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Hi. I’m Ben Benton from Flagstaff, Arizona. I believe that you will enjoy my daily journal from Winter Park, Colorado, Ski Resort during spring break 2000. I left downtown Flagstaff Sunday morning, March 19 with my skis, duffle, laptop computer, and portable 4-person spa, and ended up at Snoasis, a lodge midway up the mountain in Winter Park. My journal will continue through the end of March. You’ll read about Winter Park Ski Resort, Snoasis, Sunspot Lodge, the great people who work here, and anything else I can think of to write about. I’m the author of “National Park Employment Data,” a guide to working in national parks, which is available for purchase on my web site at www.gorp.com/nped/. I’ve been working in national parks and ski areas off and on for over twenty years. Because I want the data in my book to always be fresh, I continually test the concepts, employers, and tips that I provide. I first worked at Winter Park in the late 70s while I was a student at Arizona State University. |
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Sunday, March 19, 2000 Flagstaff to Winter Park, Colorado It’s journal time again. I decided to return to Winter Park for spring break for a few days. Jamie, head cashier at Snoasis said last week was the busiest - insane, even. Collectively, the Colorado ski resorts surveyed colleges and universities in the Rocky Mountain region for spring break dates and came up with the following: 1 school February 26 - March 4 With 23 schools this week, we’ll be pretty busy. The skiing has been great on a base of about 75 to 85 inches. ***** I left Flagstaff around 8:00 A.M. and arrived at the Winter Park base around midnight. It’s a long haul in one day. I cruised at 70 all the way and stopped only for gas and drive-through food. I decided to take the I-40 and I-25 route to maintain a higher speed and to buy cheaper gas then by going through Utah. The gas was highest in Gallup, New Mexico, where Giant Industries has a massive refinery, $1.579, and cheapest in remote Raton, New Mexico, where I would have expected it to be highest, $1.499. Go figure. I hate to think what they’re selling it for in those tiny southeast Utah towns. Why is the gas highest next to an American refinery? Something is fishy here. I was reading that the prices are high because OPEC bumped them up. But that doesn’t stop Giant and ARCO, which gets its crude from Alaska, and all the other American refineries from selling gas at $1.25 to bust the cartel. They’re all in bed with the Arabs. Pat Buchanan in a speech to Boston World Affairs Council, January 6, 2000, spoke about the absence of patriotism in our nation’s elite, which is leading us straight to the New World Order. Here’s his opening paragraphs: “Five years ago, historian Christopher Lasch published The Revolt of the Elites. It was a book about how our national elite was literally seceding from America. Pointing up the huge and growing gap in incomes between the elite and the middle class, Lasch argued that a more ominous gap existed in how each perceived America. “The old elite, Lasch wrote, had a sense of obligation to country and community. But the new ruling class, more merit based, brainy, and mobile, congregates on the coasts and puts patriotism far down the list in its hierarchy of values. Indeed, said Lasch, ‘it is a question of whether they think of themselves as Americans at all.’” That sure applies to the American petroleum refiners. On a lighter note, I was surprised to see semaphores on the
Santa Fe line north of Santa Fe and south of Wagon Mound, New
Mexico. While working on Phil Anderson’s web site, RRscenery.com,
I stumbled upon a web site dedicated to preserving the history
of railroad semaphores and read that that section of track is
the last in America to still use semaphores. They will come down
in the next year or so and we’ll never see any again.  |
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