De-evolution. For Polly.

   

    While riding the ridge above Round Valley near the 5-way bench on a colorful, clear and cool autumn day under cerulean bright skies smelling of sage and success, I looked fondly at the back of the Wasatch and thought of how beautiful it was and what a great place to live, work and play it was.  Then I looked closer and saw that it was wall to wall houses and condos, roads and ski runs from Mayflower to Murdock, without much public access to our public lands.  “My God, what have we done,” I thought.  I began to try to imagine what this place looked like 50 years ago.

    There was an empty two-lane highway stretching from town to Kimball’s Junction with twice daily cow crossings and a frost-heave roller coaster near McLeod creek in the spring.  The Junction was just a Chevron station with stale donuts and Texaco station across the street with disgusting bathrooms.  If you sat in you car long enough a guy would come out and pump your gas, maybe wash your windows and check your oil.  There was no diamond interchange or flyover but just a freeway overpass full of potholes. The freeway was an improvement from the old two-lane Lincoln highway, but the lines were painted only once a year and indistinguishable in the winter.

    Park West ski resort was just everything North of the Lookout house and Tombstone was backcountry called Tuna Ville, Dream Catcher was Old Lady and Square topped was skied once a year in the spring, probably by a guy in a cowboy hat.  A few condos were being built at the base below the muddy parking lot, with electric heat and single pane windows.    The bar at the base, Smokey’s, was rocking from 3-6 in the winter but was dead otherwise.  The Snyderville meadow was all flood-irrigated hay and was still the true mountain Parley's 'Park’ that this city was named for. 

    Park City Resort stopped at the Thayne’s lift while Jupiter Bowl and Peak were just a dream away.   The Gondola ride was a long, slow and round 4-man cabin that took 25 minutes and two one-hits to get to the top.  The Mid-Mountain Lodge was at the angle station and served 25 cents mini beers from 3-4 for the last run down.  The Bars or at the bottom always had a band and sometimes raucous skier debauchery with wet tee shirt or ski throwing contests.  Deer Valley was called Frog Valley and Silver Lake was Lake Flat at the time and the road from town turned to dirt at the small Cat Houses on Deer Valley Drive that had been the site of raucous miner debauchery until 1953.  The magnificent red  Mayflower Maples were in another county, high up off of the two lane highway to Heber

    Main Street was gentrifying but still some places were boarded up from the ghost town days.  Properties could be bought for back-taxes, but nobody wanted them.  The EE, with its Hungry Miner potato and egg pie and the Coke and Number, with its Muckers Special Enchiladas with Pineapples, were the best places in to eat in town and The Other End, across the street had huge cable spools for tables out front for large loud parties.  Art still had the hardware store where you could have your self-esteem assaulted, by Art, while you picked through the mixed nuts and bolts.  Old Miners begrudgingly shared their favorite bars with the skiers but there was a tense hierarchy, with the hippies always at the bottom.  “Ski when its good, work when you should,” was our motto.

    I think I remember diagonal parking on Main Street, but that might have been a dream.  Poison Creek near current Lo-Main was just a sandy flood plain with a bunch of hippies living in sepia brown vans or avocado green station wagons and dilapidated miner shacks.  Someone threw the first shoes up in a tree there starting a tradition that continues today.  Every house in Old-town was falling down and included crooked floors, frozen pipes and flow through ventilation but could be rented for $100 a month.

    The golf course had only nine holes but they ran out of money building the greens so there were elephants buried under some of them. Thayne’s Canyon and Park Meadows were underway with some custom homes and a lot of Enoch Smith specials, with or without porches.  Prospector was a toxic waste dump and the kids went to school at Marsac and the High School on Park Avenue.  Jim Santy was the music teacher, not the Auditorium.  The City had purchased more snowplows so they didn’t depend on the county, SLC or National Guard to help plow the roads after big dumps.  Even with lethal flows from the mines, the water tanks would routinely drain, and we would have to cut back our use for a few days to fill them in case fire flows were needed.

    “Those were the days” I thought as I rode away down the custom flow-trail with super-elevated turns and rock paved wetlands.  “These are the days”, I countered when I considered how we had all grown up together into the town and the people we have become.  No matter where we go, there we are, with the choices we have made and the people we have chosen to share them with.  We have matured and some have moved on, but in the end it’s still a pretty great place to live, work and play.  Let’s keep it that way. 

Compounding Climate

    I am a weather geek.  I always have been.  Not everyone is, but if you live around here long enough, you start to notice the weather anecdotally.  Then you attempt to forecast it, but locals know that only newcomers and fools try to predict the weather.  It is the ultimate ‘you take what you get’.  Or is it?

At one time I fancied myself as a Hydro-Meteorological-Engineer but simplified that to plain old Hydrologist since I could not consistently say, let alone spell the first title.  I study weather and climate for my work and for my play, my hobby and my fascination.   I designed big dams for the million-year flood and advised neighbors on a local stream for annual snowmelt routing.  I personally and physically field checked the snowpack here, on every powder day, for 45 years.  The weather, for me, is not only anecdotal but visceral and personal.

I am a data nerd also.  Data is the basis for artificial intelligence as well as common-sense aptitude, and we cannot get enough of it.  When tasked by the State Engineer, to forecast snow-melt runoff from the record snowpack of the early eighties, I found precious little historical climate data for this area and none of the snowpack data correlated with actual runoff flows.  It turns out that the weather in May dominates snow-melt runoff, not the size of the snowpack.   When I saw the dearth of data for our area, I initiated my local Snyderville Weather Station to take the daily readings for the National Weather Service (NWS).  I wanted to be part of the solution.  Recently I won the national annual weather spotter award recently from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).  So, I got that going for me.  Which is nice.

