Crested Butte Magazine - WInter 2018/19

Winter 2018-2019 Complimentary

Bob Brazell Photography

Crested Butte’s Custom Home Builder WrightAngleConstruction.com | 970.596.1039 Nathan Bilow

PHOTO CREDIT - JOHN HOLDER

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CONTENTS w2018-2019 SHORTIES 10 A different kind of love story by Alison White

How a missing wedding dress turned a community of

strangers into virtual sisters.

14

Learning from the snow by Bill Kastning The Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory’s fifth-grade snow science camp transformed a snowy meadow into a learning lab.

18 No more spilled soup by Dawne Belloise

Zoetica entrepreneurs Karen Hoskin and Elizabeth Smith

aim to make sustainable living more convenient.

22

4

Seeking more of Morris the Saurus by Caroline Singleton At the quarry near Gunnison, finding dinosaur bones involves a lot of time digging around NOT finding dinosaur bones.

FEATURES 28

36

Shake, shimmy and smile by Beth Buehler Crested Butte’s free spirit shows up on all kinds of dance floors.

Going to Extremes by Sandra Cortner Patrollers invest long, exacting hours mitigating the avalanche danger in the Extreme Limits, so skiers and boarders can play in the legendary powder.

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The Gunnison County Snow Shoe Club of 1886

Newspaperman John Phillips recalls Crested Butte’s 1880s snow shoeing (a.k.a. skiing) exploits in this narrative rediscovered and edited by Brian Levine.

52

Writing her own story by Dawne Belloise A lively “blether” with journalist, story collector and literary arts innovator Brooke MacMillan.

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80

88

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One-step-higher education by David J. Rothman Western Colorado University in Gunnison finds renewal in “nimble, dynamic” graduate programs.

The last accordion by Cara Guerrieri The musical Carricato brothers kept the diverse immigrants of the valley dancing together for decades, including this lifelong polka fan.

Artful philanthropy by Sandra Cortner More than 300 donors helped fund the new Center for the Arts, but the Weekley family launched the project, and the Feldberg family got it to the finish line.

Living on the surface of winter by George Sibley In modern Crested Butte, we dig, push and haul the snow out of our way. In other times, people lived on top of it.

Roads less traveled by Janet Weil Crested Butte’s alleyways bear witness to many a tale of hard work, adventure and mischief.

Small groups, big impacts by Kelli Rohr Drawing affluent adventure travelers, Eleven has quietly become a significant employer and economic force in Crested Butte.

THE VIEW FROM HERE 102 From the mountains…to the world by Molly Murfee

Let’s listen to each other. Here are some wisdom gifts from our mountain culture.

109 Hickory to carbon by Polly Oberosler

A valley native re-traces her life – and the life of Crested Butte’s ski area – in a pile of old skis.

115 The rewilding of women by Cayla Vidmar

This writer finds inspiration in the grace and grit of her Crested Butte sisters.

68 Gallery | 122 Calendar | 126 Lodging | 129 Dining 133 40 years of covers Xavier Fané

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Vol. XXXX, 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 Cara Guerrieri Bill Kastning Brian Levine Molly Murfee Polly Oberosler Kelli Ruhl David J. Rothman George Sibley Caroline Singleton Cayla Vidmar Janet Weil Alison White PHOTOGRAPHERS Nathan Bilow Nolan Blunck Trent Bona Matt Burt Sandra Cortner Dusty Demerson Petar Dopchev Mark Ewing Xavier Fané Alex Fenlon John Holder Chris Miller Rebecca Ofstedahl Lydia Stern Cayla Vidmar Alison White COVER PHOTO

By Petar Dopchev ONLINE crestedbuttemagazine.com E-MAIL sandyfails56@gmail.com ADVERTISING mj@crestedbuttemagazine.com Copyright 2018, Crested Butte Publishing. No reproduction of contents without authorization by Crested Butte Publishing & Creative.

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Editor’s note

A 40th birthday, Vail and the stories we tell ourselves

This issue officially marks the 40th birthday of the Crested Butte Magazine (though we cheated and threw ourselves a party in August). It’s also the first issue after the autumn announcement that Vail Resorts purchased the Crested Butte ski area. That raised some eyebrows in a community that has defined itself in part as the anti-Vail.

Putting together this issue of the magazine, I looked back at our 40-year ride – and thought about what will best carry Crested Butte forward into an era of changes.

In the midst of that pondering, I read David Rothman’s article in which he defines culture as “the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.” Ah, that’s what links past to future: our stories and how we curate them.

I first visited Crested Butte in the late 1970s – when I was in my twenties and the Crested Butte Magazine was a new, small, mostly black-and-white publication printed in Jeff Neumann’s barn. Even in the magazine’s early days, its pages were full of stories – funny, heart-warming, informative, mischievous. As a visitor reading about Crested Butte, I wanted to live in that place and write for that magazine.

And I did. In the four decades since then, less in the pages of the magazine than in conversations around town, I’ve also heard countless people sounding the death knell for Crested Butte’s soul. The end was supposedly nigh when the town paved its streets (early ‘80s), when

Nathan Bilow

Tony Mihelich died and his hardware store closed (mid ‘90s), when Budweiser painted Elk Avenue blue for its advertising campaign (a few years ago) and at various other landmarks in time.

Yes, we’ve known loss. I miss buying Coleman fuel amid the coal-leather-oil smell of Tony’s Conoco/hardware.

We’ve also enjoyed gains, like some of the young people and creative movements that are shaping this town. In that mix, I can scarcely imagine a place more soulful than this one.

Now some fear we’ll lose our soul because Vail Resorts has purchased the ski area. I understand that fear.

Chris Hanna, Sandy Fails, M.J. Vosburg and Steve Mabry at the magazine’s 40th birthday party, co-hosted by the Center’s Literary Arts Department.

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Editor’s note

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In Crested Butte Magazine issues from a quartercentury ago, I stumbled onto the ski area’s ad campaign proclaiming, “This is not Vail…”

But, as many have said, Vail Resorts didn’t buy Crested Butte’s town, mountains, people or soul. Nobody really wants this community to turn into Vail – including the powers-thatbe at Vail Resorts. They want to make money running this ski resort. They’re not going to entice Front Range skiers to drive four extra hours to ski in a place that’s just like the one right down the highway from them.

I don’t think we’ll wake up tomorrow to find Teocalli Tamale has been replaced by McDonalds, or Vinotok has been booted out to make room for a televangelists’ convention. I do think change is coming. Let us welcome the good and bolster ourselves for the challenges.

This is a good time to heed David Rothman’s definition of culture. Let’s make sure we’re telling ourselves the right stories about ourselves.

For four decades, the Crested Butte Magazine has given us a forum to share our best stories and images. I’m proud that the magazine has taken its deepest inspiration not from commercial ambitions but from our love of our place. With that purity of vision, we have thrived. That says a lot about the people who create this magazine – and about the community that supports it.

As I read through old issues of the magazine, I got such a kick from the stories I found there: Holly Prechter’s third-grade friends helping her through cancer; creative capital that’s better than money; oldtimer shenanigans; the tall tale of a night so cold it froze a dog’s howl in mid air; preserving the town’s architectural integrity; backcountry survival against the odds; backstage antics at the Mountain Theatre….

For 40 years, our stories have reminded us of our goodness. At our best, we are independent, feisty, caring, smart, funny, creative, kind, strong, thoughtful, weird, fit, nature-loving and soulful.

This issue adds more tales to the mix: how this town loves to dance, the Extreme Limits snow wizards, spirited women, innovative graduate studies, the accordion that kept so many feet stepping lively, ecological entrepreneurs, mischief in the alleys, and plenty more.

What a lovely way to celebrate a 40th birthday – and to greet a new era for the ski area. Let’s keep our culture vital. Let’s keep telling – and living – our best stories.

—Sandy Fails, editor

The Mountain Office Team Joel Vosburg and Charlie Farnan Long Standing Producers- Committed to Excellence and Service

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A different kind of love story

By Alison White Newlyweds Sophie and Tarik, in case you missed their story on Facebook.

Alison White

How a missing wedding dress turned a community of strangers into virtual sisters.

As a wedding photographer, I see a lot of love: young couples, older couples, second marriages, blended families. Every couple has a beautiful story. But this is a different kind of love story. Sophie and Tarik decided to elope in Crested Butte, just the two of them, their dog Bear, their officiant and me. It was to be a simple, special and private weekend for the two of them. But while they did tie the knot over Labor Day weekend, the rest of their story didn’t go quite as planned.

On the Friday night before their wedding, Sophie called me and said, “So, yeah... I forgot my wedding dress in Denver. Do you know anywhere I might be able to find a dress tomorrow?”

My heart sank. For many brides, this would be a nightmare. After throwing out a few suggestions, she asked if I could put the situation on Facebook to see if someone could loan her a dress.

So I cross-posted on the Gunnison and Crested Butte Marketplaces, our local version of Craig’s List. The post read, “Please help! Is there anyone willing to loan a dress to my bride?”

Almost immediately came replies from women offering dresses in all sizes, lengths and vintages. They posted pictures from their own weddings, spare dresses, anything they had. The comments blew up on multiple threads. People shared the posts. Within hours, Sophie 10

received over thirty viable offers.

Over the course of Saturday, the comments started to change from offerings to inquiries:

“Which dress did she choose?”

“We’re all dying to know: What ended up happening?!”

“I love how everyone is rallying around the bride who’s willing to wear a last-minute borrowed dress! Hope you found something that works, and you’ll have a great story to tell for years!”

Sophie was convinced that the Internet world was much more freaked out than she was. When they’d planned the elopement, she had only tried on two dresses of her own before buying one. Now, with that dress hanging in her closet at home, Sophie was willing to get married in her jeans and hiking boots if necessary. But the outpouring by the community was overwhelming, and clearly people didn’t want to see that happen.

Late afternoon on Saturday, Sophie went to get her hair and makeup done. While making light conversation, the stylist asked what her wedding dress looked like. When she responded that she didn’t know yet, the stylist said, “Oh, that’s you! What did you pick?!”

The woman in the chair next to her piped in that she, too, had been following the online thread.

The dresses Sophie had collected thus far were all beautiful, but still not quite right for her. So she still hadn’t decided what to wear.

One of the Facebook responses I’d received intrigued Sophie, so I grabbed that dress on my way to see her before the wedding.

Wedding time approached, and with it came the last dress I’d picked up for her. This one turned out to be the winner – as was the story behind the dress. Emmy Luna had bought it as a backup when she panicked that she hated her wedding dress. Emmy had had it altered, but she’d never worn it. When Sophie tried it on, the dress fit like it was made for her. She liked it even more than her original dress.

We headed out to shoot portraits before the actual elopement, and people who passed us and recognized me commented on the bride and her dress choice. Sophie said, “But we don’t know anyone in this town except for you!” They couldn’t believe the outpouring of support and interest at every turn.

The wedding was short, sweet, magical… everything they’d hoped.

Following the ceremony, Sophie and Tarik headed to The Sunflower for dinner. Not ones to miss a good story, owners Chris and Natalie Phillips ate up the newlyweds’ tale. They shared it with everyone in the restaurant. One diner told them she’d been following the story and had checked Facebook just before she’d left for dinner to see if the bride had chosen a dress; that woman then covered the couple’s bar tab. The newlyweds had their first dance on the back patio. Chris and Natalie bought Emmy a gift certificate as a pay-it-forward thank-you. “The whole day felt like a dream,” Sophie commented.

Knowing how interested people had become in the couple’s story, I downloaded the photos and posted one online as quickly as I could.

The responses flowed in, like these:

“I love this — what a community!”

“Good choice, beautiful, from Oklahoma!”

“I love reading all these generous offers. Sisters helping sisters.”

And my favorite: “What a beautiful story! Once upon a time, a bride bought an extra wedding dress she would never wear, and had

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Alison White

it drastically altered to perfectly fit a bride she had never met, to save a wedding day that probably hadn’t even been planned yet. BEST WISHES TO ALL!”

For days after, I continued to get stopped on the street by followers wanting to find out what happened. Sophie found a dress.

She and Tarik got married. Emmy said she could keep the dress. The newlyweds fell in love with Crested Butte and all the people they’ll never meet, people who reached out to offer dresses or just their support.

Never underestimate the power of love. For each other. For our community. For finding the good in what could have been an unfortunate situation. Weddings encompass love, and for this one, Sophie and Tarik felt it from up and down the entire valley.

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Learning

By Bill Kastning

from the snow

At snow science camp, fifth graders measured temperature and calculated moisture content throughout the snowpack.

Bill Kastning

The Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory’s fifth-grade snow science camp turned a snowy meadow into a learning lab.

Fifty excited fifth graders piled off the school bus and eagerly donned skis for a fun day in the snow. But this day was not just about cross-country skiing. These students would examine snow crystals, poke thermometers into different layers of the snowpack, and study solar radiation around sagebrush and trees. This was SCIENCE for eager young scholars.

Among Crested Butte’s many attributes is the absolute smorgasbord of activities and educational opportunities for its children. The list is astounding, encompassing far more than the usual outdoor recreation and sports available in active and vibrant communities. Here we see a summer packed with ways to engage in science, music, theater and creative arts; then the school year brings its own array.

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Immediately after I retired from teaching in the Gunnison schools, I was asked if I could drive a bus to and from school. I hadn’t planned on jumping right back into the realm of public education, but the position was hard to fill, and I knew I could be of service to the community. I quickly came to see how much it would draw me back into the world of families and their wonderful children – not just providing daily transportation, but also becoming involved in their many extracurricular sports and educational activities.

In this vein I found myself transporting the fifth graders from school to the Crested Butte Nordic Center for cross-country skiing.

When I realized this was far more than a ski outing, I took special notice. Here was a new educational experience being added to an amazing list: a winter snow science program offered by the children’s science education arm of Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL). I noted the pioneering aspect of this event, having enrolled my own children in RMBL summer science camp – in the 1980s for my son Andrew and the ‘90s for my daughter Amelie.

Over the last ten years, RMBL has grown its contributions to environmental science education and research. Dating back to 1928, RMBL has provided a platform for scientists from around the world

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to study mountain ecosystems. This longterm data collection and record of research is now priceless to the scientific community.

RMBL is both a research and education institution. Unique to RMBL is the fact that children as well as adults can learn alongside the field scientists working in this area. In the last decade RMBL’s K-12 nature and science course offerings have grown beyond summer to include fall field programs for local schools, and for the first time a winter program in 2018. These programs let students engage in hands-on field science practices while learning about the research taking place in their own backyard.

Currently, the largest research project at RMBL is the Watershed Function and Scientific Focus Area study. The fifth-grade winter science program I was watching unfold was developed to let young students be part of that project.

So it was RMBL Youth Program Director Ann Colbert who appeared at the door of my school bus ready for a full day of snow science activities. Rather than heading off for my own ski, as I’d planned, I HAD to tag along to see what she had planned.

As the parent of youngsters in the 1990s, I was amazed by this educational adventure. As the fifth graders set off toward the Magic Meadows Yurt just north of Peanut Lake, there was the inevitable burst of energy: a passel of 12-year-olds charging up and down any snowy slope that provided a chance to fly, jump and/or crash.

Fairly quickly, RMBL instructors organized them into three learning stations.

These included snowpack and water analysis; exploration of solar radiation and energy in ecosystems; and setting up an experiment related to early snowmelt and climate change. Out came the thermometers, scales, snow crystal cards, snow saw, magnifying lenses and snow/ water measuring tools.

What particularly impressed me was the child-scaled introduction to snowpack and crystal analysis and how crystal characteristics can increase or decrease avalanche danger. Even with the attention span of the average fifth grader, the students got a rich exposure to much of the snow science that their parents might have learned in an expensive avalanche workshop! By the time the kids were finished for the day, they’d learned a huge amount about what they’d formerly seen as just a big snowy playground.

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No more

By Dawne Belloise

spilled soup

Zoetica entrepreneurs Karen Hoskin and Elizabeth Smith aim to make sustainable living more convenient.

Karen Hoskin and Elizabeth Smith know they aren’t selling a new concept, but they’re doing it in a new way. Through their company Zoetica, the two friends research, test and sell reusable items to make it easy for people to live more sustainably.

Zoetica features diverse systems – from food containers to drinking straws, grocery bags to deodorant pods – that fit easily into a backpack or purse. These can replace what Elizabeth calls “convenience trash – to-go containers, plastic bags and utensils, things that have a lifespan of about 15 seconds, or even 15 minutes, and then get tossed, and then we have to deal with it.”

Convenience trash, she noted, is congesting our oceans and landfills and infiltrating our watersheds. “Now 80 percent of our drinking water has plastic in it.”

The concept of Zoetica was birthed after Karen and Elizabeth expressed their concerns to each other about current events.

“At the same moment in time, three things happened,“ Karen said with a smile. “We were upset with the political environment, extremely concerned that everything we cared about environmentally was going to get rolled back under the new administration, and we were trying to figure out how to eliminate convenience trash out of 18

Photos Nathan Billow

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our own lifestyles.” They both laughed. “We were having a hell of a time trying to figure out how to do this.”

Karen had bought a collapsible silicon bowl with a lid on it and figured she could carry it around in her purse. But on its first use, the bowl collapsed at the wrong time and drenched her in soup.

The two started comparing notes as to what they’d tried, what worked or failed, what they loved or hated. After eight months of personally testing products for efficiency and reliability, attractiveness and sustainability, they came up with a kit that worked for them.

In airports or other places, Karen would get approached by strangers asking where she got her reusable items. The interest in their personal kits generated the idea for Zoetica.

“Our kits have evolved a lot over time,” Elizabeth pointed out. ”We sent test kits out with my daughter traveling all over Europe and friends traveling overseas. And people would ask how they could get them.”

Then there was navigating the airline rules. “They don’t want to refill your [reusable] cup for sanitary reasons,” Elizabeth explained, which makes little sense since they

do refill people’s used paper cups.

The two also discovered issues with bringing their own to-go containers to restaurants, where workers said they couldn’t take personal containers over the counter. “So now we say, ‘Ok, just give me a for-here plate on this side [of the counter] and I’ll scrape it in,’” Elizabeth said. They’re just figuring out the language and “life hacks” to maneuver around such obstacles.

Zoetica teams up with 12 companies, from which they buy wholesale to assemble the systems. They feel the biggest barrier to people switching to reusable items is that they simply forget to bring what they need for uses like shopping, meal take-out, drinks and restaurant doggie bags. With downsized, lightweight reusable items that can be kept in a purse or pack, more people will eventually eliminate disposable items from their daily lifestyle.

“It’s all about refusing plastic and paper trash,” Karen said. “We’re creating systems, giving people a way to keep it all together and organized, have it look good, bring it home, wash it and put it back in their car, purse or backpack every day.”

