Colorado lawmakers grapple with a slippery I-70

Jason Blevins

Outdoors/Business Reporter

Sneak Peek of the Week

As I-70 closures clog mountain towns, municipal and state leaders ponder increased traction-law fines as truckers call for help

It was a quiet night at the Vail Town Council on Wednesday, with not many folks in the chambers and the highway outside the window strangely quiet.

So it wasn’t surprising, as a jackknifed semitrailer blocked Interstate 70’s eastbound lanes in Dowd Junction, that the council unanimously approved an emergency ordinance levying a $2,650 fine on vehicles that shut down the highway.

Council members after the vote asked how quickly the emergency ordinance would go into effect.

“Tonight?” one councilman asked. “We need to get home.”

The next morning, mere hours after the vote, another semitrailer jackknifed on icy roads and closed eastbound I-70 in the town.

It’s been an exceptionally ugly winter in the I-70 the mountain corridor. Storms have pummeled the roadway, leading to spun-out vehicles that have closed the highway more than 200 times between Glenwood Springs and Georgetown. That’s a 40% increase over the 2023-24 winter. Local and state lawmakers are weighing new regulations to help reduce the number of closures on the critical artery as trucking advocates argue the problem is not just semis driving without chains on tires.

The closures have pinched the flow of goods and skiers on I-70 while flooding mountain towns with stalled traffic. CDOT estimates a one-hour closure on I-70 costs the state about $2 million. So closures last year hit the state’s economy for somewhere around $300 million, the town of Vail argued in a letter to Gov. Jared Polis last month, citing safety hazards for emergency personnel and drivers stuck in their cars as well as “detrimental efforts on the quality of life of Colorado residents, guests and workforce.”

It’s likely state lawmakers will soon increase the $1,157 fine for vehicles without traction that block Colorado’s roadways. It will be the second time in six years that the state has hiked fines for drivers who violate the state’s traction law.

“We have the highest fines in the country today for chain laws. The only strategy in Colorado seems to be raising fines,” said Greg Fulton with the Colorado Motor Carriers Association, noting that companies do not pay fines levied on truckers.

Fulton said there needs to be more chain-up and chain-removal areas along the mountain corridor. He suggests compliance checkpoints along the interstate — well before the snow and steeps like Vail Pass and the climbs to the Eisenhower-Johnson Memorial Tunnel and Floyd Hill — would reduce incidents. He wants to see parking areas for truckers so they can opt not to drive the mountain passes during snowstorms. The association supports the roadside permitting legislation that would offer chain-up assistance.

“What is getting forgotten in all this is the truck driver,” Fulton said. “We need to have safe places for them to chain up and remove chains.”

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

In Their Words

Federal appeals court clarifies corner-crossing conundrum in decision that impacts access to millions of acres of public land

In a decision that protects access to millions of acres of public land across the West, the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver has found that hunters who stepped from one parcel of federally managed land to another did not violate the property rights of an owner of adjacent parcels.

Land ownership in the West is defined by tidy squares. But that checkerboard of public and private land poses a navigational quandary for recreational users. When they step diagonally from one parcel of public land to another, are they violating the private airspace of landowners whose private property intersects with public land at that checkerboard X?

The three-judge panel at the 10th Circuit on Tuesday ruled that so-called corner crossers are not trespassing, siding with Wyoming hunters who were sued for trespass in 2022 by a ranch owner whose 50-square-mile ranch in Carbon County includes 27 federal parcels totaling 11,000 acres. A local jury found the men not guilty of trespassing, spurring the civil lawsuit from the landowner.

The North Carolina pharmaceutical mogul who owns the Elk Mountain Ranch near the Medicine Bow National Forest in south-central Wyoming claimed as much as $7.75 million in damages, arguing his property value was diminished by the hunters who used a steel A-frame ladder to step across adjoining corners of private and public land where the owner had erected chains and No Trespassing signs. A Wyoming District Court judge in 2023 sided with the four Missouri hunters, who did not touch the private ground when they stepped over their ladder onto public land adjacent to Elk Mountain Ranch in 2021.

Ranch owner Fred Eshelman appealed the ruling to the 10th Circuit in a case that would have impacted access to millions of land-locked public acres.

“While the dispute may seem trivial, at its core, it implicates centuries of property law and the settlement of the American West,” reads the 51-page 10th Circuit ruling written by Judge Timothy Tymkovich that detailed more than a century of property disputes and rulings. “This case turns on the interplay of state and federal law enacted against the backdrop of private settlement of public lands and the property disputes that inevitably followed among rival interests.”

