Crested Butte Magazine - Summer 2021

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CONTENTS s2021

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SHORTIES

FEATURES

10 A musical testament goes big

by Erica Andrews

40 Voices in the void by Arvin Ramgoolam

The great 2020 slowdown allowed Lizzie Plotkin and Natalie Spears to polish their album “Just over the Ridge,” which topped bluegrass and folk charts after its January release.

Inspired by the pandemic-born Hopeful Birds Project,

ceramist Kristin Gruenberger gathers local artists to

hatch cheery birds bearing messages of joy and connection.

18 Keeping camping sustainable

by Sandy Fails

In our pandemic isolation, local podcasters have proliferated, exploring wide-ranging topics from parenting to climbing to conversations around race.

46 Stories, miles and children’s smiles by Sandra Cortner

14 Helping hope take wing

by Erica Andrews

Trudy Yaklich has found common ground with people everywhere – from her Crested Butte childhood, to traveling the world, to nurturing young people.

54 Crank’s Tank by Than Acuff

Slinging concrete in the rain 25 years ago, local skateboarders built a daring skate park that caught international attention. Where will the next generation of freewheelers take it?

62 The saloons of Crested Butte by Brian Levine

This summer the Crested Butte Conservation Corps is creating designated campsites on public lands around town to protect the wild landscape.

In the town’s rowdier mining era, savvy lawman Doc Shores knew where to find out what was really going on: in its watering holes.

76 The barn that could (and did) by Leslie Locklear

22 Riding for kicks…and carbon credits

by Sandy Fails

82 Just keep moving forward by Beth Buehler

TerraQuest and the county’s tourism association just invented a game-changer: using local biking and hiking miles to fund global climate action.

26 Al’s hugelkultur adventure

by Dawne Belloise

Camp4’s Al Smith hopes his ‘landscape lasagna’ of burlap bags, egg cartons and organic matter will soon teem with critters, flowers and food.

30 Getting crafty with rafts

by Erica Andrews

After a life-changing car crash, athlete Beth James returned to triathlons, this time in tandem with her daughter Liza. Team Liza has since touched people around the globe.

88 Horses as healers by Janet Weil

Equine somatic psychotherapists like Nancy Jones are using

intuitive, four-legged partners to help their clients find transformation.

94 Dancing on a pivot point by Katherine Nettles

Got a boat that won’t float? The young entrepreneurs of Oh Be Joyful Bags want to turn your raft into satchels, wallets and belts.

34 Life, death and no more broom closets

by Sandy Fails

How some determined “salvage dawgs” gave the iconic Round Mountain barn a second life.

Gunnison’s paramedics give life-saving care across a vast alpine landscape – working from a cramped old building. A new campaign could change that.

Crested Butte has always been a town in transition, but this year brought an uptick in new neighbors, reluctant farewells, innovative ideas and spirited questions.

100 Stories told in fabric by Karen Janssen

From new cloth or repurposed clothing, local quilters stitch together artistry, warmth and memories.

WHAT WE HOLD DEAR 107 Wild dips by Leath Tonino

Soak, shiver, sparkle. Repeat daily.

111 Running down cancer by Patrick Exley O’Neill

These inspired Living Journeys athletes are running, skiing or cycling to support their neighbors facing cancer.

117 Summer lovin’ by Molly Murfee

In search of connection, intimacy, sustenance? Perhaps our deepest relationship should be with the land.

7 Editor’s note | 70 Photo gallery 120 Events | 124 Dining/lodging | 128 Photo finish

Xavier Fané

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Vol. XXXXIII, No. 1 Published semi-annually by Crested Butte Publishing & Creative PUBLISHERS Steve Mabry & Chris Hanna EDITOR Sandy Fails ADVERTISING DIRECTOR MJ Vosburg DESIGN AND CREATIVE Chris Hanna ADVERTISING DESIGN Keitha Kostyk WRITERS Than Acuff Leslie Locklear Erica Andrews Molly Murfee Dawne Belloise Katherine Nettles Beth Buehler Patrick Exley O’Neill Sandra Cortner Arvin Ramgoolam Sandy Fails Leath Tonino Karen Janssen Janet Weil Brian Levine PHOTOGRAPHERS John Holder Dawne Belloise Dave Kozlowski Nathan Bilow Leslie Locklear Trevor Bona Sandra Mabry Corey Bryndal Sophia Chudacoff Constance Mahoney Rebecca Ofstedahl Sandra Cortner Dusty Demerson Connor Scalbom Mary Schmidt Petar Dopchev Tracy Schwartz Xavier Fané Sonya Hanna Lydia Stern A

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Editor’s note

When the sun gets in your eyes

This weekend I celebrated my birthday, Easter, the last day of the ski season and the first spring sighting of a mountain bluebird.

At my birthday breakfast, the restaurant proprietor treated me to a free meal. My husband walked the dog for me. The neighbors saw him stroll by and brought him homemade hot cross buns. My afternoon Nordic ski took half an hour longer than expected due to impromptu conversations with people along the trail. In this moment of post-vaccination and post-winter liberation, people seem ultra eager to share kindnesses.

This reminds me of a recent New York Times column (“How Covid can change your personality”) in which David Brooks refers to “the emotional nutrition” we missed in the isolation of the past year. The many small acts of hospitality and service we normally give and receive each day lend life purpose, Brooks writes. Now, in our emotional malnutrition, we’re ready to feast

on meaningful exchanges.

Spring feels like a great emergence: when the calves are born, the daylight lingers, and we sunburn our newly bared limbs. True, it’s only April. The snow will return; maybe the virus will re-surge. But right now optimism rises as irrepressible as the grass turning lime green at the edges of the receding snow.

Last year brought a rare exception to spring’s exuberant sense of rebirth. During April of 2020, when the novel coronavirus had walloped our town, my family’s inn was closed for the first time in the 18 years we’ve owned it. Covid had just claimed some precious lives and sent a few neighbors to urban ICUs. The ski area had shut down at the peak of spring break. People cancelled April trips, called off gatherings, locked schools, closed businesses, tightened belts and tightened them again. Uncertainty ruled the day. Instead of bursting forth into spring, we retreated and hunkered down.

Trevor Bona

In the midst of that, a friend invited me to do Deepak Chopra’s 21-day Abundance Meditation. The timing seemed dubious – to meditate on the flow of abundance when life seemed to have neither flow nor abundance.

But it turned out to be a highlight of the shutdown. In the middle of hunkering, I took time to honor the richness of my life, and to envision, invite and participate in what Chopra grandly called “the universe’s unlimited potential.” Listening to the audio, journaling, and swimming in the sea of infinite possibilities took up some of the space I might have filled with fear, insecurity, a sense of confinement and absence. The occasional Oreo or margarita didn’t hurt.

I’m hoping this is the only pandemic I’ll experience in my life. As a species, we paid a hefty mental, emotional and financial toll for this one, so maybe we should try not to waste it.

What did this last year teach us? I remember how unified we were in this 7

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Editor’s note county when the first shockwaves hit. People leaped to help the ill and vulnerable, made and delivered food, donated money and volunteered on all fronts. How proud and uplifted I felt. Then anger, the politicization of almost everything, shaming, divisiveness and stress corrupted our unity and left me feeling bruised, raw and disappointed. Let’s remember which approach brings out the best in us.

What can we carry forward? People say that during the Covid year they ditched their constant “hurry-scurry,” took time for reflection, perhaps picked up a guitar or knitting needles. Many of us learned to Zoom, work and study from our homes. Our leaders got creative, as in the one-way Elk Avenue “street fair.” Parents figured out how to have fun – for long, long, long periods of time – with their kids. Some people took action on long-simmering life changes, like moving to the mountains or stepping down from high-pressure/low-satisfaction jobs. May we hold onto the revelations and inspirations delivered by this unsettling year.

As we edge toward late-Covid normalcy, may we bring even greater gratitude for what we can reclaim. How lovely it is to hug friends, cuddle a child, boogie to live music, or refill a guest’s water glass at a shared dinner table.

NYT columnist Brooks was perhaps under the heavy influence of springtime optimism when he wrote this about our post-pandemic comeback: “People who have endured an era of vulnerability emerge with great strength.” Let’s prove him right.

He ends his column with a downright giddy prediction: “We are going to become hyper-appreciators, savoring every small pleasure, living in a thousand delicious moments, getting together with friends and strangers and seeing them with the joy of new and grateful eyes.”

I know, I know. The world is still a-brim with quandaries, cruelties, hunger, deceptions, greed, pain, etc. But right this second, I can’t see that too clearly – because the sun is in my eyes. My ears are filled with birdsong. I feel the thwack thwack thwack of my dog’s wildly wagging tail. For now, let me surrender to this springtime swell of optimism; a nice swim in the sea of infinite possibilities; and the “thousand delicious moments” that await us.

—Sandy Fails, editor

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A musical testament goes big

The pandemic slowdown allowed Lizzie Plotkin and Natalie Spears to polish their album “Just over the Ridge,” which topped bluegrass and folk charts after its January release.

The year 2020 might be remembered as the worst in the history of live music. But for area musicians Lizzy Plotkin and Natalie Spears, it will be revered as a pivotal time for perfecting their first album together.

“It changed how we were going through quarantine,” Plotkin said of her socially distanced work with Spears during the COVID-19 crisis.

“It was such a crazy, sad, hard time that to have something positive to work on was important.”

Plotkin and Spears sent off the year we’d rather forget with a memorable finale: by releasing a juggernaut duet album on January 15, 2021. “Just over the Ridge” premiered at #7 on the Billboard Bluegrass Charts the following week, and continued to pull national attention throughout the spring, holding #1 album on the Folk Alliance International radio charts for the month of February. The album draws influence primarily from old-time and bluegrass standards, featuring six original duets of fiddle and clawhammer banjo, soulful singing and a touch of funky blues.

“It wasn’t all rushed, and we were able to put our whole selves into it,” Plotkin said. “We are so happy that people are enjoying the record and playing it on radio stations around the world.”

Born in Nashville, Plotkin has lived in the Gunnison Valley for a decade. As an intern studying birds at Rocky Mountain Biological 10

By Erica Andrews

Laboratory in Gothic, Plotkin’s music took shape under the cathedral gaze of Gothic Mountain, and through meeting roots musicians in the valley. She made the switch from environmental to music education seven years ago, and started touring with local band Free the Honey prior to branching out on a more solo basis.

Spears grew up in Washington, D.C., with a father who played jazz and classical piano as a hobby. She started learning the keys at age three, played throughout high school and eventually picked up an upright bass. With her focus on sports, her music fell to the back burner, but then an interest in natural building brought her to the Rockies and back to her music. She ended up in Carbondale, working for a straw bale builder, and started playing casually with other musicians in the Roaring Fork Valley.

“I’d never really learned how to play with other people,” Spears admitted. During her time in Carbondale, she learned about old-time and roots music, and she honed into that rhythm playing with a group called Pearl and Wood.

Both Spears and Plotkin had separately attended Victor Wooten’s camp in Tennessee in 2012 and 2013; it merges the study of the natural world with the study of music. Later, they serendipitously met at a Pagosa Springs fundraiser where Wooten was performing.

“When we got there, people who knew both of us said we had to meet and play together,” Plotkin said. Since both had their instruments with them, they jammed a bit and knew instantly they had a lot in common. Plotkin invited Spears to play with Free the Honey – which she did – and they officially began playing as a duo in 2016.

After three years of playing and touring together, they recorded “Just over the Ridge” in December 2019. While the 2020 coronavirus pandemic brought a long pause from juggling performances and a

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chaotic touring schedule, it allowed precious time to mix and master the album. “We sat on it because of the pandemic and rearranged our release plans,” Plotkin said. “Musicians’ lives are fast paced, and we oftentimes don’t have the time to release our art in the way we want to.”

Since Plotkin lives in the Gunnison Valley and Spears in the Roaring Fork Valley, they were somewhat accustomed to traveling to one another’s homes to practice and perform. But like any other long-distance relationship, the musical duo suffered through the challenges of separation prompted by social distancing guidelines.

“Just like everyone else, we stayed out of each other’s lives during quarantine,” Plotkin said. They primarily texted song ideas back and forth, and took a forced break from their normal weekend songwriting retreats. “When it was finally warm enough to be outside and play together, it was pretty darn special. It was a very joyful time.”

“Just over the Ridge” stands as a testament to the healing power of music in trying times, and proves the possibilities of coming together spiritually and emotionally – even during times of physical distancing.

“This time of stillness and time to be home gets us a little closer to the heart of the music that inspires us,” Spears said. “This is music that’s played on a porch, and meant for our home life. That’s the venue in which it thrives.”

Once the timing was appropriate, the duo hosted a few socially distanced yard shows in Carbondale to fundraise for their album release, along with creating a Gofundme campaign. With more time at home, they also were able to launch a self-directed radio campaign to promote the album.

“For us, 2020 was a good opportunity to reassess how we want to move forward in the world and cultivate sustainability in our lives as musicians,” Plotkin said. The two women foresee staying a little closer to home and cultivating the folk communities in their hometowns.

While specifics depend on COVID-19 restrictions, the ladies are poised for a busy summer performance schedule. Their roster is filled mostly with appearances at outdoor venues and weddings, but it also includes a festival in Durango and a show at the I-Bar Ranch in Gunnison. “There’s a lot of optimism about the possibility of music this summer,” Spears said. “It’s going to be a really wonderful time for playing and celebrating.”

For a schedule of upcoming performances, visit lizzyandnatalie.com.

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T H E

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Helping hope take wing

By Erica Andrews

Kristin Gruenberger with a new flock of Hopeful Birds.

Inspired by the pandemic-born Hopeful Birds Project, ceramist Kristin Gruenberger gathers local artists to hatch cheery birds bearing messages of joy and connection.

It was a gloomy year for many, but there’s hope ahead. That’s the message inherent in the Hopeful Birds Project, a grassroots effort to bring art, kindness and smiles to one another during challenging times…in the form of vibrant ceramic birds.

“The birds connect us to share moments of joy,” said Hopeful Birds Project founder Rita Vali. “They serve as a metaphor – we are individuals, mostly isolated in our homes, yet by sharing similar feelings and experiences we can support each other.”

Vali hatched the idea in the throes of the Covid-19 pandemic, when a global hush settled over daily life amid stay-at-home orders and lengthy quarantines. While taking refuge in her Louisville, Colorado, home, Vali became inspired by the colorful, chattering birds reveling in the spring sunshine of her backyard.

Each glimpse of the feathered friends lifted her spirits, and she wanted to replicate that feeling for her neighbors.

Since Vali is a ceramic artist, she began crafting ceramic birds from home, each one with its own personality and features. Vali released her first flock of 21 birds in April 2020 on the trails and parks in her suburban neighborhood, with an intention to spread 14

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joy to whomever found them. Each bird had instructions for the finder to take it home, care for it and have fun with it a few days, then return it to the wilds to see where it might migrate. On her second clutch of birds, Vali invited each finder to pay it forward by making a donation on the bird’s behalf to a local organization.

“We were so in the moment when the pandemic hit hard, I had no idea where this would go,” she said. “What started as a small neighborhood project has morphed. It’s taken on a life of its own and grown organically as birds have spread all over the place.”

The idea took flight and caught the interest of a handful of artists throughout the United States, including Gunnison potter Kristin Gruenberger. Gruenberger reached out to Vali as soon as she heard about Hopeful Birds and brought the project to the greater Gunnison Valley community.

“The Hopeful Birds Project is intended to bring community together,” Gruenberger said. So she gathered community members (socially distanced, of course) in October 2020 to create the first local flock of birds. “There’s nothing better than to see imagination unfold when community birds

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are made. Each bird has its own unique personality, and each maker has their own creative exploration. To be a part of that is pure magic.”

Birds from that first flock landed in Crested Butte, Crested Butte South and Gunnison. Since then, about 100 birds have been crafted and released locally through two community events and Gruenberger’s own efforts. Finders of Hopeful Birds are encouraged to snap a few photos with their birds before releasing them back into the world. The photos are shared through a variety of hashtags on Instagram and Facebook, which also serves as a tracking mechanism to locate the birds once they’ve flown far from home.

“I’ve received really touching thank-yous and testimonials about how finding a bird has made a difference to someone when they needed it,” Vali said. “Truly that’s the absolute best part – knowing these little birds are out there fulfilling the vision I had for them.”

Gruenberger also receives tidbits of information on the whereabouts of the birds through social media, fellow finders and the rare, innocent eavesdropping of a Hopeful Birds conversation. “To hear how stumbling

upon a bird shifts and shapes someone’s day with a positive glow is truly amazing,” she said. “A single ceramic bird can extend good will more widely when it migrates. My hope is that some have left the valley and are spreading their message of love, hope and kindness wherever they end up.”

Gruenberger has been working on flocks with other involved clay artists, and she teaches workshops in other towns to extend the reach of the project. She’s also happy to facilitate individuals or groups wanting to craft and donate birds, or to help with community outreach projects that would generate more Hopeful Birds.

“It’s my hope that this project continues even after Covid-19 is behind us,” Gruenberger said.

This summer more Hopeful Birds will hatch and take roost in nooks and crannies around the valley. So while hitting local trails and streets, keep an eye out for one of these colorful little creations. Have a chuckle, take a photo, enjoy your neighbor’s gesture of kindness, and then send that message onward into the world.

For more information on the Hopeful Birds Project, visit hopefulbirds.org.

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Keeping the

camping sustainable

By Sandy Fails Crested Butte Conservation Corps workers install a firepit and signage for a designated campsite.

This summer the Crested Butte Conservation Corps is creating designated campsites on public lands around town to protect the wild landscape.

As campers lounge outside their tents gazing into the night sky, the canopy of stars seems boundless and unchanging. Their campsites, however, are not.

Camping around Crested Butte is changing this summer. In an effort to preserve the landscape, dispersed camping along roadways is being organized into designated campsites. As work is completed in each valley around Crested Butte, camping will be restricted to those official sites. This summer the sites will be free and available on a first come/first-served basis. (The plan won’t affect backpacking.)

The transition will come in phases. Designated campsites are already set up out Washington Gulch (48 sites) and Slate River (43 sites), and roadside camping out those drainages is limited to those marked camping areas. Dispersed camping will be allowed in the remaining valleys only until designated sites are completed: midsummer for Brush Creek and Kebler Pass/Irwin, autumn for Cement Creek and Gothic.

The Crested Butte Conservation Corps (CBCC) is completing the work – installing markers, site numbers and metal fire rings, delineating parking spaces and placing barriers to prevent damage to natural areas.

In total, CBCC crews will create about 200 designated sites.

