Sky's The Limit

By JORDAN BONFANTE/DENVER

COMING 'ROUND ONE SIDE OF THE mountains is John Hough. On New Year's Day, the 43-year-old police sergeant, a veteran of the Los Angeles riots, took in a view of California's San Bernardino Valley -- as best he could. A blanket of smog had smothered the landscape. "Look at that crappy air," he said to his wife Patricia, 32, as they drove home from a Colorado vacation. "Why are we spending the young years of our life in California when we like Colorado so much better?" In the next three months, Hough would turn in his badge and trade his rented Orange County, California, condo for a $103,000 cedar house on 2.5 acres of woodland in idyllic Bailey, Colorado. "It's been tough looking for a new job," he says, gazing at snowcapped Mount Evans through the tall pines outside his picture window. "But we have no regrets. It's been a great move -- for family, for affordability, for all-round quality of life."

Now, coming 'round the other side of the mountains is a disappointed family fleeing with relief back to the urban energy of the Pacific Coast, right? Wrong. On the other side is Peter Northrop, 38, a Connecticut-born Chevron oil computer programmer in Denver. In July 1992, Northrop was given 48 hours to agree to a transfer to San Ramon, California, about 30 miles east of Oakland. He and his wife Susan, 37, agonized and then opted to stay put in Denver with their two small children. It took Northrop four months to land a new job with Diners Club, at 15% less pay. "The determining factor in staying was looking at the economy of California and the economy of Colorado -- they seemed to be heading in opposite directions," he says, standing in back of his brick house in Highlands Ranch, Denver's fastest-growing suburb, in full view of the Front Range that marks the east wall of the Rockies. "I look back on this a lot and wonder if we did the right thing. But when we're out for a walk watching the mountains at sunset, I know I definitely made the right decision."

It's boom time in the Rockies. While most of the U.S. is suffering from the blues, or stuck in an outright funk like California, the six states along the spectacular spine of the Rockies -- from Montana in the north through Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado and Utah to New Mexico in the south -- are prospering happily. This is the good-news belt. Since 1991, economic growth has regularly exceeded 5%, compared with an anemic 1% in the rest of the country. The last time the U.S. as a whole enjoyed comparable growth was 1984. The Rockies' unemployment rate is 5.4%, nearly 2 points below the national rate and more than 4 points below California's. Utah last year saw its personal incomes increase almost 8%. Idaho led the nation in job growth. The region's population of 14,380,000 grew 346,000 last year, by far the largest percentage of any area in the country.

On the strength of current migration trends, some experts believe the region may even be on the way to becoming a magnetic pole of a New West, replacing California as the ultimate, mythmaking destination, tantalizing the daydreams of restless souls itching to pick up and move. "These are sustainable economies, absolutely. It's not just another cycle but a permanent, historic shift," says Richard Lamm, the popular three-term former Governor of Colorado who now teaches public policy at the University of Denver. The Rockies' notorious history of booms and busts that created ghost towns as suddenly as gold rushes may be over.

The Rockies, perhaps too rosily, are increasingly being regarded as the new American heartland. They hold out a promise not just of scenery and jobs but also, most important, of old, back-country values and certainties -- like home, hearth and family -- that have seemingly gone astray in many urban centers. California never offered those. California offered liberation and excitement. "We just decided that Pocatello, with its low crime and good schools, was the place we wanted to raise a child," says Peter Angstadt, 38, a transplant from Fremont, California. He moved in 1987, and in 1989 became mayor of the Idaho town. Angstadt, a jogger and bicycle enthusiast, thrives on Pocatello's old-fashioned, small-town neighborliness: "When you ask someone for directions, they practically lead you there in their car."

Whenever Deedee Corradini, the brisk, hard-working mayor of Salt Lake City, goes to a national mayors' conference, as she did in New York City in June and in San Francisco in July, hers is the rare grin among very long faces. That is because, as she says, "we are the envy of the others. We have our problems and challenges, but nothing like the rest of the cities. Look at some of the others. Look at L.A. Or San Francisco. I don't know how you can begin to solve those problems, whereas we can solve ours. Our problems are smaller. Our economy is healthier. Our spirit of volunteerism is great."

