Alex Miller, editor@vaildaily.com
July 23, 2008

It would be strange to live in a place where things tend to stand still. Many of us come from places like that — farmlands or suburbs and even cities where no amount of time seems to make much difference in how a place looks or feels. Visit once every five years, and there’s the same mall, the same barber shop, the same crack in the sidewalk.

But we don’t live in that kind of place. One look at a week’s worth of news in the Vail Valley confirms this is a place in constant flux. We’re not close to being done shaping the landscape, and even in these times of economic uncertainty, grand plans are still being contemplated for the future.

In Tuesday’s Daily, we did an update on the story about the group that wants to bring a minor league hockey team to the county. Our sports editor scoffs at the idea, saying we don’t have the audience base for such a thing. Will people really drive all the way from Breckenridge, Steamboat or Aspen to see the Vail Vinegeroons play the New Mexico Scorpions?

It’s hard for me to say, since I wouldn’t cross the street to watch whoever the top two NHL teams are, for free. But the very notion that a legitimate hockey league considers this a viable market for such an enterprise is amazing. We are, after all, still only a county of 50,000 or so people — yet we have the New York Philharmonic playing here this summer. And despite a lot of hand-wringing nationally over the housing market, we still have a fair amount of activity locally — even if it’s not what it was a year ago.

Visiting the future site of the Stratton Flats project in Gypsum last week, I had the rare experience of feeling hopeful about affordable housing in the valley. With single family homes under the half-million-dollar mark — pretty much unheard of around here anymore —the project will give locals a place to call their own. We can only hope that the mortgage market’s problems won’t make it too difficult for folks to get financing.

Tolerance for change varies, of course. The old saw about new folks arriving in the mountains wanting things to stay just the way they were the moment they got here is probably true. Change can be alarming, even if the source for the concern seems silly (Beaver Creek homeowners, for instance, worried that an Alpine Slide would ruin their lives). For the most part, though, full-time mountain folk are better prepared for change than their flatlander cousins. From a sleepy sheep meadow to an international resort destination in under half a century, the valley has shed one skin for another — with more on the way.

Estimates call for the county’s population to increase by 50 percent by 2025, so being resilient to change sounds like a core attribute for valley dwellers. In that time, we’ll see more retirees, more immigrants, more traffic and greater demands on services. We’ll start looking at build-out — when there’s just not a lot of open land left — as well as continued redevelopment of older stuff. If climate change predictions hold true, we’ll see our summers get warmer and our winters get shorter. That, in turn, may force our hand even more to become a true year-round resort community. Who knows? Maybe some day snowsports will play second fiddle to golf, arts and culture and other, warmer weather pursuits. People will travel here to enjoy our 95-degree days compared to triple digits at home.

I can understand why some folks want to stop the music and slow things down a bit. But can we handle living in a place that’s not in constant flux?



Alex Miller is responsible for the editorial oversight of the Vail Daily, Eagle Valley Enterprise and Vail Trail. He can be reached at (970) 748-2920, or editor@vaildaily.com.