How about a snowboard-only resort?

JACKSON HOLE, Wyo. — Taos will drop its ban on snowboards effective on March 19, but Michael Pearlman, sports editor of the Jackson Hole News&Guide, doesn’t see it as a forward march of civilization.

“I don’t subscribe to stereotypes of snowboarders as disrespectful, but there’s no question that they use a mountain’s terrain differently,” he writes. “If you’ve never seen a snowboarder wipe a steep, narrow chute clean of snow, kneel underneath a blind rollover, or lay waste to a powder field that could have housed the untracked turns of a dozen skiers, then you haven’t spent much time in the mountains.”

He notes a challenge issued in December by Jake Burton, founder of Burton Snowboards, offering a $5,000 reward for the most creative video showing snowboarding on one of the (now three) remaining ski resorts that bans snowboards. Until the remaining “elitists and fascist resorts lift their Draconian ban, there should be no rest, no justice,” says the promotional video issued by Burton.

Pearlman’s response to Burton: Take those millions of dollars you’ve earned by selling snowboarding as a countercultural alternative to skiing and purchase a small resort and ban skiers.

Whistler still growing, but in a good way?

WHISTLER, B.C. - Is Whistler overbuilding?

That’s the charge of Lennox McNeely, a local resident who recently had a letter in Pique. McNeely sees a vicious cycle of building hotel accommodations — despite a supposed limit — that force the resort to come with more attractions that will draw sufficient people to fill the beds.

“Let’s get off this treadmill of ignoring the limit of bed counts and allowing new hotels to be built, and then having to flog new activities, largely endangering the environment, in order to prop up the occupancy of these same hotels.”

At least partly the source of McNeeley’s annoyance is the new high-altitude gondola between the Whistler and Blackcomb ski areas being built by Intrawest, the ski area operator.

It has little to do with skiing and a lot to do with a superlative — it will be the highest gondola in North America.

Wood-pellet factory opening in High Country

KREMMLING, Colorado — The chips will soon start flying in Kremmling.

Located between Winter Park, Steamboat Springs, Breckenridge and Vail, Kremmling is an old sawmill town that is soon to get a plant that converts the dying and dead lodgepole pine of surrounding forests into pellets that can be burned in home stoves. The plant, reports the Middle Park Times, is expected to operate continuously, with 18 to 20 people employed.

By providing a market for the dead trees, the threat of catastrophic fire to mountain homes is expected to diminish.