Lastly, I am a math bore and have learned how to correlate data with from several sources and locations to predict results at similar locations that have very little data.  When I read about the new PRISM - Geographical Information System (GIS) climate database from Oregon State University and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), I nearly wet my pants.  PRISM takes all the Annual Average Temperatures and Precipitation climate data from the last 125 years from sources like the NOAA, NWS, USDA, State Climatologist for the contiguous states and lays it out on a national GIS Geospatial database. That is one Annual Average Temperature point per year for the Daily Average, Daily Maximum and Daily Minimum temperatures.   That is a lot of Daily data condensed into 3 points per year.  Powerful.

From all those actual data locations it correlates the data from the 3 variables, with regression equations, to the desired locations with no data.  It also considers things like distance, altitude, and aspect to predict equivalent data for any desired location.  This database was built and prides itself on its accuracy in abnormal high mountain meadows and coastal climates that are my favorite places.   How cool is that?

      I downloaded, deciphered and plotted the data for Salt Lake and Summit County, Park City and Snyderville, North Carolina and North Dakota, San Simeon and New York City and noticed the predicted climate warming patterns outlined in most existing climate change prognostications.  The Average Temperatures for most of these locations are going up by the projected 1-3 degrees F over the 100-year period, just like scientists prosaically claim on the news.  Much of the temperature increase is related to the morning Minimum Temperatures rather than afternoon Maximums, with typical exceptions made for different seasons, sunshine and snowpack, cloud cover, wind and urbanization, humidity, ocean and lake affects, orographic, altitude and aspect.  These results correspond nicely to the linear trends in the Global Surface Temperatures data collected by the National Center for Environmental Information (NCEI) and published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). This is good, consistent, calibrated peer-reviewed data.  We all know anecdotally this is happening, but we have no idea as to the extent.

      When I looked closer to home at the data for Park City and Snyderville it appears more interesting.  Temperature data trends for the last 100 years are notably higher, particularly for the last 50 years morning Minimum Temperatures.  Summer Minimum Temperatures, for example, have gone up 10 degrees (45-55 F) over a 50-year period in certain mountain meadows like Snyderville.  Wow. 

      I fit regression equations to the data and the standard, flat-line fits show the 1-3 degree increase usually predicted by independent climatologist.  I also installed a 20-year running average that tracked the data well and instituted a better fitting, third-order polynomial equation.  Both exercises follow the 10-degree Minimum Temperature rise of the last 50 years much more accurately, without exceeding the actual measured data.  These are actual data numbers that would make Greta’s bright baby-blue eyes pop right out of her head.

Most alarming are the extrapolations for the future that show the local morning Minimum Temperatures possibly increasing here by another 2 degrees (linearly) or 10 degrees (exponentially) in the next 50 years.  That would give us summer mornings like Salt Lake at best, Moab at worst.  That is real change, real heat.  Luckily, the local Maximum Temperatures do not see such radical rises, discounting common claims of urbanization, and winter minimum temperatures are even flatter, probably because of the tempering effect of our deep snowpack, mitigating and perhaps understating the Average Temperatures.   

Climate and nature, it turns out, are not linear.  The compounding effects of increased greenhouse gases, warming oceans, melting ice caps, frequent wildfires, population growth and economic development accelerate the warming trend exponentially.  If you get outside at all you are aware of these trends, but even I am surprised at these alarming local numbers and feel compelled to share these results with the community.  I can’t predict the future and I don’t have the answers, but I do know that it is getting warmer quicker, and we must stop burning stuff and not elect people who ignore the numbers and the science.  Will we continue to compound this inconvenient climate data or will we address it.  Will we be part of the problem or part of the solution. 

Changes in attitude, changes in aptitude.

 

6 am. Day before Christmas.  We shuffled from professorial office to office in the Cushing Engineering building looking up our final grades next to our anonymous ID numbers taped to the doors.  My sophomore study-buddy and I absorbed the bad news with false aplomb and insouciance.  Calculus – D and C, Physics – C and F.  It went on like this for 6 dismal doors.  Woe is me.   We shuffled back to our gloomy dorm - humbled, contrite, scared.  

Sophomore means ‘wise fool’ and we thought we had it figured out.  Apparently not.  Too much partying, chasing girls, sleeping in and sluffing classes means ‘Academic Probation’.  Our parents are going to kill us, we thought. They didn’t.  Our old-school, working-class dads just asked us what we were going to do to keep from failing-out of our fancy-schmantzy, trophy-school.  Study harder, own the problem, we promised.  And we did.

Fast forward to the Engineering Honor Awards dinner the day before graduation.  We sat with our Groundling friends and applauded politely as the smart kids received their awards.  At the end they presented a special award for technical writing, and they called my name.  Our group went wild to have one of us included with the elite and standing on that stage.  My study-buddy shot off a bottle of Champaign.  Afterwards, as I caught up with my parents and showed them my plaque, my mom said to me, “you were the only one up there without a tie”.  Yes, but I was up there.

