Crested Butte Magazine - Winter 2021/22

Winter 2021-2022 Complimentary

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CONTENTS w21/22 SHORTIES 10 Six decades of ups and downs by Sandy Fails

The Crested Butte Ski Area debuted in the winter of 1961-62. It has launched countless skiers and countless stories in its 60 years.

14 Picturing this place by Sandy Fails

While building a global career, Nathan Bilow has photographed almost every corner of Crested Butte, which he showcases in a new guestbook.

18 A tail of hair-oism by Karen Janssen

While most of us fight and fuss with our manes, local hair harvesters share their tresses to transform others’ lives.

22 A better ‘easy way down’ by Katherine Nettles

A new Peachtree chairlift and re-graded slopes give beginner skiers a gentler place to learn.

24 One person’s trash = another person’s decking

by Sandy Fails

Instead of dumping your old television, Tupperware or t-shirts in the landfill, you can now put them on the Recycle Train.

28 Winter play, outside the box by Stephanie Maltarich

We really needed to get outside during the pandemic. The Met Rec District and its winter recreation partners helped make that happen.

FIRST PERSON CONNECTIONS 95 ‘River above the river’ by Leath Tonino

Slipping into the Oh Be Joyful flow – on skinny skis.

99 What you might miss by Cara Guerrieri

Found in the old ranch shop: a pipe wrench, a funny memory and a little lump in the throat.

103 Spring flux by Cosmo Langsfeld

Living on the edge of the wilds, this writer finds solace in nature’s quiet currents.

108 A tribute to the trees by Polly Oberosler

For air, water, shelter, solace: in so many ways, we are tied to the forests.

7 Editor’s note | 54 Photo break | 114 Events 123 Dining and lodging | 128 Photo finish What happens when you fling boiling water into sub-zero air? Evaporation, condensation and some strange photos.

(Disclaimer: Do your research before you fling boiling water!)

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FEATURES 34 All rolled into one by Sandra Cortner

76 Nature isn’t the only artist here by Beth Buehler

Whether you call it povitica, potica or Slovenian nut bread, this sweet, fragrant mainstay of old Crested Butte requires hours of work and “a handful of love.”

40 Powered by ‘tree juice’ by Stephanie Maltarich

A foot or bike tour of Crested Butte’s dispersed public art shows the community’s creative side.

82 Old lift chairs find new lives by Katherine Nettles

From old family traditions, Krista Powers found a new way to fuel.

Other athletes are catching on.

The last classic double chairlift was removed from Crested Butte’s ski slopes this year. But many of those refurbished chairs are still swinging -- in backyards and even living rooms.

46 Small but mighty Snodgrass by Karen Janssen

88 The dynamic & fickle lives of water by George Sibley

Over the seasons, over the decades, Snodgrass Mountain has remained a steady refuge – for wildlife, wildflowers and wild-seeking recreationists.

Solid, liquid, vapor, repeat: the valley’s life-giving water spends remarkably little time in the faucet-flowing form we take for granted.

60 Tales from behind the bar by Janet Weil

118 Eating, drinking and being merry, then to now

Eric Roemer’s history has been intertwined with the Wooden Nickel’s for four decades. After the celebrated tavern sold recently, he shared some favorite memories.

by Jacob Rothman A local museum exhibit looks at Crested Butte’s culture through its food and libations.

68 Ski jumps and cattle fences by Brian Levine

The Rozman Hill Ski Area (1949-1960) ushered in a lively ski era for the valley, but as the snow melted each spring, it turned back into John and Mary Rozman’s cattle ranch.

Constance Mahoney

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Inspire your passion...

Vol. XXXXIII, No. 2 Published semi-annually by Crested Butte Publishing & Creative PUBLISHERS Steve Mabry & Chris Hanna EDITOR Sandy Fails ADVERTISING DIRECTOR MJ Vosburg

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LAYOUT AND DESIGN Chris Hanna ADVERTISING DESIGN Keitha Kostyk WRITERS Beth Buehler Stephanie Maltarich Sandra Cortner Katherine Nettles Sandy Fails Polly Oberosler Cara Guerrieri Jacob Rothman Karen Janssen George Sibley Cosmo Langsfeld Leath Tonino Brian Levine Janet Weil PHOTOGRAPHERS Nathan Bilow Nolan Blunck Trevor Bona Sophia Chudacoff Sandra Cortner Raynor Czerwinski Dusty Demerson Petar Dopchev Don Emmert

