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Free Delivery and In-Room Fitting Choose the time and place for delivery. Usually the night before you start skiing is best. Your personal ski concierge will deliver and custom fit you with the latest in ski and snowboard equipment.
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’16-’17 CONTENTS
SHORTIES 12
Winning bronze...and fans of all ages by Sandy Fails Olympic medalist Emma Coburn shares a mutual affection with Crested Butte.
14
Skiing masterfully by Drew Holbrook Murray Banks and other Masters Training Group coaches help Nordic athletes ski faster and “at a higher level of consciousness.”
16
Windows for peace by Sandy Fails With its Elk Avenue posters, the new Peace Museum Colorado promotes peace through storytelling.
18
Science where the water starts by George Sibley To better predict downstream water supply, a comprehensive East River study will trace the intricate journey of moisture from snow to stream.
22
The water bearer by Sandy Fails Crested Butte entrepreneur Taryn Jacob wants her Nada Bottle to carry healthy water for her fellow adventurers and for her global neighbors.
24
A building of many stories by Sandra Cortner People still share their memories at the Crested Butte Mountain Heritage Museum, just as old-timers once told tales around its potbelly stove.
70 Photo gallery | 116 Calendar | 120 Lodging | 122 Dining | 128 Photo finish 4
FEATURES 32 Laughter, hugs, fear and awe
by Chris Garren A Crested Butte millennial ponders how adventure shapes us, from risky feats to backyard campouts.
40 “Not your grandma’s bell choir”
by Joanne Reynolds For 20 years, Crested Butte’s handbell choir has created beautiful music – from Handel to Lady Gaga – and built sound friendships.
46 Frozen on glass: portrait of an avalanche
by Brian Levine An 1884 mining-town tragedy as it could have been seen through the eyes of Crested Butte photographer C. F. Blacklidge.
56 New vibrations
by Dawne Belloise Guitar geeks and celebrities are taking note of Kent Viles’ Dobrato, which gives a new voice to a classic blues guitar.
65 Literary dirtbags
by Arvin Ramgoolam Luke Mehall: scribe, editor and community builder among dedicated climbers. Other new local books, p. 68.
74 The gentle music of winter
by Polly Oberosler A lyrical tribute to the sounds of a snowy world.
76 Red doors, toilets and bridesmaids in fur
by Kathryn Vogel The Mountain Theatre challenges local playwrights: How much fun and drama can you fit into ten minutes?
82 Beyond the welcome mat
by Beth Buehler These guest cabins house visitors in creative, compact spaces, so hosts and guests enjoy both closeness and privacy.
90 Harder than it looks
by David J. Rothman David Chodounsky’s long, tough path from Crested Butte to Dartmouth to the podium as national slalom champion.
98 A friendship transplanted
by Beth Buehler Soccer, deployments, faith and families bonded these longtime friends, now familiar faces in our medical community.
105 The Spaghetti Gang and the Big Mine bathhouse
by Richard and Cara Guerrieri A feisty “gang member” recounts his boyhood exploits in 1940’s Crested Butte.
110 Ode to “off” season Mark Ewing
by Molly Murfee When desperation gives way to wonder. 5
Vol. XXXVII, No. 2 Published semi-annually by Crested Butte Publishing & Creative PUBLISHERS Steve Mabry & Chris Hanna EDITOR Sandy Fails ADVERTISING DIRECTOR MJ Vosburg DESIGN Chris Hanna PRODUCTION Keitha Kostyk WRITERS Dawne Belloise Beth Buehler Sandra Cortner Sandy Fails Chris Garren Cara Guerrieri Drew Holbrook Brian Levine Laurel Miller Molly Murfee Polly Oberosler Arvin Ramgoolam Joanne Reynolds David J. Rothman George Sibley Kathryn Vogel PHOTOGRAPHERS Dawne Belloise Matt Berglund Nathan Bilow Bob Brazell Trent Bona Sandra Cortner Dusty Demerson Petar Dopchev Mark Ewing Xavier Fané Braden Gunem Kevin Krill Rebecca Ofstedahl Lydia Stern Joel Vosburg COVER PHOTO Skier David Bunt Crested Butte Mountain Resort By Trent Bona ONLINE crestedbuttemagazine.com E-MAIL sandyfails56@gmail.com ADVERTISING 970-349-6211 mj@crestedbuttemagazine.com
6
Copyright 2016, Crested Butte Publishing. No reproduction of contents without authorization by Crested Butte Publishing & Creative.
Editor’s note
Pumping up the good I want to write about beauty and pain, love and fear, heroism and petty irritations. In ten paragraphs. No sweat. First, here are some things I learned while editing this issue of the Crested Butte Magazine. •
•
•
•
Dr. Steph Timothy’s friend Erica Eaton helped care for her five-month-old son when Steph was unexpectedly deployed to Afghanistan. With steady dedication, steeplechase runner Emma Coburn earned a place on the Olympic podium in August, then came home the same humble sweetheart she was before. In his cross-country bike ride, Chris Garren met a hundred times more kindness and generosity than meanness and judgment. Avid traveler Taryn Jacob started a water bottle company in part so she could help bring clean water to impoverished communities.
Trent Bona
7
Lydia Stern
Editor’s note
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I want to remember these things right now, because it’s been a rough autumn. I just saw an end to two precious lives, a tiny baby girl born too soon and a dear man who died too young. The election is stirring paranoia, lies, nastiness and contention. Horrific events in the news give us ample reason to despair. This fever of negativity seems to be contagious. But despair, fear and anger don’t empower or motivate us. Most of the good that’s done in the world comes from love, wisdom and hope. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” Sure, we all have our turns feeling sad, mad and afraid. And we all know what cranky feels like. (A friend named her irritable alter ego “Phyllis”; on days when she woke up itching for a fight, she forewarned her family and co-workers that Phyllis was on the prowl.) These are all fine as emotions passing through; but they’re not so helpful as worldviews or permanent states of being. So what’s the antidote to this contagious negativity? According to recent research in “positive psychology,” it appears to be a lot of what we find in Crested Butte: genuine human connection, healthy lifestyles, time in nature, active bodies, priority given to experiences over belongings, and lives directed by meaning rather than ego. This issue of the Crested Butte Magazine reminds us how Crested Butte can be a positive enclave in the global outbreak of negativity. These articles tell of adventure, friendship, creativity, beauty, determination and kindness. If in the midst of all that, we can’t be the immune response to the negativity fever, where else can it happen? In that hope, may these pages feed your eyes, mind and heart – and offer not a crumb to your inner Phyllis. —Sandy Fails, editor
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Winning bronze... and fans of all ages
By Sandy Fails Emma Coburn autographs the arm of a young fan at the Crested Butte Community School.
Joel Vosburg
Olympic medalist Emma Coburn shares a mutual affection with Crested Butte. Last September, eight years after standing on the Crested Butte Community School stage clutching her new high school diploma, Emma Coburn stood there again, this time holding her Olympic bronze medal. In the audience, the students listened as she talked about growing up in Crested Butte and her path from multi-sport mountain girl to the fastest woman steeplechase runner in the country and third fastest in the world. In her three sessions with the students, the elementary children asked a hundred questions, the high schoolers played it cool but listened attentively, and the middle school students mobbed her, holding out anything – shoes, caps, forearms – for her to autograph. That evening, the Brick Oven hosted a reception for Emma, and her admirers overflowed the courtyard. Emma greeted, hugged, laughed, and handed out photos and autographs to her former teachers and coaches, neighbors and friends, Western State runners, and parents with wide-eyed kids. She let the children hold her Olympic medal and posed for countless photos. “It was kind of weird,” she said later. “It’s not like I’m some closed-off celebrity. You could come knock on my door any day…. But I was really happy to say hi to everybody.” 12
Two months earlier, community members had gathered in front of the Brick Oven’s televisions to cheer Emma as she set a new American steeplechase record (9:07:63) and powered from behind to take the bronze medal in the Rio de Janeiro Olympics. Crested Butte loves this athlete. It’s mutual. Former running coach Trent Sanderson remembers meeting Emma as the shy high schooler overshadowed by her older siblings, Willy and Gracie. Though Emma has gained poise and confidence, she hasn’t lost that “child-like wonder and innocence,” he said. “She sees this vulnerable kid in the corner and makes an impact because she can see herself.” “What impresses me about Emma is her kindness and humility,” said Charlotte Camp, Emma’s high school cross-country coach and English teacher. “She thinks of others first. She’s incredibly giving, generous and sincere. She’s supportive of everyone around her – family, friends, peers – and always positive.” As a coach, Charlotte could get frustrated because, though Emma was a gifted runner, she preferred team sports like volleyball and basketball. “She ran mainly because Willy and Gracie did.” Now Charlotte realizes that doing many sports probably prevented Emma from having more injuries and developed the diverse skills needed for the steeplechase (3,000 meters of running, hurdles, jumps and water obstacles). Though Emma had such talent, she sometimes struggled in high school races, Trent said. “I felt it was because she was afraid to fail and put herself out there.” He brought her an Olympic tape to watch
and “asked her to take a leap of faith.” Shortly after that she took second in nationals. “She understands grit and adversity and not fitting in, which has shaped her life tremendously. She’s a true champion,” he said. After winning several national steeplechase championships for the University of Colorado, Emma turned pro and painstakingly whittled at her time. She took eighth in the 2012 Olympics steeplechase, then climbed into top three by this year’s Olympic Games. Still, she’ll never forget crossing that finish line as a bronze medalist. “To say you’re ranked third in the world is great; but to say you’re an Olympic medalist is still kind of amazing,” she said. Sharing that feat with the family and friends who joined her in Rio prompted “a lot of happy tears.” A few weeks later, she described for some students the act of hoisting the American flag around her shoulders after the race. “I started bawling just talking about it,” she said. “It still feels kind of raw to me.” Speaking with Crested Butte’s youngsters, Emma emphasized the work necessary to be a professional athlete. She talked about “respect, working together for a bigger goal, and learning to be a coachable athlete. That extends beyond sports.” She encouraged the students to take advantage of where they live: “Crested Butte is a paradise. I didn’t realize that until I started traveling around the world racing. I thought Crested Butte was normal: gym class where you ski twice a week, and all the outdoor adventures. It’s not.” After the school presentations, Charlotte said, “Emma helped them understand and appreciate what a gift they have here: the gift of a supportive community, a pristine and healthy lifestyle, quality education and teachers who care so sincerely for what they do.” Though Emma lives in Boulder, Crested Butte still feels like home. She often returns to visit her parents, Bill and Annie, and younger brother Joe. “It will always be a big part of my life; it’s my happy place,” she said. Charming and genuine, Emma has attracted ample media attention, but “superstardom hasn’t gone to her head in any way,” Charlotte said. At Emma’s Brick Oven reception, Charlotte stood in line with her children to say hello and get an autographed photo. “Both of my children feel like Emma is their friend,” she said. “My six-year-old daughter wants to grow up to be a runner and be just like Emma. I’d be the proudest mama in the world if she followed in those footsteps, in any way. Emma is as classy as it gets.”
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Skiing
By Drew Holbrook
masterfully
Murray Banks inspiring his Masters Training Group athletes.
Xavier Fané
Murray Banks and other Masters Training Group coaches help Nordic athletes ski faster and better, “at a higher level of consciousness.” On a typical afternoon, the Nordic trails around Crested Butte host a few dispersed skiers, a couple enjoying a skate, a fat-biker spinning along, a dog on a walk, and perhaps a group of kids playing tag on the tracks. The past couple of winters, though, a new group has descended upon the trails: 20-40 adults skiing en masse. The group, dubbed the Masters Training Group, is a diverse assortment of Crested Butte locals with one common goal: learn to ski faster and more efficiently, together. The Masters Training Group was started a few years ago by avid Nordic skier Murray Banks, who had just moved to Crested Butte from Vermont. He and his wife Jane had been spending winters in Crested Butte, and he wanted to find people to ski with. Murray and friends had created a masters training group in Vermont over two 14
decades ago, since they found it difficult to get motivated to do hard workouts alone. Over time, the group grew from just a handful to more than 70. When Murray brought the concept to Crested Butte, an active town with a world-class trail system, he knew it might be a hit. Nordic skiing (along with swimming) is widely considered to be the most physically demanding, full-body workout. That makes it a perfect fit for Crested Butte, with its long winters and fit people. But the sport is incredibly technically challenging, and technique is the key to skiing efficiently and quickly. When you put Buttians on Nordic skis for the first time, two things tend to happen: they get great exercise, and they flail, hard. Some people are content flailing, and, hey, why not; the harder you flail, the better your workout. But those who want to ski more proficiently often seek out the Masters Training Group. Over the last few years, the group has ballooned to more than 60 people. Murray had already seen his Vermont group expand so much that the coaches had a hard time accommodating everyone’s needs. “What started as a few racers evolved into more people who just wanted to learn how to ski better. The range of ability levels got so big we eventually grew to a coaching staff of five.” Expecting the same to happen in Crested Butte, Murray over
the last three years has added coaches. This winter the group will have four coaches for most sessions, covering novice, intermediate and racing ability levels. Murray, a multi-time World Masters Champion, has taken a break from competition and training to concentrate on coaching the group himself. One member joked, “The coaching in the group has become a lot better since Murray stopped training and started focusing on coaching!” The Masters Training Group meets two days a week in various Crested Butte locations depending on grooming and snow conditions. Athletes alternate skate and classic techniques each session. Fitness is a central component, but there’s always an emphasis on technique. On any given day the participants might ski with only one ski, race around cones, hop, jump, or ski without poles, drills that instill proper movements essential for efficient skiing. Murray’s skiing philosophy reflects his deep roots in the sport; it’s profound, almost spiritual. “People ask me if I ever just go out and ski for fun rather than focusing on technique all the time. But being focused doesn’t have to be arduous or ruin your workout; it’s just that you ski at a higher level of consciousness, which means eventually you ski faster, and eventually you have more fun.” Fun, in fact, is the primary goal. For 15 years in Vermont, Murray taught physical education and coached high school sports with the aim of creating an environment where learning was really fun. For the past 30 years as a professional speaker, delivering keynotes or leadership training to business professionals, he’s had the same goal for his audiences: have a good time while taking away key points for self improvement. In coaching the training group, Murray enjoys seeing the athletes “get it.” They come to the coaches with a genuine interest in skiing better. “I like watching them become more aware of their skiing,” he said. Participants in the training group vary: a World Masters contender, skiers who just want to do the Alley Loop Nordic Marathon without fading, people looking for another way to get fitter and have fun. “There’s one guy who doesn’t show up consistently because he’s choosing between skiing at the resort, backcountry skiing and Nordic skiing. Katie Meyer, who several times placed top ten at the World Masters Championships, credits the training group for improving her technique and helping her make the podium last winter,” Murray said.
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Windows
By Sandy Fails
for peace
Liska Blodgett and Elise Popp (center) with volunteers and peace posters.
With its Elk Avenue posters, the new Peace Museum Colorado promotes peace through storytelling. We think of museums as buildings holding artifacts. While Peace Museum Colorado might some day incorporate walls and objects, for now it is taking a different approach: storytelling. The fledgling organization, based in Crested Butte, is placing posters of “peace heroes” in the windows of Elk Avenue businesses. Each poster bears the photo of a selected peace hero, local to international, historic to current, plus a brief story about how that person promoted peace. That includes improving the conditions (e.g. environmental, economic and social) that allow peace to flourish. Peace Museum Colorado founder Liska Blodgett said the posters convey the message: “We are a community of peace-thinkers.” She also hopes Elk Avenue passersby will read the stories and ask themselves, “What can I do for peace today?” Peace Museum Colorado is “truly a startup nonprofit,” said Executive Director Elise Popp, who earned her masters degree in peace and conflict studies at Rutgers after studying politics and government at Western State Colorado University (WSCU). Started in July, the organization is applying for official nonprofit status. The Crested Butte Mountain Heritage Museum this summer hosted the peace heroes exhibit, and now the Peace Museum is seeking its own home base. This summer volunteers staged a Peace Walk as part of Crested 16
Butte’s July 4th parade and distributed more than 50 posters. Popp is seeking interns for next summer: graduate students and undergrads to “research, organize and educate.” The museum also needs donations and the help of artists, historians, grant writers and accountants, she said. Local Peace Museum activities could include more peace walks, presentations and education efforts, art projects, a conflict mediation resource, and further recognition of people and businesses whose efforts encourage peace. Blodgett also hopes to spread peace-related exhibits to museums throughout Colorado’s towns. Popp and Blodgett have begun to network with entities such as WSCU, the International Network of Museums for Peace, Peace Studies at University of Colorado Boulder, and the World Peace Games. Blodgett, a longtime Crested Butte second homeowner who now lives here full time, several years ago started Peace Museum Vienna. Having lived in or traveled to 50 countries and learned eight languages, she was struck by the similarities and basic goodness of most people around the world. Wars, she noted, are started by governments and the military-industrial complex. A peace museum might seem more appropriate in Vienna than in Crested Butte. But Popp pointed out that peace and conflict happen even among hikers and bikers, environmentalists, miners, corporations, ranchers, immigrants and students. In telling the Wild West stories of Colorado, why not also emphasize the people who bettered their communities through peaceful solutions? As one volunteer said, “What we memorialize is what we give value to for future generations.”
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Science where
By George Sibley
the water starts
Photos Petar Dopchev
In September, scientists released red dye into the East River near Gothic to study how groundwater enters the river downstream.