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Nick Catmur, director of the CBCC and operations manager for the Crested Butte Mountain Bike Association (CBMBA), has been working on the camping transition plan as part of his masters in environmental management (MEM) studies at Western Colorado University. MEM student Jennifer Fenwick did the initial planning.

Though in the short term the plan reduces the amount of camping available around town, Catmur considers it a success.

“As much as it’s a bummer to see dispersed camping go away,

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it’s got to happen,” said Catmur, a Crested Butte native and lifelong camper. After helping to clean up and mitigate damage from recreationists flooding the backcountry, and after hearing the Forest Service consider halting all camping in the area, “I see designated campsites as a great solution,” he said. “This will help preserve what we love so much and why people visit here. The goal is to concentrate the human impact to isolated and sustainable locations.”

The plan got unanimous support from the Sustainable Tourism and Outdoor Recreation (STOR) committee, which includes representatives from the towns and county, federal agencies like the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, and land-related nonprofit organizations like CBMBA, the Crested Butte Land Trust and the Gunnison Stockgrowers Association. The Forest Service public comment period drew generally positive feedback as well.

Additional designated sites could be added in the future. A STOR subcommittee is also studying the possibility of the Forest Service using a reservation system for the sites and charging fees, which could cover the cost of hiring personnel to monitor the campsites.

Once the designated camping plan was approved in 2020, the Forest Service partnered with the CBCC to buy supplies and do much of the work. The Forest Service allotted $150,000 for the project, matched

by STOR. The Conservation Corps was created by CBMBA to educate recreationists and mitigate their impacts, so it seemed a logical resource for the campsite transition.

“We were happy to take this on, to get it done in an efficient and timely manner,” Catmur said. “The sooner we get the sites designated, the sooner people can adapt.

This summer might be tough because we’ll be in transition.”

His advice: Plan ahead, especially for your first night in the valley. Research other camping areas a bit farther from Crested Butte. Or plan far in advance and book a reserveable public campsite at Oh Be Joyful, Taylor Canyon, Irwin, Cement Creek or Gothic (rec.gov). Or book a hotel room for your first night, or stay at a private RV park like the ones in Crested Butte, Gunnison or Blue Mesa. The CBMBA website provides campsite maps and updated information.

Eventually new kiosks in each drainage will display campsite information.

“It will take some adjusting, but it’s the right thing to do,” Catmur said.

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Riding for kicks

...and carbon credits

By Sandy Fails

Dave Kozlowski

TerraQuest and the county’s tourism association just invented a game-changer: using local biking and hiking miles to fund global climate action.

This summer, when you hit the local trails by bike or foot, you can feel good for all kinds of reasons. You can burn some calories, soak in the beauty, and – through a new CBGTrails carbon challenge – help fund global efforts to lower carbon emissions into the atmosphere.

Gunnison County’s Tourism and Prosperity Partnership (TAPP, formerly known as the Gunnison-Crested Butte Tourism Association) and TerraQuest, an app and mapping company, four years ago set up the TrailQuest game. Mountain bikers record their routes, or tracks, with ongoing leaderboards and the ultimate goal of covering all 750plus miles of singletrack trail in the valley. Wilderness TrailQuest invites hikers, trail runners, backpackers and horseback riders into the game.

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“We have more than 1,000 people playing TrailQuest, approximately a third of them from outside the valley,” said John Norton, TAPP’s executive director. “We were asking ourselves if there were other games we could create with the app that might cast a wider net. Derrick [Nehrenberg of TerraQuest] had the idea of people riding and hiking for carbon credits. Visitors could basically offset the carbon they used to get to the valley [e.g. driving from Denver or flying from Houston]. We mountain lovers have a stake in eliminating carbon in our atmosphere.”

This summer, visitors or residents can download the free CBGTrails app, join the carbon challenge and record their biking or hiking tracks in the valley. For every 100 miles of track recorded, TAPP will purchase a carbon credit, equivalent to one metric ton of carbon offset, through a tradeable carbon currency called UPCO2. UPCO2

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currency is used to retire VCUs (verified carbon units) from carbon emission-reduction efforts.

Those include well-vetted REDD+ (reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation in developing countries) projects in South America, Africa and Indonesia. A third party, Verra, monitors and confirms the offsets.

Norton said if the CBGTrails carbon challenge game is “wildly successful,” TAPP this year could contribute up to $150,000 to fund carbon offsets.

“There’s a lot of talk about climate change and how to tackle the problem,” Nehrenberg said. “When you do the math, carbon credits are a viable option. They’re not a panacea, but they’re a bridge to future solutions.”

For Nehrenberg and TerraQuest, the carbon challenge might be even more of a game changer.

“It’s incredibly exciting,” Nehrenberg said.

He foresees large corporations, municipalities and other entities jumping on board with similar challenges – “whoever wants to take the lead, taking decisive action on climate change not just by purchasing carbon offsets but also by engaging their communities.” Cities could reward bicycle commuters with carbon credits; companies could likewise encourage their employees’ healthful practices. TerraQuest would set up and maintain the challenge for each entity. “Things are going to change for TerraQuest very rapidly,” Nehrenberg predicted.

TerraQuest benefits from its TrailQuest games by incentivizing people to hit the trails and share their tracks, which adds data and on-the-ground observations to the company’s navigation services. Though Nehrenberg’s office is in Crested Butte, TerraQuest’s detailed trail mapping covers the entire United States, building off trail users’ data. The company aims to provide “wearable navigation” of the highest sophistication. Explorers can download information for their region and use the app anywhere, even without cell service, because it uses GPS satellite technology. The app offers route building with audible turn-by-turn navigation, winter map layers and other unusual features.

Nehrenberg said it’s appropriate to debut the carbon challenge concept in this valley. “The spirit of Crested Butte is in this. The community has very deep connections to the outdoors.

That’s why I’m here.”

Norton also expects the carbon challenge idea to take off locally and then spread to other places. “It’s just another reason to come and ride our beautiful trail network,” he said. As for becoming a model for other entities, he said, “It’s always fun to be first.”

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Al’s hugelkultur adventure

By Dawne Belloise

Photos Dawne Belloise

Decomposing layers should generate heat and support plants that don’t normally thrive in this zone.

Camp4’s Al Smith hopes his “landscape lasagna” of burlap bags, egg cartons and organic matter will soon teem with critters, flowers and food.

As Cement Creek Road deepens into its canyon, it narrows, weaving through stands of quakies in its dusty journey to Italian Mountain and Tilton Pass. In a grove several miles up, a berm rises unexpectedly – a fortified wall of tree trunks, dirt, burlap bags, cardboard and egg cartons layered among plantings and colored flags. There, on the moist earth, sits Al Smith, energetic Camp4 Coffee entrepreneur and now bio-experimenter. An elderly couple stops to ask him, “What is that? What are you doing?” Al beams his wide grin and launches into the story of hugelkultur, a permaculture concept from Germany and Poland that inspired this organic bio berm experiment edging his property.

Hugelkultur, according to Wikipedia, is a horticultural technique where a mound is constructed from decaying wood debris and other compostable biomass plant material.

Nel Curtiss of Rocky Mountain Trees came up with the idea for the Cement Creek hugelkultur. Al recalls: “Initially, I had a bunch of trees come down on my property here and I had to put them somewhere. My fence along the road was also down, so I stacked the trees there,” figuring the pile of trees would substitute for the fence. That’s when Nel stopped by to tell him about permaculture.

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Al Smith working with his hugelkultur experiment out Cement Creek.

Nel explained how a layering system of greens and browns and vegetative matter, basically anything compostable, would eventually turn the berm into a living, composting bio creation that would generate heat, take in water and release it slowly.

“It’s like lasagna,” Al says of the alternating layers. “Grass clippings are green, twigs are brown.”

Nel started by bringing dump trucks full of sod and tree debris.

When word got out, other friends began filling burlap bags with weeds, clippings and branches for the project. Eventually Al began cultivating plants in the berm.

“I put a bunch of flags around the plantings so I can figure out what’s what. The orange flags mark the ornamentals; they don’t have any food value, but they’re pretty.” Al points to a red twig dogwood.

A geranium is not quite ready to bloom next to its yellow flag identifier. Volunteer currant bushes are poised to take over. Green

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flags mark types of conifers that spike up next to stacked logs. White flags signal the silver buffalo berry, and Al explains that the regular buffalo berry isn’t edible, but silver is.

About 2,000 feet up the hillside is Al’s spring, so the hugelkultur receives plenty of unadulterated water. Walking along the inside of the berm is like being inside a fort built by kids…if they were botanists. There’s a corner flush with elderberry bushes and coldhardy blueberries. “We’re at growing zone 4B and these blueberries are supposedly good down to zone 3,” Al says hopefully, but he’s also experimenting with warmer zone 5 plants. “The hugelkultur can allow things to grow here that don’t normally, because the ground is warmed by the berm. The hugelkultur generates heat in the wintertime.” Al points to some flourishing plants that shouldn’t be able to grow in our harsh mountain climate. This past fall, Al planted apple, pear and cold-hardy peach trees from a nursery in Missouri that guarantees them even at 9,500 feet.

A squirrel jumps on top of the berm, which is about six feet tall, and Al says, “We didn’t used to have squirrels, but we have spent grain from Irwin Brewery on the top dressing. You just keep throwing twigs and burlap coffee sacks and coffee grounds and theoretically, you can get things to grow and thrive here.” Like the grape vines and paw paw trees he’s planted. Al explains that paw paw is North America’s largest native fruit tree, and like a proud papa, he shows off the new green foliage the tree is putting forth.

“We have cranberries. They don’t look good,” he laughs, “but they’re still alive.” He creates the acidic environment cranberries need by throwing his Camp4 Coffee grounds around them. He walks over to a group of small bushes to make his point about the created climate

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of the hugelkultur. “These are cold-hardy goji berry bushes.”

Perpendicular to the existing berm is a new wall of layered organic material which will also help wind blockage for the established berm. What Al hopes to accomplish, he says, is multi beneficial and long term. “We started off just trying to clean up the place, but one of the coolest things is that you get to recycle a whole bunch of stuff instead of throwing it away.” Al smiles. “Then I realized what was possible, that down the road you can have this whole property that’s just full of life, full of animals, and full of food.

Animals are attracted to the hugelkultur, a lot of birds, chipmunks, squirrels and voles are attracted to the grain.” Although, he laments, voles ate the rhubarb, so this year there will be a steel deterrent surrounding it.

In another experiment Al inoculated tree stumps with shitake and oyster mushroom plugs, by drilling small holes into logs and tapping the spore plugs into them. Shitakes grow in conifers and the oysters are inserted into aspens. Al explains the mushrooms won’t fruit until the log is fully populated. “If it works, we’ll have another berm with a whole bunch of mushroom logs leaning up against it. A lot of the logs are starting to do their own mushroom thing naturally.” He turns over a stump to reveal threads of white mycelium, a fibrous mass of threads which will break everything down. “When the snow melted, this entire berm was covered in a web of fungus.” He beams.

The wall keeps getting taller, and Al says, “If I can see the house from here, I need another bag on top. It’s going to shrink as it decomposes. We’re optimistic, but things may or may not work. It’s really fun, and I’m really hopeful.”

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Getting crafty with rafts

By Erika Andrews

Samantha Hunter, Austin Shirley, Lewis Price and Sean Pope giving life to old rafts.

Got a boat that won’t float? The young entrepreneurs of Oh Be Joyful Bags want to turn your raft into satchels, wallets and belts.

Rubber garbage. While it’s typically not the stuff dreams are made of, it’s the cornerstone of an ambitious start-up for four aspiring social entrepreneurs. Born out of a school project at Western Colorado University, Oh Be Joyful Bags is the brainchild of Samantha Hunter, Sean Pope, Lew Price and Austin Shirley. Armed with a mission to give new life to old rafts that are otherwise destined for the landfill, the young company has cast a broad net in sourcing materials, adapting production methods and developing a variety of products.

“Our vision is to see a world where every piece of rafting material is given new life,” Pope said of the group’s creative upcycling endeavor. “The material itself isn’t recyclable, and with boating becoming more and more popular, more are being built and eventually heading to the landfill.”

It all started when one of Price’s favorite professors, Taryn Mead, emailed him information about a competition and class that Western was hosting. “The intent was to encourage some start-ups in the valley,” Price said. With a circular economy approach, the 30

Dusty Demerson

competition directed participants to find a waste stream in the valley and do something with it.

Concurrently, Price had three dead rafts that he’d decided to fix.

Estimating that it would take 60-70 hours to get each raft to float again, his thoughts shifted to what else he might be able to make from them. First came the idea of making patch or repair kits. But once the group assembled around a table for the first time and started brainstorming, they came up with the idea of making durable, longlasting bags in the form of the Sunny Gunny Satchel. As part of the competition, they created a pitch video and garnered enough votes to win, which awarded them a Venture Well grant and access to the ICElab business accelerator on Western’s campus.

“The accelerator has been amazing. We’ve been in touch with other start-ups, and they basically let us know what we don’t know,” Hunter said, admitting that the closest she’s been to business school is the class that brought her in contact with Pope, Price and Shirley.

To Hunter, the whole idea of building a business from the ground up has been somewhat daunting, but also exciting. “It’s certainly high risk, high reward,” she said.

The group has since been able to synthesize their ideas, developing a variety of prototypes – from belts and wallets to purses and bags. “One thing I liked about our group from the very beginning is that we come to decisions relatively easily,” Hunter said. “We have different strengths, and we wear many hats and have

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talents that metamorphosize.”

All three men have been rafting guides and have connections throughout Colorado and other rafting hubs like West Virginia and Idaho. While they’ve tapped into those connections to receive donated rafts, there seems to be a culture in the rafting community of holding onto rafts as sentimental testaments to good times spent on the river.

“We want people to know that we’re here to accept that material,” Hunter said, when and if they’re ready to let go of it. The group constantly has feelers out for materials and recently picked up a 200-pound donation from a Gunnison man.

Lovingly called Large Marge, this was a behemoth that might have stayed in the shed another decade prior to drifting to its final destination at the landfill. But now it will be sewn into Sunny Gunny Satchels, which have become the flagship products for Oh Be Joyful Bags.

Start-up life has certainly had its challenges for the group. “Every week is something new,” Price said. “It’s absolutely exhausting.” Given the resiliency and thickness of the materials they use, finding machines capable of handling the sewing process has been tough. After running through a few sewing machines, they were able to buy a heavy-duty serger with grant money. The assembly process now relies on a combination of using the serger, handstitching and utilizing local upholsterer Claire Pitcher’s expertise.

But the biggest challenge thus far has been locating and transporting dead rafts, and the future of Oh Be Joyful Bags will depend on consistent sources of material.

“We thought that sourcing would be the easiest issue, but it’s actually been the hardest,” Shirley said. They recognized early on that there is far more pre-manufactured waste available to upcycle into their bags.

Finding it, however, has been difficult. The founders are looking further downstream to determine the best partnerships to obtain pre-consumer and post-consumer waste materials to keep growing their business.

“As we expand to the limits on our production, we may have to partner with a manufacturer,” Pope said. “That involves exploring our values as people. We want to be a community-driven business. That will remain a core value as we scale up.”

Bags, wallets and belts should be available for purchase by mid summer. For information, head to ohbejoyfulbags.com.

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Life, death and

no more broom closets

By Sandy Fails Every space is maximized and multi-purposed in the outgrown Gunnison EMS station.

Dusty Demerson

34

Gunnison’s paramedics give life-saving care across a vast alpine landscape – working out of an old, cramped steel building. A new campaign could change that.

the icy pavement at -20 degrees, trying to stay calm, knowing that every minute is critical,” Malcolm said.

The planned EMS station will include nine bedrooms, kitchen and dining area, eight to ten ambulance bays, plus space for administrative work, training, equipment storage and maintenance.

When C.J. Malcolm left his Grand Canyon emergency medicine job to head the Emergency Medical Services (EMS) for Gunnison Valley Health, he saw similarities between the two situations. In both, the vast and dramatic landscape, plus the criticality of some calls, demanded that paramedics have wide-ranging and high-level skills.

But one difference became strikingly clear. At the Grand Canyon, Malcolm worked in a spacious, state-of-the art facility. In Gunnison, Malcolm and his team run Colorado’s 2020 EMS Ambulance Service of the Year out of an outdated, undersized steel building that’s bursting at its uninsulated seams.

A campaign launched this summer could change that. The Gunnison Valley Health Foundation is raising funds to build a new EMS station on the Gunnison Valley Hospital campus, at the corner of North Colorado and East Denver Avenue.

Currently, the six or more on-duty medics might gather elbow to elbow in the station’s small office, while colleagues do administrative tasks at desks crammed against a nearby wall. (“Want privacy? Go sit in an ambulance,” Malcolm said.) A medical researcher works in a former broom closet. Because the building has no sleeping quarters, on-duty medics sleep in two nearby condos. A wee-hour winter call might send the crew “sliding flat-footed across

Beyond its outgrown station, Gunnison’s EMS faces daunting challenges. It serves the largest zone in Colorado – 4,400 square miles, about twice the size of Delaware, much of that area remote and mountainous. Crested Butte’s EMS works closely with GVH Paramedics for mutual aid. Many of the rivers, canyons and mountains that draw local recreationists lie within the Gunnison EMS zone.

Gunnison’s crew members – 21 full-time and 15 per-diem – responded to about 1,500 calls last year, including 260 timeconsuming transfers to medical facilities throughout the state, including Grand Junction and Denver.

Compared to urban ambulance services, GVH Paramedics have a lower call volume per crew, but in the city a medic might only care for a patient for half an hour before arrival at a hospital. In Gunnison’s huge, rugged service area, medics often spend hours with patients and employ higher-level treatments, such as Rapid Sequence Intubation (RSI) and using ventilators. Gunnison is the only ground paramedic service in the state to carry blood supply on board. With swaths of its service area out of communication range, medics frequently make critical decisions on site without the support of a busy urban system.

LIFE-SAVING CARE IN RUGGED TERRAIN

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Donate today The Gunnison Valley Health Foundation is an IRS designated nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization and donations are tax deductible.

The alpine terrain (encompassing Blue Mesa Reservoir, Taylor Canyon and a section of the Continental Divide) can turn a medical call into an intense adventure. One medic vividly recalls helping with a swift-water rescue; another snowmobiled into Tin Cup to treat a potential heart attack victim overnight until the person could be transported the next day.

Perhaps because of the contrast with urban EMS, about ten percent of Gunnison’s medics “commute” from cities. They then share their urban medical skill sets with their mountain colleagues, and vice versa. Training is crucial for rural medics to ensure they bring the highest standards to the more advanced critical care scope.

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The new EMS station will cost about $5 million. Some funds will come from Gunnison Valley Health, leaving approximately $4 million to be raised by the GVH Foundation.