 

THE EMERALD MILE - KEVIN FEDARKO - REVIEW

 

Kevin Fedarko’s book The Emerald Mile was first published in the summer of 2013 and became an instant hit with river rats and water geeks alike.  It is basically the story of the spring of 1983 when the winter snow pack continued to build unexpectedly in the Rocky Mountains until Memorial Day weekend when it all started to melt all at once.  This snow melt runoff caused unprecedented flooding along the Colorado River systems that stressed the Bureau of Reclamation on-stream dams, their engineers and their operators.  From this adversity came an opportunity for a select, almost mythical, group of river runners and guides.  They seized the moment, as well as the high water, and attempted to break the fastest rowing record thru the Grand Canyon.  These stories are seamlessly woven together in this book to provide an enlightening and entertaining story of the various, often competing, special interest groups, and stakeholders of the rivers and the water in the west.

Kevin Fedarko was originally a staff writer for Time magazine and a contributor to Esquire and Outside as well as other magazines.  He is a part time river guide in the Grand Canyon which manifests as respect, almost reverence, for that place and the river that carved it.  This may contribute to his over-the-top storytelling and his fraternity to the culture of the river guides.  Every chapter is an adventure, and every subsequent chapter is an exciting opportunity that is not to be missed.  He also translates the complex hydrologic engineering concepts and numbers into layman terms that flow like water.  The book therefore reads itself and is impossible to put down. 

Along with his complete history of river running and the development of the culture of the western river guides, Fedarko does equally well in describing the operating engineers for the Bureau of Reclamation at Glen Canyon Dam.  They are first seen anxiously watching car sized sandstone boulders shooting from the spillway tunnels and then hopefully putting plywood on the dam’s spillway gates to hold back the relentlessly rising level of Lake Powell.  Only BOR dam operator Tom Gambel really knows how close we really came to losing the dam that year.  From this gripping true story we all become more aware of the power, persistence and patience of the Colorado River from this story.   As these competing cultures converge in a crescendo of crisis, Fedarko navigates the storylines like a well season river guide riding an invisible eddy line. 

 

The story starts benignly enough at the beginning, where most good stories start.  Don Garcia, a captain in the 1540 Coronado expedition sent to find the seven golden cities of Cibola, accidently stumbles upon the Grand Canyon and is relatively unimpressed.  From that inauspicious first sighting of the Canyon by a white men, to the courageous first navigation of the Canyon in 1869 by John Wesley Powell, the story proceeds systematically to the dam builders, conservationist and the river runners of modern times. 

Martin Linton is presented as the enlightened entrepreneur and environmentalist who perfects the method of running the river in elegant but fragile wooden Dory boats.  He also fights along side David Brower of the Sierra Club against the dam builders for the preservation of the canyon.  His Dorys are subsequently named after environmental tragedies and we are introduced to a beaten and battered boat called the Emerald Mile that is named after an old growth, Redwood clear cut in Northern California.  This bastard boat is adopted by guru guide Kenton Grua and meticulously repaired and rebuilt for its epic run. 

Along with his equally skillful and obsessive friends, Steve Reynolds and Rudi Petschek, Grua ignores the National Park Service closing of the flooded river and, on the night of June 25 1983, launches the Emerald Mile just below the dam into a river swollen to almost 100,000 cubic feet per second.  This book is unmistakably about this historic run but it is wrapped nicely in the other side stories of the canyon, the river, the dams, the conservationists, the guides, the bureaucrats and the competing interests for the American west. 

It could be the text book of a Western Water 101 course and stands among the great books in this category along with Cadillac Dessert by Mark Reisner and Beyond the 100^th Meridian by Wallace Stegnar.  The Colorado River is the poster boy for the exploitation of the waters and the resources of the American West and this book is a revelation of the complex consequences that arise when you mess with mother nature, for thrills or for profit.

This is also the story of hubris and arrogance, confidence and adventure and the surprisingly counter-intuitive forces of nature on our unsustainable life style.   It is a rollicking ride full of the hyperbole and didactic exaggeration, courage and legend and the conquering of the gear and the fear that is the lexicon of the river culture.  Strap yourself in and prepare for a frantic and fantastic journey.  You will not be disappointed.

APPARENT VERACITY - COMMUNICATION AND CALIBRATION FOR DAM HYDOLOGIST ASDSO 2023 - PALM SPRINGS

 

For engineers, getting the right answer is not the problem, communicating it is.  Take Global Warming or Y2K for example of bad communication.   Using the right tools, models and equations, assumptions and data is key.  Communicating, teaching and selling the proper problem and solution to the various clients, regulators and political powers-that-be is possibly the most important part of the process.  This includes the media, lawyers, politicians and the public that think we fake elections and moon landings.   

 

We have all heard the medical doctor learning process for procedures.  Learn it, do it, teach it.   I contend that our learning process should consist of learning models, doing models, teaching models and finally defending a model in a court of law where everyone throws stones at you to create reasonable doubt and throw your entire model out.  I had such an opportunity. 

 

I worked on a dam failure trial for 5 years, because of Covid, and learned some good lessons.  After my client’s failure I did the field forensics and had a fair idea of what had happened but convinced myself and the client that I had to do a lot of expensive HEHMS and RAS 2D modeling to prove it.  They agreed to an unlimited budget (since they all think they will win, and the other side will have to pay for it).  Not only would we prove that this flood was an Act of God or a ‘Force Majeure’ – something unavoidable - we would also satisfy the ‘but – for’ defense that the results would have happened ‘but – for’ (with or without) or our contribution. 

