Mike, Look In Here!!!

Cole

This is what I am looking at:


What do you think?

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jbfan

Looking to buy and build? I need something like that here. Hows the thumb by the way?

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Cole

Yes, I am going to buy and then build.

My thumb looks the same way it did when it happened.

The healing is very very slow.

Thanks for asking,
Cole

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Glasshousebltr

Man Texas looks almost as flat as here, my years in the smokies have me spoiled.

Bob

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Bob

Mike Finley

Nice view. Where is it?

Cole

About 15 min from Telluride.

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paroofer

It's beautiful!

Mike Finley

Cole, if you are really serious about buying and building on some land down in that area you should take a REALLY serious look at Silverton. I don't know how much you know about that area or Colorado in general, but about 5 years ago Aaron Brill openned up a ski operation in Silverton. He has spent the last 5 years battling with the Forestry service for his final permit. In Colorado almost every ski resorts land is not owned, they own the base area but the expanse of the land that you ski on is leased from the Forest Service.

Anyways Brill finally got his permit and impact studies stamped and now has his go ahead. Silverton is what Vail, Telluride, Aspen, Breckenridge were 40 years ago when they first got started. This is basically a chance for anybody to get started in the infancy of what will surely happen as it has with every other ski resort in Colorado. The property values went from the average house selling for $125,000 in 2001 to $300,000 today. While that sounds like a lot of money and it sounds like it is too late, that is not the case at all. When you look at the history of any other resort in Colorado, the same scenario is homes were selling for $30,000 and now they sell for 3 million.

For me it doesn't work, that area is a 6 hour drive for me and not something I would want to do. But if you are already looking at doing it, you should seriously look at Silverton. That town in 2001 had 600 residents, and nothing stayed open during the winter, it relied on the summer tourist season. Today they have doubled in population and business are springing up and they have the beginnings of a year round economy. Silverton is beginning to be known as a serious out doors adverture junky place to go with the Silverton Mt skiing being the only thing like it in the entire USA, they have always been known for the ice climbing in the area and the crazy 100 mile races over the mountain passes, but now things are just on the verge of busting out. A nice investment in a piece of property there could be an instant retirement portfolio.

Cole

I will think about that, thanks Mike.

I will keep you informed.

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Mike Finley

Back in 1962 when Pete Siebert was trying to develop Vail ski resort, Vail Colorado didn't even have a grocery store, didn't even have a doctor in town, it was just a tiny mountain town on a lonely 2 lane road.

See any similarities?

Back then your investment was $50,000. It gave your family a life time membership to the ski resort and Pete gave you a plot of land near the base of what is now Vail village. Those plots are now worth on average 1.5 million dollars and up. Not too bad of an investment. Things are now different in Colorado, where once development of any kind was welcome now the political climate is all about controlled development. Silverton is already formulating a plan to limit their own growth, which will only make the land available for development worth even more as time goes by and the town eventually eliminates any more land available for building on.

747

I think its time for you to get the skies out. I thought i seen aspen has 2 feet of powder on the ground

Cole

Mike thanks for metioning this to me.

I searched some more and found out some great info.

Great article:
http://www.powdermag.com/features/on...ive/silverton/

Is this his place?:
http://www.silvertonmountain.com/index.php

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Mike Finley

One step ahead of you, we skied Keystone on Saturday!

Aspen is nice, that's where I proposed to my wife, but it's not my kind of town.

Now Steamboat on the other hand just got 30 inches dumped on it yesterday. And by the way, just to prove how crazy the weather is here and how people are led to believe Denver gets a ton of snow. Yesterday Steamboat to the west got 30 inches of snow, today they closed the highway on the eastern plains of Colorado leading to Kansas because of a blizzard and today in Denver it was deep blue skys with sunshine!

Cole

How is the denver construction industry? hint hint

Residential?

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Mike Finley

Yep, that's it. Nothing like it anywhere else in the USA - 100% expert terrain.

Here is what they do in the summer time to pass the time when they can't ski.


