Old lift chairs find new lives by Katherine Nettles

The ski area just replaced its last double chair lift. But plenty of these classic lift chairs are still swinging around the valley.

By Katherine Nettles

My memories of riding Crested Butte’s double chairlifts start around 1991, when my family visited from Ohio and it quickly became our favorite ski area. Almost three decades later it also became my home. Back in 1991, the Silver Queen had a hard cover you could pull down to avoid the wind, and the Keystone lift was still running. Even as we outgrew the terrain served by little lifts like Peachtree, we would return every once in a while for a slow, restful lift ride and a quick jaunt into well-known paths of the past. Peachtree was a placeholder in our history.

The same goes for Twister. I spent many afternoons bumping through the moguls of Crystal trees, chasing my brother for one lap after another until my legs felt like noodles. Those lift rides prepared us for the eventual exploration into the Extremes. Twister was the rookery that prepared us for flights down Headwall and Phoenix.

The double lift was home, for a while, and the memories are etched in my mind like the scratched-in initials and the layers of stickers and paint on those old chairs.

Of course I’m not alone. The nostalgia is so poignant that hundreds of diehards have stood in line at dawn to purchase old lift chairs as the ski area has inevitably decommissioned them and sold them off.

When Crested Butte Mountain Resort (CBMR) offered the decommissioned Teocalli and Twister chairs in the spring of 2019, the chairs sold out quickly. My husband arrived at 5 a.m. to buy one, which now sits idly in our backyard awaiting some creative future purpose.

This past summer, the resort auctioned the last of its old doubles, those of the Peachtree lift. Originally installed in 1971, the 50-year-old lift was pulled down, and

Mark Ewing

Ben Sweitzer

CBMR donated the proceeds of the chair sales – $65,000 – to the Valley Housing Fund for affordable housing.

Thus the legacy of the fixed-grip doubleseaters lives on in the valley, though they no longer dangle over ski slopes. Thanks to several local metalsmiths and a lot of creative ideas, they can be found in backyards, storefronts, the Crested Butte Mountain Heritage Museum and perhaps even some living rooms.

Brothers Sean and Deven Bennett, coowners of the Powerstop burger and sandwich shop in Gunnison, were born and raised in Crested Butte. “We both grew up riding the Twister chair,” said Sean. So they went together to the 2019 chair sale, got there at about 6 a.m. and claimed Twister Chair 96 – the year Sean graduated from high school. They decided to mount the chair in front of their business, and it’s been there ever since.

“People love it. We’re probably going to try to figure out how many butts have been in that chair and put up a plaque, to represent that part of history here. I’m psyched that CBMR used it for a good cause,” Sean said, referring to the chair sale proceeds, which that year went to the Crested Butte Land Trust and Vail Resort’s Epic Promise Employee Foundation.

Ben Sweitzer, co-owner of Ace Hardware in Crested Butte, also got what he believes is a Twister chair in the 2019 sale. Ben was born in Crested Butte and lived here with his family until third grade, when they relocated to Austin. Ben moved back to town more than 16 years ago. “I spent a lot of time on that lift over the years, so it’s pretty cool I got one,” he said.

Ben sandblasted and powdercoated the chair, and a friend of his in Paonia did the graphics, which include feathers and pinstriping. Last, Ben mounted an elk skull to the top and installed the chair in his backyard in Riverland. “I just like doing metal work, and it was a fun personal project,” he said.

Scott Gilman, owner of Cement Creek Welding, has made about ten different chairs for clients in and out of the valley. He just finished his first of the Peachtree chairs that were sold this last summer, and he also refurbishes old chairlift cables into railings. Some chairs hang from an A-frame with attached tables to hold a book or a drink, and some hang from the rafters of a front porch. “The key,” he said, “is that I make sure your feet don’t ever touch the ground. So it’s like you’re still in the air up on the mountain.”

For those who didn’t have the fortune to get a chair in last summer’s Peachtree sale, there are still a few other vintage Crested Butte chairs available. Ryan Stucker of Hotchkiss collects old chairs from resorts all over Colorado, and he even found some old CBMR Keystone chairs (replaced with the Red Lady Express in 1995) at a scrap yard in Montrose. He routinely rents a semi or two when he comes across bulk finds and rescues the relics from uncertain outcomes. He refurbishes them and sells them on his Etsy shop, Colorado Ski Designs.

“I’m always willing to deliver them myself when they are a local sale,” he said, and that includes purchases by Gunnison Valley clientele.

“My favorite client was someone who purchased it for his dad, who had been a ski instructor at CBMR for decades. So he got a piece of that history…that’s what I really like,” he said. “And they’re getting harder to find.”

Whether you have your own repurposed lift chair or happen upon one around town or at a friend’s house, it’s worth taking a minute to sit and pay tribute to an era of low-speed doubles and low-key Colorado living. b

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