The good times in the Rockies are producing a distinctive old-and-new life- style laden with a backpack of paradoxes. Its trademark is no longer the pickup truck with rifle rack driven by a blue-collar hunter but the Jeep Cherokee or the Range Rover maneuvered by a young professional who more likely than not favors gun control. "I love it here in Denver," says Tom Bauer, 33, a Harvard-educated architect who left Skidmore Owings & Merrill in Los Angeles to try his hand at environment-sensitive design in Colorado. "Sure, I worry about urban problems like crime catching up to us here, but I guess I'm hopeful they can be resolved by people voting the right way for things like gun control."

The Rockies' new ethos manages to combine the yearning for a simpler, rooted, front-porch way of life with the urban-bred, high-tech worldliness of computers and modems. When the San Francisco earthquake struck almost four years ago, computer writer T.C. Doyle, 30, and his wife Naomi, 29, picked up and moved to scenic -- and relatively sophisticated and pricey -- Park City, Utah. "We wanted a smaller town that was on the upswing," says Doyle. From there he now sends stories almost daily to his employer, Computer Reseller News, in Manhasset, New York. Bruce Tipple, 48, moved to the same mining town turned resort from Minneapolis seven years ago and set up shop custom- designing training systems for Toshiba, Syntex and other large corporations. "With data communication and computers and faxes, distance is not an issue," he says. "We have easy access to our markets, most of which are on the West Coast. The airport's 45 minutes away."

The Rockies are especially fertile ground for a proliferation of workers who, like Tipple, are variously known as the telecommuters, the modem cowboys or, as Philip Burgess, president of the Denver think-tank Center for the New West, puts it, the "lone eagles." Burgess agrees that "what's happening in the Rockies is not unlike what happened in California in its golden years." But he emphasizes a big difference: "In the Rocky Mountain region, it's not taxi drivers anymore -- it's professional people who realize they can locate anywhere and live by their wits. Many were middle managers who were forced off the corporate gravy train in the latest recession and said, 'Why live in New York or L.A.? I can have a modem and a fax and live anywhere I like.' The upscale golden eagles go to Jackson Hole or Vail, the plain mid-scale eagles to Buffalo, Wyoming, or Grand Junction, Colorado."

Ray Janus, 42, and his wife and business partner Renata, 40, two Utah transplants from Toronto, telecommute from a mountain house and, for about 100 days a year, from the cabin of their 36-ft. Catalina sailboat, the Miss Behaving III, on the Great Salt Lake. A consultant with a contract to distribute high-end data communications systems for Motorola's Codex Corp., Janus says that "the boat's especially nice during the heavy winter snows. Or if there's a great sunset on a Sunday evening, I can just stay on board until Monday morning." It is also as useful as the golf course for hustling business. He says, "Our best deals have been closed onboard."

In a small three-room office overlooking Lake Coeur d'Alene in western Idaho, the man with a phone to his ear looks like another recreational fisherman in polo shirt and khakis lining up a partner for an afternoon of angling. But Robert Potter is actually an expert at a different kind of fishing -- trolling for out-of-state companies. His trophies are impressive. As president of Jobs Plus, a nonprofit economic-development firm in Coeur d'Alene, he has single-handedly lured 35 companies to the lake area since 1987 -- 30 of them from Southern California. His technique is so simple it would make an M.B.A. blanch. Potter flips through the Southern California Business Directory and Buyers Guide, finds small-to-medium-size firms that seem to fit, and calls them up cold to ask whether they would let him prepare a state-vs.- state comparison for them -- at no cost. Most agree. "And when we do that, Idaho usually comes out the winner compared with Southern California. It's a no-brainer," says Potter. "I'm at the point where I'm almost feeling sorry about California."