Gunnison Valley Health Paramedics are not tax-funded like fire and police departments, noted Jenny Birnie, GVH Foundation director. Funding comes from Gunnison Valley Health and insurance reimbursements. As health care costs rise, while reimbursement dollars shrink, providers must raise the money needed to serve their communities over the long term.

This summer’s campaign will partner with Gunnison Valley full-time and part-time residents, while pursuing funding from local government, private foundations and businesses. “Donations will help provide each individual who calls 911 with the best possible experience and outcome,” Birnie said.

What will EMS crews most appreciate about a new station? Room, they say. Room to store and maintain the ambulances and gear.

Room to cook and eat meals together. Room to train, work, interact and plan. Room to sleep on site. And room to recuperate.

“I’ve been in this business for 25 years, and I’ve seen how important mental health is,” Malcolm said. “We make do here; it’s super positive. But we need space to decompress.

You come back from an intense call and the ambulance is trashed, the gear is trashed, and you’re trashed. You’ve got to rehab it all and get ready to go out again.”

Donations to the nonprofit GVH Foundation to support a new EMS station are tax deductible. Visit gunnisonvalleyhealth.org/ donations or contact Jenny Birnie at JBirnie@ gvh-colorado.org.

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scenic views photo: john holder

36

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Voices in the void

Arvin the binge-listener turned podcaster.

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In our pandemic isolation (and even before), local podcasters have proliferated, exploring topics ranging from motherhood to hiking to deep conversations about race and resilience.

By Arvin Ramgoolam

Lydia Stern

For years, during my drives around the valley, I’d become tired of the holy trinity of my car CD player: Depeche Mode, The Cure, The Smiths. To change things up from my usual gloomy shoe-gaze brit-pop, I’d begun downloading podcasts for my long drives, and then I became addicted enough to suddenly realize I needed to make a trip to Denver in order to binge listen to some of my favorite podcasts. Podcasts fulfill two of our most basic needs as humans: to be told a story and to learn something new. The best podcasts combine both; they give us information by telling us a compelling story in a digestible format. Podcasts like This American Life, Radiolab and Invisibilia take this a step further with pregnant pauses and audio-engineering tricks to dramatize even the simplest stories.

With the flourishing access to recording technology and the inquisitive nature of most people, it’s no surprise that podcasters have been popping up here in the Gunnison Valley.

Local podcast topics range from the outdoors to the fascinating lives of the people of our valley.

Bart Laemmel began his podcast, Make a Mess, Clean It Up, as a part of his new business, Nu Action Life Coaching.

Inspired by The Tim Ferris Show and Debbie Millman’s Design Matters Podcast, Bart sought to talk to people in the valley who’d led interesting lives and faced challenges, and to find out what part of their background or routine was key for overcoming those obstacles. For himself and for others, Laemmel wanted to learn from people’s experiences and hear “fantastic stories about everyday life.” His first episode featured his friend, entrepreneur and adventurer Jay Prentiss, who since getting sick last year had become a “Covid long hauler.” What

41

Bruce Eckel and James Ward record an episode of Happy Path Programming for their fellow techies.

Lydia Stern

Through Awkward Angler, Erica Nelson offers her own take on social justice and fly fishing.

Ryan Duclos

a year earlier would have been a conversation about Prentiss’ backcountry exploits instead became a warm and difficult conversation about the disease that has affected all of us, but in this case impacted someone who had once seemed invincible. I had to stop listening at points because of the raw honesty about the difficulty Prentiss was experiencing. The beauty of Laemmel’s podcast (with a handful of episodes so far) is his openness to learning and having challenging conversations about failure and triumph in our everyday lives.

Erica Nelson, a diversity, equity and inclusion consultant, began fly fishing when she worked for NOLS (National Outdoor Leadership School) in Wyoming, borrowing a rod from the gear closet because fly fishing seemed to be the thing everyone did in Lander. She then became an Instagrammer to share her adventures. Conversations 42

grew around place and around people of color in the outdoors, so she created the Awkward Angler podcast. Nelson was tired of “influencers” in the outdoor world and wanted to say and hear more about social justice and fly fishing. Existing related podcasts, she felt, held a singular story: white guys fishing and “conquering” the outdoors.

Frank Konsella, real estate guru, author and backcountry ski magician, began his podcast, Crested Butte Is Home, to connect with clients and future clients but at the same time to explore the stories of new and old residents of the valley. I was fortunate to talk to Konsella for his first pandemic episode, which meant I was his first remote interview.

His questions were poignant and interesting, and we had a great talk about the things we love about the valley. Konsella said his overall mission with the podcast was to “connect

people who love the valley but don’t live here full time and to build a bridge with fulltime residents.” As a side effect, Konsella’s podcast also became a way for locals to get to know each other during this era of social distancing.

The Momversation Podcast with Leah Wrisley and Melissa Statler tackles one of the most pressing issues: parenting. A proposed mom’s group, hampered by the difficulty in getting parents together, became a partnership between college friends reconnecting on Instagram. Wrisley called the endeavor “affirming on a soul level.” Their main mission was to have an “open conversation about all things motherhood.” The podcast has become a robust array of mom outreach with an Instagram page, replete with quote cards, a wealth of interviews, memes, and a blog that touches on everything from postpartum issues to challenges faced by working mothers. The Momversation Podcast is so good, even people without kids and whose kids have grown up can appreciate the candor and conversation of Wrisley and Statler.

Kyleena Falzone, supermom, restaurateur and business maven, created a podcast because of the 2020 shutdown and helping those in need. According to the Secret Stash Pizza website, “We started a podcast to bring more hope, hype and inspiration to those who could benefit.” Her first episode explored the life of polar adventurer Eric Larsen, who was part of perhaps the last human-powered team to traverse the North Pole (due to melting ice caps). After that episode was recorded, Larsen was diagnosed with cancer, and Falzone in turn raised money for his family as they endured a challenging time. The Secret Stash Podcast is, in effect, the ouroboros of podcasts, a podcast that began from the inspiration to help people, that featured a guest who then needed and received help, and that will inspire others to help people in their communities everywhere.

With a far more specific audience, longtime local and computer programming author Bruce Eckel teams up each week with fellow programmer James Ward. In the Happy Path Programming podcast, they get down to the nuts and bolts of the programming world, its culture and technical languages. A podcast for both beginner and veteran programmers, it promises “no-frills discussions about programming, what it is and what it should be.” The podcast is a nice reminder of the non-outdoor-focused communities that flourish in the valley.

However, the outdoor podcasts are

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numerous, to be sure. You can hit two summer activities with The Trail Show for hiking, Luke Mehall’s Dirtbag State of Mind and Peter Horgan’s Climbing Advocate Podcast on your way out to Taylor Canyon.

While Horgan’s podcast tackles stewardship, advocacy and maintaining access to public lands, Mehall’s podcast gets into the personal stories of the climbers he’s known since his earliest days at Western Colorado University and finding himself in the crags and cracks of the desert southwest. Within his podcast you can feel the midday heat, contrasting the crisp, cold mornings that greet emerging car campers in Indian Creek. Mehall stresses that his podcast is also about mental health and people’s lack of knowledge about mental wellbeing, depression and the suffering it causes. The Trail Show, simply titled by Lawton “Disco” Grinter, is guided by his show’s tagline: “More beer, less gear.” It boasts a large worldwide audience that tunes in for stories about hiking around the planet.

Some listeners don’t even hike but enjoy the often-hilarious banter among the show’s frequent guests about their love of beer and making their backpacks lighter.

There are so many podcasts in the valley, but I want to mention one in particular: the Gunnison Valley Audio Journal, supported by the local Resiliency Project. This is a thoughtful and insightful look at the Gunnison Valley through a literary lens, featuring writers and writing from all over the county. Producer and former KBUT staff member Chad Reich created the podcast in hopes “that it will introduce literary works by local authors to new audiences and that it will also encourage a podcast audience to pick up some local print magazines and do some old-fashioned reading.”

The most successful podcasters I spoke to were David Flora and Crested Butte’s own Annie (Rijks) Flora, at the helm of two award-winning podcasts, Blurry Photos and Quiz Quiz Bang Bang. Both podcasts have well over 100 episodes and boast an international audience. Blurry Photos began as a lore-busting look at monsters, myths and legends. David described it as a way to “explore the unexplained and explain the unexplored,” with a skeptic’s lens and critical thinking about the paranormal. He is fortunate to make part of his income from his podcasts. When I asked for David’s advice to other podcasters, he highlighted the need for time, consistency and quality. He said it takes about a year to get going, and a consistent release of episodes is vital to growing an

audience. Another tip: Adding blankets and rugs to a recording space helps to “make it not sound like you’re recording in a tin can.”

Quiz Quiz Bang Bang, “the pub quiz practice show that hits you POW! right in the quizzer,” was born from the absence of quiz-centered podcasts. Annie noted that in growing a podcast, you should look at what people are not talking about, take your perspective and passion and “throw your voice into the void.” The Floras began the projects in Chicago during their time acting in improv shows, which feeds the energy and abundant humor in both podcasts. The podcasts are a wonderful window into the couple’s creative and curious world, which will likely incorporate their new surroundings, as they recently moved to Crested Butte (where Annie grew up). Perhaps Crested Butte locals will appear on Quiz Quiz Bang Bang, or a team-up with Gunnison County MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) investigators will be the subject of a future episode of Blurry Photos. We’ll have to tune in to find out!

Addicted and ever looking for the next podcast, even I was inspired to start one. Over the last year, my thoughts about discussing race in the mountains became something more people were talking about. I decided the best way to have this conversation and create a way for others to have better conversations about race was to create my podcast, Crested Butte Conversations. I wanted it to be informative and engaging in a way that anyone could download it and listen on a trip to the grocery and back.

Ultimately, all of us, in creating our podcasts, wanted to do something we haven’t adequately been able to do in the last year: communicate. Perhaps when we can gather once again, clink our reusable metal mugs and hear our friends’ voices on a crisp fall day outside Rumors, we’ll have even better conversations than we did before, thanks to the podcasts we’ve binged.

Editor’s note: We must be an articulate bunch! The valley boasts so many podcasters that we couldn’t include everyone in this article. But we’re curious. If you produce a locally based podcast, feel free to email the basic information to sandyfails56@gmail. com. If there’s enough interest, we’ll include more local podcast information online via the blog at crestedbuttemagazine.com.

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Trudy Yaklich in her early thirties in 1978, and at her 70th birthday party in 2015.

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Stories, miles and children’s smiles I met Trudy Yaklich in 1968 when I joined her as a cocktail waitress in the Warming House at the ski area. I thought she was the prettiest girl I’d ever seen. Fifty-plus years of friendship later and I continue to discover more about this tall, blonde, slender beauty of whom I was slightly in awe.

A fourth-generation Crested Butte native of Slovenian heritage, Trudy is descended from Marija and Jacob Kochevar, Sr., who with his son Jacob Stefan built Kochevar’s Bar on Elk Avenue. On her mother’s side, Trudy is a sixth-generation Coloradoan whose grandfather was a foreman building the Million Dollar Highway over Red Mountain Pass. Trudy bridges Crested Butte and Gunnison, the mining days and the ski area days; she connects with the generations of both towns, young and old, newcomers and natives. It seems she knows everyone, particularly their children and grandchildren, and she’s related to many of them. “I can find common ground with any human being,” she told me, which is probably why she has friends all over the world.

Trudy is quick to help others, whether it’s giving a ride to the hospital or listening to a romance gone bad. Her sisters invited so many guests to her surprise 70th birthday party in 2015 that it was held at a restaurant in Crested Butte; a private home couldn’t hold all her good friends.

Born in 1944, during the height of mining in Crested Butte, Trudy came to adulthood during the first years of the ski area. Her father Ferd (Fritz) was one of the few men not working in the mines. He and his wife Leola owned the Mountain Glow Dairy, which had been in his family since 1908. He pastured his cows near Peanut Lake, milked them by hand, processed the milk and sterilized the bottles inside the dairy at Second Street and Maroon Avenue.

Trudy remembers the milk bottle caps read “Mountain Glow Dairy,” with an image of the sun rising over Crested Butte Mountain.

“Our milk had the richest butterfat content in the state,” she said. “My dad made special chocolate milk for us.” He delivered the milk in winter by horse-drawn sleigh, often accompanied by young Trudy and her brother Fritz. By 1958 her dad was forced to sell the cows because there were too few people in town to buy milk; the mines had started closing in 1951 and residents had left to find work elsewhere. “He dumped gallons of milk in the ditch. Selling the cows was the worse day of his life.”

Trudy’s childhood in a small mining town included visiting the soda fountain in the Grubstake Building and dancing in the Company Store before it was divided into small shops in the late 1960s. Summer people from Kansas and Oklahoma filtered

Trudy Yaklich has found common ground with people everywhere – from her childhood helping with her family’s Crested Butte dairy, to traveling the world, to teaching and nurturing young people.

Story and photos by Sandra Cortner

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The Yaklich sisters – Mari, Trudy and Cindy July 4th, 1978.

into Crested Butte. “The girls would show us the newest dances and fashions. News of the first out-of-state license plate to hit Main Street was all over town in five minutes. I liked tourists.” She smiled at me, since I was once one of those tourists. “I remember I met you in 1964 by the Bierstube at the ski area. I thought you were adorable.”

Trudy and her friends thrived outdoors.

“We were always building skating rinks, and in the summer we’d haul out an old mattress to take camping. I was the kid who drug home every stray and could squat for two hours watching an anthill.” That fascination with the natural world would lead to her career.

Trudy worked from the time she was 12. “It was what you did. I cleaned Dr. [Hubert] Smith’s houses, and we had worm stands.” Local kids sold worms to the visiting fisherman. “Martha Sporcich would take all six kids out and dig for worms.”

Trudy’s small-town life didn’t prepare her for the huge University of Colorado campus in Boulder. After one year she enrolled at Western State College (now Western Colorado University). “I originally wanted to major in international relations, but it wasn’t offered so I took Introduction to Education.”

In 1968, she graduated with a double 48

Trudy, holding a photo of her Kochevar grandparents, at the 2008 Crested Butte Reunion.

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The Yaklich dairy building in 1982.

major in history/education, then taught third grade for a year in Denver. The stage was set for her treasured career as a science teacher.

First, though, in 1970, Trudy, her friend Marty Graves, brother Fritz, sister Mari and beau Chuck Wirtz went to make some summer cash in Alaska. The guys worked on the fishing boats and the women in the cannery processing salmon and shrimp.

Trudy stood at the conveyor belt as the salmon rolled by, reaching in two fingers and pulling out guts. With the other hand she stripped each of roe. At another station, she packed roe in wooden boxes. Because the sun never set, it seemed a constant party.

But during that time, she contemplated her future. “I had a BA from Western. I was just 26, and I had done nothing with my life.”

Returning to Crested Butte she determined to fulfill a life-long dream of traveling. First she needed more money. She started by working at a casino in Las Vegas.

It was the “winter of no snow” (1976-77) in Crested Butte, and soon Trudy’s best friends, Diana Maunz and Rosie Hamm, showed up and enticed her to join them finding jobs in Hawaii. Then Trudy’s boyfriend encouraged her to travel to India. She returned to Crested Butte and, after selling her possessions and car, she flew to Seattle. From there she ventured to Alaska, Hawaii, Japan, Korea, Philippines, Thailand, Sri Lanka and on to India. There, she said, “I felt like I was home.

You have more open experiences if you are not traveling with anyone.”

Trudy worked her way across India north to Kathmandu, Nepal, including a stint in Mom’s Health Food Café, where she sprayed nightly with DDT to kill the cockroaches.

Later she and her friend Wally went to Ladakh, the northernmost province of India, which had just opened to Westerners. “In

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Trudy (in hat) with childhood buddies Maryanne Gallowich Fore, Sporcich sisters Cathy, Helen and Deb, Mari Yaklich Ettlinger and Irene Rozman.

970.349.1200 Crested Butte, Colorado photo by James Ray Spahn Photography

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Kabul, Afghanistan, we went all through the mountains in Wally’s Land Rover and watched trains of camels and tribal women in beautiful clothes walking alongside.”

Her travels generated so many stories: “In Sri Lanka I met a couple who hated India because people stared at her all the time.

She had been (unknowingly) wearing a sari petticoat; native people thought it weird she was wearing an undergarment.”

Finally, weakened by dysentery, Trudy returned to Crested Butte for her sister Cindy’s wedding. “Everyone was staring at me because I got my nose pierced,” she recalled.

For the next few years, she kept the Wooden Nickel together until it sold in 1979, the same year she was crowned Flauschink Queen. “That’s when I decided I needed retirement and health insurance.” Chuck Wirtz talked her into visiting Bisbee, Arizona.

The desert appealed to her, and she worked as a substitute teacher. “That’s when I knew I really wanted to teach.”

She began in Nogales, Arizona, teaching sixth grade. “I loved Nogales. But it was not much of a life for a single person.” She earned her first masters degree, in multicultural studies, in 1985, attending classes nights,

weekends and during the summer. All the while she was teaching in Nogales and commuting from her home in Tucson, 62 miles each way on a dangerous, busy highway.

She earned her second masters degree, in public administration/secondary education, in 1990. “I don’t know how I did it because I had a very demanding job — labs, snakes to feed, children to nurture. I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown with both of those MAs, but I survived and then decided I didn’t want to be a principal. The kids needed me in the classroom.”

She spent the next 14 years at Apollo Middle School in south Tucson, where the children were mostly Mexican immigrants, undocumented or first generation, and often language disadvantaged. “I got to be a Mexican for all those years; like Slovenians – they love food, music, laughter. The Mexican ladies in the cafeteria cooked the best food!”

When Trudy talks about her teaching years, she glows, and the words and memories come pouring out. She taught biology and environmental studies, eventually heading the science department. “I wanted to learn by teaching, and I gave it 150 percent. I hung out with the kids and we had ice cream together. I told the other teachers to look out

for them as they moved up in the grades. I loved those kids! They gave me their final art project instead of their moms. School was their safe place.”

And Trudy’s classroom was their fascinating place. Someone hung a poster by her door: “This Place is a Zoo.” And it was.

Trudy laughed as she detailed the occupants.

“Madagascar cockroaches, tarantulas, gerbils, a pair of mating gopher snakes, a Ball python, mice that we raised to feed the snakes, crickets to feed the tarantulas. If they got out, we were looking all over the classroom for them. I purchased 24 goldfish to look at under the microscope. You could see the blood cells moving. I sent the fish home with the kids at the end of the year, and two years later, one told me, ‘I still have the fish!’”

Trudy took her students to clean up the neighborhood for environmental studies class and gave prizes for the most “yucky” things found.

