Ski Resort Proposal Has Been an Uphill Battle : Development: The idea was brought up in 1974. Environmental challenges have kept the $200-million project in Washington from receiving a single building permit.

Winters come early and hard to the Methow Valley, a scenery-rich but cash-poor corner of the craggy North Cascade mountains.

No wonder, then, that many residents applauded when a ski resort was proposed in 1974 to exploit the area’s biggest resource--snow. People eagerly awaited the resort as their economic salvation.

After 18 years, they are no longer holding their breath.

This quiet valley is the scene of one of the longest and most contentious battles ever waged over building a ski area.

The clash itself is not unusual. Because of stricter environmental laws and fierce competition for a limited pool of skiers, there hasn’t been a major new U.S. ski resort completed in a decade.

But there’s another twist to the Early Winters story: Regardless of whether chairlifts and chalets ever go up, the mere prospect of a giant resort has transformed the valley.

It made people here take a hard look at what they wanted their community to be. And as the years passed with Early Winters remaining a mirage, many residents decided that if any saving was to be done, they’d have to do it themselves.

“I’ve stopped waiting,” Lucinda Fasse said. She and her husband just opened a hotel in Winthrop, 15 miles from the proposed resort. One week recently, the 16-room hotel was empty for three days straight. But Fasse believes they can make it, even without the crowds that a big ski resort would bring.

“We need that ski area,” she said. “But I don’t count on it anymore.”

Her attitude could prove useful in other remote mountain towns staking their economic hopes on new ski areas. Times have changed since the 1960s, when major U.S. ski areas opened at a rate of more than one a year.

In the past decade, the only major ski resort to near completion has been northern Idaho’s Silver Mountain, and that expansion of a smaller ski hill only got off the ground with a grant from Congress.

Other ski areas remain mired in the approval process. In Colorado, developers are awaiting permits to build new resorts near Steamboat Springs, Vail and Pagosa Springs. In Nevada, construction of the Galena resort near Lake Tahoe was about to begin last summer after 10 years of planning, when a land exchange proposed by environmental groups stopped the bulldozers.

Developers everywhere cite the same reasons for delayed or aborted projects: a new generation of environmental laws, and a new generation of environmentalists quick to apply the letter of those laws.

“They can literally tie the hands of an operator merely by appealing, regardless of whether there are grounds for their appeal,” said Doug Campbell, president of the Pacific Northwest Ski Assn.

Environmentalists reply that they’ve helped head off the pollution and uncontrolled development that often followed resorts in the past. The lack of new resorts, they maintain, is because of the aging of baby boom skiers who once filled the slopes.

“It’s got nothing to do with environmental issues. The demand for skiing has been flat for the past 10 years,” said attorney David Bricklin of Seattle, an Early Winters foe.

The arguments go on and on--as anyone in the Methow Valley can attest.

The debate began in 1974, when the Aspen Corp. chose this site in the Okanogan National Forest--about 120 miles, as the crow flies, northeast of Seattle--over 300 sites nationwide for a destination ski resort.

Aspen thought conditions were ideal. The snow was dry and deep, and the scenery a magnificent mix of pine groves and mountain meadows. Ski runs would be built on Sandy Butte, a mountain with 4,000 vertical feet of skiable terrain. Real estate development, the crux of a profitable modern ski resort, could occur on 1,200 acres of private land at the mountain’s base.

Resort opponents also considered this place ideal--as is. They conceded that it was hard to make a living, but said the rugged isolation was what drew them here. Deer outnumbered the valley’s 3,500 residents by six to one, and Early Winters opponents didn’t want that changed by hotels, condominiums, two golf courses, lodges, restaurants and up to 8,000 skiers a day.

And so began the battle, a convoluted legal dispute that has traveled up to the U.S. Supreme Court and down again, touching on its way the gamut of environmental concerns: wilderness preservation, air pollution, and most recently, protection of the northern spotted owl. The resort area has been designated a habitat conservation zone for the threatened bird.

While the resort danced in legal limbo, the Methow Valley hardly stood still.

Speculation raised land prices, and even ski-area supporters realized the project could bring unpleasant changes.

To prepare, Okanogan County residents passed air quality regulations to limit wood-stove emissions and strict zoning laws to ride herd on ranchers subdividing their land. A nonprofit group secured easements to develop a 22-mile recreational trail running the valley’s length. The state bought an 845-acre ranch and set it aside for wildlife.

The specter of Early Winters also hastened the valley’s transformation from an economy based on cattle ranching, logging and apple-growing to one dependent on tourism.

“It’s been small growth, but it’s been steady over the years,” Hult said. Twenty years ago, he could count on two hands the stores and restaurants in town. Today there are 42.

Yet the Early Winters resort is no more a reality than when it started 18 years ago. The project has already eaten up two groups of investors--Aspen dropped out in 1977--and a third group is having serious financial problems.

But the resort is not dead. Most agree the property is so valuable it probably will be developed eventually, though perhaps not at the same scale.