The Club Fails

Ever hear about the Yellowstone Club?

Bad idea. And now it's gone broke.

Read about it from the ski bum perspective here.

I eventually learned that the Yellowstone Club had so few skiers that sensors were installed so lift operators would know when someone was actually riding a chair. Powder lasted for days and they had a run named EBITDA, which I learned stands for “earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization.’’ The employees were apparently treated well, but good luck trying to get an invitation to visit. For the masses, it was a mirage of a ski area, even though you could look down into it from Big Sky.

Buh Bye.

The CT River Valley

One of the great American pastoral areas is the Connecticut River Valley that divides New Hampshire and Vermont. We spent a lot of road time driving through this area on the way to the Whites, and it is spectacular natural area, if a bit depressed economically.

The NY Times reports on this unique area.

Still, the ambition of Mr. McAllister’s eco-resort, Liberty Mill, has surprised locals in this struggling town, whose lodging choices now include the Hetty Green motel — not exactly the green Mr. McAllister has in mind. “Avoid at all costs,” said one traveler in a review of the motel on Trip Advisor. Liberty Mills plans to offer an Olympic-quality kayak race course, a skate park and a pool where a coal furnace once fumed; photovoltaic, wood pellet and geothermal power; and compost toilets for guests that will fertilize a farm growing food for the resort.

Parking Day

September 19th is Parking Day.

Killing Camping

The Economist weighs in on why they think we don't go outside...

We have always blamed the decline in camping and interest in National parks on electronics, quoting the fifth-grader: “I like to play indoors better ’cause that’s where all the electrical outlets are.” The Economists disagrees, and suggests that we should "blame conservationists, not video games."

Food for thought.

Read more at Treehugger.

Update: I don't want to give the impression that I agree with the Economist, but the notion that some Ntional Parks are less friendly for folks from today's society is worth considering.

A New Backyard Model

Bradford Plummer at the New Republic comments on the idea of creating communal lawns as a way of building community, and the roadblocks that would get in the way of doing such a thing.

Not everyone wants to share a yard, of course, for a whole slew of reasons, but I do wonder if, with the rise in gas prices, we'll start to see more experimenting along these lines. Anyway, this reminds me to link to Elizabeth Kolbert's New Yorker essay on the cultural history of lawns. In Britain, lawns were originally seen as a status symbol, a preserve of the rich; nowadays, in many suburban neighborhoods, they're seen as a necessity, a patch of green to be trimmed and watered and doused in chemicals no matter how often you use it, because it demonstrates your commitment to the local community. (In Orem, Utah, one 70-year-old woman was even arrested recently when she fell afoul of local "weed laws" by letting her grass go brown.)

This started with a post by Jonathan Zasloff after he watched the Backyardigans with his son.

When you think about it, the front lawn is somewhat of a relic of 1950's family structure: Dad goes to work and the kids play on the lawn, supervised by Mom. But now, Mom is at work, too, and the kids are in child care. It is completely wasted space from a planning perspective--not to mention the extraordinary waste of water that comes from everyone having to manage lawns that they never use, gasoline from mowing, etc. Ditto with backyards.

So why don't more neighborhoods have this? Because in most suburbs, it's illegal: you can't share a lawn--there are setback requirements, fencing requirements, lot size requirements, etc. Developers won't build what they can't entitle. And so we assume that single-family neighborhoods mean far lower density, and transit accessibility, than we should.

Interesting notion which should be food for thought for designers of new communities. Communal lawns could inspire a feeling of safety that parents have lost much of today.

I have enough trouble dealing with my yard, as the warm weather and heavy spring rains, coupled with vicious invasive exotics, turns things jungle-like in a matter of days. Lucky there's no community associations in my village.

thanks to The Daily Dish for the tip.

New Urban Gym Design

Wow.

Check out this new human powered gym design. problem is you're still indoors...

Have you ever pedaled on a stationary bike at the gym and thought to yourself: ‘What if this energy I am exerting could be used for something better than just making me sweat?” Well now a new proposal from architect Mitchell Joachim promises to take all that energy expended at the gym to the next level, by capturing all that exertion and using it to transport people around the rivers of New York City. The River Gym concept is a human-powered floating gym that will provide the user with the one experience that no other gym can provide: floating your workout around Manhattan.

Farming in the Sky

The NY Times reports on the design and development of urban vertical farms, where crops are grown on specially designed skyscrapers.

When Mr. Stringer heard about the concept in June, he said he immediately pictured a “food farm” addition to the New York City skyline. “Obviously we don’t have vast amounts of vacant land,” he said in a phone interview. “But the sky is the limit in Manhattan.” Mr. Stringer’s office is “sketching out what it would take to pilot a vertical farm,” and plans to pitch a feasibility study to the mayor’s office within the next couple of months, he said.