To better predict downstream water supply, a comprehensive East River study will trace the intricate journey of moisture from snow to stream. When streams turn a strange color, it usually means something bad happened upstream – a major leak from an abandoned mine or a landslide. But when a stretch of the East River near Crested Butte Mountain turned red for a day in September, it was no disaster; it was part of a major new study that may eventually help water managers in the arid West deal with diminishing water supplies and ever-growing demands. Our East and Slate rivers are high tributaries in the collection zone of the Colorado River. In this zone, most of the river’s water accumulates as a winter snowpack that melts in the spring and either sinks into the ground or runs off in hundreds of little streams that flow together into ever-larger streams. Crested Butte sits on the lower edge of that collection zone, one of the first places to begin drawing on the Colorado River water supply for human uses. Ultimately, the river supplies some or all of the water needs for around 40 million of us, and it irrigates five million acres of the land that feeds us – while also providing some of the finest whitewater and flatwater recreation on the continent. So what happens with the water, in both its frozen and liquid 18
forms, in the mountains above Crested Butte is obviously important to the entire river basin (and its numerous out-of-basin extensions). As the demand for water grows with the population, those who manage the myriad public and private utilities, irrigation systems and recreational industries throughout the basin need an increasingly high degree of predictability for the amount of water that will be available. In recent decades, however, the historical record relating snowpacks and runoff flows no longer provides a dependable level of predictability. The relationship appears to be shifting between the water content in the snowpack and the amount of water that eventually makes it to users and reservoirs. Presumably this is due at least in part to climate changes
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associated with increasing “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere, causing warmer temperatures that result in an earlier onset of snowmelt, runoffs peaking sooner, and more evaporation, transpiration and sublimation losses. But the need for accurate water supply information no longer affords time for collecting decades of new data to adjust the historical record – which may prove to be a moving target in any case as the greenhouse gas levels continue to rise. More dynamic and accurate tools are needed for predicting downstream water supplies from upstream precipitation measures. This thinking led to the headwaters study just underway in our East River watershed. Utilizing the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL) in Gothic as a “research platform,” scientists associated with the prestigious Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory from California will conduct a multi-year, multi-disciplinary, multi-milliondollar study of “Watershed Function” in the upper East River. The study, according to its Colorado coordinator, Dr. Kenneth Williams of Carbondale, encompasses just about everything connected to the waters that fall on the upper East River watershed.
And as Congressman Wayne Aspinall used to say, “Touch water, and you touch all.” Researchers, Williams said, will examine in depth “the flow and flux of water in everything from bedrock to tree canopy.” The overarching question for the Watershed Function study is: how do mountainous watersheds retain and release water, nutrients, carbon and metals? Addressing that and related questions for this “scientific focus area” will bring together hydrologists focusing on the interactions between water and mountain geologies; ecohydrologists and biologists exploring the relationships between water and the movement of nutrients for and to plants; and biogeochemists examining the cycling of carbon, nitrogen and metallic minerals within the hydrological cycle. One local scientist, Dr. Rosemary Carroll, works on this project. A hydrologist with the Nevada-based Desert Research Institute, Carroll “commutes electronically” from Crested Butte, where she lives with her partner Torrey Carroll, a valley native, and their two sons. She will manage a network of water-gauging stations for the East River study, gathering data on the interactions
between surface water and groundwater as the water moves from snow to stream. She’s also conducting a separate but related study on “the residence time of surface and ground water in mountain watersheds,” with funding from the U.S. Geological Survey. Dr. Ian Billick, director of RMBL, noted the importance of the Gothic facilities as a magnet for such studies – “a research platform providing logistical support, access to lab space, and accumulated knowledge of the mountain watershed region” as a result of nearly 90 years of longitudinal research. Williams sees the forecasting challenge as the study’s prime interest; he believes that findings about watershed functions in the East River scientific focus area can be generalized and adapted in other mountain snowpack-dominated river systems. Dr. Gary Geernaert of the U.S. Department of Energy also sees utility to downstream water users as a critical metric for the project’s success. Oh – and the red-dyed river? It was a creative experiment to look for undyed groundwater entering the river. The river is just where water ends up in a watershed; this study will explore the whole adventure of the watershed’s water.
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The water
By Sandy Fails
bearer
Tatton Jacob
Crested Butte entrepreneur Taryn Jacob wants her Nada Bottle to carry healthy water for her fellow adventurers and for her global neighbors.
causes of death in the world is bad water,” she said. Years later in Crested Butte, after her dog had chewed up a fourth Platypus water bottle, she and her boyfriend, engineer Andrew McKee, started imagining the next generation of collapsible water containers. Andrew began working on designs and materials. After some kitchen experiments with nylon sheets and an iron, they came up with a tough (dog-resistant), lightweight prototype. Andrew honed in on a military-grade Cordura nylon exterior and a lid attached by a “survival strap” — a paracord (used in parachuting) that can be unraveled to a long, multi-purpose cord. The nylon cover Taryn Jacob is an entrepreneur with a cause. She and friends protects the BPA-free plastic liner from damage by the sun. The nylon started their business, Nada Bottle, to raise money to bring clean also works well for screen-printing designs, team mascots and logos. water to people in need. She’s doing that by giving travelers and outdoorspeople an innovative collapsible container to carry water on Friend Jordan Mercer joined the enterprise, and Nada Bottle was born. their ventures. Taryn, now 27, has itched to travel since she was a Kansas Focused on the global need for clean water, Taryn insisted that youngster with a huge map of Africa on her wall. So she used her Nada Bottle be “more of a social mission.” The company committed jobs to see the world: via plane as a flight attendant, and by train as that for each water bottle sold, it would donate a water filter to a a backstage technician for the Ringling Brothers circus. She learned disadvantaged community. to travel on her own “on the smallest budget possible,” sometimes With a product and a mission, the friends tackled fundraising, backpacking internationally for three months at a time. Almost outreach and preliminary manufacturing research. Via Kickstarter everywhere, she found clean water was an issue. “One of the leading they raised $30,000 and got orders for 1,500 water bottles. But the 22
next hurdle loomed huge. “We were so naïve about the manufacturing,” Taryn said. The type of nylon they wanted wasn’t being made or sewn in the U.S., so they resorted to a Chinese manufacturer. Next they discovered the minimum order for the product they wanted was a whopping 16,000 bottles, which required renewed fundraising and additional debt. Then came communication issues, hassles and delays. “We’re low priority because we’re small,” Taryn said. “Everything takes three tries. We insist on quality, and they’re not used to that. Each step takes a couple of months. Now we’re waiting another 30 days for ocean freight. I have to remind myself all the time to be patient.” Taryn expects the first shipment of Nada Bottles to arrive by early winter. After filling the Kickstarter orders, the company will market the bottles online (nadabottle.com) and pitch them to large retailers like REI and Cabela’s. For the initial Kickstarter orders, Taryn partnered with a nonprofit to provide Sawyer water filters to impoverished people in Honduras. She is now working with Missouri-based World Serve, which will use Nada Bottle funds to build community water wells in Tanzania, Africa. Taryn and Andrew use Crested Butte as their home base and the operations center for Nada Bottle. But they’ll store the containers at her family’s warehouse in Kansas. In addition to overseeing Nada Bottle, Tayrn runs a children’s performing arts camp. Even with frustrations and delays in getting a marketable product, Taryn has ambitions for Nada Bottle. Within a few years she hopes the business will be large and solid enough to diversify its containers, offering various designs, sizes and features like water filter attachments. “We’re still in the seed stage, but we’re about to take off,” she said. It’s been a long path from studying the map of Africa on her wall as a child to knowing she’s helping some people there drink safe, healthy water. “To keep going, I have to remember why I’m doing this: for clean water,” Taryn said. “To accomplish that, I have to have a good product and a successful business.”
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Keller Williams Realty, Inc. is a real estate franchise company. Each Keller Williams office is independently owned and operated. Keller Williams Realty, Inc. is an Equal Opportunity Employer and supports the Fair Housing Act.
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A building of
By Sandra Cortner
many stories
Photos Sandra Cortner
Tony Mihelich in the Conoco days, 1982. Right: Glo Cunningham greets museum visitors, 2016.
People still share their memories at the Crested Butte Mountain Heritage Museum, just as old-timers once told tales around its potbelly stove. As a volunteer docent at the Crested Butte Mountain Heritage Museum, I greet visitors, answer questions and explain a bit of the history of the museum. I tell our guests why it’s located in an old blacksmith/hardware/gas station dating from 1883. Sometimes I see them looking at the wall of black-and-white photo portraits I took of the old-timers in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s, and I’ll ask if they know any of them. I’m often delighted by the stories I hear. One Thursday, I came in a couple of minutes late for my shift to find a petite woman in her sixties with blue eyes and blond hair gazing at the photos and excitedly pointing out people to her teenaged sons. Turning to me, she began to ask of the various individuals, “Did you know…” I assured her I knew every one of them. Then her eyes filled with tears, and she told me some of her story. “I’m Jennifer Carpenter. We lived up at the corner of First Street — seven of us kids. My dad, Tim Burns, helped build the ski area. Is Marie Campbell with the quilts still right next door?” She looked out the window above Tony Mihelich’s old rolltop desk. Instead of finding Marie’s small log cabin, she glimpsed the yellow side of a real estate office. 24
“And remember all the old guys used to sit in here by the potbelly?” she asked, then added, “We left in 1982, and this is the first time I’ve been back.” Her sons had wandered away, so she and I exchanged more memories. She seemed genuinely touched to find someone who shared her experiences in a town she obviously loved and missed. When I showed her my book, Crested Butte Stories…Through my Lens, she turned the pages, stroking the faces printed there. She asked me to sign the book for her mother, Jacque Carpenter, and then pulled me outside to take a photo of us with Crested Butte Mountain as a backdrop. Gathering her sons, she left, promising to return. By this time, Glo Cunningham had finished guiding her historic home tour, and a man on the tour approached. “This is the fourth time
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I’ve been here. I live in Tulsa, and I read about Crested Butte and the museum in a bike magazine. I so wish I could live here,” he said. Some visitors linger. Others walk in and out. He was a lingerer, as if reluctant to leave his morning immersed in Crested Butte history. For a couple of visitors, their noses made the connections. One man looked at Tony’s leftover hardware stock on the shelves — now a museum display, despite the occasional requests from visitors to buy a jar of salmon eggs or the fishing waders. “I used to sell the same stuff when I worked in my dad’s store. I could smell the oiled floors from right outside your front door. Same as my dad’s place,” he said. A young woman studying an interior photo of a town grocery store, taken in the early 1900s, commented, “My grandparents had a store just like that. Just seeing the picture, I can smell the pickle barrels and the feed grain.” Just before I left, a fourth-generation resident of town stopped by to say hello to a fellow docent whose shift I was taking. We chatted about his mother Mary. “She was a friend to all,” he said, and then related the story of a ski instructor’s wife, new in town, who spoke no English. “My mother saw her walking by and invited her in for tea almost every day. They visited, neither speaking the other’s language. Everyone loved my mother.” Most people think of a museum as a house of artifacts, dates and old photographs, many with unidentified people. For me, our museum is more. Here, people feel comfortable telling their stories of the past. I’ve attended evenings where speakers ranged from ski patrolmen, reminiscing and laughing about early ski area days, to a fifth-generation Crested Butte friend telling us about her youth, when she and her dad delivered milk from his dairy by horse-drawn sled. “We looked forward to the arrival of the summer people. The girls from Texas and Oklahoma would show us all the latest in fashions,” she said with a grin. When I arrived in Crested Butte in the 1960s, the “Hardware” or “Tony’s” as we called it, was a centerpiece of a town whose population had been decimated by the closure of the coal mines. Little about the building has changed since Jennifer Carpenter and I saw the old-timers shooting the breeze around the potbelly or relaxing on the bench outside. We are still trading stories. Join us. Sandra Cortner is the author of two books: Crested Butte Stories…Through My Lens and Crested Butte…Love at First Sight.
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Raising funds to preserve a community landmark The Crested Butte Mountain Heritage Museum has launched a campaign to raise $400,000 to rehabilitate portions of its historic building. The structure, more than a century old, housed Tony Mihelich’s Crested Butte Conoco and Hardware from 1939 until 1996 and then the museum beginning in 2003. Shelley Popke, the museum’s executive director, said the board hopes to be awarded a $200,000 grant from the State Historical Fund; that decision should be made by February 2017. “If that’s successful, we’ll need to match 25% of the total project budget—about $80,000—for phase one and $25,000 for phase two. We’ll also try to raise $100,000 for a building maintenance fund. We need to be proactive in taking care of this old structure,” she explained. Although a renovation between 2001 and 2003 got the museum up and running, the building continually needs work. If the funding is secured, the first phase, beginning in the spring of 2017, will include replacing the roof; rehabilitating the exterior siding and trim (mitigating for lead paint during the process); replacing the water heater, furnace and vent piping material; adding insulation; dealing with the false front cornice; and rehabilitating the front door. “Monitors will be installed to measure movement in the foundation so it can be addressed proactively,” added Shelley. Phase two will deal with the doors, windows and floors. The projected completion date is 2018, the 15th anniversary of the museum in its current location. Shelley explained that to preserve the building’s historic character, the rehabilitation has to mimic the old look with new materials. The museum board will reach out to the community to help with the project and seek other grants as well. Key to the State Historic Fund grants is demonstrating the importance of the
museum to the community and the support, financial and otherwise, of the townspeople. In 2015, 46,123 people visited the museum, and it has hosted speakers, dinners, slide shows, reunions, book signings and other events. Anyone wishing to donate funds should contact Shelley at the museum at Fourth Street and Elk Avenue or call 970349-1880.
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LAUGHTER, HUGS, FEAR AND AWE A CRESTED BUTTE MILLENNIAL PONDERS HOW ADVENTURE SHAPES US, WHETHER THAT MEANS RISKY FEATS, DISTANT TRAVELS OR BACKYARD CAMPOUTS. BY CHRIS GARREN “A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes Biking through a remote part of Iceland, I found myself chilled to the bone from days of torrential rain, and exhausted from gale-force winds and steep mountain passes. When I saw a sheep lying next to the road, it looked like a wool blanket on legs. In all seriousness, I pondered, “Would that sheep let me cuddle it for a few minutes to warm up?” A few days later, I got a ride to the coast with friendly locals and watched hundreds of puffins flying in to nest. I love both kinds of adventuring: circumstances that put me near my limit and also small, unique moments that stir a sense of awe. In modern society, the word “extreme” is used for anything from B.A.S.E. jumping to potato chip flavors. “Extreme” and “epic” have been diluted and beaten into
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submission by advertisers and social media. I briefly lamented that the same fate had befallen “adventure.” We’ve strayed from its definition as “a bold, usually risky undertaking or hazardous action of uncertain outcome.” Shouldn’t it hold prestige and exclusivity, reserved for crazy feats of daring and suffering at the edge of possibility? Well, maybe not. The word “adventure” conjures images of the great seekers and explorers of times past; the intrepid few who pushed the boundaries in their disciplines. But it also makes me smile. Plenty of my escapades have involved elements of fear and the unknown, but I also recall experiences that were simply fun and wondrous: wandering in the mountains with friends, marveling at new cities and countries, and immersing in unfamiliar cultures. I’m a millennial who lives in Crested Butte, my hometown. I moved back because
Chris Garren in the Black Canyon.
