West’s Recreation Areas Face Dilemma

MAMMOTH LAKES —  Cutting down thousands of trees for a new golf course, marketing $700,000 townhouses that will line the fairways, breaking ground on an immense condominium complex, tearing down entire neighborhoods, the billion-dollar make-over of this eastern Sierra community is well underway.

When it’s done, the Canadian resort conglomerate behind the project promises, Mammoth will have shed the slightly slapdash look of a relaxed weekend getaway and taken its place among the great, glittering playgrounds on the continent.

Destination Mammoth will have plenty of competition. As the developers here proclaim in their promotions, the remake of the town is part of “the last great real estate boom of the 20th century.” It is a rush for mountain land across the West, motivated to a great extent by the appeal of year-round outdoor recreation, which now accounts for 10% of all consumer spending.

As prosperity and mobility make it easier for people to live where they can play, developers predict that the market for resort living is just beginning to take off.

In the next 20 years, about 80 million people will be reaching ages when their children are grown and incomes are peaking. The resort industry predicts these aging baby boomers will be responsible for a 40% rise in second- home ownership in the next decade.

That prospect poses a major dilemma both for the environmental movement, which has long backed recreation as a more benign use of the land than mining, logging or other traditional activities, and for residents of communities across the West.

A series of seven suspicious fires at Colorado’s Vail ski area last month has given the issue a new urgency. A communique to a local newspaper, signed “Earth Liberation Front,” claimed responsibility for the fires, which burned five buildings and four ski lifts. Still under investigation, the fires were set in the midst of a legal challenge by local conservationists to block expansion of the resort into an adjacent national forest.

But plans for development--and the tensions associated with it--go far beyond Vail and Mammoth. Intrawest, the company, based in Vancouver, Canada, that is bankrolling the Mammoth project, for example, plans to build 19,000 homes around the nine resorts it owns in the U.S. and Canada.

For those who treasure the solitude and rusticity of rural Western environs, the changes planned for places like Mammoth can indeed be traumatic.

“It’s the theme-parking of the great outdoors,” said Andrea Lawrence, a member of the local Mono County Board of Supervisors and a 1952 Olympic skiing gold medalist.

For others, becoming a star on the map of destination travel isn’t such a bad thing.

“It’s a windfall,” said town manager Tracy Fuller, referring to the millions in new tax revenues that she said the development will generate for municipal improvements.

As for environmentalists, “after years of touting recreation and tourism as the sensible alternative,” they are “at a bit of a loss,” said Doug Kenny of the Natural Resources Law Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

“If not recreation, what? You can’t build a fence around the public lands and keep the public out.”

“It is a major, major issue,” said Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, acknowledging that the club does not have “a fully realized strategy” for dealing with the explosive growth of commercial recreation.

Impacts Being Felt With New Expansion

The impacts of resort development on the environment are just beginning to be felt as developers push to expand roads, pump more water, flush out more sewage, and build more homes, stores and restaurants in areas that until recently have seen little human activity beyond hiking and cross-country skiing.

Some experts say the build-out is a response to public tastes in recreation that have become decidedly more sophisticated.

“You’re not seeing two-week trips to go fishing or camping anymore,” said Lyle Laverty, a recreation specialist with the U.S. Forest Service in Colorado. “Instead, you’re seeing busy, two-income families trying to pack in as much activity as possible in a long weekend. Hiking or mountain biking, followed by shopping and a nice meal and maybe something fun or romantic at night.”

Criticized for bringing traffic, construction and hordes of people into fragile and beautiful places, representatives of the recreation industry say they are far less destructive to the land than the miners and loggers who preceded them and who were once the bulwark of rural economies.

In a lushly produced video shown at its Mammoth Lakes real estate office, Intrawest proclaims that the writings of pioneer environmentalist John Muir “guided the development of the resort.”

Lawrence said linking a ski development to the man who raged against the encroachment of civilization into the Sierra is an “obscenity.”

But Dana Severy, Intrawest vice president, thinks the linkage with Muir is appropriate.

“Through his writings, John Muir was the first to market the beauty of the place. We’re in the same business.”

Kipling Decried Crowds in 1889

People have been railing against tourism of one sort or another in the West since English author Rudyard Kipling recoiled from the “ghastly vulgarity” of the crowds at Yellowstone National Park during an 1889 visit.

“I am in Yellowstone and I wish I were dead,” Kipling wrote with not altogether mock horror. “The tourists--may their master die an evil death at the hands of a mad locomotive--poured into that place with a joyful whoop.”

Yet, without the promise of tourism, America might never have mustered the political will to preserve wilderness. Beginning with Yellowstone in 1872, crucial support for creation of the national parks came from the railroad industry, which wanted to promote the park as a destination for train travel.

Today, the Yellowstone region may offer the best example in the West of the promise and peril of recreation.

