The owners of the Las Vegas Ski & Snowboard Resort are seeking U.S. Forest Service permission to expand their 70-acre ski resort to 500 acres with 50 trails and 10 lifts. The $32 million plan seems especially ambitious considering that Las Vegas can’t even afford to finish their downtown city center monstrosity. The idea of a ski resort near Vegas is baffling. You go to Vegas to drink beer and lose money at craps, then maybe you take a day off to climb Red Rocks if you’re going to do anything outdoorsy. You want to ski on vacation? You go to Utah or Colorado. People don’t usually bookend gambling benders with a day on the slopes.

A New York ski area trying to recover from a devastating fire and a terrible website has been struck another massive blow - teenage vandals. Two local kids have admitted to tearing up the ski resort’s lodge and lift shacks after police confronted them. It seems they thought the buildings were going to be torn down post-fire/terrible-website, so they decided to have some fun. Bummer for them, there can’t be much to do in these little towns over the winter but ski or snowboard - it’s going to be a lonely few winters.

Skiers and snowboarders of Stevens Pass showed up en masse to pitch in and clean the resort on a sunny day. The resort pays just enough full timers to clean around the base of the mountain, so they ask suckers, er volunteers, to come in and clean up the mountain in exchange for an afternoon of ‘hiking’ and a free meal. In a few short hours they managed to find a broken iPhone, a broken pipe, a tire and several hundred pounds of cans and bottles.

The Breckenridge Town Council finally had their day on stage regarding Vail’s proposed expansion to Peak 6 that would involve a new lift, restaurant and several hundred new acres of skiing. Some council members railed against Vail, and others warned that the huge resort would pull out of an intergovernmental agreement that would task the resort with addressing impacts of the expansion if the council failed to sign onto the expansion.

It’s an odd setup. If the council doesn’t approve the expansion, then Vail can leave this agreement that puts them in charge of paying for the fallout from the expansion. Then if the expansion goes through anyway, Vail won’t be bound to dealing with the fallout. But if the town fights the expansion and wins, then it won’t have mattered anyway. If there were any teenagers involved it’d be great fodder for a John Hughes movie.

Pond skimming purity. No chanting crowds, kegs of light beer, people dressed as characters from Sesame Street. Just a skier and a high alpine pond. And a camera. Backcountry.com Athlete Noah Howell takes a crack at this purist sport.

via Backcountry Facebook