I was stoked and modeled my face off and did some of the best work of my career modeling and calibrating the model and communicating my results to our legal team.  It was like playing with a slot machine or Turbo tax where the numbers go up and down all day long.  I can almost hear the bells ringing.  It is my concept of Apparent Computer Veracity where everything looks true on computers.  I can make a model say anything.  Liars model and models lie. 

Sometimes we approach models with a preconceived notion of what we want to prove and justify with Apparent Computer Veracity. Sometimes we can back into the preconceived solutions that we want.  Sometimes we adjust reality to fit the model.  Everything must be tied to reality.  Regulators are savvy and resistant to this backing-in process and owners usually

think it is too fancy and will cost more money. What we must strive for is the truth, no matter how surprising or inconvenient.  Garbage in equals garbage out. 

 

I spent years recreating the storm and rain-on-snowpack event in data free NE Nevada.  Big country, no precipitation or flow gages.   I calibrated everything to hypothetical and to real events, data, measurements.  I used contiguous and equivalent data employing normalized regressions, considering proximity, area, altitude, elevation angle and aspect.  I had 1000 photos with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining where it is at. 

 

I even learned and used the latest versions of the models since my lawyers said my 1974 HEC-I punch card version would be laughed out of court, even if the algorithms were the same.   I surveyed cross sections and highwater marks and calibrated my 50 miles of routing through canyons and across an alluvial plane and over several dams and bridge crossings.  I balanced grid size and time intervals for reasonable convergence and results over a million acres and ten days.  I ran sensitivity analysis and a Monte Carlo distribution of solutions to land on the one most probable, most likely and the most defendable.

 

When I finished, I noticed that everything in the system worked well but the answer always depended on one undersized culvert under a highway that obviously backed up enough attenuated dam breach water to cause a second, larger breach that was responsible for the damage downstream.  The answer was simple and elegant, but the robust modeling led me there and helped me communicate the results to our esteemed team of lawyers.  I could not help but wonder if the solution could have been more easily formulated with better engineering and imagination.  Did I model it just because I can?  As a farmer rancher once cautioned me about overthinking a project – “We ain’t building pianos here.”              Simplify.

 

When we presented all the technical results at a mock trial and watched the resulting jury deliberations, we realized that we had missed the mark.  Even as I patiently and respectfully, but not condescendingly explained units of CFS and ACFT, they were more concerned with my tie and haircut than they were about my infiltration rates or Manning Coefficients.  I felt like screaming “You can’t handle the math’ but my team told me not to get mad or try to be funny.  That would happen naturally.  They threw 99% of the technical models out the door and said it was a big flood and no one was responsible.  It was an Act of God.  Force Majeure.   It would have happened anyway.  They were not wrong.

 

When the trial came, we threw all the technical stuff out the window and after getting the jury to like me, (they have to like you) I looked them in the eye and told them, “ You live here and were here for this storm and you know that was not a 20 year storm as proposed by the plaintiff, or a 100 year storm as required by the state, it was an Act of God.”  They liked my casual Bola tie and my professorial ponytail and agreed with me.  After two hours of deliberation, they completely exonerated the defense of any wrongdoing.  The other side had to pay the legal fees. 

 

The moral of the story is consistent communication and calibration of your client and your audience as well as your data and model is the key to elegant yet robust problem solving.  Start with what answer you want to find and who and how you want to communicate it.  Then back up and perform a minimal tool analysis, like they do for dam work in wilderness areas.  Sometimes pack-horses are more efficient than helicopters when fixing dams in high places.  What is the least complicated way of arriving at the desired solution.  What are the requirements, what are the limitations, what are the desired results.  Often the most elegant solution is the simplest – Occam’s Razor.  Robust models have their place, but make sure it is necessary, fitting and proper.  Don’t use a bazooka to kill a mosquito, even if you want to, and even if you can.

 

Pace Yourself - Olympic Park City

 

We were out on our new, used carbon road bikes the other day cruising along on our fine machines and hammering hills.  We were getting back into a sport we had collectively logged almost one hundred thousand miles on but had forgot about it because of bad bikes and other options.  We were even thinking that a good road bike is about as efficient as a bad e-bike.  Then this guy passed us on a slick new bike like we were standing still and a short while later a woman passed us, and I think she was talking on the phone. 

We were embarrassed for a moment and then we remembered where we were.  Olympic Park City.  Everyone here is in great shape and shreds no matter if it is skiing, biking or Pickleball.  It is the reason most of us came here, extreme recreation and the ‘quality of life’ thing that keeps score by how many days you spend playing outside or on vacation in someplace challenging and exotic.

We didn’t feel so bad, after a while, knowing that there are gold medal winners out there training or elite competitive bikers on the road and in the woods.  They have $10,000 bikes and million-dollar quads with their designer kits and matching shoes.  Who can keep up with that?  No one.  Because we don’t have to. 

I was skate-skiing one day, thinking that I had it down until Bill DeMong zoomed by and left me in the dust, like I was standing still.  No matter what you do or how well you do it, there is always someone here who can do it ten times better.  It’s almost like playing Hockey with Wayne Gretzky.  I remember beating Cindi Schwandt to a finish line one year and she said ‘congratulations Matt but the pros had to do another lap’ and she took off up the hill while I gasped for breath.

So, the key is to just go out and do things at your own pace, on your own level.  Compete with your friends and yourself but never compete with age.  It is just not equivalent, equitable or fair.  I remember smugly latching on to a peloton of older riders in Ireland when I was young and touring with light packs.  They all gave me a look as I moved up the line and a hoot and a holler when I took a turn at the front before flaming out and getting ignominiously dropped.