Mark Ewing Xavier Fané John Holder Constance Mahoney Rebecca Ofstedahl Mark Robbins Mary Schmidt Tracy Schwartz Lydia Stern

MOUNTAINEER SQUARE 218/220

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Winter 2021-2022 Complimentary

LUXURY SLOPESIDE WESTWALL PENTHOUSE

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COVER PHOTO Constance Mahoney ONLINE crestedbuttemagazine.com E-MAIL sandyfails56@gmail.com ADVERTISING mj@crestedbuttemagazine.com Copyright 2021, Crested Butte Publishing.

No reproduction of contents without authorization

by Crested Butte Publishing & Creative.

Editor’s note

Trevor Bona

On purpose

Years ago, I found myself working day after day at the front desk of my family’s inn, frustrated because I felt my “higher calling” was to write. I whined to a wise friend. But instead of offering sympathy, she offered a challenge. “Right now, it seems your calling is to be at the hotel front desk. What if you could make that a higher experience, even a spiritual one?”

After I recovered from not getting the “oh poor you” response I expected, I tried on her dare: front desk clerking as a spiritual practice. At first I treated it a bit flippantly.

I imagined showing up for my day shift in billowing monk robes. Yeah, and I could greet guests with the chime of ancient singing bowls or a riff of celestial organ music instead of the chit-chit-chit of the credit card machine. But seriously, what the

heck, I could give it a try.

The next day, I paid extra attention to our newly arriving guests, often edgy from truck-stop coffee and full bladders.

Beneath the road buzz, they were eager for replenishment from urban angst and workaday stresses. I tried to consciously care about each person who walked in the door. How could I help them set down their worries and deeply renew in a place I found so healing? Could I make a sacred act out of offering strangers a hot tub towel or a perfect-for-them Nordic trail suggestion?

Well, yes, as it turned out. I ended the next few shifts more energized than weary. I still itched to write (and here I am, writing!).

But in the meantime, overlaying a sense of purpose, even though it started somewhat facetiously, turned what could be considered 7

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Editor’s note a menial job into a meaningful one.

The service/hospitality sector dominates our local culture. These can be tough jobs; so many of us feel overworked, undervalued and besieged by yearnings toward our skis, studies or poems-in-progress. But I started imagining. What if all of us in Crested Butte hospitality/service jobs accepted my friend’s work-as-spiritual-practice challenge? I envisioned legions of us, with our imaginary saintly vestments draping down to our Sorels, steering buses or slinging beers with transcendent love and presence.

Okay, that also sounds a bit flippant, but, in truth, living in Crested Butte does offer us two higher purposes: 1) sharing this place with others who seek its magic, and 2) understanding, valuing and protecting what makes it magic.

As I pretended to overlay deep purpose onto my front desk clerking – and then realized it was actually happening – I noticed how some of our hotel guests changed during their stays in Crested Butte. A formerly frazzled mom and her formerly sullen adolescent son breezed in laughing, cheeks rosy from romping on the slopes. An elder couple walked in holding hands, romance rekindled by an alpenglow stroll. People teased and smiled more, their shoulders ever looser, their greetings to me more genuine. When they checked out, I liked to think they were returning to their daily routines a little happier and clearer, maybe a bit kinder to the people around them.

In my mind, I extended my friend’s experiment to Crested Butte’s visitors: i.e. tourism as a sacred practice. Here’s how I envisioned that: seeing and honoring the deeper beauties of this place, then being transformed by those qualities without diminishing them. Connecting, not just consuming. So, esteemed guests, you’re hereby invited to don your imaginary robes and join the challenge.

Yes, it’s a stretch. Sometimes we’re cranky; sometimes we’re oblivious. But I dare you to give it a try. We are, after all, in Crested Butte – a fine place to connect to wildness, beauty and our own higher natures.

—Sandy Fails, editor

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rise riseand andglide glide bringing bringingdreams dreamshome home

Six decades of

ups and downs

By Sandy Fails Then and now: Crested Butte’s ski area in the fall of 1970, and a current skier’s view of the base area.

Sandra Cortner

The Crested Butte Ski Area debuted in the winter of 1961-62. It has launched countless skiers and countless stories in its 60 years.

