OUTDOORS
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2013 THE NEW MEXICAN B-5
Inside: New Mexico fishing report and Sierra Club hikes. Page B-6
Online: Your guide to skiing in New Mexico. www.santafenew mexican.com/outdoors
An early jump on the ski season
Gary Forrest, left, the new general manager at Sipapu Ski and Summer Resort, stands by the lodge built in the early 1960s. The ski area, which features quaint amenities such as log cabins, cozy apartments and dorm-like lodging, is set to open Saturday.
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f we lived outdoors, we’d need more calories when the weather turned colder. Well, birds do too. Fortunately, native berry and seed producing plants are still loaded with food for the birds. Branching sunflower, pyracantha, chamisa and many other local plants hold on to their fall bounty until the birds pick them clean. You’ll sometimes even see robins eating pyracantha berries late in the winter. Those berries can last a while. Birds also eat seeds from pine cones, larvae stuck in tree bark and food at birdfeeders. Birds only eat when it’s light outside, so in colder months, birds are in the position of having to find more food in less time. Help birds make every beak-full count by feeding high fat foods. High fat foods include suet, seed cylinders loaded with sunflower and nuts, and a seed blend also containing lots of sunflower and nuts. Woodpeckers and Suet is rendered beef many other birds love fat and often comes in seed cylinders. prepackaged “cakes” mixed with nuts or bugs. Woodpeckers, nuthatches, bushtits and others love suet. Try feeding suet in any suet feeder — even a simple suet cage will do. Place it on a tree for best results. Suet-eating birds hang out in trees, so placing it where the birds are helps them to find it faster. Birds find food by sight. If your birds don’t find your suet cage after a few days try “gluing” some birdseed onto the cage with peanut butter to jump start activity. Seed-eating birds will find it first and hopefully that activity will catch the eye of the suet eaters. Sometimes you have to “teach” birds to come to a feeder. But once they get it, they will keep coming back. Seed cylinders are my favorite way to feed the birds — and a high fat source of food for the birds. Good cylinders are a combination of sunflower and nuts and are held together with gelatin. Both seed eaters (like grosbeaks and chickadees) like cylinders, but so
Please see BIRDS, Page B-6
By Will Webber The New Mexican
P
icking a launch date for the 2013-14 ski season in Northern New Mexico can be a roll of the dice. In the case of Sipapu Ski and Summer Resort, the gamble began to take shape last spring, when the resort’s curators sat in front of a calendar and tried to figure out when to open their mountain hideaway for the hectic winter sports season. Right about the time that last winter’s snow was trickling away as runoff, the decision was made to open the resort’s skiing operations even earlier than usual. In its latest attempt to corner the market on the skiing itch, Sipapu will open for business Saturday. It is believed to be one of the earliest known opening dates in the state’s winter sports history. In fact, the only resort in the Southwest that poses a challenge to Sipapu is southern Colorado’s Wolf Creek Ski Area, which opened Nov. 6. Sipapu will offer half-off lift tickets and allow kids and seniors in for just $15. Adult rates are $20. “When we were trying to figure out when opening day should be,” says Sipapu media relations contact Stacey Glaser, “we knew we basically wanted to up the ante on anything we’d done before. We traditionally are the first to open, but we wanted to start even earlier if we could.” Opening day is usually reserved for the Saturday before the Thanksgiving holiday. This trumps it by a full week, a start that suggests a plentiful early dump of snow. Not true. Billed as a laid-back alternative to the busy ski resorts that surround it, Sipapu has been abuzz with activity the last few weeks. It just hasn’t gotten much of a break in the form of a bountiful early snowstorm. Aside from a blast of winter air about two weeks ago, conditions on the mountain have been almost too pleasant to think about skiing. But, as Glaser says, the show will go on. Situated in the rolling mountains not far from two of the
No snow covers the area near the Sipapu Ski and Summer Resort lodge and ski lift Wednesday, but general manager Gary Forrest says there will be adequate snow cover for skiers to get to and from the lift by Saturday.