A lady in Belgium told me one rainy day that we only get so many beats to our hearts in this life and if I waste them riding around Europe, I will pass early.  I said we don’t look at it that way.  But maybe we should, a little. I’ve had more than a few doctors tell me, when asked what went wrong with my body, ‘it's just worn out’.  Elite athletes have a markedly higher rate of A-fib, even Kareem.  So, I take it with a grain of salt, these ideas of eastern and western medicine where we want to be fit but we don’t want to get worn out or hurt.  I’ve adopted moderate exercise in a town of obsessive Olympians.  It’s OK.  We don’t have to compete or win.  We just want to get out.  We just want to play.  Moderation not mediocrity.

I had a Rasta-Jamaican caddy named Raphael at a fancy golf club in New York who, after watching me struggle to play with my friends, said ‘just play your own game man – don’t worry about the others’.  And so I did.  We had a grand time in the woods and the water and forgot to keep score.  I bought that wise man a Red Stripe beer when we were done.  So, remember my friends to get out and play your own game.  Moderation in everything, including moderation.

Oh Canada

 

Lately we have been going to western Canada.  A lot, in all seasons.  Not to avoid the draft or escape the insurrection, but to beat the crowds at our National Parks and on our Park City Streets. We go to chill out and relax in a big land full of huge mountains and glacial valleys with few people, lots of trees, little towns, big lakes, ice castles, hot springs, low temps and deep snow.  It’s like having a foreign country right next door with funny money, words, accents and customs.  Exactly like that.  But it’s clean and close, inclusive and inviting, safe and comfortable, affordable and affable.  Like Switzerland, but you can drive there. 

Sure, it can be cold in winter.  Wicked cold.  It’s usually below zero, oftentimes well below zero, sometimes 40 below (F and C!).  But it’s a dry cold and usually manageable.  It can even be hot in the summer.  They have a desert valley below Kelowna, in the rain shadow of the coastal range, where they grow wine and fruit.  They have lakes and big water.  The Columbia River starts up there, among other major rivers, with lots of dams and hydro power.  The lakes have free ferries that are not crowded and don’t require reservations.  Check availability in the winter.

The Canadian dollars are called Loonies, like the bird, and Twonies, like two birds,  with a good dollar exchange rate (0.7) and there is good value there for your money.  They are metric, like the rest of the world and like we should be, with almost 0.7 km/mile.  Gas is taxed more to cover the actual costs and promote conservation at $1.75 a liter or $7 a gallon. So, between the money, miles and gas, you learn to multiply by 7 very quickly.   Camping is cheap and reservations are recommended but you can always find a spot.  Cheap hotels are less than $100 a night, good ones are $150 and classic ones are $200 so if you don’t camp, lodging is reasonable. 

Canada's infrastructure has been much improved lately.  No longer do you take a two-lane, traffic-signaled highway through downtown Calgary to get to the hills.  There are freeways and belt routes and even a Banff bypass to get you up the canyon.  And once in the canyon there is no pass to go over to get to Banff or Lake Louise.  West of there is Kicking Horse pass to Golden and then Roger’s pass to Revelstoke, which are formidable, even in the summer.  From there to Whistler are some wild coastal mountains and crazy roads that are in good condition.  The Powder Highway from the Idaho-Montana border connects a dozen large and small ski resorts but beware, in some places they do not plow the roads at night!  There are many border crossings that are open at various times so check their web page and if you are civil, they won’t hassle you.

And so, we go there in the summer too, and it is not crowded.  There are more people in California than Canada and it is the second largest country in the world, by area behind Russia, which is almost twice as big.  We have ten times as many people as they do in our slightly smaller country.  90 percent of Canadiens live within 100 miles of the US border which means the rest of the place is wide open.  It’s like North Dakota with trees.  The people are polite to a fault and their favorite saying is ‘soorry’.  The vibe is friendly and inclusive, and they are curious about us.  Canadiens think we are all rich, a little crazy and slightly immoral.  Some think our politics are nuts and that we want to take over their country for their natural resources, free medical care and the pleasant low-key vibe.  I never thought about it, but it’s not a bad idea.  

Make-Do

 

Stopping in front of a neighbor’s house on a snowy evening, we discovered that it had been completely gutted and there was a sign out front with a picture of a completely new house.  ‘What was wrong with the old house’ we wondered.  Well, the kitchen counter was granite and they wanted slate, they wanted a truly great Great-Room with 30 foot ceilings, the master bedroom was not a suite with a bathroom the size of a gymnasium and they wanted radiant heat and air conditioning with a heated three car garage and driveway.   The nice house across the street had sold for over 2 million dollars but had been completely razed and now was being rebuilt as a glass cube with a flat roof.   

‘What’s wrong with our house’, we pondered.  The rooms are small and dated, the microwave is on the Formica counter, the mud room is Linoleum, the bathrooms get crowded and claustrophobic during our daily five-minute visit and the windows are foggy and cold.  The roof is still cedar shakes, and the original furnace and refrigerator are only 80% efficient but the trees have grown tall, the lawn is greenish and most of the sprinkler system works.  We Make-Do.