In early winter 1961, a borrowed rope tow pulled the first official skiers up the slope of the new Crested Butte Ski Area. It’s been a rich and sometimes bumpy ride since then.

In 1960, Kansas-born ski enthusiast Dick Eflin and college buddy Fred Rice had big dreams when they purchased the Malensek Ranch on Crested Butte Mountain and applied to develop skiing there. The U.S. Forest Service issued a special-use permit the following year, and the new resort opened to lift-served skiing for the winter of 196162 with a generator, a T-bar and a rope tow borrowed from the old Rozman Hill ski area. A J-bar soon replaced the rope tow.

In what now seems like an ironic pairing, an early-1960s issue of Vogue Magazine described Crested Butte and Vail (which opened in December 1962) as two new “in resorts where everybody who’s anybody is going.” The accompanying photos showed svelte skiers in fashionable stretch pants.

The two “in” resorts went very different directions because 10

Dusty Demerson

they came from very different roots. By the time Vail Village was built to support the new Vail ski area, Crested Butte had been a strong, feisty community for 80 years and multiple generations.

The people who had settled here in the mining days, many from the Old Country, weathered tough circumstances through strength of character and community, and they passed on that legacy. Dick Eflin spent many hours around kitchen tables getting to know the people,

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and a handful of oldtimers went to work for the new ski area, like Rudy Sedmak, John Krizmanich and Tony Gallowich. Locals referred to the Keystone chairlift as “Rudy’s lift.” The ski area drew more flannel and denim than haute couture and was hardly a magnet for “everybody who’s anybody.”

The Crested Butte Ski Area wobbled into bankruptcy in the mid 1960s. In 1970, the Callaway and Walton families brought fresh enthusiasm and capital, expanding the ski terrain and lift system and renaming it Crested Butte Mountain Resort (CBMR).

Three decades later, as the ski area once again needed refurbishing, Tim and Diane Mueller purchased it in 2004, bringing needed capital improvements. In 2018, Vail Resorts acquired the ski area as part of a multi-resort deal.

That announcement stunned a community that touted itself as the antonym to Vail. For a small, non-cookie-cutter town, being interdependent with a huge corporate entity didn’t sit well. But most nightmares failed to materialize. Being part of Vail Resorts’ international Epic Pass drew skiers to Crested Butte from distant points, but not the stampeding hordes people feared. Vail Resorts focused on ski area improvements and didn’t try to gentrify the town; the more Crested Butte maintained its character, the more it added something unique to the constellation of Epic Pass offerings. For the most part, the town kept its community, personality and scale.

The resort and town are still inextricably tied: an internationally notable ski area, and a charming and authentic, old but young-spirited town three miles down the road. Neither would be the same without the other. Most people who arrived in the last six decades wouldn’t be here without the ski area, though some no longer hit the slopes that initially drew them here. This landmark 60th birthday is worthy of our celebration.

Vail Resorts will honor the anniversary “and the grit of our founders” with events throughout the season, said Will Shoemaker, CBMR communications manager. As of press time, the resort had not yet announced specific plans.

It’s been quite a journey from Dick Eflin’s first visit with the Malenseks to discuss the purchase of their ranchland at the base of Crested Butte Mountain. Now 15 lifts serve 121 trails across 1,547 acres of ski terrain. And the mountain of stories born on those slopes just keeps getting bigger.

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Picturing

this place

By Sandy Fails Nathan Bilow with his new photo book, Guests in Paradise.

Don Emmert

While building a global career, Nathan Bilow has photographed almost every corner of Crested Butte, which he showcases in a new guestbook.

When Nathan Bilow decided to put together a Crested Butte photo/guestbook, he knew having too few images would NOT be an issue. Nathan has lived in and photographed Crested Butte since the 1970s – when he was in his early twenties, shooting film he then developed in his darkroom or mailed away to be turned into slides.

He has taken hundreds of thousands of Crested Butte images for local newspapers and magazines, for nonprofits and businesses, and eventually for Associated Press (AP) and international photo agencies and publications. Even as his photographic scope has stretched around the globe, his lens has found almost every corner of this town.

Two characteristics have made Nathan unusually suited for an adventurous photographic life. First, the visual world is his native language; “This is the way I speak,” he said, holding up his camera.

