Tag Archives: Colorado

Even the Californians are fleeing Colorado – go figure

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Last year, more people moved out of Colorado to other states than vice versa. Interstate “net migration” was negative.

After factoring in births, the state’s overall population increased less than half a percent. That’s the lowest since the oil and gas bust of 1989 nearly a half century ago.

These figures put Colorado in the bottom half of population growth. We’re 29th of the 50 states. Neighboring Utah grew at the fifth-highest rate, so Colorado can’t blame it on the demise of the carbon-spewing, environment-wrecking, injury-causing, traffic-jamming ski industry which is mired in a record snow drought.

Colorado used to be cool. It was young, vibrant, virile. Colorado often led the nation in the youth and fitness of its residents.

It was the state to move to. Hardly anyone was born here. Even I wasn’t, though I’ve lived 90% of my life here. If you said you were born here, you were either a cowboy or a liar. (Nobody is both.)

Like a lot of low-density farming and ranching states, Colorado was a red state before “red state” was coined. Then it was a purple state for a brief transition in the late 20th century. Now it’s a deep blue state.

Colorado has not had a Republican governor for 19 years. The next one won’t be, either. The state legislature is overwhelmingly far-left Democrat, and routinely passes full-blown whack-job legislation that even the Democrat governor opposes.

All seven of the state Supreme Court Justices are Democrat appointees (who became a laughing stock after the real Supreme Court issued a 9-0 smack-down of their disqualification of Donald Trump from the 2024 state ballot).

Colorado College, once a gem of a liberal arts college, has fallen to a ranking of 370 in the latest Wall Street Journal college rankings, which puts it somewhere between Howard (that’s spelled with a “ow” not a “arv”) and the University of Alabama.

Alumni donations to the school are down as well. Perhaps all this has something to do with the fact that CC’s obsession with DEI (call it CC-DEI) drove them over a cliff into abandoning the SAT.

That’s right, today’s CC students get admitted not with test scores, but with skin color. The SAT was an inconvenient obstacle to that.

Needless to say, most sizeable Colorado cities including Denver (ruled by Democrat mayors for the last 73 years), Boulder, Fort Collins, Longmont, Lakewood, Durango and Greeley are “sanctuary cities” where local law enforcement is prohibited from cooperating with federal officials enforcing the nation’s immigration laws.

So how did Colorado go from paradise to parasite?

It’s not because the politics of the people changed. Rather, it’s because the people themselves changed. Back when Colorado was a hip place to move to, the hipsters moved here in droves. Hipsters, in case you haven’t noticed, tend to be Democrats.

Legalizing pot in Colorado also helped. In case you haven’t noticed, heavy pot smokers tend to be Democrats, as well.

Swarms of Democrats fled the hell of Democrat-controlled California. Utterly devoid of any perception of cause-and-effect (notwithstanding their preaching about “science”), they bring with them the Democrat policies that caused the hellish effect that they fled in California to inflict on the heavenly refuge of Colorado.

It’s the same everywhere. Californians flee their self-made hell but ignorantly bring with them the policies that created it. That pattern continues for a while, until the hellish policies of the newcomers turn their new heavenly refuge into a hell of its own. The next thing you know, people are fleeing that heaven-turned-hell, too.

Even then, Democrats remain incapable or unwilling to connect the dots between the hellish policies they enact in the statehouse and the living hell they produce on the ground.

And so, they flee to another new heaven – maybe Montana, maybe Idaho, maybe Utah. Naturally, they again take the same hellish policies that caused them to flee Colorado and, before that, caused them to flee California.  

I wish these people who faithfully chant “I believe in science” would learn about cause and effect.

Colorado ski conditions are worse than ever. Yay!

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Switzerland ski resort last February. Places in Colorado this year are worse.

OK, it’s not technically true that ski conditions right now are worse than ever. The snowpack at Colorado ski resorts today (Jan. 16, 2026) is not worse than the snowpack in, say, an average August.