More here.

More on Jackson Hole

We posted a film showing a year in Jackson Hole a while back. I mentioned I used to head there three times a year. Considering fuel prices, I'm glad that I'm not surfing the United Airlines website looking for my plane tickets this Fall.

I have a bunch of friends that are fortunate enough to live there, and most own their own places. Looks like owning a home in Jackson will continue to get more and more difficult as "the billionaires push out the millionaires".

For more on this, here's a post on what Jackson's become, courtesy of the Mountain Culture Blog. Let's hope that in the future, that more than the rich can afford to live long term in great natural areas. I think we can check Jackson off as lost.

I’ve come to terms with the fact that I may never own a home here, and I may never even own a doorknob here.

Green Developments

Vanity Fair does two articles on the future of architecture, with examples from today.

First, discussing Bill McDonough's vision of a world without waste,

Cradle to Cradle, in McDonough’s words, “does not just reduce waste, it eliminates the concept of waste,” stipulating that products be manufactured in new ways that will allow them to be reduced to their essential technical or biological elements in order to be re-used. Nature’s cycles provide the model.

and second, an introduction to the new California Academy of Sciences Building in San Francisco, the greenest museum ever.

Beneath the roof, a rectangle of transparent walls would contain the museum’s traditional exhibitions: a rain forest (enclosed in a glass dome), a theater for viewing the cosmos (in a sphere that looks like it’s made of eggshell), a coral reef, a swamp, a habitat for penguins, and an exhibition on climate change and the earth’s future. Piano envisioned a profound connection between the building and the park: a facility in a pavilion that would be visually and functionally linked to its environment. He also proposed sustainable construction, which would use innovative technology to create the greenest museum ever built.

Wanna buy a house in the desert?

Throughout our history, we've seen boomtowns rise and fall. Read from the NY Times about the contrived town of Maricopa, Ariz, which stands as an icon to our disconnect with our environment. Here's a description of the place, and remember, it's in the desert 40 miles south of Phoenix.

But if you leave Penascos and head north on 347, you soon hit a very different Maricopa, one that didn’t exist at all a few years ago: a sprawling matrix of neatly planned subdivisions lining both sides of the highway. Newly paved roads with names like West Magic Moment Drive and North Enchantment Pass wind past outsize houses with tiled roofs and stucco exteriors, painted in a limited palette of adobe shades. Artificial lakes feed underground irrigation systems that keep lawns green despite summer temperatures that regularly hit 100 degrees. There are about 14,000 brand-new homes in this new Maricopa, as well as a golf course, two strip malls with big supermarkets, a few sports bars and a couple of pool-supply shops. There are also plenty of open lots where developers have prepared land for future Maricopans.

You can guess what happens next. Sure this is a story about the sub prime crisis, but it's also about the lunacy of building huge new exurb communities in the face of an unyielding natural environment, in this case the Sonoran desert. Check out this link to see where things are at now.

Our kids deserve better, but considering the disconnect our kids show with nature today, I wonder if many will learn from this revised boom town fable.

From Rural Virginia

Ward Burton, NASCAR driver and conservationist:

“This is what defines quality of life,” Burton said. “Our property, our farms and our heritage … this is the single greatest gift we can share with out future generations, our children.”
He said children are suffering from “nature-deficit disorder” because they are not connected with the outdoors.
“We have a responsibility to share our passion with the next generation,” he said. “Land is like a child - it must be nurtured; together, we can make a difference.”

Rural Virginia does not want to become another "urban center". More here.

From Canada

Abbreviated holiday weekend post.

"Steve," my friend said, "they're all gone — Warner's Pond, Caddy's Pond — they're both filled in, and the North Woods is just one big housing development."

Check this out.

Thanksgiving Day Post

Here's a post from earlier in the Fall that I came across recently. It's worth checking out.

My hometown is the small town of Coon Rapids, population 1,200. Downtown hasn’t changed much in the past 100 years. There are a number of new homes with the owners commuting to jobs in larger communities. All but one of the car dealerships are gone, along with a number of farm machinery dealers. In many ways it is a typical rural community except for its multi-million dollar school athletic facilities—track; swimming pool; football, baseball, soccer, softball fields; electronic scoreboards; press boxes; concession stands and more. Kids who participate in multiple sports often practice nearly every day. Several years ago the football program had to switch to 8-player teams because of low student participation and have to travel further for games.

More blog posts

See here.

Above the wooden "No Swimming" sign, a bright red sign warns: "Violators subject to $100 fine. And/Or 15 days in Jail." That sign has been there, at the side of Pretty Colour Lake for as long as I can remember. We've always treated it as a joke.