Colorado's central and southern mountains still draw droves of skiers to the slopes. However, many of the historic runs and areas that were popular over the past century--some near the current resorts of Aspen, Breckenridge, Crested Butte, Purgatory, Telluride and Vail--no longer exist. Local hills like Whittaker Ranch near Eagle featured little more than a rope tow and warming hut. Now underneath Lake Dillon, Prestrud Jump hosted tournaments where Olympian Anders Haugen broke ski-jumping world records. From Lands End near Grand Junction to Sugarite near Trinidad, from swanky Hoosier Pass in Summit County to Stoner in Montezuma County, authors Caryn and Peter Boddie take readers on a tour of the lost ski areas of central and southern Colorado.

In its heyday, Colorado had more than 175 ski areas operating on the slopes of the Rocky Mountains, and while many of those resorts have shut down, their runs still shelter secret stashes of snow. Pristine slopes await backcountry powder hounds out to discover these chutes and steeps, bunny hills and bumps. Chronicling the history of more than 36 of these "lost resorts," Powder Ghost Towns provides the beta for how to ski and board these classic runs today, with comprehensive information on trailheads, where to skin up, and the best descents. Coverage ranges from southern Wyoming's Medicine Bow Mountains to the Colorado-New Mexico border, including famous old resorts like Hidden Valley in Rocky Mountain National Park.

Imagine Huck Finn "lighting out for the territories" 150 years later, this time as a late-30s corporate dropout turned backcountry snowboarder and mountain climber. Dudeville is a coming-of-middle-age adventure story, set in and all around small-town Colorado during the outdoor sports explosion of the 1990s. Inspired by a wide and wild range of influences -- from Thoreau, Whitman, Muir and Twain, to Jack Kerouac, Edward Abbey and Warren Miller -- Dudeville is equal parts extreme sports tale, male bonding romp, and reluctant love story, a sensuous, lyrical, exuberant exploration of the American West. Dudeville's author, J.D. Kleinke, was a serious health care guy in Baltimore until he discovered snowboarding, hang gliding, jam bands, and the raw spiritual power of life above treeline . . . and moved to Colorado. He is the author of three books about medicine in America, including Catching Babies, a novel about the culture of maternity care and childbirth. He has also been involved in the formation, management, and governance of several health care companies and non-profit organizations. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and dozens of medical and business publications. He lives with his wife in Half Moon Bay, California, and Portland, Oregon. From Dudeville: "From this summit, the horizon seesaws open into an electric blue dream of Colorado sky. The adolescent swagger and brawn of the Rockies is nothing like the stooped and rounded hills back east. Spiked with mammoth formations of rock and ice, this vast, continental cacophony is the very roof of the world, pushed skyward by geologic time while collapsing under its own weight. I drop in, and surf off the wind-scoured edge, working the margin between transcendent bliss and utter catastrophe, a controlled fury exploding from my core into arcing snowboard turns as I crisscross the fall-line and dissolve into gravity..."

The West without Water documents the tumultuous climate of the American West over twenty millennia, with tales of past droughts and deluges and predictions about the impacts of future climate change on water resources. Looking at the region’s current water crisis from the perspective of its climate history, the authors ask the central question of what is "normal" climate for the West, and whether the relatively benign climate of the past century will continue into the future. The West without Water merges climate and paleoclimate research from a wide variety of sources as it introduces readers to key discoveries in cracking the secrets of the region’s climatic past. It demonstrates that extended droughts and catastrophic floods have plagued the West with regularity over the past two millennia and recounts the most disastrous flood in the history of California and the West, which occurred in 1861–62. The authors show that, while the West may have temporarily buffered itself from such harsh climatic swings by creating artificial environments and human landscapes, our modern civilization may be ill-prepared for the future climate changes that are predicted to beset the region. They warn that it is time to face the realities of the past and prepare for a future in which fresh water may be less reliable.

A ski and snowboard guidebook for Rocky Mountain National Park in Estes Park Colorado

Hidden amongst the hills and mountains of southern Vermont are the remnants of sixty former ski areas, their slopes returning to forest and their lifts decaying. Today, only fourteen remain open and active in southern Vermont. Though they offer some incredible skiing, most lack the intimate, local feel of these lost ski trails. Jeremy Davis, creator of the New England Lost Ski Areas Project, looks into the over-investment, local competition, weather variation, changing skier habits, insurance costs and just plain bad luck that caused these ski areas to succumb and melt back into the landscape. From the family-operated Hogback in Windham County to Clinton Gilbert's farm in Woodstock, where the very first rope tow began operation in the winter of 1934, these once popular ski areas left an indelible trace on the hearts of their ski communities and the history of southern Vermont.