The region owes much of its boom to the energy bust of the mid-'80s, which forced companies to downsize and the states -- notoriously overreliant on natural resources ever since the silver rushes of the 1870s and 1880s -- to diversify. Idaho also continued to help small companies grow larger while encouraging the new high-tech industries around Boise. Wyoming revived its moribund coal fields with the world's most highly automated mining processes. Colorado financed an ambitious drive to make Denver an international hub with a new $3 billion airport. Utah restructured its copper and steel mills and absorbed their laid-off workers into gleaming new aerospace, computer-software and financial-services facilities. "The Rockies became leaner and meaner ahead of the rest of the country," says Russell Behrmann, Utah's economic- development director of administration. When the national recession hit, the states were "recession resistant -- they had some built-in antibodies."

Lower taxes, lower salaries, affordable housing and less red tape also showed companies on both coasts, and especially in high-cost California, that they could operate less expensively in the Rockies. That has given the mountain states a leg up in the interregional competition popularly known as "smokestack chasing." Companies discovered that even after factoring in transportation costs, basing themselves inland could be advantageous. This spring Rio Rancho, New Mexico, used a $114 million tax-incentive package to lure Intel into expanding its local semiconductor plant. The deal was the largest private investment in a U.S. city by a single firm this year. It means an additional 2,000 jobs in what is already the fastest-growing suburb in the U.S. In 1970 Rio Rancho's population was 2,000; last year it was 38,000.

"Can you think of anything more different than moving from Brooklyn to Utah?" asked Frank Layden, the waggish hefty president of basketball's Utah Jazz. "I came here scared to death. For the first time in my life, I was going to be a minority, an Irish Catholic among Mormons." That was 14 years ago. Now Layden says he's found home, and "nobody jammed the Mormon religion down my throat. Look at it this way," he says, sitting in his memorabilia- plastered office in the Delta Center arena in downtown Salt Lake City. "I used to get calls from agents and players: 'Don't draft me -- I don't want to live there. What is that, Amish country?' Well, now players are saying, 'Hey, get me!' "

"QUALITY OF LIFE" LONG AGO BEcame a mantra in the mountain states, but now newcomers don't have to junk their M.B.A.s and open dulcimer-repair shops in order to make a living there. And when high-tech companies compete for upscale engineers and technicians, it is a distinct advantage to offer up stunning scenery, woodland residences a mere half-hour from workplaces, wilderness sports within ready access of one another -- not to mention safe streets and functioning schools.

Only three years ago, Montana seemed doomed to chronic depopulation and a depression-like rash of property repossessions. Today the state is enjoying a land boom that has tripled and even quadrupled property values in some areas. The Flathead Valley especially has attracted droves of vacation-home buyers, including celebrities from Whoopi Goldberg to Mel Gibson. Idaho has similarly seen its economy grow more than 6% in each of the past two years. Its personal-income growth of 7.2% is the third highest in the nation.

"More than 98% of our companies have fewer than 100 employees," says Jim Hawkins, director of Idaho's commerce department. "That gives you diversification. If we lose a company, we sneeze, but we don't catch a cold."

The region's two most populous states, Colorado (pop. 3,470,000) and Utah (1,813,000), have long since been rendered semi-urban and semi-industrial, chalking up economic growth rates of 5% and 5.6% last year. With their more developed infrastructures, both states have not only invited small firms to relocate in rustic industrial parks and backwoods -- as Idaho has been doing -- but have also aggressively gone after bigger game: highly developed companies such as aerospace firms, and their subcontractors, to make their complex, top-to-bottom economies capable of competing with those of any medium-size state in the country.

Denver in particular is intent on becoming a regional capital that is busier, if not bigger, than Dallas or Atlanta. Five years ago, the Greater Denver Corp. corralled 51 local economic-development agencies into a single hard-sell organization. The payoff: 126,000 new jobs. Then in 1990 Denver gambled on a stunning new tepee-topped international airport, due to open late this year. "The idea was to build a 21st century 'port' analogous to the great seaports that created the commercial capitals of Europe in the 16th century," says Richard Fleming, who, when he was president of Denver's Chamber of Commerce, headed the original airport drive. "The other states are selling this transportation center emerging in Denver along with their extraordinary quality of life. It will put Billings, Montana, say, in one-stop touch with Europe and the global market."

