Vail, Colorado — It’s early, but the wave of foreclosures that has hit the county the past few years shows no signs of breaking.

Through March 10, there were 102 new foreclosure filings at the Eagle County Public Trustee’s Office. There were 615 filings in 2011 and 618 in 2010. That was the year foreclosures really hit in Eagle County. There were 452 filings in 2009 and just 179 in 2008.

Foreclosures filed in 2010 and 2011 were the most on record. The previous high — 599 filings — came in 1987.

There were 334 foreclosure sales in 2011, more than half the total filings. There were 275 sales in 2010 and 158 in 2009. The most recent figures available from the state of Colorado show sales increased by more than 53 percent in the first half of 2011 compared with the same period in 2010.

- Vail Daily

VAIL, Colorado — World Cup ski racer Sarah Schleper spent the first 16 years of her life preparing for World Cup ski racing, and another 16 years later, she is retiring.

Vail native Schleper, 32, raced her last race Thursday in Lienz, Austria. She didn’t qualify for a second run Thursday but did score World Cup points with a 23rd-place finish in Wednesday’s giant slalom.

The four-time Olympian and oldest woman on the U.S. Ski Team had thought about retiring and felt that now was the right time.

She knows that she and her family are moving back to the Vail Valley. Her husband will work in Beaver Creek at Sotheby’s, and she hopes to find a job at Vail or Beaver Creek doing what she’s so good and experienced at — skiing.

EAGLE, Colorado — Tebowmania has brought national attention to little Bonfire Brewing in Eagle.

The brewers at Bonfire a few months ago cooked up a barley wine — a high-alcohol, heavy-drinking concoction — with the intent of selling it at the brewery and putting it into the commercial tasting event at the Jan. 7 Big Beers, Belgians & Barleywines festival in Vail. The brew is ready, and last Sunday the Bonfire team was tasting and trying to think up a good name for the stuff.

Like many people who enjoy beer, the team was also watching football while they tasted, and watched the Denver Broncos pull out another in a series of improbable wins since Tim Tebow has become the team’s starting quarterback.

That’s when Ken Hoeve, Bonfire’s “Ale Ambassador” said, “Let’s call it Tebrew!”

The name stuck, a logo was created — a beer-holding man kneeling in the now-familiar “Tebow” pose — and the company put up the name on its Facebook page.

At that point, automatic Internet thingies trained to search for anything with the word “Tebow” in it went to work. The name soon hit beer blogs and newspaper websites, and the Tebow tsunami soon engulfed Bonfire.

“We’ve been getting calls from all over the country,” brewery co-founder Andy Jessen said. “It’s been great for the brewery, great for Eagle and great for the state.”

Jessen acknowledged that he doesn’t know whether Tebow drinks beer or not — but said the brew is more about fans and football than the player.

“It’s just a good time to be in Colorado and be a football fan here,” Jessen said.

EAGLE COUNTY, Colorado — Plenty of local property changed hands in October, but prices are down from last year.

According to the latest report from Land Title Guarantee Company, there were 130 transactions in October, the second-highest total of the year, behind September. The Eagle/Gypsum area had the largest share of those transactions with 30 sales.

Most of sales were for $500,000 or less, and there were 18 sales of bank-owned property.

Those bank-owned transactions — which often carry below-market asking prices, have helped drive down average prices throughout the market. There were more 15 more sales in October of this year than the same month last year, but the total sales volume was down 16 percent.

As is often the case, a few high-dollar sales account for the lion’s share of the dollar volume. Eight transactions of $2 million or more were completed in October, but those sales accounted for one-third of the month’s dollar volume.

So far in 2011, 40 percent of the county’s sales volume has come from Vail Village, which has recorded 49 of the year’s 1,100 sales. In fact, the average price per square foot for a single-family home in Vail Village has gone up by one-third over last year while the price per square foot of single family homes elsewhere in the county has dropped an average of 23 percent.

The county looks to be on track to surpass $1 billion in real estate sales for this year. That’s a long way from the years of $2 billion-plus in sales in the years just before the current economic slump, but it’s a marked improvement from 2009, when the county didn’t reach the $1 billion mark for the first time in years.

