These days, Mount Vernon Canyon is Denver’s busy gateway to the high-flown and high-priced ski resorts of the high Rockies. Not so many days ago, though, serious schussers trekked that gorgeous gorge to plant their planks on the slippery slopes of – Mount Vernon Canyon.

Long before Vail, before Breckenridge and Beaver Creek, in a simpler age before snow-making machines and quad lifts and time-share condos and the $6 doughnut, there was Genesee Mountain, the 8,284-foot cradle of Colorado’s ski industry.

The year was 1919, and most Front Range ski enthusiasts scratched their alpine itch at Inspiration Point, a modest mound of prairie located at Sheridan Boulevard and West 49^th Avenue offering about 60 feet of vertical dissatisfaction and tantalizing views of plunge-ier prospects to the west. At the time, the term “skiing” was widely understood to mean “ski jumping.” Downhill equipment hadn’t yet progressed much beyond plank-and-lash technology, and while a few earnest types were fooling around with the arcane mysteries of “telemark”, Nordic technique was still hip deep in the age of “French fries” versus “slice of pizza.” Early skiers needed unambiguous point-and-shoot runs offering nowhere else to go but straight down. Ambitious elements of the freshly-minted Denver Winter Sports Club began constructing a loftier kind of inspiration on the north face of Genesee Mountain.

The Genesee Ski Jump opened for business in 1920 to immediate success. Ski clubs from Steamboat Springs, to Hot Sulphur Springs, to Homewood Park in Deer Creek Canyon sent their best to compete against the local set, and they all gathered together in a cozy warming house after a hard day’s jumping to crow about their aerial exploits and enjoy “dainty Norwegian pastry gems.” The Genesee Jump went big-time the following year, hosting the first of seven National Ski Jumping Tournaments to be held atop Mount Vernon Canyon. From 1921 to 1927, the prestigious events drew top-tier talent from across the region and annually attracted up to 10,000 spectators from across the Front Range.

Before bemoaning too deeply the parking lot that forms in Clear Creek Canyon each winter weekend, modern skiers should consider the personal price of a lift-ticket in the 1920s. The very idea of Interstate 70 was purest science fiction back then, and U.S. 40 wasn’t even a glint in a civil engineer’s eye. To reach Genesee Mountain, most skiers drove the harrowing Lookout Mountain Road and endured a back-breaking bump-fest along miles of abandoned wagon road. That probably sounded downright posh to the typical spectator, who would take the trolley from Denver to Golden, ride the funicular to the top of Lookout Mountain, and trudge the remaining distance on foot.

Genesee Mountain boasted four separate ski jumps during its brief-but-brilliant hey-day, the largest measuring some 2,000 feet in length and plummeting 700 vertical feet. Given the region’s mild meteorological profile, fleets of trucks and teams of strong backs were frequently enlisted to haul snow from far afield and shovel it by hand onto the sun-washed mountainside, creating shiny ivory ribbons of winter cascading through grassy meadow. It was the canyon’s cursedly clement climate, along with improved access to snowier slopes in Steamboat Springs and Estes Park, that ultimately doomed the Genesee Jump. All but derelict by the late 1930s, the site caught a brief second wind in the mid-1950s when the University of Denver chose it for a handful of collegiate meets. But academia, too, quickly moved on, and today the once-prominent landmark is largely obscured by encroaching pine forest and upscale condominiums.

And that would have spelled the end to skiing in Mount Vernon Canyon, except that it didn’t.

In 1946, a Dartmouth graduate, 10^th Mountain Division veteran and Denver winter sports promoter named Laurance ‘Larry’ Jump helped launch Arapahoe Basin Ski Area among the gasping peaks just south of Loveland Pass. Fast-forward to 1972 when Jump, perceiving an under-served market of potential skiers who might pick up the habit if they didn’t have to face the rigors of Loveland Pass in winter, launched Arapahoe East Ski Area on the south wall of Mount Vernon Canyon just a couple of miles down-stream from the area’s original Jump.

The effort started strong, serving about 600 feet of vertical drop serviced via one double chair lift, a Poma lift and a rope tow. The half-dozen anchor runs bottomed out at 6,800 feet where Arapahoe East’s modest, but modern, ski lodge offered hot food, equipment rentals and ski lessons. Modeling the venture on successful suburban ski areas of the Midwest, and hoping to capture the interest of “casual” day-skiers, Jump introduced Colorado to “shift” pricing, single-ride lift tokens, night skiing, and the new and novel notion of “ski-bobbing.”

Of course, no more snow fell on Arapahoe East’s 7,400-foot “Top One” than fell on the Genesee Mountain Jump, and not even the modern magic of manufactured snow could rescue the low-flung folly from temperate oblivion. But that’s not to say that Laurance ‘Larry’ Jump gave up without a fight. Taking heat from his partners at Arapahoe Basin, he promoted the concept of “grass skiing”, which never took off, and in 1976 he applied for an alpine slide permit, which was never granted. In a desperate bid at re-branding, in 1982 the area was re-named “Ski Golden” and closed for good two years later when the Colorado Tramway Board cited the operation for numerous violations including a thoroughly demoralized staff found drinking on the job.

While Genesee Park remains a popular antidote to the daily frets and fidgets of civilization, there’s virtually nothing left of the celebrated Jump that helped put Colorado on the nation’s ski map. The rusting lift towers of Arapahoe East would stand still and silent until 1996, when they were pulled down to make room for nothing at all. Although the area’s access road is still plainly visible, it takes a sharp eye to trace the course of the “Top Two” trails that still fall through the trees from the ridgeline above.