In Zoetica’s display room, the shelves exhibit attention-grabbing products like kids’ lunch boxes, stainless steel food containers, nested lidded bowls, eating utensils, straws, bags from larger nylon grocery bags to smaller cotton gauze produce sacks, space-age polished stainless steel ice cubes, and mattefinished steel deodorant pods embedded with a silver ion technology that doesn’t need chemicals to eliminate odors from hands or underarms. For use in the home or on the go (e.g. for festivals, feasts and picnics), Zoetica offers modernistic, bamboo-husk dish sets, plates and bowls that are lightweight, compostable and dishwasher safe. Karen and Elizabeth vet everything by research and personal trial.

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You use it under your arms or on your hands.

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Zoetica only utilizes 18/8 steel in its metal products. It’s the highest quality of stainless steel you can get with the least amount of aluminum, and it’s also nontoxic, easy to clean and long lasting.

“There’s a reason none of our products are coated,” Hoskin said, holding up a stainless steel cup. “As soon you take a cup like this and coat it, you have to use it 300 times to make it better than single-use paper cups, because there’s an environmental cost to the making of anything. This uncoated cup you only have to use about 20 times to make it pay in sustainability.”

To be included in the Zoetica product line, an item has to fit the company’s goals of sustainability, safety and responsibility.

Plastic, the owners note, is really hard to recycle, but steel isn’t.

Zoetica products have been on the market for a year, and the timing coincides with the Crested Butte town ordinance prohibiting single-use plastic bags, which came into effect September 1. Zoetica works with Sustainable Crested Butte, the nonprofit organization that pushed for that ordinance. Zoetica has donated money to Sustainable CB as well as donating kits so the organization can raise money from them.

They’re exploring the idea of collaborating to bring free water bottle-filling stations throughout the valley, similar to the one installed by Sustainable CB in the bus terminal near the four-way stop.

Zoetica products are sold through its website, zoeticalife.com, which allows both individual sales and corporate orders.

Products are shipped in boxes that are either repurposed or 100% recycled, with no packaging materials inside and no plastic wrap. People can also visit the Crested Butte display shop by appointment (which can also be made online).

Karen and Elizabeth acknowledge their impact might be small, but Karen pointed out, “It’s the way movements grow; change happens from the ground up.”

She added, “The immediacy of the environmental situation was crushing our souls, and we could just do nothing about it or we could do something to change the paradigm, even if it’s small.”

Their company name derives from the adjective “zoetic,” which pertains to life, living, vitality. It applies to bringing something back to life, which Karen and Elizabeth hope to do by bringing sustainable, Earth-friendly convenience kits into the culture of throw-away.

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Seeking more of

By Caroline Singleton

Morris the Saurus

Caroline Singleton and Andrew Smith excavating at the dinosaur quarry.

Photos by Ryan King

A novice at the dinosaur quarry learns that finding sauropod bones involves a lot of time digging around NOT finding sauropod bones.

In 1970, while looking for arrowheads in the sage hills surrounding Gunnison, two Western State College (now Western Colorado University) students came across an exposed dinosaur bone. That bone and others from the same Apatosaurus – a scapula, four tail vertebrae and pieces of a rib – are displayed in a glass case under fluorescent light in Western’s Hurst Hall. To me, it seems an underwhelming place to exhibit such significant objects.

There are likely additional bones buried in the quarry that would help researchers gain a better understanding of the creature. Dr. Ryan King wants to find these. A Western geology grad and friend of Ryan’s, I was eager to help. But, as I learned, finding dinosaur bones generally involves a lot of time digging around NOT finding dinosaur bones.

Ryan King is a paleontologist who earned his doctorate in earth and atmospheric sciences from the University of Alberta. He has been doing fieldwork digging bones for 15 years and working with dinosaur tracks for 20.

Ryan is coordinating with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to continue excavation on the Apatosaurus site. “Collecting 22

Bone fragments of “Morris the Saurus” found at the quarry near Gunnison.

more bones from this animal gives us a greater understanding of its morphology and allows us to compare this sauropod to others.

Then we can understand variations in growth or speciation,” he said. “Also, data collection during the quarrying has changed over the years, and by examining bones in place (still in the rock) we can understand more about how the dinosaur died: was it scavenged and spread out; was it deposited by a river current with a lot of bones sharing the same orientation; was it trampled by other animals after

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it died, leaving bones broken at different levels?”

After I begged for months to join the search, Ryan finally allowed my friend Andrew and me to accompany him in excavating the closed dinosaur quarry, where the original Apatosaurus skeleton fragments were found.

Heading east on Highway 50 through Colorado, dinosaur discovery locations range from Grand Junction to Delta, but then there is little sign of these ancient reptiles for 150 miles, until Canon City. The 50-100 sauropod bones unearthed outside of Gunnison helped to bridge this geographical gap.

Also noteworthy in this discovery is the location of the bones in the basal stratigraphy of the Morrison Formation.

“Morris the Saurus,” as this skeleton was nicknamed, could be the oldest sauropod ever found in this rock formation. He walked the Jurassic river flood plains around 150 million years ago, grew to around 70 feet long and could have weighed up to 22 tons.

On our excavation day, we drove to a nondescript location, slight hills of tan dirt with intermittent clusters of sage. Each hill resembled the next. I’m not sure I could find the place again. We walked away from the road lugging shovels, five-gallon buckets, rock hammers and little whisk brooms.

It seemed a worthwhile way to spend the afternoon, trying to find clues about an ancient past, just down the highway from where we live.

We walked farther and farther into the hills and at last stopped in the middle of some sage bushes. Ryan pulled out surveying tape, and I assisted by holding one end.

He measured out a rectangle four by seven meters. After nailing in stakes as corners of our study area, he tied pink neon string to rope off the area.

“The previous people who dug the quarry made a map, so we have an idea where they dug,” he said. “It’s essential to be systematic as you dig, so you don’t miss a square meter. While much of this animal is very large, something like a skull, which is very small proportionately, might be overlooked.”

I was timid at first, imagining that with each dig of a shovel I could break precious prehistoric material. Ryan emphasized, “It’s important to always understand where you dig in terms of how deep the bone layer is and what the topsoil looks like, so you understand where you can dig quickly and where you need to be very patient and

diligent.”

I cautiously dug dirt, filled my bucket and waddled about 20 feet away. I dumped the overburden in a heavy bucket by some more sage. It felt as though we were manually taking out a hillside.

An additional excavation was conducted here between 1992 and 1996. Hundreds of bone fragments from that time remain unidentified. They’ve been prepped out of the limestone but need to be sorted, organized and reassembled in order to make accurate identifications and be able to compare bones to other specimens.

With more digging, our conversation lulled. I gained confidence and chipped at the side of the dirt bank with a rock hammer.

The dirt moved more quickly, but still no bones. Just a lot of tan dirt. I fidgeted with my gloves and filled up more gallon buckets.

It’s monotonous work, NOT finding buried bones.

No one drove by this lonely road all day.

The only sound was an occasional airplane above.

We took short water and food breaks.

The afternoon was hot, but eventually the clouds came. I half hoped it would rain so we could go back to town and get cold drinks – though I knew those bones would not be found by getting refreshments in Gunnison.

Ryan showed no signs of stopping. He lay down in his freshly dug hole, patiently brushing off dirt with his small broom. His tidy hole looked much more professional than the messes Andrew and I had made.

The only things I found were bones from a deer that probably died last winter.

Finally Ryan told us we could pack up and apologized that we didn’t find anything.

He seemed more disappointed than we were.

Andrew and I were just excited to tell our friends we went on a dinosaur dig.

After being utterly unsuccessful in our excavation, I could barely contain my excitement when I heard from Ryan the next day. He’d gone back, dug more and found a rib and several pieces of vertebrae called transverse processes.

The hunt continues for pieces of Morris the Saurus, though Ryan’s permit with the BLM will expire at the end of this year. And winter is not conducive to excavating bones.

Ultimately Ryan hopes to collect more of the Apatosaurus’ bones, put the collected fossilized pieces back together, and further study this dinosaur that lived in Gunnison County 150 million years ago.

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317 Elk Avenue, Crested Butte, CO • 349-5913 • 10am to 9pm Daily zypp.net 25

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211 Elk Avenue | Crested Butte

SHAKE, SHIMMY

AND SMILE Crested Butte’s free spirit shows up on the dance floor.

By Beth Buehler

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Lydia Stern

C

rested Butte dances. We dance in classes and concerts, community events with a dance twist, the alwayscreative Move the Butte shows, the Soul Train float in the Fourth of July parade. We polka during Flauschink and Memorial Day festivities. Going to the Red Lady Ball, Miner’s Ball or annual PTA fund-raiser? Dress accordingly, don your dancing shoes, and tell the babysitter you might be late!

FINDING A GROOVE I scarcely remember a time when dance wasn’t part of my life.

At five, I got the golden ticket to join my teenage sisters in taking classes at Mary Funk’s School of Dance near our home in Greeley. In our matching red leotards, white skirts and black fishnets, our first (and only) stage performance together was a tap dance with other sister duos and trios. Then I danced to “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” with a group of other kindergartners, capping my first year of tap, jazz and ballet training that extended through high school.

Fast forward to 2018. I found myself tapping with Don Cook, Amy Bright and several talented high school students to another precipitation classic, “Singing in the Rain,” during a Crested Butte School of Dance recital in February. A few weeks later, I hit the stage with Move the Butte, and then shook my booty at my third local Soul Train. Living in Crested Butte for 14 years has reawakened my love for dance.

Lydia Stern

Pulling on tap shoes again in 2011, after some gentle prodding from Bobbie Reinhardt, my daughter’s dance teacher, felt like coming home. Adding dashes of jazz and hip-hop also has been soul stretching. Think you’re too old to dance?

Nonsense. You’ve never taken a dance lesson in your life? You can learn with other newbies, and you don’t have to perform.

You don’t have time? Well, it’s as easy as moseying up by the outdoor stage at a summer concert to shimmy in the soft grass.

Here’s how several locals found their dance mojo in Crested Butte.

SETTING THE STAGE Bobbie Reinhardt (a non-skier at the time) and her husband moved to Crested Butte in 1973. After growing up in Denver and graduating from the University of California at Berkeley with a degree in history and minor in music, she found Crested Butte pretty quiet. “It was so different here; everyone was a jock. The Crested Butte Mountain Theatre was about it for the arts,” Reinhardt recalled.

The course of dance in Crested Butte changed when Reinhardt met Shirley Straubhaar, who trained at the School of American Ballet in New York City and taught ballet in Crested Butte. Straubhaar had told her suitor Robel (founder of Crested Butte’s ski school) she would marry him and move to Crested Butte only if he built her a ballet studio, which he 29

Lydia Stern

did. Reinhardt fell in love with ballet at age 23 and began attending classes at Straubhaar’s studio every morning at 7 a.m. – before Straubhaar left to teach skiing. When Straubhaar, who also started Dance in the Mountains, died of breast cancer at 49, Reinhardt was devastated.

Fortunately, Heidi Coe (now Frazier), a professional dancer with the Radio City Ballet Company in New York City, had arrived in Crested Butte a month earlier and offered to help. Reinhardt and Frazier continued Straubhaar’s legacy, teaching in her studio before moving classes to the town’s historic train depot and establishing the nonprofit Crested Butte School of Dance (SOD) in 1978.

Reinhardt taught the younger kids, and Frazier focused on other age groups. They created Dansummer, bringing teachers to Crested Butte from all over the country “so our kids didn’t have to travel to summer camps,” Reinhardt explained. “It was extremely successful, and we built an outdoor stage for Dansummer behind the depot.”

Eventually, they relocated to the third floor (the Pump Room) of the new fire station, and the outdoor stage was moved from the depot to the Center for the Arts.

Though Reinhardt was running SOD and raising two boys, she missed her early days of teaching history, so she took a job as a parttime elementary music and gym teacher at Crested Butte Community School. As the school grew, she focused solely on music, integrating a bit of dance into each class over her 20 years of teaching.

PASSING THE BATON When Frazier relocated six years ago, the school had become too 30

Petar Dopchev

large for Reinhardt to manage alone. So she transitioned the reins to one of SOD’s dance instructors, Adge Marz Lindsey, who along with Administrative Coordinator Annie Tunkey and a growing population, are “taking it to another place,” she said. “The dance school has now been around for 40 years and has been a huge part of this community.”

Reinhardt still teaches ballet, tap and creative movement to the youngest dancers, ages three to second grade. “Bobbie is an incredible spirit and wonderful mentor who has given me creative freedom. It’s inspiring to see her get back to the basics of teaching,” Marz Lindsey said.

SOD has undergone a gradual rebranding, reshaping the way

classes and shows are scheduled and bringing into the fold the Crested Butte Dance Collective (CBDC), an organization Marz Lindsey founded 10 years ago with KT Folz. The collective was created to fill a void for people who love to dance but can’t fit regular classes into their schedules or budgets. CBDC’s umbrella covers aerial dance classes, Move the Butte and a fall dance production that she describes as “pushing the creative edge.”

Today, 400 dancers are involved in one or both programs. Newer options like aerial, hip hop, lyrical and African dance have expanded the traditional tap, jazz and ballet equation, and men and boys have bought into this new formula. There are approximately 70 boys in SOD classes, with a big focus on hip-hop and aerial. “It has become cool to dance,” Marz Lindsey observed.

She also plans to bring back partner dance (e.g., tango, salsa, jitterbug) on the first Friday evening of each month, with the first hour devoted to instruction and the rest to dancing.

After studying dance growing up in Philadelphia, Marz Lindsey didn’t pursue it in college. Instead she earned a master’s degree in special education and performed physically integrated dance with the AXIS Dance Company in California. After she moved to Crested Butte and enrolled in a jazz class at SOD in 2006, Frazier asked her to take over as the instructor. Marz Lindsey fell in love with teaching and especially enjoys leading lyrical, modern dance, rhythm tap and boys’ hip-hop classes. She wants to explore physically integrated dance that involves people with disabilities, and she has already partnered with the Adaptive Sports Center.

As SOD hits year 40 and her danceloving daughter Galena turns four, Marz Lindsey confirmed that the biggest need is enough affordable space for dance classes and practices. But there’s no holding back those who want to dance. As the current Red Lady and a previous Harvest Mother for Vinotok, Marz Lindsey suggests that creating a costume box (or finding a friend who has one) is a simple way to plug into the many local events where you can dance.

Alison White Photography

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BORN TO DANCE

Laura Daniels had her costume box ready, which led to her being named the 2015 Queen of Soul at Soul Train, an annual dance party fund-raiser for public radio station KBUT. There was foreshadowing:

211 Elk Avenue, Crested Butte

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2015 Queen of Soul Laura Daniels boogies alongside KBUT’s July 4th parade float.

her first season in Crested Butte, 2009, involved dancing in the back of a pickup with the King and Queen of Soul during the Flauschink parade.

“It was great, great fun; I’d never known anything like that to exist before moving to Crested Butte. I felt like I’d found my people!

So I wanted to be Queen of Soul myself one day,” Daniels said.

At Soul Train 2015, knowing she had to wake at the crack of dawn the next day to coach Crested Butte Community School’s high school track team and without a drop of alcohol for liquid encouragement, Daniels brought home the crown in tandem with King of Soul Anthony Perez.

The daughter of a semi-professional ballerina, Daniels grew up in a household “rich with dance.” Jazz and ballet classes gave way to sports and academics by middle school, but “anyone who knows me knows I love to dance,” she said.

Daniels prefers free-form dancing versus classes, and she relishes opportunities to go out with friends to boogie, which typically involves bands or late evenings at Talk of the Town. She’s also attended the Red Lady Ball and Black & White Ball. “Clubbing isn’t my thing, but I love a really good DJ and house music,” she noted.

“I’d like to see more opportunities to dance here… there’s a hunger for it. Soul Train is packed and so are after-parties at Bonez.”

Amy Bright also played sports in high school and college but didn’t take dance lessons. Bringing her son David to Reinhardt’s dance class when he was young, she learned of the adult jazz class held immediately after. Participant Sally Hensley encouraged her to check it out. Tap and jazz classes have been part of her life ever since.

“It brings me so much joy to dance,” she said. “It fills me up in a way that nothing else does; it’s just so much fun.” For Bright, it’s rewarding to perform after working hard to get a dance ready; she also enjoys the camaraderie with people she otherwise might not have crossed paths with, especially teenagers. “It has stepped up my 32

Matt Burt

dancing, following along with kids who have danced since they were itty-bittys. It’s a chance to interact with them.”

INSPIRING YOUTH One of those teenagers is Dane De Frates, who started dancing through Celebrate the Beat, a program at Crested Butte Community School. Now a junior in high school, he started taking classes with SOD in fourth grade, when only a handful of boys were participating.

Hip-hop and now aerial have driven up the number of interested guys, which prompted the startup of a boys dance team last year. The purpose isn’t to travel and compete but to “open up opportunities for trios, duos and solos to perform and for leadership roles,” he explained.

How has this phenomenon transformed middle and high school dances? While the boys are no longer afraid to hit the dance floor, “we don’t break into a solo at a homecoming dance like in the movie ‘Footloose.’ If there’s a popular dance move going around, we can do it well,” De Frates said.

In seventh and eighth grade, he was part of the SOD’s newly formed dance company and became close to the high school girls who also participated. “They ignited his passion for dance,” said his mom Jenny, whose seventh-grade daughter also dances with SOD. She noted that the Center for the Arts’ new auditorium should be done by May 2019, just in time for her son’s senior dance recital.

Best known for his hip-hop prowess, De Frates also is partial to tap and has enjoyed jazz funk and contemporary jazz classes. “Dance is a unique part of our town… the whole community comes out to support us.” Though he doesn’t plan to study dance in college, “it will always be special to me,” he said.

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Ella Donovan, a former itty-bitty who came up through the SOD ranks since age four, was one of the high school girls who impacted De Frates. She’s now in her junior year studying dance on a scholarship at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. After juggling many activities in middle school, she focused on dance as a freshman in high school, the year SOD launched the dance company, which requires additional practices and travel. “By doing basketball, volleyball and dance, I was going to be mediocre at everything, and I decided that dance is my passion,” she said.

“My third grade dance class was the first one that Adge taught, and we developed a special relationship with her,” Donovan noted. Having a passionate teacher and dancing with her best friends, Avery Forsythe and Ansley Potoker, proved a powerful combination. During summers in high school, Donovan added to her technique repertoire at places like PerryMansfield Performing Arts School and Camp in Steamboat Springs, Boulder Jazz Dance Workshop, Cherry Creek Dance Center in Denver, and Interlocken Center for the Arts in Michigan.

After earning a bachelor of arts in dance performance, Donovan hopes to dance with a small company in Chicago or New York City, but teaching also is on her radar. She began co-teaching as a high school freshman and led jazz, tap and hip-hop classes for third and fourth grade girls and hip-hop for fifth grade boys. This summer she taught jazz and creative movement before heading to Grenada, Spain, for a semester abroad (and perhaps to learn flamenco).

With a 21st birthday on the horizon, Donovan’s agenda includes attending her first Soul Train, and she appreciates that dance is something all generations share.

