Noticias

• $1 Billion Four Seasons Hotel Stirs Community
• Yom Kippur Brings Atonement and Remembrance
• TanzTheater Moves Until the Grave

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$1 Billion Four Seasons Hotel Stirs Community

The Four Seasons, a luxury hotel company with more than 100 locations worldwide, including Denver and Vail, is coming to Mountain Village.

With a building permit finalized in late September, the billion-dollar project in cooperation with Merrimac Ventures is slated to finish by 2028. The resort will have two restaurants, 52 hotel rooms, 40 hotel residences and 28 private residences, selling for $4 million to $40 million.

The project represents another step toward the “world-class” vision of Mountain Village, a vision rooted in Ron Allred, a founder of the Telluride Ski Resort.

But neighboring communities aren’t convinced. They’re sounding the alarm and asking how the development will impact housing, infrastructure and the local workforce.

Over the past year, Merrimac Ventures, co-developer with Four Seasons, purchased the Rimrocker Hotel in Naturita and obtained a four-year master lease of the MTN Lodge hotel in Ridgway for workforce housing.

Aimee Tooker, a West End resident who owns a bed and breakfast in Nucla, said losing the Rimrocker is a blow to lodging tax income.

“I believe that the businesses need to prepare themselves for what’s coming,” Tooker said. “I don’t think that they understand the implication. I’m already seeing a lot of phone calls because the hotel is turning people away, you know, for hunting season, things like that.”

Tooker said the Rimrocker was essential to West End lodging capacity, hosting everyone from highway workers to elk hunters. The increase in temporary workers for the Four Seasons, she said, will be hard to absorb.

“There is no sustainable way. We can’t, we can’t sustain any of it with our food,” Tooker said. “The grocery store is already, you know, overburdened with people because, you know, Nucla doesn’t have one, so it’s Naturita only. So our grocery store already has empty shelves, you know, and it’s just going to be, you know, quadruple worse.”

The Four Seasons project will include 10 deed-restricted employee apartments and a public benefits package for Mountain Village, including $2.5 million toward housing mitigation efforts and improvements in the Plaza areas.

For Norwood Mayor Candy Meehan, those benefits should extend beyond Mountain Village.

“A healthy West End means a thriving East End, and you can’t truly have one without the other,” Meehan said. “With that being said, there’s a stakeholders group that we’ve got together talking about the agencies and the organizations that are directly impacted. Nucla’s got one gas station. Norwood’s got one little grocery store. We’ve got kids in our school system that we’re concerned about too. What do all these things look like? So, you know, it’s an opportunity for bigger and deeper conversations, and hopefully the town of Mountain Village can understand the true depth of the ask that they’re putting on the West End.”

Meehan said she believes there is room to work together. With hundreds of construction workers expected to live temporarily in the West End, her main fear is water availability.

In July, West End stakeholders sent a letter to Merrimac Ventures and the Town of Mountain Village outlining impacts to their communities and requesting collaboration on a community benefits package to help “mitigate the inevitable impacts of supporting the workforce that our communities will be hosting.”

The Telluride Foundation, a nonprofit that has supported West End communities for 20 years, has also entered the conversation.

“I think we have a very unique moment in time to help bridge the gap of a developer who is building a massive project in Mountain Village, but is using these communities in a temporary basis,” said Jason Corzine, president of the Telluride Foundation. “There will be real impacts of adding that amount of people, driving up the needs and again, tapping already a pretty limited resource base in those communities.”

While Merrimac Ventures declined an interview request, a West End stakeholders meeting with the developer is planned for early October.

Mountain Village Town Manager Paul Wisor commended the developer for making efforts to mitigate workforce impacts.

“I think that in a lot of cases, what I’ve seen in other regions is that with projects like this, you will have a developer come in, and the workers will be the responsibility of subcontractors, and there is no coordination in terms of how those workers are being housed,” Wisor said. “And so the developer here, in this case, is actually thinking about those things up front and trying to think about housing in a responsible and organized fashion.”

Wisor said the project is expected to create 150 to 200 jobs, with a “waterfall” effect of benefits for local businesses in Mountain Village.

Brian O’Neill, one of two real estate salespeople for the project, said they plan to prioritize local hiring.

“Why not hire people who are already here and have housing and give them an opportunity to have a job with a world-class company that will have some very nice benefits?” O’Neill said.

The Four Seasons is consistently listed among the top 100 companies to work for. Wisor said this project represents another step toward building a world-class community.

“We continue to work as hard as we possibly can to do all those projects with open ears and open eyes and an open mind so that we can listen to the concerns of the region as a whole while trying to continue to build what is a world-class community,” Wisor said.

Construction activity on the Four Seasons project began Sept. 29 and is scheduled to last three years.

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Yom Kippur Brings Atonement and Remembrance

On Wednesday night, millions of Jews across the world will sit down with family and friends to celebrate and honor Yom Kippur.