Second, he grew from a childhood gymnast and cyclist into a versatile athlete who could ski, climb, scuba dive or bike where other photographers couldn’t. He has taken pictures deep under the sea and while hanging out of a helicopter – “but the most scared I’ve ever 14

been was ice climbing with my buddy, mountain guide Jim Nigro,” he said.

Nathan grew up near Hollywood, in the “valley girls” area just over the hill from the hub of movie making. His mother died when he was five, and young Nathan had freedom to hang out around the movie sets, observing the lighting and composition work of the pros behind the cameras. Wielding an Argus C3 and then a Canon in 1975, he photographed for his junior high and high school yearbooks, learned technical details by selling cameras in a store, and found an elder mentor to instruct him.

Store-bought film was expensive, so Nathan purchased the remainders of bulk-film spools used to shoot movies. He developed the black and white film in a garage darkroom he built with his father, who specialized in remodeling historic structures.

Turning down Los Angeles job offers from the studios and Walt Disney after high school, Nathan traveled in Europe for nine months, then Mexico and Canada, before hitching to Aspen, where his uncle owned the Mother Lode. There he learned to ski, sold photos to Aspen Magazine, and visited a place called Crested Butte. He also honed another skill handy for fledgling photographers: frugal living. He hitchhiked, slept on friends’ couches, and ate from restaurants where he worked.

Partly because he loved bicycling and skiing, Nathan settled in Crested Butte in the mid 1970s. He sometimes lived out of his car,

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Number of Transactions

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Nathan Bilow

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showering at the bathhouse (formerly the famous Sunshine’s Bathhouse) that his father owned for a time.

“I connected with the people and the land first through ranchers like the Niccoli family,” Nathan said. “Without the wonderful people who ranched this land, we wouldn’t have these grand open spaces.”

Everywhere he went, Nathan translated the experience into images. “I would sit down on a bench and watch people go by, study them, and think about how I would capture the scene,” he said. “I thought about contrast, color, softness.”

Shooting for local publications and organizations, from Crested Butte Mountain Resort to the Center for the Arts from its beginning, Nathan learned diversity: “I knew how to photograph people, action, places, things, or a specific moment.”

In 1982, the Associated Press (AP) wire service picked up one of Nathan’s photos of the nascent sport of snowboarding (the first photo of the sport to be published on the wire). He eventually became a prime AP photographer on the Western Slope. “I shot fires, plane crashes, Presidents Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush, Margaret Thatcher, many sports stars, skiing Santas.” His most widely published Crested Butte photo: President Jimmy Carter performing as Carnac the Magnificent for an Adaptive Sports Center fundraiser.

As his boxes of slides and prints grew, Nathan signed with photo agencies, including what became Getty Images. His circle widened: he photographed for the New York Times, National Geographic, Runners World, Sailing and other sports magazines, and for the travel industry. He shot World Cups, the X Games, the America’s Cup and ten Olympic Games. On the local front, he co-published the book The Edge of Paradise in 1990 and marketed cards through Mountain

Impressions.

Nathan’s career took him around the world: Costa Rica, New Caledonia, Oman, Madagascar, the Philippines, Argentina, New Zealand, Norway, China, Borneo, Russia, Africa, Nepal. He became a prime photographer when adventure racing evolved because few photographers had the physical skills needed, from scaling vertical walls to caving.

In Santorini, Greece, for a photo shoot, Nathan met Monica, who became his wife and the mother of his two children, Elior and Naomi. “Elior got my technical side; Naomi my artistic side,” he said.

Nathan has adapted to so many changes over the decades: embracing the digital revolution in photography (no more boxes of slides!), building a nice home (no more living out of a car!), shaping an international career while raising children in a small town, and now seeing those children off to college and the world.

For many years Nathan had been thinking about doing his own book. This year the timing seemed right. He asked Arvin Ramgoolam, co-owner of Townie Books and a sponsor of the project, to write an introduction. The two agreed to focus on valuing and protecting the character and beauty of this place. Before leaving for college, daughter Naomi drew some icons for the book. Nathan narrowed down 3,000 pictures to 300 favorites for graphic artist Keitha Kostyk to work with.

Guests in Paradise is a 144-page guestbook/diary, available through Townie Books and other retailers. The sections – seasons, weddings and culinary – invite people to record their memories in words alongside Nathan’s images. He hopes the photos inspire people to appreciate and take care of the place that has meant so much to him for so much of his life.

