Canyon dwellers are still without phones

Friday, April 15, 2005 | 10:54 a.m.

More than three months after an avalanche severed the only telephone line linking Lee Canyon to the outside world, the small community on Mount Charleston remains without reliable communications.

Sprint, the company whose telephone line from Kyle Canyon to Lee Canyon linked the two communities on the mountain, is sending up employees in helicopters loaned by Metro Police and the National Guard in an effort to determine the extent of the damage and to gauge the best way to repair the line. The company does not know when the line could be repaired -- or if the line will be repaired at all.

Sprint has scheduled a meeting in early May to talk about telephone service with the residents of Lee Canyon and other interested parties, among them representatives of the U.S. Forest Service and the Las Vegas Ski and Snowboard Resort.

Stephanie Myers is a resident of Lee Canyon who is very unhappy with Sprint. Myers now uses a satellite phone to communicate with the outside world, but service is spotty and there is a disconcerting half-second delay.

It is a serious problem for Myers, who says her business of consulting on jury composition in trials has taken a near-fatal beating because of the communications difficulties.

"I am a trial consultant. I do jury selections. I do mock trials," she said Thursday. "Lawyers don't want to talk to voicemail. They want to talk to a living, breathing consultant, so my business is hurting.

"When you're out of touch, you're out of business, and I am definitely out of touch."

But economic considerations aside, there is a potentially more serious issue for the residents and visitors to Lee Canyon.

"I think it is more and more dangerous to be up here without any cell service or any phone service," Myers said. "How would we contact emergency personnel? It's a dangerous place up here without telephones. ... Accidents are going to happen and lives are going to be threatened because of it."

Myers wants something done now to provide telephone service to her community, where she estimates there are about two dozen permanent residents.

But Sprint executives, who put the number at about a dozen full-time residents, say there is not a lot they can do until snow -- perhaps 20 feet of it -- melts. They are still trying to gauge the extent of the damage to the 40-year-old telephone line that was severed in the same Jan. 9 avalanche that killed a young man at the ski resort.

Lou Emmert, Sprint's general manager for Nevada and vice president, said the engineering challenges are significant.

"There is a tremendous amount of snow on the top, all over the mountain, as a matter of fact," Emmert said. The company has 69 customers in Lee Canyon, the ski resort, and seasonal camps run by Clark County and the Girl Scouts.

Scott Mitchell, Sprint's operations director for the state, detailed the difficulties. The cable is supposed to be suspended from trees on the sharp drop on the Lee Canyon side of the mountain ledge. Mostly, it is still buried by snow, but the helicopter trips have revealed at least some of the damage.

"There's at least 2,500 feet of cable that's been ripped off the trees," Mitchell said.

Repairing the line will mean a difficult job of hiking up the mountain then repelling down a sheer cliff face about 1,000 feet. In snowy conditions, which could persist for weeks or months, it would be a very dangerous job, he said.

Even taking up a National Guard helicopter in the effort to survey the damage can be dicey as strong spring winds whip through the canyons on the mountain. Mitchell said winds bounced the chopper around Wednesday enough that the crew is waiting for a calm day to go back up.

Emmert said that the company, with the assistance of Metro and the National Guard, the U.S. Forest Service and others, will do what it can to repair the damage as soon as possible.

"It's obviously our focus to get that repaired and get those customers service."

Some people, among them Myers, are asking why the cable has to be repaired at all in this age of wireless communications. Mitchell and Emmert say they are open to wireless alternatives.

While the ski resort made it through the tail end of the winter with satellite phone service, the resort's Jack Bean, mountain manager, is concerned that the lack of reliable phone service could become a safety issue.

"We are very interested in wireless communications and we are pressing as hard as we can on that," he said.

Emmert and Mitchell said wireless could be a whole new level of difficulty because there is no direct line-of-site to Lee Canyon. However, one Las Vegas company suggests they could bring communication to the site.

Jason Mendenhall, president of Verde Communications, an Internet service provider, said flatly that there "is a way to provide service up there."

The process would mean putting up one or two towers to bounce microwaves into the canyon. But the technical ability doesn't mean it would be easy. Not only would the process have to make financial sense for the company, which is in contact with the forest service, the ski resort and other potential Lee Canyon customers, but there are significant potential difficulties in putting in microwave relay towers on the federal land.

Some of that land is federally designated wilderness, which restricts almost any kind of permanent addition or motorized vehicles.

"It is an extremely complicated issue, and there is the cost issue as well," Mendenhall said.

He said that Verde Communications did warn of the potential for losing phone service.

"Unfortunately, it's one of those situations where a year ago we said, hey, you're going to have problems up there and you really ought to do something about this," Mendenhall said.

But the warning wasn't taken seriously at the time before the snow started falling furiously, he said.

"They're kind of in a desperate situation right now."

He estimated the cost for bringing service to the canyon could range from $300,000 to more than twice that. One problem is that there just aren't that many customers on the mountain, Mendenhall said.

"We have to make sure from a financial viewpoint that it makes sense for the company."

Verde Communications, which is just a little over two years old, is open to talking to Sprint about working together to find a solution that works, he said.

Mitchell, with Sprint, said the cost could be $700,000 to more than $1 million for replacing the damaged cable. He said he wasn't familiar with Verde Communications or the company's embryonic proposal to bring wireless phone service to Lee Canyon.

"I would be very interested to talk to them," Mitchell said.

The Forest Service, the federal agency responsible for most of the mountain, wants a solution as well.

"We're working with Sprint as we try to identify options either to repair or replace or find another reasonable alternative to the cable," said Tim Short, Forest Service district ranger.

Finding a way to cross the designated wilderness, he acknowledged, would be a potential legal stumbling block.

"It would be difficult. I don't know it if would be impossible."

The regulations governing such uses in wilderness do carry a potential exception in cases where safety is an issue. That might open a door for other uses, he said.

Short noted that another cable might not be the best, and not only because a cable could be an unwarranted intrusion into the wilderness and national forest.

"Another cable, you don't know, it could be susceptible to further avalanches," he said.

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