Here is a copy of the article they ran in the paper today that made me think about you:

Mecca for going to extremes
Silverton's expert ski area kick-starts a town revival
Dennis Schroeder © News

SILVERTON - You're expected to endure at least two or three winters in town to rank as a local.
When the snow is piled barricade-high along the center of Greene Street and the wind rips around the pastel corners of the ornate Victorian buildings built in the town's glory days, then the white grip that defines winter in Silverton has taken hold.

"If you make it through the first winter, people give you more respect and take you more seriously," said Jenny Brill, co-founder with her husband, Aaron Brill, of Silverton Mountain Ski Area.

The ski mountain is the new economic engine that has kick-started Silverton's revival as an outpost for extreme sports and for quiet renegades who savor the joy of isolation in a town of not quite 600.

"But," she said, "the test is making it through the two or three winters after that."

Silverton's remoteness is emphasized by the avalanches that sweep down from mammoth snowpacks above U.S. 550, closing the only highway into town from north or south for hours at a time.

Last winter, Red Mountain Pass, on the north, was closed the equivalent of 12 24-hour days, and Molas Divide and Coal Bank Pass, on the south, were blocked by snow for the equivalent of five days.

"The avalanches can run all day and night, but it doesn't matter if no one is there," said Mark Rikkers, an avalanche forecaster in the Silverton office of the Colorado Avalanche Information Center, which analyzes the avalanche risk on U.S. 550 for the Colorado Department of Transportation.

"But if more people come to Silverton, and you put 100 cars under them every hour, instead of one car, it's more likely there will be an accident," Rikkers said.

With Silverton Mountain opening Dec. 15 for its fifth season of expert-only skiing, attention generated by the ski area and the lure of other extreme sports has begun to stir one of Colorado's last, best remote places into a year-round town.

At issue, according to local residents, is whether the town can grow and revive itself without losing its soul.

"I like our quaint little town," said Tammy Long, owner of the Cow Palace Cafe on Greene Street, Silverton's main thoroughfare. "A little bit of growth is good for any place, but not a lot."

Aspen, Crested Butte and Telluride also were once mining camps that had fallen on hard times before they were rediscovered as resorts catering to high times.

Silverton residents know the risks of losing their Carhartt working man's image to the Bogner brigade in their elegant ski suits if real estate prices keep going up.

"I was actually going to move to Telluride, but I stopped in Silverton and I'm still here," said John Sites, a building contractor who arrived in Silverton six winters ago for the ice climbing.

"I like Silverton better than Telluride," Sites said. "I like to visit Telluride, but it would be more of a hassle to live there because it's become a small city."

"People are far more real here." he added.

WOOFs and soaring home prices

The winter ahead will be the first in Silverton for Everett and Margie Lyons, retirees from Peoria, Ill., although they bought a second home in town in summer 1997.

"On our first visit here, I literally said to my wife, 'We should buy a house here,' " said Everett Lyons, 57. "We came back the next day and began looking at houses. Since that point, our vacations have been built around Silverton."

Neither skis, but they hike, practice yoga, visit the library, attend lectures and walk wherever they go along the town's wide streets.

They are so-called WOOFs, well-off older folks, who are buying second homes at prices that averaged $125,000 in 2001, but have soared to $295,000 this year.

In the same years, from 2001 to 2005, San Juan County's assessed valuation jumped from $24.1 million to $40.6 million, a 69 percent increase, but a pittance compared to resort counties such as Pitkin County, with its $1.9 billion assessed valuation.

The real estate dynamic set in motion by affluent newcomers tends to price out longtime residents, eliminating the work force that might provide services.

"The growth in second homes is not necessarily what they need or want in Silverton," said Ken Francis, director of the Office of Community Services at Fort Lewis College in Durango. "It's the second-home market that is driving the real estate market, making it more difficult for the families who are already there and making it more difficult to attract new families who are the full-time residents who make a real community."

While home prices are soaring, by Silverton standards, the number of children who would qualify for free or reduced-price hot lunches at the Silverton School is increasing. It's now about two-thirds of the 74-student, K-12 enrollment.

But the tiny school has no cafeteria to prepare hot meals, said Superintendent Kim White. Instead, children bring lunch in brown bags and townspeople contribute to provide milk to them.