For its part, Utah went after new business with a one-stop-shopping regulatory agency and a program to steer youth toward high-tech jobs. (Utah claims its population is the most literate and youthful in the U.S.) It has a sophisticated state "center of excellence" that screens scientific and technological research projects with an eye to bringing the most promising to market. To convert miners into machinists, the state finances retraining programs both on campuses and at companies. State officials argue that it is no accident that McDonnell Douglas has laid off thousands of its workers in Long Beach, California; Mesa, Arizona; and St. Louis, Missouri; but not in Salt Lake City, Utah.

New Mexico's moderate economic growth (2%) has also been spurred by an enterprising though less elaborate campaign to entice firms. Among the prize catches, mostly in the Albuquerque area, are companies ranging from a Hawk missile facility and an Olympus camera plant to a J.C. Penney telemarketing center. The state, which has a budget surplus of $100 million, can afford to offer generous tax incentives, and it assiduously cuts red tape. When Great American Stock relocated to Rio Rancho two months ago, it obtained a building permit in 11 days at a cost of $2,200; a comparable permit in San Diego, the company says, might have taken 18 months and cost $40,000 to process.

With prosperity has come an influx of people, and then more people. Colorado had a net immigration of 61,000, the highest number of new arrivals since 1978. Utah, historically an exporter of its well-educated population, particularly to the Pacific Coast, has had a net influx of 19,000 in each of the past two years. All the states report that the largest number of newcomers are former Californians. "There is a push-pull effect at work," observes Lamm. "The push is the businesspeople of Los Angeles saying, 'The workers' compensation system is prohibitive, I have to spend an hour on the freeway, and I can't attract good staff anymore because of the cost of housing.' And you've got the pull here, which is visitors saying, 'My God, Colorado Springs! You can look up every morning and see Pikes Peak.' That's a strong combination." Lamm goes further, venturing that the shift from coast to mountains may signify a basic redefinition of the West. "It means a filling in of the middle. It means a populating of the areas that used to be passed over."

IT ALSO MEANS, LAMM ADMITS SADLY, that the shift is bound to come at the expense of California. "I think we are looking at some permanent dislocation. And it seems to me very difficult to recapture the golden age of California. A lot of people who once rushed to California are going to come here."

It is the tradition of the range that if a dog crosses your property, you can shoot it. That is how it's always been -- dogs can threaten the livestock, or the tulips, so you can shoot 'em. This spelled trouble near the leathery Colorado town of Durango last month after the Bakers, a large Californian family, moved in next to an old ranch. The Californians' golden retriever ventured onto the ranch property and ate a couple of chickens. The Californians duly apologized, but the ranchers remained incensed. And soon after, when the dog strayed across again, sure enough, the ranchers shot it. The Californians wrote a letter to the editor of the Durango Herald wailing that their beloved pet had been heartlessly destroyed. Upon its publication, the paper received a dozen other letters castigating the Californians and telling them that is how it's done here and if they didn't like it, why didn't they just go back to California?

Poor Californians. No sooner cashed out of Glendale and resettled in Sun Valley in new Pendleton shirts than they are generally eager to please, dig in, join the school board. But the natives often regard them as interlopers who force up property values, stretch emergency services and introduce alien notions. So many celebrities and other moneyed migrants have moved to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, for instance, that some resident working people can no longer afford to live there and have to commute from the small towns of Driggs and Victor, Idaho, across the treacherous Teton Pass.

"THEY'RE POSERS," COMPLAINS Larry Lahren, 49, a native Montanan hunting- and-fishing outfitter in the town of Livingston in Paradise Valley. "They never had an adventure in their lives until they bought all this stuff. Now, with $2,000 or $3,000 worth of fly gear, they suddenly think they're experts."

"Part of the problem is a cultural revulsion against the idle rich," says University of Montana economist Thomas Power. "In our culture there's something noble about people who make their living sweating, risking their fingers and lives and limbs, harvesting logs or digging minerals out of the earth. Somebody living on retirement income, somebody working in a service industry, we begin to wrinkle our noses." However, Power sighs, "very few of us in future are going to mine the earth, harvest logs or work in blue-collar manufacturing, and we'd better get used to it."