‘Should we update it’ we considered.  Nah, we could throw our kitchen in the land fill and rebuild it but in 5-10 years when we sell the house, they will throw the new kitchen in the land fill and build their dream kitchen.  Besides, we are Make-Do people.  We have gotten used to the way it is, it is our home, and we make the best of it, we do not want what we do not have.  This seems to be a lost art in Park City where every house is in a constant state of redo, rehab, and rebuild.  Why buy a house that you don’t want or like?  Build your own dream home on your own dream lot.  Everybody wants what they want and will not compromise or capitulate.  Everyone wants it perfect and the hell with the costs or the carbon footprint.  But perfection is a journey and not a destination, with Heisenberg uncertainty, and ultimately unobtainable.  As Ms. Fields might have said - perfect is the enemy of good.  Make-Do.

It’s the same with the roads around here where there are three to seven lanes coming and going to town and we only use half of them.  We have huge shoulders for buses we never see and bikers who prefer the bike paths on either side to getting run over.  Use the shoulders for peak traffic, at least through the big intersections.  Don’t zipper down four lane roads for a mile in front of the High School or for 100 yards on the road to Kamas.  Admit it, it’s a four lane road.  Use what we have and Make-Do instead of building tunnels and billion-dollar bypasses.  We have Park-and-Ride lots no one can get to or that are full of buses and tents.  Consolidate that crap where it won’t get in the way (Richardsons?) and incentivize tourists and workers to use the lots we have.  Make-Do. 

It goes for recreation as well.  Dozens of people sit around, in the hot sun or cold gym every day, to play Pickleball while tennis courts and basketball courts sit empty waiting for someone to play.  Adjust your schedules and priorities to maximize the resources we have instead of building more ten million dollar  courts.  Use what we have.  Put temporary nets on the unused courts and if someone comes to play hoops or tennis, let the Pickleball fanatics respectfully step aside.  Make-Do.

Park City has money, so we have water.  But that doesn’t mean we should not conserve this precious resource for things like wildlife, rivers, the Great Salt Lake and other people.  Our water bills are high to encourage us to conserve and to pay for what our water is really worth.  None-the-less there are trophy, second homes watering the Aspens daily because no one is here to adjust the timer, and they just pay the bill.  The rest of us consider brown-is-beautiful so we pay attention, and we use only what we need.  We Make-Do.  It’s not about money or entitlement or prerogative, it is about wisely using limited resources efficiently.  Consider the difference between what we need and what we want.  Make-Do. 

Finally let’s mention the stickers, the stayers, or the people that have lived here through thick and thin.  Miners, Hippies, Latinos and Ski Bums – rich and poor. The Alaskan Inuits consider theirs a subsistence culture with just the basics.  That includes community and belonging, in a harsh environment, but they stay, they Make-Do.  We could all leave our homes in search of a better place, but we stay and make the best of this place and help make this place be the best. Because we stayed.  We Make-Do.

Snyderville, Utah 2023

 

Less is More

 

Gridlock in August?  I can hardly believe my eyes.   Kimball Junction is backed up to town, so is 248.  On a Thursday at 330 PM.  They tell me there is an extreme-soccer tournament in town.  Someone must have thought that was a good idea at one time.  I’m sure they are nice people and great kids, but I am here to remind you politely, politically and publicly, it was not.  Make a note of that so you don’t forget the locals again, the collective consciousness that makes this town real.  This is our home, not Disneyland.

We gave up on Christmas, New Years, President’s week, Sundance and the Art Festival years ago and consider them a necessary evil, a sacrifice we make for living in such great town and sharing it with the world.  Remember the Olympic moto – The world is welcome here.  Well not all at once and not all the time.  We have our own quality of life to consider and maintain.

The planners at the City, the County and the powers that be, have done a better job lately at planning only one big event per weekend, one tournament, one Silly Market or one bike race, and that has kept summer activity to a manageable, low roar.  I am thankful that this extreme-soccer tournament was not on Art Festival Weekend along with a stage of the Tour of Utah ripping up Main Street at the same time as the Shot Ski and A Taste of Park City, but do we really need to have these big tournaments here so often.  Remember when we had a motorcycle race in Thayne's Canyon.  That didn't last.  But it seems like we always have at least one event per week.

We talk about sustainable tourism, but what does that look like? Fodor’s has recently rated Lake Tahoe as too crowded to visit.  Too much traffic. Too much car culture.  They want to limit or charge fees for auto access.  Good ideas but are they too late?  They say they have a ‘people problem’ and need ‘tourist management’.  They want to tone down their Chamber of Commerce, Merchants and their marketing efforts.  Locals cannot live their lives.  Do we want to get that kind of rating?  It would be like shooting ourselves in the foot, or killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.  Could we tone down our Chamber and Merchants and marketing?  We understand the desire of some people to fill beds and paid parking spaces, but we do we need to fill all of them, all the time. 

What kind of town do we want to be?  When Deer Valley started in the 80’s they were all about customer service, like Nordstroms and REI, and the customer was always right.  That set the tone for Park City for years to come, we focused on the customer and the product.  We have been recognized as one of the most expensive places to vacation in the US and I therefore conclude that we already aspire to have a more low-key, high-end appeal, inclusive to all but with a relaxed vibe, in a classy backdrop.   Our Brand has already been successfully and honestly established so do we need to advertise and recruit that much?  Let us try a little more moderation in the planning, scheduling and in the exploitation of our largess.  Do we want to be classy or crowded, bucolic or bustling, relaxed or frantic, success or failure.  Do we want to be Nordstroms or Disneyland?  I know it is a delicate line to draw but we must find the balance.  Sometimes, less is more. 

