Park Record | 2004-09-22 | Page 22

The Park Record B-6 Recreation Report [Wasatch-Cache National Forest In the Uinta Mountains, campgrounds are starting to scale back for the season. Water systems above Shady Dell are closed, and lower systems are being shut down. Soapstone and the back loop of Ledgefork will be open through the deer hunt. There are no specific fire restrictions in place.The Ranger recommends being prepared for cold conditions at higher elevations. For more information about camping and hiking, including fire regulations call the Kamas Ranger District, 435-783-4338. For information on Hunting schedules, contact the Division of Wildlife Services at [phone]. Facilities and services are available at: Wasatch Mountain State Park- (435) 654-l79l;Jordanelle State Park - [phone]; Rock Cliff Nature Center - [phone]; Rockport State Park [phone]; For more primitive trails and camping, contact the U.S. Forest Service - [phone].Wasatch has a fishing pond that offers fishing and free equipment rentals to kids. Hiking and Biking ^^^^^^^^^^^ The MountariTrals Foundation manors 300 miles of trafc in and aroundforkQty. Asof Tuesday, Sept 21 they report that the viewof the autunri colors c spectacular from the Mid MountariTraiL Start at Skier Late in Deer\&lley and yau cress throu^i Park City Mountah ResortThe Colony and The Canyons. You can continue on to Phebrook and Gorgaza ParkWatch outfororangefencrigand constnjcbon equpment on Lower Svreeneys &vitchback through October. TheTeam Big BearTraJ at Deer Valley is dosed. Trail maps are awaibble at bl<e sheps and the Visitors Center Fcr more hfcrmation call 649-6839 or visit wwvwTOuntahtraib.org. Sundance Resort offers hkng and bkrigfar the surrner seascn. FCT rrore nforrraticn cal [phone] or visit vwvwstndanoerescrixom Fire Conditions Fire danger is currently moderate, but caution is advised Summit County has banned fireworks this summer. Open fires require a permit available through fire wardens, fire chiefs, sheriffs or through the State Division of Forestry, Fire and State Lands. For more information, contact the Division at [phone]. Park City Golf Club The Park City Golf Club course is open, weather permitting, from 9 a.m. to dusk. For more information, call 615-5800 or visit www.parkcitygolfclub.org. You can now use the web site to book your tee time. Golf Courses Area golf courses open to the public include: Wasatch Mountain State Park, Midway - [phone];The Homestead Resort, Midway - [phone]; Round Valley Golf Course, Morgan - [phone]; Soldier Hollow, Midway - [phone] Deer Valley Resort Deer Valley Resort's summer activities have ended for the season. The opening for the 2004-2005 ski season is scheduled to be Dec. 4, 2004. For more information or a list of upcoming events at Deer Valley, log on to www.deervalley.com. The Canyons L "-H The Canyons summer activities are scheduled Saturdays and Sundays through bept. The Farmer's Market is open on Wednesdays. Hikers and bikers can enjoy lift-assisted access to mountain trails. For more info, call 649-5400 or log on to www.thecanyons.com. Park City Mountain Resort Park City Mountain Resort late summer and early fell activities will be in operation Friday through Sunday until Oct. 31 .weather permitting. Hours will be from noon until 7 p.m. Among the summer activities are the Alpine Slide, Climbing Wall, ZipRider, Miniature Golf, Horseback Rjding and more.The Town Lift is also operating. For more info, call 800-222-7275; or log on at www.parkcitymountain.com. Utah Olympic Park The Utah Olympic Park is open for activities Friday through Sundays including Freestyle and Adventure Camps, Street Luge, Aerial Bungee and tethered Hot Air Balloon Rides and the new ZipRider. Saturday will have a Freestyle Big Air Show. Guests can still visit the Joe Quinney Winter Sports Center/Aif Engen Ski Museum. For more information, call 658-4200 or visitwww.olyparks.com. Come experienceyow last summer change before the winter season.. Wed/Thurs/Fri, September 22-24, 2004 Big Colo, ski resort plans still alive By JASON BLEVINS MediaNews Group Wire BJ. "Red" McCombs, a selfmade billionaire from Texas, has never been closer to his Colorado dream. All that stands between success and his plan for Ihe state's largest resort village near the Wolf Creek Ski Area in southwestern Colorado is 250 feet of roadway and a federal decision on that roadway due Jan. 10. Of course, there are lawsuits pending, and there could be others, depending on the roadway decision. As the often fiery car dealer turned radio company founder turned Minnesota Vikings owner girds for his final push to sculpt a project he has pursued for close to two decades, opposition has reached a crescendo. The battle for what could come of McCombs1 287.5 acres of spruce and aspen atop Wolf Creek Pass promises to be spectacular. The venerable owners of the Wolf Creek Ski Area who recently abandoned the McCombs village team arc suing him. Environmentalists of all ilk arc mobilizing lawyers for land-protecting appeals. Locals on the Pagosa Springs side of the southern Colorado mountain pass fear a loss of business and jobs to the village. Leaders on the other side of the pass in Mineral County see a bounty of jobs and tax revenue if the plan goes through. The speedy time frame for completion of the Forest Service's environmental impact statement on the access road and the dale of the final decision for the project - 10 days before the presidential Inauguration Day - arc also raising eyebrows among opponents of McCombs. a well-connected Republican from Texas. The federal environmental impact statement on the plan began last December. 