Nothing epitomizes the transformation of the region from its hardy frontier stereotype more than the city of Boulder (pop. 95,000). Its New Age proclivities are evident on the handbills advertising everything from channeling to aromatherapy on the kiosks along the Pearl Street pedestrian mall. Boulder still accommodates a leftover '60s style, like that of its Buddhist-inspired Naropa Institute, where Allen Ginsberg still holds court each summer. And it regularly hyperventilates with an ultra-liberal world view that has prompted the city council to pronounce itself on foreign policy as readily as on sewage easements. During the Gulf War, Denver, like the rest of the U.S., appeared to be 80% in favor. Not surreal Boulder: there, hundreds of antiwar protesters blocked traffic in the city center day after day.

Yet the region's reputation as a haven has also led it to harbor right-wing cliques and go-it-alone extremists. The mercenary periodical Soldier of Fortune is published in Boulder. And such rural backwaters as Hayden Lake, Idaho, are headquarters to sundry survivalists, skinheads and supremacist groups like the White Aryan Nation.

The clash of cultures erupted last November when Colorado unexpectedly passed Amendment 2, a ballot initiative aimed at outlawing ordinances protecting homosexuals against discrimination. The measure -- which is in abeyance while awaiting a Colorado Supreme Court ruling -- was strongly supported by voters in the rural counties and the Front Range suburbs, and just as conspicuously opposed by the urban voters of Denver, Boulder and Aspen, where so many of the newcomers dwell.

For all its steam, the Rockies boom has its pitfalls and built-in limitations. For one thing, it cannot go on forever in the continued absence of a general economic recovery. "The longer the national doldrums persist, the more susceptible we'll be," says Behrmann. "We're not an island. We may be a refuge. We can weather the storm. But we're not immune." For another, the region's scarcity of water poses as much of a challenge as it always has. The northern tier of Montana, Idaho and Wyoming, with plentiful rivers and low population density, expects no problem satisfying its pockets of growth. The semi-arid southern tier of Utah, Colorado and New Mexico, however, has to give water high priority.

Salt Lake City is covered for the next 30 years by the Central Utah Project. But Denver's hydrological future is far less certain. Because the Rockies impede rainfall, the city enjoys 300 days of sunshine a year. The weather, though, comes at a price. Ever since the early 1900s, elaborate water projects have sought to capture snow melts, pumping water across the mountains from the moist west to the dry east. That engineering worked satisfactorily until 1990, when the Environmental Protection Agency outlawed the building of the giant Two Forks dam in order to protect a trout-rich river system. As a result, Denver is now judged to have only about 20 years' worth of identifiable water sources left.

The final factor that is bound to curtail indefinite expansion is the natural law that insists the built-in cost of growth is change. That, of course, is what the natives resent most of all. As a longtime advocate of managed growth, Lamm, for one, is worried that Westerners with their traditional sense of independence will continue to wave off essential land-use planning and allow Denver, say, to become "the Los Angeles of tomorrow." Others point out that some of that nefarious future has arrived. Denver this summer has been gripped by anxiety over a sudden surge of gang violence. In only one week at the end of July, three people were killed and two wounded in drive-by shootings. A housewife in the Capitol Hill district was fatally shot while washing the supper dishes in her kitchen.

Diehard optimism, however, comes with the territory. "Hope's native home," Wallace Stegner, the Hemingway of the Rockies, called the West, "the youngest and the freshest of America's regions, magnificently endowed and with a chance to become something unprecedented." And he wrote, "Nothing would gratify me more than to see it . . . both prosperous and environmentally healthy, with a civilization to match its scenery." If the Rockies find that state of grace, the cry around America will continue to be "Head for the hills!"

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CREDIT: [TMFONT 1 d #666666 d {Source: Census Bureau}]CAPTION: BOOM! HEAD FOR THE HILLS

With reporting by Patrick Dawson/Billings, Anne Palmer Donohoe/Salt Lake City and David S. Jackson/Pocatello