 |
 |
 |
|
| Bursting at the seams, local favorite Monarch eyes a major expansion | |||
| Wednesday, January 04, 2012 09:50 |
|
(A snowboarder rides through the fresh powder on a bluebird day in December at Monarch Mountain. Photos by Christian Murdock, The Gazette)
By R. Scott Rappold, The Gazette MONARCH MOUNTAIN • Here on the snowy spine of the Sawatch Mountains, you can’t rent a ski-in/ski-out condo. There are no snow-making machines, glitzy boutiques or $20-a-day parking lots. Most can’t even get a cellphone signal. It’s skiing the old-fashioned way, with short runs and slow chairlifts, and that’s how people seem to like it. “I hate ice. This is all-natural,” said skier Wesley Janck, who made the two-and-a-half-hour drive from Colorado Springs on a recent Thursday. “You get more in with shorter runs.” “It gets more powder typically here than just about anywhere in Colorado,” said skier Larry Hilliard, also from Colorado Springs. But after 73 years, Monarch is bursting at the seams. There has been a sharp increase in visitors in recent years, drawn by heavy snow, a “locals’ hill” feel, low prices ($57 for an adult this season) and 2-for-1 ticket deals with gas purchases at some stores. Monarch officials say parking has become too limited, the base lodge too crowded and the slopes too congested. They have embarked on a major expansion: a bigger base lodge, more parking, a tubing hill, new chairlifts, on-mountain huts and the area’s first “back bowl” terrain over the Continental Divide. They might even add snow-making. The U.S. Forest Service last month accepted Monarch’s master plan detailing the improvements. Environmental reviews for individual projects will follow, and officials hope to launch the expansion this summer by doubling the size of the lodge. Monarch began updating its master plan in 2008. That year the area saw its best season, 184,000 skiers, up from 142,190 five years earlier. Marketing director Greg Ralph said Monarch has to turn away people for lack of parking about 20 times a year. Some park along U.S. Highway 50, a dangerous hike. On these busy days, it’s difficult to find a place to sit and have lunch in the lodge. While addressing these problems, planners took a look at another perceived deficiency — upper-intermediate terrain. The No Name Bowl, on the west side of the Divide between the Panorama and Breezeway lifts, always had been a possibility. It holds good snow and has a grade suited for blue runs and gladed tree-skiing. Then Summit County’s Arapahoe Basin ski area received Forest Service approval to expand to its back side with Montezuma Bowl. “When A-Basin did it, obviously it set more of a precedent for us to put pencil to paper and get on it,” Ralph said. The terrain is in Gunnison National Forest, but since the rest of the area is in San Isabel National Forest, that forest’s agency will oversee the environmental review. If approved, it would add 160 acres of cut runs and 240 acres of tree-skiing, bringing Monarch’s total acreage to 1,144, about the size of nearby Crested Butte Mountain Resort. The new two-seat chairlift and warming hut would be flown in by helicopter. At a time when ski-resort expansions generate controversy — Breckenridge’s Peak 6 project is contested by some residents who worry about too much growth, and the Forest Service blocked Crested Butte’s expansion to Snodgrass Mountain after many there complained of the same thing — public meetings on Monarch’s master plan have had nary a voice raised in opposition. The reason could be that the expansion carries no risk of development, Ralph said. Monarch is surrounded by national forest land so the projects come with no likelihood of multi-million dollar homes or slope-side condos. And he said parking will always be free. Other elements of the expansion include 350 parking spaces, an 8,000-square-foot ski school center, a 5,000-square-foot overflow restaurant, a 3,000-square-foot ski patrol/medical clinic building, various maintenance and employee buildings, a three-seat chairlift to replace the Breezeway and a tubing hill and conveyer lift. The Forest Service already has approved a mid-mountain lodge — with toilets and a sun deck with barbecue for sale — near the bottom of Panorama lift and a mountain-top warming yurt with restrooms and “limited food.”
(Monarch officials want to expand the base lodge, which is often filled to capacity on busy weekends.)
Still in doubt is snow-making. While Monarch often touts its all-natural snow, the fear of climate change has led officials to get approval to make snow on 33 acres. Ralph said no water rights or equipment have been bought, and it is considered a contingency in case of several years of poor snowfall. Among Monarch skiers — two-thirds of whom are from Colorado Springs, according to Ralph — the expansion seems popular. “I like the fact Monarch’s not real big and the trails are to my liking as an intermediate skier,” Colorado Springs skier Phil Skellie said. Karen Michels, also of Colorado Springs, likes Monarch’s short runs because they don’t have long, flat run-outs back to the lift like many larger resorts. “There’s a lot of stuff to do on each of them, especially if you get in the trees,” she said.
Ralph said the face-lift won’t give Monarch a mega-resort feel. “We don’t want to change the flavor of the area,” he said. “We don’t want to pay for it with high ticket prices. It’s enhancing the existing Monarch experience, not changing it. It’s still going to be stuck in the 20th Century, even if we do get Wi-Fi someday.” |