“Teaching is your life. I don’t feel like I’m making a contribution to the world if I’m not in the classroom. I become so attached to the children.”

Although she quips she has many daughters, Trudy has no biological children.

In 1995 she discovered that two former

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students (sisters) were in protective services and asked them to come live with her. It took many hours and much red tape for Trudy to become a foster parent, but she did it willingly for the sisters, who’d never been to the dentist and couldn’t go on school field trips because the border patrol would stop the bus and deport kids like them. They had been born in Mexico but brought over the border at ages three and five by their parents; family problems left them as wards of the state. Trudy asked protective services to get the girls legal status – green cards, which put them on the road to citizenship.

“When they were 16 or 17, we got them social security numbers. I’m their mom and they are my daughters and I have four beautiful grandchildren.”

Trudy influenced many young lives. One person confessed to her, “If it wasn’t for you, I would have taken my life.” Another: “You are the reason I made it through college.” When she retired and returned to Crested Butte, she received a Facebook message from a former student who had been extremely difficult, telling her he was in the Armed Forces because of her and was going to college to become a teacher.

Which teachers inspired Trudy? “Helen Morgan in first grade and Frances Somrak in sixth and high school. They were kind, loving and outstanding teachers who made learning fun.” Just as Trudy set an example for her students, her grade school teacher had done the same for her decades earlier.

“Mrs. Morgan let me be left-handed (during a time when many lefties were forced to use their right hands). She was ambidextrous and taught me to write.”

Trudy continues to give. She has sat with older residents at the Senior Care Center in Gunnison while they passed, and served on the Crested Butte Cemetery committee. “The cemetery is where I feel at home,” she said.

Trudy and I have attended many a Memorial Day mass at the cemetery after watching the parade down Elk Avenue. I admire the Yaklich family plot that she has decorated with flowers, and then we visit the graves of her other relatives and our friends. For us, Memorial Day is the highlight of holidays.

Trudy has been a summer docent for 17 years at the Crested Butte Mountain Heritage Museum and is an incredible resource, said Nel Burkett, the museum’s former curator.

“She’s so knowledgeable about so much in this town.”

She is also, I might add, still blonde and beautiful, inside and out.

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By Than Acuff

Slinging concrete in the rain 25 years ago, local skateboarders built a daring skate park that caught international attention.

Where will the next generation of freewheelers take it?

Back in 1996, Lenny Byrd, a 24-yearold transplanted Floridian who was living the classic ski town lifestyle in Crested Butte, had a skate ramp in his rental unit in Riverland. It became the focal point for skaters throughout the Gunnison Valley, and that freewheeling energy soon spilled out onto Elk Avenue, much to the chagrin of the business community.

One day, Byrd got a call from thenCrested Butte Town Manager Bill Crank. It seemed that several business owners on Elk Avenue had grown weary of the whizzing skateboarders and wanted something done about it. This being a small town, Crank had heard of Byrd’s skateboard ramp.

“I guess he’d heard about it through the grapevine,” recalled Byrd. “It was near the end of the ski season and I was going to move out of my place anyway, and I told him that if he wanted, we could move the ramp and just set it up over at the Nordic Center.”

Relocated with help from friends and refurbished with Town funds, the ramp became an instant hit with young people.

But to everyone’s surprise, what grew from that first ramp had a ripple effect on the skateboard world, not just in Crested Butte, but eventually nationwide and ultimately worldwide.

“Once we set it up, it was flooded with kids, every single day, all summer long,” recalls Byrd. That then led to the creation of the bold and original Crank’s Tank, the current skate park shoehorned in at the corner of Third Street and Belleview Avenue 54

Nathan Bilow

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Photos courtesy of Matt Johannes

Opening Day - Fall 1997

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next to Big Mine Ice Arena.

The first step to building an actual skate park was finding someone who knew about building a skate park. Or, at the very least, a little about building a skate park. So Byrd reached out to friend Tim Payne in Orlando, Florida, who had started a skate ramp building company called Team Pain.

“I had built a lot of skateboard ramps with Team Pain, but I’d never built a concrete skate park – but I knew some people who had,” explained Byrd.

With his friends at Team Pain, Byrd brainstormed what they wanted in a skate park. “We just kind of drew it on some paper and built it from there,” he said.

While there were other skate parks nationwide, including one being built in Grand Junction and another in Durango, they were rare, and Byrd and the local skateboard contingent wanted something different.

“There were a few of them in the country, Crested Butte was like the fifth or sixth one, but ours was the first one planned with a pool section with pool tile and pool coping,” says Byrd.

But, while ideas are great, ideas within a municipality need approval, and that’s when a groundswell of support rose for the skate park. As word spread, local filmmaker Murray Wais helped usher the skate park enthusiasts through the official process, resulting in an audience with the Crested Butte Town Council.

“We were just going for it; it was really just a bunch of skaters wanting to build a skate park,” said Byrd. “Murray really stepped up. He helped us craft the paperwork to get our points across.”

An initial conversation with the council led to a public hearing, and that’s when the idea took hold at the town level.

Danny Hartigan, one of many skaters who spent time at Byrd’s ramp, recalled that first public hearing. “There was a line out the door. There were so many skaters there I couldn’t even get in. We bombarded that meeting.”

Byrd added, “They were kind of in a position where they had to say yes. They gave us carte blanche to do what we needed to do.”

This also prompted Bill Crank to remind the passionate crew of skaters, “If I go down, you’re going down with me.”

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a furious pace to build the skate park.

Such a pace that when they were close to finishing the deep pool end, it was night, and it started drizzling rain.

“The concrete started sloughing down, so the guys finishing the concrete had to build a tarp tent over the deep end,” said Byrd.

The only problem was that, it being night, materials for building a tent structure were nearly impossible to come by…nearly. While the lumberyard was closed, it was still just half a block away, so a couple of volunteers hopped over the fence to grab the needed lumber.

“We went back the next day to pay for it,” said Byrd.

Still, the concrete wasn’t doing what they needed it to do, so they improvised.

“Since it kept slumping down, they had to take shovels and start flinging the concrete onto the wall. It was quite the operation,” recalled Byrd.

By the fall of 1997, the park was built and open to the public.

“It was the first one designed and built by skaters in the state,” Hartigan said.

Little did those skaters know what they’d started by creating a new type of skate park complete with a pool section.

Not only was it a haven for local skaters, but it attracted some nationwide attention as well.

“It kind of became this Mecca for people to travel to,” said Byrd. “People were coming from all over the country to skate here.”

Crank’s Tank drew not just average skate-tourists, but also professional skaters, as well as the editor of the seminal skateboard magazine Thrasher. There was even an article in Transworld Skateboarding magazine about Crank’s Tank.

“It kind of set the standard for what skateboard parks should be,” said Byrd.

“We were kind of pioneers.”

Several people who helped on Crank’s Tank went on to grander projects, building parks all over the world with Team Pain.

Team Pain wasn’t done in the Gunnison Valley, either; the company returned to build a 12,000-square-foot concrete park in Gunnison. “They’ve become one of the premier concrete skate park builders,” Byrd said.

The legacy in the Gunnison Valley continues as well. Several of those at the start of the Crank’s Tank build have remained in the area and are now hoping

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to hand the reins over to the younger kids, including their own.

“We just want to keep a good skateboarding vibe there,” said Hartigan.

Since Crank’s Tank took shape in 1997, skateboarding locally has been on a rollercoaster ride, but it has seen a recent resurgence. Thanks to the efforts of Joe Steckdaub, Hunter Donleavy and Town of Crested Butte Recreation Supervisor Joey Carpenter, skateboard programs are now offered once again through Crested Butte’s Parks and Recreation Department.

“It was dormant for about five years and then we brought it back,” said Carpenter.

“The big reason was Hunter reached out to me through his Capstone class at Western Colorado University. From the beginning he was on board to put the work in and make it happen.”

The renewed interest has the Town of Crested Butte paying attention. For years, skaters have been calling for maintenance to Crank’s Tank. In those years upkeep and repairs were in the hands of volunteers.

Recently, the Town has agreed to fund some of the repairs, with Ever Peacock, son of local Pete Peacock, doing the work.

“Pete would buy the materials and get Ever to do the work,” said Hartigan. “He’s great at it.”

The Town may be stepping up even more. According to Parks and Recreation Director Janna Hansen, the Town will go through a public planning effort this summer regarding the skate park, with plans to apply for Great Ooutdoors Colorado and Met Rec funding for possible renovation work in 2022.

But it doesn’t stop there, as Crested Butte South is also interested in having a skate park facility built there. “It’ll be great,” said Hartigan. “You’ll be able to skate in Crank’s Tank, get on the bus, skate in CB South, and then get on the bus and skate in Gunnison.”

And while the announcement met with mixed feelings among the larger skateboard community, skateboarding is now an Olympic sport. Once improvements and an expansion are made on Crank’s Tank and the park in Crested Butte South is built, the three parks in the valley could have Olympic repercussions.

“These kids could essentially train for the Olympics,” said Hartigan.

“Skateboarding has come a long way since I was a kid getting arrested for ‘coasting’ in Boston.”

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By Brian Levine

Patrons in John Rozich’s Elk Saloon, circa 1895.

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Sheriff Doc Shores

Cyrus “Doc” Wells Shores served two terms as Gunnison County sheriff, 1883-1892. During that time, Doc Shores gained an extraordinary reputation for his “amiable” form of law enforcement and, at the same time, was known for his equally effective use of force when necessary. Shores’ exceptional arrest record and generally nonviolent career earned him an honorable place in Colorado’s frontier history. In 1893, Shores was hired by The Denver & Rio Grande Railroad as a special investigator, with his office relocated to Grand Junction.

Doc moved from Gunnison yet retained his Gunnison home and returned often.

During a fall 1934 Gunnison sojourn, the respected lawman was interviewed

by Gunnison News-Champion writer Agnes Winters. The following interview excerpt is based on fact, but fictionalized for fluidity.

Agnes Winters: People seem always interested in pioneer saloons. Can you tell me a bit about the ones you knew?

Doc Shores [cricking his grin to his right]: Let me say from the start, I was never much of a drinkin’ man. Maybe ’cause I hadn’t the time. But then, I wasn’t much for Prohibition either. Still, they were a part of my job.

The more popular a saloon, the greater its influence. Ever since I can recall, saloons have been an intriguin’ part of our culture. Taverns, inns, pubs, groggeries, public-houses, beer-parlors – call ’em what you like – they were gatherin’ places for like-minded souls. Safe havens for business, politics, shared heritage and the like. Every saloon had its different atmosphere.

Some were theaters for human drama. Others, gamblin’ clubs. Others still

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brothers – Crested Butte’s founders – deemed it wise to haul in a sawmill and plat a town. They promoted their new hamlet as a supply center for the emerging minin’ camps. Business and residential lots sold quickly. Smith provided lumber for housing and also built the Elk Mountain House, which, of course, sported a drinkin’ parlor. Around 1879-80, George and William Holt raised funds for a smelter.

Winters: Can you remember the first saloon?

Shores: Not the name, but I can picture it.

A makeshift, board-and-barrel spread under a leaky canvas tent. As for its proprietor, odds favor Henry Wright or Pat Daly. As saloons opened, social factions chose their favorite tipplin’-house. I was elected sheriff due to saloon talk. Word was, I could shoot straight and hit somethin’. I also wouldn’t take any jawflappin’ from a whiskey-fueled curmudgeon.

Soon, bartenders accepted me as their confidant and told me about any malevolent schemes afoot. Rumors with the English sort were heard down at the Elk Mountain House, the Irish at the Alhambra, Scots at the Senate, Slavs at the Crested Butte House, Italians at the Tirolean Palm, and so on.

For just dry, straightforward law, there was town hall. For learnin’ who was servin’ Byrnes’ homemade, high-proof whiskey, you went to Stearns and Bowman at the Forest Queen. For what was brewin’ with politicians, Dowling & Quinn’s. And to gauge the town’s overall vibrancy and prosperity, the Elk Mountain House.

The Crested Butte House, before the building was moved down Elk Avenue and reopned as the Elk Saloon.

others, union headquarters. Their interiors often varied with their clientele. Some were squalid, others fancy. Some housed fortunate characters, others tragic. One thing for sure, life inside ’em was seen through ambercolored glasses.

[Brief pause] Shores: But you’re right, I’ve seen a few saloons in my time. Not like I could’ve avoided ‘em. Back in Michigan, where I was born in 1844, saloons were filled with talk of the West. And most anyone was in ’em: trappers, surveyors, scouts, bullwhackers, cowpunchers, farmers, marshals, gunmen, railroaders, miners… even preachers and senators. Saloons were waterin’ holes of information. No different in Gunnison or Crested Butte. That’s why I went to ’em.

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Winters: All right then, let’s focus on Crested Butte and its saloons. How do you see them in the town’s history?

Doc Shores: Mostly good and lively and, at times, eerily somber. That’s ’cause they were mirrors of town happenin’s. In its early days, Crested Butte was wide open. Energy was high and people abuzz with mountain-sized ideas. Money seemed ready-found in every shovel. Mines, smelters, hotels, railroads -name it and someone was plannin’ it. More still, some fool was financin’ it. And the saloons were where many of those ideas were concocted and sealed.

As more silver was discovered up in Irwin and Gothic, and gold in Augusta, more people rushed in. Howard Smith and the Holt

Winters: Which saloon was the most extravagant?

Shores: The Elk Mountain House set the tone for the fine and fancy. With its wainscoted walls, cork-matted floors, walnut bannisters, carpeted hallways, lighted chandeliers, diamond-sparklin’ glasses, glimmerin’ silverware, plush-cushioned chairs, the Elk Mountain was Crested Butte’s preferred hotel.

Especially for notables like William Palmer and Horace Tabor. In the early 1880s, Tabor was Colorado’s flamboyant silver king, and while he resided at Fourth and Elk Avenue, he bought into the Bank of Crested Butte as well as the Augusta gold mine.

The Crested Butte House was another well-maintained establishment. Owned by John Rozich. Its crowded sample-room was part of a two-story hotel located on the south side of Elk Avenue, near the corner of Third. John was a well-respected sort. Did a lot to help Eastern

European migrants and was noted for servin’ Old Homestead and Stonewall whiskeys, which miners preferred. He also ran a level roulette game.

[Shores leans back in his chair, pushes up his Stetson, rolls through his thoughts.]

There was no standard interior for a Crested Butte saloon. And for the most part, the people who inhabited ’em gave ’em their appeal. Floors were often wood plank spread over with sand or sawdust, to absorb spilled drinks and missed spittoons. Cast-iron stoves issued heat. Floral wallpapers – purple and red – were used when shiplap wasn’t.

Other decorations included reverse-onglass advertisin’, Bierstadt- or Moran-like paintin’s, sometimes Jackson panoramic photographs, occasionally a Lillian Russell or Lilly Langtry lithograph. Twelve-foot-high ceilings were egg-and-dart plaster or presspatterned tin. But the center attraction of each was always the back-bar, often standing ten feet high, composed of ornate mahogany columns and pediments and marble counters.

Whiskey bottles filled the shelves. Small, rounded, nickel-plated glass cases exhibited Baxter and Dale Dean cigars. And, of course, there was always an elk head or two.

Some saloons called themselves “resorts with private club rooms.” Like the White Hall, wherein special wines, whiskey and cigars were sold, to attract moneyed clientele.

Then there was the Arcade, advertisin’ “grand lunches” so as to say it was more like a tavern. Mollet and Rosebuck’s Elk Head Saloon offered a bowlin’ alley, billiards, roulette, faro, stud poker and Mexican monte.

Then there were the saloons that doubled as dance halls or theaters, and when necessary lent themselves to church congregations.

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Winters: Was there much violence in saloons, as portrayed in Ned Buntline dime novels?

Doc Shores: There were episodes. Like in 1881, two gunmen, Arizona Bill [James A. Lewis] and Frenchy [John Shomberger] were imbibin’ up and down Elk Avenue most of the day, samplin’ goods at various drinkin’ emporiums. By evening, they were at John Hayes’ The Age Saloon, opposite the bank at Third and Elk. They raucously threatened everyone in sight. Marshal Charles Hays – a good friend – was alerted and soon found himself confrontin’ the two braggards. Guns were pulled. Five shots fired. Both Arizona 65

and Frenchy hit the sand. Frenchy died from his bullet wound.

Winters: What about labor troubles?

Shores: There was the miners’ strike in 1891. That crisis made clear where each of the town’s minin’ factions received their marchin’ orders. On December 1, the Colorado Coal and Iron Company reduced payment per ton of coal from 75 cents to 65.

That, as you might imagine, caused outrage.

Coal was Crested Butte’s lifeblood. So the miners congregated in their usual saloons to hammer out reprisals. The Italians – often fervent unionists – met at Follette’s saloon in the Tetard Building. Slavs, Croats, Austrians and other moderates filtered into Rozich’s Elk Saloon. Others went to Tim Dowling’s Ruby Saloon or Ed Edward’s in the Burnett Building. People were riled, and alcohol only exacerbated the anguish.

On December 11, I was called in. Seems the strikers had turned off the ventilation system of the Crested Butte Mine. With ill intent they shut down the compressor plant drivin’ the 20-foot Guebal fan. Now, poor ventilation was what caused the Jokerville Mine to explode in ’84, killin’ 59 miners.

Celebrants outside the Elk Saloon, 1895.

No chance we were gonna let that happen again. I deputized a posse of 24 men and took a special Denver & Rio Grande train up to Crested Butte. My intent was to surprise the strikers, but a telegraph man had already warned the men in Follette’s saloon. Minutes after we disembarked, a fierce gun battle ensued. Men dropped like felled trees, mostly on the miners’ side, and snow darkened with

blood. My posse and I made it up to the Crested Butte Mine’s entrance and fortified ourselves.

From our vantage point, we could see near everythin’ goin’ on in town. Follette’s saloon was a powder keg of miners’ anger.

Next day, after we got the Crested Butte Mine’s ventilation restarted, I went into town with several sharp-shootin’ deputies – the Marlow

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brothers and Texas Ranger Jack Watson. We were gonna pull the fuse on the most violent agitators. John Follette was one of ’em. We arrested him in his saloon. Found James Drympel between saloons. And Stuart Hurd at Quinn & Ryan’s. Followin’ day, reasonable sorts from the miners’ union, Colorado labor board and CC&I met in the Elk Mountain House to find a suitable compromise. By the end of ’91, most miners were back at work.

Winters: What about fires? Mixing drunken men with flames isn’t all that clever.

Shores: Oh, we had ’em. Mostly in winter.