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A tail of

hair-oism

By Karen Janssen

Over the years, Lois Rozman has grown and donated more than eight feet of hair to be made into wigs for those with medical conditions involving hair loss.

While most of us fight and fuss with our manes, local hair harvesters share their tresses to transform others’ lives.

Hair. In general, we take it for granted. It grows; we cut it.

Genetics dictate its color, its texture, whether it sticks around or falls out. A lot of folks have mixed relationships with their hair. Those who have straight strands long for curls, those with curls wish for flowing locks. Men who had long ponytails in their youth may look back wistfully as they protect bald pates from the sun. Some folks find hair a pain: they take clippers and get rid of it, or beg their hairdressers to color, curl, straighten or style it. Some keep the same hairdo their whole lives; others experiment constantly. In some cultures, it’s a status symbol. On some heads and faces, it can be a thing of wonder: dreadlocks hanging in ropes down people’s backs, mustaches twirled and waxed to works of art. There are even world records: like the woman who wove 136 pencils into her locks, or the man who fit 101 Afro picks into his, or the intrepid guy who dragged a car more than 300 feet – with his ponytail.

However, detach hair from its natural location on a body and it becomes disgusting. A loose hair in one’s food? Distinctly unpleasant.

Hairs in the bathtub, in the drain, unattached strands haunting our clothes when we’re dressed in our best….

Yet there are those who view unattached hair in a completely different light. It can be a gift like no other, something to transform others’ lives. Lois Rozman is one of those people. For many years, Lois was the Town of Crested Butte’s finance and human resource director. In the fall of 2004, when Diane “Diner” Theaker, the Town’s administrative assistant (“not a good title for the gal who was the face and life blood of Town Hall,” insisted Lois) was diagnosed with 18

Nathan Bilow

breast cancer, a number of employees decided to buzz their heads in solidarity as she underwent her chemo treatment.

“I told Diner I didn’t think I could do that,” recalled Lois, “and that instead I’d do the opposite. I’d grow my hair out long and donate it to an organization that could use it to make wigs for children suffering from hair loss. So I did!” But she didn’t stop there. “I seem to have a God-given talent for growing hair.” Lois laughed. More than 18 years later, Lois has grown and donated her locks eight times.

Locks of Love and Wigs for Kids are the two organizations to which she has sent her ponytails, clean and rubber banded, ready to be crafted into custom hairpieces. Given that the minimum length for a donation varies from 10 to 12 inches, Lois has grown and bestowed approximately eight feet of tresses!

“It all just began with a desire to honor Diner’s amazing spirit and love,” said Lois. “The last time I cut it, I kind of thought it might be the final time, but who knows?”

Lois isn’t the only one in Crested Butte who has shared hair. I pedaled around and took an informal poll at many salons, to see how often it happens. Though not an everyday occurrence, it seems the donators are mostly men and young girls ready for the change that extreme hair removal symbolizes. Older women tend to color or bleach their hair, which precludes a donation. Yours truly cut off and mailed away a long ponytail one Halloween; I remember a few folks thought I was wearing a costume wig, in a kind of ironic twist!

Finn Harrington, a local 12-year-old, had grown his hair for years.

He liked the way it felt, until it became an hour-long ordeal to comb out and take care of. Eventually, when he was 11, the time came for his braids to go. “It was an impressive amount of hair!’’ said Kate, his mom. They’d heard about hair donating and were excited to send his plaits away so another kid could benefit from them. Unfortunately, they were unaware of some of the protocols necessary to make a

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successful donation. “Let this be a cautionary tale,” Kate warned wryly.

“Do a bit of research so you’re sure to meet their requirements.” In any case, Finn underwent a transformation that day.

Change and transformation seem to be the new normal in this pandemic world. Hair has been no exception! Many emerged from quarantine with a surplus of hair. Some folks viewed this pandemic hair as a borderline-annoying predicament, but others realized their newfound abundance could be an opportunity for good. The pandemic “made people want to help other people,” stated Suzanne Chimera, co-founder of Hair We Share, in a recent Washington Post article. When many are struggling financially, they can still give hair. Her organization’s individual hair donor base increased 230 percent once salons began to reopen.

It seems that many, during quarantine, also decided to stop their fight against the oft-dreaded gray. Simply by waiting and doing nothing at all, a lot of folks experienced a makeover! We all pondered a multitude of questions with our new reality: mortality, privilege, what was important. For some, letting the gray grow was empowering. And some saw it as an opportunity to contribute to the greater good. Hair We Share, one of the few charities that accept gray hair donations, saw a large uptick in gifts of that hue.

