I guess we all knew it was coming. According to Variety, Danny Boyle, the director of Slumdog Millionaire, plans to make  “127 Hours,” a film that tells the story of  Aron Ralston, a former software engineer and outdoor enthusiast who turned motivational speaker after his right forearm got pinned for nearly five days under a boulder during a hike in Utah in May, 2003, and Ralston used a dull knife tocut it off.

My question is this: Yes, it is a facinating and allegorical predicament Ralston got into, but it lacks a lot of action, and people already know what happened, so how do you fill 90 minutes of film?

The Wyoming legislature may consider a bill that would require require permitted backcountry users in grizzly country to carry bear spray.

The guy pushing the bill said conflicts increasing at a “nearly exponential rate,”  but also human deaths caused by grizzly bears. While only 44 people have died from grizzly attacks since the beginning of the 20th century, the majority of those attacks have occurred in the last 20 years.

I guess that is better than the unofficial Alaskan law that you just have to carry a big bad gun. At least if you shoot yourself with pepper spray the sting wears off after a while.

Thanks to help from Mother Nature last week, Keystone Resort announced it will open earlier than planned, on Thursday, November 5. The resort will open with top-to-bottom skiing and snowboarding served by the River Run Gondola with the Spring Dipper and River Run trails as well as the beginner skier learning area at the Gondola mid-station.

Keystone will also open  one jump and more than 20 features at A51 Terrain Park, the No. 2 ranked park in North America by Transworld Snowboarding Magazine.

This year, it’s all about the curves.

When it comes to the season’s latest skis, the curves can be found at the tips and tails of the latest rocker skis. Slowly introduced over the last few seasons, rocker skis feature a higher rise at both the tips and tails, giving them a slightly bowed profile and, combined with broader width, make them ideal for powder skiing.

Green snowboards are also increasingly hot. Read more here.

AP - Breckenridge has voted overwhelmingly to legalize marijuana.

Early returns Tuesday night showed the proposal winning with 72 percent of the vote. The measure would allow adults over 21 to have up to 1 ounce of marijuana.

The measure is largely symbolic because pot possession remains a state crime for people without medical clearance. But supporters said they wanted to send a message to local law enforcement.

That message? Dude, do you want to watch re-runs of Family Guy with us?

Colorado Springs’s parks department has seen its share of the city budget shrink  from $6.9 million to $5 million in the last few years. At the same time, irrigation costs have gone up by over 40 percent. In response, the department has cut back services and watering. The city hoped a new poperty tax could be a shot in the arm for anemic departments like parks, but that tax was solidly defeated by C. Springs voters last night.

So what now?  Well, some park budget lines won’t change. Parks relies on the Trails Open Space and Parks (TOPS) tax for some funding, and that tax can never be spent on anything else. The department also gets some money every year from the Colorado Lottery. But money will be increasingly scarce for maintenance of existing parks.  We’ll know more soon.

You can now get light switch plates decorated with vintage ski posters. That’s right up there in classic alpine schlock with the ski boot lamp.

Kristen Anderson, maker of these neato light switch covers said  “I started making switch plates with my own art. One day, I was admiring a vintage ski poster that I have, and saw that the dimensions were perfect for a switch plate… a light bulb went off over my head!”

Get it, light bulb?

Are you 29er curious?

Old Town Bike Shop is sponsoring a Gary Fisher Bikes Demo Day!
At Palmer Park
Sunday, November 8th, 2009 at 10:00 AM
Ride the: Superfly 100 29,
Hi Fi 29,
Rumble Fish 29,
Roscoe 26,
and Ion Technology Road.

Voters in the Rocky Mountain town of Breckenridge will decide Tuesday whether to legalize  legalize possession of smoking paraphernalia and up to 1 ounce of marijuana for all adults.This at a time when Colorado Springs is discussing a crackdown.

The AP says rospects look good for the measure. In 2006, a statewide ballot measure to make marijuana possession legal failed 59 percent to 49 percent. But among Breckenridge voters, that measure won almost 3-to-1.

Maybe they could used cannibus to reforest the slopes that will soon be barren due to pine beetle.