Petar Dopchev
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a sense of liveliness and activeness pervades the culture here. Camaraderie and growth through adventures are intrinsic in the community’s values. Like many here, I climb, mountaineer, bike, run, travel and anything else that captivates me. I’ve met pain, frustration and discomfort, but any struggles have been matched by tremendous gifts and opportunities to learn. Many of us puzzle over how to find contentment and fulfillment in our lives. The work of Cornell psychologist Thomas 34
Gilovich offers some insight. He and his colleagues have shown that experiences are far more important than material possessions in determining happiness. Anticipating new experiences excites us, the experiences themselves help us live in the moment and connect with others, and reflecting on past experiences brings a degree of lasting joy. In contrast, through a process known as “hedonistic adaptation” we quickly grow accustomed to material purchases, and their value to our happiness is short-lived. Soon,
we’re seeking something newer or envying what others possess. We weigh material wealth largely in comparison to others. Fortunately, we tend to judge experiences on their own merit rather than on if we’re successfully outdoing our peers. Society is catching onto the value of exploring versus accumulating. A Harris study found that 78% of millennials would rather spend money on a new experience than on buying a desirable item. This preference is rippling through other
Petar Dopchev
Trent Bona
generations, too. This isn’t to say we’ll never covet the exploits of others or that wanderlust won’t return quickly after a trip. What’s clear is that prioritizing happiness through experiences is a savvy plan. This applies to seeing concerts, bungy jumping, taking a cooking class or any venture you can dream up. Adventure is important not only for individuals but also for our culture as a whole. We’re bombarded with a dissonant mix of positive and negative messages. We
Petar Dopchev
see bloodshed, bigotry and fear-mongering. In a world marred by inequality and injustice, it’s easy to view life as a battleground. The answer isn’t to be apathetic or uninformed, but seeing only the worst leads to distrust and the stifling of love. Adventure can be a strong antidote to negativity. It can help cure irrational fear, mind-numbing repetition and close-mindedness. For me, it’s one of the most effective pathways to seeing beauty in the world. I’ve seen kids living on the streets
in Nepal, burning trash for warmth, and refugees in Turkey running from wartorn Syria. But I’ve also been amazed by kindness and beauty. Peace signs flashed out of passing car windows brightened many days bike touring. In Glacier National Park, a family heard that my friend and I were biking across the U.S. They eyed our unimpressive ramen noodle meal and promptly went off to catch us fresh fish for dinner. On a dark summit in Mexico, I looked out at the tiny twinkling of city 35
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lights over 17,000 feet below and the curvature of the earth as the first hint of sunrise lit the horizon. Every view in nature, piece of architecture in a new city or story heard around a campfire is an invitation to positivity. As our minds are “stretched by new experience,” we create social change. We’re tapping into old wisdoms, opening to new ideas and realizing our potential as empowered individuals. Consumers are influencing the market to provide organic goods and products made with ethical labor. Yoga, alternative healing and mindfulness practices are becoming more mainstream. I see this as part of the same shift toward nurturing ourselves while being conscientious and giving. Adventure also bonds us to friends and family through shared, meaningful experiences. I’ve given hugs at the top of a peak or shared a silent look that spoke volumes on a hillside exploding with wildflowers. Far from our comfort zones, we rely on each other and learn to trust. Adventuring, I’ve seen my friends at their best and worst, and they’ve witnessed the same in me. This raw version of people, away from traditional social veils, is refreshingly genuine. For me, bonds formed in the mountains or on the road are some of the strongest and most enduring. Adventure can happen anywhere
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but often involves the outdoors. Just as it creates interpersonal connectedness, at its best it also unites us with the earth. In Contact, Jeffrey McCarthy tracks our evolving relationship with the environment through the history of mountaineering literature. First, we “conquered” mountains through large-scale assaults and tactics that blighted the environment. As stories of magical, far-off lands spread, we learned to be “caretakers,” but nature was still viewed as a separate entity. Finally, we became “connected,” both protecting the environment and seeing it as part of us, something within us and vital to our livelihood. This final phase gives me hope for what can happen as more individuals respectfully explore their natural surroundings. This closeness with nature also brings us more into harmony with ourselves. The Japanese have the concept of Shinrin-yoku, or “forest bathing.” The goal is essentially to walk leisurely and soak in the healing benefits of natural areas. Researchers in Japan and South Korea have noted an impressive array of health benefits stemming from time spent in nature, including improved immune system functioning, lowered stress, improved mood, increased energy levels and better sleep. Forms of forest therapy have become a staple of Japanese medicine and something many of us seek intuitively. Fun
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hikes and rambles can make us happier and healthier. As John Muir wrote, “Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home. Wilderness is a necessity.” Many people, especially Crested Buttians, thrive on bold and ambitious undertakings. Often we learn the most about ourselves when our mettle is tested and we’re near our limits. Spending hours in the vertical realm climbing, shivering in subzero temperatures and slogging through deep snow at odd hours of the night all promote and require a strong sense of self, absolute honesty about your abilities and intentions, and profound connections between those who share such trials by fire. Intense experiences can cut like a scalpel through ego, self-centeredness and a tendency to place blame on others. The best result is confidence tempered by humility. Being in severe situations forcefully demands the attention of your mind and body, like a form of meditation. The tasks at hand require you to be engaged in the present, which elicits the coveted sense of “feeling truly alive.” But a similar feeling can come from any experience that is unique and enchanting. Adventure can be something lighter, something that meshes with your own risk tolerance and appetite for discomfort. If you prefer your adventures to induce joy and random fits of laughter rather than a sense of danger, then go forth and be silly. Your brand of adventuring might also depend on your means and location. The term “microadventure” was coined by British author Alastair Humphreys. It refers to an overnight, outdoor adventure that is “small and achievable, for normal people with real lives.” The New York Times described a microadventure as “short, perspectiveshifting bursts of travel closer to home, inspiring followers to pitch a tent in nearby woods, explore their city by moonlight, or hold a family slumber party in the backyard.” Grand, expensive undertakings aren’t feasible for many, but almost all of us can explore a new trail, compete in a race or learn a new skill. Being a Crested Butte millennial has taught me that we should do whatever we can, to experience any level of adventure we choose and do it with passion and heart. We may cringe at some of the contexts in which we hear the word “adventure,” but its overuse could be a positive sign for our world. Perhaps we will be better for it.
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FOR 20 YEARS, CRESTED BUTTE’S HANDBELL CHOIR HAS CREATED BEAUTIFUL MUSIC – FROM HANDEL TO LADY GAGA – AND BUILT SOUND FRIENDSHIPS. By Joanne Reynolds Photos by Lydia Stern Director Tina Kempin hoists a low-pitched bell. 40
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andbells are curious instruments. Born centuries ago to attract attention or convey a message when rung individually, the bells evolved to be played together to create beautiful music. The history of Crested Butte’s handbell choir is much more recent. Since its founding in 1996, the bell choir has provided music at Union Congregational Church (UCC) in worship, for semi-annual concerts of both religious and secular music, and at weddings and funerals. The bells have also moved beyond the church for outdoor Christmastime offerings and for Hospice’s annual community memorials. “This is not your grandma’s bell choir,” said Director Tina Kempin, pointing to the secular repertory heard during the choir’s annual summer concerts. These include rock standards by Led Zepplin, Lady Gaga, Adele and Bill Haley. For Kempin, these pieces keep the choir interesting and interested. While their outward role is to create lovely music, these ancient-yet-modern musical instruments have served a deeper purpose in Crested Butte by bonding the people who gather to play them. Laura Meredith, a founding member who still plays with the choir, said, “I love all the personalities of the women in the choir who are not my everyday friends. They bring such different perspectives with them. We are supportive of each other in so many ways – within and outside of bells.” That support has carried choir members through tough times brought on by serious illness, divorce, family deaths, miscarriages and whole-house remodels. But it has also provided shared joy in weddings, births and the completion of whole-house remodels. About ten years ago, two members brought their babies to practice sessions. Various bell players took turns rocking the infants’ carriers with their feet as they rang bells with their hands. That deep bond of friendship was not on the mind of founder Marilyn Mears 20 years ago when she had her first “bell encounter” and was so smitten by their sounds that she decided to start a bell choir. Mears had just moved back to Crested Butte after a sojourn in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, resuming her position as music director at the UCC. She had that “encounter”
Founder Marilyn Mears with the first bell choir members in 1996.
while visiting family in Oklahoma. “I couldn’t get it off my mind,” she recalled. There were serious obstacles to having a bell choir at the UCC: Mears did not know how to ring a handbell; she needed to find a set of bells to ring; she had to learn how to direct a bell choir; and she had to find people who would play them with her. But she managed to overcome all of these issues by Christmas of that year. “I can’t recall how I found out that Oh Be Joyful Baptist Church had two octaves of bells. They’d been there for many years and never much been used. So I called (then Pastor) Jim Kunes, and he let me bring them to Union,” she said. The one man and eight women who formed the original choir had their debut at the Christmas Eve services. Mears, concerned about the group’s playing, asked a friend to listen to them rehearse before the service. The choir played through a simple arrangement of “Silent Night” that they had been practicing for a few weeks. The woman listened and then said, “That was really pretty. What was it?” Lynn Jagaciewski, one of the original choir members who’s also still part of the group, said that for her, the bell choir is a small family within the church family within a larger community family. “I love the friendship as well as the challenges. And there are challenges.” For Reggie Masters, another continuing original member, the challenges include learning to trust the players immediately
around her. “Often we rely on hearing what the next person is playing as a mark for where we are in the music. If she’s off, it can get me off.” As Meredith said, “It’s not just your hands, it’s everyone’s. Everyone’s hand holds a note, so it all has to come together at the same time.” Unlike with many other musical instruments—think strings or horns—it’s quite simple to produce a clear note with a handbell. But they are difficult to play as an ensemble because each ringer is assigned a very narrow range of notes—from two to eight. Each individual bell sounds its specific pitch. So the musicians must ring their bells in rhythm at precisely the right time. With a brisk piece, such as the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s “Messiah” (which the UCC choir plays every Easter), a note rung a fraction of a beat too early or too late ruins the flow of the music. Counting beats is critical. A simple arrangement becomes a sonic train wreck when players lose track of where they are in the music. As with any other musical ensemble, there are issues beyond ringing the right bell at the right time. These come under the heading of musicality: practices such as playing loud or soft, keeping up with changes in beat or tempo, and using various ringing techniques, all of which are written into the music. That original UCC bell choir started with two octaves of bells and level-one music, meaning the players had fewer bells to keep track of and they played only easy 41
Mandy Sciortino and Laura Meredith during a 2015 Christmas concert.
arrangements. Over the past two decades, the borrowed bells have been returned to Oh Be Joyful and replaced with Union’s own, expanding to four octaves. Three of the players—Sue Sweetra, Mandy Sciortino and Meredith—use an advanced technique known as four-in-hand, in which they play the small, high-pitched bells with two in each hand. At the other end of the size spectrum, a raft of the low-pitch bells are rung by two women, Lucy Hecker playing with either Mears or Kempin. The lowest pitched bell, a C two octaves below middle C, is so big that it is hefted with both of the ringer’s hands. In addition to hoisting the bells, the ringers also occasionally play hand chimes within the pieces, sometimes ringing a bell with one hand and a chime with the other, or putting down one instrument to pick up a third, sounding it and then grabbing a fourth in quick succession. These changes can occur with separate hands at different times. The players’ bell-ringing and musical skills vary widely; women who read music but had no prior bell experience play alongside professionals like Sweetra, who can perform solo pieces written for two-dozen bells. Of those nine original players, four are still with the bell choir: Meredith, Masters,
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JC Leacock Photo
Jagaciewski and Candy Shepherd. “This is a wonderfully loyal group of people,” Mears said, noting that people have left the bell choir only when they’ve moved away. Mears is not immune to the lure of relocation. After 20 years of directing and playing with the UCC bell choir, she recently moved to Santa Fe with the thought of, perhaps, forming another bell choir. Without Mears, the current bell choir is directed by Kempin and includes those mentioned earlier plus Mary Toole, Stephanie Juneau and Joelle Haley. Haley, one of the choir’s newest and youngest members, said the combination of Mears’ sweetness and Kempin’s diligence kept her coming back. “Bottom line: it’s fun. And I do especially like our outside social times, like the parties we have at Christmas.” Meredith noted that like many of the choir members, she joined because she missed making music, but she gets far more out of it than that. “Yes, there are the friendships which are so important, but there’s more. You come here and you play the music and it’s an escape from your daily life. You can’t think about those challenges when you’re focused on the music, so it’s also about the beautiful escape into the music.”
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How to ring a bell
Ringing a handbell is not limited to making it sound with a flick of the wrist. Here’s a sampling of other playing techniques: • circle ringing, in which the bell is twirled around in the air after it’s rung;
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• malleting, in which the bell is either held or left on the table and struck with a stick that has a round, soft head; • marteliato, otherwise known as mart, in which the bell is rung by striking it against the padded bell table, or rung in that way and then lifted off the table to sound; • tower ringing, in which the ringers step back from the table to swing the bell behind them as it’s ringing; • shaking, in which the bells are shaken vigorously to produce a more percussive sound. Some professional choirs develop their own advanced techniques in which they ring bells with everything from their shoes to the hard handles of the bells themselves or toss them to one another. Handlers always wear gloves when touching the bells, as skin oils can coat their surfaces, interfering with the quality of the pitch and tone.
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From whence they came
Handbells date back to ancient religious ceremonies and can be found in cultures around the globe. These bells, usually rung one at a time, were used to mark passages in ceremonies or to attract attention. Town criers from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century used them to gather crowds to hear news announcements. In the late 18th century, they began to be used together by change-ringers in the British Isles. The players could use the much quieter handbells to rehearse indoors before ringing the multiple church steeple bells sounding across the countryside in the various patterns of change-ringing. It soon followed that the number of pitches, or notes, of these rehearsal bells was increased in order for an ensemble of players to provide musical offerings within the church during worship services. Thus was born the modern handbell choir.
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Maggie Dethloff
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310 elk avenue crested butte 970 349 2107 milkywayboutique.com
WINTER SEASON Art Walks 5pm to 8pm
Don’t be surprised to find the art you were looking for here in Crested Butte. Internationally recognized artists in every medium can be found here. Officially one of Colorado’s Creative Districts, tell your friends you found your art in… Crested Butte!
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The map shows downtown galleries that participate in this winters Art Walks. Of course the galleries are open on a daily basis. Complete your experience with a tour of the galleries.
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Thursday, December 29th Saturday, January 14th Saturday, February 18th Friday-Saturday, March 17-18 1
Gallery Kasala 111 Elk
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Art Studio of the Center for the Arts / 111 Elk
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The Grubstake Gallery / 229 Elk
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Zacchariah Zipp & Co. / 317 Elk
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J.C. Leacock Gallery / 429 Elk
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Red Line Gallery / 429 Elk
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Gallery 3 / 3rd & Elk
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River Light Art Gallery / 318 Elk
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Oh Be Joyful Gallery / 409 3rd
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John Ingham Fine Art Gallery / 403 3rd
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Paragon Gallery / 132 Elk
artistsofcrestedbutte.org
Rescuers near a building crushed by the 1884 Woodstock avalanche.
By Brian Levine
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Hauling out the bodies of avalanche victims.
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The train halted by the Woodstock snow slide.
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t was a necessity back then, when the snow piled so deep that trains stalled in icy rock cuts, horses struggled to push forward, and life could easily be lost. In the early 1880s, snowshoeing – skiing, as it’s known today – wasn’t mere pastime or sport; it meant survival in the extreme winters of Colorado’s Elk Mountain wilderness. Of this I’m confident…from firsthand experience. One incident in particular comes to mind, from early March 1884. The sky hung dense with sheets of heavy white cotton. Snow fell in blustery waves. Sound crunched like brittle glass in a hollow box. And time passed like isolated moments along a railroad track. Despite the hazardous snowstorm, my mind remained clear, focused on printing the pictures I’d just taken of the Woodstock disaster. You see, I’m a photographer. I own Blacklidge’s Gallery in the town of Crested Butte. Been there since 1881, lured by an old friend, John Phillips from the Hardscrabble Mining District, and his praise for the opportunities in the Gunnison country. Phillips is editor of the Elk Mountain Pilot 48
and a fellow Snowshoe Club member. Phillips accompanied me on the venture where we encountered the deadly Woodstock avalanche, which could easily have killed us as well. We undertook what we expected to be a routine trip for Aaron Slaght, owner of the Michigan and Colorado Mining Company. Slaght wanted winter photos of the Silver Islet Mine in the Quartz Creek District, a mile outside of Pitkin -- to show investors the property’s accessibility from the nearest Denver, South Park & Pacific (D, SP & P) railhead. Slaght commissioned a special railcar to take us from Crested Butte to Pitkin, the same one William Jackson had used for his photographic work. When the train left Crested Butte, snow was already making transport problematic. By the time we arrived in Pitkin, we were told two engines would be needed to get us up to the Palisades and on through the Alpine Tunnel. That got our attention because after the Silver Islet business, we were scheduled to meet John Kelly in St. Elmo, on the other side of the Continental Divide. Kelly had offered a good sum for a
booster article on the Mary Murphy Mine, and Phillips needed that income to keep the Pilot going. But we were tethered to the railroad’s timetable and had to make quick work of our snowshoeing to the Silver Islet and back. We worried about snow conditions. Our hardwood snowshoes had already been bees-waxed and were ready for use. Mine measured 11 feet long and four inches wide under foot. They tapered toward both front and back, with tips bent upwards five inches. Leather straps secured toes and dorsals, leaving heels free and enabling Norwegianstyled telemark turns. The optimum condition for our snowshoes was hard-crust. It had to support a man’s weight; otherwise, we’d just break through to soft snow. Nighttime would’ve been a better time for us to go, but our schedule didn’t allow this. So, with Phillips on his 12foot snowshoes, Slaght on his fourteeners, and me towing a sled full of photographic equipment, we headed out to Silver Islet Mountain. We made good time because there was hard-pack beneath the powder and managed the trek without a single broken
strap. Once there, I took seven images while Phillips learned about the Silver Islet’s 350foot shaft, its three levels and impressive production record. Then we had to rush back. On Pitkin’s outskirts, we heard the train steaming up, its whistle echoing like panes of shattering glass. We sped up our legexhausting pace to meet it. Once inside the railcar, I chemically fixed the glass-plate images, and then made albumen prints. Phillips headed to the passenger car to interview several mining men who’d recently snowshoed from the town of White Pine, in the Tomichi Mining District. They were in high spirits about the May-Mazeppa Mine, having recently signed a bond and lease for the property. Phillips gleefully got the story before the White Pine Cone and the Gunnison Daily Review. Meantime, the train struggled up the snow-laden tracks, rotary plow straining and creaking, shoving heavy, icy masses aside. I heard the battle in grinding gears and castiron wheels. The crew heaved anthracite coal into engine furnaces, but they’d hit top capacity. Still, the train pushed on and finally crawled into Woodstock Station. There the train halted to take on water. Outside, sound vibrated and rumbled through mountain scenery. Several passengers disembarked and trudged through high drifts to Doyle’s Boardinghouse. The cheerful May-Mazeppa lessees slogged on farther to Royegno’s Saloon. Phillips and I, on an engineer’s recommendation, ate at Doyle’s. The place was more shack than restaurant, but we found the hostess and her family delightful. Seven served us: Mrs. Doyle; Martin, 23; Andrew, 19; Katie, 18; Marcelles, 14; Maggie, 12; and Christopher, 10 – variously bringing out tablecloth, silverware, plates, napkins and coffee mugs. All very eager to please; a most enjoyable experience. But soon the train was ready to go. We paid our bill and stepped out into the mounting snow. Again, we heard that noise of breaking glass as we pushed through the winter terrain. I stopped briefly and looked about at Woodstock’s buildings. They stood like phantoms burdened with snow in an over-developed photo. I hadn’t time to photograph the scene; the train had to reach the Alpine Tunnel before it was closed. I believe it was just before 6 p.m. when the train rounded a switchback above Missouri Gulch. There was a brief opening between roiling sheets of heavy snow. In 49
Snowshoers beneath the path of the avalanche, April 1884.