If you, too, have cultivated a pandemic mane or share Lois’ gift for growing hair, consider donating. Visit www.wigsforkids.org , www.locksoflove.org or www.hairweshare.org. The stigma of hair loss is real, whether it’s from treatments for cancer, the autoimmune disease alopecia or other factors. A hair prosthesis can return a sense of selfconfidence and normalcy to a person’s disrupted life. Lighten the load that hangs from your scalp, and you can leave the salon with a new look and the joy of having made a difference.

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Finn Harrington holding the just-shorn braids he’d intended to donate. (Lesson learned: Read the fine print before you get out the scissors!)

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Photos Nathan Bilow Nathan Bilow

To find out how these retired Peachtree chairs have been repurposed, see story on page 82.

A new Peachtree chairlift and re-graded slopes give beginner skiers a gentler place to learn.

Skiers have long joked that even the beginner area at Crested Butte Mountain Resort (CBMR) is a bit advanced. For the past 50 years, a brisk pole-centered double chair would whisk fledgling skiers up a few hundred yards and release them to the top of some “green” terrain that had relatively steep starts and double fall lines (where the slope angles downhill in multiple directions). The High Tide and Augusta runs were short but not entirely forgiving. This year, new skiers will find a gentler welcome.

In addition to the steep, extreme terrain for which it’s best known, CBMR is investing in beginners. This winter will showcase a new Peachtree lift at the base area, serving re-graded ski runs for learners. The former two-person fixed-grip Peachtree lift was taken out after closing day last spring and has been replaced with a more modern three-person fixed-grip lift. The new lift increases Peachtree’s uphill capacity by 50 percent. Crews also re-contoured the Peachtree slopes to minimize terrain challenges.

The lift is located adjacent to the Aspen and Pine conveyor lifts, so early skiers can easily advance from surface lifts to a mellow chair lift.

“We wanted to create a more comfortable learning area for beginners to experience the mountain and have their own place to be wild. The re-grading of the terrain served by Peachtree provides a smooth, open and steady slope for our beginner skiers and riders to 22

learn as they make their way toward more advanced terrain. This will be their stepping stone to the steeps,” said Will Shoemaker, the resort’s communications manager.

He explained that re-shaping removed the double fall-lines on portions of the trail where skiers or riders previously had to contend with multiple grades simultaneously; now they’ll find a more consistent, flowing pitch. “That will allow beginners to focus on the fundamentals of skiing and snowboarding: starting, stopping, balance, carving and more,” he said.

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One person’s trash... another person’s decking

By Sandy Fails Crested Butte fourth graders helped collect and sort Recycle Train items in September.

Nolan Blunk

Instead of dumping your old television, Tupperware or t-shirts in the landfill, you can now put them on the Recycle Train.

Thanks to Crested Butte’s new Recycle Train, your broken lawn chair can turn into a plastic railroad tie, your old cooking oil into biodiesel, and your busted bike tubes into up-cycled bags. It’s not magic, but it does involve a CHaRM: the Center for Hard-to-Recycle Materials.

Sustainable Crested Butte, a nonprofit organization focused on reducing waste in the Gunnison Valley, hosted its first Recycle Train drop-offs in summer 2021. Through the July and September events, Recycle Train volunteers collected almost three tons of materials that might have been destined for the landfill – computers, bubble wrap, toilets, books, clothing, etc. (see side list). Instead, volunteers hauled the items to Boulder’s Eco-Cycle CHaRM facility. Eco-Cycle, which is 40 years old and supported by a Boulder trash tax, partners with businesses and organizations to repurpose the materials.

“Everything you put in the landfill creates greenhouse gas emissions,” said Nicole DelSasso, board president of Sustainable Crested Butte. “Waste is a smaller part of our emissions problem, but it’s a part that each person can control. If people recycled everything on our list, plus what Waste Management takes, and did composting, they could probably get to a very small amount of trash that goes to the landfill.”

Sustainable Crested Butte volunteers plan to host Recycle 24

Train winter collections, once they figure out the logistics of snow season. The two summer events, with drive-through stations for different materials in the Crested Butte Community School parking lot, garnered great response, DelSasso said. Volunteers filled up the trailer and sent two truckloads to storage before having to shut the first event early. Crested Butte fourth graders helped staff the second collection. The organization expects to divert almost seven tons from the landfill annually.