Even though the town had a fire department since 1880, conflagrations weren’t assuaged by ordinance. On January 25, 1890, the saloon in the Edwards Building, on the south side of Elk Avenue, was set alight. Since the town’s water system had yet to be completed, it didn’t function properly. Sixteen business buildings were lost, five of ‘em saloons.

Then, on January 9, 1893, a fire began in the cellar of Carlisle and Tetard’s. It rapidly spread along the south side of Elk Avenue between Second and Third streets. This time, the water main was frozen. A hundred and fifty pounds of black powder was used to destroy the Miller Furniture Buildin’ on the southeast corner of Second and Elk, to prevent the flames from consumin’ more structures.

Unfortunately, that explosion blew a rather large hole in Town Hall, which stood on the southwest corner.

Winters: Any lessons learned?

Shores [leans back, smiles]: Not necessarily.

But one of our more enterprisin’ saloon owners, John Rozich, took the opportunity to purchase Miller’s now-empty lot. He then moved his saloon buildin’ – the Crested Butte House – a block and a half west to the southeast corner of Second and Elk. You see, Rozich recognized the business possibilities of so many miners usin’ Second Street to go to and from work. Only he didn’t want to construct a whole other buildin’, since he already owned one.

Instead, he had his two-story buildin’ moved there and renamed the Elk Saloon.

Oh, yeah, there was yet another January fire – in 1899. After the usual pistol shots and fire bells, a chemical engine and two water wagons raced to Whipp and Samsel’s Buildin’.

This time, the flames were quickly contained.

Sad thing, though, the bodies of a man named Jack Kennedy and a dog were found in the ashes.

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Winters: What about Prohibition? How did that impact Crested Butte’s saloons?

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Doc Shores: What do you think; stopped ‘em cold. Saloons had been powerful voices throughout the previous years. Due to money.

Now there wasn’t any. Once, saloon owners were town board members, even mayors.

To protect their investments, write laws. I don’t know how many times Pat Daly or Tim Dowling served as mayor while I was sheriff.

But after the Turn, Prohibitionist voices grew more cacophonous. By 1908, lectures like “The Saloon in Politics” were commonplace throughout Colorado. In May 1913, even Crested Butte was forced to rein in its liquor laws. And in November 1915, Crested Butte Mayor Angus Taylor – once a saloon owner himself – had signs posted around town warnin’ all saloons would be permanently closed on January 1, 1916, in accordance with Colorado’s new Prohibition Law.

Didn’t take long before Crested Butte began to change. Saloon owners like Marcus Sodia moved their families to Denver. Mike Fisher converted his business premises to a grocery and pool hall. John Rozich changed from selling Zang’s lager and Neef’s beer to peach and apple cider, Ironbrew, cream soda and wild cherry phosphate.

With this big change, new social centers gained prominence, like the Crested Butte Blues baseball field, Kikel’s billiard hall and Joe Faussone’s Princess Theatre. Unfortunately, bootleggin’ and speakeasies also garnered significant influence. But they weren’t so lawabidin’ as the old saloons.

Winters: What, as a lawman, did you miss during Prohibition?

Shores [after a brief pause]: Communication lines. Sources of reliable information. Figuratively speakin’, alcohol went underground durin’ Prohibition and a new type of criminality emerged. A new outlaw required a different kind of lawman. {He seems suddenly tired.]

Winters: Should we save that subject for our next talk?

Shores: Sure, Agnes, sure.

Agnes Winters was unable to conduct further interviews. Several days after this one, Cyrus “Doc” Wells Shores contracted a severe case of pneumonia and died in the hospital, on October 18, 1934.

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How some determined “salvage dawgs” gave the iconic Round Mountain barn a second life.

By Leslie Locklear

Self-described “rustoholic” Leslie Locklear reigns over a kingdom of salvaged treasures at Jack’s Cabin Cutoff near the former community that people called Howeville. The “newest” building on the property, a stately barn, harbors its own stories, some from long ago and some from the recent collective efforts that gave it a new life and home. Here is Leslie’s account of those efforts.

I had an itch for another barn.

I needed storage, work space, a place to create. My mom suggested that I ask about the barn standing a ways off of Highway 135 at the base of Round Mountain, and one fall afternoon I happened to see the barn’s owner standing at her gate. I pulled up on the shoulder, introduced myself and asked if she might consider selling that barn. She said she’d consider it, and we left it at that. Well, winter hit with a hard, fast, heavy, worldrecord snowfall. So much snow accumulated that several old buildings in the valley collapsed, and that included the majestic, timbered barn. The walls held, but with the massive snow, the towering cupola took a dive with the roof timbers right down into the center of the barn. Smashed! All smashed!

Tears! This whole community shed tears.

A few days later I received a phone call asking if I still wanted the barn. The “salvage dawg” that I am spoke right up and said I’d buy what wasn’t broken or rotten.

Immediately I bit my lip, thinking, “What am I gonna do with a pile of wood?”

I met with an engineer. We went over the 76

details needed to save the building. I looked that barn over, through watery eyes, as he told me how bad it was; my heart physically hurt. From the inside I could see a lot of good wood. The upper floor was still intact. At the end of the inspection, the engineer explained that I would be throwing immeasurable amounts of money and time, and lots of new expensive lumber, trying to save this barn. He could build me a new log barn, he said, for less stress and less money, with milled walls that fit perfectly together.

I wasn’t interested. I wanted this one!

I wanted its history, its hand-hewn logs, its nails, scratches, all its chewed stalls. I wanted the meaningful feeling that I’d saved someone’s craftsmanship from long ago, the place where the livestock took shelter during the blistering-cold winters. I walked away feeling as broken as the roof timbers.

From there it kinda gets blurry. A call to the owner – and a mental call out to all the doubters – had me saying, “Hold my beer.”

Not really knowing how I was going to pull this off, I reminded myself that I’d been binge watching “Barn Wood Builders” for months.

I also had some furniture-building skills, having managed properties for 27 years and tinkered on my Jack’s Cabin place for 20.

In my zest, and unbeknownst to my mother, who thought I was going to salvage some barn wood and build a shed, I promised the owner that I would build the barn back as close to original as I could. I would take it all.

Clean up everything, every nail, every piece of wood. I would haul the junk away. I would

The relocated, rebuilt barn presides over Leslie Locklear’s kingdom of salvaged treasures.

Corey Bryndal

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leave only the original rubble foundation as a landmark.

I managed to get a loan. My brother Larry and his buddy Vic came up from Texas.

I enlisted my friends Stacie and Todd Murray to help. I asked a neighboring ranch foreman if I could hire him with his big tractor to pull the remaining upper walls down. He declined and thought I’d lost my mind. That day, Larry cut the upper timbers on one end, and the north wall accordioned slowly down onto the upper floor, stacked doors still perfectly intact. Auspicious start.

In the next “Hold my OTHER beer” moment, I put on a heavy coat and my ski helmet and hooked up my little John Deere 4310 to tow straps tied end to end, while Larry and Vic went to cutting timbers on the south wall. Once the mini tractor was strapped to the first timbers, they gave the ALL CLEAR, but the first pull I made broke the straps. New straps and the next cautious pull lifted the front end of the tractor dangerously off the ground. Don’t tell my mom! With a few more cuts from the chainsaws, the south upper wall came down in slow motion. Stacked doors also intact!

Next came a very painstaking, slow log removal. Teetering one 30-foot log at a time on the lip of the John Deere front loader, with a person on either end of the log, the tractor in granny gear crawled along and then lowered the log gently onto my old trailer. After a few days of that, with such little progress, Larry lost it! He yelled at the helpers to grab the next log, he grabbed the middle, and they muscled that 30-foot log off the barn and threw it, bam, onto the trailer. I explained that this was a sacred historic site and there would be no more of that!

About that time the spirits took pity on me, and a dark sports car pulled into the pasture. As the guy approached, I wondered what this yahoo wanted. Then I recognized Corey Bryndal, whom I’d met briefly at a heated Crested Butte Town Hall meeting. He said he liked barns and wanted to help. With that, he had his new excavator delivered, and he gently but swiftly picked apart and loaded the rest of the logs on my flatbed. Wow, what great friends, old and new. I’m a lucky gal.

Next came many flatbed loads of debris to the dump, countless loads of logs to my place and one load to Montrose to recycle the old wire and junk metal. Every single nail was saved and placed in buckets. From those we brewed rusty nail ”tea” to stain new rough-cut lumber for the beefed-up flooring and framing. This dream was coming 78

together.

Ironically, when I spoke to Bob Rozman about purchasing lumber, he explained that his father’s sawmill at the end of Elk Avenue had also collapsed from the weight of that winter’s snow. So, we went to work cleaning up that mess, and with some clean-up trade we salvaged partial beams from his broken sawmill. Now, from an unexpected source, I had the support beams for my newly engineered old barn.

In my hunt for a roof, I discovered that the Crested Butte Mountain Heritage Museum in the old Tony’s Conoco building had just been reroofed. Artist Sean Guerrero had hauled all the “antique” patinaed roofing tin off to his place in Paonia, and he generously offered to sell me what I needed at a sweet deal. So off I drove, pulling my trusty old flatbed to reclaim the historic Crested Butte sheet metal. I spent the day sorting through hundreds of sheets of roofing tin, picked out 80 sheets and headed back over Kebler Pass into the darkness.

Around 10 p.m. I stopped somewhere on the pass to check the load. I discovered it had come loose and was tossed about the trailer. I wondered if I’d lost any tin along the way, but on the narrow road there was no way to turn the truck and trailer around to go look. Meanwhile, I waved down an oncoming car to warn the couple to watch out for sheet metal on the road ahead. Instead, when they asked if they were on the road to Lake City (they weren’t), I ended up rescuing them from driving hours in the wrong direction.

(There are no mistakes in the universe!) I made my weary way home, with one more thing checked off my “build a barn” list: beautiful, local, well-used, holey, metal recycled roof.

Next I put out an APB for some very tall reclaimed poles to hold up the new roof.

Voila! John Murphy answered the call and sold me what I needed for a song. I promised him credit toward some future rust from my treasured collection. Support poles: check.

To honor my new friend, the barn’s previous owner, I asked her to join me for the ground-breaking at the new site on my property. With shovels in hand, we performed a small but significant ceremony.

Now it was time to get the tractor and start digging.

I affectionately call my John Deere tractor “my boyfriend.” He handles all my big jobs. He lives under the stairs right outside my window so I can admire him. He starts on a dime, is always there when I need him 79

The rebuilt barn has the same dimensions as before, with a steeper roof for snowshed.

and never argues or cheats! So I warmed his glow plugs, cranked on the key, drove him over to the site, backed the little guy up, set the feet on his backhoe, and began nibbling at the rock-hard ground. Larry and Vic started heckling me. “It’ll be winter by the time you pull the dirt out of there!” “One big rock and you’ll tip over that toy tractor!” About that time Corey Bryndal, miraculously, appeared and offered to bring his glorious excavator over again. In no time, he dug the foundation.

I foresaw more heckling: “Poor John Deere was out-did by a Trackhoe.”

Next the concrete was poured, set up and inspected. Then Vic and crew set the logs. Wood salvaged from the original dairy stalls became the lower support poles, with Bob Rozman’s reclaimed beams placed above to hold up the second floor. Vic built new, beefed-up, rough-cut, rusty nail teastained floors. John Murphy’s tall poles were installed to hold up the roof. I begged my neighbor Eric Iverson to help me, and he beautifully faced the upper walls using the original wide-planked floors of the old barn.

He rebuilt the original doors and damaged cupola. At this point, I had a panicked, heart-crushing few days when Eric saw the old, bent, holey tin that had come off Tony’s Conoco. He said it couldn’t be used. But with some coaxing and research, he went to 80

hammering the tin down and epoxying all the previous nail holes. Soon an amazing roof crowned the barn.

From the old barn site, under the years of cow manure, Vic found and restored giant, thick-planked, weathered, Douglas fir flooring. The dairy cows had stood many a cold morning on that, and my dear friend John Polzin built the most amazing interior stairs with those planks. Metal railing plucked from a neighbor’s dump trailer became rails for the balcony. I located old, operable windows from the side of the road in front of the “Magnolia” cabin in Gunnison. Those were installed alongside reclaimed windows I got from Julie Robinson of Habitat For Humanity.

The Round Mountain barn is truly a gift from the higher realms. It taught me to ask, do the work, and be open to what the universe has to offer.

Oh, but there’s more to be done – like chinking. What are you doing in late June?

Perhaps a chinking party?

If chinking isn’t your thing, you can support Leslie’s endeavor via her Go Fund Me page: Jack’s Cabin Historic Barn Restoration Project. Or buy an antique treasure from her backyard collection (Highway 135 at Jack’s Cabin Cutoff), or shop her repurposed art at the Paragon Art Gallery in Crested Butte.

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After a life-changing car crash, athlete Beth James returned to marathons and triathlons, this time in tandem with her daughter Liza. Team Liza has since touched people around the globe.

By Beth Buehler

Humans express love in a million different ways. For one mom, Beth Hodges James, it takes the form of running, swimming, biking and climbing mountains with her 25-year-old daughter, Liza, and receiving a huge grin in return. This has also been a form of healing for mother and daughter since their lives were dramatically changed by a car crash in 2004. Liza was robbed of her ability to walk and left with a significant brain injury at the age of six.

Facing such an ordeal, some might just curl up and find respite under the covers. But Beth’s fighter instincts and her experience as a triathlete helped stop the blues from taking over and gave rise to the grand vision that has become Team Liza.

Competing as a mother-daughter duo in races as grueling as the Ironman World Championship, Beth and Liza have drawn attention and inspired athletes around the world.

In 2014, ten years after the wreck, the family moved from Oklahoma City to Mt. Crested Butte. Here they’ve found resources to help Liza live a fulfilling life, plus a challenging and fun place to train and spread their message of hope and resilience. While Liza can’t speak, she clearly communicates

Beth James riding with daughter Liza in the final stretch of Ironman Kona.

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her wishes and excitement. “Liza is healthy, happy and ready for action. She melts your heart!” Beth said.

TURNING HARDSHIP INTO HOPE After graduating from college, Beth began competing in 10K running races, marathons and triathlons, and she conquered Ironman Florida in 1999. “Liza was healthy then, and I qualified for the 2000 Boston Marathon and had a blast,” she recalled.

Recently, at her parents’ home, Beth found an old scrapbook featuring articles about that year’s marathon, including several she’d clipped about Dick and Rick Hoyt, a father-son team who would go on to complete more than 1,000 races together despite Rick’s physical disabilities. “The stories about Team Hoyt touched me in 2000, even with three healthy children at the time,” she said.

When Beth clipped those articles, little did she know that four years later, as a single mother living in Enid, Oklahoma, she would face an extremely difficult situation as well.

Heading home from a July Fourth gathering, Beth was turning left at a green light when two drag racers entered the intersection and collided with her car. Miraculously, Beth and

her other two children, Alexandra and J.C., escaped with only minor injuries, but Liza was in a coma for two months.

On top of that, Beth was diagnosed with a noncancerous tumor a few months after the wreck. “The same neurosurgeon who saved Liza removed a golf ball-sized tumor from my brain,” she said. “I’d been athletic all my life, and I knew Liza and I both needed to pull ourselves up. It was time to start running again.”

Four months after the accident, Beth completed the Oklahoma City Memorial Marathon. Soon after, she reached out to Dick Hoyt, who helped her find a jogging chair. He continues to stay in touch.

For Beth, the bottom line is that life is a precious gift, and Team Liza aims to share that message. Beth reflected, “I needed Liza, and Liza needed me. Life is full of challenges, and how we react to challenges defines us. We had a dark hole to dig out of, so I would love to motivate others not only for athletic challenges but for overall health and life.”

CRESTED BUTTE: A MOVE, A MARRIAGE, A MISSION When Beth was a child of seven or so, she

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Liza, Beth and David James, with cousin Abby at the Pikes Peak Challenge.

crashed on skis and broke her leg on the first day of a Crested Butte family vacation.

But that didn’t crush her desire to ski or to return to Crested Butte. On the contrary, she developed a passion for the sport and harbored a fondness for this mountain town.

After meeting David James at a hot yoga class in Oklahoma City in 2013, Beth shared the memorable ski trip story from her youth, and the new couple decided to check out Crested Butte as a possible place to live. The visit struck a chord, and they relocated from Oklahoma City in October 2014 and married (in a blizzard) on New Year’s Day 2015 at the outdoor chapel atop Crested Butte Mountain Resort’s Painter Boy chairlift. “We love it here and plan on being here forever!” Beth said.

Work flexibility helped make relocation possible. Beth owns an appraisal business, and David has been based out of a home office for years as an oil and gas attorney.

The people, activities, Adaptive Sports Center and Crested Butte Community School sold them on life in the valley, where they relish the world-class Nordic and downhill 84

skiing, mountain biking and hiking. The James family also enjoys attending the Live!

From Mt. Crested Butte summer concert series and wandering Elk Avenue to dine and shop.

Liza attended the Crested Butte Community School until turning 21. “There’s a beautiful school system here with beautiful people, which is very heartwarming. It’s very genuine and positive here,” Beth emphasized.

The Adaptive Sports Center helps keep Liza active with outdoor pastimes like ziplining, water activities and skiing.

Beth stays busy training, attending classes at Thrive Yoga, and competing in events like the Crested Butte Nordic Center’s Grand Traverse, Gothic Mountain Tour and Alley Loop Nordic Marathon. “I wake up ready to train, thinking of Liza’s next event. I don’t want to enter one for me; I want to stay healthy for her next event.”

IT TAKES A VILLAGE TO COMPETE Team Liza had conquered several 5Ks and 10Ks, a Dallas half-marathon and more when

Beth learned about the Challenged Athletes Foundation (CAF), organizers of the San Diego Triathlon Challenge. “It takes a team to do these events, and thanks to David, San Diego was our first triathlon in 2015. From then, it was one step after another,” Beth said. “David is our backbone and teammate from every angle and provides so much love and encouragement. He has been very athletic all of his life, with marathons as his main focus.”

In 2016 and 2017, Team Liza took on the Redman Triathlon in Oklahoma City, and they worked their way up to half-Ironman events in Boulder, Colorado, Raleigh, North Carolina, and Lubbock, Texas. Next, it was on to Madison, Wisconsin, in 2018 for a full Ironman race. An Ironman covers 140.6 miles, consisting of a 2.4-mile swim, 112mile bike ride and 26.2-mile run.

David commented that at the Ironman Wisconsin, Beth and Liza became the first mother-daughter duo team to finish a full Ironman. “This is significant in many ways but most importantly, a duo team does not

James Ray Spahn

receive any special favors. Team Liza’s total time in Wisconsin was 16 hours and 30 minutes, beating the 17-hour time cutoff by 30 minutes. NBC Nightly News had a film crew present to record this accomplishment.”

