POWDER BURN: Arson, Money and Mystery On Vail Mountain.

POWDER BURN: Arson, Money and Mystery On Vail Mountain

by Daniel Glick

Public Affairs, $25.00

THIS IS A DETECTIVE STORY where the crime turns out to be nowhere near the most evil act. Early in the morning of Oct. 17,1998, a few hunters camping near the summit of Vail Mountain saw flames leaping into the dawn sky. Someone had set fire to chairlift towers, a ski patroller's shack, and an enormous restaurant that had just been built on the slopes of what is perhaps the country's premier ski resort. The structures burned to the ground--and though the fires had clearly been started by someone, the FBI has yet to make an arrest or present evidence to a grand jury. In fact, the best summation of the evidence yet collected is in this book, a kind of private investigation conducted by Newsweek correspondent Daniel Glick.

What he finds is an infinite list of suspects--dozens of people and groups that had every reason to hate Vail Associates, the Wall Street-owned mountain-managers who quickly rebuilt their buildings with insurance money and got back to the work of growing their bottom line. The line-up includes the following:

* Animal rights activists and other environmental warriors, angered by Vail's plans to expand their operations (which mostly take place on the public lands of the White River National Forest) into critical lynx habitat.(*)

* Local businesses, which were suffering as Vail tried to maximize its profit flow by setting up its own malls full of coffee shops and ski-wear boutiques.

* Ski bums, the backbone of the slope-grooming and chairlift operations, who saw their wages withering in the face of inflation caused by an influx of zillionaires, their benefits shrinking in the Face of Vail Associates' bottomline zealotry, and their laces freezing because of the company's new grooming guidelines. (No beards for ski bums!?)

* Immigrant workers, living share-cropper lives in company trailers, most of them afraid to complain because their papers were not entirely in order. "What they call affordable housing is a joke," said one Mexican, a maintenance worker at a local hotel. "You pay $450 a month, live with a bunch of room-mates you don't even know, and when you get your check at the end of the month [you] don't have anything"

* Local government officials--those in nearby Minturn, for instance--whose water supply was stolen by a platoon of Vail Associates lawyers bent on more snowmaking. This is, in other words, a classic story of a company with almost endless power.

Some of that power came from New York money, which in turn bought a lot of attorneys, not to mention local politicians. Some of the juice came from Washington.

Vail first etched itself onto the national map when Gerald Ford made it his western vacation destination. It appealed primarily to Republicans (unlike the Hollywood/Democrat-oriented Aspen) until new director Adam Aron, who arrived at Vail from the cruise-ship industry, managed to make it thoroughly bipartisan. Al Gore flew into Aron's Beaver Creek home; Dick Gephardt was another houseguest, along with a dozen Senators. Over the course of a one four-day summer seminar, Aron boasted, he hosted F.W. De Klerk, Secretary of Defense William Cohen, Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala, Brent Scowcroft, Dick Cheney, and Newt Gingrich.

And some of the company's influence came, as is always the case in this epoch, from careful public relations and savvy marketing-through the endless junkets and feature articles that kept the super-rich, and the merely prosperous, flocking in. What about guaranteeing "first tracks" on new powder for the highest rollers? What about ski concierges to carry your boards to the lifts in the morning and dry your boots at night? Well, why the hell not? Glick, whose book falters a bit toward the end as it becomes clear he won't actually finger a culprit, deserves real praise for telling a fairy tale for one age, one in which the evil stepmothers pretty, much control everything and come out on top at the end.

But what if you somehow want to stop this kind of machine, or at least alter its trajectory a little? It's a question that more and more people are asking as they confront the sort of enormous economic powers that can affect entire nations as profoundly as Vail Associates affects its small valley. What do you do when the justice system doesn't deliver just possibly because the federal judge who dismissed the final appeal against the expansion into wilderness habitat belongs to a family that still owns some of the largest parcels of private land in Eagle County? What do you do when there are lawsuits "lined up like airplanes over O'Hare" against anyone who challenges the corporation? What do you do?

What someone did in the case of Vail was burn down the timber-beamed restaurant. Suspicion centered on the Earth Liberation Front, a shadoW group that had previously claimed credit for "liberating" some mink ranches. But as Glick points out, the evidence is not very good--one e-mail that arrived a few days later with no telling details, and no real suspects.

Whether or not it was the ELF, the lesson from those October blazes was clear: It's very ham to fight greed with fire. Unlike the often-clever actions of Earth First! in the 1980s, when the group was still under the spell of Edward Abbey's novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, the Vail fires were cowardly enough to create a wave of sympathy for Vail Associates, and all but guaranteed they'd be able to go ahead with their expansion plans. In fact, an amazing number of Glick's sources indicated that Vail Associates itself had the most to gain from burning down its own buildings.

While it's easy to condemn destruction, it's very hard to know what kinds of tactics do work against massive power. In Seattle, civil disobedience seemed to be making some progress in opening the issue of globalization to public view, though the message was undermined by violent anarchists smashing windows. On big environmental issues like climate change, environmental leaders have taken the exact opposite tack--they toned down the militancy and spent the last eight years cozying up to the White House in hopes of extracting real victories, but they were largely disappointed.

Some new combination of Internet organizing, street campaigning, and political lobbying seems to be evolving on the progressive Left, but it has not yet taken mature form. Activists hope the Bush presidency may give them new vigor, but it is at least as likely that his public relations specialists will spin any attacks to their advantage. It's hard work trying to find traction against power in boom times, and maybe harder when the economy turns a bit sour and people get fretful.

The deep valley that leads up to Vail Mountain is one of many test tubes for this research, but so far at least, the experiment has not gone well. For the moment, the rich are getting richer, the poor are working harder, and the lynx are getting run over on the highways.

(*) Read more on this in Nancy Watzman's piece, "Playground or Preserve?," on p. 36.

BILL McKIBBEN is the author, most recently, of Long Distance: A Year of Living Strenuously.