A $5 drop-off fee helps cover transportation costs. Some items incur additional expense because Sustainable Crested Butte has to pay to recycle those. The Recycle Train doesn’t accept materials that can be recycled through Waste Management.

DelSasso said many people are surprised at what can be reused – like toilets, gardening containers, even plastic appliances such as blenders. The CHaRM website shows how items are repurposed: e.g. white block foam made into CD cases and cover plates, books distributed to schools and charities, and bubble wrap mixed with wood waste to make decking. “So many materials can’t be recycled at facilities in the Gunnison Valley. We hope to teach people to save up things [like cereal boxes and orange juice cartons] and bring them to the Recycle Train,” DelSasso said.

For now, Sustainable Crested Butte rents a trailer to collect and haul materials, but the board hopes to purchase one eventually.

In the long run, the vision is grander: to create a local center for industrial composting and hard-to-recycle materials that could serve as a Western Slope hub. “That’s a ways down the road,” DelSasso said. “Recycle Train is a bridge solution.”

She noted that Gunnison County in 2015 forecast that landfill

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greenhouse gas emissions would grow 21% by 2030, a greater percentage than any other sector studied except ground transportation.

“Luckily, many big institutions in the valley are invested in finding a solution to our waste problem.”

Sustainable Crested Butte has no paid staff, just four board members and some hard-working volunteers. “We’re a small group doing a lot,” DelSasso said. They have received widespread support, she added, including funding from the Town of Crested Butte and practical assistance from Vail Resorts, Marlene Crosby and the County Public Works Department, Eco-Cycle in Boulder, the Crested Butte Community School, Western Colorado University (WCU) and eco-minded businesses like Flatiron Sports. Sustainable Crested Butte hopes to have a WCU student help strategize the organization’s future as part of a Capstone academic project.

In addition to Recycle Train, Sustainable Crested Butte runs a Waste-Free Events program. For gatherings of less than 300 people, the organization offers the use of four types of place settings ($1-4 each), ranging from casual cocktail hours to nicer parties. “We deliver, pick up and wash everything to make it really easy for people,” DelSasso said. The service has become popular, particularly for weddings.

Sustainable Crested Butte spearheaded the campaign in Crested Butte to move away from single-use plastic bags, and volunteers still sew old clothing into reusable “boomerang bags” to distribute around town.

The organization helped create the Town’s Climate Action Plan, led a campaign to encourage alternatives to disposable plastic straws, and now helps other communities make similar changes.

To volunteer, contribute or find more information, see sustainablecb.org or the organization’s Facebook or Instagram page.

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media, plastic appliances, plate glass windows, compostable to-go plastic, white foam block, porcelain toilets/ sinks, books, paper to be shredded, fire extinguishers, bike tires and parts, glassware, shoes, clothes, tetra pak, empty aerosol canisters, paperboard, hard-to-recycle plastics.

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Winter play, outside the box

By Stephanie Maltarich

John Holder

We really needed to get outside during the pandemic. The Met Rec District and its winter recreation partners helped make that happen.

In the dim late-afternoon light of mid winter, in the parking lot near the Van Tuyl trail system in Gunnison, dozens of elementary school children clicked off their Nordic skis and scurried to find their parents. Their excitement was palpable, and their numbers surprising; during the 2020-21 winter, Gunnison Nordic’s youth program grew by 300 percent.

In the Gunnison Valley, as in many places, the pandemic prompted a desire for people to spend more time outside. In autumn 2020, it was clear that demand would continue through the winter.

Many recreation organizations expressed worries about the upcoming season and their ability to meet increased needs while operating safely amid the novel coronavirus. The county’s Metropolitan Recreation District (Met Rec) listened.

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Hedda Peterson, Met Rec manager, recalled, “We started to hear shared concerns throughout the community about the need for locals to stay active during the Covid winter. At the same time, some partners were concerned about overcrowding in the backcountry as well as the organizational capacity needed to keep the programs going that help get folks outside.”

The concerns aligned with one of the Met Rec District’s new program areas: increasing access to recreation. So the staff convened partners to share resources and grow programs, working to ensure that, even in the time of Covid, Gunnison Valley residents had access to affordable and safe winter recreation.

