Two Elk lodge in flames, October 19, 1998
(photo courtesy of Vail Fire Department)
In the pre-dawn hours of October 19, 1998, a commando-style arson destroyed or damaged $12 million worth of chair lifts and mountaintop buildings at Vail, Colorado, the largest ski resort in the United States. The timing of the fires indicated a calculated attack, since the fires were set on the same day the ski area’s owners were about to begin construction for a controversial expansion into an old-growth forest on federally-owned land. Within days, an email arrived from a little-known radical environmental group known as the Earth Liberation Front, claiming credit for the arson “in the name of the lynx,” a rare species whose habitat was disappearing in this rapidly developing part of Colorado. But the ELF’s claim of credit was never substantiated, and the number of potential suspects grew in direct proportion to the number of enemies that the ski area’s owners had made.
Powder Burn is the story of a particular kind of trouble in paradise. At the time of the fires, Vail and its environs had become a powder keg of social and economic unrest, and much of the tension revolved around the locals’ frustration with Vail Resorts, Inc., the company that owns Vail ski area and neighboring Beaver Creek. Run by a group of Wall Street financiers, the company had also purchased two other high-profile Colorado resorts, Breckenridge and Keystone, and its expanding reach prompted many locals to begin calling it “the Evil Empire.” Among its adversaries – and potential arson suspects – were the ski bums sick of Vail’s corporate mentality; fearful small business owners; nearby towns that had fought Vail over water rights, disgruntled former employees; and folks in the Eagle Valley who saw their quality of life diminish with every golf course and high-end subdivision that Vail aggressively attracted or built. Some even suggested that the company might have set the fires themselves as a way to garner sympathy – especially after it rebuilt the lost buildings bigger and better and collected on other insurance policies as well. “Who couldn’t have done this?” a local sheriff’s deputy told federal investigators. “The list of people pissed off at [Vail’s owners] is pretty long.”
Daniel Glick takes readers on a compelling and wild ride through this bizarre town full of bombastic characters to lay bare the growing pains of a breathtakingly beautiful region. In the 40 years since Vail’s founding fathers literally carved the resort out of a high-altitude lettuce patch, the resort’s fortunes have mirrored the fortunes of what has become known as the “New West,” as well as the “new economy” run by modem cowboys and lifestyle refugees. Vail has been in the vanguard of the tremendous social, cultural and economic changes that have transformed the Rocky Mountain West, displacing the ranchers, miners and loggers in favor of the multinational corporations and Fortune 500 executives who visit their 12,000-square-foot trophy homes only a couple weeks out of the year.
Packed with odd characters and paranoia, with beautiful mountains and despicable actions, this is a book about crime, the environment, a small town, and an unsolved mystery.
Powder Burn reads as quick as a ski racer at an Olympic downhill.
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All day Sunday, environmental activists armed with walkie talkies and handles like “Lodgepole” and “Calamity Jane” had scattered around Vail Mountain on reconnaissance missions. They had picked up the combinations to the on-mountain gates by listening to scanners. A couple people camped further up the creek to establish an advance camp, lugging tents, a two-burner Coleman stove, and, among other things, a hundred Boulder Bars, a high-energy sport food. Huddled around the campfire that night, the scouts reported that Vail had not yet begun operations on the ski area's dreaded expansion. That meant that the next day, Monday, would probably be D-Day. Word was that a crane was coming one hundred fifty miles from Grand Junction to drop a bridge over the creek so the heavy machinery could follow. “We weren’t going to do anything until we saw the trucks roll,” said Ben Doon, one of the main organizers from Ancient Forest Rescue. When that happened, he said, they would find a way to stop the crane. Somehow.
Around midnight, Doon and the crew of protestors who were staying at a snowy campground near Vail began dispersing into their tents, VW vans and sleeping bags to brave the cold autumn night ahead. At about six a.m., Doon recalls being awakened by somebody shouting something about a fire on the mountain. Doon, a little groggy, crawled out of his tent and saw the smoke plume on the ridge. He realized right away what the implication of arson meant. “Everybody’s immediate fear was that if this was arson, we’d be prime suspects,” says Doon. “I expected the feds to start swarming into our campsite.” Doon knew that there were hunters nearby who could probably corroborate their story about camping there all night, but worried about the obvious knee-jerk reaction that a lot of people would have.
“There is no way enviros did this,” he later told me. The fires were up on the mountain with no apparent connection to the imminent ski area expansion. The arson had effectively turned all the environmentalists’ organizational work to ashes, as the locals rallied behind Vail as the “victim” and shunned the environmentalists. Besides, Doon argued, why would a tree-hugger burn down Two Elk lodge, with its two thousand tons worth of wooden beams, acres of cedar shingles, and dozens of thirty-foot high old growth Douglas Fir poles that had come from one hundred twenty five year-old trees in order to make the point that logging old-growth forests was bad? Or, for that matter, risk a fire that might spread and destroy the forest they were trying to protect? Whoever lit the fires had to have an intimate knowledge of the mountain and VA’s security systems, Doon reasoned.
“It had to be,” he said with conviction, “an inside job.”
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“Daniel Glick’s dark parable of the post-Western West has it all: an unsolved whodunit with a Hayduke-style scapegoat; a deft portrait of Wall-Street-infected Colorado’s incurable socio-political dysfunction; a Dickens-worthy rogue’s gallery of the out-of-state over-moneyed and local over-powered and poor; and about a thousand gruesomely hilarious reasons to leave that corporate carcass-in-the-sky, Vail, to the Drooliannaires who think they own it, and to the samurai powder-hounds and lone lynx who truly do.”
DAVID JAMES DUNCAN, author of
The Brothers K and
The River Why
“
Powder Burn is a riveting story. I hope and pray that Daniel Glick’s book is not a harbinger of the environmental battles to come. I fear, however, that it may be.”
RICHARD D. LAMM, former governor of Colorado
“Vail, with its deep powder snow and high and fast society, is the siren song for the New West. When arson hit the ski area, Daniel Glick covered the story, which grew into this startling account of seized opportunities, memorable characters, mystery, and the endangered lynx. Powder Burn exquisitely and authentically captures a fascinating place and time.”
CHARLES WILKINSON, Moses Lasky Professor of Law, University of Colorado, and author of
Crossing the Next Meridian and
Messages from Frank’s Landing
“Powder Burn is a lively whodunit with more twists, turns, and surprises than a double black diamond ski run. Daniel Glick's masterful book keeps you asking who did what to whom.”
LEN ACKLAND, author of
Making a Real Killing: Rocky Flats and the Nuclear West
The email claiming responsibility
for the arson said the fires were
set "in the name of the lynx."