With a population expected to approach half a million in the next decade, the region is fast acquiring the demographic characteristics of a metropolis.

Eight ski resorts are planning to add almost 2 million square feet of commercial construction, 14,000 hotel beds and more than 500 dwelling units over the next decade.

Typical of the West, boom towns in the Yellowstone area have gone up with little regard for the environment.

More than 90% of the new subdivisions completed in the region were built without considering their impact on water quality or wildlife, according to a recent report by the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, a local environmental group.

One neighborhood in Big Sky, Mont., was so shabbily constructed and prone to sewage leaks that the whole development--120 condominiums--was eventually abandoned and bulldozed.

It is the fate of the region’s wildlife, however, that is causing the greatest concern as civilization expands. The Yellowstone region is unique for its biological diversity. Most of the animals that inhabited the region before white settlement took root over a century ago are still there.

But the bear, elk, antelope, bison, wolves and eagles that make the area special have always needed room to move about--from summer to winter pastures, from one national park or wilderness area to another.

Studies estimate that half the bald eagles in the area nest on private land, and 90% of the mule deer found in Teton National Park and one-quarter of Yellowstone park’s northern elk herd migrate to lower-elevation private pastures for part of the year.

Yet one-third of that private acreage has been subdivided into lots of 200 acres or smaller, mostly during the past decade.

“If we cut them off from that land, which we have just about done, sooner or later, we’ll have a hard winter and a die-off of major proportions,” said Franz Camenzind, executive director of the Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance.

But despite the burdens that recreational use of the land can pose for wildlife and for the environment in general, the pressures for ever-greater use are only likely to grow on private and public lands alike.

Near the Maroon Bells Wilderness in central Colorado, the Forest Service has agreed to turn over several hundred acres of public land in a real estate trade that will allow a ski area to develop homes on a pristine mountainside in the middle of one of Colorado’s most spectacular wildflower areas.

The Forest Service has also given a green light to large-scale private real estate developments on national forest land in Utah near the site of the 2002 Winter Olympics. In Arizona, next to Grand Canyon National Park, the agency has tentatively approved development of about 1,000 hotel rooms and related buildings.

Advocates of commercial recreation say both the public and the land will benefit if businesses have incentives to invest money in the upkeep and preservation of public places. Equally important, they argue, more people and their outdoor tastes will be accommodated.

“The public lands need to be part of the sizzle of drawing people outdoors,” said Derrick Crandall, president of the American Recreation Coalition, a lobbying group for the makers of recreational products ranging from canoes and mountain bikes to motor homes and off-road vehicles.

A good example of sizzle is Vail’s Adventure Ridge--a highly controversial sports and entertainment complex that was not a target of the recent fires.

Designed to attract nonskiers to the famous ski resort, Adventure Ridge is an urban playground, leased from the Forest Service, atop a 10,000-foot mountain on public land.

Environmental groups complained that the development was an inappropriate use of a national forest, that it would scare off native wildlife and that the lights would pollute the night sky. But the Forest Service disagreed, and today Adventure Ridge attracts 1,000 people nightly to hear country music at a nightclub, visit a pizza bar or eat a candlelight dinner at one of the four other restaurants. There’s a skating rink, a hill for snowboarding and snowmobile tours.

Enthusiasm Mixed With Foreboding

In Vail, Mammoth Lakes and other Western towns in the grip of the development frenzy, locals project a combination of enthusiasm and foreboding at the changes in store for them.

The Mammoth Lakes town council has consistently voted in favor of the Intrawest development, although three of the five council members have had to refrain from voting at various times because they own property that could benefit from the project, according to town manager Fuller.

Under the redevelopment plan, the town’s total assessed value is expected to double, generating $75 million in new property tax revenue over the next 30 years.

“Those dollars will allow us to revitalize a very tired commercial core that suffers chronically from a high vacancy rate,” Fuller said.

But at least $20 million worth of civic improvements are to benefit the Intrawest development, including about $6 million for a new high-speed gondola that will run between the ski slopes and Gondola Village, an enclave of resort condos, shops and restaurants. Intrawest plans to build Gondola Village on the foundation of Mammoth’s North Village, which is to be largely torn down.

Critics of the project, such as Andrea Lawrence, warn that local businesses will find themselves in direct competition with Intrawest’s stores and restaurants--something small merchants in Vail complain of.

But of greater concern, she said, is the fate of surrounding Mono County, long dependent on Mammoth Lakes, its largest community, to pay for vital services. Now, the county gets up to 35 cents from every dollar of Mammoth property tax revenue. Under the redevelopment plan, however, officials say the county’s share will fall to 7 cents.

“Ultimately, we are going to beggar the county to create a mountain playground for the rich,” Lawrence said. “I wonder what John Muir would have said about that.”