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

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The Playground

A late-minute festival bumps into a race in Telluride as locals ponder a sustainable balance between tourism and lifestyles

They used to blast for gold and silver in Telluride. Now they mine for summertime weekends.

In a box canyon where festivals fill the warm-weather calendar, late arrivals can raise hackles. A last-minute proposal by Planet Bluegrass, the producer of the 51-year-old Telluride Bluegrass Festival, will wedge a two-day concert in Town Park into a late August weekend usually set aside for the popular Telluride Mountain Run.

Organizers of the technical running race say 8,000 concertgoers in Town Park “would make it impossible” to host the race that draws about 450 elite trail runners. The Aug. 22-23 festival — Planet Bluegrass has not announced the headlining performer yet — was approved by the Telluride Town Council despite long-simmering concerns among locals that large-scale concerts are not a sustainable path to protecting local lifestyles and natural resources.

Regular Outsider readers will recognize that narrative. There’s a growing chorus of mountain town residents asking local tourism promoters to better balance crowds with local concerns. As more residents land in mountain towns with jobs that are not entwined in the tourism economy, longtime champions of events, festivals and other visitor-attracting promotions are retooling their strategies.

Arguing for a 450-runner race over an 8,000-person concert is yet another example of this paradigm shift in towns that were built by tourists. And just like the miners ceded to vacationers in mountain towns, the decades-long reign of visitors could soon ebb as communities tap the brakes on tourism.

At Counter Culture, a lunch spot just outside of Telluride in Lawson Hill, Steve Hertzfeld was more skeptical. As the concert gained approval, Hertzfeld, who co-owns the cafe with two other locals, worried how the new event would impact the race.

Race organizers should not be forced to reshuffle dates and plans, Hertzfeld told Sun freelancer Gavin McGough. Of course Hertzfeld welcomes new visitors, but he’s wary of the long-term gains.

“A headliner who is going to be here for two days this one summer — just to me — it doesn’t promote a sustainable economy,” he said. Hertzfeld was more interested in seeing Telluride develop its recreation economy.

“That’s less boom and bust,” he said.

>> Click over to The Sun on Monday to read Gavin’s story

In Telluride, is it “time to chuck Chuck?”

Over the past 20 years, I’ve fielded dozens of questions from San Miguel County residents and visitors, asking me to look into the erratic management of the owner of the Telluride Ski & Golf Resort.

Chuck Horning bought the ski area in 2004 and that same year I wrote a profile of the California real estate investor that revealed his plan to “learn on the job” as he navigated ownership of his first ski area. Horning’s still learning.

For more than 20 years, Telluride locals have quietly grumbled about the resort’s owner. As locals are wont to do. It’s pretty rare to find a mountain community without a consistent bellyaching over the local ski hill boss. But the griping in Telluride has been particularly acute and enduring. Horning has fired a lot of managers, including some of the most respected resort veterans in the industry.

That persistent quibbling boiled over last week in the Mountain Village Town Council chambers in a unanimous vote to approve condemnation of a parcel owned by Horning. The council today will weigh a 4.5% tax on lift tickets, similar to the municipal lift tax imposed at the Breckenridge and Vail ski area.

Both moves by the council reveal a rare public exposure of the decades-long rift between Horning and the communities that surround his ski area.

“We are now here as a direct result of the choices you, and you alone, have made,” Mountain Village Town Administrator Paul Wisor wrote to Horning in a letter informing him that the town was going to consider a lift ticket tax after the owner failed to reach an agreement with the local transportation authority over funding for the public gondola.

Wisor, in an airing of grievances reminiscent of the “Seinfeld” holiday of Festivus, blasted Horning last week in a fiery diatribe that marked a first-ever public exposure of abiding angst over Horning and his control of the local ski hill. Horning, who manages in temperamental bursts that include firing managers and even his own son, did not attend last week’s council meeting when leaders voted to condemn a parcel of his land after the town was unable to secure permission for a 25-year-old summer concert series in the Mountain Village core.

“Chuck has failed in every respect to meet his responsibilities in a meaningful way and he’s been doing so for quite some time,” Wisor said, rousing a standing ovation in the chamber. “It affects our town, It affects our community. And it affects our future. This is reality that we can’t just whisper about anymore. I truly believe that this mountain and this community deserve better.”

The speech drew wide support from locals. Telluride Town Councilman Dan Enright took to Instagram to support Wisor, saying “it’s about damn time for a change” in a post he titled, “It’s time to chuck Chuck.”

It’s no secret that the heavyweights in the ski industry have repeatedly knocked on Horning’s door, offering to buy the consistently top-ranked ski area, where high-end hotels and homes coddle the jet set and rowdy steeps thrill dedicated skiers.

— j

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