the distance below was Woodstock, with its wooden water tank, small railroad station, ramshackle boardinghouse, saloon and scattering of miners’ cabins. The scene appeared tranquil, almost idyllic. Then suddenly, the train jolted, jarred and stopped. It was stuck in a rock-cut packed with dense snow. Faces populated railcar windows. Here we were, just around 11,000 feet, and trapped. Worry transmuted into horror as an enormous, and expanding, snow mass at the top of Missouri Gulch gained an electromagnetic intensity. It billowed outward in great rounded clouds, then rushed downhill at terrifying speed. Thousands upon thousands of tons swept away huge boulders and large swathes of spruce and evergreens. Cold air exploded like millions of breaking bottles. Below, directly in the avalanche’s deadly path, lay Woodstock Station. Shock leadened our reactions. Then Phillips, with some passengers from Pitkin, strapped on their snowshoes and fought 50
their way down through the precarious terrain. It took me a bit longer as I loaded my Scovill view camera, undeveloped glass-plates and chemicals onto a sled. At a frightening speed, I navigated down through the debris-laden snow. Others followed. The avalanche, ironically, had halted right atop Woodstock. A strange, crisp and eerie silence enshrouded the area, as if we were standing on a forgotten burial ground. We started digging wherever we believed there was a structure. We dug, and we dug, and we dug, with whatever was at hand, and late into the night. Much later, a snowshoed rescue team – a large group of men and women – arrived from Pitkin. They brought shovels, food, water and medical supplies. And so we continued digging, snow still falling, darkness absorbing the scene, and the sound of broken glass reverberating in our minds. After ten or so hours, the diggers unearthed a dog -- alive. That boosted our spirits. Then the roof of a railroad workshop was uncovered. Next, a tool shed. And then
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the side of the eating-house. Here we found Mrs. Marcella Doyle, still breathing after 12 hours of being buried. Three hours later, rescuers recovered Celia Dillon, blue-gray in color but still conscious. A few hours later, Joseph Royegno, the saloonkeeper, was located; but, sadly for us, he was dead. Then we discovered Jasper Caswell, of Tomichi. He’d suffocated beneath 20 or more feet of compressed snow. J. S. Brown, the telegraph operator, was also dead, as were Michael Shea and James Tracy. Still, we kept shoveling, and shoveling, hoping to find others still alive. We finally came upon the roof of the boardinghouse. Anticipation spread. We concentrated on the twisted, ramshackle structure, digging as if to unearth silver. One of the Pitkin townsmen located a broken window and managed to slip down through the rhomboidal space. Minutes seemed like hours. Then, his head jutted up from the shattered pane. The expression on his face told all: none of the Doyle children had survived. I took pictures of the rescuers as they bundled up ten bodies in coarse blankets and tied them to wooden sleds made from nearby debris. Two days later, the D, SP & P was still trying to get a train up to Woodstock from Buena Vista. Meantime, the rescuers decided it best to return to Pitkin. We knew others were still buried in the slide, but we could do little in the face of such deep, dense snow. Their bodies would have to be recovered in spring – late spring. The trail back was treacherous on snowshoes, especially for those hauling sleds. We were exhausted, weak and hungry, yet determined to bring back the survivors. Phillips and I forgot all thoughts of getting to St. Elmo. In summer 1884, my pictures of the Woodstock snow slide were widely distributed, seen in newspapers and magazines throughout the country and sold in novelty stores around the state. A crew rebuilt the Woodstock Station within a year, far from Missouri Gulch’s deadly path. Mrs. Doyle filed a legal suit against the railroad, but little came of that. By mid-summer, all the avalanche victims had been recovered. Yet, to this day, when the snow is hard-packed and the cold is brittle glass, I sometimes load a sled with camera equipment, unleash my dog, Woodstock, and snowshoe from Pitkin to the site of that old train station. There, I stand atop the hardfrozen snow, taking pictures and hoping to recapture phantoms.
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Center for the Arts building in the heARTS of Crested Butte
“I’m choosing to raise my family in a community where the arts are as exciting as the mountains and trails Crested Butte is known for.” – Heather Paul Featherman, Pro Skier & Center for the Arts Board Member
P H O T O B Y X AV I E R FA N E . C O M
heather is a professional skier, a two-time National Telemark Champion and World Cup Medalist. Heather has continued her career in the ski industry working with K2 Skis and the Alliance Team designing and developing women’s products. She also serves on the Board of Directors of the Center for the Arts because she wants to help make the new building a reality. Heather, her husband, John, and their children are looking forward to enjoying more music, new classes, events and activities for families in the Center’s new home.
After 30 years, our community has outgrown our current space. Help support your new building with a tax-deductible gift. Every gift makes a difference. Contact Jenny Birnie, Executive Director | 970.349.7487 jenny@crestedbuttearts.org. Learn more and DONATE NOW at buildingintheheARTs.org
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Words and photos by Dawne Belloise When Kent Viles cradles the guitar-like contraption on his knee and begins to play, the bright, vibrant tones seem to hang in the air. Viles is an accomplished musician of many years and several instruments, but even more amazing is this instrument he designed, the Dobrato, which is making waves in the music world. Viles owns Castle Creek Guitars in Gunnison, a wonderland for musicians, a dream shop of accessories from rainbowhued picks and capos to ukeleles and harmonicas. Guitars stand in formation like soldiers of music. Toward the back of the store, workbenches hold stringed instruments in various stages of repair. This is where Viles assembles each Dobrato: a resonator or resophonic guitar mounted with a tremolo arm (a.k.a. a vibrato bar). The sounds created by this new combination have recently caught the ear of celebrities
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like Jimmy Buffett, Tony Furtado and top music producer Jay Joyce. The Dobrato took years of research, trials and prototypes before Viles felt the design and sound were perfect. Six years ago, the concept was “a garage idea,� he said. He was playing progressive finger-style blues guitar and thought that adding a vibrato system to a resophonic guitar would allow him to play more voicings, more creatively. Rummaging through an online forum and researching to see if anyone made a resonator guitar with a tremolo tailpiece, he found that no one had even heard of such an idea, but many were excited about the prospect. Experimenting on an old dobro he had laying around, Viles started engineering ways to mount a tremolo bar onto it. Though putting a vibrato on any acoustic instrument was virtually unknown, Viles noted the resophonic guitar lends itself to the concept
Petar Dopchev
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because the vibrato allows the player to get voicings similar to a slide guitar. The vibrato tailpiece was originally designed by Paul Bigsby, a motorcycle designer and engineer in the 1950s who created the metal “whammy bar”; it attached to an electric guitar and simulated the wavering pitches of the then-popular Hawaiian-style slide guitar. Viles explained the concept of the vibrato: “When you push down on the vibrato arm, you release tension on the strings so it lowers the pitch. As you allow the arm to come back up, it brings the strings back up to pitch. So when you push down and up repeatedly, you create a vibrato similar to your voice.” The bar allows guitarists to add the inflection only when they want it. Viles felt that attaching a vibrato arm would work with a resonator guitar because its body is stronger than a regular steel-string guitar. The resonator guitar’s sound projection works opposite of a regular guitar, since the vibrations emanating from its aluminum sound cone, the cone inside of and on top of the guitar, create its music. On a regular steel-stringed guitar, the wood construction vibrates to create sound. The resonator guitar was created in 1929 to be loud, because the guitars of that era were all parlor guitars – small instruments meant to be played quietly to an audience in private homes or small, intimate venues. Viles explained, “Simultaneously, there were big bands and dance bands, and guitars had become very popular but you couldn’t hear them because they weren’t loud enough. A call went out to the major luthiers for a new design that would amplify the sound. “The Dopyera brothers came up with the concept of the resophonic aluminum-cone guitar, so when you strum it, the cone vibrates. It’s really a speaker design more than anything. Lo and behold, this thing was like five times as loud as anything on the market, so all of a sudden resonator guitars, or dobros, shot to the top of the market sales.” 58
However, the electric guitar was born in the late 1930s, and the resonators, with their sometimes-tinny sound, fell out of popularity. “The resonator manufacturers couldn’t give their guitars away; everybody wanted the new electrics,” Viles said. “Coincidentally, in the South, the blues was developing and becoming really popular, but a lot of the poor juke blues joints didn’t have electricity, so you couldn’t use the electric guitars. When you listen to those early blues recordings, you hear a lot of resophonic guitars. It wasn’t so much that they were looking for that sound, but that the guitars were affordable.” To produce his newly designed Dobrato, Viles searched for manufacturers first in the U.S., then Mexico, China and Australia. After two years of discussing and modifying, he finally got his first prototype, only to find the craftsmanship “so sub-par that I was dejected.” He then connected to Music Link, a
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company out of San Francisco with instrument-manufacturing houses in Shanghai. Their machines cut the wood parts for the Dobrato to precision. Viles chose high-quality mahogany laminated wood because of its density and strength. After another two years, he held the next-generation Dobrato prototype. “Making the mold for the instrument is the most expensive part of building a product in a factory,” he said. “You can’t change the mold once it’s created; the body shape and taper are dictated by the mold. You can make some adjustments, like the thickness, all of which can change the way an instrument sounds.” With a few minor changes, many delicate aesthetic reworkings and a lot of patience, Viles finally got the Dobrato body he’d envisioned. “They built three pieces for me, the last of the prototypes. It would be a year before I received the final product. I had people coming into the store who played the prototypes and loved them, and they’d get on a waiting list. By the time the Dobrato was ready, I had about thirty people on a pre-order list.” He received the first 100 instruments in December 2015. Viles showcased his Dobrato to thousands in the industry at the January 2016 National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) show in Anaheim, California. “The response was overwhelming,” he said. “There’s nothing out there like the Dobrato. Nothing has changed in resophonic guitars until now, so this was big news. And with a resurgence in this particular type of blues, resophonics are being used like never before; they’re even more popular than they were in the early 1930s. People are looking to be more unique in their sound.” Now some top-name musicians are starting to hear about the Dobrato. Viles has what he calls a hit list; “I’d love to get one in Bonnie Raitt’s hands and to get Eric Clapton to play one.” His first “big fish” was Mac MacInally, a longtime Nashville singer-songwriter and six-time Instrumentalist of the Year who plays guitar for Jimmy Buffett. Viles sent a Dobrato prototype to Nashville for MacInally to try, and he bought it. “Next thing you know, I’m watching a Jimmy Buffett live stream from a concert, and Mac comes out to play a song, and he’s playing it on the Dobrato!” Viles said. “I got a call from 60
Buffett’s manager saying Jimmy wanted one, too, so I sent him one from the second batch of prototypes. And there he was, playing it at one of his shows. It was great exposure.” Recently, Viles added another unique feature to his Dobrato’s tremolo bar: a B-Bender. It pulls the B string and bends the note a half-step up, creating “a quintessential pedal steel guitar sound,” he said. After Tom Petty watched a youtube clip demonstrating the Dobrato and the new B-Bender, Viles got a Dobrato order from the Heartbreakers’ guitarist, Mike Campbell. Tom Petty plays it occasionally as well. Other big-name Dobrato owners: Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top, Tony Furtado (now a rep for the Dobrato) and Michael Martin Murphey. “One of the biggest dudes who owns one is Jay Joyce, who’s the A-list Nashville Grammy-winning producer and owns a recording studio,” Viles said. “He produces people like Carrie Underwood, John Hyatt, Little Big Town, Emmy Lou Harris, the Wallflowers and some of the biggest names in the industry. He keeps the Dobrato in his studio and loves the uniqueness of the sound, because they’re all looking for a different sound to give them that edge that another producer down the block doesn’t have. You’ll hear the Dobrato on hits by these artists.” Stevie Wonder was testing out lap harps at the NAMM show when Chris Viles, Kent’s wife, invited him to come listen to the Dobrato. It was an exciting moment when his 20 bodyguards parted in front of the Dobrato booth, and Stevie Wonder stepped forth and said, “I hear you have a beautiful instrument.” Viles played for him and watched his expression as Wonder ran his hands over the instrument, feeling where all the vibrations and sounds were coming from. The Dobrato looks as unique as it sounds, and guitar geeks find it pretty intriguing. Since Viles has only had the finished product on the market for a few months, he doesn’t know where it will go from here. “For me, the biggest thrill is the process,” he said. “I don’t necessarily have an ultimate goal where I can say, now it’s a success, or now I have a wheelbarrow full of gold bricks I can take to the bank. I don’t even approach it that way. Maybe down the road I’ll sell the Dobrato concept to a company like Gretsch Guitars and license it to build them. But as long as I can, I love the fact that they’re all hand assembled by me on a bench in my shop.”
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Trent Bona Photography
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limbing saved my life from my de
Braden Gunem
Literary dirtbags
By Arvin Ramgoolam
WITH HIS BOOKS AND CLIMBING ZINE, LUKE MEHALL HAS BECOME A SCRIBE, EDITOR AND COMMUNITY BUILDER AMONG DEDICATED CLIMBERS.
“Climbing saved my life from my demons,” Luke Mehall told me, his voice steady and certain. Luke is a Gunnison Valley-grown writer and climber, discovering his talent for both amid some of life’s hard luck. The story of his personal journey has unfolded in not one, but four books: Climbing Out of Bed, Great American Dirtbags, American Climber and Graduating from College Me. Luke is also
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Luke Mehall doing what he loves best.
Braden Gunem
a founder, editor and contributor to The Climbing Zine, another self-started project to share tales about climbing that started, as most ‘zines’ do, with the generous loan of an office copier. The Climbing Zine has grown after several years into a glossy, promoted, sponsored grail among the climbing community. Luke is a dirtbag success story. In case you’re not familiar with the term dirtbag, I’ll reference volume five of The Climbing Zine for its definition: “dirtbag climber (durt-bag kli-mer) n. a person who dedicates her or his entire existence to the pursuit of climbing, making ends meet using creative means. A 66
dirtbag will get her food out of a dumpster, get his clothes from a thrift store, and live in a tent or vehicle to save money. Often found living near major climbing destinations, the dirtbag is a rebel with a cause who finds happiness in nature. When the dirtbag grows up (if ever), he or she often is drawn to a profession engaged with the outdoors and/or creative arts.” Luke has most certainly grown up, and with this impressive curriculum vitae, Luke is still the same humble dishwasher who welcomed me to sit next to him in front of Mountain Earth years ago while he ate his Donita’s Cantina shift meal. Each
of his books deals with his drug addiction; his journey from the aptly named Normal, Illinois, to Western State College; and his place in a world where people are expected to go on to good jobs, homes and family life. He shares all this with a dark wit and a colorful cast of recurring characters like Two Tent Timmy, a man who lived in two tents, one inside the other, and was thus cursed with a dirtbag nickname that could never go away. Lately, Luke has given up the too-long Gunnison County winters for a longer climbing season in Durango. He’s still a long way from Normal, Illinois. “Freaks, hippies, dirtbags don’t thrive in Normal,” he told me. His climbing community continues to grow and thrive, and this is his family. He described the Thanksgiving Turkey Trot, a yearly gathering of dirtbags in Indian Creek, Utah, that has evolved from a group of dudes to families and kids. It all started with things like The Climbing Zine. “It’s all about grooming talent and creating communities. I’ve met some of the most amazing people through The Zine,” Luke said, then noted the obvious: “Nothing in the [climbing] industry supports writers.” Luke’s creation of an avenue to help climber-writers like himself is no small feat and certainly not lost on his audience. Since Luke and I both love books, we often talk about the future of print and digital media. He deftly pointed out, “A blog isn’t going to be sitting on someone’s coffee table. Ten thousand climbers have a blog; different people embrace print.” A blogger himself, Luke is always pushing his work to the largest audience possible, but even he knows that books are far more treasured than the skimmed-through blog. Recently, when I introduced Luke at a book event, I jokingly urged his audience of climbers to buy his book instead of sharing it. Luke also understands the marriage of the digital and print worlds and recently undertook a Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign for the launch of American Climber. “There was support for my work and validation from people I didn’t know,” he said. Luke has always done his books and tours the dirtbag way. But with his latest project, he’s trying a slightly more traditional model of rolling out a book to the public. In his pitch to established publishers, Luke sold himself and his work with the honesty he brings to his non-fiction. “After pitching to the traditional publishing industry and getting quickly jaded with the experience, I decided I would do this thing myself, and
just hire a PR agency to promote the book,” he said. “Luckily, I got acquainted with PR By The Book, who handles many climbingrelated titles, including many from Patagonia Books, a perfect fit. Most of the funds I raise will go to hiring this agency; the rest will go to printing costs.” He noted that Kickstarter is “a powerful way to get the work out.” In his work, Luke often visits the themes of America and freedom — not in the political sense bandied about in elections, but in the vein of the West, a place for everyone who’s looking for something and who needs a little space to figure it out. Luke took this idea to the extreme as he and Gunnison artist Nathan Kubes painted his ‘80s-era car in American flag colors and rousted about the Southwest in what he dubbed “The Freedom Mobile.” “Ever since I saw the classic 1969 American road movie ‘Easy Rider’ with Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson, I’ve wanted to paint a vehicle in the colors of our country. I’ve always sensed that we mountain folk are living out our own version of the American Dream up here in the Gunnison Valley, and my car is representative of our unique culture.” This idea — the freedom of the climbing life and what the West offers — carries over to the covers of Luke’s books, their titles, and his stories. It’s become somewhat fashionable to bemoan the changing West and the different sports that inhabit it. However, Luke is optimistic. “Climbing is changing and getting more popular,” he told me happily. In a world that watched Alex Honnold, on live television and streaming, do his freesolo climb of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park, it’s hard to imagine the sport saving its dirtbag soul. But Luke keeps things in perspective: “People identify more with me than with professional climbers.” He grounds his community of Southwest climbers with love and respect. “Climbing is embraced by more people, but climbing changes with people.” Imagining his future as a creative and a climber, Luke effused more optimism. “Climbing is a lifelong activity. You can be at your best as you approach 40.” With writing he is no less driven. “The desire to write and create is everyday now.” It’s easy to see how the space in Luke’s life once occupied by drug addiction is now filled with so much more. As we ended our conversation, I asked Luke why he wrote a book in the first place. He responded, “I needed a book that I could give myself when I was at the age of trying to figure everything out, and that was it.”