“The spirit of dance in Crested Butte is really unique in that it encompasses all ages and abilities. Having ages three to 63 perform on stage is awesome,” she said. “I don’t know anyone else in college who had adults and teens dancing together. It added to the whole experience here. I have so many friends in their thirties and forties that I wouldn’t have met without dance.”

Perhaps it’s always been like that in Crested Butte. The town founders celebrated life in a small mining town many ways, including with their feet. That passion for movement lives on, as Daniels noted. “People are free spirited here, and it shows up on the dance floor.”

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JOHNNY BIGGERS GENERAL CONTRACTORS 970-349-5990 970.209.3261 P H O T O : N AT H A N B I L O W

Going to Extremes

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For hours before skiers revel in fresh powder in the Extreme Limits, patrollers have been studying the snow, dropping charges and ski cutting the steeps to manage the avalanche danger.

By Sandra Cortner // Photos by Mark Ewing

A patroller launches a charge to trigger potential avalanches and stabilize the snowpack.

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On powder morning routes, patrollers analyze the snowpack and set charges in unstable areas of the Extremes.

It’s snowing steadily in the darkness.

Eighteen inches are forecast for the next 24 hours, not surprising for January. While vacationers and locals sleep, the snow cat drivers on the slopes of Crested Butte Mountain Resort (CBMR) roll their machines over the newly fallen snow. High above, in the Extreme Limits, those places reserved for expert skiers able to handle the steep and deep, the flakes gently pile up, crystal upon crystal, untouched by machines or skis — for now.

At 2:30 a.m., Frank Coffey, snow safety director for the Crested Butte Professional Ski 38

Patrol, gets out of bed. He looks at the realtime weather, satellite pictures and forecasts to determine if there’s enough snow and wind to create an avalanche situation, then makes a decision by 3:30 before recording a phone message. Fifty-four full-time and part-time ski patrollers start dialing in to listen. Snow doesn’t stop on holidays; Krista Hildebrandt, a 29-year patrol veteran, remembers calling in at 4:30 a.m. one December morning to hear Frank’s cheery message: “Merry Christmas.

You are all coming in for early morning.”

When summoned for avalanche control work, the 30-40 patrollers on duty fortify for

the exhausting day to follow, a day that might not include a lunch break. Lift operators and mechanics, some of whom live down valley, also get the word from their supervisors. A day of shoveling ramps and sweeping chairs awaits them.

Patrollers dress at the lower patrol room before riding up the Silver Queen Lift at 6 a.m. Their mission is to open the mountain’s terrain to the public, safely setting off avalanches from above before a stray skier does. First they work the in-bounds slopes, then the Extreme Limits.

Frank and his assistant John Mortimer

plus two other members of the patrol explosives team travel on snowmobiles accompanied by snow cats to meet a couple of lift mechanics at the base of the North Face Lift at 5 a.m. “We snowmobile one at a time under Paradise Cliffs [for safety] because they haven’t been controlled yet, and get the mechanics up to the top of the Silver Queen to turn on the lift,” said Frank.

Once all the patrollers are on top, the lift shuts down until 9 a.m. when the ski area will open for business. The explosives crew starts assembling charges at the “makeup facility” just off the High Lift, making approximately 100 charges on a typical control morning. Each consists of a one-kilo high explosive, attached to a cap and safety fuse assembly. All the crew members have training and clearances with the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agency and the state explosives permit agency. Frank, who’s been with the patrol since 1980, is in charge of the explosives purchase, use and storage, and he answers to four different governmental agencies. He and the explosives crew must account for every blasting cap, fuse, detonator cord, igniter – every component of the charge.

At the beginning of the season, Frank pairs 24 two-person teams according to their days off and knowledge of particular avalanche control routes. On snow-control days, those teams initially attack the avalanche paths that hang over in-bounds trails: Horseshoe, Upper Forest, Paradise Cliffs and Tower 11. Then, depending on snow, they hit the rest of the Extreme Limits: North Face, Headwall, Glades, Spellbound, Phoenix, Staircase, Third Bowl, West Side, Forest, Peel, Banana, Funnel and Teocalli Bowl. Some routes take extra time during a big storm. The patrollers working Phoenix often need three passes to fully control it and may find themselves breaking trail just to get there.

At patrol headquarters, Krista and her partner look at previous photographs of their routes to determine where charges were placed and what slid. At the end of the day, they indicate on a new photo copy where they threw explosives and ski cut (zigzagging across the slope to compact the snow).

Eventually the partners learn by heart the most dangerous places that need controlling.

But they always use the photos stored in a notebook for reference and continuity.

Partners may change, slopes may slide, but notes and texts keep up communication between patrollers, passing down knowledge

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from day to day and year to year.

Next, they walk to the “boom-boom room” (make-up facility) and get from the explosives crew the number of charges they’ve calculated they’ll need that day.

Ski Patrol Director Bill Dowell coordinates “the chess game” from the top patrol headquarters. “I help with dispatching.

If patrollers who are assigned to East River for the day are still on their control shifts, I assign people to take their place. If needed, I’ll call in off-duty patrollers. We also need people to dig out signs, 30-40 toboggans around the mountain, tower pads, patrol room roofs and decks, and lift rope lines. I don’t go out on patrol routes, but I’ve been on every one and can fill in.” This is Bill’s 36th winter as a patroller and his sixth year as director.

Once they can see without headlamps, the teams load the upper lifts headed to their routes. The explosives, by federal regulation, can’t be used until then. Communication is essential among the partners and the other teams as well as the cat drivers opening access and egress routes.

Krista explained the explosives process.

She and her partner stay in visual contact with each other as they ski down the slope.

Once in position, she tells her partner she’s preparing the charge, pulls out the explosive and pull-wire igniter, and radios, “Ready to arm.”

“Copy,” says her partner.

Krista places the igniter on the fuse end of the charge.

“Armed.”

“Copy armed.”

“I’m going to pull in three, two, one. I have a burn.”

They start timing and Krista tosses the charge at its target and shouts as loud as she can: “FIRE IN THE HOLE!” They have two minutes to retreat to safety and cover their ears before the explosion, which sends an avalanche of snow thundering down.

“There are islands of safety as you work your way down the route,” said Bill. “The idea is not to be surprised by an avalanche.

The mountain is so complicated and filled with so many little pockets and zones, and the public goes everywhere.”

Frank agreed. “We’re dealing with the most dangerous snowpack on earth. All Colorado areas have this ‘continental snow’ characterized by persistent weak layers in old snow.”

Are the patrollers ever afraid? One of the first on the scene of an avalanche that killed a fellow patrolman, Frank said, ”It changed

me. I realized how fragile we are. Every day is a risk.” Added Bill, “If you aren’t a little aware and nervous, you should be.” For Krista, it’s simple: “I’m a mom.”

On a powder morning, skiers at the bottom might see the patrollers ski cutting the North Face or the Headwall trying to get it to slide. “Why isn’t it open?” they might moan. “I see the patrol up there.” Bill explained that the ski cuts and compaction are critical to strengthen and stabilize the snowpack. A series of boxes must be checked before the call goes out to open the Extremes. “When we do open, we have patrollers at the gate telling where the good skiing is and where the gnarly parts or avalanche debris are,” he said. “We won’t succumb to pressure to open if it’s not ready.”

Added Krista, “If it takes extra time, that needs to be respectfully received.”

That same care applies to opening the Extremes initially each winter. “We understand that the Extreme Limits are our forte, and we pride ourselves on getting them open for the season as soon as it’s safe,” said Bill. However, the patrollers need at least two feet of snow at the top of the mountain to start working it with ski packers, and 48 inches of compacted snow before opening the terrain to the public.

“Once we open the terrain initially for the season, we’re dealing with storm snow instabilities. The danger is mostly limited to the new snow,” said Frank. Wind, water content, temperature and snow depth present different challenges.

In 2016, during a January storm that dropped 11 feet in as many days, the mountain closed. Bill explained, “Snowmobiles were getting stuck, and the ambulance couldn’t even get up the ski area road. We got a lot of good press, though, because it was pretty unusual to close a ski area because of too much snow.”

Frank reassured skiers that “when we drop the rope, we’ve given it our best effort.

This team is highly trained, hard working and dedicated to making the skiing as safe as possible.” The rest is up to the skiers, who must heed the name Extreme Limits. Bill and Frank emphasized that the terrain requires a high level of skiing skill. About twice a year, they have to use ropes to evacuate people off rock cliffs and dead-end chutes.

Why do patrollers put in this effort year after year? Krista smiled. “To watch the public coming down hootin’ and hollerin’...

We have the pure pleasure of seeing them enjoying the powder.”

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Memory, like snow, swirls, undulates and drifts away with life’s vagaries. One moment you’re gliding through airy powder; the next, rattling over rippled ice. Ultimately, though, both memory and snow melt into the unavoidable bedrock of the future.

Believe me: I got this from a photograph.

Frank Dean, a Gunnison photographer, took this photo in February or March 1886 to commemorate the founding of the Gunnison County Snow Shoe Club. It’s one of my cherished mementos. I’ve had it since leaving Crested Butte in 1893. I no longer own a pair of snow shoes – skis, in today’s language. But I kept that photograph -- in this musty old scriptorium, once the inner workings of the Elk Mountain Pilot.

Look at it! Oak cabinets, gouged desks, broken wood-slat chairs, heavy printing press, scattered lead type – all sixty-some 44

William Henry Jackson photograph of a snow shoer en route to Gunnison from near Pitkin, circa 1880

1886 Gunnison County snow shoers Al Clark (labeled “5” on the photo) and Bill Middleton (8) hold 12-foot-long wooden skis with leather footholds; Tom Boughton (6) of Crystal sports a snow shoeing guide pole. Also pictured: Sam Gill (1), Percy Ramsden (2), Ed Burton (3), Claude Burton (4), author John Phillips (7), Frank Williams (9) and Moses Bloch (10) with his retriever.

years old or more. But, as you might guess, the memories are not quite the same, here in Alhambra where palm trees grow. The stories in this place originally took stage in an alpine backdrop, at nine thousand feet and up – with deep snow on the ground and temperatures below minus ten. Mining camps, personalities, silver, gold and intrigue – from my days in the Gunnison Country.

I was owner and editor of the Pilot, first in Irwin, Colorado, then Crested Butte. Long back, near forty years, those stories were transported here, to this old adobe shed back of my California home.

Feel that warm breeze passing through the San Gabriel Valley, outside these old windows. Yet today I don’t see Alhambra.

Rather my past, revived in a sepia-toned, albumen photograph.

Ten men gaze at me from Dean’s

photograph. No – nine men and a boy. Plus Moshe Bloch’s old retriever. The image, on its dark, time-etched mat, brings an avalanche of memories. The ten of us, along with many others -- from White Pine, Tomichi, Tin Cup, Pitkin, Ohio City, Irwin, Baldwin, Gothic, Anthracite, Oversteg, Almont -- we were the Gunnison County Snow Shoe Club, newly formed in 1886 and ready to compete. There wasn’t a more robust group to be found on snow shoes (skis). Minutes after the surrounding granite and green vanished under wavy-white blankets of snow, we were on the slopes, testing wood and metal.

Some, like Percy Ramsden, more readily fit the mountain-man image. Percy was tall, broad-shouldered, muscular, a handsome Englishman whose job was operating weighty, cast-iron mining machinery. He just

as easily controlled hoists and crushers as he did his 12-foot snow shoes. I knew Percy when we both lived in Irwin. He rousted about with the Cornwall brothers, originally from Brooklyn. When beers were on the bar, they indulged in all sorts of horseplay, including the Queen’s fisticuffs, occasionally for money, always for laughs. Ramsden, like so many others in winter, travelled around Ruby Camp on snow shoes. He reveled in the steep slopes of Robinson and Independence basins above Irwin, and few could blaze through deep drifts as could he.

Even fewer could manage the unexpected ridges and cliffs and remain upright.

Percy’s fighting spirit often saw him pitted against one or both of the Johnson brothers from Crystal. Their races always resulted in jaw-locking awe. Fred and Al were not only ardent snow shoers but also 45

Avalanche near Gibson Ridge, 1880. Photo by George E. Mellen.

aggressive entrepreneurs. They owned a hotel and a general store and published the Crystal River Current, all in the town of Crystal. They also managed Crystal’s post office, so delivering winter mail to Marble, Schofield, Belleview, Gothic, Aspen and Crested Butte gave them excellent reason to practice their snow shoeing.

In 1886, Al Johnson, Percy Ramsden and Harry Cornwall were among the finalists in the Gunnison Snow Shoe Carnival. Ramsden 46

won the race on Gibson Ridge near Crested Butte, where the Horace coal mine was, yet he didn’t stay to compete in Gothic. Instead, Percy moved to Ouray County, Colorado, and took over machinery operations at the El Mahdi Mine in the Paqui Gold Mining District. Percy must’ve gone on snow shoeing; it was too deeply entwined in his heart. But I never heard another detail about him.

Then there was Sam Gill – and what a

character he was. A Kentuckian who wanted to start his own newspaper. Sam moved to Trinidad, Colorado, in territorial days, worked for a time on a weekly sheet and then, inexplicably, went into the banking business. In 1879, Sam moved to Gunnison.

He entered town wearing the typical tenderfoot costume -- flannel shirt, brushed cotton trousers, top boots, engineer’s hat -- and never changed that style. In 1880, he, David Moffat, Henry Tabor and Alonzo Hartman established Gunnison’s Iron National Bank, the first establishment of its kind in the city. A few years on, Sam invested in the Pickwick and Silver Hill lodes in the Ruby District, served as Gunnison City’s mayor for a couple of terms, and made good friends with the famous Sheriff Doc Shores.

Sam apparently didn’t learn much about guns from Doc, because he became known as the snow shoer who shot up the Tabor House billiard hall. Purely by accident, of course. While playing about in his office, next door to the Tabor Building, Sam dropped a loaded firearm. The revolver fired, then kicked up to leave a gash in his forehead. At the same time, a bullet pierced the walls, flew into the billiard hall, struck a table and sailed through the ceiling. No one was injured. But the story made the rounds, especially at Bloch’s dry goods store across the street.

As for Sam’s snow shoeing – well, let’s just say he was a much better banker.

In the mid 1890s, Sam moved to Denver and opened the Stockyards Bank and International Trust Company with his partner, W. J. Fine. Both proved profitable establishments. Sam retired in 1908 and in 1920 passed away in Denver from a massive stroke.

Now E. W. Burton and his son, Claude, were a snow shoeing team, with Claude the more accomplished of the two. Captain Ed Burton owned one of the best-stocked hardware stores in Gunnison County. His inventory included picks, rock drills, giant powder, dynamite fuses, farm implements, blacksmithing tools, tin ware, sheet iron, copperware, ranching supplies – even groceries. In 1885, Burton’s wagons delivered in White Pine, Gothic, Pitkin, Irwin – what’s more, you could order by telephone if you were fortunate enough to have one.

Burton was known for carrying a special political medal – what he called his “goodluck charm.” Bronze, dated 1840, it bore embossed images of a log cabin and a cider barrel on one side and a portrait of General

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W. H. Harrison on the other. Why? Some say Burton served under Harrison in the military.

Harrison was elected president in 1841 but died in the White House after serving a mere 30 days. Ed Burton, on the other hand, was a member of the People’s Party, president of the Gunnison Board of Trade and mayor of Gunnison City. Not all at the same time.

Burton’s mining ventures weren’t all that productive. He and Crested Butte merchant M. J. Gray tried hydraulic operations in Washington Gulch, to no avail. After Mike Hayes couldn’t get much out of the Shenando Lode near Gothic, he deeded part of it to Burton in trade for supplies. In 1891, when Burton sent some bags of Shenando ore to the Central Sampler, the return assays showed few signs of valuable minerals. Good thing Burton continued selling his hardware to all parts of Gunnison County. He needed the profits to make up for his inability to strike silver or gold.

As for snow shoeing, the Burtons took part in the 1886 Gunnison County Carnival, but the only medal they left with was that bronze one of William Harrison.

Back in the 1880s, Crystal City’s summer population amounted to just under 300 – even fewer in winter. Tom Boughton, though, wasn’t a part-timer. When he went in, he went in for the whole high-grade experience. Boughton worked several claims in the Crystal area year-round, mostly property on Sheep Mountain. In 1886, he and Art Edgerton worked the Excelsior Mine. They hit high-grade copper and galena ore in an 18-inch pay streak. The assays were unbelievable: 760 ounces of silver to the ton, according to Boughton and Edgerton. But the ore had been hand picked, so the report didn’t take in the whole picture. Didn’t matter: high-grade was high-grade and reason to celebrate, summer or winter. Off Boughton and Edgerton went to the big town of Crested Butte to seriously carouse.

Boughton and Edgerton had numerous high-grade jubilations, and more often than not they included other year-round Crystal residents, like Al and Fred Johnson, Joe Bray, Ben Wilson and Frank Williams.

Money usually drained away like spring run-off -- on food, beer and rye. And drunk and disorderly fines. Then, if it was winter, Boughton and crowd would strap on their snow shoes, head up to Gothic and stop for refreshments at Judd’s Saloon. A few hours later, they’d snow shoe over Schofield Pass and down to Crystal. Sober or drunk, Boughton and crowd were adept on their

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snow shoes, and racing made the journey all the rowdier.

Back in Edgewater’s Crystal saloon, snow stories piled up like cornices on mountain ridges, so exaggerated and full of puffery they’d echo throughout the Crystal River Valley – even to the ears of Boughton’s girlfriend in Avalanche. From Marble to Carbondale, everyone knew how Tom Boughton had been caught in a snow slide up Marble Creek while posting mining notices. He was hit hard and unaware, then thrown 500 feet down a precipitous slope.

Every time that story was told, the details became more harrowing and raucous, like a winter version of a Pecos Bill legend. In 1886 Boughton had to make good on those boasts, which he did by placing in nearly all of the Snow Shoe Carnival’s races.

Bill Middleton, whom I don’t remember all that well, was a metallurgist from Gunnison, I believe. Snow shoed, that’s for sure. But sometime in the late 1880s, not long after the club’s first carnival, Bill moved to Ophir, near Telluride. Don’t know much about him after that.

Then there was Moses (“Moshe”) Bloch.

He looks a bit impish in his winter kit, doesn’t he, old Number 10? Gus Levi, Moshe and his curly-haired retriever traveled from Bloomington, Illinois, in early 1880 to set up shop in Gunnison City: a dry goods store selling boots, shoes, hats, gents’ furnishings, trunks, notions and other things. The store became a gathering place, as both Bloch and Levi were affable characters, always cheering on a good laugh. By 1882 both Moshe and Gus were considered original “boomers” of the Gunnison Country; however, in 1883, Gus decided development in the region wasn’t traveling at quite his speed. Moshe bought Gus out. Still, the jovial atmosphere in Moshe’s dry goods store continued. Soon the store expanded, offering delivery to White Pine, Tomichi, Pitkin and Ohio City.

