Park City goes Hollywood

It's a very long, very ugly story about property rights, zoning, self righteous state representatives and senators and campaign contributions (bribes), but Park City is getting a movie studio complex.  More accurately, Park City is getting a movie studio shoved down its throat. The short version:

There's a guy who owns some property just outside of Park City, at the intersection of 248 and 40, over by the new hospital.  The land was zoned for some minimal development, but he wanted to build a lot more.  Meanwhile, the Utah government wanted to encourage the movie industry to expand in the state.  So the landowner went out and found Raleigh Studios who wanted to build a new studio. To make this work, all you need is the wonderful state government threatening to pass legislation that completely ignores and overrides the local zoning.

Rather than getting absolutely no say in the matter, Park City and Summit County succumbed and are allowing the zoning changes.  Of course, this isn't just a studio building.  It's a studio, hotel and retail space.  Park City really needs another hotel?

I went out when the planning commission and city council did a site visit with the builder.  I think they will end up building something decent, but because of all the legal bullshit that went on, the builder isn't having to follow the same rules for set backs, open space, trails and density that everyone else in Park City does. Must be nice to be so special.

Several lessons:

• It's not what you know, it's who you make campaign contributions to.  Again, I would prefer to be honest and just call them bribes.  If you want something unusual, start bribing the politicians early and often.
• As much as the Utah government talks about keeping the federal government out of the way and making decisions locally, they only mean that when they get to have their way.  They are more than happy to override local zoning. "Make decisions locally, unless you aren't deciding the same thing I would."

Given that it's going to happen, I hope they do it well and make it successful. It could be a nice addition to the city, but the way it was done leaves everyone with bitter feelings about the whole deal.

My first time lapse effort

I decided to learn a new photography skill today, time lapse. It took me two tries and some education on the PC, but here is what I ended up with.  This trial is quite boring.  There's no music,  I edited it oddly and it ends abruptly.  But I did learn a lot!

If you click on the little YouTube icon, you can watch it in HD.

To do this, I...

• Shot about 1000 photos, one every 5 seconds.  Thank goodness this is very, very easy to automate on my camera. Unfortunately, the 40+ mph winds we were having kept blowing the camera around, even using a very strong tripod with a full ski boot hanging from it for ballast.
• Loaded them into Lightroom on my laptop
• Edited the pictures and the movement using Lightroom and a tool called LRtimelapse
• Waited what felt like a day for Lightroom to spit out the results

It's a long, slow process and my hope is that after trying a few more time lapse series, I won't have to iterate as often.

Now I am building a long list of interesting time lapse subjects.

What the melting snow leaves behind

Last year we had our lawn aerated and I pointed out how the little grass nuggets looked like dog poop.

This year the snow is melting pretty quickly and unfortunately, the dog poop also looks like dog poop.  I was wondering where Jasper was putting all that food we gave him.  Now I know.

It still seems like there should be some sort of Park City event for this.  Instead of rolling Easter eggs, we roll poop?  Everyone donates their collected dog poop as manure for the community gardens?  In a town where over 50 percent of the households have dogs, poop should be part of celebrating spring!

Sabre versus Champagne

Thanks to Rob Schumacher for inviting us to join he, his wife Theresa, and friend John Wells to visit the St Regis Deer Valley for the hotel's daily champagne toast.  Every evening around sunset, one of the bar's employees comes out with a short sabre in one hand and a bottle of champagne in the other.  First he tells a story going back to Napoleon's time to explain the tradition.

Then he takes the sabre, quickly runs it along the edge of the bottle, and literally lops the top of the bottle, cork and all. Even though it breaks the glass, the pressure from the champagne blows all the debris away from the beverage, leaving a nice bottle to pour.

All the better, they offer free champagne to all the guests for a toast.  Very unique and fun to watch.

Enjoy skiing PCMR? Do it soon or miss out!

I would normally make a comment like this post's title because of the rapidly melting snow.  The base is low and the temperatures are quite warm.  However, this gets a lot more interesting than that.

Park City Mountain Resort is like a lot of ski resorts, where they don't actually own the property they sit on.  Many resorts lease land from the National Forest Service or some other derivative of the US government.  Park City is an old silver mining town and even though the mining has been stopped for quite some time, United Park City Mines owned a lot of the land in the mountains.  While PCMR owns the land at its base, most (or all) of the ski runs run across land that was leased from the mining company.

Now the rub....  A few years ago, a private Canadian company named Talisker decided to start investing heavily in Park City.  They have built several subdivisions, both on the mountains and outside town.  They bought the Canyons ski resort when American Ski Corp went into bankruptcy (outbidding Vail).  Now the funny part....  they also bought the land from the mining company where PCMR's ski runs are.

This week Park City sued Talisker. Apparently Talisker has told PCMR that their lease expired and that they need to negotiate a new one.  Park City seems to think that they extended the lease they had. Unfortunately, with both negotiations and a legal case both being held in secret, it's hard to tell exactly what's going on.  PCMR is screaming that the world is ending, that Talisker is cheating, and that they did everything they were supposed to.  Talisker quietly says "nope".

My completely uneducated, uniformed guess is that PCMR screwed up somehow on extending their lease.  They are going to court and immediately started a big campaign about "Talisker is trying to shut down PCMR!"  They even created a web site called Support PCMR.

Should be an interesting series of events, but of course, all the good stuff will be behind closed doors unless the court records become public.

UPDATE:  Oops.  Sure enough.  Seems PCMR forgot to mail the letter saying they wanted to extend the lease.