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IN ADDITION TO LUKE MEHALL’S RECENT RELEASE, HERE’S THE NEWEST CROP OF BOOKS WITH LOCAL AUTHORS AND CONNECTIONS. By Arvin Ramgoolam LIFE AS A MOUNTAIN MAN’S WIFE by Fae-th Davidson is a fun, refreshing look at the dreams and desires many have to move to the wild side of Colorado and experience life from a different perspective. Beginning with Davidson’s fascination with the West from an early age, and her subsequent move to the Front Range, her very personal memoir moves quickly into her swift decision to move to Crested Butte and her marriage to a local animal trapper. The book is filled with unusual animal adventures, travels throughout the area and finally a divinely inspired trip to Jerusalem. THE ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO ROCKY MOUNTAIN MUSHROOMS BY HABITAT by Cathy Cripps is one of two plant-related books released in the last year. Cripps, a longtime local who now teaches and researches at Montana State University, gives readers a beautiful book of photos and information for a mushroom hunter’s mycological pastime.
The book is organized into ecological habitats from lodgepole pine forest to subalpine areas. David Rust, president of the North American Mycological Association, said of the book, “Beautifully written, informative and based on decades of field experience.” MOUNTAIN STATES FORAGING: 115 WILD AND FLAVORED EDIBLES FROM ALPINE SORREL TO WILD HOPS by Briana Wiles is an essential compendium for any Western plant lover’s bookshelf. In this second plantrelated book of the year, Wiles gives plant finders a new guide to explore Western landscapes, for rediscovering glacier lilies and their edible delights to turning cota into delicious tea. Wiles adds taste as another way to experience Colorado. FINDING ABBEY: THE SEARCH FOR EDWARD ABBEY AND HIS HIDDEN DESERT GRAVE by poet and professor Sean Prentiss is both an endcap and starting point for reading the works of the irascible Edward Abbey. A cornerstone of Western thought and conservation, Abbey has been long overdue for a deep analysis into the maw of his fiction and life. Prentiss originally sets out to find his mysterious Western gravesite, but the journey takes a more substantial turn into the world of Abbey through his friends and the real-life characters of his books. AROUND THE GUNNISON COUNTRY by Duane Vandenbusche is the seventh installment in his sepia-covered series by Arcadia Books. Bringing to light the forgotten and misremembered corners of the county through recently discovered photos, Vandenbusche lets us visit a wild and unpaved Gunnison and Crested Butte. CRESTED BUTTE…LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT is the second book by longtime Crested Butte photographer and writer Sandra Cortner. Almost a decade after her original book, Crested Butte…Through My Lens, debuted, there were just too many good stories of mid-timers to let go untold. Revisiting a Crested Butte after the death of the local coal industry and at the precipice of becoming a ski town, Cortner introduces us to the people who helped make Crested Butte the cozy, unforgettable hamlet it is today.
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PILING ON
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PILING ON
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Delicately shaped crystals spun into form at 30,000 feet tumble headlong toward the earth, gathering moisture along the way until they land silently, bonding to the peaks like comfortable clothing. The layers of snow transform the high peaks into one large amphitheatre, bouncing sounds around like pinballs. On a clear day in the winter, the mountains look entirely different from their summer counterparts. Their brilliant white forms loom stark against the bluest sky imaginable, their shapes as crisp and clean as if cut from cardboard. But the knife-sharp appearance of the ridgelines is mellowed by quiet shadows cast by the winter solstice. The vague blue tint of high northfacing slopes and the green cloak of trees skirting below lend a softness to winter that I can almost hear. When the sun comes up in the morning, I hear in my mind cymbals crashing as first light splashes the tops of the peaks with amber. My imaginary soundtrack grows calmer as the sun ascends and soft white light plays over the ridges. I sometimes notice distant peaks I’ve never seen before, as they seem to hold themselves in grandeur under their winter cloaks, standing tall and handsome as if confidently addressing me. Coyotes and foxes run a daily pattern across the virgin snow, looking this way and that for their next meal. Sometimes early in the morning, I listen to the coyotes’ sharp barks and long mournful howls echoing off the ridges to greet the sunlight creeping over the landscape. As I walk, the packed snow beneath my feet plays a noisy tune like the creak of an old rocking chair or a brand new saddle. It gives measure to my gait, and when I stop my ears are left straining in expectation, but I hear nothing. In contrast to the sharp lines of the high peaks, the snow-covered valleys flow in mellow curves and seem to swallow sound.
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Trent Bona
Ice-choked creeks yak ceaselessly as their waters flow through cauldrons formed by their passing, but you must be close to hear them. The waves lap at the ice, making a smacking sound before submerging again to join the downstream flow. The waters chortling their way downstream will one day return as snow to cover the earth like a patchwork quilt. Impending winter storms push high cirrus clouds in front of them as silent prelude, muting the sounds of the day. The storms sometimes arrive on the heels of the winds, which sweep large plumes of snow from the highest peaks, cleaning the foliage for the grouse and the ptarmigan that cluck and bob all winter on their high perches. As the winds skim over the snow, they pick up unanchored crystals and hurl them into the air like daggers of sand, striking anything they encounter. They sting my face and clatter against my jacket, buzzing like hundreds of bees.
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The music of winter is always present, but oftentimes submerged beneath the surface of the snow. The ermine pokes its head out from the snow, looking in all directions like a periscope; it is searching for its prey, the mouse. After a quick glance around, it hurries across the snowy field, its blacktipped tail flying like a flag behind its long, sleek body. The mice scurry under the winter blanket in search of bedding and food, and they rarely surface. They are slowed by winter’s slumber and might easily fall prey to hawks striking from above or other surface enemies like foxes. Hawks preen and bask in the sun from the fence posts, but they have everwatchful eyes and in a flicker can have their meal, which might include the ermine. The sun sweeps almost parallel to the ground in its winter mode, sinking early. The earth is shrouded in long shadows that race across the land, and darkness falls quickly. Evening brings a mellow symphonic closure to the day, and unlike in the summer, I look forward to it. I’m comfortable and cozy in my home, with the wood fire’s warmth wrapping around me, and the flames crackling and popping a finale to another day of gentle winter music.
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Words by Kathryn Vogel Images by Sandra Cortner
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Harry Woods, artistic director, supervises the creative chaos of dress rehearsal.
during the first week of June, and people slowly gather around the Mallardi Cabaret on Second Street. Inside the second-floor theater, stacks of chairs ring the darkened room, and someone stands on a tall ladder moving a spotlight. Harry Woods, managing artistic director of the Crested Butte Mountain Theatre (CBMT), supervises the preparations and looks somewhat harried while awaiting the arrival of a photographer from the newspaper. Tonight is the first full rehearsal for the ten-minute plays that will open in just three days. As the writer/director for one of these plays, I remark that I’m excited because tonight will be the first time I’ve been able to get all of my actors together. Another writer/ director smiles ruefully, telling me I’m lucky – he’s had to re-cast every part in his play during the last two weeks and still doesn’t have a complete cast for tonight’s rehearsal. And so, in rather typical chaotic fashion, the run-up to the 2016 Ten-Minute Play Festival is underway. The idea to begin producing locally written ten-minute plays in Crested Butte started 15 years ago in the theater’s cramped costume room. According to Tricia Seeberg, a long-time regular on the CBMT stage, the two items most frequently donated to the theater were bridesmaid dresses and fur coats. Shoshana Partos, CBMT artistic director at that time, saw this as an opportunity to create a production that could get many local folks involved in theater. A call went out to writers for plays that must have several bridesmaids onstage and at least one character in fur, and then auditions were held for directors and actors. The result, “Bridesmaids in Fur,” consisted of five original plays presented to enthusiastic crowds over two weekends in January 2002. This production included a Shakespeare-spouting beaver and a gorilla as a groom, setting the tone for the funny and somewhat wacky plays that continue to be the hallmark of this event. Prior to the “Bridesmaids” plays, Kathleen Mary, artistic director of the theater in 2000, decided that short plays would work well for Crested Butte. She instituted 77
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juggling other demands by then: kids out of school, work, or hiking and biking in the great weather. “This is a constant struggle with community theater,” said Partos. “It needs to be fun, but there must also be enough discipline so people will take it seriously. It’s probably even more difficult to get folks to come indoors for rehearsal when the theater is in a place as attractive as Crested Butte.” Preparation for the ten-minute plays begins several months before performance with announcement of the theme for that year. Partos remembers “The Spooky Plays,”
Ten-minute play veterans Rachel Blank (“Date-icaid”); Katie Thomas and Taylor Britton (“The Original Sellout”); and multi-timer Eric Ross.
off-season production of published short plays, hoping to pull in people who couldn’t commit to a full play, with its six weeks of rehearsal plus a three-week run. Auditions for the shorter plays drew a great response. “People need to be invited and recruited to theater,” Mary said. She speaks from experience. Before Crested Butte, Mary had no background in theater; she became involved when a friend told her there was a role in the next CBMT play for which she would be perfect. That role was the beginning of a life-long career in theater that has taken her from Crested Butte to New York, Denver, Seattle and Phoenix. The Ten-Minute Play Festival was originally designed as an off-season event, because that’s when potential directors and actors would have time to rehearse. However, the place for ten-minute plays in the theater calendar has moved around considerably, especially as the theater’s production schedule became more crowded. No date was perfect. Winter and summer were reserved for bigger productions. If the local plays were scheduled right after the ski area closed, when potential actors would have more free time, too many people were out of town. If they were performed in mid May, as was the case for many years, the audiences were small because summer residents weren’t yet here. The current schedule of early June has brought substantial audiences to the recent plays, but many who would like to participate are
and Brent Laney remembers “Fractured Fairy Tales,” which required a toilet (throne) in each scene. While Elizabeth Bond was managing director of CBMT the themes were usually a stage set, such as “In the Kitchen” in 2008 or “Around the Campfire” in 2009. This made it simple for all of the plays to utilize the same set and required only changing a few props. Recently, with Harry Woods as CBMT director, the themes have involved either one onstage item, such as “The Red Door” in 2013, or concepts, such as 2016’s “Entitlement.” Anyone and everyone can try their hands at writing a play, although usually only six to eight scripts are submitted. The theme provides just a bit of structure, and this, Partos believes, makes it easier for the writers to develop their ideas. It also provides a more coherent experience for the audience. In recent years the playwrights have been required to find cast members and act as directors of their own plays. When a cast member drops out at the last minute, the writer/director may end up as an actor as well. Seeberg feels that something valuable has been lost by not holding auditions. Mary considers it unfortunate that one person might be writer, director and even an actor in a play. “Each play needs to be seen through the eyes of different people,” she said. “The director and actors each bring something unique to what the playwright wrote, and the performance improves greatly as a result.” A major benefit of these local plays is the involvement of people who have never before been part of a community theater production. Taking a small role in a ten-minute play can lead to a prominent role in a larger production. In addition, actors can try their hands at writing or directing, and tech-oriented folks can learn the ins and outs of operating the lights and sound. “In live theater you have to think on your feet,” said Woods. “Sometimes the result is good and sometimes it’s not so good, but the audience always appreciates it. These plays are
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a wonderful showcase of what makes Crested Butte unique.” In addition, because there are no royalties to pay and no significant sets or costumes, the entire evening costs little to produce. I’m a retired biologist used to doing only scientific writing, but in 2008 I submitted a play, and to my great surprise, it won a Golden Marmot. Of course I was hooked, and I’ve written a play for each festival since then. It’s amazing to see the actors and audience transform my script into something so much deeper and richer. I can honestly say that participating in Ten-Minute Play Festivals has been one of the most rewarding things I’ve undertaken since moving to Crested Butte. It’s tough for an aspiring writer to get published these days, but you’re virtually guaranteed a Crested Butte audience if you submit a short play. Our local playwrights have included a diplomat, waitress, physician, lawyer, actors, students, business owners and a few folks with actual script-writing experience. Bob Puglisi came to Crested Butte after several years as an actor and screenwriter in California. He has been involved many times, including writing and directing two plays for the 2004 festival titled “Ski Town.” Eric Ross, long-time Crested Butte resident and former writer for the Second City comedy theater in Chicago, not only wrote a play each of the last three years, he also wrote one for the original “Bridesmaids in Fur” production. The 2016 Ten-Minute Play Festival last June presented a lively mix of silly and serious takes on the theme of “Entitlement.” There was a government plan to guarantee dates in Crested Butte; a waitress frustrated by unreasonable customers; serious monologues about social security and soup kitchens that included an entitled dog; and Adam and Eve in the garden, complaining because God was going to sell their little piece of real estate. So, all you frustrated writers, watch for the announcement of next year’s theme and start banging on your keyboard. You might be surprised by how much fun and drama you can fit into just ten minutes.
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BEYOND THE WELCOME MAT
A sod roof with wildflowers covers the bedroom of the Shaws’ pond-side guest cabin.
These guest cabins house visitors in creative, compact, charming spaces, so hosts and their guests enjoy both closeness and privacy. By Beth Buehler
Owning a home in a beautiful place brings the added benefit of sharing your good fortune with family, friends and sometimes the artists and musicians who visit your community. For just that purpose, three couples, from Texas, Tennessee and New York, built guest houses alongside their homes in the Gunnison-Crested Butte area. They offered a peek at their guest lodgings and the lessons learned in designing them.
PEACEFUL WATERS: THE SHAW GUEST HOUSE
Dusty Demerson
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“A guest cabin needs to be small and intimate. If it’s too big, your guests can’t relate to the nature outside or tune themselves into the real Colorado,” suggested Lewis Shaw, who with
Dusty Demerson
his wife Janet has owned two homes with guest cabins in the valley. The couple’s 750-square-foot guest cabin at Wilder on the Taylor, a 2,100-acre shared ranch located east of Almont, was completed in 2012. It gave them a home base during construction of their main house, finished in spring 2016. The primary home sits along the prime fishing waters of the Taylor River, while the front porch of the cozy cabin overlooks one of the Wilder’s stocked ponds. The main home has a mountain modern feel, and the guest house puts a contemporary twist on the classic log cabin with Corten steel accents and timbers milled from standing dead Engelmann spruce.
The porch and lawn, both with red chairs, give a warm welcome into a living room/ kitchen accented with red dining chairs and countertop appliances. There’s also a bedroom, bathroom and loft, with European white oak flooring throughout and cabinetry custom made from vertical-grain white oak. One of the most unique features is a sod roof with wildflowers over the bedroom portion. It’s one of only a handful of sod roofs in Gunnison County according to Steve Cappellucci, owner of Spring Creek Timber Construction and builder of the house and guest cabin.
A NOD TO HISTORY: RASPBERRY CABIN Residents of Dallas, Texas, the Shaws have
been visiting the Gunnison Valley for more than three decades, and they owned another home here before their current Wilder getaway. In 1989, they purchased property in Crystal Creek Ranch, farther up County Road 742 in the Taylor Canyon. With Cappellucci’s assistance, they renovated a historic cabin before building a larger log house in 1995. They named the main home Trout House and the guest quarters Raspberry Cabin. Henri Wedell had been visiting a friend in Buena Vista for more than 20 years. But he wasn’t finding great fishing on the Arkansas River and didn’t care for the drive to cast a line into other waters. Eventually he found it was no tall tale that the fishing 83
The Raspberry Cabin (top photos), a 1920s hunting/ fishing cabin, was reconstructed and expanded with care to preserve its rustic character.
was altogether different on the other side of the mountains. Then he discovered that the Shaws might be willing to part with their Crystal Creek home to build up the road at Wilder, also a fishing mecca. Wedell and his wife Marsha purchased the property and now enjoy breaks from the heat of Memphis, Tennessee, during the summer and fall months. They also spend time in Florida and New York. The guest cabin, crafted around 1920, has been refurbished and rebuilt often, the last time by the Shaws and Cappellucci in 1993. Originally a one-room hunting and fishing cabin with an outhouse, it belonged to the Gandys of Monterey, California. The most recent renovation by the Shaws involved carefully deconstructing the cabin board by board, reassembling it and adding a bathroom and bedroom. The outhouse still stands, adding character to the site on the banks of Crystal Creek. For the first year, the Wedells often hosted guests in the upstairs two bedrooms in the main house but quickly discovered the beauty of having a guest cabin. “We are great afternoon and evening people, but not so much morning people,” he said with a chuckle. They stocked the guest cabin with a coffee maker, toaster oven, cereal and coffee and made WiFi available, so both owners and guests can relax in private in the earlier part of the day. “When a couple of guys visit for fishing, 84
Bob Brazell
Trappers Crossing guest cabin: a tiny getaway made of reclaimed materials.