BEAVER CREEK — A guy like Ted Ligety isn’t going to stop pushing hard after a practically flawless first run in Sunday’s Birds of Prey giant slalom, but a few little bobbles in the second run were enough to put the defending Birds of Prey giant slalom champion in second place at the final finish.

Austrian Marcel Hirscher got the win Sunday. Hirscher finished third in giant slalom at last year’s Birds of Prey and said he has previously struggled at Beaver Creek to even qualify for the second run, so this win was especially sweet, he said.

“Today with my victory here — I’m pretty amused about the whole situation,” Hirscher said at a press conference after the race.

Ligety went into the second run Sunday in the lead by 0.21 seconds. His first run was clean, but Ligety knew he had to make some changes in order have a shot at winning.

“The snow is definitely super aggressive,” Ligety said after the first run. “I’m going to change my set-up a little bit for the second run just cause it was hard to really push on the ski without it bouncing around too much.”

Ligety made the changes to his equipment and said after the second run that if he hadn’t done it, he “would be out of it.” Aggressive snow means it’s grabby, Ligety said, whereas on ice the skiers can predict what their skis are going to do.

The second run was exciting as racers kept knocking each other out of the top three one after another. But with the final racers left to go — the end of the second run’s start list is made up of the fastest finishers from the first run — the spectators and athletes knew each racer had the ability to bump down the racer before him.

Germany’s Fritz Dopfer, the 26th starter out of 30 for the second run, knocked Norwegian Kjetil Jansrud, the 25th starter, out of the top position with a powerful run, but ultimately finished third. Austrian Benjamin Raich was up next and skied off-course, not finishing the race. Norwegian Kristian Leif Haugen came into 11th place at the end of his run, leaving just Hirscher and Ligety left to start.

‘Teddy will be back’

Once Hirscher put up an impressive combined time of 2:38.45, the pressure was on Ligety to make a strong, clean run.

“I was pushing hard and that snow definitely makes it easy to make mistakes,” Ligety said. “I definitely was kind of all over the place in places, but I skied well in sections and I knew exactly where I lost it when I had a little bobble on the bottom that was going to cost me some time.”

Ligety, who finished 22nd in Friday’s downhill and skied off-course in Saturday’s super-G, said he wasn’t necessarily disappointed with the second-place giant slalom finish.

“Being second place is obviously good,” he said. “But I was really wanting the win more than anything.”

The finish will motivate Ligety for Tuesday, when he will take on these World Cup racers at another Birds of Prey giant slalom race. He said he prefers the Birds of Prey course to the giant slalom course in Val D’Isere, where this week’s races were originally supposed to happen, so he’s looking forward to staying in Beaver Creek.

But after a race-filled week, beginning with Lake Louise and going into Beaver Creek, Ligety said he plans to sleep in on Monday.

For Dopfer, taking third place Sunday was almost surreal. He had finished 13th in October at Soelden, Austria, the first World Cup race of the year, and said he was not expecting a podium finish in Beaver Creek.

“It was a big surprise for me (to be on the podium),” Dopfer said. “It’s just amazing to be on the podium. To stand beside such great athletes, it’s just amazing, I can’t believe it.”

He went into the weekend confident, though, after arriving in Colorado Nov. 18 and training in Vail and Aspen. He said he has been looking forward to racing in Beaver Creek.

Hirscher had been looking forward to it, too. He had a foot injury last season and said his goal was just to ski at the level he had been skiing at before the injury. With Sunday’s win, he feels he has reached that goal, he said.

With just one day of rest between the two Birds of Prey giant slalom races, though, nothing is a sure thing for Tuesday’s race. Hirscher feels he has enough power for his next races, but he knows many of the other skiers do, too.

“We will see. I think Teddy will be also very strong, as we saw today — it was a pretty close finish between us,” Hirscher said. “…In Austria, Ted is unbreakable, so it’s pretty big success for me to beat him today, but we’ll see — I think Teddy will be back on Tuesday.”

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