For the first time in recent years, the school this fall enrolled Asian and black students, reflecting the arrival of new residents, White said. The number of Spanish-speaking students has increased to 30 percent of the enrollment, she said.

The unanticipated growth spurt has brought to the fore in Silverton the quandary that has challenged every other old mining camp undergoing a metamorphosis, Francis said.

"The issue is how to maintain their Victorian quaintness and also be affordable," he said. "That's where all the other mountain communities have failed. They are quaint, but not affordable."

The Lyonses, like other Silverton residents, want the town to succeed on its own terms, not as some "Aspenized" or "Tellurided" version of itself.

"It's a community you can easily become invested in," Everett Lyons said. "I don't know if you can become invested in Denver or Aurora, at least not in the same way.

"In the people-to-people sense."


When Silverton Mountain opens on Dec. 15 for its fifth season, about 80 skiers per day will be taken in escorted groups. Unguided skiing will begin in April, after the most extreme avalanche danger has passed, when up to 475 skiers a day will be permitted to challenge the ultra-steep runs.

"This is not a family ski experience," said Silverton ski area's Aaron Brill. "Nobody else does it the way we do it. There's no other mountain that's all expert."

Like competitors in the 100-mile run, 90 percent of the skiers who take the guided tours on the ski mountain are male, the sort of hard-core fitness buffs who seem to live only in an SUV commercial, dashing from one sport to another with toys bungee-corded to the roof.

Silverton is beginning to recognize the dichotomy that exists between the Gore-Tex-sheathed winter sports enthusiasts and the camera-laden summer tourists, mostly families who arrive on the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad. The more winter sports enthusiasts who come, the faster and wider the dichotomy will grow between summer vacationers and winter thrill-seekers.

Unlike the train riders, extreme sports enthusiasts have to be mindful of the region's unstable snowpack. The X Club, opened by -Michael Constantine, caters to backcountry adventurers and deals in avalanche shovels and probes, rather than steam-train and mining souvenirs.

"The pursuit of extreme sports in this region is hazardous and questionable because of the notoriously unstable snowpack the San Juans are famous for," said Jerry Roberts, an avalanche forecaster in the local office of the Colorado Avalanche Information Center.

Ghost towns may live again

"This is a critical time in Silverton's history," said Beverly Kaiser, planning director for the town and for San Juan County, the state's least populated. "We like to say Silverton is the only town in the county that isn't a ghost town."

But Gladstone, Eureka and other ghost towns might come back to life if the county's population doubles, to 1,200, or even triples, to nearly 2,000, as some residents worriedly discuss over coffee.

"I like the town as it is," said Wiley Carmack, who's lived in Silverton since 1959, buying up parcels of land that he prices in the millions. "Everyone is against change, but, the way I see it, change is inevitable."

Platted when Silverton was booming from gold and silver mines, the town includes about 80 buildable acres within its original limits on the valley floor and has bought 20 more contiguous acres.

How many other mountain towns offer 100 buildable acres?

"I think we have a unique opportunity that other ski towns haven't had because we are starting on the ground floor, with our own model," said San Juan County Commissioner Pete McKay.

"While there is nostalgia for the past, San Juan County is positioning ourselves for both heritage tourism and as a recreation destination," McKay said. "I would say our glory days are ahead of us."

Mike Finley

Well, its good for me I know that!

Short term we are recovering, the unbelievable crazy gowth and hot market of the late 90s that coincided with the internet boom and bust is gone.

Long term - the front range will eventually be one city from Fort Collins up north, swallowing Denver in the middle and extending to Colorado Springs to the south. Aurora is the eastern most suburb to the east of Denver, it has 400 miles of open praire to grow into. The air port DIA that they completed in 1995 was in the middle of no where, now it is almost surrounded by housing. Everyone of those bastards that we pulled out of New Orleans seems to say the same thing - "I ain't never leavin here!"

747

Any powder on the beave yet (beaver creek)

Mike Finley

Vail and the Beav are our two favorite places to ski because they get the most powder, but due to the randomness of mother nature this year the step child of snow fall - Keystone is leading the front range resorts in base. Vail and BC will catch up and pull far ahead, it's only a matter of time.