Artist Profile: Sandra Cortner

Artist Spotlight

Sandra Cortner Captures Crested Butte Through Her Lens

By Kendra Walker

Image Courtesy of Merrick Chase and www.BackcountryPhotoCB.com

Unlike most folks who find their way to Crested Butte, it wasn’t love at first sight for Sandra Cortner.

It was not love, says Sandy. “I did not come here for the skiing and fall in love the very second I drove down the hill. It was June and it was snowing when we arrived. I didn’t know how to ski. There was nobody here my age and I missed my boyfriend back home.”

Sandy first came to Crested Butte in 1964 at age 17, having graduated two nights before from her high school in Tucson, Arizona. Her stepfather was attending a conference with the Law Science Academy. Her family stayed at the Academy Arms, now known as the Forest Queen Hotel, and then moved into a rental house in town for the summer. “It was going for the outrageous price of $100 bucks a week,” says Sandy.

“The day we arrived at that house,” she recalls, “we found a loaf of beautiful homemade bread on the table. We learned that it was from Grama Stimac,” the woman next door who always baked bread for a new neighbor.

“It really began to grow on me the fact that you could know people so easily. When I first came there was hardly anybody here, all 250 people or something. We would go to the Grubstake and we knew the owner and you just got to talking and it was easier to develop friendships with everybody.” It didn’t take long for Sandy to warm up to Crested Butte and all it had to offer. Coming from the desert, the beauty of the mountains definitely stood out for her. “It was cool weather and there was green grass growing and there were little streams flowing and cows,” she recalls, a similar scene Gunnison Valley locals and visitors are fortunate to enjoy still to this day.

During her second summer in Crested Butte, Sandy’s mother started the Village Store, which sold liquor on one side, and staple items like bread, milk, cheese, butter, and canned goods on the other side.

“I would help in the store and my sisters would help and we’d take turns manning the cash register and there was hardly any business,” says Sandy. “If we did $50 bucks a day, it was a good day. We were just begging for tourists to come by and when they did you were on your best behavior.”

During those first few years in Crested Butte, Sandy held several jobs around town. “I had three or four part-time jobs, working in my mom’s store, taking photos, waiting tables.”

Sandy spent her college years at the University of Arizona and then transferred to the University of Colorado - CU Boulder. After graduating from CU, “I just put all my stuff in my little Volkswagon bug and drove straight to Crested Butte.”

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Raising the Totem Pole, 1973(far left), Tony Kapushion, rancher and owner of Tony’s Tavern, now the Wooden Nickel, 1969(middle), and The Crested Butte Pilot and Grubstake Buildings(far right). Photos taken by Sandy.

Upon graduating, Sandy went to George Sibley of the Crested Butte Chronicle and asked him for a job. “He said if you want to go take a picture of Frank Starika, I’m doing a story about him. So I went and took a picture of Frank Starika (owner of Frank and Gal’s Restaurant), that was my first old-timer picture. George liked it so well that he asked me to take Emil Lunk’s picture. That’s how the old-timer series got started.”

Sandy recalls taking pictures since she was a little kid. “I had a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye, and I was running around taking pictures all the time. They were all black and white photos back then, and you’d send them off to get printed to see if they were any good.” At CU, Sandy had also worked as a copyeditor and took a photo course.

Taking portraits of Crested Butte’s old-timers, whose families had emigrated from Europe to work the coal mines, became a part-time hobby for Sandy. “It kind of happened by accident. I would go to the bar, that was where you went to socialize and the old-timers would go there and you bet they could nurse a beer all afternoon. I would take my camera and say, ‘Oh let me take your picture.’ And then you’d schmooze around and snap a photo and have a sip of your drink and then go take another picture. Once I had about 12 of these faces, Frank Starika let me put them up on the wall of his bar,” says Sandy. “‘The Rogue’s Gallery,’ that’s what they called it.”

Sandy remembers fondly how Frank let her go behind his bar because the light was better coming from the window. “There was no photoshop, it was a craft,” she says. Sandy also quickly learned to always carry something to write with. “A lot of times folks would be sitting in the bar and they would be telling stories. I would write down their stories and then go home and type them up.”

Throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s, Sandy took candid portraits of Crested Butte old-timers at events, gathering, weddings, anniversaries; capturing the essence of the local characters who helped shape this mining-turned-ski-town. There’s the one of Tony Mihelich, owner of the historic Tony’s Conoco, now home to the Crested Butte Mountain Heritage Museum. “I stopped to get gas and he came out to pump the gas,” says Sandy. “I asked, ‘Hey Tony, can I take your picture?’ I shot two frames and he kept pumping the gas.”

And the one of Tony Gallowich, an ex-miner who worked at the ski area. “I went down to ski at the T-Bar where he was the lower lift operator. The light was perfect and there was nobody else skiing. I shot three or four frames of him. He didn’t really want to smile, and I didn’t find this out until later, but he didn’t have his teeth in.”

Whether consciously or subconsciously, Sandy felt a draw to capture the old-timers’ stories. “I’m not sure if I knew why, but I just found them interesting. I worked in stories and I worked in pictures. I wrote everything down, even though you’re not sure you’re going to need it or use it. I’ve gone back over my notes and forgotten stuff that I had. That was the beauty of doing the books.”

Sandy compiled her old-timer series along with her 40 years of photojournalism experiences into her two books, Crested Butte Stories...Through My Lens published in 2006, and Crested Butte... Love at First Sight published in 2015. Her black and white portraits and personal storytelling capture the old-timers’ lives, historically significant events in the valley, and uniquely Crested Butte celebrations; from Flauschink, to Vinotok, to the Red Lady Ball. Her books are available at the Crested Butte Mountain Heritage Museum, Townie Books, Pfister’s Handworks, the Old Town Inn, and the Bookworm in Gunnison.

But photos weren’t Sandy’s only forte as she wore many hats around town over the years, working as a ski hostess supervisor at the ski resort, acting in Crested Butte Mountain Theatre plays, directing Flauschink, playing in the town softball league, a founding member of the Paragon Gallery, and serving as the director of the Crested Butte Arts Festival for 16 years.

Sandy’s first book - Crested Butte Stories... Through My Lens (Wild Rose Press 2006) Cover featuring Tony Gallowich, 1969(top) In 1971, Sandy and her then husband started the Butte Pilot, an ad flyer that was distributed around town, highlighting local entertainment schedules, social tidbits and maps of the town and ski area. In 1972, it morphed into the Crested Butte Pilot newspaper, which Sandy ran through the ‘70s. “We bought the building on Elk Avenue that was originally called the Crested Butte Limited building, and we ran the Crested Butte Pilot out of that,” she says of the little red building now home to Butte Bagels. “My husband built a darkroom for me in the back, and boy, was that the coolest thing in the world to have my own dark room. That was a real treat, I was in heaven.”

Sandy ran the Pilot until 1976, and went on to write for the Gunnison Country Times and the Crested Butte Chronicle. “I’ve worked under eight different mastheads,” she says. Sandy still writes these days, including for Crested Butte Magazine, and she shoots photos of the Memorial Day Parade every year. “It’s my favorite, when all the guys and their relatives visit next to the Old Town Hall before getting into formation and marching down Elk and out to the cemetery.” She also still enjoys photographing the “has-beens’’ float during the annual Flauschink Parade. “I love doing it and I love seeing all the familiar faces.”

She and her husband now live on 48 acres just south of town, and they spend their time walking and hiking Crested Butte’s scenic landscapes. “We get so much wildlife - foxes, golden eagles, bald eagles, grouse, elk. And we’ve got beautiful flowers down our hill.”

Sandy feels fortunate to have had the opportunity over the years to photograph the people of Crested Butte and capture their stories in time through her lens. “I’ve seen a lot of people come and go and still have many good friends that live here. It’s easy to bemoan how town is not the way it used to be, well, that’s because we can’t go back. Looking back we forget about the hard times. I met really good people, I knew good people, some of the best. I’ve been lucky.” •

To learn more about Sandy’s books, visit crestedbuttestories.com

All photos on pages 13 and 14 are copyright to Sandra Cortner 2021. Please! No reproduction without permission.