'Hie statement does not look at the density of what could be the state's largest ski resort village, with 2.172 units, 222,100 square feet of commercial space and 4,206 covered parking spots. It looks only at the road. Even so, the speed of the review is unsettling to some Forast Service officials and environmental advocates, who say thorough impact statements can take years. In Silvcrton, for example, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management is five years into an impact statement analyzing a plan that allows skiers to access 1.300 acres of public land surrounding the Silverlon Mountain ski area. "I have never seen an (impact statement) move this fast, and this is thu most complex issue I've ever seen," said Jeff Berman, executive director of Colorado Wild, an environmental group that closely scrutinizes ski area expansions and is preparing a host of legal weapons to lake on McCombs. One Forest Service official says McCombs has Republican friends in Washington pushing for a conclusion to the environmental review before the possible inaugural ion of a new president Jan. 20. . "There's been a lot of arm-twisting, and we've had to push back." said a Forest Service official involved in the impact statement. "They have been able to influence the urgency of this thing. But you know politics only gets you so far, especially when you are talking about NEPA (the National Environmental Policy Act)." Bob Honts, a partner of McCombs in the Village at Wolf Creek project, denies that his group has applied any undue pressure, saying the parcel endured extensive federal scrutiny years ago when it was part of a federal land exchange. He said his group will get a road because federal law requires the Forest Service to provide "reasonable access" to owners of private land within public land boundaries. McCombs is already in court with the owners of the Wolf Creek Ski Area. The Pitcher clan, headed by patriarch Kingsbury and son Davey, supported the village plan up until April, when Kingsbury Pitcher angrily sold his 10 percent share of the village partnership. 'Hie Pitchers, who bought the bankrupt slci area from a Texas investment group in 1976. have a litany of complaints with the McCombs group. Bad weather? Professor is counting on it By JACK COX MediaNews Croup Wire Just inside the door of the corner office he has occupied for 37 years, hurricane forecaster William Gray has tacked up a simple ode to humility. It's a page out of baseball history, pointing out that while Babe Ruth hit 714 home runs in his career, the legendary slugger also struck out a record 1.330 times. Gray's hits and misses aren't quite as easy to keep track of, because he and his associates at Colorado State University update their storm predictions as each season progresses. But in general, he says modestly, jhe team's record is "not too bad." The initial forecast issued by the CSU group for this year called for three intense hurricanes in the Atlantic region, and so far there have been four. Last year, the seasonal forecast called for three such storms - and there were indeed three. "We don't say where and when storms will form, and for landfalls, we can only give probabilities. But we can give numbers, and if you look at the last five years, our forecasts have definitely beat the climatological average." says Gray, a pioneering researcher who has become the leading U.S. expert on long-range hurricane patterns. "We're way ahead of earthquake prediction, which gets a lot more money." he adds. Forecasts of aboveaverage or below-average activity for an entire season may seem pointless to folks fleeing storms. But such predictions, which Gray has been making since the early 1980s, are of keen concern to insurance companies, emergency planners and others whose operations are heavily affected by weather patterns. "Bill is one of the heroes in this business." says Roger Pulwarty, a research scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder. "His work has been fundamental to our understanding of why the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic varies from year to year. It's extremely important for countries in the Caribbean, because it gives them a sense of what to expect." At the height of the season, while slorms are spinning toward Florida and the Gulf of Mexico like gigantic Frisbccs. Gray is as much a spectator as anyone else. He does his work not in the midst of flooded streets and downed trees, but in rooms filled with computer terminals, weather maps and filing cabinets. It's a world not of debris and power outages but of dry statistics on wind speeds, ocean temperatures, rainfall patterns and other factors that influence the formation of hurricanes in the Atlantic - as well as typhoons in the Pacific, which he analyzes just as rigorously. Gray is mindful of the destruction Charley. Frances and Ivan have spawned, but his focus is on the future. This week, he and his colleagues are hammering out an updated forecast for October, which he feels confident "is not going to be anything like the first half of the season." During the next two months they will be factoring the most recent figures into the 2005 forecast, to be released in early December. Like the prediction for this year, it's likely to be gloomy. In Gray's view, the Atlantic basin is well into a cyclical rise in tropical-storm activity after a relative lull from the 1960s into the '90s. "This hurricane business is going to get bigger over time, because the coastal population is growing faster than the general population, and the damage in the next two or three decades is going to be much greater than in the past two or three," he asserts. "But the loss of life is going to be much lower than in the past, because they (public