Endless Progress

  

“This is never going to end, is it”, I asked my wife while queuing up behind another endless line of dump trucks making a left-hand turn into the limitless quarries in Brown’s Canyon.  “No, it probably isn’t, even if they run out of rock, water, open space and imagination”, she replied wistfully.  And that is the point of it, isn’t it, the truth.  Growth and development, building and ‘progress’ are here to stay, and we might as well all get used to it.  There is another entire city growing around Jordenelle, the open space at Kimballs Junction is going to be something big, and Heber City is off the charts, about to experience death by suburbia.  Try as we may, we are not going to stop it.

Years ago when we were involved in building Deer Valley we told ourselves that we might as well do it to make sure it was done right, because someone else was going to do it anyway.  When the Olympics came, we welcomed the world here and then were surprised when half of them stayed.  When Vail took over and tried to take our town name we were outraged initially but were smugly satisfied when we ultimately won the naming rights to our own home.  A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.  Then when Covid came and folks came out to occupy their second home that make up half of our town, we were understanding, but we never expected them to stay and telecommute to Timbuktu forever.  It was these big decisions that shaped our future as well as the little, day-to-day positive commitments like trial networks, open space, affordable housing and round-abouts.

We chained ourselves to bulldozers with cell phones and laptops, showed up Ad-Infinitum at meetings and spoke Ad-Nauseam at public hearings, much to our dismay.  Zoning changes from 16 units to 1600 units were moderated and mitigated but still approved at 1200 units when an obvious compromise of 808 units would have been more than reasonable and palatable.  We took that sitting down but that set the stage for a pro-growth, development friendly future.  Backroom deals with developers were rampant when money talked, and nobody walked in Park City.  Compromises and trade-offs were made.  When we stood our ground, the State stepped in and limited the impact fees we could charge development to at least pay for itself or they circumvented our input and approval process completely in the name of affordable housing and mass transit.  We never stood a chance.

It is the mind set of a cancer cell to grow unrestrained, but it is ultimately human nature too.  It happens everyplace good and nice despite all of our NIMBY good intentions.  Sometimes I visualize what all this will look like at buildout, if that ever comes.  Every flat spot will have something on it because this is a property-right, individual freedom type state out here in the wild wild western USA.  Will we look like Phoenix, Boulder or Vail, or something nicer like Aspen, Carmel or Stowe.  Will the next new generation still think it is nice and special around here and that the traffic is not a real problem?  What I prefer to do is try to think of this place as it was 50 years ago when we had an old run down mining town, endless meadows and hills and a blank canvas to draw on.   Did we do the best we could?  Did we give up.?  Did we sell out?

So don’t despair or be discouraged, this type of ‘progress’ is not unique.  We are not re-inventing the wheel.  It is not complicated, and we are not building pianos here. We can go out there and see what other towns are doing or have done and try to imitate and assimilate the best of it.  Aspen and Vail, Boulder and Bend did not become perfect examples of new urbanism overnight.   If we make mistakes, we can fix them.  Nothing is forever.  As the final interpretive panel prosaically predicts at the Mc Polin Barn nature trail. “The landscape is everchanging.”  We have to try.  We have to insert ourselves and our opinions into the process, relentlessly, and strive to elect good leaders, religiously.  We still have a choice and we still have a say and we still have the resilience to accept, for better or worse, what has been done with this pretty nice place.  Stand up, speak up, and forever hold your peace. 

Grateful Life

 

With the earned gratitude of the summit, I checked to make sure my boots were buckled and bindings switched from climb-up to ski-down position, at the top of the peak I had been climbing for the past hour. I was happy to be there since I had not toured the backcountry in three years because of various nefarious disabilities to my head and heart, body and soul. My loss of visual acuity and emotional stability, from too much head trauma on skis and bikes, had left me shaky and tentative. The new pacemaker for my erratic heart had also put me back a few rungs. Then a torn Achilles and a frozen shoulder further complicated my recovery. I was living on my reputation as a hard charging powder-hound, and the memories of what I once was. Age had brought wisdom and social security but along with it - self-doubt, and I questioned what I still had.

Covid had put a damper on everybody’s lifestyle, closing ski resorts along with everything else, and my solution was to retreat into a Waldenesque isolation.  I was trying to live small, not in quiet desperation but deliberately, simplifying life and my own pursuit of happiness or self-entertainment. Subsequentially, the recreational-industrial ski complex had taken over the local resorts, making them crowded and impersonal, disrupting our quiet ski world to its core. We had lost more than a few close friends, some by their own hand and some from a broken heart, unable to reconcile the changes in themselves and their community or unwilling to accept what came with these inevitable changes. Initially it made me sad, now it made me mad. This summit was consequently a test of my mental and physical abilities, but also of the healing power of landscape, snow, sun and sky. Summoning what courage I had left, I started skiing tentatively down the blind rollover to the slope below.

Earlier, my gnarlette wife Tracey, cattle dog Eva and I were looking to do a little midwinter skiing on a sunny Saturday morning to test our ailing bodies and spirits. We knew however, that our local Wasatch ski resorts were unobtainable, especially on a weekend. So, we headed east, to a Wilderness jewel among the local gems, a place untrammeled, where we were just visitors who leave no trace except tracks and we eventually leave. While not exactly an early ‘alpine start’, we got to the trailhead at 10 a.m. and smoothed our climbing skins to our ski bases. It was zero degrees with zero people around.

