I was going to be an engineer, and then discovered there was math involved. But I’m still fascinated by engineering solutions. A big part of life on the ranch is engineering, even though it doesn’t look like it. Trying to solve weird problems like water disappearing into the earth through a crack in the rock ledge the ditch crosses, or field repairs of complicated machinery with parts sitting in shipping containers in some port. Practical solutions to strange problems—that’s farming. If you can’t fix it with duct tape and profanity, it can’t be fixed.
Even more interesting are the colossal engineering fails. Deep in the channel line-up on satellite TV, there are shows that feature that kind of thing. These are the shows about a skyscraper that would, under certain weather conditions, release huge glass panels from the exterior wall and send them crashing down on the street below. Ironically, the building was owned by an insurance company. There was a building in London that concentrated and reflected the sun’s rays onto a specific parking spot down the block. It was enough to set cars on fire.
There are all the cartoons about the joining of railroad tracks, only they are misaligned and only one rail gets connected, with the others offset. We’ve all seen (and perhaps lived) cartoons about the guy who builds a boat in his basement and can’t get it up the stairs.
My current favorite is Jeff Bezos’s super yacht. He commissioned a 417-foot-long “superyacht” from a shipyard in Rotterdam, Netherlands. This thing is so big that it won’t be able to dock in most ports, certainly not the fun islands, and so it will require a smaller yacht to provide support services and shuttles to the dock if the helicopter isn’t flying that day. It’s all finished, and ready to sail out to sea. Except for one little problem. It’s too tall to go through the drawbridge. Well, you say, somebody might have noticed that on the plans. Oops.
The proposed solution was to temporarily dismantle the historic iron bridge, and the shipyard applied for a permit to do just that. There were going to be some disruptions, since the bridge would be closed for a long time. More importantly, the bridge is a beloved local landmark, apparently the first public structure to be repaired after Rotterdam was bombed in WWII. While the bridge is a beloved landmark, Jeff Bezos is Jeff Bezos.
Nobody seemed remotely interested in disrupting their lives so he could get his half billion dollar mistake out of the harbor. I don’t think it ever got to a vote, and the shipyard withdrew the application. So far, nobody has figured out how to withdraw the yacht. Not even Amazon Prime can do it. On-line observers suggested he move it with his rocket ship. For now, it’s just racking up parking tickets in the shipyard.
We’ve got a somewhat similar issue here. Just the other day, another truckload of parts for the new ski lifts at PCMR arrived in the parking lot. For a while, the parking lot was jammed full with lift parts, re-bar cages for the tower foundations, and other custom-built, non-refundable hardware. But there is no permit, and no clear path forward on getting one. It’s all going somewhere for storage. Maybe on the good ship Bezos. Should be plenty of room and he’s not using it.
Vail assumed they were proceeding under the terms of an old, but intact, approval that addressed mountain upgrades and improvements. The City pushed back a little bit on that, requesting some additional steps, but ultimately determined that it fit, and granted the approval. There was an appeal, and the planning commission said the plan exceeded the scope of the old approval, and needed a new application. So there we are. There isn’t time before ski season to do anything, so the new lifts are as useless as Bezos’s yacht. Former manager Mike Goar suggested a compromise of building the Silverlode replacement, and setting the base lift, Eagle, aside while they sort it out. That seemed very reasonable to me, but after last ski season, PCMR is no more endearing than Bezos when it comes to special accommodations.
Litigation would take years to sort out. Filing a new conditional use permit would probably supersede the old approvals, or at least re-open a lot of very difficult issues that the old permit had put to rest—issues which need to be re-opened because the situation has changed so dramatically, or perhaps Epically. It all centered on the “comfortable carrying capacity” of the resort—and anybody who skied last winter knows that whole concept has been blown to smithereens.We’ve got until next spring to sort it out, and a jam-packed, goat rodeo winter ahead. I’m not sure where it ends up. The lifts are needed, but so is a hard cap on the number of skiers on the hill, a real parking solution other than “park somewhere else, not our problem.” It’s in everybody’s interest to find solutions. Let’s hope that the City and Vail can sort it out.
By the time I put my home of 40 years on the market, I was ready to leave that dwelling. . . I was not ready to leave every part of my yard.
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