serve on the board. It would appear to me they want to control the Granby Ranch Metro District board.”

The Glarners are brothers and real estate developers from Missouri whose GRCO LLC and GR Terra LLC bought the financially struggling Granby Ranch in May 2021 for $29 million.

It is not the first time the Glarners have clashed with homeowners at their development projects. In 2021, homeowners in the Villages of Huntleigh Ridge in Wentzville, Missouri, about 45 miles west of St. Louis, raised concerns about spending by the homeowners board, which had three members: the brothers and their mother. The Glarners were planning to develop homes on property they owned in the village and the association was racking up annual legal bills to Husch Blackwell that were as high as $54,000.

“That’s a lot for an HOA that is taking in $85,000 a year. Fence approvals or anything that had to do with the HOA would go through his lawyer, David Richardson at Husch Blackwell, and we would get these huge bills,” said homeowner Danny Vehlewald, who was elected to the homeowners association board after the Glarners sold their property. “We were literally charged $700 for a phone call with Husch Blackwell over a fence approval.”

When the homeowners complained to local news outlets, “we all woke up to cease-and-desist letters from Husch Blackwell,” Vehlewald said. “The only thing I can say to owners in a similar situation is to get all your local town and county leaders together and tell them they can’t do business like this in your community.”

This is the latest round of issues at Granby Ranch, where a complex network of metro districts and complicated financing plans have challenged homeowners for decades. The Colorado attorney general has filed a complaint against Husch Blackwell for possibly violating campaign finance laws involving the homeowner metro district board election last spring. And the Granby Ranch turmoil is an example of largely unregulated behavior by developers and their metro districts, said John Henderson, whose Coloradans for Metro District Reform group is pushing for legislation that gives homeowners greater say in financing and developing their communities.

Henderson, a lawyer who works with homeowners in developer-controlled metro districts, said the letters from the Glarners’ lawyers are “totally strange and childish.”

“My 4- and 6-year-old grandchildren behave more maturely than this,” he said.

>> Click over to The Sun on Friday to read this story

— j