But for this time of year, the Colorado snowpack is officially the worst on record.

That’s right, since the time they’ve been keeping records of the Colorado snowpack, this is the lowest it’s ever been for mid-January. It’s barely half the normal. The forecast for the next ten days is more of the same – warm and dry.

My eyes confirm all this. The snowpack on top of Vail Pass at 10,662 feet is barely over my shoe tops.

In the town of Vail itself, about 2,700 feet lower, there’s bare dirt where there’s supposed to be deep drifts. The kitschy Norman Rockwell style sculptures littering Vail which are supposed to be buried under the winter snow are fully visible. That’s a bad thing; that stuff shouldn’t be visible even in the summer.

The ski resorts try to hide all this bare dirt with snowmaking equipment. Not by parking the equipment on the bare slopes, but by using it to make artificial snow that they spray over the slopes at night.

But that doesn’t work very well. Even a modest-sized resort of three thousand acres can cover only a fraction of the slopes with artificial snow. Moreover, they can’t cover the slopes deep enough to safely bury rocks and tree stumps. They instead succeed in burying such obstacles just enough to conceal them with a half inch of artificial snow – until the customer hits one.

As for the challenging terrain of blacks (lower case “b”), double blacks and extreme stuff, forget about it. They won’t be open at all this season, or at least not safely. The open terrain at Copper Mountain right now is barely a third of their total terrain. In a normal mid-January, it would be more like 90%.

The daily lift ticket price at Aspen is $254. That amounts to about $1.00 per snowflake.

But cheer up. It’s only about ten cents per a-hole.

I see two things to cheer about amid this skiing catastrophe. First, driving is great. The roads are snow-free. In fact, they’re bone dry, even over the high passes.

As I mentioned in a recent piece, the Catch 22 of skiing is that when the skiing is good because slopes are snowy, you can’t get there because the roads, too, are snowy. And when the driving is good because the roads are snow-free, the skiing is bad because the slopes, too, are snow-free.

Moreover, traffic volume is down. Skiers are staying home because they know that, since the roads are great, the skiing is terrible.

The second good thing about the skiing catastrophe is that it allows Colorado to be, once again, something like Colorado – the Colorado I grew up in. The Colorado of the Ute Indians and Zebulon Pike and Molly Brown. OK, maybe John Denver. The others were all before my time (but not by much.)

Skiing, you see, ruined Colorado. And I say that as a person who used to ski upwards of fifty days a year, including significant backcountry winter ascents coupled with skiing descents.

Resort skiing has nothing to do with nature. A ski resort is like a mountain converted into an expensive amusement park full of no-nothing morons who ski the way they drive – too fast for their ability and with little regard for others.

A few more years of great winter driving conditions, and Colorado might again be Colorado. We might get rid of the skiers from out-of-state.

Now if only they would take with them the wolves from British Columbia, the potheads from California, and the Democrats from all over . . .

The death of skiing may be the rebirth of Colorado

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Colorado is a much different place from when I grew up in Colorado Springs in the 60s. That was before the Eisenhower Tunnel on I-70 was drilled under 11,990’ Loveland Pass. It was before the gondola at Aspen and it was before Snowmass was founded. Vail Pass was a treacherous gravel road, and the town of Vail did not exist.

It was wonderful.

Our family had one of those pop-up tent trailers and we went camping several times a year. Getting there was half the fun.

Our family of six would pile into the station wagon with the trailer in tow. My father would floor it, seeking momentum and speed – maybe 60-65 mph – to get a run at Ute Pass which was the two-lane road serving as the gateway from Colorado Springs into the Rocky Mountains. He’d invariably get slowed by a truck in front, curse, and we’d struggle up the pass at about 35 mph.

But we got there. “There” would be one of hundreds of campgrounds with spots for tents, trailers and tent-trailers like us. There were only a few RVs back in those days. They literally looked down on us from their perches high above the ground, but we figuratively looked down on them for not being real campers.  

Only rich people stayed in motels. We weren’t rich.