After joining our Snow Shoe Club, Moshe could often be seen trying the winter slopes after he completed his deliveries. You always knew where Moshe was snow shoeing because you could hear his dog barking as it followed him down the mountain.

Moshe Bloch didn’t place in any snow shoe events during the 1886 carnival, but he gave prizes from his store to all who did, and he was a much needed, uplifting spirit.

Moshe was an idea man, always coming up with new inventions, experimenting with new concepts. Most didn’t work out, but he laughed at his failures and became an 48

Crested Butte, March, 1883.

endearing part of the Gunnison community.

His departure in 1888 was an unexpected disappointment.

But it turned out to be for good reason.

Moshe Bloch had an idea for “baby coaches” and acquired financing to manufacture them. In the early 1890s, the Bloch Go-Cart Company began advertising its models in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, newspapers.

Baby carriages such as the Bloch-Reed Pullman, Bloch-Reed Hood Stationary Go-Cart and the Bloch Leather Hood Reed Reclining Go-Cart became fashionable.

Before long, Moshe Bloch became one of Philadelphia’s wealthiest manufacturers. It was easy to spot one of Moshe’s carriages by its signature oval-shaped reversible top. I missed Moshe’s energy and drama, but that’s the speed of life.

Who have I forgotten? Frank Williams, a mine operator from Crystal, who won first place on the Gothic course in ’86.

Al Clark and George Hale, who broke an

ankle or some such in one of the races.

Charles Baney, who was also injured, and the Cornwall brothers, George and Harry, of Irwin. Bob Sterling of Schofield and Al Stanfer, who died in a snow slide on his way to Aspen. So many characters, so many stories.

I wonder where they all went after Gunnison County’s hard-rock mining petered out. I’ve rarely been on snow shoes since I left Crested Butte. I hear a snow shoe resort – no, a ski resort – has been started in Cement Creek, using old mining machinery from the Tin Cup District: aerial cable, towers, hoists. I wonder if they’d like some stories about Percy Ramsden, Tom Boughton, Al Johnson…for their advertising perhaps.

Oh, probably not. Best to file away these scribblings, along with Dean’s photograph, in the palimpsests of my Alhambra scriptorium…paper memories swirling and drifting in deep snows.

b

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By Dawne Belloise

“Dad was a hard-working, good ol’ Colorado boy, and mom was a Colorado rancher girl, and they were both a little bit wild.” Brooke Harless MacMillan laughs, and it rings with a hint of that inherited wildness.

But travel, education and experience have refined wildness into enthusiasm, which Brooke brings to her new role in Crested Butte: the founding director of the Center for the Arts’ new Literary Arts Department.

Through her job, she wants to energize and bring a sense of community to the diverse writers and readers of the valley. So far, Brooke has pulled local literati together for events like free-writing/discussion sessions, workshops, interactive salons and even a storytelling-about-town bicycle procession.

Brooke was raised in Eaton, just outside of Fort Collins, and her lineage is steeped in Colorado history: from grandparents who were Scottish ranchers on the eastern plains, to her paternal grandfather, who was born in a shack outside of Mancos and grew up in Telluride because greatgrandpa was a coal miner there.

Brooke stayed in her hometown for college at Colorado State University (CSU), where she studied photography and aboriginal studies and dreamed of living in Australia. With characteristic determination,

52

Alison White

53

she headed down under for a little more than a year at the University of South Australia.

There she spent a lot of time fishing with 80-year-old Italian men because, she said, “I was beyond homesick for my family. I was just a 19-year-old kid, and I moved over there alone.” Luckily, the town she chose, Glenelg, was filled with typical Italian and Greek families who were more than willing to include an extra child.

In 2003 Brooke’s visa ran out, and she returned to finish her degree at CSU, graduating in 2005 with a BA in English literature and creative writing and a minor in Medieval English history.

“I’m a big history dork,” she confessed.

“The common thread for me in all those diverse studies was learning people’s stories.”

She was intrigued first by the narratives, then by portraying them with a camera. “With the lens I could capture people; with creative writing I could take a tidbit of something overheard or somebody’s story and make it my own. And history is reading about people and hearing their stories from centuries before. It was endlessly fascinating.” That foundation eventually directed her toward a career in writing and also gave her an affinity for the life stories of the elderly.

After two dangerous stints amid political upheaval and violent murders while serving in the Peace Corps in Guyana, South America and Jamaica, Brooke decided to move to a less risky place: Crested Butte. She’d discovered the mountain town while working as a fishing guide one summer in the Gunnison Gorge.

After moving to Crested Butte, Brooke tended bar at the Princess, was one of Al’s Backhoe “dirty girls,” and took photographs for the Crested Butte News. Shooting for the News and being part of the arts scene led her into the director position for the Alpenglow Gallery in The Lodge at Mountaineer Square.

Living in Crested Butte after the harshness of her work with the Peace Corps, Brooke felt even greater appreciation and gratitude. “I just loved this community, and all I wanted to do was give back to it.” So she applied to coordinate the Gunnison County Substance Abuse Prevention Project. Seeing the need for more of the same up valley, Brooke, along with Melissa Mason, started the Crested Butte Youth Council as a way to engage youth in the community.

Brooke married Crested Butte teacher Jason MacMillan in June of 2012, and in July they left for Istanbul, where Jason was hired to teach fourth grade in an international private school. “It was hard at first but also 54

Brooke and Jason MacMillan with daughter Charlotte.

really exciting,” Brooke said. “I went from a population of 1,500 to 15 million. Everything was drenched in culture – Turkish, Muslim and cultures from all over the world. Istanbul is a melting pot for so many different ethnicities, with so much to see and so much history.”

They also travelled to the Republic of Georgia, where they hiked up glaciers, going right up to the Russian border and waving at the border guards toting Uzis. Brooke landed a job with a Turkish film channel, writing for their foreign markets as well as writing movie and film synopses. She did script writing for

online TV programs, which, she laughed, were cheesy but fun. She even did a spot of acting, playing the character of a German businesswoman in a Turkish soap opera, and portraying a doctor in a hospital commercial.

Then the riots started. “The social uprising came about because their current leader, Erdogan, is instilling a more authoritarian religious rule,” Brooke said.

Knowing they wanted to start a family, she and Jason decided to leave Turkey in 2014 when Jason was offered a teaching position just outside of Aberdeen, Scotland.

Brooke started over again, moving from

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Literary teasers

Words don’t have to be stuffy. The new Literary Arts Department, under the direction of Brooke MacMillan, will bring some lively, offbeat gatherings to Crested Butte this year. Some of the more unusual: •

A Literary Pub Crawl in December, starring local writers reading their own work and others’ and dispensing a bit of local lore while wending their way through local establishments.

•

Murder in the Mountains, a miniNoir festival in February, including a live panel exchange with the Grande Noir festival in Aberdeen, Scotland.

Other features: murder mystery films, Pinot Noir & Noir writing workshop, a children’s crime fingerprinting workshop and more.

•

Burns Supper with poetry readings, haggis, bagpipes and conviviality to celebrate poet Robert Burns and the Scottish immigrants who helped to found Crested Butte.

•

Limerick writing workshop and poetry reading to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day.

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In a slightly more traditional vein, classes and workshops this year will cover topics like memoir, translation, artists’ bios/headshots, storytelling, thriller/noir, children’s book writing and screenwriting.

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Alison White

a very vibrant city to an isolated farmhouse.

“We lived on a farm outside of Laurencekirk.

It was the only place that would allow dogs. [They had finally reunited with their Crested Butte pooches.] It was a depressing, cold farmhouse, but a beautiful place. The landscape was craggy steppes. Grazing cows and chickens surrounded us, and moss-green lush grass and trees.”

Secluded at their Scottish farmhouse, she started visiting the nursing home in town, Burnside Care Home. As a child, Brooke had spent many summers accompanying her dietician mom to nursing homes. “Money was tight, and without the means for childcare, my mom began taking my brother and me to work with her. While my friends spent the summer hanging around the pool, my brother and I made friends with a pack of octogenarians,” Brooke recalled.

As an adult visiting the Scottish elders, Brooke began to think about agedness. “The natural order of life is organized in such a way that as we grow older, we return to a time of enforced vulnerability, of slowing down 56

and acknowledging that we need the care and nurturing of others to survive. This late phase encourages us to draw people closer in a realm of transmission, during which older people can spread whatever truth they’ve learned and knowledge they’ve gathered in the course of thirty thousand days of living. In modern western culture, we’ve moved further and further from this arrangement, and the consequence is a lopsided culture weighted dramatically toward valuing youth.”

Combining her love of history and of people’s stories, Brooke returned to her first love, journalism, recording the residents’ memories for an oral history project. Because of her project, Goucher College in Baltimore accepted her into its prestigious literary journalism program. “My background has always been writing, but when I lived in Crested Butte before, I did everything else to make a living. All I wanted to do was write about people and to deeply investigate things I’m passionate about.”

Meanwhile, Jason and Brooke moved from the farmhouse to a remodeled old coast

guard building right on the North Sea, in the small, eclectic artist community of Catterline.

“There were all sorts of creatives,” she said.

“We’d all go to the village pub on Friday and have a long blether [a Scottish colloquialism meaning an extended chat].”

In the beginning, Brooke spent a lot of time with octogenarians or older, recording their stories. She visited nursing homes, retirement clubs, adult day centers and sheltered housing complexes in all corners of the country. Eventually Brooke used these interviews in her thesis, “Before They Go.” The thesis describes Brooke’s meetings with older people, “where she learned about their inner struggles, losses and illness, but also existences rich in resilience, hope and contentment — often only achieved at the end of a long journey. These encounters ignited an exploration into what it means to be an older person today, in a world where the old will soon outnumber the young, but are given very little social equity and importance.”

Two weeks before completing her thesis, which earned Brooke her MA in literary journalism, their daughter Charlotte was born.

They gave her a middle name of Catterline, after the town they’d grown to love. Brooke recalled, “We had a blissful first year of Charlotte’s life in Scotland, just the three of us.

It was so magical.”

In the summer of 2017, while Brooke was visiting Crested Butte, she and Melissa Mason began discussing the need for a literary arts department at the Crested Butte Center for the Arts. Brooke created a proposal and recruited Western Colorado University as a partner through David Rothman, director of Western’s creative writing graduate studies. The Center for the Arts board eventually voted yes, and in November 2017, Brooke began work from Scotland as the Literary Arts Department’s new director.

“When I was in the U.K., I went to so many literary and book festivals and sat down with their programming directors to get a sense of how best to grow the literary arts in Crested Butte. It was a lot of fun work.”

Brooke, Jason and Charlotte moved back to Crested Butte last July, as all her organized programming kicked in. Her mission: to engage readers, support writers and inspire the community through the power of stories.

Brooke also became a commissioner for the Crested Butte Creative District.

After six years away, Brooke is delighted to be back among her community. “It’s like seeing a big family all the time,” she said. “I feel very much like myself here.”

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EDUCATION Western Colorado University finds renewal in “nimble, dynamic” graduate programs.

By David J. Rothman

Greg Smith

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Across the century that has elapsed since it opened, Western Colorado University (formerly Western State College) in Gunnison has educated scores of thousands of students and employed thousands of faculty and staff. It’s an unusual success story, an institution of higher education that also serves as a major economic driver in a rural economy, creating a unique way of life in which reading, writing and arithmetic matter as much as natural resources, ranching and recreation. The school is growing when similar institutions are struggling. The recent $80 million gift to found the Paul M. Rady School of Computer Science and Engineering is one reason for this growth (Rady’s donation is the thirdlargest gift to higher education in the state’s history); another is the success of the new School of Graduate Studies.

As Abbot Fay documents in his 1968 book Mountain Academia: A History of

MEM students install solar panels on the roof of Kelly Hall.

Courtesy of Western Colorado University

Western State College of Colorado, Western has always had a strong commitment to the liberal arts, and this commitment included graduate programs from early on. The school was the product of an ambitious vision. It received its charter in 1901 as the two-year Colorado State Normal School at Gunnison, with a mission to prepare schoolteachers to work on Colorado’s Western Slope—and if you think we’re a bit remote now, imagine when the only travel options were horses and slow trains. After a decade of political fisticuffs and hard-nosed fundraising, the school opened in the fall of 1911, slightly more than 30 years after the founding of the town, and graduated its first class (of five students) in 1912. In 1920 the school was authorized to offer its first BA, in education.

In 1921, the school was also authorized to offer its first graduate degree, an MA in education, and the first advanced degree was awarded in 1922 to Anna F. Robinson, an

English major (my field, so yes, it matters).

In 1923 the school’s name was changed to The Western State College of Colorado, making it the only public liberal arts college in the state.

Graduate programs have been part of the institution for most of its history.

In the 1940s and 1950s, graduate degrees constituted 25% of all degrees awarded. As Fay writes, “In all, 440 MA degrees were earned between 1947 and 1960, of which 380 were in education, 27 in the social sciences, 12 in music, 11 in English, five in history-political science combinations, two in English-speech combinations, and one each in biology, French and economics.”

Many of these programs enjoyed national standing.

But the course of education never did run smooth. By the 1980s, Western’s graduate programs fell victim to fractious state politics and a bumpy economy, and

they were discontinued in summer 1989 by legislation. It was a blow to the school, and as time passed it became ever more clear that Western would benefit from their return, as they had conferred a national reputation for serious research and advanced study. This realization led to concerted lobbying by Western’s administration, until, on March 9, 2007, Governor Bill Ritter signed H.B. 071014, which “expands the role and mission of Western State College of Colorado to allow the college to offer a limited number of graduate programs.” Cue cheering and the opening of hip new restaurants in Gunnison.

Two graduate degree programs were approved in 2009 and offered for the first time in summer of 2010, an MA in Education and the Graduate Program in Creative Writing, which offers both the MA and MFA in many genres (and which I direct, following founder/professor Mark Todd). Today Western has six graduate 59

programs and, as of a few years ago, a fully-fledged School of Graduate Studies with a new dean, Dr. Abel Chávez, who also teaches in the Master’s in Environmental Management (MEM). In addition to creative writing, environmental management, and education, Western offers the MS in High Altitude Exercise Physiology (HAEP), the MA in Gallery Management and Exhibits Specialization (MGES) and the newly minted Outdoor Industry MBA (we’re in higher education— acronyms are us).

There are enough proposals on the table for other programs that the curriculum committee may have to get a new table. Many of the programs combine residential education with low-residency options, in which students attend the university for intensives and then study in online programs that offer real-time video conferencing and all sorts of other bells and whistles. This is not your daddy’s online degree—we pipe students in from all over the planet.

The new graduate programs are serious and ambitious, and they’re helping to return the school to national prominence.

Because they’re small and focused on training advanced students to lead in specific fields, graduate programs reach far beyond the region to serve the country and even the world. As Greg Salsbury, Western’s president since 2014, puts it: “The increasing urbanization of the country and the West require small, rural universities like ours to innovate. We can no longer survive by only serving a four-year, residential, on-campus population. This is why nimble, dynamic graduate programs committed to global excellence are now a crucial part of Western’s success.”

And successful they are. According to Dean Chávez, “At the start of fall 2017, our five programs served close to 350 students, almost 15% of the student body at Western.” Where many small, rural schools are losing ground, Western is growing, in large part because of these programs.

Bill Niemi, Western’s vice-president for academic affairs and the university’s chief academic officer, observes, “The graduate programs at Western have energized us, adding intellectual capital, boosting enrollment, and most importantly, helping us to fulfill our mission.” As in the past, that mission is not only to serve our own region, but also to lead in a number of fields at the national level.

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Dr. Lance Dalleck tests Alex Lambro on a treadmill in Western’s High Altitude Performance Laboratory.

Greg Smith

MGES students work in the Quigley Gallery.

Taylor Ahearn

Western is a tenacious, distinctive, ambitious school with a rich history. Along with innovation in its undergraduate curriculum and the new Paul M. Rady School of Computer Science and Engineering, the School of Graduate Studies

is returning the university to prominence in carefully chosen fields where it can shine. If a culture is the ensemble of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, this success story is one of the reasons many of us have made this place our home.

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Western’s graduate programs at a glance

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John Hausdoerffer directs the Master’s in Environmental Management, in its fifth year: “Students can choose specializations in Sustainable and Resilient Communities, Integrative and Public Land Management, and Global Sustainability. They’ve enjoyed an 85% environmental-career placement rate. The program offers residential and distance options, leading to master’s projects serving our public land agencies, landowners and environmental nonprofits, and including work as far away as Kenya and Costa Rica. We’re turning Western and Gunnison into a beacon for sustainable communities everywhere, and we’ve forged key partnerships with public land agencies, High Country News, Solar Energy International, the United Nations Mountain Partnership, the Telluride Institute, Aspen International Mountain Foundation, AmeriCorps and Peace Corps.”

Heather Thiessen-Reily leads the MA in Gallery Management and Exhibits Specialization: “Our program offers advanced training for careers in art galleries, museums, auctions, art fairs, curatorship and collections management — everything from administration, entrepreneurship and marketing, to exhibit design, logistics, art handling and installation. Internship opportunities provide experience in all these fields. We’re training the next generation that will run this global industry.”

George Kamberelis, chair of the Education Department, is carrying forward Western’s tradition of training teachers for service in Colorado and farther afield: “The MA in Education, in its ninth year, now includes a program in teacher licensure with a master’s degree in elementary education and most middle and high school subjects, and another program for principal licensure with a master’s degree in elementary, middle and high school. For practicing teachers interested in ongoing career development, we offer an individually tailored master’s degree in educational effectiveness focused on professional growth. These online master’s programs in K-12 education were just ranked tenth in the nation by College Choice. Finally, the Education Department plans to launch an EdD program. Students who earn their doctoral degrees through

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The only thing more valuable than real estate, is the time you’ll spend here...

Greg Smith

this program will be prepared for leadership positions in P-12 schools throughout the nation, and for faculty positions in colleges and universities.”

Pete Sherman is director of the new Outdoor Industry MBA: “Western’s innovative MBA is the first of its kind, and it’s a perfect fit for the Gunnison Valley. It’s the only program in the country tailored for students who want to be business leaders in this growing industry. What better place to do it than here?”

Christina Buchanan leads another program well-suited to Western’s location, the MS in High Altitude Exercise Physiology: “Our program prepares students for careers in academia, research or clinical practice, as well as for further study. Our setting offers the perfect opportunity to study how the human body functions, both acutely and chronically, in extreme environments. We offer a residential program where all students conduct original, publishable research in their second year. The focus is on how to improve health and performance through exercise, training and treatments such as ischemic preconditioning. Students work with populations from clinical patients to

elite athletes. Altitude is at the forefront of what we study, whether it’s how to improve overall function during everyday activities or improving training and recovery in athletes at altitude.”