A 19-year-old skier was buried up to his head in a slide this weekend. The slide was 15 feet wide at the top, expanding to 65 to 75 feet wide at the toe, and about 500 to 600 vertical feet in length. It took the backcountry skier for  a serious ride over some rocks. He was helicoptered to the hospital in Denver.  It is the 7th reported avalanche already this year. The snow that fell in October may be setting up a very weak layer, suggesting more slides to come.

Here is some TV footage showing photos of the slide.

You hear this one yet? A 17-year-old boyscout was lost in the New Hampshire woods for three days last winter.   He did a fairly good job of using his boyscout skills to keep himself from freezing to death. Rescuers finally found him hiking toward Mount Washington. After they rescued him, they sent him a bill for $25,734.65.

This is highly unsusual. In Colorado, though search and rescue teams are legally able to bill people, they never do because they don’t want people to endanger themselves by delaying a call to search and rescue because they are afraid of the bill. I’ve only heard of a few places, such as Pikes Peak or Grand Canyon, regularly charging people for rescue — and the idea there is to deter them.

I’m skeptical of charging for rescue. One of my dearest friends is a search and rescue volunteer in Summit County, and I am constantly astounded by the quality and enthusiasm of his unpaid team. They truly believe in what they do, and they believe in keeping it free.

Charging as a form of deterant sounds like a great argument. After all, who wouldn’t think twice if they knew it might cost them $25.  I’ll tell you who wouldn’t — the people that don’t think. Yes, forward thinking, cautious, organized people would probably take extra precautions, but what about the yahoos — which is generally who is getting rescued anyway?

The headline pretty much says it. The ski racer who was shot by his crazy girlfriend in Aspen in 1976 joins the ranks of famous ski racers like Billy Kidd and Picabo Street who have unusual names.

I always assumed it was a name he took on to be hip, like Sting or Black Francis. Here’s what I did not know. His real name was Valdimir. His father gave him the name Spider because he was born premature and had skinny arms and legs. The name just stuck.

In the storm swirling around Colorado right now, the big winner, in terms of accumulation, seems to be tacky gambling town Blackhawk, which, according to the Devner Post, pulled in 30 inches last night. The heaviest accumulations seem to be in the low foothills west of Denver: 39 inches in Coal Creek Canyon, near Pinecliff; 31 inches in Blackhawk; 30 inches in Genesee; 22 inches in Louisville; 18 inches in Arvada; and 11 inches at Denver International Airport.
Nederland, above, got slammed.

My yard in downtown Colorado Springs? Maybe an inch.

The scientific evidence is piling up, and it suggests  that we were made to be long-distance runners. The long legs, the sweaty, hairless bodies and the specialized pelvises all seem to be designed for hoofing it across the sun-scortched savanah, probably to beat the jackals to the last bit of wildebeest ribs. Now, of coarse, we have riblets.  Read more here.

Local trail runner, liberal gadfly and all-around nice guy Steve Bremmer set out recently for a solo circumnavigation of the Ring the Peak Trail (an almost 70-mile patchwork of trails and roads around Pikes Peak.) Almost halfway through, having done most of the climbing along the route, he encountered snow, cold, nightfall and decided to call a friend for a extraction just outside of Cripple Creek. It did not keep him from making a video journal along the way.

You can watch it here.

And here.

And here.

Oct. 26 (Bloomberg) — Vail Resorts Inc.’s season pass sales rose 13 percent in September as skiers eager for powder prepared to make tracks a year after the financial crisis.

“This year the economy is still struggling but there is more confidence that it’s not getting dramatically worse,” Robert Katz, chief executive officer of Vail Resorts, said in an interview. “The economic issues that we faced last year started right at the beginning of ski season and got worse until the end of the season.” The company operates five U.S. ski properties.

Resort operators are forecasting increases in bookings this season after the recession kept some snow lovers home last year. Lodging and slopes close to metropolitan areas such as New York, Denver and Los Angeles stand to benefit the most as residents stay closer to home, said Ralf Garrison, an analyst with the Denver-based Mountain Travel Research Program. Read the rest of this entry »