I learned many years later that, unsurprisingly, my mother hated camping – for all the reasons that an 11-year-old boy loved it.

What’s not to love? Fishing with worms, walking and wandering, climbing trees, making forts, getting dirty, shooting imaginary Indians and, most importantly, camp fires!

It was wonderful.

This fun was limited to summertime, of course. Winter was too cold for even intrepid would-be mountaineers such as that 11-year-old boy.

Winter brought skiing, but it was an oddity. Skis were long and straight with “bear trap” cable contraptions for bindings. Boots were leather. Clothing, at least in my case, was an army surplus jacket, cotton jeans, a stocking cap and work gloves.

I once rode a two-person chairlift with a stranger. It moved excruciatingly slowly, as they all did in those days. As I shivered, the stranger scolded me, “Kid, you’re gonna shake us off the lift!”

Given the slowness of the lifts, you were lucky to get six or seven runs into a day. But the price of a daily lift ticket was commensurate – about six or seven dollars.

You had to be a good skier to get down the mountain in one piece. I wasn’t. I could guarantee a “yard sale” most days, where a wipeout would scatter over the slope my assorted apparel, skis, poles and boots (well, not the boots).

It was wonderful.

Things are different now. Skiing is big business, and lift tickets are upward of $250. Vail Resorts is a public company listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Slopes are finely groomed with both natural and man-made snow, and equipment is vastly improved, such that an ordinary Joe on his third day can ski easy slopes without falling down.

It’s terrible.

Traffic is horrendous. I-70 is jammed with stop-and-go traffic heading into the mountains on Friday afternoon and headed back to Denver on Sunday evening. A two-hour drive between Denver and Vail often takes four, and more if there’s an accident or snowstorm.

Which highlights the irony of skiing. For a real skier interested in challenging terrain, the snow is good only for a day or two after a storm. But that’s when the mountain roads are clogged with rental SUVs from Texas and California (don’t even get me started on the Australians) driven by so-called drivers who attempt to drive on snow only once a year when they come to ski Colorado.

When the snow is good, the driving is horrendous. And when the driving is good, the snow is horrendous.

Driving has been exceptionally good this winter. It’s no exaggeration to say that Colorado has had record-good driving this winter.

The only solution to this cruel paradox is to live at the ski resort. In Aspen, that’s perfectly doable for about $9 million for a three-bedroom condo. (It’s only about $6 million in Vail, but then you have to live in – ugh! – Vail.)

With that condo, you do get to live in Aspen (or – ugh! – Vail). That’s great if you like crowds (and, in the case of Vail, you like the interstate highway passing right through the center of town).

And it’s great if you like locals who despise you for having earned money as an investment banker in New York working 70-hour weeks while they were ski-bumming their youth away in Aspen (or dodging the interstate in – ugh! – Vail) while bitchin’ about the rich tourists who hire them for ski lessons at $1,500/day, plus tip.

This devolution of the State of Colorado has coincided with the state’s legalization of pot and the color shift from a red state to a blue state, but that’s a story for another day.

OK, enough snark. My point is, skiing brought boatloads, planeloads and shitloads (well, OK, maybe a little more snark) of people to the Colorado mountains. I miss the Colorado of my boyhood.

But there’s hope. Skiing may be dying. As I hinted, snow conditions this year are really terrible. The snowpack on top of Vail (ugh!) Pass when I drove over it last week was about 4 inches. As my hero Dave Barry might say, I’m not making that up. There’s less snow than I’ve ever seen for this time of year, and very little in the upcoming forecast.

And this isn’t just a one-year drought. I’m pleased to report that the stock price of Vail (ugh!) Resorts, Inc. is down 64% from its peak some four years ago as the recreational tastes of the baby boomer generation ages from downhill skiing at high altitude into flat ocean cruises at, as you might expect, sea level.

I’m praying that this season of good driving continues next winter, and the winter after that. With three consecutive good-driving winters and the continued aging of the Boomers, we just might reclaim Colorado for 11-year-old boys, of all ages.