A pinnacle moment for the motherdaughter team came a year later when they were invited to race in the 2019 Ironman World Championship in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii. Physically challenged teams have to enter a lottery, and it was the second time Team Liza had tried. “It’s the Super Bowl of triathlons, a world champion event. Every athlete has to qualify to go there, and there are [qualifying] Ironman events all across the world,” Beth explained.

In Kona, Team Liza finished the 2.4mile swim in choppy ocean waters with time to spare, but the bike course proved much more difficult; it sent riders through lava fields where they experienced extreme heat and devastating winds. “Beth had a grueling 112-mile ride pulling Liza, who weighs 100 pounds, and the racing chair that weighs an additional 21 pounds,” David said. “I’ve pulled Liza in events on my bike, and I can testify it’s very difficult. Beth and Liza missed the time cutoff for the bike portion by a mere eight minutes and were not allowed to continue with the run.”

In the transition zone at triathlons, teammates are allowed to help athletes manage their equipment and clothing. The timing is critical. Both of Liza’s siblings, Alex and J.C., help out as much as possible, as do the four oldest of their five children.

The accident motivated Alex to get a degree in special education and become a special education teacher and counselor. Liza’s cousins, Abby and Alli Hodges, also have assisted Team Liza.

Washington-based Adaptive Star Mobility, Inc., makers of alternative mobility products, is at the forefront of Team Liza’s equipment, and owners Teri and Greg Durrin have become great supporters. The company designed the carbon-fiber chair that has made it much easier for Beth to pull Liza on her bike, and the Durrins were part of Team Liza at the Ironman World Championship.

They had planned to go to Germany with the James family for the 2020 Challenge Roth before the popular European triathlon was cancelled due to COVID-19. (The 2021 event is scheduled for September.)

“We’re comforted to know that our immediate and extended family will continue to give Liza love and support forever,” Beth said.

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SHARING A MESSAGE OF RESILIENCE

Liza and Beth doing the 2.4-mile swim at the Kona Ironman and completing the Boulder half-Ironman; Liza with David in their Challenged Athlete Foundation team shirts; Beth training in the Endless Pool in her Mt. Crested Butte home and skiing with Liza on the Town Ranch.

The story of a mom determined to give her daughter the thrill of competition and the freedom of outdoor adventure has touched racers, spectators and media far beyond the race venues. In addition to coverage by NBC Nightly News, Team Liza has been featured on Today and Good Morning America, as well as radio stations and newspapers around the country.

Beth and Liza also educate and inspire people with their “Yes you can!” motto through speaking engagements.

“Healthy Kids Running Series invited us to Philadelphia, and we were so honored to be there,” Beth said. She and Liza also have presented to Ironman athletes at various events and served as ambassadors for the Challenged Athletes Foundation.

Before the pandemic shut down much of the world in March 2020, Team Liza took part in the Publix Atlanta Half Marathon with the Kyle Pease Foundation; this organization was created by brothers Kyle and Brent Pease, who in 2018 became only the second wheelchair duo assist team to complete the Ironman World Championship. Team Liza was invited to participate in several races in 2020, including Germany’s Challenge Roth, CAF’s Million Dollar Challenge (a weeklong bike ride that runs 620 miles from San Francisco to San Diego) and Ironman Cozumel. Some races were cancelled and others happened, but Team Liza hunkered down in Crested Butte to stay safe. Beth hopes they’ll be back on the road for the 2021 events.

Team Liza took part in several virtual events during the pandemic, including ones organized by Ironman, CAF and Challenge Roth. Like many Crested Buttians, the James women also charged ahead with a regular fitness routine during the pandemic. Beth confessed they probably could be in the home gym business based on all the equipment they own, including an outdoor Endless Pool with a hot tub installed in 2020. Liza does physical therapy in the hot tub and walks on a treadmill in the pool. “She loves every moment…we can walk, sit and watch the sunset,” Beth said.

What fuels Beth’s dedication? “I want to keep Liza healthy and happy but also to motivate other families and individuals to just go for it. It can be a walk around the park or a basketball game that gets you off the couch and pulls you out of something difficult to move forward.”

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Horseshealas ers

Equine somatic psychotherapists like Nancy Jones are using intuitive, four-legged partners to help their clients find transformation.

By Janet Weil Photos by Rebecca Ofstedahl

A young, single woman tragically lost her baby two days before her due date. In grief and despair, she came to psychotherapist Nancy Jones for help. She had delivered her stillborn baby alone, without support from her family or friends.

She was shattered, unable to function, suffering with health problems. She rarely slept, and when she did, disturbing dreams tortured her.

Nancy could feel the young woman’s pain, very intense, right on the surface.

They had a few therapeutic ‘talk’ sessions, and the woman, one small step at a time, gathered the strength to accept the death of her child. She looked at pictures of her baby.

She held Nancy’s newborn grandson. As the woman took slow steps toward acceptance, Nancy encouraged her to do an equine somatic psychotherapy session with Nancy’s thoroughbred mare, Chica, who was a little wild but very intuitive.

Normally, in an equine somatic psychotherapy session, Chica would run crazily around the arena for a time before coming anywhere near the client, who would be lying face up on a massage table, waiting for the session to begin. But this day was different. Nancy described the scene: “In this session, Chica did not run around the arena. The mare moved purposefully around the arena twice and then came directly to the table, approaching the client from the ‘head’ end of the table. This was totally out of character for the horse. Chica carefully stepped up to the table and gently placed

her muzzle between the client’s cheek and her shoulder. The woman turned her head into the mare. Chica did not move. She stood there for a very long time while the client cried uncontrollably. She cried and cried and cried. In that moment, there was an energetic holding between the client and the mare that was truly profound. As the client completed her long release, the mare stepped carefully away from the table and rested peacefully.

The woman, shaken, got up from the table and said, ‘I have left something behind today.

I unburdened some of the pain and suffering I’ve endured since the death of my baby.

Finally, I feel I can move forward in my life.’

That horse knew instinctively, deep in her very being, what the woman needed.”

In the Gunnison Valley, equine somatic psychotherapy (ESP) is becoming known as a valid therapeutic alternative, particularly in healing deep pain and loss. In ESP, the horse is incorporated into the therapeutic process and is placed at the focal point of the session; the therapist takes a back seat. Nancy emphasized that in an ESP session, the horse is front and center, unhindered and allowed to interact with the client as it wishes. It’s about the relationship of the client and the horse, not the client and the facilitator.

This hands-off approach creates an environment for change and opens doors to the unexpected and unplanned. The process allows clients to experience breakthroughs and find answers for themselves. People from all walks of life have used ESP to grapple with issues: troubled teens, traumatized war 89

veterans, struggling families. In Nancy’s experience, equine intervention brings the client to the moment, expands awareness, focuses attention and encourages spiritual connection.

Nancy Gex Jones has had a private, “spiritual” psychotherapy practice, Inner Resource Wellness, in the Gunnison Valley since 1998. She sees her clients at her beautiful, sprawling 10X Ranch near Almont.

ESP, “a specific type of equine-human sharing of space and time,” has become a valuable adjunct to her spiritual psychotherapy, she said. Because horses are highly sensitive, clients can work through their life struggles by interacting with the horses without feeling judgment or interpretation, as often happens in therapeutic settings. Nancy believes equine somatic psychotherapy encourages clients to be introspective, helping them to heal and grow.

“It allows the psychotherapist to access additional senses and perceptions,” she said. “The sensory system of the equine is beyond our understanding; it is deep, full, ancient and primordial. Horses use their senses daily to sift through the messages 90

from nature, those swirling on the wind or drifting through the weather, observing how the birds fly and what the horse two pastures over is sensing. Horses are tuned into the minutia of natural details without concern for time, calendars or agendas. They convey their feelings through body positions, touch and emotional validation.”

Horse fans often say horses have five hearts. When a horse walks, it pushes the ‘frog,’ the middle of the hoof, up and down.

This action forces blood up the legs, thus creating four places where the horse is pumping blood, and the fifth is to the heart.

If you touch a horse on its chest and up on its withers, where its neck meets its body, you form a connection from your heart to its heart, a continuous circuit. You can feel this heart connection, Nancy said, and the horse will let you do it until it feels complete and then steps away.

Nancy has long had a deep love for horses. Her equine somatic psychotherapy grew out of her affection and respect for her horses and their intuitive nature, plus her observations of the young people she was seeing in her psychotherapy practice.

Nancy received a master’s degree in spiritual psychology from the University of Santa Monica, after spending 20 years in the radio business. (Many in Crested Butte know her also for acting in the Mountain Theatre and raising her daughters, Malia and Hallie.) She studied for several years at the Radix Institute, practicing a bodycentered psychotherapy model. She also studied with Linda Kohanov, who founded the equine group Epona. Kohanov wrote The Tao of Equus, the definitive text on equine psychotherapy that explores the healing potential of the horse-human bond.

Nancy additionally explored Eagala, a highly respected, global equine treatment model that creates “an arena of possibilities where people’s lives can change.”

In her practice, Nancy began to notice how her younger clients, in particular the teens, would connect with her horses when they met in the barn, talking about their bodies, their body image and what they felt when they worked or played with the animals. So much more growth and learning seemed to happen. The young people would open up, and she could have conversations

with them that were introspective and meaningful, while they were grooming or playing with the horses.

Recently, a mom brought her young daughter to Nancy for help. The girl was shutting down at home, being super hard on herself, not wanting to connect with her family. She was full of blame and self-recrimination. This young girl had no experience with horses. She came to the ranch to meet Nancy’s three horses and immediately felt an attraction to one of them. For the first three or four times at the ranch, she groomed, talked to and played with that horse. Sometimes she would get loud, and Nancy would tell her, “That’s uncomfortable for the horse.” She would stop. “I get it.” She learned organically about self-regulation and boundaries. The horse was drawn to the girl and would hang over the fence when he heard her car pull up.

The girl told Nancy what she loved about the horse was she couldn’t have an attitude with him. “When I have an attitude, he confronts me. He gets an attitude right back,” she said. She and the horse were developing a stronger, more positive relationship.

Horses can feel deep into a person and know what’s hurting, Nancy said. They can use their bodies and their intuition while offering a connection – which in this case helped the girl feel more connected to herself. Nancy told the girl she could touch the horse’s nose. The girl smiled as she reached out to the horse. “I’ve never felt anything so soft.” The horse leaned down and put his nose next to her and held still while she rubbed his face. The heart connection was there. Horses respond to our emotions, Nancy said. Healing happens from non-judgment and unconditional acceptance.

Another young client of Nancy’s had difficulty balancing the left and right hemispheres of her brain. The doctor had given her exercises to do, but they weren’t working. Nancy put the girl on a horse, and balance was immediately achieved through transference of electrical energy from the horse. That horse knew what the girl needed.

Horses want to include us in their energy field, Nancy said. They want to share a space with humans. They want to be included, to be close to people and to teach us. They really would like us to be part of their herd. This feeling of inclusion gives the client a sense of wellbeing and a connection with the horse. It feels safe and reassuring. Approaching horses helps us to

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reflect how we approach our relationships and how we can face other big and overwhelming things in our life. We learn through the animals’ unconditional acceptance to allow our feelings, to be who we are without shame or judgment. We can realize that every experience is an opportunity for growth.

Nancy has many stories about the intuitive power of horses. A woman from Boulder came to an ESP demonstration Nancy was giving. Out in the arena, overlooking the rolling fields, the visitor lay down on the table face up. The horse walked right up to the woman and put his nose on her stomach.

He started to go around and around with his lips on her stomach. When she eventually got up, she said, “I was never going to tell anyone during the workshop, but I have a large ovarian cyst right where the horse was touching me.”

Touching or even looking at a horse connects us to it through oxytocin, the bonding hormone. It’s the hormone women produce when breastfeeding that causes a mother and her baby to bond. When humans lived mostly on farms and in rural communities, we produced more oxytocin and were much more connected because we touched the animals that lived with and around us, Nancy noted. Now we’ve lost that connection and we’re more distant.

In order to evade predators, horses have become extremely sensitive to their environment and highly emotionally intelligent.

In an equine somatic psychotherapy session, the horse willingly brings those qualities into the process to assist in the healing of the human. The energy in this encounter is of tremendous surrender and vulnerability. Nancy senses profound magic in each ESP session.

“It feels charged with information both species are gaining and sharing and attempting to communicate in their vulnerable states. Horses instinctively analyze and react to our body language and other non-verbal cues, reading our intent and providing valuable feedback and insights,” she said.

To Nancy, horses are a mysterious gift to the therapist and to anyone who wants to heal or be transformed. She senses these highly evolved beings protecting, nurturing and gently guiding us, waiting for us to acknowledge the wisdom they hold. She quotes Kohanov’s writings about horses: “They have an extraordinary ability to awaken intuition in humans, while mirroring the authentic feelings people try to hide, making these animals powerful, therapeutic teachers and healers.”

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Crested Butte has always been a town in transition, but the last year brought an uptick in new neighbors, reluctant farewells, innovative ideas and spirited questions.

By Katherine Nettles

Xavier Fané

Trevor Bona

The words “this town is changing” have been rolling off people’s tongues for years, but the sentiment hit a fever pitch in the past 12 months as record numbers of visitors, home buyers and newly remote workers sought refuge in this valley. The numbers tell a story of growth and change, but how we are transforming might only be unveiled as we get to know our new neighbors.

Waves of change have been part of the Gunnison Valley’s story since fur trappers and gold miners began displacing the Utes in the 19th century. Some of those changes came in fits and starts, like coal mines replacing silver mines, more recent real estate booms and busts, and the tenures of various ski area owners.

In a way, the stories of our pandemic-era arrivals are similar to the stories of people who moved here before (take your choice: European-American explorers, fur trappers, miners, farmers, ranchers, hippies, ski bums, urban refugees…). Some had roots here; others had been looking for a place like this for years; still others didn’t know what they were seeking until they found it.

Recently the waves of change have felt more like a tsunami. For years, a steady stream of newcomers had been quitting the city life and joining the party here, but the pandemic turned that stream into a deluge. In the past year, the Town of Crested Butte and Gunnison County overall reported record high revenues from real estate transfer tax, lodging tax and sales tax, in contrast

to some other mountain towns. A lot of property is changing hands. Realtors tell us Crested Butte is a better bargain than many other resort areas; perhaps buyers are seeing the potential here and want to be a part of the ride. This county, after a brief shutdown in spring 2020, also managed to stay relatively open and safe to visit through the pandemic, as people could spread out across our vast outdoors.

While many industries across the nation suffered in the last year, from tourism to manufacturing and construction, Crested Butte bucked the trend. Homes are going up faster than ever, as people have decided to stay a while – possibly forever.

Interestingly, student enrollment at the Crested Butte Community School (CBCS) has not peaked in any record-breaking way, even with a number of families who enrolled here for the 2020-2021 school year to participate in classroom learning while their home districts went virtual. CBCS secondary principal Stephanie Niemi said, “We have a few families that are here ‘weathering’ Covid, but our growth this year was very typical. The secondary (grades 6-12) has averaged a 6.8 percent increase per year over the last decade.” So maybe our children have made new friends, and a few will become pen pals as they return to city life.

Perhaps the pandemic simply accelerated a time of change, but its impacts will likely last beyond some people’s brief mountain-living experiment. Crested Butte native Roland Mason believes the past year will leave a legacy, as evidenced in Elk Avenue’s one-way summer traffic and on-street dining; the Town had contemplated the concept for years, but the public health crisis finally got it across the finish line.

Since Mason grew up in Crested Butte, served on the town council, and now serves as a county commissioner while running a building business, he has a fairly broad view. He thinks people recognize value in Crested Butte. “Crested Butte is one of the most affordable [mountain town] places to go to, and we have been much more open during the pandemic.

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The construction industries have been on lockdown in many other areas,” he said.

Maybe the value attracts people seeking a place with room for new ideas, with room for the contributions and visions of newcomers.

And while many locals feel protective of what they’ve worked hard to maintain – a wild, unconventional place of passion – maybe that sense has been attracting people here all along.

In tandem with the influx of people, a changing of the guard seems to be happening.

“A lot of the folks who moved here in the ‘70s and ‘80s are getting ready to retire,” Mason pointed out. With the hot sellers’ market fanned by the pandemic, some long-time residents decided to sell their property and move to areas that were warmer or closer to specialized medical care.

“Of the people moving in behind them, many are younger families who can afford a $1.5 million home,” Mason said. Having been involved in politics for the past decade, he has taken note of a changing political climate as well. “There are more conservative people moving to Crested Butte…. I think you’re going to start to see that interaction within the town council, and we are seeing it in county commissioner races.”

Conversely, the city of Gunnison might become less conservative over time as development there persists and more Crested Buttians move south for the elbow

room and lower prices. “There is all that land in Gunnison. I think you’re going to see growth there, and I hope they are ready for it,” said Mason. He points to a high rate of commercial and multi-family construction in Crested Butte South as well.

“The pandemic brought these changes faster, but I feel like the change is going to be permanent,” he said.

Mason has noticed locals tend to look at certain events as change markers. The pandemic will likely be one of those. “From someone who has grown up here and seen changes over the last 40 years, I think we’re at one of those pivot points, and it will not be what it was.”

What, then, will it be? To answer that, without the proverbial crystal ball, we can turn to those who are at our entrance. What drew them here? What do they have planned?

Eldy and Jarrod Deines moved here in December 2020 with their two elementaryaged children. Their path may sound familiar to many, with roots in Texas and more recently in the Front Range. Eldy Deines, 40, said Crested Butte was a foregone conclusion pre-pandemic, “but I think it helped nudge us.” The family first visited Crested Butte in March 2019. “We absolutely fell in love with it and came back that summer.” They were drawn here by the mountain biking, general access to recreation and the vibe and engagement of the community. They found

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“There’s a perspective in your life, too, when things happen and you want to be more present for your kids. I know that was the biggest driver for me,” said Deines.

Her husband retired from the military after his last station in Colorado Springs, “and we wanted to find the place that we could call home.” Deines, an IT director for El Paso County, was at a professional crossroads: “Do I want to spend more time working, or take that time out of my day to spend with my family?”

She stepped down from her position to a less demanding work schedule, but said that since moving here, “I want to slow down even more.” She feels that a calm has come over her since leaving Colorado Springs, where she felt she always had to work.

Deines has taken the virtual Gunnison Valley history seminars with local historian Duane Vandenbusche, and she senses that Crested Butte is “still trying to keep the spirit alive.” As she gets to know her new home, she’s now asking herself: “How do I become a part of this community?”

