Phone service returning to Lee Canyon

Thursday, Oct. 6, 2005 | 7:11 a.m.

The Aspen leaves in Lee Canyon are turning yellow and gold, signaling that snow will soon return to the upper elevations of the tiny Mount Charleston community.

Last year the mountain's residents had to contend with 50 feet of snow in some areas. There were avalanches that killed a teen and knocked out telephone service. After the avalanches in January, the residents living in about 60 homes in the canyon struggled through the rest of the winter, spring and summer with just patchy satellite phones or no phone capability at all.

After about nine months, telephone provider Sprint Corp. said residents should get their phone service back this week, news that comes as a relief to Brian Strait, general manager of Las Vegas Ski and Snowboard Resort at Lee Canyon.

"It's difficult to operate a business in today's world without the more common conveniences like communications," he said.

The resort struggled through three months using only satellite phones, which would sometimes lose their signals. Strait said the original schedule was to get the phones back on line by the end of this month, but he hopes to have phone service within a few days.

Managers of the Girl Scouts' Camp Foxtail had their phone to the camp working Monday.

"Communication!" exclaimed Patricia Miller, chief executive of the Girl Scouts of Frontier Council.

She said the Girl Scouts kept emergency medical technicians at the camp up the long Lee Canyon Road from U.S. 95, and Sprint provided a satellite phone, but people still worried that if an incident occurred, it could be tough to get help.

"You'd have to wait. Without that immediate contact, it was just an unsettling thing. We take for granted how much we depend on the phone, all of us do -- until we lose it."

The importance of having dependable phone service only increases during the winter, when the camp continues to operate but always with the threat of sometimes heavy winter weather.

Miller knows well what Sprint had to do because the Girl Scout camp will be providing the generator to keep the new telephone service operating.

She said Sprint engineers had to deal with difficult terrain to replace a trouble-prone, and decades-old, telephone system that depended on a fragile cable strung across Mount Charleston from Kyle Canyon. Thousands of feet of the cable were destroyed by last winter's avalanches.

"Sprint tried its hardest to get something repaired there, but once they saw the extent of the damage, they saw that it would be impossible just to repair the cable."

Sprint engineers said they buried almost seven miles of cable, and built a new microwave station and a relay station to bring telephones back to Lee Canyon. The first dial tones returned to the canyon Monday.

Scott Mitchell, Sprint operations director, said the new service cost "in excess of $1.5 million," but is an improvement over the old cable, which was vulnerable to damage from fires and heavy snow.

Mitchell said the company had to contend with the terrain and state and federal land-management agencies before instituting a high-tech system.

Intense snowfall or high winds could still threaten phone service, but Mitchell said the system "is a much more reliable service."

"It's very robust ... It's a very good solution here, one that will last us a long time."

One telephone user expressed some caution along with relief.

"I am ecstatic to have phone service again," Lee Canyon resident Stephanie Myers said. "It's been nine hard months and that's as long as it takes to make a baby ... I'm not canceling my satellite Internet phone, even though it almost never works, until I see if this new phone system will actually make it through the winter."

Launce Rake can be reached at 259-4127 or by e-mail at lrake@lasvegassun.com.