David J. Rothman directs the Graduate Program in Creative Writing: “We offer a low-residency MA and MFA in Genre Fiction, in Screenwriting for Film and TV, and in Poetry, along with a Certificate in Publishing (which we hope to turn into an MA as well). We also plan to offer an MA/ MFA option in Nature Writing. Currently in our ninth year, we’ll graduate our 100th student next spring, and our students are enjoying success in publication, script production, editing and teaching around the country. We publish an internationally distributed literary journal, THINK, and run Writing the Rockies writers conference each July during our residential intensive. As the only graduate program at the university dedicated to training artists, we graduate accomplished students who have the crucial ability to tell the stories of who we have been, who we are and who we might become.”

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For more information: western.edu/academics/ school-graduate-studies.

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Building in the heARTS of Crested Butte Capital Campaign a home where dance practices, sushi classes, film screenings and pottery classes can happen simultaneously. Arts interaction and discussions between multiple disciplines will expand creative thinking and exposure.”

With a multimillion-dollar closing gift from the Feldberg family, the Center for the Arts is now doing final fundraising to support fitting out and equipping the interior spaces of the new facility.

Upon completion, the contemporary arts facility of 28,000 square feet will include a new theater, new outdoor stage, four art studios, four performance studios, new visual arts gallery, a bar and kitchens for culinary programs. Ed Schmidt, Board President, explained, “The new building will provide a venue where everything can be under one roof,

With construction funding secure, the Center is now focused on raising the $2 million needed to equip and fit out the new building.

Fit out is the process of making the interior spaces suitable for occupancy, and includes things such as acoustical curtains, sound systems in the studios, LED lighting, digital control systems and more.

“We are over 90% of the way to successfully completing our campaign and securing the future of the arts in Crested Butte. Please give today to help us reach our goal,” urged Jenny Birnie, Executive Director. To make a tax-deductible donation and to see a 3D animation of the new facility visit BuildingintheheARTs.org.

Center for the Arts Building in the heARTS of Crested Butte

home stretch Gifts of all sizes will help complete your new building.

To find out about naming opportunities still available or to make a tax-deductible donation, visit buildingintheheARTS.org or call Executive Director| Jenny Birnie | 970.349.7487

Silvio and Ernesto Carricato in 1930s Crested Butte.

By Cara Guerrieri

my brother Dexter Guerrieri and his new bride Jane Ordway danced to the sound of the Carricato Polka Band, as my family had been doing for generations. From the early 1900s the Carricato Band was one of a handful of go-to Crested Butte bands hired for high school proms, Saturday night dances, July Fourth and Memorial Day celebrations, and of course, wedding receptions. The music united families and brought Crested Butte’s diverse immigrant community together. “The whole town came to the dances, and everyone danced with everyone,” Eleanor Carricato Nierling used to tell her family.

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Ernie Carricato’s accordion and a volume of family history, The Carricato Story.

July 4, 1926: Music and dancing highlighted most celebrations of the day.

Photos of Dex and Jane’s wedding mirror those from our family album taken July 4, 1926, in Crested Butte.

The same families, Carricato and Spritzer, played the instruments, and my great grandparents, grandmother and great uncles were part of the gathering. Like Crested Butte’s population then, they came from different cultures and didn’t all speak the same language. The Carricatos and Guerrieris of Italy, the Snellers and Spritzers of Croatia – four immigrant families bonded by music – shared work in the coal mines, the struggles of making a new life in America, and a close-knit town.

The Guerrieris and Carricatos were especially good friends. The families both arrived in Crested Butte in the 1890s and ended up living next door on Whiterock Avenue.

From the same region of Italy, the two families had much in common, but it was the Carricatos who brought the music.

Eight boys were born to Eleanora and Francesco Carricato, all given rolling, melodic Italian names — Guiseppe, Silvio, Marsilo, Ernesto, Francesco, Michele, Gilberto (who died in infancy) and Ottavio (named for his eighth place in the family lineup). Of those boys, four discovered they had musical talent.

Silvio, Joe (Guiseppe), Ernie (Ernesto) and especially Frankie (Francesco) had a passion for playing the accordion. “They learned to play on their own,” wrote Eleanora Carricato Nierling in The Carricato Story. “They had no formal training, nor could they read music.”

“It’s no small feat to be self-taught on accordion,” said Pete Dunda, local accordionist and polka band leader.

“Learning the right-hand keyboard, sure, you could teach yourself, but the left-hand with 120 buttons... I don’t know how they managed it.”

But manage it they did, and the Carricatos, who worked grueling jobs in the coal mine, could be counted on to entertain the town whenever called upon in the evenings.

Ernie played with the Salinger Band and sometimes with the Willard Ruggera Band. Frankie and Joe were staples in the Carricato Band, playing in Crested Butte, Almont and Gunnison.

By the late 1950s, the coal mines in Crested Butte were closing, and lots of the old-timers left. Many moved to 66

Gunnison, including most of the Carricatos. As luck would have it, the Guerrieris ended up living next door to one of the Carricatos again after my grandparents and aunt bought houses on either side of Ernie’s place on Eleventh Street.

Much to the delight of my cousin Brenda Mielke, when Ernie practiced his accordion, she could hear it from her kitchen. “I’d go out on the back porch and no matter how long he played, I’d stay out there to hear it better. I could have listened for hours.”

Even as Crested Butte’s population dwindled in the 1960s, the music of the Carricato Band was still in demand, still bringing folks together, and theirs was the music we heard as my generation of Guerrieris learned to polka. I remember Friday night dances at the Almont Pavilion, giggling with my sister and girl cousins as we tried to figure out the steps. By 1977, at Dex and Jane’s wedding, I loved the music and the dancing, and eagerly said, “Yes,” to anyone who wanted to be my partner.

Perhaps as I whirled around the room that day, some of the old-timers wondered if the aging musicians would soon retire or if the robust gatherings of old Crested Butte names would fade, but as a girl of 17, I had no such thoughts. In the naiveté of youth I thought this band would always be part of my life and these people — Malensek, Christoff, Guerrieri, Carricato, Spann, Eastman, Spritzer, Adams, Sneller, Bifano, Nash — a microcosm of old Crested Butte and old Gunnison, would always get together like this.

I had no reason to believe otherwise. Those pioneer families were connected by more than their proximity to

each other. Most of the older men had entrusted their lives to one another in the coal mines. Many, including two of the Carricato brothers, served in World War II. The sashaying women had shared food, hand-me-down clothing and recipes to get by during the Great Depression. Through it all, the accordion with its “happy music,” as Pete Dunda likes to say, kept playing, healing old wounds and celebrating new memories.

But time changes everything. Five short years after my brother’s wedding, the Carricato Band played their last local gig.

Joe died that year, and Frank moved to Salida. Of all the local Carricato brothers, only Ernie and Otto still lived in Gunnison County.

Ernie stopped playing publicly, and when he died in 2000, his brother Otto gave his old Philharmonic accordion to Pete Dunda. The same instrument that had enthralled my cousin Brenda on her porch was now safely in the hands of the last local polka band. Although Pete doesn’t use Ernie’s accordion for gigs, his band carries on the polka tradition started long ago by immigrants like the Carricatos and Spritzers, playing regularly at celebrations in Gunnison, Almont and Crested Butte.

After Otto’s death in 2014, his daughter, Vicci, was the only Carricato still living in the county. She doesn’t play the accordion, but she is still a Guerrieri neighbor, now living on our family ranch.

She and I like to say we’ve been friends for 120 years, which always draws a laugh. But when I think of the Carricatos and the way their family and music weave in and out of my own family history, I don’t think Vicci and I are joking.

Last spring Pete brought Ernie’s accordion to my house and played a few of the old-time songs, polkas that made me think of my youth, of my brother’s wedding, and of the long connection between the Guerrieris and the Carricatos. The cheerful sounds filled my small living room, and I found myself dancing with an invisible partner to “Just Because” and singing out the lyrics to the “Beer Barrel Polka.” When the songs ended and Pete put Ernie’s accordion back into its pretty red-lined carrying case, I knew that might be the last time I heard a Carricato accordion being played.

I also knew that as long as there was a polka dance in Crested Butte, the special contribution of the Carricato musicians to the town’s culture would continue.

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Artful philanthropy More than 300 donors helped fund the new Center for the Arts, but the Weekley family launched the project, and the Feldberg family got it to the finish line.

By Sandra Cortner

The Weekleys and the Feldbergs didn’t know each other when the new Crested Butte Center for the Arts was conceived, but both families helped make it happen. These two biggest donors to the construction of the $16.5 million Center do have a few things in common. Both families live part time in the Crested Butte area and both have been taught a valuable lesson by their parents: give back to the community that has given so much to you.

Jenny Birnie, director of the Center for the Arts, explained that the Weekley Family Foundation contributed to the construction of the new Center “on the front end to make sure we go forward, and Teddy Feldberg gave the multimillion-dollar closing gift to complete the capital campaign for the building’s construction.” Thanks to the 74

two families and 315 other donors, the 25,000-square-foot Center next to the current facility on Sixth Street will be completed this March, with a grand opening scheduled for July. (The summer Crested Butte Magazine will feature more about the sophisticated new arts campus.)

Stanley and Teddy Feldberg of Mt. Crested Butte and Hilton Head Island, SC, have supported the Center for the Arts since its opening in 1986, along with their daughter Margery and her husband Dr. Jeremy Levin. The senior Feldbergs fell in love with Crested Butte and first bought a condominium, then built a house at the ski area and came in the winters to ski. Later they began enjoying the summers as avid golfers. “The ball travels farther at altitude,” explained Margery with a smile. “It makes you look like a champ.”

Nathan Bilow

When cancer attacked Stanley, he had to give up skiing, hiking and golf. During the years before his death in 2004, he and Teddy discovered the Crested Butte Music Festival and each summer enjoyed every one of the performances.

Margery eventually became vice president of the Music Festival board. “By then we were gaining attendance but losing performance venues,” she said. Its packed season demanded a larger place than the Center for the Arts in which to rehearse and perform. The festival board started looking at creating its own facility and spun off the Mt. Crested Butte Performing Arts Center (MCBPAC) to be located at the ski area. Margery became its board president.

Meanwhile, Jenny was helping the downtown Center for the

Arts feel its way through a remodel/enlargement project. As plans evolved and fund raising began for both the downtown and ski area facilities, Margery saw the big picture: collaboration and building bridges. “This would be a chance to get a world-class stage here. The planning for the MCBPAC was done hand in hand with the present Center for the Arts. We felt the valley was ready for two facilities.

They would be complementary to each other and offer different-sized performance spaces,” explained Margery.

A total of $24 million was needed for the MCBPAC, by then named Biery/Witt. Last year it appeared “there was not the philanthropic will,” as Margery termed it, to raise the final amount of that money.

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The Feldberg family (left to right): Eve Levin, Margery Feldberg, Danielle Levin, Jeremy Levin, Teddy Feldberg, Marielle Feldberg.

David Weekley was one of the skeptics. “At first I was confused by two competing projects. I had to get to a place where I understood how important it was to local residents to have the center in town.

During that time, my brother Bob died. He had asked me as executor of his estate to see that his money went to worthwhile philanthropy.

I knew that Crested Butte and the arts were at the top of his list.”

David formed the Weekley Family Foundation with his and Bob’s money. Brothers Bob, David and Dick, and particularly their parents Rosalie and Weldon, had been huge contributors to the Crested Butte Mountain Heritage Museum. Weldon ran a successful marketing firm and was always looking for ways to help promote both Crested Butte and his favorite nonprofits.

The Weekleys came to Colorado from Houston each summer, staying at Harmel’s Resort near Almont before buying a lot for $15,000 at the new ski area in 1963. They built the second chalet there. “It was a $5,000 pre-fab kit home. They poured a foundation and then brought in the parts and put the house together.” David was five. Growing up, he and his brothers fly fished, rafted, hiked and played in the mountains. “All our family left our cars at Tony’s Conoco. We felt a kinship with the local residents,” he remembered.

Rosalie and Weldon died in 2010 and, with Bob, are buried at the Crested Butte Cemetery. Now 64, David and his wife of 42 years, Bonnie, come a few months a year. “Crested Butte has always been a place of rest and joy for us. My brother Dick remodeled our parents’ chalet last summer, adding a breezeway to a new house next door.

We have three children and seven grandchildren, all of whom have grown up coming to Crested Butte.”

Once David and Bonnie decided to get involved with the Center downtown, he did so in a big way, with more than cash. As the 76

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David and Bonnie Weekley.

Nathan Bilow

owner of award-winning David Weekley Homes, one of the largest privately owned construction companies in the country, he was in a unique position to advise the project. He described Bonnie as the quiet one “who helps me to see and understand people on a different level. I’m very analytical.

Sometimes I’m drive, drive, drive, and I miss the human aspect.”

Jenny started talking with David three years ago. “Initially I didn’t ask him for a contribution. He offered his expertise to our fund-raising campaign and has been a mentor to me. He recommended that we hire Crockett Farnell with Black Dragon Construction, and it was the best decision we ever made. David also financed a design competition to find a new architect, and that resulted in finding the perfect team to build the new Center. His advice along the way has been spot on.”

The author of a couple of books on philanthropy, David concluded that he was no longer motivated by money alone. For the past 25 years, he has spent about half his time and wealth on nonprofit projects in Houston and around the world. “My parents have instilled in us the philosophy of giving back to the community.”

Jenny continues to update David on the Center’s progress. “I want to be involved,” he said. The Weekley Family Foundation gave the name “Grace Lobby” to the lobby and atrium event space (with its iconic two-story entry, floor-to-ceiling picture window and grand staircase) “because I feel our family is graced by being here in the mountains for over 60 years.” The Foundation made the donation for the lobby in honor of his parents and brother.

During fund raising and construction for the new Center, Margery and her husband spent two years in Israel. Now they raise Angus cows on their Connecticut De Hoek farm, utilizing the farm-to-table principles they learned there. Similar to Gunnison County’s grass-fed beef farms, it has one key difference. They’ve built a USDA processing facility on site, so the animals don’t have to be trucked to feedlot and slaughter.

Through those years, Jenny kept Margery in the loop about the progress of the Center, sending her drone shots of the construction, while the Feldberg family continued with smaller financial gifts.

Last March Margery toured the site and was impressed. “In May Jenny signaled to me, ‘It’s time’ (for a significant gift). So I approached my mom. I reminded her how

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she had enjoyed 100 to 200 concerts at the Music Festival with her husband, and how meaningful it was to both of them. This was a chance to make a big difference.”

The building was two-thirds done, and Margery told her mother, “You’ll be there for the opening performance.”

Jenny sent photographs and, with Margery’s help, gave a PowerPoint presentation over the phone to Teddy and her financial advisers. Teddy asked, “How much for the theater? How much for closing the capital campaign?”

Jenny gave her the figures.

“We’ll call back.”

Once off the phone, Margery asked her mom, “What do you think?”

“Let’s do it,” Teddy replied.

Later the 91-year-old Teddy remarked, “It struck me as the perfect way to honor my husband Stanley, who treasured the music he enjoyed for years in Crested Butte.

He was always mindful of giving back to a community that gave so much to him.”

The son of Russian immigrants, Stanley helped create the first self-service discount department store, a business that would spawn such names as Marshall’s Department Store and T. J. Maxx. Teddy was an astute investor as well and has always found joy in the act of giving.

The couple’s commitment and generosity created the Feldberg Library at Dartmouth College, the Feldberg Communication Center at Brandeis University, the Feldberg Center for Visual Rehabilitation at the Medical University of South Carolina and more.

Now, thanks to their generosity, there will be a Feldberg Family Theater, Feldberg Family East Courtyard and Feldberg Family Entry Plaza/West Courtyard.

Margery’s 20-year passion to have a worldclass performing arts center here has come to fruition.

Both she and David credit Jenny.

Said Margery, “She had the emotional stamina to get it done. Just getting it through BOZAR [the Board of Zoning and Architectural Review] took a lot of courage.”

David added, “I’ve met hundreds of executive directors from around the country over the last 25 years, and she is one of the best, big city or small. The Center would not have happened without her. She did a masterful job navigating between all the interests. She caused us to want to get involved.”

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79

Living on the

surface of winter

By George Sibley

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Raynor Czerwinski

In modern Crested Butte, we dig, push and haul the snow out of our way. In other times, people lived on top of it.

I had not really thought of the different levels of winter until my partner and I moved to Gothic long ago as the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab’s winter caretakers.

Then I realized how much time, energy and money we spend here in our snowy town, struggling to maintain life at the lowest level of winter.

Our most intimate engagement with this struggle is the hours we spend with snow shovels keeping personal paths open to the street, to the woodpile and – well, no more outhouses, I guess. In a heavy winter, we throw new snow up onto piles of old snow taller than we are, and we start thinking about Ice Age stories we’ve heard, snow thousands of feet deep, with the cumulative weight of the light fluffy stuff sufficient to compress the bottom layers to ice capable of breaking rock and grinding it to dust….

Beyond that personal engagement with the sometimes not-so-light-and-fluffy stuff, there’s the community effort to keep life operating at ground level. The Town of Crested Butte budgets around $150,000 a year to maintain and operate a fleet of plows, loaders and dump trucks, the front Rebecca Ofstedahl

line against the snow. In a light snow year like last winter, not all of that gets spent, but in a heavy snow year like 2011, the cost of keeping things moving at ground level can rise to around $250,000.

It’s the automobile that drives the ground-level culture – that and the trucks essential to our survival here at the end of the road; we must maintain life at the level on which they can operate. But Crested Butte people have not always had to make this concentrated effort to keep life at street level.

Town streets were not plowed at all in the seventy years before the 1950s. The town’s main connection with the outside world then was the train, which required only a relatively narrow trench down to ground level; the rough road to Gunnison was not dependably open. The people who had automobiles put the cars up on blocks for the winter and took the rubber inside. Sleds replaced wagons for the snowy months, and the horses pulling them kept tracks packed out, but even the packed snow got deeper as the snow fell, and life was basically lived up on the surface of winter. One still had to do a little shoveling to get from the ever-rising

surface of the snow down to the porch or door level, but a packed path sloping up to the street sufficed.

That era ended when Colorado Fuel and Iron closed Crested Butte’s Big Mine in 1952, and the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad abandoned the rail line the next year. At that point, the state transportation department improved the road from Gunnison to Crested Butte and committed to keeping it open through the winter; and the town thus became a remote year-round extension of the automobile culture that by then had conquered the rest of America.

When I first moved to Crested Butte in the mid-1960s, Highway 135, Elk Avenue and the road to the ski area were plowed, as time permitted, by the state and county crews, and a wide trench through the accumulating snow was considered sufficient; plow banks were just left in place at the sides of the street-trenches, even on Elk Avenue. This meant that every business as well as every household had to keep a ground-level path shoveled through the plow bank to the street (although the standard varied there, a factor of age and agility). Now 81

that the Town has its own equipment and a street crew to run it – a pretty regular 1:0010:00 a.m. shift during and after every storm – residents have the additional responsibility of remembering which side of the street they can park on as the night shift works tirelessly to keep life moving at street level.

