Liability concerns threaten Ouray's ice festival

In 1999 we were listening to an NPR story about an ice climbing park in Ouray, Colorado, a former mining town that has remade itself by farming ice when my daughters' mother turned to me and said, "wow, they should do that in the Open Cut." 

It was if she had spoken with the Voice of God. The very next day I made an appointment then met with Homestake Mine General Manager Bruce Breid, an aerial photo of the pit displayed on the wall behind his desk. "What a brilliant idea, Mr. Kurtz, we have water here, here, and here," Mr. Breid said, pointing to locations at the rim near the Homestake Visitor Center. "Can you provide a legal instrument holding Homestake harmless?" 

Right. There was that.

Our Lady of the Arroyo and her man just drove through Ouray and it was packed with travelers soaking in the hot springs and bathing in the Fall colors. But after a 2008 incident at the US Air Force Academy landowners are wary of loopholes in the Colorado Recreational Use Statute or CRUS.

It all started in the early 1990s when adventurous ice climbers asked Eric Jacobson if they could traverse his land in the dark gorge to climb. Jacobson owns the Ouray Hydroelectric Power Plant, which started sparking electricity from water-spun wheels in 1886, making it one of the oldest operating power plants in the world. Jacobson does not have any liability insurance. Neither does the nonprofit that operates the park. Winter visitors spent $13 million in Ouray, which stirred an overall economic impact of $17.8 million when the trickling effect of visitor spending was estimated. The spending by ice park climbers and visitors supported 184 full-time jobs and $6.4 million in local wages. [Ouray Ice Park, once the gold standard for free recreation on private land, caught up in liability concerns]

Image: during a stop at Blue Mesa Reservoir just west of Gunnison DM captured this image of her elderly hunched over driver looking at a dog’s butt.