Aspen Skiing Company joins “The Resistance”

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Your correspondent has reviewed a memo labelled “For Internal Distribution Only” from the CEO of the company that owns and operates the skiing operations at Aspen and Snowmass (referred to locally as “SkiCo”).  

It’s a doozy.

Everyone knows that Aspen is rich and liberal. The billionaires crowded out the millionaires decades ago. What passes for “thinking” by think-tanks like the Aspen Institute is the notion that “balance” means hard-leftists like Madeline Albright and Jonathan Capehart on one side and soft-leftists like David Brooks and Liz Cheney on the other.

Years ago, SkiCo decried Donald Trump’s enforcement of America’s immigration laws. Enforcement of those duly enacted American laws, they declared, was un-American. (Coincidentally, enforcement of the immigration laws also impacted SkiCo’s supply of low-paid workers.)

So maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise to see SkiCo’s reaction to the election. Still, it’s worth noting, especially if you happen to be one of their customers.

The memo from the CEO to employees begins by bemoaning “the gravity of what just occurred.” A majority of voters, he said, chose “a vision that can be viewed as openly at odds with some of the values [SkiCo] stands for.”

In case you don’t get the drift, the CEO helpfully spells it out. SkiCo’s self-declared “values” with which he contends over half of America is “openly at odds” are:

“Equality, democracy, civility, compassion, tolerance, sustainability, open-mindedness, gratitude, freedom, integrity, and justice.”

In short, in the public opinion of the CEO of SkiCo, the election represents a triumph of the opposite of all that. It represents a triumph of inequality, anti-democracy, incivility, unsustainability, close-mindedness, ingratitude, tyranny, and injustice.

He fails to explain how an open election, in which a candidate won a majority of both the people and the Electoral College, is anti-democratic. Perhaps he meant anti-Democrat.

Oh, and intolerance. With no sense of irony or self-awareness, the CEO of SkiCo – the leader of a prominent company offering services to the public with the power to fire employees – declares to those employees that half the country with whose votes he disagrees are intolerant.

In closing, he muses, “Clearly, the approach of trying to model, speak aggressively, and ‘teach’ others is not sufficient.” (The scare quotes around “teach” are his.)

That sounds slightly threatening. After failing in his effort to “teach” the deplorable, unteachable garbage that constitute half of America, is he perhaps considering limiting access to the gondolas to card-carrying Democrats?

I can see the gondola operators to the line of skiers:

“Papers? Papers? No, I don’t care about your lift ticket, I want your voter registration papers!”

The First Amendment probably does not protect the employees of SkiCo who happen to be Republicans (yes, there are some) and have received the CEO’s coercive political memo, since SkiCo is not an arm of the government. On the other hand, SkiCo does enjoy numerous leases of Forest Service lands owned by the government. Also, its gondola and chair-lift operations could make it a “common carrier.”

And some states offer state law protections that could be implicated. If SkiCo has any employees in California, for example, the memo could be in violation of California state law. (Talk about irony.)

But the legalisms are a column for another day. Today’s point is that the operator of Aspen and Snowmass considers you persona non grata if you’re in the half+ of the country that voted for Donald Trump. Maybe you should consider them resorta non grata.

The Colorado Secretary of State says she now trusts the people to make the decision she didn’t trust them to make four months ago

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The cabal that calls itself the Democratic Party of Colorado nearly pulled a coup last fall. Unburdened by any inconvenient process that might have been due, a Democrat state judge decided that Donald Trump was an insurrectionist. Therefore, under a clause of the 14th Amendment designed to prevent former Confederates from running for federal office, Trump was ineligible to run for president.

Never mind that Trump had never been convicted or even charged with the crime of insurrection.

On appeal, four of the seven Democrat-appointed justices on the Colorado Supreme Court agreed. The other three in their strident dissent all but wondered out loud what kind of Colorado-legal weed the majority was smoking.

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