Trent Bona
16 Snowmass Rd #12
Slope side living-ski in /ski out. 3BR/3.5BA/2Car garage. Gorgeous finishes. Private elevator and hot tub $1,695.000
702 Forest Lane Skyland
Serenity in the aspens. 4BR/6BA/Oversized 2 Car garage. Bonus room/Home office. 5 minutes to town of Crested Butte. Easy access to 1000’s of acres of National Forest. Co-listed with Kiley Flint/Benson Sotheby’s. $1,375,000
27 Belleview Drive
Best value on the mountain! 4BR/4.5BA/2Car Garage with workshop. Panoramic views. Immaculate condition $899,000
Colette Kraatz Bob Brazell
it works a lot better to have them in the cabin. There are two single beds there,” Wedell said. “We always fill the cabin first, and if there’s another couple or additional guests, they stay in the main house.” Raspberry Cabin wears its history well, and guests love its “authenticity, comfortable furnishings and coziness,” Wedell said. “Plus they can be independent.” Having the windows open to the summer breeze is one of his favorite things about the mountain cabin.
O 970-349-4991 M 970-376-7304 ckraatz@cbmr.com
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ALPINE RUSTIC: TRAPPERS CROSSING GUEST CABIN Seth Novatt always envisioned having a rustic mountain home, but the log residence he and his wife, Priscilla Natkins, built in Trappers Crossing ended up being completely modern inside to accommodate large groups of people. “I wanted the look of rustic cabins in the Irwin backcountry,” he said. Several years after completing their home in the late 1990s, the couple hired Ben Somrak, of Somrak Concept + Structure, to design and construct a guest cabin as overflow for the main house. They also wanted a place for visiting Crested Butte Music Festival musicians to stay in the summer. Novatt describes the cabin as “quiet, private and inspirational,” yet close enough to the primary house for guests to go over for meals and socializing. “As Ben put it, we wanted to build 85
something that looked like it had been there for a hundred years — like we found the land, this was on it, and the main house came after,” Novatt said. “I’ve always loved that spot; it looks right into the aspens in the valley below our house. It’s my favorite place on the property.” At around 375 square feet, the quaint cabin has a compact open area, featuring a kitchen, dining and living space, that leads to a small bathroom and an open doorway to the bedroom. Every piece of wood inside and out is reclaimed and purchased from AM Salvage Barnwood in Gunnison, including flooring from a Pabst Blue Ribbon factory used for the ceiling. The furniture is simple and charming, handmade by Will Crim of Crested Butte. Novatt and Natkins reside in Sleepy Hollow, New York, and spend about three months a year in Crested Butte. “We have a guest book,” Novatt said, “and everyone who has stayed in the cabin has said it is one of the most extraordinary places they’ve ever stayed.” Great guest cabins offer compact, practical and charming spaces that fit into their natural surroundings. They give guests privacy and inspiration, along with easy access to the primary house. Whether they involve historic remodels or new construction, they greet friends and family with hospitality far beyond the welcome mat.
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The Novatt-Natkins guest house: 375 square feet of quaint, livable space.
Trent Bona
GUEST CABIN 101
With many years of welcoming friends and family to the valley, Lewis and Janet Shaw offered a few nuggets of guest cabin wisdom.
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Make the space very comfortable and livable and provide the option of cooking. “We don’t want our guests to feel like they’re joined to our hip.”
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Provide lots of appealing nooks for reading, watching the hummingbirds and enjoying the setting.
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A pullout sofa in the living room provides additional sleeping space without requiring more room.
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The bathroom may need to be utilized by more than one family, so privacy doors should be accessible and workable for two groups of people.
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If you don’t have room for a bathtub/shower combination, go with a shower and steam, so guests can relax and soak after a day outdoors.
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A guest cabin should be small and intimate so people connect to the space and to each other.
Trent Bona
Contributing to a Stronger Economy for the Gunnison Valley
Now in final architectural design and construction planning.
The BWC will be a catalyst for economic development in our valley and is a place for performing arts, education, popular touring acts, dance, community events, meetings and presentations. The BWC will inspire our youth, spur an enhanced sense of community and financially anchor our economy.
Will YOU join us?
(970) 349-4769 • MCBPAC.ORG
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Peacock Alley Pine Cone Hill Zwilling Henckels Staub Lollia Lafco
casabellacb.com (970) 349-6380 321 Elk Avenue
Sprawling over 600 acres of pristine wilderness, The Club at Crested Butte offers extensive amenities including a Robert Trent Jones Jr. Golf Course, State-of-the-Art fitness and aquatic center, tennis, award-winning dining, Nordic-skiing and our new ski-in/ski-out, on-mountain facility, SlopeSide. Located just steps from Red Lady Lift, SlopeSide offers ski lockers, parking, social lounge, full-service bar and deck.
Membership Opportunities Available • Public Play & Dining Open to the Public • Available for Weddings and Events 970.349.8601 • theclubatcrestedbutte.com 88
DAVID CHODOUNSKY HAS TRAVELED A LONG, TOUGH PATH FROM CRESTED BUTTE TO DARTMOUTH TO THE PODIUM AS NATIONAL SLALOM CHAMPION. AND HE’S NOT FINISHED YET. By David J. Rothman David Chodounsky was sent to my office just once when he was in high school. I was the Head of Crested Butte Academy, an independent school that boasted high academic standards and world-class mountain sports training. It was the winter of 2002, and David was a junior. “Snapping pennies,” he answered. “Seriously?” I think I laughed. David was an excellent student who went on to double-major in engineering and earth science at Dartmouth; a superb athlete who won the NCAA Division I men’s slalom title as a freshman, then led Dartmouth to its first national title in 31 years in 2007; and one of the most charming young men I’ve ever met in my career in education: modest, gracious, thoughtful. He’s been the object of many parents’ complaints to their own 90
children: “Why can’t you be more like that Chodounsky boy?” Before I sent him back to class with the admonition not to fire pennies across the classroom at high velocity, I saw a certain look in that boy’s eye. After all, he was just sixteen or so and already under a lot of pressure to perform. And he did not like being in my office. From that glint of fierceness, I sensed something exceptional smoldering in this Crested Butte youngster. Fifteen years later, David holds that Dartmouth degree, is recently married, and is the dominant men’s slalom skier of his generation in America. A Sochi Olympian, he’s won the U.S. national slalom title four times and the combined title (a mix of super G and slalom) once. Going into this season, he is ranked 14th in the world in slalom and
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David Chodounsky at the finish line of his 2015 World Cup run in Beaver Creek, and last summer in Crested Butte with bride Ramsay Hill.
Kevin Krill
46th in giant slalom. David is not only the most successful alpine ski racer to graduate from high school in the Gunnison Valley, but the most successful American alpine skier to attend college full-time and race in the NCAA before making it to the World Cup. And he’s still charming, modest and gracious. At his wedding to the equally charming Ramsay Hill this summer at the Club at Crested Butte, he said to me with astonishment, “I’m just so happy…” I told him it was his wedding and that was probably appropriate, and then we all danced. I’ve been watching David run gates, in person and on video, since he was 13. Over those 18 years, he has moved slowly but steadily upward through every national and international pyramid of competition until the only one left is World Cup podiums. Watching him, I’m astonished that anyone can achieve this. It’s a very long path, strewn with obstacles and detours. What does it take to keep coming back, year after year, and to improve until you’re one of the best on the planet? After all, such excellence is never foreordained. David had been a top high school racer in 92
Alison White
a ski-obsessed state, but that placed him in a group of 50 or 60 young American men, most bound for the NCAA circuit, not the Olympics. How long did it take David to get where he is? When he graduated from high school in 2003, which is when most young men
make the leap to the U.S. Team rather than college, he was ranked just 14th nationally in slalom among men born in 1984; he was 75th overall in America and 537th in the world. Impressive, but not the numbers that get you onto the U.S. Team. After a year off school in 2003-04, he hadn’t improved that
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ranking much, so off he went to Dartmouth. He could have trimmed his sails, had a great college career and finished. No shame there. Instead he took a big step up, and by spring 2008, he was eighth overall in slalom in America, and 83rd in the world. Again, impressive, but by then he was 24, an old man to be making it to the World Cup, and the U.S. Team still wouldn’t bite; in fact the coaches had seldom taken a racer at the end of his college career, no matter how strong. They did take him out of college in the middle of his senior year for a series of six Europa Cup races in a single week. This was an honor, as the Europa Cup is the second most elite circuit after the World Cup. The results? Six races, not a single finish. Ouch. Many thought David might be done, but he decided to take just one more year off after graduating to see if he could ski his way onto the U.S. Team. He did well, but not well enough to make the team at his age. Then, at the last possible moment, in the final run of the slalom at the 2009 U.S. Nationals, sitting in fifth place, he smoked the field and won his first U.S. title, guaranteeing a World Cup start the following year. He had finally punched his ticket. I watched video of that first World Cup race. There he was, NCAA champion, reigning U.S. champion, at the peak of his powers…skiing like a duck. As he put it, “I felt like Bambi on ice.” That season, 20092010, he finished only one first run of a World Cup slalom, and in that one he didn’t make the top 30 to qualify for a second run. Ski racing is relentlessly hierarchical. Either you qualify or you don’t. So yet again, many thought David might be done. And then again at the last moment, at age 26, he won two major international races in the summer and fall of 2010. In both cases the field was stacked with World Cup racers, and David won so handily that he dropped his world ranking to 31st, once again guaranteeing a World Cup spot. That year he finished three World Cup slaloms in the top 25, and since then he has made steady progress, improving slightly every year. How does a racer find the resilience to slowly, purposefully keep growing and improving through his twenties when scores of other talented athletes drop away? According to David, there were several major transitions where he had to transform his approach to the sport. The first and biggest breakthrough came when he went to Dartmouth. “At Crested Butte Academy I got a great foundation, but we were racing
the same kids week in and week out, and you kind of get stuck in that speed. It was a whole new level at Dartmouth — Oh, I realized, so this is what it means to ski fast.” The second transition was that week falling down on the Europa Cup in 2008: “I had never seen ice like that. I had skied FIS races in Europe, but never Europa Cup. And back home I was starting every race in the top 15, but in Europe I was starting in the 70s and 80s — it was like starting all over again.” Then came the jump to the World Cup: “I was skiing well, my timing was there, but it just wasn’t fast enough.” What changed? He described the fine shift in his technique. “I was pressuring the edge too late. Whenever you turn late you’re fighting gravity and losing time. Then, when you release the ski it’s going to pop and you lose snow contact and therefore speed, timing, balance and stability. I finally understood this just last year. You basically have to be a little more patient at the top of the turn, come out a little further towards the apex and then make your turn one smooth arc. And the ice changes it. You actually pick up speed, so you have to move your body with the ski much more
dynamically to keep up with the turn.” Got that? Now practice. On the side of the Chrysler Building. While 25,000 people scream at you in 17 languages. Now, about the psychological side of the sport: David’s resilience and growth over such a long time. David feels he can do this now because he’s had to do it at every level; he was never a natural champion. “I was never winning all the time. First of all, when I was young, I was small. I wanted more success so kept driving after it. But the main thing was that I wouldn’t get discouraged. Obviously you have frustrating moments, but for the most part I was evenkeeled and never got too down on myself.” But David has taken that winning psychology to a deeper level. He said, “Now that I finally understand how to ski as fast as all the guys in the top 30, the difference is mental. It’s being able to put complete trust in yourself at the top of the course and send it down these hills that are so steep and so icy. That’s the biggest thing — being mentally confident and focused enough to make this perfect turn every single time. Because if you miss just one of those turns, you’re out.” How hard is this? Harder than it looks.
“All sorts of things can throw you off — a gate breaks, someone skis into the course, the weather changes, you have gear problems — and you can’t be rattled, no matter what, because if that happens even once, it can start to mess up your entire season. You begin to lose confidence and go into a downward spiral,” David said. He recalled races last year where sudden weather squalls affected his results. But he was able to face the next race unshaken and ski well. “Last year I finally stayed strong in this way,” he said. “These guys who are winning all the time, their mental strength is unbelievable.” David’s observations about what it takes to succeed at this level go far beyond the glamour of athletic achievement. “You have to be so patient, even when things don’t go your way. And when they don’t, you have to deal with that in exactly the same way you deal with success. Celebrate success, but don’t go over the top, because then when you get frustrated you’ll drop emotionally too far down. Simply bring your success to the next race, and that’s what enables you to deal with the frustrations. The guys that have 100% confidence in themselves and don’t get shaken by anything, they’re the
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ones who become champions. The fear of not winning just isn’t there.” This isn’t just about skiing. When David was a high school junior, he was skiing well, about tenth in the country in slalom for his age group. At the Rocky-Central Junior Olympics, which was the closely watched regional championship, he was fifth after the first run. Then, in the second run, the clock said he had won, and celebrations broke out in the base area. His first victory in an FIS race had come at a crucial event. But it wasn’t over. Another coach challenged the result. In such races there are multiple clocks, and if they vary by more than a tiny margin, the decision then has to include data from a hand-timer, all of it based on a complicated formula for reaching an average. In this case the clocks did vary, the rules kicked in, and David was deemed to have tied for second on that final run, missing first by 0.04 of a second and placing him fourth overall. Some tempers flared. But David gracefully accepted the result. At the awards ceremony, he joined the other victors at the front of the crowded room, accepted his fourth-place ribbon, smiled and waved to the crowd. Wearing sunglasses indoors. He was given a Sportsmanship Award. It still chokes me up. That’s when I knew this young man might become a champion. No one else on the finish list from that 2002 race is still ski racing. Many went on to outstanding NCAA careers. None made the World Cup, let alone the Olympic team. None won a U.S. title. Only David. In the end, the philosophy David articulates about patience and an even keel is the wisdom of the ages. It returns us to the notion of living in the moment. After all, ski racing is supposed to be fun. What it means for David is that he’ll race all the slalom and GS events in this year’s World Cup. As he put it, “My goal is just to go and have fun.” The elusive key to success in so many things. David’s life is a version of the American Dream. His parents Martin and Anna, still Crested Butte locals, left Czechoslovakia in the 1980s to find a better life and taught him to ski starting with hand-hewn planks. Now he holds an Ivy League degree and is the reigning U.S. champion in his sport. He’s also a nice guy. David, the podium beckons. Keep cool, have fun, carve at the apex — and snap that penny.
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Surgeon Steph Timothy and physician assistant Erica Eaton, friends across miles and decades.
Soccer, military deployments, faith and families bonded these two longtime friends, who have both become familiar faces in the valley’s medical community. By Beth Buehler They met more than 25 years ago playing club soccer at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, and their criss-crossing paths eventually led them both to our valley. Dr. Stephania (Steph) Timothy serves as a general surgeon with Gunnison Valley Health, and Erica Eaton works as a physician assistant (PA) at Griggs Orthopedics. The two friends shared an apartment with three other soccer players their junior and senior years at Baylor. When an acquaintance of Steph’s happened into the house one day, he caught Erica’s eye, and she eventually married him in 1993. The couple stayed in Waco after graduation, Erica earning a master’s degree in biology and her husband Eric attending seminary. Steph moved on to medical school for four years at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, where she met her husband, Scott. Surgical training involved a five-year stint at Ochsner Medical Center in New Orleans, and she spent summers learning
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flight surgery and how to eject out of airplanes with the U.S. Air Force.
INTERCONNECTED PATHS Steph said of her friendship with Erica: “It’s always been a comfortable relationship. We would talk every six months or so and then take a vacation together; it’s never been awkward.” Fortunately, their husbands became good friends as well. “In 1998, we met Scott for the first time on vacation in Puerto Rico for nine days. It worked out well.” Erika laughed. “Our husbands are like brothers from a different mother.” Life circumstances grew the roots of friendship extra deep. Once Steph finished her training in New Orleans, she started active duty with the military and moved with Scott to Colorado Springs. With a lifelong love of Colorado, Eric became a pastor at a church in Colorado Springs and also relocated his family, reuniting the former
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roommates in the same city for the first time since college. Steph had just returned home from her first tour of duty in Kuwait when the Eatons drove up from Texas and temporarily moved into the Timothys’ home with three young children and two dogs in tow. Soon the Eatons found a home of their own and then had their turn to help out. Only five months after giving birth to her first child, Curtis, Steph was deployed again to Kyrgyzstan for six months. A hard situation was made easier, knowing that her close friend would be watching her baby while Steph was thousands of miles away. Her mom moved from Oklahoma to help as well. “The worst part was coming back and Curtis didn’t know me,” Steph recalled. “I also came back with a broken ankle. I was playing soccer, of course, trying to block a shot off a 200-pound firefighter while practicing for a friendly in-country game with the Kyrgyzstan military.” Disillusioned with the military after being deployed so soon after her son’s birth, Steph left the service, and her family moved to Wenatchee, Washington, for four years. With the arrival of their second child, Owen, she and Scott realized they were too far from their parents. While it doesn’t happen often in a fairly small community, jobs for a general surgeon and a physical medicine rehabilitation doctor (Scott’s field) opened up at the same time in Glenwood Springs, landing the Timothys back in Colorado. They stayed for four years before moving to Crested Butte in 2014.
