iRide
Zaskoda’s Snowboarding Journal

I received and interesting phone call yesterday. Someone from Snow Magazine found some of my posts regarding the Bearfire Resort project and hunted me down. I have noticed in the past few weeks, a lot of traffic hitting my site is coming via google searches for information on the resort. All this buzz makes it feel that much more “real”. If I were still down in Texas, I’d go out, find the site where they’re building, and snag some photos. Anyway, I’m excited to see if I get quoted in print. Come to think of it, I’m not entirely sure she ever asked for my real name. Furthermore, she didn’t really ask me anything that I hadn’t already discussed here on the site. Still, I was stoked to get the call.

The Wall Street Journal did a piece on the Bearfire resort and produced this nifty video about it. All of the footage is cropped from other videos floating around the intarwebs, but the montage with narration tells the story well.

I’ve noticed a huge surge in search engine traffic related to the Bearfire Resort project. I decided to make my rounds and see if anything new or interesting hit the wire and my first stop, the office websites, popped up a special surprise. Instead of a website, I got a 509 error reporting that they’ve exceeded their bandwidth. While that’s a huge bummer, it is a sign that this project is getting more attention than they anticipated.

I just ran across a June 12th Interview with Charlie Aaron over on t h e e i g h t f o l d. Hvgill writes:

My fascination isn’t because it’s some interesting new business model or new way of approaching theme parks. It’s not even the peculiarity of building an outdoor year-round winter attraction in a state known for summers over a hundred degrees.

I was recently grilled by a forum goer regarding the potential environmental impact of the resort. This interview sheds some new light on just how green this project really is!

“I think it’s good to note from the get-go that a facility the size and scope of Bearfire will have no portion of its’ operation that will emit any type of gases or contaminants.”

As a side note, I was particularly tickled to see the author of the interview use the term “LOHAS“. As I’ve mentioned before, I recently relocated to the Denver area to get in a season or two of snowboarding. I just happened to be working for Gaiam, the company that originally coined the term. Small world.

Anyway, go read the interview!

This video was recently posted to the official Bearfire website. I couldn’t watch it on my laptop running Ubuntu and the quicktime link was broken so it was a while before I finally got to see it. I took the liberty of up’n the video to YouTube so the whole world could watch. I like how they slipped in a few live video shots of real boarders in the mountains - at least they could have slipped in snowflex shots… heh.. Still, it’s nice to see the new media. Enjoy!

Bearfire Resort finally has a website online. It’s kinda meh, but it’s nice to see something up. They’ve posted a lot of stock art and artists renders. All the real snow might be misleading, but I suppose they have to get the message across until they get something real built. The most interesting thing, in my opinion, is the poll asking users where they think the next resort should be. I personally voted for Progreso, Mexico. I think it would be a huge win in as a business decision because the area is currently exploding with growth. I also think it would be a big win for me because my parents are retiring to the area! Ok, I’m selfish. Anyway, nothing overly noteworthy on the site. No new news or information that I’ve found. You can view the current results of the poll when you vote.