safety agencies) can warn people and get them out of harm's way sooner." Gray, a tall, white-haired scientist whose recall of storm statistics is matched only by his mastery of base- hall trivia, has been a meteorologist for more than 50 years and a faculty member at CSU since 1961. Almost 75, he got into forecasting as an Air Force officer in the 1950s, fresh out of George Washington University, and received his doctorate from the University of Cliicago in 1964 with a dissertation on motion and internal stresses in hurricanes. During his career, he has flown into the eyes of numerous slorms aboard planes called "hurricane hunters" and seen the forecaster's toolbox expand from radar and weather balloons to satellites and computer models. Yet he remains as full of fervor about the field as an undergraduate who has just discovered the wonders of the barometer. "I want to make a contribution that other people wouldn't make." he declares. " I don't want to be just a decimal-point extender." During the past year. Gray has stopped giving lectures and advising graduate students, and he no longer takes a salary. But he still spends most days in his office in the atmospheric sciences building northwest of CSU's main campus, where his desk faces a wall map of the world and a big white board covered with numbers representing the storm totals he and colleagues have predicted during the past three or four years. "We've never bothered to erase them/ he says, a bit sheepishly, before scampering down a flight of stairs into the basement of an adjoining building to join the daily 3 p.m. departmental briefing on what's going on 1.000 miles or more away. "Where he gets his energy, I can only speculate,11 says Hill Cotton, a fellow professor 10 years his junior. "But part of it is related to his general inquisitiveness and enthusiasm for storm research, which really drives him." With his schedule newly freed up. Gray intends to devote much of his time to writing a book on how and why tropical storms occur, synthesizing the knowledge he and his students have accumulated. In addition, he hopes to do more to debunk the notion of global warming, which he believes is based on an "appalling" reading of climatological history. The globe has warmed some in the past 30 years. Gray concedes. but he derides the implication that human beings are to blame, arguing that the changes are evidence of natural climate variability. Consider the medieval period, roughly the years 1000 to 1350. when the weather in England was warm enough to make wine. Gray says, or the "little ice age" from 1550 to IS50. when European painters depicted ice skaters on lakes and canals that no longer freeze over. "The question is, with this warming we've had. are we just coming out of this little ice age. or are we in a period similar to the medieval period?" To find the answer. Gray plans to collaborate with his daughter, Sarah, a marine geologist at the University of San Diego, who has been studying climate change in Indonesia and the Antarctic region. Gray has another daughter. Janet, who lives in Boulder, and a son. Bob, who recently became the father of Gray's first grandchild. The professor's wife. Nancy, a civic leader and former mayor of Fort Collins, died of lung cancer three years ago at age 69. Gray's chief professional concern, though, remains the seasonal forecasting project, which he has struggled to keep alive with government grants and contracts with insurance firms. He sees "tremendous potential for new research" in the latest technological tools, which arc making it easier for scientists to trace ocean and wind patterns that encircle the globe like a giant conveyor belt. "The more I know, the more interested I become and the more possibilities 1 see,H he says. "What I'm fascinated by is that there's a 'memory' in the ocean circulation patterns. You can measure them and predict an active or inactive season, and I'll go to my grave being challenged to learn the real processes that make the difference." Incredible Custom Home in Hidden Cove A MOST PLEASURABLE DINING EXPERIENCE At Silver Lake JOIN "us FOR DINNER! >-O fit / ENTREES WITH THIS AD OPEN THURS-MON FROM 5:30PM 9 4 O . O 8 O O / 7 5 8 O Royal Street East / Silver Lake RHSPRVATIONS SUGGESTED COMPLIMENTARY PARKING VALID UNTIL SEPTEMBER 30. 2 0 0 4 <NOT VALID w/ANY OTHEKOPFER) M A K I N G C U S T O M E R S FOR L I F E SI NCE 1 99O PARK CITY TITLE TRUST YOUR 167O RECORD NARI TROTTER, Parenting is a Ministry See more pictures at: www.greatparkcityhomes.com $545,000 BUILDING BONANZA DRIVE # With Joe Ellis and Family Training Ministries At the Christian Center 1100 Iron Horse Dr. Park City, UT Gourmet kitchen, radiant zoned heat, master suite laundry room, steam shower and Japanese soaking tub, custom wet bar with mini Sub-zero fridge, heated upper garage and lower detached garage, RV parking and incredible views are just a few of the extras in this 3,500 sq. ft. south-facing mountain beauty. REAL ESTATE TRANSACTION TO PEOPLE W H O CARE PARK Presents a Series of Seminars • 4 bed/4 bath • 0.65 secluded acres • Separate office •Weight room • Tons of storage • Hot tub 105 One Day Conference Sac.,Sept.25 8:30 am-4:30 pm No Child-Care Provided $25.00 Per Person (includes lunch & materials) For Married & Engaged Couples Starts Mon. Oct. 4, 6:30- 8:30 pm No Child Care Available Empowering Couples $25.00 Per Person (at least one book per couple required) Parenting 8 Week Class Starts Tues. Oct. 5 6:30-8:30 pm Child Care Available ($3.00 per child per night) # $20.00 Per Person for the cfasses PRESIDENT 649-8322 JESS REID -'REAL ESTATE cell [phone] direct [phone] www.grcaiparkcirvhomes.com Information & Registration [phone]