If skiers on their way to Pitkin County glitz, Eagle County glamour and the elegant resorts of Summit and Grand rarely spare a thought for Jefferson County’s precipitous landscapes, it’s because those too-familiar hillsides offer precious little to remind them of the not-so-long-ago days when both gateway and destination were in Mount Vernon Canyon.

Look! Up in the sky!

It’s not a bird, but it might be getting ready to lay an egg. It’s not really a plane, although it’s sure got the Federal Aviation Administration’s attention. It’s an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), if you like, or an unmanned aircraft system (UAS) if you like that better. You probably know it as a drone, and it’s taking Metropolises everywhere by swarm.

The first consumer drone, the semi-venerable Parrot AR quadcopter, was launched at a Las Vegas tech show back in 2010. By 2014, industry watchers estimated some 350,000 consumer drones hangared in American garages. Christmas 2015 saw about a million more sold between LGA and LAX, and by New Year’s Day, 2017, experts expect the country’s remote-control civil fleet will soar to at least 2.5 million.

That’s a lot of unregulated aviation, which is why in 2014 the FAA began requiring drone owners to register as such. To date, about 325,000 actually have, which still leaves a lot of unregulated aviation.

Granted, most consumer drones aren’t big enough to do any serious damage. Models ranging from $99 starters to $6,500 professional-grade units can tip the scales anywhere between MOTA’s half-ounce JETJAT Nano and DJI’s burly 22-pound Spreading Wings S1000 Octocopter. Consumer drones don’t have to be big because their primary function is photographic, and cameras – even high-speed, hi-res video platforms on stabilizing gimbals – are getting smaller all the time. Still, there have been, er, incidents.

Two years ago a Dutch tourist crashed his eye-in-the-sky into Yellowstone’s fragile Grand Prismatic Spring. That same year an Australian triathlete ended up with stitches in her scalp and a disappointing time after a drone following the race fell to Earth directly on top off her noggin. Intending to catch lovers in mid-lip-lock, a TGI Friday’s holiday promotion called “Mobile Mistletoe” left a bad taste in participants’ mouths when an extra-extreme closeup cost a woman named Georgine Benvenuto the tip of her nose. And several people attending an event at Virginia Motorsports Park in Richmond were injured when a hobbyist’s UAV made an unscheduled landing in the stands.

While undoubtedly sympathetic toward terrestrial victims, the FAA is mostly uptight about UAVs in the airways. Sucked into a jet engine, that half-pound My-First-Drone under the Christmas tree could present a not-very-jolly holiday surprise for a plane-load of folks on their way back from grandmother’s house. In 2015, commercial pilots reported well over a thousand too-close encounters with recreational flying objects, a rate of more than three per day.

Just 26 states have acted to put the airbrakes on drone traffic, and then with almost monkish self-restraint. In Colorado, several attempts to legislatively sanitize sensitive airspace have all gone down in flames, burned to a crisp by concentrated heat from what this year became a $5.5 billion industry dominated by the Great Big Chinese manufacturer DJI.

Police departments and customs officials love drones. Farmers and ranchers love drones. Geologists, ecologists and archaeologists love drones. Drones are great for search and rescue, public and private security, mapping and surveying, and for the general monitoring of just about anything under the clear blue sky. Hollywood has gone positively drone-crazy. Collectively, however, that’s all small potatoes compared to the real prize – drone delivery.

For most of its short life, the backyard buzz-bot has been severely limited by range, tethered to its operator by a short radio leash. With the decreasing price and increasing reliability of GPS guidance systems, “autonomous” commercial units are expanding the boundaries of self-guided freight-hauling into profitable territory.

America’s first-ever drone delivery was made in March of 2015 when an Australian outfit called Flirtey teamed up with Virginia Tech and NASA to deliver 10 pounds of medical supplies from a rural Virginia airfield to a clinic about three miles away.

Eighteen months later, autonomous UAVs are poised to haul 50-pound payloads up to 15 miles, and some very heavy retail hitters are racing to be the first to get their goods in the air. Amazon, Google X and Walmart are all testing drone delivery systems, and since the FAA finally overcame its UAV anxiety long enough to formalize UAS operational rules a few weeks ago, Millennials should at last realize their fondest dream of using their smartphones to obtain everything from groceries to garments, electronics to auto parts and medicines to Montrachet without ever once having to interface directly with a tiresome human being.

Not surprisingly, first into the breach have been food and beverage entrepreneurs. In San Francisco, the “Tacocopter” is good for a crunchy lunch anywhere in the city. In Minnesota, ice fishermen have been known to get a 12-pack of Lakemaid Beer air-dropped hole-side. Guest to the Casa Madrona Hotel in Sausalito can get champagne droned to their rooms, and the Marquee Dayclub in Las Vegas vends over-priced bottles of stronger stuff the same way. London-based YO! Sushi has been sending “sushi burgers” on the wing, and Coca Cola has been air-lifting ice-cold comfort and notes from home to migrant construction workers stuck for weeks at a time atop rising Singapore skyscrapers.

A couple of California dreamers have completed beta testing the “Burrito Bomber.” Customers place their order via a special smartphone app. A custom-made refried wrap is loaded into a high-tech “Burrito Delivery Tube” affixed to the bottom of a Skywalker X8 Flying Wing. Upon reaching the specified coordinates, the Burrito Bomber engages a Quantum RTR Bomb System which releases the payload in mid-air, automatically deploying a parachute that allows the high-flying feast to descend gently into the hands of the hungry.

“We’ll be able to take to the skies to bring you your burrito faster than you can say ‘Salsa roja, por favor!’” declare a source close to the project.

It’s hard to see how that kind of Yankee Doodle ingenuity can miss. FAA analysts predict that innovation, imagination and rapidly advancing technologies will make drones a $90 billion business within the next 10 years.

Truth and justice aside, that’s definitely the American Way.