For all the talk of affluent young families or retirees moving in, the allure of our valley endures for young, discerning and free-spirited adults. Natalya Clasen, age 22, moved here in August from Fort Collins, where she grew up and attended college.

Her boyfriend attends Western Colorado University, and she’d decided to move here eventually, but the pandemic accelerated the timeline. Clasen has made connections throughout the valley, mostly by joining local Facebook groups. “The valley heavily uses Facebook pages,” she noted. Clasen’s work takes her to Crested Butte, Crested Butte South and Mt. Crested Butte, often riding the bus from Gunnison. She observes life across several demographics: nannying for local families, babysitting for visitors at the resort, doing odd jobs and even tutoring retirementaged locals on how to Zoom or prepare a résumé to re-enter the workforce.

“There’s a lot of older folks asking for computer advice,” she said. “Being home and contending with all these new electronics and systems, they’re needing help.”

Clasen enjoys the social media connections and the insights they provide about what occupies people’s minds here (weather, pets, lost items, newcomers); through those channels she also finds opportunities for extra work.

“I love that we are separated from major cities and major shopping districts,” she said.

“It’s a different lifestyle here, and that has

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been the biggest blessing, being able to enjoy that ease and steadiness, and doing some self-discovery.”

Clasen described a very real struggle for newcomers anywhere – and especially in a close-knit community like ours. Though she enjoys making connections and helping people, moving somewhere new during a pandemic was anything but easy. “I joined the Facebook groups because it felt very difficult when I first came to the town. I didn’t feel like I belonged; I felt like a complete outsider.”

Clasen has wrestled with aspects of the valley that differ from Fort Collins. “People hold themselves differently here,” she said.

People make less eye contact with others they don’t know and seem more guarded at first.

“It feels difficult to make any actual solid relationships with people outside of work.”

That newcomer syndrome can be somewhat universal. Dawne Belloise, one of several long-time locals who relocated last year, is experiencing it in Paonia. She spoke fondly of Paonia’s more temperate weather and said she doesn’t miss shoveling snow off the steep roof of her former Crested Butte alley house. But as she celebrated her 69th birthday, she reflected that while living in Crested Butte, “I had a community that would check up on me; there was a support system there.” She admitted she didn’t really want to leave, and she might even come back. “I’ve been trying to get Deli [Mayor Jim Schmidt] to start making plans for a senior home in Crested Butte for all of us geezers,” she quipped. “He wants to name it Fossil Ridge.”

The Deines, Clasen and several other new arrivals agreed that this place holds some amazing people, once you get a chance to know them. Though our valley is getting more diverse, we still have one thing in common: we have chosen to be here, and by no mere accident. As things get busier, staying closeknit means learning the names of new people and welcoming them to the party.

Clasen offered one other insight about living in the valley: “The best thing is it really physically puts you in an environment where you are…contending with yourself all the time. I didn’t like it at first, but now I’ve gotten more used to it.”

We are a community of people who each came to the end of a road, where Paradise Divide stands firmly between us and the next stretch of lights and pavement.

And rather than seeing that as a limitation, we’ve seen possibility. Here’s to contending with ourselves, and each other, in the same spirit.

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Want to know what Gunnison Valley kids are up to these days? They’re building homes. In fact, they’re teaming up with local architects, engineers and construction professionals to learn all aspects of the residential design and building trade.

That’s because the non-profit SOAR hooks up kids with building professionals to design and build affordable housing What’s more, when the homes sell, all the profits go right back to our schools. The result? Students learn a trade from the ground up. Our schools get a funding bonus. And our community gets more affordable housing. Built by our own students. Your financial donations and 0% interest loans help us keep the program going. Give us a hand.

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Lois and Rudy Rozman display the quilt made from her father’s ties.

From new cloth or repurposed clothing, local quilters stitch together artistry, warmth and memories.

By Karen Janssen / Photos by Xavier Fané

There are so many ways to tell a story, from campfire confidences to social media posts to printed pages. The need to tell stories stretches back to ancient pictographs on red sandstone cliffs. Sharing our memories, our trials and triumphs, our sadness and joy has long been part of the fabric of life.

In the Gunnison Valley, we share tales of epic adventures and personal experiences through photography, paint, film, words, dance, quilts. Wait…quilts? In our valley, as in many places, there’s a whole subculture of artists designing, cutting and stitching fabric pieces into amazing works of art that provide 100

a visual treat, preserve memories and tell their own stories.

Take, for example, Lois Rozman’s tie quilt, fashioned from a drawer-full of her father’s ties. When he passed away, she and her family faced the difficult task so many have faced throughout the years. What should they do with her father’s belongings?

Lois’ mother, shaped by the Depression, felt nothing should be thrown away. With her skills as a quilter (each of her children and grandchildren own one of her creations), the idea of a quilt seemed a natural progression.

“It became a project we did together,” recalled Lois. “I would set her up before I

left for work, and when I’d come home at lunch or after work, she’d proudly show me the progress she had made.” Though Lois’ mom died before the quilt was finished, it now provides a special memory of both her parents.

These themes of repurposing, of creating and holding onto memories, and of working together are some of what makes quilting such a unique and special pastime.

Most of us have seen movie scenes or read about quilting bees, where women of the late 18th century gathered to socialize and sew.

Many hands made lighter work of a complex task, and it was a chance to connect and

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Heidi Duryea and her long arm quilter have finished many local works of fabric art.

Sarka Shull crafted memory-holding quilts out of her sons’ old t-shirts.

share materials and knowledge.

Donna Rozman, another local quilter (and Lois’s sister-in-law), appreciates the closeness the art has brought for her and her family. When her husband Richard passed away after a car accident in 2015, she was left with a closet full of button-down shirts that held such strong memories. “I wouldn’t have been able to cut them up, but my sister could!” she said. Thanks to her sister’s cutting, her cousin’s ironing and Donna’s sewing, the fabric created enough panels for three good-sized quilt tops. Another sister and her husband picked out the backing and machine-quilted them. By Christmas of that year, the projects were finished. Before giving one to each of her sons, Donna kept alive Richard’s holiday tradition of giving lottery tickets; she stuffed some into the shirt pockets left on the quilt panels.

The stitching together of layers of padding and fabric may date back to 3400 BCE. In the British Museum, an ivory carving from the Temple of Osiris at Abydos in Egypt features the king of the First Egyptian Dynasty wearing a mantle that appears to be quilted. The oldest surviving example of a quilted piece is a linen carpet found in a Mongolian cave, dated to between 100 BCE and 200 CE. For much of its history, quilting was primarily a practical technique to provide protection and insulation (think knights in inhospitable, albeit shining, armor). However, decorative elements were often present. From those humble beginnings, quilting has evolved to 102

include more than 21 million quilters in the U.S. alone.

In fact, what is considered to be the largest community arts project in history is a quilt. In November of 1985, while helping to organize an annual candlelight march, long-time San Francisco gay rights activist Cleve Jones asked fellow marchers to write on placards the names of friends and loved ones who had died of AIDS. At the end of the march, Jones and others stood on ladders and taped the placards to the San Francisco Federal Building. The wall of 1,000-plus names looked like a quilt. People from all over the world were moved to honor their loved ones similarly, and today the AIDS Memorial Quilt is an epic 54-ton tapestry that includes more than 48,000 panels dedicated to more than 100,000 individuals.

Quilting crosses race, age, economic class, gender and skill-level boundaries.

Nancy Vogel, a former Crested Butte Community School teacher, spearheaded at least 15 quilting projects with her fourthgraders over the years. The class would brainstorm a subject, and after first honing their skills with Mother’s Day gift pillows,

students were responsible for hand-sewing one square each, representing their take on the theme. “We’d work on the quilt the last month of school, when the kids would start to get antsy and needed something to focus on! To this day I have students who say that embroidery and needlework calms them down,” said Nancy. “It was a wonderful way to teach them a life skill, and it also let them each be an individual, yet a part of a larger whole.” The quilts have found numerous homes. Some are displayed around town, like a pet quilt at the Crested Butte Animal Hospital and a quilt at Town Hall showing local historic buildings. Several of the creations were gifted as special memories to parents who lost their children too young.

For indeed, quilts are comforting.

Gazing at or snuggling beneath such a labor of love is consoling. And it seems the process of creating them is equally so. Julee Nelson has been part of the Tuesday Night Quilters in Gunnison for 13 years. “You quilt for the enjoyment and the bonding and friendships, but you also do it from a love in your heart for somebody,” she said. Heidi Duryea, a member for 18 years, agreed: “Quilters are

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givers!” Over the years, the group has made several quilts to place in new Habitat for Humanity homes, as well as crafting raffle quilts for Tough Enough to Wear Pink, Gunnison Valley Hospice and a Japanese earthquake relief effort. Every other year the group presents a show at the Gunnison Arts Center, with far-ranging themes.

Heidi has found that the process really brings the generations together. “We share a common interest, and through that, invaluable friendships have been created. We share stories and support each other through both joy and loss.”

The Tuesday Night Quilters group was formed in 1985, in the back of the E & P Sewing Emporium that occupied a building on Gunnison’s Main Street. Ellen Harriman (the ‘E’ of E & P) recalled, “It started as a marketing thing, and as an opportunity for people to gather and have a large space where they could spread out their projects. It provided motivation to actually finish stuff!”

The group has welcomed quilters from their late thirties up to 85 years old, both local and part-time residents. COVID-19 suspended their gatherings, but they still touch base every Tuesday evening by Zoom, sharing their stories and projects.

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Quilts can be wholly sewn by an individual or can be a combination of panels, each contributed by someone different.

When the quilt top is complete, a backing is then selected and the two are stitched together with a layer of batting in between.

In the olden days this was all done by hand, an incredibly time-consuming process.

Around the 1970s, machine quilting was recognized as an acceptable alternative, and today many people either own or use the finishing services of someone who owns a long-arm quilting machine. This special sewing machine makes handling such large pieces of fabric more manageable.

Heidi Duryea owns one of these, and she sews about three to five quilts a week for people. After the fabric is quilted together, it’s then returned to its crafter for the final steps of adding binding. Amazingly, a large finished quilt can hold up to $1,000 worth of materials and represent an equal (if not more) number of hours!

Of course, that isn’t always the case.

There are as many types of quilts as there are memories and stories behind them. Sarka Shull, a local seamstress, decided to use only free and hand-me-down materials in her creations. She loves knowing exactly where

the pieces come from: “It’s all about the memories.” She has crafted several quilts out of her two sons’ old t-shirts (some of which they even inherited from other families) and another out of a box of jeans someone gifted her. For Sarka, like so many others, sewing and the creative process are relaxing and rewarding, as well as a tie to her past. She grew up in Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic and Slovakia) in the ‘70s and ‘80s, when there wasn’t a free market economy there. Goods and choices were limited, so if you wanted your clothes to be different, you had to sew them! This freewheeling spirit has carried over into her projects today.

Several women expressed their concern that quilting might be a dying art, relegated in people’s minds to little old ladies or the generic, inexpensive pieces that come from China. But there is a vibrant and caring community sewing away here in the Gunnison Valley. In a county of extreme athletes, they embody a different kind of extreme: patience, community, creativity, love. They cut stuff up and then bring the pieces back to life and purpose. They carry on a tradition that runs through generations.

They serve as the guardians of memories and the stitchers of stories.

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WILD DIPS Soak, shiver, sparkle. Repeat daily.

By Leath Tonino

Like so many great difficult rewarding bizarre obsessions, this one started innocently, almost sneakily – without fanfare and thus without me realizing anything special was afoot.

The next 120 days of my life are about to take a turn for the cold, for the shivery? Just because I’m stripping naked way back in Baxter Basin, tiptoeing across a crusty spring snowbank, and doing two quick pushups in a swirling, 18-inch-deep eddy? I’m hot, that’s all. Been hiking all morning. There’s no commitment here, no

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pressure, nothing but spontaneity and joy and the year’s first swim and – oh sweet merciful crap!—the worst brain freeze in the history of humankind.

Think again, bud.

By accepting the invitation of that crystalline subalpine eddy, and by relaxing on a smooth flat rock after – smoking pipe tobacco, adjusting a topographic map to shade my pale, burnable nether regions, tingling at the cellular level (nay, the mitochondrial level) with exuberant aliveness – I unwittingly embarked upon a

summer-defining project. In over my head, as the saying goes.

The following day (oh sweet merciful...)

I managed an eight-second bath beneath Gunsight Bridge. Then it was a Long Lake cannonball. Then another Long Lake. Then a muck-floored, willow-walled chamber inside the Slate River’s labyrinthine wetlands.

Come Friday evening, I’d achieved six daily soakings in a row. A gauntlet had been thrown down, a challenge embraced.

Saturday. Low fifties, gray rain splattering Coal Creek.

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Once more unto the breach!

Three summers out from that inaugural Baxter Basin plunge, I’m still going strong, and now the project has a nickname: Wild Dips. There’s a single rule, an elegantly simple mandate: Every day, regardless of weather or my own wimpiness, I must submerge myself – a Baptist-style baptism, zero Christians, one nude pagan – in a creek, river, pond, lake, marsh or similarly untamed waterbody. I typically vary my dipping sites, using the project as a springboard to local exploration (though repeats are allowed). If I miss a day, I’m required to dip twice the next day at a pair of distinct sites, no exceptions (rarely do I miss a day). Eventually, in September or early October, fearful of inducing a heart attack, I abruptly quit.

Leaves fly. Snow falls. And then, in May or June, with a hot morning hike – my streak begins anew.

I’ve heard countless authors (E. B. White of Charlotte’s Web fame, for instance) insist that if you wait around for “perfect” conditions – quiet house, inspiration, zippier coffee – you will fail to write a sentence. I.e. you have to force the issue of composition.

The same could be said for summer at 8,888 feet in the Rockies. Summer? What is this

summer of which you speak? A childhood pal from Vermont passed through one July, and after waking up in my yard with a frost-coated sleeping bag, he furrowed his brow and asked me, “So, like, you don’t have summer, huh?”

“Nah, we do,” I replied, “but it’s, um, unique. If you’re swaying in a hammock, wearing a Hawaiian shirt, hair damp from a dip, hey, it’s got to be summer, right?”

Okay, but there’s more to this pastime than merely conjuring the season against its will. A few paragraphs ago I referred to myself as a pagan, a word initially employed to designate those subjects of the Roman Empire who practiced polytheism, who revered a plethora of gods. The etymology is interesting – Latin paganus (“villager, rustic”), from pagus (“country district”) – and seems to point directly at this remote valley in the Elk Mountains.

I’m wary of wilderness-is-my-temple talk, so please don’t misunderstand when I offer that the fiftyish dipping sites I frequent – a micro-waterfall at treeline in Rustlers Gulch, an irrigation ditch edging Town Ranch, the gamut – smack of the spiritual. I don’t mean they are metaphysical entities, nor do I mean they are loci of

innate religious power. (To label X sacred is to effectively desacralize Y and Z.) I only mean that they receive my attention, my devotional ablutions, and that this imbues them with a mysterious significance. Quite literally (due to the shallow character of most Crested Butte swimming holes), they make me bow.

It’s good to be attentive, to be devoted, to bow. Yet for all this highfalutin’ spiritual mumbo jumbo, ultimately my Wild Dips project is profane, insofar as it’s motivated by a desire for pure raw fun. Granted, not the fun of sipping cocktails on a deck at sunset, but fun nonetheless – what endurance freaks and climbers with bloody knuckles term Type II Fun. The fun of painful physical engagement. The fun of suffering and suffering’s relief.

Reflecting on the pleasure I derive from (oh sweet merciful...) the worst brain freeze in the history of the world, the image that arises in my mind, oddly, isn’t of the infamous Blizzard Dip or the infamous Sick-with-a-Fever Dip or the infamous Tarn-at-13,700-Feet Dip. Instead, what I see is my two-year-old niece and her best friend, a cornflower-blue stuffy, Sparkle Bear.

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glitters, as though the Chinese factory workers who assembled him had access to industrial-grade fairy dust.

Sparkle Bear. The moniker is likewise apt for me, a gentleman who becomes semi-feral during the summer – who extracts himself from a murky puddle or an aquamarine pool, packs the tobacco pipe, shades his pale, burnable nether regions with a topographic map, and reclines into the shimmer and shine of his body, the environment, everything.

Last summer, when my niece visited Crested Butte, I explained that her beloved ursine friend isn’t so different from us: We, too, can feel our skin glitter, our cells and organelles tingle, our souls giggle and shout and screech and sing.

She looked at me like this was totally obvious (which I suppose it is), then she reached up and grabbed my hand, smooshing Sparkle Bear between our palms. Like that, the three of us strolled over to Totem Pole Park, waded into the water fully dressed, and splashed each other until giddily saturated.

A day later it rained and, of course, we did the same.

Once more unto the breach!

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RUNNING DOWN CANCER For the Living Journeys Athlete Corps, the intensity of racing takes on even greater meaning – because they’re running, skiing or cycling to support neighbors facing cancer.

By Patrick Exley O’Neill

Crested Butte has a gritty history of miners, ranchers and scrappy athletes.

Since the late 1800s, the Gunnison Valley has lived an ongoing story of boom and bust, struggle and triumph, soaring joy and crushing tragedy. Since my arrival on a snowy November in 1986 at age 22, I’ve come to one conclusion. I’m here to stay.

Why? La gente...the people. Crested Butte has always been a tightly knit community. We stand together in our shared triumphs and disasters. We celebrate historic characters like skiing mail carrier Al Johnson – and modern heroes like World Champion steeplechase runner Emma Coburn and Olympic half-pipe giant Aaron Blunck. But we also stand behind seven of our fellows who lost almost everything in a Christmas 2020 fire at the legendary Gers house. The town simply rallies for those who need our help. As my dear friend and longtime native

Emma Vosburg, Pat O’Neill and Jack Linehan at the finish of the Grand Traverse.

Joel Vosburg

Rudy Rozman told me two years ago when “Our Captain” Paul Redden was in his final days at age 91, “Pat, this has always been the Crested Butte way. We keep our heads low and help those who need help...with no need to be recognized or given anything in return.”

Amen, Mr. Rozman.

But, Rudy, after my 28 years as a public servant at the Crested Butte Community School, what now? “Easy. Keep your head low; help others.” Boom. I have the Old Timers’ Road Map.

Okay, Joel Vosburg and Rosie Catmur, two old friends of mine, and Mikaela Berglund Simoens, a former student who survived cancer during her Crested Butte Middle School years, are all on the Living Journeys board of directors. Julie Laird is the new executive director. I’m in! Living Journeys is a local non-profit that supports people with cancer and their families in

Gunnison County. Are you kidding me?