The snowpack was huge and after 20 years of drought, this kind of coverage was truly amazing. The Atmospheric River had been pointing at us all winter, like a firehose, but nothing lasts forever, not even snow, the earth and sky. As a hydrologist I could appreciate the record snowpack but I was determined to ignore the numbers, live in the moment and make the best of what nature had provided. An old cowboy once told me that only fools and tenderfoot try to predict the weather. Nature always bats last.

We could distinguish a ghost of the normal, low-angle climbing route but we opted for a more direct and steeper approach further upstream. Setting a skin track in shifts we found that it was wicked steep, perhaps too steep for my mechanical heart. Fortunately, the pitch soon moderated, before I blew a gasket, and we settled into a sustainable groove with enough purchase for us and punch for Eva. We shed layers to avoid a cold and clammy sweat and settled into the familiar routine. It felt like home.

For the first time in years, I heard my heart in my head and felt my pulse in my groin from the rigorous exercise. After my heart rate dropped by half last summer, doctors quickly installed a pacemaker designed to keep my heart modulated. It’s like having a weird governor on my engine that keeps me running within the proper limits for my age and ambition, mileage and experience. I am all about moderation these days, but it is disconcerting to have a device or even a doctor dictate that. I was going with it, no matter how humbling at this age. Now with my pulse pumping loud and clear in my extremities, I felt healthy and athletic for the first time in a long while.

The pucker-brush and understory shrubbery that populates these low elevation approaches was buried this year with the abundant snowpack, leaving some exquisite hummocks.  Up higher, the slope was feathered with surface-hoar flakes the size of potato chips, formed by subzero temperatures of the previous night, freezing the moisture rising from the snowpack, shining like mini-rainbows in the low angle winter sun. We called this pitch Ruffle’s Ridge after the corrugated potato chips commercials of the 60’s. This area had almost certainly been clear-cut at some point and fire probably played a role in the succession of the Oak/Aspen to Herbaceous/Conifer vegetation. Nothing is stagnant in nature, and we were looking at a perfect picture in time that develops slowly but is ever changing.

Above 8,000 feet, the slopes opened into low-angle meadows with dwarf red spruce trees, blighted during the latest beetle kill. Topping out, we investigated several pitches and agreed on a shaded, north-facing gully and we de-skinned quickly so we wouldn’t catch a chill. “Thirty-degrees-in-the-trees” is our avalanche mantra for skiing low angle, vegetated slopes for worry-free fun-in-the sun, even on high hazard days. The snowpack was deep, but stable and the usual, subconscious distraction of the sleeping hazards was the furthest thing from our minds. Nonetheless, we practiced prudent safety protocol with one descending and the other watching from an island-of-safety, as we had done a thousand times before, on and off the snow.

While I held the dog, Tracey took the first line, top-cutting the slope to the left, skiing smooth and ever more confident telemark turns as she descended. When she stopped and whistled from her safe perch, I released the hound. Eva initially plowed downhill in Tracey’s serpentine tracks, but eventually centerpunched the deep untracked snow, making dollar signs as she gained momentum and bravado. When it was my turn, I started slow on the roll-over with free heels and an open mind, hugging the left side of the gully. I was surprised how good the snow was and how easily the turns came. I gained speed and began reading the slope further ahead - always a good sign. The pucker-brush hummocks turned into soft moguls to be seen and skied deliberately.  Before long I was launching dynamic tele-turns, hopping between bumps to switch feet, angle and aspect. Near the bottom I dropped one last deep knee for the finishing dynamic carve and stopped deliberately. I was back. Reborn and renewed. My heart was full and my sight was true. Like old times. I had thought I might not ever be able to do this again but the muscle-memory and balance, the soulful and liberating feelings returned.

Although we had planned to be one-and-done after a single run, it was too good to leave. So, we ate, drank, skinned up and did it again and again and again. On the final run we got separated and out of synch on the up-track, which added some drama to the day. With a trace of panic in my throat, I felt momentarily abandoned and vaguely alone, frustrated and emotional, with a head full of doubt. Lately, we had been struggling because of different physical ailments and conflicting priorities. We missed the shared outdoor experiences and adventures that had solidified us in the past and had been floundering in our detachment. This was the first time we had returned to our roots in months, to the places that bond and connect us. I whistled our secret code, to no avail.  Eventually our miracle herding dog connected the dots by running back and forth between us until we happily merged. There is nothing like a moment of uncertainty to solidify what we really know about ourselves and each other. The Boss reminds us, “God have mercy on the man who doubts what he’s sure of.”

Eva’s feet were getting cold, as she alternately hung one foot after another, so we ultimately skied to the bottom and headed back to the car before we were tired or hurt, broken or cold. Sometimes less is more. We loaded up the car and headed down for a late lunch in the foothill cow town where we ate burritos the size of footballs and chatted up the new cafe owner in hobbled Spanish. Back on the road, the hometown mountains spread out before us in the alpenglow, hazy in their polluted popularity and the visible sublimation of our old lifestyle. We felt almost relieved to miss another day at the resorts, but also nostalgic for how it used to be. We didn’t need a crowded, corporate ski resort to have a great day, just the grandeur of gravity in the local Hinterlands, as well as the natural purity of fresh snow and blue sky. We had our health of body and soul, the wealth and wisdom of our age, and the companionship and camaraderie of each other.  For that we were grateful.