But life at street level ends where the streets and roads end; beyond that, we venture up onto the surface of winter. Skiing happens on the surface of winter. At ski resorts, that surface is usually packed down somewhat by huge machines that float across the surface of winter at night, on the same shift as the crew downtown maintaining life at street level. Only the resort groomers are doing an equivalent of “pouring oil on troubled waters,” smoothing out the moguls and troughs that skiers gouge out during the day. But go beyond those maintained slopes, and you’ll find yourself up on the real surface of winter, where it no longer matters how deep the snow is, a foot or a glacial mile, so long as you have the gear for staying on top of it.

I had the privilege of living on the surface of the snow for four winters, when my partner and I and our young son were caretakers for the lab in Gothic, four miles beyond street-level civilization. Winter life in Gothic was most comparable to living on an island in the middle of a big lake, except you couldn’t really swim in the lake. It was of course possible to get yourself “highcentered” in a situation where you had to do something kind of like desperate swimming.

A friend told me about going out alone one day on a snowmobile, back in the early days of those, and stalling out in the Slate River flats. He had neglected to bring snowshoes – the snowy-world equivalent of a lifeboat.

So to get back to the trailhead, he had to lie down and roll, over and over – fortunately only a quarter-mile or so. And we won’t talk about falling into tree-wells; it’s possible to drown in snow.

Up on the surface of winter, you realize that skis and snowshoes are really like boats for moving around on frozen lakes.

Different kinds of boats for different kinds of activities. The skis are like canoes or kayaks, adventure vehicles for covering a lot of winter’s surface fairly quickly, while traveling light. Every additional pound you put in a pack on your back deepens your track and diminishes the joy of the glide-stride incrementally – especially if you fall down on a slope and the pack slides up around your neck and head.

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Photos by Raynor Czerwinski

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For other activities up on the surface of winter, skis are not useful at all. In Gothic, we had some daily chores, like bringing water to the cabin from the springbox 50 yards away, and on a nice day going into the woods for a couple more dead-standing aspen to supplement the wood supply gathered in the fall. For work like that, snowshoes – “webs” – were essential. Webs are to life on the surface of winter what tractors are to the farmer: work vehicles, good for granny-gear activity, but you wouldn’t want to drive them to Gunnison.

Modern snowshoes or webs are great, lightweight aluminum contraptions with teeth on the bottom to prevent slipping. Snowshoes like that weren’t around when we were caretaking in Gothic. Ours came from Tony Mihelich’s Hardware and Conoco, which either had one of everything you could want or had it “on order.” Tony’s webs were wooden frames with rawhide webbing, all heavily shellacked.

“Heavy” pretty well described them, but they were fine for forging a trail to the springbox or for maneuvering in the woods.

We also used them to lay the path to the outhouse. For a couple days during and after a storm, we had to use the webs to go to the outhouse – which required some foresight because that also meant putting on boots and getting buckled into the webs. But after a day or two of sun, we could walk – a little carefully – on the paths with just house shoes. Step off the path, though, and you were in trouble.

We did have to do some shoveling at both ends of the paths – shoveling up to the surface of winter from the cabin door, and down to the springbox or door of the outhouse. But that was a lot better than trying to keep the entire paths shoveled down to ground level.

For the years we lived in Gothic, the sunny days of March coupled with cold nights created such a crust on the snow that it was possible to walk anywhere sunny without falling through – until

84

around 10 or 11 a.m. when the crust softened. On those mornings, we could ride our bicycle on the snow’s surface – even with no “fat bikes” back then.

But as winter moved toward what passes for springtime in the Rockies, the surface of winter gradually deteriorated and became downright treacherous, especially in the afternoon. The Gothic Road in the townsite turned into an underground stream – a fact I discovered the first winter, skiing home late one afternoon with a full pack (eggs, veggies and fruit, and balanced half-gallons of Carlos Rossi’s finest). A hundred yards from home, I crashed through the entire snowpack, which then caved in on top of my skis, and really cold water began running over and into my boots. I honestly don’t remember exactly how I got out of that mess; some things you just don’t want to remember. But thus we learned that, in April and May, if you go to town and can’t get back by midday, you’d better plan to sofa-surf in town for the night and start out in the morning.

For all our Gothic misadventures, I most remember the freeing nature of living on the surface of winter, the absence of shoveling and moving the car across the street to live at the level of the automobile.

Of course there are even more special days to remember on the surface of winter. Days when that surface becomes more of a zone, segueing from snow coming down into snow already down, when you float through that neither-either in a slow-mo descent, trying not to inhale too much of it. When you’re not sure whether you’re in or on or even slightly above the snow, with butt, legs and skis working a linked rhythm to slow the descent, to make it last, forever if possible.

Life is just a little better on or near the surface of winter.

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Roads Less Crested Butte’s alleyways bear witness to many a tale of hard work, adventure and mischief.

By Janet Weil

Rebecca Ofstedahl

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Crested Butte traces its roots to a small community of European immigrants trying to create a better life and raise their large families. Isolated by long distances and harsh winters, they led lives of simplicity, camaraderie, resourcefulness and endurance.

A steel company owned the largest coal mine in the area and part of the town itself.

The miners and their families lived in small cabins down the hill from the Big Mine. The alleyways behind the cabins connected one yard with another, one neighbor with the other, one road to another, threading together the town’s fabric. The miners’ cabins and the sheds behind them – the coal sheds, outhouses, smokehouses, horse barns and woodsheds – are authentic monuments to Crested Butte’s “alley architecture.” They whisper a story of a time long gone, of the daily rhythms of the hard-working immigrants who settled in this challenging mountain environment.

Today the alleyway cabins and sheds are disappearing, though some have been remodeled into cozy dwellings, creating hidden mini-neighborhoods. Meanwhile, stories set in these alleyways, from long ago or just yesterday, keep the funky heart of Crested Butte beating.

traveled Chris Hanna

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“Rose, did you invite a friend over?”

Channing asked.

“No,” Rose said. “Could you please go see who it is?”

Channing, still seated, yelled, “Hello, who’s there?”

Silence.

He walked to the top of the stairs and looked down on a huge brown bear standing in the entryway, only steps away from his son’s and daughter’s bedroom.

His heart pounded. He screamed. The bear stood his ground, not moving a muscle.

At that moment, their tiny “chiweenie” (chihuahua-dachsund) Roger ran to Channing’s side, barking wildly in his highpitched tone. The bear lowered his head, clawed around a bit, slowly backed away, then turned and sauntered through the still-open front door. His parting gift was an overpowering fishy odor that permeated the entryway for days. The kids slept peacefully through the ordeal, unaware of the wild intruder.

Roger was embraced by his grateful family and declared a fearless hero.

BAD DOG ALLEY Nathan Bilow

TWO-STORY OUTHOUSES Two-story outhouses created a legend in Crested Butte. They were offset so two people could use them at the same time. The upper-story one was used in heavy winter snows, since the lower-story outhouse was not accessible unless the snow was almost continually shoveled. A two-story outhouse still exists in the alley behind the old Masonic Building (presently occupied by the Artisan Rug Gallery) on Elk Avenue. Oldtimer Fritz Kochevar said, “We built them so people living upstairs didn’t have to walk downstairs to go to the john.”

THE LICENSE PLATE HOUSE A unique architectural style, buildings sided with license plates, began in Crested Butte sometime around 1949. Jessie Mae Richardson, the wife of a miner, began tacking old license plates to a coal shed that her daughter and son-in-law, Mildred and Lyle McNeill, moved from the Big Mine hill to the alley behind her house at Elk Avenue and Fourth Street. The whimsical siding 90

includes dented, rusted and curling license plates from every decade since Colorado started issuing them in 1913.

After the coal shed was covered, Jessie Mae continued nailing the license plates to a garage in the alley. These two structures are now a chic guesthouse and the home to Camp 4 Coffee. People from all over the world now send their license plates to coffee entrepreneur Al Smith, who screws them onto Camp 4’s two other locations, linking the folklore of the town’s past to the present day.

ROGER, THE TINY, FEARLESS HERO Rose and Channing Boucher live on an alley between First and Second streets.

One summer night, after putting their two children to bed in the first-floor bedroom, the couple headed upstairs to the living room for the evening. After settling onto the sofa, they heard the front door open. There was no mistaking the sound, since the door was difficult to open and had to be pushed forcefully.

Cindi Lang lived on an alley for 21 years. In the heavy, silent snows of winter, neighbors would tread down the alley, creating a crooked pathway with steps leading off to each house. The moon and the amber porch lights from the houses gave the path its starry light.

Cindi moved into her home with her big black dog. A prominent man-abouttown lived across the alley and had cats. A month after moving in, Cindi’s dog chased one of that neighbor’s cats. Furious, he came running out of his house wielding an ax aiming to kill the dog, but instead nearly axed Cindi. She grabbed her dog and darted inside. Several hours later, the apologetic neighbor knocked on her door, explaining that he’d thought her dog was going to kill his cat. Narrowing her eyes, Cindi said, “Thanks for the apology, now get off my property!” Shortly afterward, she put up a fence. They didn’t speak a word to each other for the next ten years.

SKITCHING THE ALLEYWAYS

In the winter months, when packed snow and ice lined the alleyways, Amiel Mason and his friends raced out of school to go “skitching.” The boys first tested their boots for slickness on the icy patches in the schoolyard before taking them to the streets. If a car driving down an alley or

street stopped and the driver wasn’t looking in the rear view mirror, the boys would crouch down and grab onto the bumper, waiting for the car to move forward. Sliding along on their boots while squatting down and holding tightly to the bumper was called skitching a ride.

When the alleys weren’t plowed, they held on for dear life as the powder hit them in the face, blinding them. Sometimes the soft snow was so deep that when they let go, they got buried, the ultimate experience.

They skitched day or night, on streets or alleys, behind anything that moved: horsedrawn carriages, delivery trucks, police cars or school buses. One afternoon, Amiel hit a gravel patch, got road rash on his butt and had to face his mom with his underwear hanging out of his torn pants.

There were parents who allowed the kids to skitch, those who frowned on it, and parents who were completely oblivious to it.

At times the driver of the car would realize something was up, stop and chase the boys. In such a small town, it wasn’t hard to figure out who the culprits were and inform their parents of the shenanigans.

That, however, never stopped those youngsters (who are now adults) from skitching alley rides.

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SOUPÇON Jacob Kochevar, Sr. and his son Stefan built a log structure just down the alley from their saloon, Kochevar’s, in 1916. Originally, it was half its present size. For many years, it functioned as a private residence. Carolyn (Kochevar) Tezak lived there and gave birth to her son in the tiny cabin.

In the early 1960s, Kolbet and Lynn Schrichte opened the Fondue House in this small (15 x 15) cabin, and it became a favorite gathering place for early skiers. In Sandra Cortner’s book Crested Butte…Love at First Sight, Lynn said of the rustic eatery: “It was heated with a potbelly stove, which added to the charm and melted the butter on nearby tables.”

Also according to the book, the cabin then housed Art and Bea Norris’ Swiss Fondue House, followed by the Pot of Stew, Bacchanale (affectionately called “Backin-Alley”), Sancho’s and Chez Danielle, renamed Soupçon by Candy Smith in 1974.

She sold it to Jeff Keys and Nick Lypps, who at first perched his sons on milk crates to hand wash the dishes in the deep metal sinks; later he invested in an automatic dishwasher.

AUGUST 2-4, 2019 CRESTEDBUTTEARTSFESTIVAL .COM

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The Alley Loop Nordic ski race.

Alex Fenlon

Rebecca Ofstedahl

Mac and Maura Bailey, Jason Vernon and now David Wooding have had their turns owning and running Soupçon. It remains one of Crested Butte’s iconic restaurants, still in the same cozy log cabin in the alley between Elk and Maroon avenues.

A BONEY HALLOWEEN COSTUME On a moonlit Halloween night in 1990, Michael Weil and his friend Paul Moscatelli, fresh out of college, arrived in Crested Butte after driving across the country from New York. They were determined to spend the winter skiing in this powder-fabled town.

Elk Avenue was buzzing with revelers outfitted for Halloween, and the bar was giving free drinks to anyone who came dressed up. These thirsty guys wanted to join the fun but had no costumes. Wandering the alley behind the Wooden Nickel, Michael eyed a cow’s skull hanging from a fence.

He grabbed the skull off the fence and tied it to the top of his head with his belt. Now properly attired, they strutted into the Nickel, claimed their drinks and joined the party.

THE ALLEY LOOP Locals use any excuse to dress up and celebrate, and the Alley Loop is Crested Butte’s biggest and most colorful costume party.

This unique Nordic ski race, started in 1986, starts and finishes in the heart of downtown Crested Butte, meandering through the alleys, behind false-fronted businesses, over footbridges and alongside 92

residences. Townspeople offer racers refreshments along the way. Prizes are given for best costume as well as fastest times. Town crews truck in snow (after spending much of the winter trucking it away), spreading it on the streets and alleyways to insure a wellpacked ski surface.

After the race, Cindi Lang recalled from her alley-dwelling years, drivers would sometimes see the ski tracks heading down the alley, assume it was plowed and drive down it. Within 50 feet they invariably got stuck, often in front of Cindi’s house. She put a winch in the tree in her front yard and for ten bucks pulled the cars out.

MISCHIEF NIGHT During the 1950s, teens in Crested Butte dubbed Halloween “Mischief Night.” The males in town were deputized for that night to help keep order. The kids wrapped toilet paper around the trees in front yards, painted graffiti on buildings, cut clotheslines hanging across the yards, soaped whatever car and house windows they could get to, overturned sheds and outhouses in the alleys and wreaked havoc any way they could.

One year they overturned an outhouse when it was occupied. The occupant wasn’t hurt, but he sure was hopping mad! The deputized males chased the offenders up and down the alleyways all night long as the rascals ran from the wake of their mayhem.

Such tales are etched deeply into the wood and tin of Crested Butte’s old alley sheds.

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94

Small groups,

big impacts

Drawing affluent adventure travelers, Eleven has quietly become a significant employer and economic force in Crested Butte.

By Kelli Ruhl

Photos Courtesy of Eleven Experience

In the eight years since its inception, Eleven Experience has made an indelible mark on Crested Butte, and on a series of similarly majestic locales worldwide. The adventure travel company’s mission is to “custom-make powerful experiences that impact the people who impact the world,” which it accomplishes by hosting groups of all shapes and sizes at seven luxurious escapes across the globe.

Eleven, which makes its headquarters in Crested Butte, began after a friend introduced Chad and Blake Pike to snowcat skiing at Irwin. They saw the operation as a gem that needed to be dusted off. After acquiring the backcountry ski operation and the historic Scarp Ridge Lodge (formerly the Croatian Hall and then the Lodge at Crested Butte on Second Street), they approached Irwin cat-skiing in a novel way. Their crews used a Tucker Snowcat to shuttle guests the 13 snowy miles between Irwin’s powder fields and Eleven’s beautiful in-town home bases.

Though Scarp Ridge marked the beginning of Eleven, the company has grown exponentially, with seven properties across five countries, plus three more in the works.

The Eleven portfolio includes two lodges in Crested Butte, Scarp Ridge Lodge and Sopris House; the fly-fishing-centric Taylor River Lodge near Almont, south of Crested Butte; Chalet Pelerin and Chalet Hibou in France; a live-aboard fishing vessel, The Outpost, which travels up and down the Mississippi Delta; Bahama House in the Bahamas; The 95

Scarp Ridge Lodge in Crested Butte.

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Mothership, a three-suite fishing vessel also located in the Bahamas; and Deplar Farm in Iceland. Eleven will open the Palena Lodge in Rio Palena, Chile, in February 2019.

The company also owns a handful of other businesses in Crested Butte: Irwin Guides, Irwin Brewing Company, Public House and Crested Butte Lodge and Hostel.

Those are commonly owned but have unique purposes separate from Eleven’s adventure travel business.

While every Eleven location is unique, they share two themes: each offers access to either world-class fly fishing or skiing (or both), and each is found in a community that boasts a fiery spirit—something that Crested Butte locals understand well. From Iceland to the Bahamas, the Pikes have sought places with a certain kind of hometown soul. Their passion for each place has driven Eleven’s growth, and their goal is to enrich and complement each locale, not to take away from what makes it special.

Jake Jones, Crested Butte resident and managing director for Eleven Experience, said the Pikes “love the places as they are.

They hope time has shown that Eleven having a strong presence in Crested Butte hasn’t changed the spirit of the community. Eleven operates in places that are geographically among the last great places on earth, and maintaining their character is an extremely

important part of the company’s ethos.”

Each property is small by design, intended to function as a buyout (one group using the entire property) or a by-room situation. This allows large parties to take over, or smaller parties to share space and evening cocktails, but pursue their dream activities separately.

Every trip is tailored to the group’s goals, but all are focused on a​ dventure​, as defined by the guests. While relaxation and unwinding are major draws, trips are fashioned like safaris in their respective environments, whether it’s fishing, skiing, biking or simply outdoorscentric. Jones summed up the company’s goal: “to get people together in a setting where their only agenda is to have fun and enjoy each other’s company.” He added, “We’re purveyors of joy.”

Jones noted that although the brand seems shiny and corporate from the outside, “in the context of the global hospitality industry, Eleven is fiercely independent and original.” In each community it enters, Eleven lives by three pillars of business: high-quality tourism, high-quality employment and highquality development. In what Jones describes as an era of low-quality tourism (think inexpensive online home rentals and endless new cost-cutting travel options), Eleven takes the opposite approach, bringing high-quality dollars into each community and focusing on small groups making big impacts. For

Jake Jones, managing director for Eleven Experience.

example, Eleven chose not to serve dinner at its Crested Butte lodges, specifically to drive business to the town’s excellent restaurants.

In addition to investing in the success of each host community, Eleven works to develop the careers of community members, hiring locally and creating “high-quality employment.” As Jones pointed out, it takes a special personality to commit to living — and making a living — in a place like Crested Butte, and there’s no better employee than one who’s committed to the ​place​as well as the ​job​. In Crested Butte, approximately 120 locals have been hired by Eleven, making it a significant employer in the valley.

The final pillar of Eleven’s business model, high-quality development, shows in how the company has chosen and utilized its properties. Historic buildings like Scarp Ridge Lodge and Public House, for example, weren’t easy to renovate and aren’t simple to operate. But Eleven’s owners believe in historic preservation and upholding the values of their host communities, so they’re willing to direct money and effort into revitalizing rather than replacing.

Looking forward, Eleven Experience is working to expand into new locales around the world, while planting solid roots in its current host communities. As Jones explained, Eleven’s team members have kept their noses to the grindstone for eight years, building their brand. Now, with the foundation laid, Eleven can begin enjoying its hometowns. In Crested Butte, for instance, Eleven’s first-ever softball team took to the field this summer, and employees have created a communityoutreach committee that spearheads initiatives like backcountry clean-ups in the spring and fall. Though still a relatively new and novel feature of Crested Butte’s landscape, Eleven has attempted to enhance the area’s outdoor offerings and bring quality jobs and business into town.