Double friendships: Steph’s and Erica’s husbands, Scott and Eric, became close as well.
FALLING FOR CRESTED BUTTE “Our first experience in Crested Butte was after my first deployment to Kuwait. We camped in the back of Scott’s truck in Almont,” Steph said. She went from wearing chemical warfare gear, having missiles launched nearby, and working in a canvastent hospital near a busy flight center to a “sense of wonder, nature and peacefulness.” Steph did a few locums (filling in for other physicians on a temporary basis) in the Gunnison-Crested Butte valley when Curtis was young. Several years later, in 2014, she contacted Gunnison Valley Health CEO Rob Santilli and discovered he was looking for a full-time surgeon. Suddenly the place where the Timothys thought they would retire someday became home for their family, with a top-notch local school sealing their decision to move. Steph’s 100
Erica (second from right in front row) and Steph (far left) met as club soccer players at Baylor University.
specialty is working with breast cancer patients, but the surgeries she performs are all across the board now. Scott opened Ragged Mountain Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at the Gunnison hospital, with a branch in Crested Butte as well. “We’re living in the perfect place to enjoy work and the other things in life,” Steph said. Around the time the Timothys left Colorado Springs, Erica began commuting to the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Denver to become a physician assistant. After graduating, she worked as
a PA in Colorado Springs before her family relocated to Phoenix for nearly four years. The Eatons joined the Timothys nearly every summer for vacations in Crested Butte to escape the hottest part of Arizona summers, especially when Steph was doing locums in the area. Once their good friends moved to Crested Butte, the Eatons got the bug and joined them a year later in 2015, purchasing a home nearby in Crested Butte South. Steph connected Erica with Griggs Orthopedics, and Eric works out of their home as a senior manager for the global
firm EY and is the author of the recently released book “The Raging Sloth.” He also co-founded Knights of Heroes Foundation, which is based in Monument, Colorado, and empowers children who have lost their fathers during military service. “I love the small community here and how everyone knows each other, along with the slowing down and simplifying,” Erica said of her new home. When the Eatons first moved, they resided with the Timothys again, but this time with only one dog, Erica noted with a smile. “We were in and out of town at different times for vacation, but there were a few times when all nine of us were in a three-bedroom home together. We’ve vacationed enough together that it worked.” The Timothys have since moved to the Rivergreen neighborhood to be closer to the town of Crested Butte, but the few extra miles between families haven’t stopped their kids from being more like cousins than friends. Owen and Curtis Timothy are now 9 and 11, while Presley, Jude and Dylan Eaton are 13, 15 and 16. The Timothys are regulars at Dylan’s high school soccer games, and the families both attend Oh Be Joyful Church.
PRACTICING MEDICINE
Steph acknowledged that providing medical care in a rural area can be tough because a doctor can’t just focus on one thing like being a breast cancer surgeon, trauma doctor or gastroenterologist. “I have to be a lot of things to a lot of people, which can be overwhelming,” she said. The Gunnison Cattlemen’s Days initiative to fight and bring awareness to breast cancer through Tough Enough to Wear Pink has put the topic on the local agenda, which has helped Steph stay plugged into her specialty. She also has the flexibility to work at Littleton Adventist Hospital in metro Denver a few days a month to expand her experience as a trauma surgeon. Erica started out as a family practice PA in Colorado Springs and then transitioned to working at a refugee clinic in Phoenix for two years, quickly learning the word “pain” in eight languages. When a clinic opened near their home, she went back to being a family practice PA. “Crested Butte is a small community where ties run deep,” she observed of her newest position. “I love working in the operating room. The staff has been inviting, and there’s an instant camaraderie.” Both women eyed careers in medicine 101
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from early on but chose slightly different paths. Steph began talking about becoming a doctor at age 10, perhaps due to her hospital-administrator grandfather and her childhood on a farm watching the circle of life. She lived in the library and her dorm room for the first year of college, one of 1,000 pre-medical students in her class at Baylor. Erica and another friend coaxed her into playing soccer, which provided an outlet and “gave me that balance in my life.” She was among only 50 out of the original 1,000 that graduated in pre-med. Erica, on the other hand, recalled, “I knew all along that I wanted to be in medicine but didn’t know what that would look like.” She applied for medical school but ended up getting a master’s degree in biology instead, and initially stayed home with her three young children. In Colorado Springs, Erica met a PA in the pediatrician’s office, and a discussion over lunch planted the idea of her becoming a PA.
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Many times a setting, lifestyle or job draws people to move to a specific place. In the Eatons’ case, friendship became part of the decision. “That was a huge draw for us to move here,” Erica said. “It’s funny to see the kids back together again — their teenagers and my younger ones,” Steph added. For Crested Butte, the friends’ reuniting means the addition of three skilled medical providers and a professional who can work from home. Their two families are already becoming part of the community fabric, contributing time, talents and resources to help make it a great place to live.
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Excerpted from a memoir by Richard Guerrieri, age 85, with his daughter Cara Guerrieri
People in town called us the Spaghetti Gang,
Richard Guerrieri in his Crested Butte youth.
an apt name for a bunch of scrawny Crested Butte kids, mostly Italian, who knocked around together in the late 1930s and early ‘40s. We were a busy crew, what with playing marbles, running the streets, and in my case spending a good amount of time trying to avoid whippings, a regular feature of my nine-year-old life due to the fact I often forgot my piano lessons with Mrs. Morgan. But depending on how our day was going, a few of us would make time to grab towels and sneak into the Big Mine bathhouse for a shower. Some kids were regulars in the gang, like Jiggy, Frank, my cousin Gus, and me. Others came and went. If you wanted to join the Spaghetti Gang, all you had to do was hang around with us. There were no initiations and sure as hell no qualifications. We weren’t tough or even tough looking, nothing like gangs 105
Above: Crested Butte’s miners circa 1940, well respected even by the young rascals. Below: Big Mine mule barn, en route to the forbidden bath house.
nowadays. About the worst Spaghetti Gang misdeed was stealing radishes from gardens around town, risky enough to prompt worry about another whipping, but more mischievous than criminal. We didn’t have any rival gangs, although we did feel intimidated by the older boys in town. Then a kid named Alberto, twice as big as the rest of us, joined our gang, and with someone of his bulk hanging around us, we weren’t worried anymore. We loved him. We also loved a challenge. A forbidden trip to the bathhouse fit the bill. The first hurdle was to climb the multitude of stair-steps to the mine. There must’ve been 150 steps, and from the bottom looking up, the enclosed stairway appeared to go straight up at a 90-degree angle. A daunting climb, but not for a gang of kids with a purpose. We’d take after them worn-out steps like we owned the world, Jiggy in the lead and Alberto, as always, lagging at the back. Small shoes bounded up the stairs in the footsteps of our dads, uncles, grandpas and the other men who trudged back and forth to the mine each day. By the time we got halfway up, where there was a little landing, us heroes needed a rest. Even Jiggy, a nervous, jumpy kinda guy, stopped moving while we all caught our breath. The last 75 steps were a slog, and then we’d emerge from the stairway where I suppose the view was fantastic, but we never noticed. The mountains in front of us meant home, nothing more. We’d seen the views of Crested Butte Mountain, the Gothic and East River valleys, and up toward Peanut Lake every day of our young lives. Marveling at them was not something we did. The Big Mine had a huge shop with a lot of buildings around the mine shaft opening, and we still had to get around them without being seen. The workers wouldn’t have taken kindly to a bunch of hooligans traipsing through. First we’d creep around the huge, two-story mule barn. The barn had stalls on the first floor and the hay on the second floor. A ramp on 106
each end made it so local ranchers could drive their teams of horses pulling wagons loaded with hay up one ramp, unload the hay, cross the barn, and drive out using the ramp at the other end. A set of scales weighed the loads before the wagons unloaded. The Big Mine needed a tremendous amount of hay for the 50 or more mules used in the mine. There was a stall for each mule. Like I said, it was a huge barn. We’d skirt the barn and head around the fenced mule lot and past a big warm water spring, which ran through the mule corral and down into Coal Creek or wherever it went. The steam coming off the year-round spring had a sulfur smell, like other hot springs. If the gang made it beyond the spring without being caught, we’d crawl through a wide spot under the fence and we were home free. The bathhouse was about 150 to 200 feet long and 150 feet wide. The shower room had upwards of 50 showerheads to handle the needs of the mine’s 400 employees. The room was also clean as a whistle, the opposite of what you’d think with all the miners rinsing off black coal dust. The cement floors were painted gray with not a spot of black on them.
The Difference is in the details!
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Cara Guerrieri and her father Richard in his shop at the family ranch, working with a draft of his memoir.
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In the main changing area, a bench stretched all the way down the side of the building, long enough for dozens of men to sit and dress at once. We would undress there and go stand under the big showerheads, seemed like forever, with endless hot water spraying down on our heads. None of us had showers at home — my ma heated water with the cook stove for the tepid baths me and my sisters took. But at the bathhouse, if we had everything timed right, we could stand there a long, long time before the miners got off shift. We’d stay as long as we dared, then dry off in a hurry and pull on our overalls. Above us in that tall-ceilinged bathhouse hung rows and rows of miners’ clothes. Clips attached to chains hoisted each man’s clean clothes up out of the way, clear up by the rafters. At the end of his shift, the miner would do the same thing in reverse, running his dirty mine clothes on his own clip up high. Each chain had a number on it, so miners could identify their own clothes. The mine was at full production, which meant a lot of chains with clothes. To me it was as if those clothes were ghost people, empty likenesses of the hardworking men laboring underground in the mountain. An eerie sight. We were intruders, and an ornery, curious bunch, but we had enormous respect for those men, and one thing we never did was mess with those chains or their clothes. Instead, we knelt down, slipped on our laceup boots, and hustled back to town and to the lively adventures of the Spaghetti Gang in Crested Butte, Colorado.
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By Molly Murfee I shook my fists at the sky as the curtain of moisture balled into hail, snow and then rain, drowning the red-rock heat I’d so desperately traveled to find. “Sto-o-o-o-p-p-p!” I begged, yelled and cried at any god, goddess or great spirit that might be listening. Days before, I’d paced like a caged animal in my tiny Crested Butte home while the rain-snow pelted outside, and my soggy mood sharpened until it threatened to peel the paint off the walls. It was April, or maybe May. A glaciated mountain’s worth of roof-slide snow still threatened to seep in through my windowsills. The frozen gray lint of the sky concocted every variety of icy substance known to 110
man or beast, and threw it about in fitful bursts. I felt like a mad woman. My bones ached from seven months of winter. I longed to be warm, to wiggle my toes outside of woolen socks, to get sunburned and touch real dirt. So I packed the truck and barreled to Utah, only to find that in the great swath of rainsnow, the canyons were flash flooding. At times praying seems too feeble a request. I resorted instead to screaming at the top of my lungs. This is what spring off-season can feel like. It’s an excruciatingly slow, insanity-inducing transition. Winter refuses to let go, digging his frigid talons in even deeper, baring his white fangs and spitting
Dusty Demerson
sleet in our faces. A friend turned foe. In one of these moments, risking a saunter in a small burst of sunshine that interrupts the battering shards, I hear them. The first red-winged blackbirds. To me their sound is synonymous with the rain-snow – the first herald of our returning creatures, their melodious trilling breaking the chill. For after the wind has blown hard enough, the more dainty face of spring begins to shyly peek through. Life is returning. The great V’s of the sandhill cranes, like specks of pepper high in the sky, further zip open the clouded heavens, and the rusted barn door of winter slowly creaks open in their wake as they migrate from
the expanses of the San Luis Valley to the arctic north of Alaska. Robins follow – those burly members of the thrush family – sometimes pecking through the thin lace of new-fallen snow in search of meager springtime fare. Their red breasts blaze, like cheery ponchos from Mexico, reminding us that despite all current appearances, there are places in the world that are actually warm. I didn’t always notice these things, portents that life was returning. I didn’t always know to look forward to the creaks and crawks and songs, as the birds, species by species, slowly returned to their summer home. I learned. And mostly I learned to prepare. Now October signals 111
Xavier Fané
J.C. Leacock
a visit to the local garden stores, where colorful promises of tulips, daffodils and hyacinths lay in dried, dead-looking bundles. At the season’s last Farmers’ Market, darting between winter’s early fits, I seek garlic. Siberian (fitting, I think). Brown Tempest. Purple Glazer. I load garlic and bulbs by the small sackfuls, then rush home to engage in the odd act of hoeing in the fall. I plunge the bulbs into the cold earth, tuck them under a 112
blanket of hay to protect them from the subzero temperatures of January, and whisper “good luck” with a chuckle of expectation. All but forgotten through the numbing winter months, the stout shoots of the garlic and tiny snowdrop come to save me amid spring’s bouts of rain-snow. Their brave leafy spears pierce the layer of frozen granules. The first green of the season appears so fragile, yet these shoots face storms of
sleet and survive frostbitten nights, and sometimes even days. Every morning I rush outside and crouch in the dirt to see if another spring tendril has found its way from earth toward sky. It’s like a month of Christmases. Life is returning. My walks along Peanut Lake Road, sometimes the only melted “trail” in town, take on the same nuance of childlike discovery. The first blade of grass poking through the matted remnants of the previous summer. The delicacy of the first spring beauty and determined dwarf bluebell. Glacier lilies popping from the swampy edges of receding snowbanks. The ambrosia of their petals enlightens the tongue. Spring becomes the subtle act of noticing. The first flying insect. The first bumblebee. Summer, with its riots of wildflowers like the painted rowdies in Toulouse Lautrec’s good-time brothels, is hard to miss. But spring is summer’s shy sister, the sweet, virginal essence of new beginnings, still flirting from behind her veil. In spring we pilgrimage to Cement Creek to catch the fuzzy purple vestments of the pasqueflower carpeting the ground beneath the lodgepole pine and sagebrush. Spring finds me roaming the Almont Triangle, getting down on my knees to plunge my nose into the low-lying bouquets of the many-flowered phlox and, after months of white, filling my eyes with the color of crimson paintbrush and arrowleaf balsamroot. In these places I find early salvation while feet of snow still loom on the distant peaks of Paradise Divide. Spring is one of the gauntlets we pass through to earn our locals’ cards. Surviving it becomes a collective badge of accomplishment: “Together, we prevailed.” It’s easy to love Crested Butte in the summer, when wildflowers rise to tickle our earlobes, the days are warm but not too, and a sunny deck with a cold beer crowns our day’s adventure. Fall is no less magical, with crisp, cool mornings and a million aspen leaves turning yellow so the very air hums with gold. Deep winter offers bottomless powder days and the communal euphoria that trails them. Spring, with its brutal fits of indecision, tests our love and lets us earn the right to call this place home. A lifelong partnership doesn’t come only from honoring the easy parts: e.g. the partner who’s all dressed up in sexy sundress, strappy sandals and sparkling
LUXURY SLOPESIDE CONDOS Ski in/ out residences in WestWall Lodge with Alpine Club membership included. Premier ski location with high end finishes. 3 & 4 Bdrm offerings from $1,195,000
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LODGE AT MOUNTAINEER SQUARE
Mountain residences at base of ski area. Strong rental income with extensive amenities. Penthouse #608 ~ $565,000 #312 ~ $549,000
Meg Brethauer
Broker Associate 970-209-1210 mbrethauer@cbmr.com
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Xavier Fané
mood for a night on the town. A true lover still sees the beauty of the beloved in her bathrobe, curled on the couch with menstrual cramps, sobbing at romantic comedies. This is a Crested Butte spring. Yet spring also gifts us the magic of watching a world come back to life. The manic schedule of summer awaits, but now there is time. Time to sleep until you wake, with no alarm or purpose. To wander to the coffee shop for a frothy quad mocha with fresh hazelnut milk. Then to sit on a bench through noon, practicing your skills of eyeballing who is going over 15 m.p.h. To greet new babies who emerged between snows, and to scritchel old dogs behind the ears. Spring off-season, when you know everyone at the bar or on the street, is a time to chat with the liquor store clerk or a neighbor at the post office without rushing to the next chore. This is the “pause” button in an overscheduled, over-burdened world of expectation and speed. Time crawls so languorously that even the single car on Elk Avenue intrudes on the absolute halt in the air. The unfolding becomes so exquisite I don’t want to miss a single moment. The
Dawne Belloise
first butterfly dries her wings on the warm rock of my garden border. The first bluebird, equal to a rainbow in fresh promises and hope, flits through air that is misted with vapors rising from mud puddles, still-damp streets and saturated earth. I hear the trill of the first broadtailed hummingbird as he scouts for flowers. The first aspen leaf tenderly unfurls the shocking chartreuse that is even more fleeting, even more precious, than the gold robes of autumn. I watch the snow melt and the creek rise, until the tumult of water crashes through town with a soaring energy of becoming – finally – unleashed. The air fills with an electrified green current, and we walk around with our jaws gaping, as if this miracle has never happened before.