state’s most popular ski resorts — Taos Ski Valley and Angel Fire — Sipapu features quaint amenities, with log cabins, cozy apartments and dorm-like lodging among the forested base near N.M. 518. Sipapu makes up for its lack of black-diamond runs and high-speed lifts with affordable tickets, family oriented lodging, uncongested slopes and plenty of alternatives to traditional skiing. The marketing approach isn’t meant to attract the masses. Instead, the resort aims for people who want to avoid the crowds and take advantage of a more traditional setting that offers most of the modern perks — albeit on a smaller scale. A ski bike option, for instance, is one of the few quirks that Sipapu embraces. Rather than using snowboards or skis, patrons can buy a lift ticket and rent a modified mountain bike to navigate the slopes. But don’t be fooled. To pull off the early opening, it takes the work of a snow-making wizard. For the last month or so, no one has worked harder than mountain manager John Paul Bradley and his tireless crew. They have been on the clock virtually 24/7 since mid-October, making artificial snow and installing a new ski lift to replace a previous model installed in 1962. Bradley says he cranked up the first of his snow guns Oct. 17 after an exhaustive scan of the moun-
Section editor: James Barron, 986-3045, jbarron@sfnewmexican.com Design and headlines: Brian Barker, bbarker@sfnewmexican.com
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Sipapu ski area
Sangr ed Mou e Crist ntain o s
Birds need more calories in cold
Sipapu Ski and Summer Resort employees Michael Aivaliolis, left, and Isa Arthur check the snow prior to turning off a snowmaking machine early Wednesday morning as rising temperatures made conditions too warm to make snow. Aivaliolis and Arthur had been operating the snowmaking machines since 11 p.m. the night before. The resort plans to open Saturday. PHOTOS BY CLYDE MUELLER/THE NEW MEXICAN
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FOR THE BIRDS ANNE SCHMAUSS
Sipapu
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Please see TRAX, Page B-6
Final push to be first to open slopes at
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s I write this, the sun is out and the temperature is headed back into the 60s. But, while we still are enjoying these beautiful mid-fall days, winter has already shown its face and left its mark in the form of snow on the Sangre de Cristos, Jemez, Brazos, San Juans and other mountain ranges of Northern New Mexico and southern Colorado. Despite the general overall drying and warming trend the Southwest seems to be in, as we all know, this summer set many local precipitation records and the moisture has continued to flow this fall, which hopefully indicates a similarly wet winter. Thus we are launching “Snow Trax” two weeks earlier than normal and looking forward to a great season. Please feel free to drop me a line about topics you’d like to see addressed here, to comment about an article or just say hola. I’m at dbgibson@newmexico.com. The column also will be running Daniel on The New Mexican’s website Gibson every week, so you can check on the local scene even if you are on Snow Trax the road or have distant friends planning to come visit. In fact, the paper has already run three significant snow sports stories — on snowshoeing, on the yurt ski hut system in the region and a look at all our local ski areas. They appeared in the paper’s annual magazine Winterlife and can be found online at www.santafenewmexican. com/magazines/winterlife. Now, a look at news and conditions from around the region as we head toward opening day. Perhaps the most significant regional development is the departure of Alejandro Blake from Taos Ski Valley. Grandson of the area’s legendary founder, Ernie Blake, “Hano,” as he is known, served as the special events director and summer operations manager of TSV. He and his sister, Adriana Blake, the administrative manager who handles the resort’s public relations, ushered in a generational change at TSV a handful of years ago. Quickly the resort dropped its policy of not allowing snowboarding, and the duo brought a welcome infusion of new energy and ideas to the secluded valley. Hano accepted an enticing job offer with online events ticketing company HoldMyTicket.com. Filling his role at TSV this season is Taos resident and mountain industry veteran Jonah Salloway. TSV reported a 31-inch base after the last storm and will open Nov. 28 to Dec. 1, then Thursdays-Sundays until Dec. 19. Early season adult lift tickets are $55. Expect to see Chairs 1 and 2, and lots of beginner and intermediate terrain available on opening day, with all lifts running from Dec. 19 onward. The most important infrastructure development
Trampas 76 Truchas
The New Mexican
ABOUT SIPAPU Website: www.sipapunm.com Where: On N.M. 518, 20 miles southeast of Taos, approximately two hours from Santa Fe. Opening weekend: Saturday and Sunday (open select days until early December, when the resort will be open full time). Lift tickets: $20 for adults (ages 21-59); $15 teens and seniors. What’s new: An additional Magic Carpet ski lift has been added and will be fully operational at the base of the mountain. Specials: Discounted lift tickets this weekend are half-off normal prices. Additional discounts are available on lodging through the resort’s website.
ON OUR WEBSITE u See more photos and download a Sipapu trail map at www.santafe newmexican.com/outdoors.
tain revealed the best places to start filling in with snow. Utilizing a fleet of 13 snow guns, Bradley’s crew has spent approxi-
mately 19 hours a day spraying strategic spots on the mountain. He says two guns placed in close proximity can produce a pile of snow 60- to 100-feet long and up to 15 feet deep. From there, snowcats move in and spread the product as far as it can, creating a base depth between 12 and 24 inches in several spots. “You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to make a bunch of white stuff people use to slide down a mountain,” Bradley says. “When we’re not doing that, it’s doing something to get the lift up and running.” The new lift is aptly called the Magic Carpet because that’s pretty much what it looks like. It is essentially a shoulder-width conveyor belt that slides 450 feet along the snow. It closely resembles a motorized walkway seen in most airport terminals. Bradley says it will be fully operational in time for Saturday’s launch. While he likes to boast about the new lift and all the other activity on the mountain, Bradley admits that his specialty is making snow. Because the weather in most towns is still warm enough to permit cargo shorts and lightweight shirts on most days, he says it has taken some serious research to figure out a way to keep Sipapu’s slopes packed with the fake stuff. Until Ol’ Man Winter starts cooperating, it’s up to him to fill the bare spots with what he can. During a recent interview, he tossed out terms like “wet ball temperature,” “vertical pumping pressure” and “ambient atmospheric conditions.” Within seconds, he can shake a casual conversationalist with the tricky scientific and mechanical engineering characteristics of covering high-desert mountain terrain with artificial snow. “Basically,” he says, “a standard day this time of year for me and my guys is like 12 to 20 hours. It’s crazy. It takes a lot of work but, really, everyone I’m working with is just like anyone showing up here to buy a lift ticket. We’re all skiers and snowboarders. We want this place to be in the best condition possible, and I don’t think anyone minds working
Please see SIPAPU, Page B-6
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