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We built this in school.

This beautiful home was designed and built by Gunnison Valley school students working with local architects, engineers and construction professionals. When it sells, the proceeds will go right back to our schools. How cool is that?

The idea is the brainchild of SOAR, a non-profit that teams students with local building professionals to design and build affordable housing. Sold on the open market, the projects create a revenue stream for our schools and give kids a hands-on, interdisciplinary education.

Students learn everything from design to carpentry to business administration.

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SOAR builds up our kids, our schools and our community. To keep the projects going, we need donations and 0% interest loans.

Want to pitch in?

Toddy Glosser 214.394.6162 gunnisonvalleysoar@gmail.com

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FROM THE MOUNTAINS… TO THE WORLD Let’s listen to each other. Here are some wisdom gifts from the Mountain People.

By Molly Murfee

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Xavier Fané

I see the planet in struggle. Industrial greed forfeiting the value of water and air clean enough to ingest. Acres of land gorged upon by machines and extraction and the burden of too many people. Hate and war and isolation and anger.

The world at times feels like it’s going to hell. Too often the loudest voices are those with money, political power, possessions.

Greed and fear. Temper.

The best decisions do not come from this place.

Instead…

I want to collaborate with the people of the ocean and find out what they can teach us about the rhythms of life. The desert people about mystery and magic. The plains people about the balance of vision and root.

I want to hear from the rainforest people, those who live close to the fiery hearts of volcanoes, the ones whose villages lap at the tongues of glaciers.

What can each environment offer the larger conversation of the whole? What wisdom gifts can we take from every little corner of the world, offering up our best selves for the benefit of the planet?

Here is what the Mountain People have to say…

Mountains – not humans – dominate the highland communities tucked into the crags and valleys of the peaks. Not homes and cars and skyscrapers and shopping malls.

Towering masses of granite, slate, limestone.

Both heaven-reaching and heavily grounded, our heads soar into infinite blue skies, our feet treading great strata of quartz, conglomerates of boulders, talus the size of VW vans. The dust flying around us, collecting in the dry crevices of our fingertips, is the work of eruptions, tectonic shifts, a core of continental crust over a billion years old. A 300 million-year-old mountain range eroded, then thrust back into the atmosphere in vast, laboring heaves.

Oceanic plates grinding under the great continent of North America.

Landscape directs with supreme drama and force. The world is more than our tiny human selves. Here, nature rules. We are not in charge. We acquiesce.

We learn the importance of scale.

Proportion.

The influence of mountains and their tumultuous weather over our lives and

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J.C. Leacock

decisions is colossal. The dominance forces us to pay attention.

Beauty slams us into the present.

There’s nothing we can do but pay rapt attention. In the face of rosy alpenglow illuminating gray cliffs, or the slow presence of a moose grazing in shallow waters, modern culture, with its faux importance on human-fabricated schedules and trivial irritations, erodes like insignificant pieces of sedimentary rock.

We live. Here. Now.

In these instances beauty commands that we construct values other than economics. “Be aware of this,” she sometimes screams, straining muscles in her neck throughout the ether, or sometimes lovingly whispers in our ear like a spirit passing. Suddenly, we are outside of ourselves, immersed in a waterfall, a wildflower, a storm. Living from an inspired place.

As beautiful as mountains are, they demand of their inhabitants in equal measure. Like the beaver erecting a den, we understand that logistics matter. Don’t construct your door under your roof shed.

Get off high peaks before noon. Know

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where your snow shovel and insulated boots are at all times. Never put away your down jacket. Always carry your raincoat.

Our lives are more intimately intermingled with the environment.

Not paying attention has consequences, sometimes deadly. This place influences every aspect of our existence. Consequently, a relationship is formed. Intimacy, knowledge and connection to place weave themselves into our cells. Responsibilities ensue.

We believe our ceremonies and dances can please the gods and goddesses of snow and rain; we listen for messages the hawk or coyote might bring. We build fires for the sun, honor fertility, abundance, the sensuality of sex.

We see our impacts on our place. Our footsteps on the fragile alpine meadow.

Taking too much firewood from one location. The bear that loses its life for our lack of garbage care. We must be good stewards of our four-legged and winged neighbors. The earth and its plants, water and air. We must take notice when the cores of our hills are threatened by greed and industrial “progress,” and protect the caches of minerals in their hearts. The influential spirit that lives inside and around mountains far exceeds the material gain from extraction of their physical riches.

To balance, high-altitude communities are naturally diminutive. With imposing topography closing in, there is only so much reasonable home-making space between peaks and wetlands and rivers. As big as our mountains are – that’s how small we must be.

We understand resource scarcity and construct undersized homes to trim our impact. No more than we need. Less space to heat and electricity to burn. Less room to collect unnecessary things. Less time housekeeping and more time outside.

Finances better spent on other endeavors.

We are less obsessed with the accumulation of stuff, and more infatuated with a life enriched with experiences.

Newer, better, shinier, faster, more appeals much less… so much better seems scaling a summit, running a river, arcing graceful turns down a slope. Our sense of adventure is one of our greatest.

From the end of a rope, the receiving call of a beacon, we know our partners are our lifelines, and we take these backcountry travel ethics into our community. Our common goals and adventures bond us,

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make our connections all the stronger. Like a pack of scruffy coyotes, we take care of each other, support each other, depend on each other.

We’re tight-knit, more family than friends, a tribe of commonality, resonance, comfort and encouragement.

We know that difficult journeys are accomplished through patience – resolutely putting one foot in front of the other – gradually, steadily arriving at the goal. Yet we also know that focusing solely on the destination means we miss much of the journey.

Therefore we must always take pause for wonder – the tiny bits on the trail that wink as we pass by, like raindrops resting in the center of lupine leaves.

We learn tenacity from ascending these pinnacles. The power of going with the flow from running rivers. Time and again we learn to soothe the jagged edges of fear. We are focused, determined. We set our teeth. Narrow our eyes. Take flight. Ascend.

Like the mountain goat we climb summits, our vision obliterated with waves of peaks and wide-open air. Above tree line, in the ancient alpine meadows, the sky stretches so taut it begins to rip apart. Openness beyond open. All of that space. The ability to see so far. Our minds become clear. Time. Stretches.

Perspective.

With horizons so large, our personal definitions expand in response. Like the hawks in the air, our way forward is free. Pathless.

Savagely independent with radical self-expression. Our freak flags can fly. Our hair can be long and loose. Wild ‘n’ wooly. Rough ‘n’ rugged. Some carry the nature of bear’s peaceful warrior, others the mysterious darkness of raven, or the gentleness of deer. In our midst are fox, moose, ermine, those that flit about with the joy of

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hummingbirds.

As harsh as our climate, that’s how hardy and fierce we can be.

We synchronize with the seasons – releasing and rebuilding through melting snow, blooming wildflowers, dying leaves, growing darkness.

We’re aware of cycles, ebbs and flows, our own moods and bodies reflecting the world outside. The deep hunger that comes before winter. The need to allow the golden glow of autumn to seep into our pores and all the spaces in between. We live in rhythm. Yin and yang.

Light and dark. Hibernating with our internal processes in the depths of January, pushing our radiance out into the world with passion in the manic summer.

And we seek solace in silence. Solitary time. Lonely places where we can hear what the wind has to say, ponder the hawk’s circling unhindered above. Space to allow the dust bunnies of too much ruminating thought to fall out of our ears like unnecessary fluff. Time away from the monotonous hum of machines, the noise of cars and the presence of too much humanity.

Here in this pause, solutions and epiphanies arise. Natural inspiration rejuvenates any weariness we’ve collected. We unravel metaphorical mysteries present in a snowflake, bones on the forest floor, the symbiotic relationship of an ant and a sunflower. Here we discover and develop our own growth patterns, alongside the ancient rings of the spruce and fir.

We are, in fact, our place.

Listen.

Watch.

There are lessons in the ways we live.

Take them home.

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FROM HICKORY TO CARBON A valley native re-traces her life – and the life of Crested Butte’s ski area – in a pile of old skis.

By Polly Oberosler

Nolan Blunck

This fall I was looking for something upstairs in my garage and happened to notice the standing pile of skis I have stashed there. It dawned on me how much they represent the evolution of the ski industry – and my life with it.

I don’t remember the first pair of skis I stood on, but I do remember the bindings were made of leather that laced over the toe of my overshoes and a small leather strap that held my foot forward from the heel. As a small child, skiing was part of the outdoor fun, along with stacking all of us kids onto our big toboggan and letting it rip straight down a hill behind our house. My dad even made a harness for our big collie dog, so we could hitch her to a runner sled and have her tow us. We ice skated on a pond near the house as well. As rocks were to hillsides and leaves were to trees, winter sports were to us.

Of the many skis I carved my early life on, I have my first “big girl” skis still in my possession. They’re about 130cm, painted blue, and now considered antiques that can be bought on the Internet for about $50 – at least four times what they cost in 1963. They were manufactured by the Adirondack Peters Toboggan Company and have a simple triangle binding toe with basically a screen door spring to hold my foot against it. Memory doesn’t serve me, 109

but I’m betting they steered like a toboggan as well. Nonetheless they toured me and my imagination around the yard and down the steep hill behind the house. Probably the day the heel spring sprung did me a huge favor, considering I was still using overshoes to cover my tiny feet and the bindings were far from releasable.

With skis I’ve long forgotten, I eventually managed to afford the $1 lift ticket and ski the J-Bar at Crested Butte Ski Area in its early days. I even begged my sister into submission one day to take me on the T-Bar, though she was courting a handsome ski instructor and I was nothing more than an interruption to the romance.

I was proud to be leaning on the T-Bar with my big sister, even though it was a struggle for both of us, considering our difference in height and weight. We managed to get to the top. I stood there admiring my accomplishment until I looked downhill, at which time I began to cry; I had overestimated my abilities. My sister wished she’d held firm to “no” when I’d asked to come in the first place, but her handsome friend reminded her that a catwalk off the top of the T-Bar led to the top of the J-Bar.

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They talked me down the hill and dropped me off at the J-Bar, where I happily skied the rest of the day. Later we met at the Bierstube, where the snow piled over the windows, making it warm and pleasant even for an underage little sister.

My family couldn’t afford new boots and skis, so my growing interest in the sport forced me to hit local ski swaps for used skis, four years out of date. As a ten-year-old, I ended up with a pair of beautiful, hickory Northland skis with real step-in bindings, a faster rubber composite Ebonite bottom, and real edges! At 190cm they were oversized to say the least, as my skis and boots had been my entire life. The bindings didn’t fit my old lace-up boots, so I also bought a used pair of size-eight or -nine buckle boots. As with most boots I’d owned, I wore three pairs of socks to take up room that my size-six foot wouldn’t fill. But, I was cool.

In my teen years, my lift ticket went to adult prices of $7 per day, and I felt compelled to keep up or shut up. I stepped up to the gondola the first time about 1967, sliding my skis into the tubes on the back of the three-person car, then cramming my body into the single seat that faced an opposing double seat, twisting my legs to interlock others in a mass of knees. The gondola car was pushed by hand until it caught the haul rope and whisked me to a new adventure. I was so prideful then, with new plastic boots and everything.

My buddies and I were feeling smug one day, so we followed a mutual friend on a trail through the trees from the top of the Gondola to Paradise Bowl. None of us, save for our leader, had any idea what was coming as we gained speed, ducking tree branches on a steep trail not wide enough to even check our speed. The girl in front of me straddled a tree that I had to push and pull her off, then we flew again down a tunnel of evergreens. Suddenly the bottom fell out, and I dropped into the bowl, skimming the snow at lightning speed on my butt.

The five or six of us, scattered like litter on the slopes, one by one began to laugh at what we’d gotten ourselves into. We finally gathered up and began to sing the newly released, “Miss American Pie.” It seemed appropriate at the time.

To this day, my favorite skis of all time were my Yamaha “All Around.” Standing unused in that pile of skis now, they’re plain-looking, nothing-fancy hand-medowns, but they skied incredibly. Paradise and East River lifts were built by the time I

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got those skis, expanding my choices of ski terrain. Although I skied always a bit guarded, I loved the wind in my face and the feeling of floating on clouds in the powder down Upper Keystone, Ruby Chief, Treasury and, yes, even T-Bar, the nemesis of my pre-teens. I remember the day my Yamahas carved their last turn near the bottom of Paradise Bowl. I was heartbroken to realize they were completely delaminating. It makes me a bit sad to see them now sprinkled with dust, but they created so many good times that they shine from the pile like no other pair.

Things changed in the early 1970s with new ski lifts and buildings. The beautiful wood structure of Pitta’s warming house was torn down and replaced with common stucco and steel. I loved that old warming house with its lovely curves, beams and hard wood floor, even though walking on it in plastic ski boots was a bit like ice skating. Wonderful smells came from that kitchen, and the building was warm and snug. I can smile just thinking about it.

Eventually, I got a job at the ski area and bought my first pair of new skis, Rossignol SMs. They were a nice carving ski, but quick turns were not in their nature, and they changed my style forever.

Those skis took me into my mid-twenties and my work as a lift mechanic, then onto the ski area rental shop, where I learned to tune skis and could choose any equipment I wanted to ski. I bought a pair of demo Squadra Course skis that were by far the fastest I was ever on. Handmade in Italy, they carved like a dream but could hold an edge on a downhill course, something my friend Ro proved when she won a citizen’s downhill on them. I was proud to own them.

Much of my time in the Butte, spanning 30 years, was spent tuning skis. I kept the boards of the famous, and the not-so-famous

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working folks, gliding down the hill and carving out a few hours of their day with pure pleasure. It pleased me to make skiers happy and to fix their blown edges so they could get one more run, month or year out of their boards. Some clients worked hard to afford a season pass, or a room in an old shack, many working two and three jobs.

Others were simply appreciative of being treated like they belonged to the community, if even for a week. One of my proudest moments was being given new handmade Swiss skis by the ski school director, also a well-known mountaineer — the height of appreciation. In my memory bank of pride, that ranks as high as being the second woman in the country to become a ski lift mechanic, certainly one of the most interesting jobs I’ve ever had.

Nearly every ski in my pile peels back a corner of my mind, loosening a memory caught there. My emotions reel, thinking of getting my first pair of cross-country skis via a family treasure hunt on Christmas morning. They spark thoughts of my mother, whom I got to know better on our ski excursions together. The laughs, the pain of sprained knees and visual flashes of memory come from that pile of hickory, carbon, plastic and foam. My dad’s ski boots, which used to ski Pioneer, bookend my life; now they hold the old books I’ve collected that represent his early time in life. They bridge the gift of skiing from his generation to mine. My sister has my mother’s skis that cultivated her love of sports as she threw herself straight downhill on those seven-foot planks.

Not only does my old pile of skis represent my life and the life of a ski area – it also speaks softly of great times, with the wind whistling by my ears and my body gliding in soft, smooth lines. It rests my mind.

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REWILDING WOMAN This writer finds inspiration in the grace and grit of her Crested Butte sisters.

Words and images by Cayla Vidmar “Tell me the landscape in which you live, and I will tell you who you are.”

—José Ortega y Gassett

Standing on the tops of the craggy peaks, clipped into a mountain bike, stark naked on the gravelly beach of some high alpine lake, her white bum flashing to the sky as she dives in. If we don’t see her outdoors, we see her in her storefront, or rallying for a cause, putting in hours of work behind the scenes. We see her everywhere.

She’s the wheel around which this town turns. The woman of Crested Butte.

Quintessential yet undefined. Unchained and on her path.

There’s a certain magic of Crested Butte that feeds the wild soul. It beckons the uncommon wanderer further down the road, the ones who seek a life outside the confines of “normal.” The wild in this place speaks to

Carrie Jo Chernoff-Hicks: expanding the definition of “bad-ass.”

the wild in those who are willing to listen.

Crested Butte shapes its people with a sometimes quiet, sometimes confrontational intensity; you are changed just by being here. If it’s not the harsh winters or the ample opportunities to test yourself in the outdoors, it’s the small community and the seasonal economy that refine people with a sandpaper persistence.

Molly Murfee, local nature writer, speaks of Crested Butte as the iron against which we are all forged. Forget sugar and spice; the women of the valley are made of grit and forging sparks.

This grating isn’t always pleasant, and it often sends people packing, at least to spend half the year in more temperate climates and

communities. But this story is about the ones who stay.

To be a woman of the valley is to be different from the rest. There is seldom the question of what women can and cannot do, or should not do, based on gender. As Molly says, “You’re not let off the hook just because you’re a woman.”

For Carrie Jo Chernoff-Hicks, 2006 freeskiing champ and owner of Synergy Athlete, part of her mission is expanding the definition of “badass” beyond the myopic definition of “athlete.”

“There are women here who are badasses in their own right, and that has nothing to with athleticism and everything to do with their value in the community,” 115

Molly Murfee: sidestepping gender conventions.

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says Carrie Jo. The women who stand out and thrive here are those who, according to Carrie Jo, have “found their line.”

Finding her line has been a constant in Carrie Jo’s life, not just when she’s on a pair of skis looking over an intimidating cliff.

Carrie Jo follows her line of commitment, whether she’s winning ski championships or buzzing her hair to stand in solidarity with a friend losing hers in chemotherapy. It’s a commitment to living – to doing – even while fear taps your shoulder.

Whether it means being an entrepreneur, athlete, artist, traveler, mother or not, survival in Crested Butte means unabashedly pursuing the best line for your life. Crested Butte isn’t an easy place to live. As in a narrow, steep and rock-lined chute, you must be fully dedicated to the challenge – committed to your line – to survive the descent.

Molly embraces the gentleness of loving and advocating for the world’s wild places, and her past has been dotted with dirt-bagging out of tents and cars in remote places for work. She says, “You don’t have the entrapments and expectations of conventional women’s roles here. Coming from the deep South, there are definitive ideas of what your life should look like, and what you should look like. Here you don’t have to have your hair done and wear lots of makeup and heels and a bra in order to be considered a woman.”

Life at the edge of the wilderness further pulls apart the traditional weave of what it is to be a woman. The constant confrontation and communion with nature contributes to a woman’s rewilding. Living here means keeping up with snow shoveling if you want to be able to leave your house. It means locking up your trash so bears don’t get into it. It means testing yourself in nature

and deciding who you want to be: hiker, biker, skier, backcountry enthusiast, slow stroller, trail runner… the list goes on.

Nature is the framework within which we get to define ourselves. This connection with the seasons, and the earth, allows us to connect more deeply with ourselves. It’s difficult not to live authentically when the world around us is so utterly real and raw.

These challenges, and the small community, force women to step up to the plate in ways they might not be asked to elsewhere.