b
T he
Trailhead
children’s Museum
where playful adventures begin. OPEN WED-SUN 10 AM-4 PM AT THE BASE AREA • HOLIDAY BREAK CAMPS • AFTER SCHOOL CLASSES • FAMILY MEMBERSHIPS
open daily 10 am-4 pm
WWW.TRAILHEADKIDS.ORG • 970.349.7160
GROUND UP CONSTRUCTION AND FULL SERVICE PROPERTY MANAGEMENT
970-209-2763 115
Winter events 2016-2017
NOVEMBER 12
Opening day, Crested Butte Nordic
23-27
Thanksgiving Nordic Ski Camp
23
Ski for $15 donation, Crested Butte Mountain Resort (CBMR)
24
Official opening day, CBMR
26
Warren Miller film at Center for the Arts (CFTA)
26
Crested Butte Nordic winter kickoff/social
27
Alley Loop Race Series, first Nordic ski race
DECEMBER 2
Avalanche Awareness Night, CB Avalanche Center
4
Santa Night at CB Mountain Heritage Museum
9
Holiday light-up night in downtown Crested Butte
10
Santa Ski and Crawl, CBMR
10
Christmas tree light-up night, Mountaineer Square
10
Alley Loop Race Series, second Nordic ski race
15
Crested Butte Film Festival monthly film, CFTA
18-23
Rock on Ice, ice sculpting at CBMR
20
KBUT’s 30th birthday open house/party
21-23, 27-30
CB Mountain Theatre’s “Home for the Holidays”
23, 26, 27, 29-30 Magic Meadows Yurt Dinner Experience
Petar Dopchev
Lydia Stern
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29
Art Walk Evening at galleries and studios
31
CBMR torchlight parade and New Year’s celebration
31
New Year’s Yurt Dinner Experience
Petar Dopchev
JANUARY 1
Free Day at the Crested Butte Mountain Heritage Museum
4, 11, 18, 25
gO SkiMo series, ski mountaineering races
6
12th Night Christmas tree burning in Crested Butte
7, 16, 21
Alley Loop Race Series
8
Food Pantry Donation Day, CBMR
9
Magic Meadows 7 Nordic race and fundraiser
14
Art Walk Evening at galleries and studios
14-15
Mountain High Music Festival with songwriters/performers
19
Crested Butte Film Festival monthly film, CFTA
20-22
Grand Traverse SkiMo Academy
25-29
Elevate & Align: Yoga and Nordic Ski Retreat
26-29
Borealis Fat Bike World Championships
28
KBUT Female Arm Wrestling
29
Uley’s birthday celebration, CBMR 117
Winter events 2016-2017
Lydia Stern
FEBRUARY 4
Alley Loop Nordic Marathon
MARCH 3
Miner’s Ball for the CB Mountain Heritage Museum
4, 11, 14, 18, 25 Magic Meadows Yurt Dinner Experience
3
KBUT’s yurt bingo
4-5
IFSA Jr. Regional Freeskiing Competition
4
Crafted Tasting Event, brews, spirits, Mt. CB
9
“Snowball Express” movie night at the museum
4, 11
Magic Meadows Yurt Dinner Experience
10
2 Star Freeride World Qualifier
10-12
IFSA Jr. Nationals Freeskiing Competition
10
Full Moon at Ten Peaks
12
Full Moon at Ten Peaks
11-12
4 Star Freeride World Qualifier
14, 21, 18
Ten Peaks Sunset Soirees
11
Crested Butte Unplugged, with the Shook Twins
16
Crested Butte Film Festival monthly film, CFTA
16
Crested Butte Film Festival monthly film, CFTA
17-18
Art Walk Weekend at galleries and studios
18
Art Walk Evening at galleries and studios
18
Skitown Breakdown, CBMR
23-26
Prater Cup ski qualifiers for young racers
19
Al Johnson Uphill/Downhill Telemark Race
25
Gothic Mountain Tour backcountry ski race
30-1
Grand Traverse backcountry ski race to Aspen
28
Mardi Gras celebration
31
KBUT’s Soul Train
118
Lydia Stern
APRIL 4-9
Flauschink end-of-winter celebration
7
Crested Butte Nordic Volunteer Appreciation Party
9
Closing day for CBMR and Crested Butte Nordic
30
CB3P: Crested Butte Pole Pedal Paddle
Matt Berglund
119
LODGING
Matt Berglund
ALPINE GETAWAYS Vacation Rentals 510 Elk Avenue Crested Butte
Cozy B&B with European ski lodge charm. Homemade Continental breakfast. Hot tub with mountain views. Private baths. Near free shuttle; walk to shops & restaurants. 1.800.824.7899 cristianaguesthaus.com info@cristianaguesthaus.com
Historic inn located in a residential neighborhood of downtown Crested Butte. Just two blocks off the main street. 19 rooms individually decorated. Some with balconies. 1.800.374.6521 elkmountainlodge.net info@elkmountainlodge.net
AD PAGE 39
AD PAGE 121
OLD TOWN INN
PIONEER GUEST CABINS
The warmth of a family inn; value, convenience & amenities of a hotel. Home-made afternoon snacks, yummy breakfast. Rooms with two queens or one king bed. On shuttle route, stroll to shops, restaurants & trailheads. 1.888.349.6184 oldtowninn.net info@oldtowninn.net AD PAGE 121
Established in 1939, inside National Forest, only 12 minutes from town. 8 clean and cozy cabins, with Cement Creek running through the property. Fully equipped kitchens, comfy beds, fireplaces and more. Dog friendly, open year round. 970.349.5517 pioneerguestcabins.com pioneerguestcabins@gmail.com AD PAGE 121
Hotel & Family Inn PO Box 990 708 6th Street, Crested Butte
120
ELK MOUNTAIN LODGE
Bed & Breakfast Hotel 621 Maroon Avenue PO Box 427, Crested Butte
Crested Butte’s premium vacation rentals. We work with each client to provide the perfect vacation -- arranging accommodations, activities, tours and more. 1.800.260.1935 alpinegetaways.com
CRISTIANA GUESTHAUS
Bed & Breakfast Lodge PO Box 148 129 Gothic Avenue, Crested Butte
AD PAGE 121
Cabins 2094 Cement Creek, South of CB
Dusty Demerson
The warmth of a family inn...
...the value and convenience of a hotel A Distinctive, Unique, Historic Inn Downtown Crested Butte
800.374.6521 ElkMountainLodge.com
Complimentary WiFi and continental breakfast Hot tub • Designated pet-friendly rooms • Non-smoking
(888)349-6184 • www.oldtowninn.net A TripAdvisor GreenLeader and 2016 Certificate of Excellence winner 121
DINING 9380’ • (970) 251-3000
Elevation Hotel, Mt. Crested Butte Spirits and food with altitude.
A contemporary spin on the ski lodge. Serving something for everyone, all with subtle twists to intrigue your palate and keep you coming back for more. The large deck with its slopeside fire pit and outdoor bar is the perfect location for an après drink.
Breakfast / Lunch / Dinner
Ad pg. 125
BWC CAFE/CAMP 4 COFFEE 349-4675
BUTTE 66 ROADHOUSE BAR & GRILL 349-2998
The BWC Café/Camp 4 Coffee Mountaineer Square location is now featuring specialty coffees, wine and beer! Stop by for the same great coffee, tea and tasty grub! Food items include pastries, breakfast sandwiches, burritos, breakfast bars and more. Open daily.
Hand-crafted smokehouse specialties, hearty salads, roadhouse-style burgers. Delectable milkshakes for adults and for the whole family. Serving daily 11 a.m. Slopeside Treasury Center.
Breakfast / Lunch
Lunch / Dinner
Mountaineer Square, Ski Area Base
Ad pg. 127
Treasury Building, Ski Area Base
Ad pg. 127
DONITA’S CANTINA • 349-6674 4th & Elk, Downtown
Mexican. Down-to-earth eatery specializing in good food, ample portions and fun service. Fabulous fajitas, enchanting enchiladas, bueno burritos. Local favorite for over 30 years!
Dinner
Ad pg. 124
ELK AVENUE PRIME • 349-1221
THE ICE BAR AT ULEYS • 349-2275
LAST STEEP • 349-7007
Downtown Crested Butte on Elk Ave. Serving U.S.D.A. Prime Steaks, fresh seafood, wild game and more. Come watch the game on the biggest HD screen in Crested Butte. 16 draft beers and the largest wine selection in the valley.
Serving gourmet lunches daily inside the cozy, remodeled cabin and signature drinks outside at our legendary bar made out of ice. At night, embark on an epicurean dining adventure. Enjoy a starlit ride in a snowcat drawn open sleigh to a charming cabin in the woods, then delight in a gourmet dinner. Call for dinner reservations.
Sandwiches/soup/salads. Casual family dining. Affordable menu with Caribbean island flair; Cajun chicken pasta, curry shrimp and coconut salad, artichoke-cheddar soup in bread bowl. Happy hour and daily specials.
Dinner
Lunch / Dinner
Lunch / Dinner
226 Elk Avenue, Downtown
Ad pg. Back Cover
LILS • 349-5457
Serving the best sushi in town as well as meat, seafood, and options for the kids. We take pride in serving our guests the highest quality of fish which is why we get it delivered 6 days a week! We offer a nightly happy hour at the bar from 5:30 to 6:30. Open 7 nights a week at 5:30. Reservations are recommended but not necessary.
Dinner
Ad pg. 125
UMBRELLA BAR AT TEN PEAKS On Mountain at top of Painter Boy Lift skicb.com
Our newest addition! Listen for the alphorn as it welcomes you to our 35 ft umbrella bar and large deck with spectacular 360 degree views. Take in the scenery while you get a bite to eat, tip back a Bavarian beer, and soak up the sunshine. Top of Painter Boy Lift.
Lunch
Mid-mountain at the base of Twister Lift
Ad pg. 126
MARCHITELLI’S GOURMET NOODLE • 349-7401
321 Elk Avenue, Downtown
122
Trent Bona
Ad pg. 126
411 Third Street, Downtown
208 Elk Avenue, Downtown
Ad pg. 127
SOUPCON . 349-5448
Off Elk Avenue on Second, Downtown
Italian. Offering generations of family recipes in a cozy, relaxed atmosphere. Featuring unique pasta sauce combos, traditional and regional Italian, seafood, veal and elk. Reservations recommended.
Romantic, petite bistro featuring traditional French technique using local ingredients married with the finest cuisine from around the world. Open seven nights a week. Two seatings nightly. Reservations recommended.
Dinner
Dinner
Ad pg. 124
Ad pg. 123
WOODEN NICKEL • 349-6350
WOODSTONE GRILLE • 349-8030
Steaks, prime rib, king crab. USDA Prime cuts of beef, Alaska King crab, ribs, pork and lamb chops, grilled seafood, burgers, chicken fried steak and buffalo burgers. Reservations accepted.
The WoodStone Grille offers a generous breakfast buffet to charge you up for the day’s adventures. Come back to rest by the fire while sipping your favorite drink, and stay for a pub-style dinner suited for the whole family. Serving breakfast, après ski and dinner daily.
Dinner
Breakfast / Dinner
222 Elk Avenue, Downtown
Ad pgs. 13,15,17
The Grand Lodge, Mt. Crested Butte
Ad pg. 127
A French American Bistro
Seatings nightly at 6:00 and 8:30 For Reservations Call 970.349.5448 On Coal Creek in the alley behind The Forest Queen 127 Elk Avenue #A soupรงon-cb.com
Nathan Bilow
“The vitality of the barrel” Montanya celebrates its newest extra-aged, single-barrel rum. By Laurel Miller Crested Butte’s Montanya Distillers already produces some of America’s best rum; the awards range from Best in Class at the UK’s 2015 World Rum Awards to gold medals in international competitions. But president/ co-owner Karen Hoskins (husband Brice is head distiller) isn’t about to hit autopilot. In October 2015, Montanya released Montanya Exclusiva, an extra-aged singlebarrel rum finished in Cabernet Sauvignon and port barrels (made from French Oak) from Cortez’s Sutcliffe Vineyards. Hoskins has created an exquisite sipping spirit with notes of cardamom, clove and toasted almond, and also achieved a longtime goal. Since opening the distillery in 2008, “I’ve wanted to create an extra-aged rum in collaboration with Sutcliffe. I was inspired by Snowflake, a limited release whiskey from Stranahan’s that’s aged in Cabernet 124
CB’S ONE AND ONLY SUSHI BAR Dinner Nightly 5:30 Happy Hour at the Bar and Sushi Bar 5:30 - 6:30 321 Elk Avenue | 970.349.5457 | l i l s s u s h i b a r a n d g r i l l . c o m
Trent Bona Photography
Franc barrels,” she said. “We were going for the contrasting elements of a dry, tannic finish from the cabernet and the plum notes of the port. It was delightful to work with a renowned vintner whose process and product were equally impressive, and who also happened to be in Colorado. It was exactly the alchemy we were hoping to find.” Sustainability is a core value at Montanya, which recently converted its distillery and tasting room to 100-percent wind power, and sources only traceable American ingredients for its three rums (which also include Platino and Oro). Hoskins isn’t a fan of molassesbased rum, which is overly sweet for her palate, and since 2014 the distillery has direct-purchased all of its sugar cane from a 50-square-mile co-op of multi-generational family farms in Belrose, Louisiana. In a serendipitous twist, the matriarch of one of the cane families is from Crested Butte, and the connection has enabled staff and family members from the distillery and co-ops to visit one another. “The cane sourcing closed the loop for us, making our rums a certified American product with as much Colorado connection as possible,” said Hoskins. Montanya also uses Rocky Mountain water and Durango honey, and distills in old school-style alembic copper pots. Exclusiva, which is only available in Colorado, was a difficult endeavor for the best possible reason. “We kept trying to extra-age Oro for three years, but there was too much demand so we never had the supply,” said Hoskins. The distillery was finally able to squirrel away enough to develop Exclusiva, although each batch has variations innate to the barrels used for finishing. Explained Hoskins, “The Sutcliffe barrels we’re using add a natural, beautiful rosy color and vinous, nutty, dry elements, but with a handcrafted product, there are going to be slight differences in every batch. We never bottle anything that isn’t ready, and while I understand the value of some distilleries blending rum from many different barrels, I think it’s often done to address insufficiencies in the bottled product. I like to know how long every drop of rum in the bottle is aged.” Hoskins was referring to the global practice of using additives like caramel to color or flavor improperly aged rum or to mask harshness. “It’s legal all over the world to say a rum is aged for eight to ten years, when in
AMERICAN STYLE BISTRO CUISINE WITH SPECIALTY MARTINIS AND COCKTAILS Open Monday thru Saturday 5:00 Late Night Happy Hour Thursday thru Saturday 10:00 - Midnight 122 W. Tomichi Ave | Gunnison | 970-641-4394 | B L A C K S T O C K B I S T R O . C O M 125
DINE [ AT THE BASE AREA ]
BUTTE 66 ROADHOUSE GRILLE
Nathan Bilow
SERVING FROM 11 AM | SLOPESIDE TREASURY CENTER | (970) 349-2999
SPELLBOUND PIZZA OPEN DAILY | TREASURY CENTER UPPER LEVEL | (970) 349-2998
JEFE’S SERVING FROM 11 AM | MOUNTAINEER SQUARE BREEZEWAY
THE WOODSTONE GRILLE SERVING BREAKFAST, APRÈS & DINNER | GRAND LODGE | (970) 349-8030
APRÉS SKI AT TRACKERS OPEN DAILY | LOBBY LEVEL LODGE AT MOUNTAINEER SQUARE
COAL BREAKER COFFEE CO. NEW! OPEN DAILY | TREASURY CENTER
reality, only a couple of ounces of aged spirit are added to a younger blend,” she said. “I’m a proponent for truth in labeling and transparency in production, and I wanted to make a 100-percent aged rum. By single barrel-aging our spirits, it’s all aged together in the barrel for the same amount of time. The spirit can be moved from barrel to barrel, but it’s not mixed with different rums of different ages from different barrels (i.e. blended). “We’re at the whim of the barrel and the char, which means each bottle of our rum has slightly different flavor profiles,” she continued. “Blended rums try to eliminate variety in the character from the wood; we embrace it, like winemakers do. Some of our best surprises come from allowing this vitality from the barrel to emerge.” Note: In addition to Montanya’s tasting room, many local restaurants and nightspots serve Montanya rum. Curious? Ask your waitperson/bartender about it.
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DINE [ ON THE MOUNTAIN ] Open Daily Espresso | Pastries | Good Grub Wine | Beer | Specialty Coffees BWCCafe.com
UMBRELLA BAR AT TEN PEAKS OPEN DAILY | WEATHER PERMITTING | TOP OF THE PAINTER BOY LIFT
ULEY’S CABIN & ICE BAR DAYTIME DINING & SLEIGH RIDE DINNER OPEN DAILY | BOTTOM OF THE TWISTER LIFT LUNCH & DINNER RESERVATIONS: (970) 349-2275 | skicb.com/uleys
PARADISE OPEN DAILY | BOTTOM OF THE PARADISE LIFT
skicb.com/eat 127
PHOTO FINISH
Petar Dopchev
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GUNNISON VALLEY’S FINEST RECREATIONAL MARIJUANA STORE Locally Owned
SOMA Grown
CRESTED BUTTE 423 BELLEVIEW AVE \\ 500 WEST HIGHWAY 50 #101 GUNNISON BOTH STORES OPEN DAILY \\ MUST BE 21+ WITH VALID ID
\\ SOMACOLORADO.COM \\
2014 BEST BUDTENDER
2015 BEST NEW BUSINESS
Crested Butte News Best of the Butte
CB/Mt. CB Chamber of Commerce
Prime Dry Aged Steaks, Steakhouse, Fresh Seafood, Large Groups and Weddings Welcome
226 Elk Avenue, Crested Butte 970 . 349 . 1221 elkaveprime.com