The winter season ended late this year and this weekend the summer season will unofficially begin here in the Treasure Valley.

Now communities like Sun Valley, McCall and in what people generally call the shoulder season or the off-season. Business owners catch their breath and prepare for the much larger summer rush, which seems to start earlier every year.

Jackson Hole, one of the longer established winter-summer tourism communities has the best name for this period. They call it the cocktail hour.

Weary waitresses, ski patrollers and marketing directors take off for vacation in Moab, Mexico or Maui, depending on the size of their tips, salaries or trust funds. Those with year-round jobs just try to make ends meet.

They can't leave behind the continuing clashes of Next West boom towns. The gulf between rich and poor, the "Hummer crowd," and "the Subaru crowd," is one of the defining characteristics of these places across the West. Both classes have been attracted to the breath-taking landscape and the outdoor activities that economists say is the engine of development in our region.

As environmentalists were attempting to reign in the excesses of the traditional resource industries of the West in the 1990s, many, including I, advanced the myth that a land friendly, tourism economy could replace the destructive extractive economy. As Jackson, Ketchum, Aspen, Crested Butte and other resort communities have demonstrated, it's just not true.

Places like Teton County, Idaho and Valley County are struggling to control the development.A resource industry that some say exploited the land was replaced by a tourism industry that some now say exploit its workers.

While federal lands heal, development permanently eliminates wildlife habitat on private lands. The housing crisis has even given us a boom and bust that economists said we weren’t going to have after the miners and loggers left.

Some of these communities, such as Ketchum and the Wood River Valley, can’t nor should turn back. But other rural Western communities ought to think twice before totally replacing their traditional economies, especially agriculture. Once you turn on the tourism growth spigot it can be hard to bring it under control.

Cocktails anyone?