For Peace Wheeler, snowcat operator and co-owner of Crested Butte Rental Center, being herself was never a question of gender norms; it was just the way you did things. Peace grew up in Crested Butte, running around with her beloved siblings and learning about heavy equipment from her father Bill and about running a business from her mother Joey.

Peace’s upbringing illustrates life in Crested Butte, as does the career path she chose, first working as a late-night snowcat operator at Crested Butte Mountain Resort and at Mt. Hutt in New Zealand, and then helping customers rent heavy equipment from her family’s rental center. Like many women here, Peace is a surprise; her gentle personality and grace would never disclose the grit required to battle snow in the middle of the night behind the wheel of a hulking snowcat.

The question of whether a woman is capable of shoveling her roof, paying her bar tab, or keeping up with the men doesn’t get asked regularly; ability defines people, not gender. Because of this, women aren’t as quick to put themselves into the pink box marked “female” either.

For Kate Seeley, a well-known artist in town, this freedom allows

Peace Wheeler: being gentle and tough at the same time.

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Kate Seeley: creativity and the freedom “to do anything.”

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women to be whomever they want. There’s a layer of “weird” to the Crested Butte community, which creates a supportive backdrop for people to pursue their dreams.

“The key to this town, and what I love about it, is that you can do anything,” Kate says, and she would know. Kate not only painted the beloved “fish bus” for the town bus system, but later acquired it to use as a studio in her yard. Without meaning to, Kate also became the loving adopter of abandoned doors, and her quirky house is brimming with them.

These two things – the supportive community and the celebration of the oddballs – Kate credits for creating the strong and resilient women of the valley. If you want to do something here, you’ll likely find a supportive group of people pushing you to keep going – or at the very least, bringing you doors to fill your home.

Crested Butte was made by entrepreneurs – no chain stores on these streets – and that tenacity fuels women and men alike.

Living here means you’re measured not by title or gender, but by how much life fills your days. How connected you let yourself be to your own personal “wild.” To make it in Crested Butte means to hold yourself in tension – to be soft, loving and gentle, while having the tenacity and strength to do hard things and live a life according to your own definition.

The entrapments of the status quo are shoved aside for the rawness of living in a place where it’s difficult, but worth it. The landscape of Crested Butte is the iron upon which we’re forged, but the difficulty is tempered by the community of others who are willing to stand the heat, too. We’re all a little more wild here, and that is the point.

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Photos: Tom Stillo, Matt Johnston, Chris Segal, Trent Bona, James Ray Spahn

wick@ibarranch.com ~ 970.209.9796 ~ ibarranch.com

Be a part of the finest ski-in/ski-out community in Colorado.

Choose your homesite now while the opportunity lasts. Schedule your tour of the Prospect neighborhood today.

HOMESITES STARTING AT $310,000

970-349-4999 | info@cbliving.com | prospectcb.com

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Winter events 2018-2019

NOVEMBER 10

Opening day, Crested Butte Nordic Center

15

Historic Pub Crawl, CB Mtn. Heritage Museum (CBMHM)

21

Donation Day, Crested Butte ski area

22

Official opening day, Crested Butte ski area

22

gO Initiatives Turkey Trot, downtown Crested Butte

22-24

Thanksgiving Nordic Ski Camp

25

Alley Loop Nordic Race Series

25

Torchlight Parade at the ski area

30

Movie Night at the Museum (CBMHM): “Ghost Town Skiers”

DECEMBER 2

Santa Night at the Museum, CBMHM

5

This is Serious: A Satire Workshop, Center for the Arts (CFTA)

7

Crested Butte Light-up Night

7-9, 14-16

CB Mtn. Theatre (CBMT) youth production “Elf, the Musical, Jr.”

8

Alley Loop Nordic Race Series

8

Light-up Night in Mountaineer Square

15

Literary Pub Crawl, CFTA

17-20

Rock on Ice, ice-sculpting at ski area base

22-23, 26, 28-30 Yurt Dinner, Crested Butte Nordic

Dusty Demerson

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24

Torchlight Parade and Santa’s Sleigh at the ski area

29

ArtWalk at Crested Butte galleries and studios

29

Warren Miller’s “Face of Winter”

31

Special New Year’s Eve Yurt Dinner, Crested Butte Nordic

31

Torchlight Parade and Fireworks at the ski area

31

New Year’s Eve après celebration at the Umbrella Bar

Lydia Stern

Chris Miller

JANUARY 1

Free admission day at the museum (CBMHM)

1, 4, 5, 19

Yurt Dinner, Crested Butte Nordic

5, 13, 26

Alley Loop Nordic Race Series

12

ArtWalk at Crested Butte galleries and studios

12

CB Unplugged concert at the ski area

12-13

Matthew Taylor: The Art of Storytelling, CFTA

12

Shane Smith & the Saints, CFTA

16-19

Mountain High Music Festival

18

Crested Butte Film Festival Monthly Film Series

19

Write Your Way Forward, CFTA

19

Butte Banked Slalom at the ski area

23

Sam Bush, CFTA

24-28

Fat Bike World Championships

25

Movie Night at the Museum (CBMHM):

“King of Hearts”

26-27

USCSA Collegiate Slalom races at the ski area

31

Chris Robinson Brotherhood, CFTA

For updated calendar, see gunnisoncrestedbutte.com/events.

Dusty Demerson

Winter events 2018-2019

FEBRUARY 1

Chris Robinson Brotherhood, CFTA

1

Alley Loop Pub Ski, Crested Butte Nordic

2

Alley Loop Nordic Marathon

2-3

IFSA Junior Freeski Regionals

2, 9, 14, 16, 22-23 Yurt Dinner, Crested Butte Nordic

Chris Miller

MARCH

3

American XC National Masters, CB Nordic

7

Creative Writing Taster Series:

1-3

USASA Boardercross and Skiercross at the ski area

Environmental Writing, CFTA

2, 9, 16

Crafted, Colorado craft brews, spirits and local fare

7-8

Freeride World Qualifier at the ski area

2

Regenerations: Writing and Art in Nature, CFTA

9-10

U.S. Extreme Freeskiing Championships

3

Donavon Frankenreiter, CFTA

9

CB Unplugged concert at the ski area

8-10

IFSA Junior Freeski Nationals

14

Crested Butte Film Festival Monthly Film Series

14

ArtWalk at Crested Butte galleries and studios

16

Writing the Past:

14

Corned Beef & Limericks:

Researching Historical Narrative, CFTA

Limerick Writing Workshop, CFTA

16

ArtWalk at Crested Butte galleries and studios

15, 21

Crested Butte Film Festival Monthly Film Series

18

Writing with Purpose and Passion, CFTA

16

Children’s Book Festival, CFTA

20

Free admission day at the museum (CBMHM)

16

CB Unplugged concert at the ski area

21-24

Prater Cup alpine ski race, Junior Olympic qualifier

17

Whiskey & Limericks Live Readings, CFTA

22-23

Murder in the Mountains: Mini Noir Festival, CFTA

25-28

NAACF Airlines Ski Races

23

Pinot & Noir: Intro to Mystery Writing, CFTA

26

Literary Salon Series, CFTA

23

Gothic Mountain Tour, Crested Butte Nordic

28-30

North Face Grand Traverse, Crested Butte Nordic

26

Literary Salon Series, CFTA

28

Ghost Light, CFTA

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APRIL 4-7

Flauschink celebration to flush out winter

5

Front Country, CFTA

5-7

Ski Town Breakdown at the ski area

6

Landshark Pond Skim at the ski area

7

Closing day, Crested Butte Nordic and ski area

18

Crested Butte Film Festival Monthly Film Series

28

CB3P: pole, pedal and paddle race

30

Literary Salon Series, CFTA

Xavier FanĂŠ

Nathan Bilow

125

LODGING ALPINE GETAWAYS Vacation Rentals 510 Elk Avenue 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

ELK MOUNTAIN LODGE

OLD TOWN INN

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

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 128

Bed & Breakfast Hotel 621 Maroon Avenue PO Box 427, Crested Butte

AD PAGE 128

PEAK PROPERTY MANAGEMENT & SALES Vacation and Long-term Rentals PO Box 2023, 318 Elk Avenue

Crested Butte’s premier provider of vacation rentals, long-term rentals, property management services and real estate sales.

Specializing in one to four bedroom private vacation rentals in historic Crested Butte, the mountain and the Club at Crested Butte. Call or email us today.

1.888.909.7325 info@peakcb.com AD PAGE 77 126

Nathan Bilow

AD PAGE 33

Bed & Breakfast Lodge PO Box 148 129 Gothic Avenue, Crested Butte

AD PAGE 128

PIONEER GUEST CABINS Cabins 2094 Cement Creek, South of CB

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 128

Hotel & Family Inn PO Box 990 708 6th Street, Crested Butte

THIRD HOME

Luxury Home Exchange and Travel Club THIRDHOME is the luxury property and travel club that enables its members to explore the world through a variety of travel experiences.

We invite second home owners to join an exclusive community of like-minded members to trade time in their home for stays in spectacular destinations.

615-454-2329 thirdhome.com contact@thridhome.com

AD PAGE 127

YOUR SECOND HOME IS THE KEY TO A WORLD OF TRAVEL.

With over 10,500 properties in 94 countries.

Imagine the possibilities.

THIRDHOME Exchange allows second home owners to enjoy rent-free stays in spectacular destinations by simply and safely exchanging time in their second home.

From desirable locations to insider tips to luxurious amenities, everything is designed for upscale travelers. Our Club of trusted owners shares a passion for adventure, discerning tastes and an appreciation of an elevated approach to travel

Your THIRDHOME joining fee has been taken care of by

Our exclusive property management partner in Crested Butte.

Find out how to book your first Exchange on us‌ JOIN TODAY 833.682.6164 JOINTHIRDHOME.COM/CRESTEDBUTTE 127

Op e n Ye a r R o u n d • Po o c h e s We l c o m e

For Reservations 970.349.5326 • 800.824.7899 CristianaGuesthaus.com VIEW OUR CABINS INSIDE AND OUT AT PIONEERGUESTCABINS.COM | 970.349.5517

If you want to truly experience the last Great Ski Town, stay in downtown Crested Butte with the Elk Mountain Lodge

800.374.6521 ElkMountainLodge.com 128

The warmth of a family inn; the value and convenience of a hotel.

Call 1(888)-349-6184 to book! OldTownInn.net

Xavier Fané

9380’ • (970) 251-3000

ELK AVENUE PRIME • 349-1221

Elevation Hotel, Mt. Crested Butte Spirits and food with altitude.

226 Elk Avenue, Downtown

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. 132

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.

DINING

Closed Tuesday & Wednesday

Dinner

Ad pg. 131

IRWIN BREWING CO • 970-349-7560

LAST STEEP • 349-7007

LIL’S • 349-5457

Irwin Brewing Company is Crested Butte’s newest craft brewery bringing 23 years of brewery experience to the valley. IBC sells growlers and kegs at their 326 Belleview Ave location Friday – Saturday 3-6pm and is currently available on draught at bars and restaurants throughout Gunnison Valley, Montrose, Ouray, Ridgway and Telluride.

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.

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.

Reservations are recommended but not necessary.

Closed Sunday & Monday

Lunch / Dinner

Dinner

326 Belleview Ave, Downtown

Inside Back Cover

208 Elk Avenue, Downtown

321 Elk Avenue, Downtown

Ad pg. 132

MARCHITELLI’S GOURMET NOODLE • 349-7401

PUBLIC HOUSE • 970-444-2277

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.

Public House is a modern vision of a historic Colorado saloon that celebrates farm-driven food, local craft breweries, spirits and wine. The Tap Room is the best intimate live music venue in the West, and the Lofts offer three generously appointed king suites.

Dinner

Lunch/Dinner

411 Third Street, Downtown

Ad pg. 101

SLOGAR . 349-5765

Corner of second and Whiterock, Downtown

202 Elk, Downtown publichousecb.com

Inside Back Cover

TASSINONG FARMS FOOD & WINE 970-648-0545

Slogar serves delicious skillet-fried chicken and grilled steak dinners with all the trimmings, using a recipe from 1915. Full drink menu, beers on tap and an excellent wine list. Open nightly from 5-9.

Reservations highly recommended.

241 Gillaspey Ave, #3, Crested Butte South

Dinner

Lunch/Dinner

Ad pg. 101

“Come for the lettuce, stay for the wine!” Tassinong Farms LLC has a mission to create a sustainable, year-round local and healthy food network for it’s community. We sell hyper-local, fresh produce grown from non-GMO seeds. We have opened a dining room and wine bar open Tuesday-Saturday.

Ad pg. 130

Ad pg. 132

SOUPCON . 349-5448

Off Elk Avenue on Second, Downtown 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

Ad pg. 130

WOODEN NICKEL • 349-6350 222 Elk Avenue, Downtown

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.

Dinner

Ad pgs. 87 129

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

A farm to table restaurant and wine bar offering salads, sandwiches, cheese & charcuterie boards and flat breads House-made sourdough baguettes, brioche, crackers, desserts, coffee drinks and nut milks.

Greens, herbs and other produce grown on-site.

Served on our menu and also available for retail sales.

Offering rotating wine selections using Italian wine dispensers plus a variety of beer, bubbles and ciders.

Hours and menus vary with the season.

Please check our website for updated information.

21+ starting at 5pm Happy Hour Daily 4pm - 6pm (15% off) Space available for party and event rentals.

Reservations accepted for parties of 4 or more.

Please call, text or email to reserve.

241 Gillaspey Ave, #3, Crested Butte South tassinongfarms@gmail.com

970.648.0545 TassinongFarms.com

130

How to pair food with… just about anything

Crested Butte folks like to expend calories (skiing, biking, etc.) and then to have fun consuming them. We appreciate good food, and we’ve been known to do some celebratory tippling – hence the number and quality of our eateries and drinking establishments.

This is also why food and spirits show up so often on our special events calendar.

Here are a few clever and delicious pairings on the menu for this winter.

Pinot + Noir. What better accompaniment for a murder-mystery writing workshop than some pinot noir?

The plot will thicken with other activities as well during the mini-noir festival Murder in the Mountains on Feb. 23.

Two more literary pairings will celebrate St. Patty’s Day in proper form.

Corned Beef & Limericks, a workshop in honor of the playful poetic form, will be followed by Whiskey & Limericks live readings on March 17.

The Alley Loop Pub Ski. On the eve of the famous Alley Loop Nordic Marathon in early February, several of the town’s streets and alleys turn into a groomed Nordic ski course. You can’t drive to the doorstep of the local taverns that evening, but you can glide to them, along with a few dozen of your favorite skiing and drinking buddies.

Crafted. Work up a thirst by skiing or riding the slopes all day, then feast on local fare and some of the state’s finest crafted beers and spirits. This party gathers at the base of the ski area for dining and toasting with a dramatic alpine backdrop.

Yurt dinners. Another way to combine two winter favorites: the Crested Butte Nordic Center’s ski-in dinners at the Magic Meadows Yurt. With a guide if they like, diners cross-country ski about a mile along a mellow trail to the canvas-sided cabin, or yurt. Fine dining and cocktails, live music and a blazing wood stove await.

Torches and stars light the way as they ski back to the trailhead, full and happy, at the evening’s end.

Historic Pub Crawl. History and adult

beverages can make great companions, as shown by this lively annual event hosted by the Crested Butte Mountain Heritage Museum. As “crawlers” parade from one iconic drinking establishment to the next, local hosts share pertinent tales from Crested Butte’s colorful past.

Literary Pub Crawl. You can never have too many pub crawls! This inaugural event, created by the Literary Arts Department of the Center for the Arts, will pair literature and libations. At each tavern, local writers will read appropriate passages from their

own work or that of celebrity authors.

Feasting amid flowers. Gardens and imaginations go wild here in the summer.

The calendar overflows with foodie events, like the Center for the Arts’ Food & Wine Festival, Tour de Forks dining experiences, weekly farmers markets, Mountain Roots’ Feast in the Field, Vinotok’s Community Feast, the Crested Butte Music Festival’s fun-spirited music-drink-food pairings, and the Beer & Chili Fest in Mt. Crested Butte.

Here’s to creative dining, drinking and celebrating.

b

Prime Dry Aged Steaks Fresh Seafood Groups & Weddings Welcome make reservations online

226 Elk Avenue

970 . 349 . 1221

elkaveprime.com 131

970.349.7007

208 Elk Avenue, Crested Butte

www.TheLastSteep.com 132

AMERICAN STYLE BISTRO CUISINE Specialty Martinis & 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 | BLACKSTOCKBISTRO.COM

Trent Bona Photography

CB’S ONE AND ONLY SUSHI BAR

Open Tuesday thru Saturday 5:00 Happy Hour at the Bar and Sushi Bar 5:00 - 6:30 321 Elk Avenue | 970.349.5457 | lilssushibarandgrill.com

Our ski duds have changed in the four decades since the Crested Butte Magazine debuted, but time hasn’t erased the beauty, character and fun of this place. In honor of the magazine’s landmark anniversary, here’s a stroll through some of our favorite covers.

133

134

135

Summer 2014 Complimentary

SUMMER 2013

summer 2015

complimentary

summer 2017 complimentary

136

Winter 2014-2015

CRESTEDBUTTEMAGAZINE.COM

Complimentary

summer 2016

Winter 2015-2016

complimentary

Complimentary

Winter 2017-2018 Complimentary

Summer 2018 complimentary

Winter 2016-2017 Complimentary

Winter 2018-2019 Complimentary

ELEVATION 8,885 FT

OPEN DAILY

|

PUBLICHOUSECB.COM

COLORADO INSPIRED SOURCED FOOD + SPIRITS

202 ELK AVENUE, CRESTED BUTTE CO

LOCALLY BREWED

|

SERVED VALLEY WIDE

326 BELLEVIEW AVENUE

|

| LIVE MUSIC

970.349.0173

KEG + GROWLER SALES AT THE BREWERY

970.349.7560

IRWINBREWINGCO.COM

01

Premium ski rentals, delivered to you.

02

BOOK YOUR GEAR ONLINE OR BY PHONE

03

FREE DELIVERY & PICKUP AT YOUR ACCOMMODATION We want you to come back to Crested Butte every year. However, if you choose to visit one of the other resorts that are part of the EPIC PASS family, Black Tie is most likely there to serve you.

IN-ROOM FITTING & SLOPESIDE SERVICE

COLORADO: VAIL, BEAVER CREEK, KEYSTONE, BRECKENRIDGE, ARAPAHOE BASIN, TELLURIDE, CRESTED BUTTE,

STEAMBOAT, WINTER PARK, COPPER, ASPEN / UTAH: PARK CITY, THE CANYONS, DEER VALLEY / CALIFORNIA: HEAVENLY, KIRKWOOD, NORTHSTAR, MAMMOTH, SQUAW VALLEY / CANADA: WHISTLER BLACKCOMB, BANFF / IDAHO: SUN VALLEY MONTANA: BIG SKY

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