The holiday, the Jewish New Year, serves as a time of atonement, forgiveness, and remembering those who have been lost.

KOTO’s Julia Caulfield spoke with Stephen Wise, a member of the Telluride Jewish Community, about what the holiday means to him.

Story beings at 6:47.

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TanzTheater Moves Until the Grave

Two bodies move away, across, beside, and through each other in the Black Box Theatre at the Palm.

André Koslowski and Colin Sullivan are performing the new dance theatre piece “Until the Grave: Ein Trauerspiel.”

“It’s about conflict between two people, two entities. It can be one person and the way they relate to the world,” Koslowski said.

Koslowski is the artistic director of TanzTheater André Koslowski, the choreographer, and a dancer in the piece.

“It’s hard to talk about dance because dance is movement language. You’re trying to put it into words, so I’m a little hesitant about that,” he said. “Plus, I don’t want to take the space away for the audience to bring their own experience and their own story to what they see.”

Tanztheater is a German-born style of dance theatre, blending dance, spoken word, and the theatrical elements of human experience.

“I think there’s the opportunity for it to give the audience a lot of space to bring themselves to it,” Koslowski said.

Colin Sullivan adds that in the current cultural climate, the performance lives in the gray.

“There’s not a lot of room for discussion, or there’s a lot of black and white happening, and I don’t think that’s what this piece is,” Sullivan said.

Koslowski agreed, “theatre is a space where, all of us participating, are allowed to disagree.”

For Koslowski, the performance is whatever the audience needs it to be.

“I would hope that people can walk away reflecting on their life, their relationship, their environment, our country,” he said. “As long as it is somewhere in the world that I’m in, and that Colin and I are in, and take that into their own lives, I’m happy with whatever story they make up.”

Performances of “Until the Grave: Ein Trauerspiel” will take place at the Bob Saunders Black Box Theatre at the Palm on Thursday, Oct. 2, and Friday, Oct. 3, at 7 p.m. The performance runs about an hour. Tickets are available at telluridepalm.com or at the door.

Story begins at 12:35.

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New Water Year Begins Amid Drought Concerns and Dry Soils

The new water year began on Wednesday.

October generally marks the point when the majority of precipitation in the mountains falls as snow rather than rain—and the West’s water system is snowpack-based.

Seth Arens, a research scientist with the Western Water Assessment, says it can be tough to determine if the Upper Colorado River Basin will have a wet or dry year, because seasonal forecasts aren’t always accurate.

But he says there are other factors that can tell us something about the environment. Right now, a lot of soils in the region are near historic levels of dryness.

“When you have dry soils, that is indicative that there’s almost certainly going to be an inefficient runoff,” Arens said. “So that means if the soils are really dry, the first part of that melt period, all the water is going to go into just rewetting those soils.”

He says this past year, much of the region saw inefficient runoff, where only part of the water in snowpack makes it into streamflows. Across the Upper Basin, snowpack was 86 percent of average, but in April, streamflows into Lake Powell were at 41 percent of average.

Arens says water observers have been seeing more seasons with inefficient runoff—and that climate change drives these conditions.

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Climbing Mt. Everest with Kelvin Kent

Kelvin Kent is a world traveler, mountaineer, British Gurkha officer, author, teacher, businessman, community leader and expedition logistics expert.

Over the past 50 years, Kent has visited and lived in Nepal nearly 20 times. In the 1970s, he was part of Sir Chris Bonington’s climbs of the South Face of Annapurna and the Southwest Face of Everest.

Kent is a historian of all things Everest, and this week, he’ll be in Telluride to share a presentation on climbing Mt. Everest—a collaboration between the Telluride Mountain Club and Wilkinson Public Library.

The presentation combines archival photos of the early history of climbing Mt. Everest, weaving in his own experience of the climb.

The Climbing Mt. Everest talk with Kelvin Kent will take place at the Wilkinson Public Library on Thursday, Oct. 2, from 5:30 to 7 p.m.

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Energy Code Workshop in Telluride and Ridgway

Did you know that new building energy codes are being considered by local governments across the region?

Join EcoAction Partners for a non-technical presentation and Q&A to learn what energy codes are, who they affect and how they shape healthier, more resilient communities.

Participants can attend in-person at the Telluride Library or Ridgway Community Center. A zoom option is also available at www.ecoactionpartners.org

Both events begin on Thursday October 2^nd 530- 630pm

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Trump Keeps National Parks Open During Government Shutdown

The Trump administration plans to keep national parks open with minimal staffing during the federal government shutdown.

Bente Birkeland reports for the Colorado Capitol News Alliance.

Story beings at 20:18.

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Paonia Creates Immigrant Protection Team

With increasing pressure on the nation’s immigrant population, some communities are forming local immigration protection groups.

One such group is now operating in the North Fork Valley on Colorado’s Western Slope.

KVNF’s Lisa Young spoke with Karen Good and Jenn Lukesh, two members of the Paonia Immigrant Protection Team.

Story beings at 21:15.