"Both Talisker and PCMR are sophisticated parties who obviously had copies of the leases. Both are chargeable with knowledge of the covenants contained therein," Cronheim notes. "PCMR's complaint all but concedes it failed to give the required formal written notice of its intention to extend the leases prior to their expiration. If this is the case, PCMR made a major and inexcusable mistake. Before commencing $7 million worth of infrastructure improvements, it should have been 100% certain that the Talisker tracts were still under lease. That said, PCMR has highlighted the inference that Talisker's ownership of nearby Canyons Resort led it to deal underhandedly with PCMR in an effort to damage its major competitor. The court might be sympathetic to the argument that Talisker strung PCMR along with the intention of pulling the rug out from underneath them or otherwise wreaking havoc on PCMR's operations.

ANOTHER UPDATE:  Bored, read through the actual court document.

Another birding trip

Not a terribly good birding trip, especially since I actually worked to get out of the house before sunrise.  No eagles.  No good hawks.  So you just take what you can get.

They were a good ways off, but you couldn't mistake their loud honking, The Sandhill Cranes are back in town.  I would love to find them when they are doing their mating dances.

Like on Noah's Ark, all the birds are arriving two-by-two.  The geese are wonderfully easy to photograph when they sit still.

My challenge is when they take off or land.  I love the look when they run along the water before getting enough speed to take off.  I just never seem to have the camera set to a fast enough shutter speed to really freeze the action and of course, there is just no time to react.

Same with this one.  1/500th of a second is just too slow.  I need a new technique.

Ever heard the expression "water off a duck's back"?   They must have been talking about Coots.  They seem to be the most waterproof birds I see.  There are always beads of water on their feathers.

If you saw my napping horses, you know the value of a sunny nap on a spring day.  Ever the ducks are feeling it.

And for a lack of interesting animal life, I tried some more artsy photos.  There is an entire art to converting color photos to black and white, using differences in the color channels to add contrast and texture.  I have much to learn.

And a weed with a pretty backdrop, although it would have been nicer without all the smog.

Welcome to spring

Sometimes, as winter leaves and spring arrives, you get one of those warm, sunny afternoons where you just feel obligated to lay down and take a nap.

If it weren't for the barbwire, I may have climbed in and joined them.

Another visit to Farmington Bay

You just can't do photography without a trained assistant.  Jasper is in charge of spotting interesting things to shoot and just staring at them.  He doesn't point.  He never barks.  He just looks at things out the window with varying levels of interest.

You may remember this guy from a few weeks ago.  He was still hanging around the same area but this time he didn't have a mouse or a vole. Kestrels are just so colorful for a hawk, especially given that this is his winter plumage.

It has been nice getting to learn about the Farmington Bay preserve area.  Today I got another lesson.  From March through August, they close off most of the roads so that the birds can nest in peace. That knocked out most of the places I have been. Oops.  I have been mostly shooting using the car as a blind.  Next time I will go prepared for long hikes.

Most of the birds already nesting were Canadian Geese, but it was interesting to see this man-made Great Blue Heron rookery.  There were some early inhabitants. It will be interesting to see this again when it is full of herons and their chicks.

The parts of the preserve that I could get to were very pretty.  The Oquirrh Mountains (yes, that is spelled correctly) got some snow last week. This range is on the west side of Salt Lake City.  Too hard to make out at this size, but on the right hand edge of the water are two Bald Eagles.

The backdrop gave me an opportunity to try and create an artsy sort of picture as a pair of geese flew by.

I did manage to get two Bald Eagles to pose for a bit. The warm winter has really cut back on the eagle show at Farmington.

My best shot of the day.  It took quite a long time to sneak up close enough to get this shot.  What a great choice for our national bird.  And Ben Franklin wanted the turkey.  Really Ben?

... and to end the day on a weird note.  With all the eagles, hawks, coyotes, fox and other predators, it must be a tough life for a bird.

Especially this one.  I carefully cropped out the parts that would lead one to believe it was a Canadian Goose.  Just trust me on this one.

The new iPad 3

Apple announced the newest version of the iPad today.  For most users, I don't think it will really make that much difference compared to the iPad 2, which is already very nice and I happen to own one.  However, from a technology standpoint, the iPad 3 rocks.  Two big things to me:

First, the new screen is off the charts for high resolution.  It has four times the number of pixels as the iPad 2, measuring in at 2048x1536.  This is higher than any laptop I have ever seen.  Most laptop screens have a long side of 1400 or 1650 pixels.  I have a ThinkPad W500 whose screen is 1920 x 1200.  Even a big HDTV is only 1920 x 1080.  Apple managed to squeeze all those pixels into a 9.7" screen.  I would love to see one.  It should be gorgeous.

Second, they increased the CPU to a quad processor, improved the graphics processor, quadrupled the pixels on the screen, added a 4G (LTE) cellular modem, and increased the battery capacity all without changing the price form the iPad 2.

Looks like Apple will continue to dominate the tablet market for a while longer.

A nice day on the slopes

We've received about 30" of snow over the past four days.  The storms have gone and now we have some lovely sunshine. Julie and I went over to Canyons for some powder. It finally feels like a Utah winter again.

Most, but not all, of the little trees and rocks are covered up, making life a lot safer for your skis.

But for some people, fresh powder doesn't mean crap unless you are the first ones to ski through it.  So, after skiing up all the fresh snow on the runs, you head to the trees.  After the trees, you start to hike.  Ski Patrol finished bombing Murdock Peak and dropped the rope.  Immediately people started up the very steep hike to ski some fresh.

To get any real idea of the hike, double click on the picture and then check out the tiny people in the top right corner.  Notice that the top of the hike isn't in the picture yet.  The face they are climbing is a double black ski run.