I get the honor and privilege to be part of an organization that makes and delivers meals; provides financial grants; helps with transportation, lodging and medical bills; provides counseling for those with cancer and their families; hosts support groups focused on impacted children, caregivers and grieving; and puts on incredible Living Journeys events like the Summit Hike. Put me in, Coach Julie.

Now, let me fast forward from my first Living Journeys board meeting in September 2019.

January 6, 2020. 5:30 a.m. Snowy, cold, dark morning. Ruth’s Road, Crested Butte.

Tacoma truck. Lights on. My former student and new neighbor, Emma Vosburg, throws pink climbing skins onto her race skis. Boom!

Emma is gone like a possessed spirit toward the base area.

Time for morning climbs for Vosburg.

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Time to get ready for winter Elk Mountains Grand Traverse #22, the yearly, 40-mile pilgrimage to our sister town of Aspen. Emma is racing in 2020 for something much bigger than her finish time...our beloved Living Journeys clients. Emma is raising awareness and funds for those in our valley who are living daily with cancer. On Emma’s watch, no one in the valley will face cancer alone.

Emma Vosburg unknowingly becomes Living Journeys Athlete #1. The Original Gangsta.

Inspired by Emma’s incredible efforts, I sign up for IMTUF 100 in McCall, Idaho, on September 12, 2020. IMTUF 100 is a 106mile running race with more than 22,000 feet of climbing. For my tenth 100-mile running race, I “celebrate” by making my event a Living Journeys fundraiser.

I’m stoked for race day. But by mile 78, I am suffering. Dehydration, raw feet, cold, chills, twisted guts. I’m on the brink of my first DNF.

Bing! I receive a divine and timely text from Laci Roberts Wright, a dear friend of Living Journeys, diagnosed in 2017.

Laci, my hero. The text: “I can’t sleep until you finish. Your courage and strength are limitless, O’Neill. Kick some ass!” So, what do I do? I endure. I endure just like Living Journeys clients endure through radiation, chemotherapy, hair loss, nausea, fatigue, weight loss, immunotherapy, endless doctor visits, towering bills and terrified family members.

No, I do more than endure. Laci’s text makes me weightless, inspired and joyous.

I run my fastest pace in the last 26 miles.

At mile 90, I have a life-changing epiphany.

“Winning is not wanting to win any more, Patrick. Winning is making sure others win.” On this night near McCall, we all win – Living Journeys clients, caregivers, family members, staff members, board members, donors and volunteers. We win, and I inadvertently and humbly become LJAC Athlete #2.

Welcome the Living Journeys Athlete Corps.

During the October 2020 Living Journeys board meeting, the Corps was spontaneously born. How many athletes?

Five. How many events in 2021? One each.

Who? Cam Smith, Laci Wright, Dustin Simoens, Stevie Kremer and Jack Linehan.

Some of the most humble, talented, scrappy and accomplished athletes to ever live in the Gunnison Valley. AKA: The LJ Dream Team.

Cam Smith, Crested Butte’s top endurance athlete, is the perennial Grand

Traverse (GT) triple-crown winner. Cam also races on the World Cup in Europe in ski mountaineering. Cam headed up the LJAC events in late March of 2021 with winter Grand Traverse #23, pairing up with Tom Goth. The two set a blazing course record. But Cam didn’t just push his personal résumé; he skied down cancer.

Next up. Athlete #4. Laci Roberts Wright, the LJAC captain. Bad-ass moto rider, skier, runner. Laci and Stevie Kremer were partners in the 2007 winter Grand Traverse. Laci will race a running event with Stevie this summer, setting a fundraising goal of $17,000. Seventeen? Yes, as in 2017, the year our captain was diagnosed with cancer. Laci lives with cancer today. Laci is the LJAC’s beacon of light, hope and tenacity.

LJAC Athlete #5: Dustin “The Wind” Simoens. Originally from Fruita, Colorado, Dustin defines Western Slope grit and the gutsy mantra: “Grinders find a way.” Dustin will be running his second High Five 100 out of Lake City on August 13. The High Five is more grueling than Hardrock 100 in that it includes five 14,000-foot peaks and 40,000 feet of climbing. I’m sure Dustin will draw strength from the two main cancer survivors in his life, his wife Mikaela and his father Kelly.

Athlete #6: Elementary school teacher, middle school counselor and Super Mom meets international running and skimo celebrity in Stevie Kremer. From 2013 to 2015, Stevie was the top female runner on the European Sky Running Series. Alongside Kilian Jornet atop the podium, Stevie was listed as top female trail runner in the world.

Look for Stevie’s and Laci’s running event this summer.

Lucky LJAC Athlete #7: Jack Linehan.

Besides winning the Titan Award with Emma Vosburg in 2009, Jack was the captain of his track team at Boston College. Jack has podium finishes in the winter GT. Jack is now living in San Francisco and has turned his endless energy and passion to road cycling. Look for Jack this fall in a northern California cycling race.

These are some incredible athletes. But all five athletes know, without a doubt, that a local child with cancer is ALWAYS the most important person in the room. The Corps’ mission is simple: “Keep your head low and help locals with cancer.” When our clients win, we win.

As long as the Corps is around, NO ONE in the Gunnison Valley will have to fight cancer alone.

Let a True Local Guide You Home.

TISHA McELROY SWAN Broker Associate

(970) 209-1998 cell (970) 349-5007 office Tisha.Swan@cbmp.com

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Pat: “I asked our amazing 2021 athletes how their athletic events have changed now that they are racing for a life-or-death cause.”

Cam: “Racing for Living Journeys makes it about all of us. The omnipresent spirit of our clients will demand the best out of me. I hope to rally a community of supporters that empowers Living Journeys to strive toward our mission. We ski together, work together and fight cancer together!”

Stevie: “It gives me purpose. I run to stay healthy both mentally and physically, but I realize now that I used to do it for myself. I’m doing it for a much more important reason. Now, the finish line isn’t just when the clock stops; it’s when we have successfully helped and supported families living with cancer. We are all racing together.”

Jack: “To me, endurance racing is the purest expression of human potential. Now, I realize that racing for the fearless men and women and children of Living Journeys is the purest expression of love.”

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Laci: “Racing for LJ is so much bigger than me as an individual.

The pain becomes the reward for our ability to get out there through movement and support our community members who need it most. We gain energy in each stride from those family members in the Gunnison Valley who are in the midst of their cancer journeys. That is what moves me.”

Dustin: “Racing against the clock and other athletes is fun. Racing against cancer means war.”

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Crested Butte 970.349.5023

Denver 303.399.4564

Steamboat Springs 970.879.9222

Telluride 970.728.3359

Vail 970.949.5500

interior landscapes that delight the senses

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SUMMER LOVIN’ In search of connection, intimacy, sustenance? Perhaps our deepest relationship should be with the land.

By Molly Murfee

As I lay on my back in the alpine meadow, my eyes slide languorously over the body of the mountain cirque; the sunshine, so bright, so clear, feels like the golden breath of the sky gods on my bare skin. The land’s darker crevices cradle the clinging remains of a season of snow, its more open terraces flushed with the deep feathery greens of the wizened sub-alpine fir and Engelmann spruce, twisted and gnarled by the creaking cold and shattering winds. A hawk circles effortlessly through the invisible spirals of air overhead. He calls to me a couple of times, dipping his wings in balance with the wind, teasing before disappearing behind the OhBe-Joyful ridge.

Beauty. Tenacity. Serenity. Perspective.

I inhale deeply, letting out a satisfied sigh that ripples the surface of the tiny lake and the ice lacing its edges like a negligee, then get up, gather the clothes I had shed from the heated embrace of the thin atmosphere, turn my back and walk away.

Raynor Czerwinski

No matter how much the coming, there is always the leaving. I know I will return, probably sooner rather than later, the craving is so deep; but I don’t know exactly when, and the wait is an ache.

I wonder, at times, how realistic my love affair with high places is, my desire to wander above treeline, breathing the spicy lemon scent of the spruce-fir forest, tracing my lips and cheeks with the powder-soft heads of familiar flowers. I would be there every minute of every day if I could. I long to feel the rising gray mammoth peaks press on top of me, to slip through alpine meadows greener than the most verdant hills of Ireland.

I remember my first big break-up with a landscape I loved more than anything I could remember, a place that had allowed me to tiptoe through its curves with my inquisitive novice travels, replenish its streams with tears of the past, and smile as bright as the varied colors of Indian paintbrush. Time after time an orgy of exquisite splendor. When I was

deep in that landscape’s presence, everything else in the world fell away – the stacks of bills, dreams teetering on the precipice of a desk, threatening to fall in the wastebasket.

Jobs and schedules and deadlines. Gone.

Despite my self-concocted clutter posing as reality, the flowers simply bloomed; the clouds rhythmically mounted together and fell apart in cool rain; the mountains walked, grain by grain, with the wind, over eons and eons. Trivialities ceased to matter in this deepeye gaze.

But I left all of that, to go and be with a man in a place I knew I didn’t like, which certainly, in my mind, had no healing qualities at all. Its landscape just didn’t fit me.

I went to ‘figure out’ the relationship with him, to show I was dedicated to making it work if it was going to, and to ‘reward him’ for his unrelenting persistence in declaring he needed me.

I remember getting in my car, tears gushing down my face as I turned the 117

John Holder

ignition. I watched my beloved mountains for as long as I could in my rearview mirror, until a final turn cleared a forested hill that blocked them from my view. I sobbed for two straight hours, blaring the lonely bluegrass notes from Bela Fleck and Sam Bush, music I first heard in that valley, that seemed to capture its spirit.

I felt as if my heart was splitting in two in a way I had never felt in any other relationship.

It hurt.

It hurt worse than when, three years later, I ended the relationship with the man for whom I’d left those mountains. Leaving him was relatively easy, the proverbial cutting of the ball and chain, and I felt my shoulder blades sprout wings.

Since that time, as life’s roller-coaster has lurched me forward and backward, careening through curves and loops that pinned me to the rails, launching me into surging storms of frustration or anxiety or anger, and blurring my vision in the process, I’ve taken the tranquility of the mountains like medicine.

We spend a lot of time fretting over our human relationships, which are definitively 118

important, but it seems that our approach is all wrong, the subject matter isn’t that all-inclusive, and the perspective tends to be sexist. Books explain why men and women are from different planets and what you can do about it. Popular women’s magazines give candid tips on how to please your man, how to tell if he’s marriage material, how to communicate, how to show your affection through cooking. There are books to help you through periods of disharmony in your relationship and how to keep the love alive.

In the self-help section of the bookstore, there are no books on how to foster a relationship with nature.

Perhaps we haven’t realized the importance this one relationship can have.

In a different section of the bookstore are books on how to climb vertical rock, or where to hike to find the most dramatic waterfall, vista or field of wildflowers. You can sign up with guide services for family hikes, adventure hikes and leisure hikes. You can find books on mountain biking, boating, fishing and hunting.

But how about the connection to what we’re moving through in these experiences?

Or better yet, what we live inside of? The cleansing breath of the trees, the nurturing soil beneath our feet, the celestial fire of the sun that beckons new growth, the winds of change – even through the windows – are our most consistent presence, and our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual sustenance. We are in constant companionship, if we would only pay attention. With the raven, the ant, the sparrow.

Our most important relationship may not be with our partners, parents, lovers or even children. It may be, rather, with the land.

We celebrate birthdays, anniversaries and national holidays with great exuberance. Do we forget to honor the first flower blooming in the spring, the new moon each month, the first warm rain after a long cold winter?

In all our striving to experience the next new and exotic place, adventuring constantly to the unknown, do we forget to connect with the place that holds us every single day,

appreciating her own inherent beauty, her delicacy of nuances and moods? Where are our celebration and ceremony with our home places? Our intimacy and knowledge? Our familiarity.

Our discordant society is riddled with stress-related disorders, heart attacks, depression and violence. I cannot help but wonder how our disconnect with the land is striking the wrong keys. We don’t flow with the rhythms of the seasons or keep time by the sun and moon, instead imposing our false environments of electricity, heat and eternal electronic contact to a system greater than ourselves or anything we could concoct. When we feel out of whack, we analyze our relationships, our jobs and our health, which is correct, but how often do we consider our severance from the very thing giving us life? When we are frustrated by finances, perhaps the hole we really need to fill is the one we dug when we divorced ourselves from the wild.

We are forgetting our tender refuge, our place of healing, our rooted home. Our bodies and minds are craving the smell of flowers, the feeling of our toes as we run them through cool grass. We’ve lost literal touch with simplicity, instead fabricating an increasingly complicated and pressure-loaded society that obscures our vision of what’s truly important.

I am working in my office, unconsciously listening to the roar of cars outside, the whirr of the refrigerator, the hum of my computer. I keep getting up, I squirm, I feel itchy and agitated. Problems fall around me like letters thrown in the air, muddling my sight. I feel overwhelmed, unable to take a break because of my perception of having too much to do.

A great-horned owl calls me to attention through my open window. I stop. I realize I don’t know what phase the moon is in. I open my calendar – half moon. Enough to lay that magical blue gauze over the hills, casting shadows the color of sapphires.

A thin silver sliver is just rising over the buttressed flanks of the pyramidal mountain guarding the town. It’s been a while since I’ve taken a moon bath, stripping off my clothes, allowing the light to envelop me like an ocean of bioluminescence before diving into some pool of water. The feeling of moonlight saturating my skin.

The owl calls again. Yup. Screw this stupid schedule, these human-imposed tasks.

I close my computer screen, grab a jacket and a towel, and head out the door.

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Summer 2021 events JUNE 4 5

6, 13, 20, 27 16 17-19 21-25 23 25 26 27 29 TBD

CB Mountain Bike Association (CBMBA) kickoff party National Trails Day, CBMBA

Tracy Schwartz

Farmers Market, 100 block of Elk Avenue Ride with the CBMBA board

Watercolor Symposium, Center for the Arts (CFTA) Wild Minds Youth Writing Camp, CFTA Wednesday Workday, CBMBA

Crested Butte Chainless World Championship

ArtWalk at Crested Butte studios and galleries

Black & White Ball, Crested Butte Mountain Heritage Museum Public Policy Forum (PPF): Biden’s National Security Priorities KBUT Fish Fry

Rebecca Ofstedahl Sandra Mabry

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Raynor Czerwinski

JULY 23 ongoing

Crested Butte Music Festival (CBMF) through Sept. 27

3

Center’s Kinder Padon Gallery opening

1, 8, 15, 22, 29 3

6, 13, 20, 27 9-18

10 10 11, 18, 25 16-17 17 19-25 20-21 21 23 24 26 26-30 29 30 30-Aug. 1 31

Thursday Farmers Market, Crank’s Plaza Chalk Walk, CFTA

Public Policy Forum speakers

Crested Butte Wildflower Festival Ride with the CBMBA board

Starry Evening, CB Land Trust dinner/auction fundraiser Farmers Market, 100 block of Elk Avenue

Crested Butte Land Trust Caddis Cup Fly Fishing ArtWalk at Crested Butte studios and galleries Crested Butte Wine & Food Festival, CFTA Acrylic painting with Beth Zink, CFTA Wednesday Workday, CBMBA

Classical Concert & Movie Experience, CBMF

Grin & Bear It Trail Run, CB Nordic Center (CBNC)

Classical music/lecture, Mt. CB wedding garden, CBMF Bluegrass & Beyond Camp, CBMF

Progressive Rafting Experience with music, CBMF Concert with Singer Songwriters, CBMF

Crested Butte Arts Festival, CB Community School Painting & Performance, CBMF

Constance Mahoney

John Holder

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Summer 2021 events

AUGUST 1, 8, 15, 22, 29

Farmers Market, 100 block of Elk Avenue

2-6

Colorado Gypsy Jazz Camp, CBMF

2, 30 3, 10, 17 5

5, 12, 19, 26 7 7 14 18

Sally Miner Lecture Series, CBMF Public Policy Forum speakers

Django Jeeping with a concert, CBMF

Thursday Farmers Market, Crank’s Plaza

ArtWalk at Crested Butte studios & galleries Gypsy Jazz Concert, CBMF

Wednesday Workday & volunteer party, CBMBA Ride with the CBMBA board

SEPTEMBER 2

Blue Mesa Pontoon Concert Experience, CBMF

4, 5

Summer Grand Traverse mountain bike & run, CBNC

4 5, 12, 19, 26 6 8 11 TBD 24-Oct. 3 25 25 25 25-26

27

Slightly Experimental Concert, CBMF

Farmers Market, 100 block of Elk Avenue

Classical Jeeping with hilltop performance, CBMF Wednesday Workday, CBMBA

Mt. Crested Butte Chili & Beer Festival Vinotok autumn harvest festival Crested Butte Film Festival

ArtWalk at Crested Butte studios & galleries Emma Coburn’s Elk Run 5K

Mariachi Block Party, CBMF

ARTumn Festival, downtown Crested Butte Sally Miner Lecture Series, CBMF

Petar Dopchev

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Petar Dopchev

Mary Schmidt

OCTOBER 1-3

3, 10

Sonya Hanna

Crested Butte Film Festival continues

Farmers Market, 100 block of Elk Avenue

Ongoing events: Rocky Mountain

Biological Lab, Trailhead Children’s Museum, Stepping Stones

Children’s Center, Crested Butte

Mountain Bike Association, Crested Butte Mountain Heritage Museum (historic town tours) and Center

for the Arts (culinary, literary and arts events). Updated calendar: gunnisoncrestedbutte.com.

Raynor Czerwinski

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dining open

Diningopportunities

Nathan Bilow

Thank You, Eric!

For more than four decades, the Wooden Nickel and Eric Roemer have been loyal advertisers in the Crested Butte Magazine. Now that Eric has sold the Nickel, we want to thank him for choosing our magazine and being such a steadfast supporter. We wish him luck as he ventures into retirement. Hope Ruth is ready!

MJ, Sandy, Chris, Steve and Keitha

Rebecca Ofstedahl

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Give credit where credit is due, the Noodle is the place to be. Featuring authentic Italian cuisine and a wine list to match, it’s obvious that the recipe for success lies in the kitchen at the Gourmet Noodle. Stop in and see what makes Marchitelli’s Gourmet Noodle one of Crested Butte’s top restaurants.

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Michael Marchitelli - Owner Marchitelli’s Gourmet Noodle

A once was, and is, a former owner of a restaurant.

Photo James Ray Spahn

Young at heart but slightly older, former restaurant mogul.

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PHOTO FINISH

Constance Mahoney

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WORLD CLASS ORTHOPEDICS BACKED BY THE STRENGTH OF GUNNISON VALLEY HEALTH

excellence. together.

Rhett Griggs, M.D. and Blake Clifton, M.D. have teamed up with Gunnison Valley Health to deliver a comprehensive suite of orthopedic services that are centered around you.

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