To accommodate this level of community collaboration, Met Rec provided a more flexible funding approach; it pledged up to $30,000 in matching funds to catalyze the work of the partners and to encourage support from other entities.

As a special recreation district, Met Rec is funded by property tax, and its work focuses on park and recreation needs for county residents. Since 2001, Met Rec has awarded over a million dollars to support local recreation. For the winter campaign, along with Met Rec’s pledge, the Town of Crested Butte committed $11,300, and

Gunnison County offered $4,000, for a total of around $45,000.

With funding in place, Met Rec convened key players in the valley’s winter recreation: Gunnison Nordic, the City of Gunnison, Crested Butte Nordic and Crested Butte Avalanche Center. The partners asked: How do we get more residents, from youth to seniors, outside safely this winter?

Strategies ranged from accessible or free gear rentals to increased staff. The Crested Butte Avalanche Center sought to ensure that residents and visitors got good snow safety information before venturing into the backcountry.

After a handful of meetings in fall 2020, the partners settled on goals, while knowing that in an unpredictable pandemic winter, flexibility would be key. Their goals included connecting more residents to winter recreation, reducing local barriers to those pursuits, promoting safe and responsible outdoor recreation, and providing capacity-building support to help partner organizations operate safely and efficiently.

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REVITALIZING YOUTH NORDIC IN GUNNISON Gunnison Nordic aimed to get more kids skiing by eliminating barriers: equipment costs, expensive programming and limited access to coaches. Joellen Fonken, chair of Gunnison Nordic, said that with Met Rec’s support, the organization was able to recruit more coaches and pay a higher rate, provide full-season rentals from Gene Taylor’s, and facilitate weekly programming.

The programming made life easy for parents: lessons were held for 45 minutes after school and included equipment.

Regular lessons and additional coaches allowed more kids to participate. Advanced skiers could take part in Crested Butte Nordic’s new Gunnison-based programming.

Fonken noted that Met Rec’s contribution was key to the program’s success and the kids’ fun. “They learned new skills, made new friends, and we had a big party at the end of the season; the kids even learned how to do a snow dance.”

NOT JUST FOR KIDS Like the youngsters, older adults involved with the Gunnison Senior Center jumped at the opportunity to spend more time on skis. The City of Gunnison worked with the Gunnison Senior Center to offer more consistent winter programming. In the past, the center offered a few snowshoe outings, 29

but without funds to pay staff to help lead them, safety was often a concern. Previous outings drew only about half a dozen seniors.

Elizabeth Gillis, the Senior Center coordinator, noted that, as with children’s programs, access to gear had been a huge challenge in the past. “It’s hundreds of dollars to rent equipment and buy clothing to maybe like it or maybe be physically able to do it.”

Met Rec’s funding allowed the Gunnison Senior Center to access skis from Crested Butte Nordic, which used Met Rec moneys to purchase a portable gear trailer.

The trailer was driven to the senior outings, providing free gear.

Gillis was astounded when the senior Nordic lessons filled up on the first day, and around 40 participants signed up for the six-week sessions, which remained full all season. Additional funding allowed for more instructors and volunteers for safety.

“It was just such a high for everyone,” Gillis remembered. “People really loved it.”

Jan Nixon is a senior who grew up in Gunnison, but she never skied as a kid because of the cost. Last winter she

found out about the lessons and outings offered at the Gunnison Senior Center and immediately signed up. “It was always something I wanted to try; it looked like so much fun,” she said. Nordic skiing proved to be just as enjoyable as she had imagined.

She only missed one lesson the entire season, and she loved that each day brought a new experience.

SAFETY FIRST Than Acuff, the executive director of the Crested Butte Avalanche Center (CBAC), noticed an extreme uptick in backcountry users during the pandemic spring. He decided if the spring was foreshadowing the upcoming winter, he needed to do something. So he created a community outreach program, and he reached out to Met Rec with some ideas.

Met Rec’s funding allowed CBAC to increase its presence at popular trailheads, where center staff checked in with skiers as they ventured out into the backcountry.

Second, they delivered regular fireside chats over Zoom, with experts discussing avalanche safety and snowpack. A new sign at the entrance to town indicated the current

avalanche danger. Lastly, the staff increased youth education programs.

The feedback was tremendous. Some outreach videos reached up to 40,000 views.

People tuned in for the fireside chats from Canada to Tennessee.

In addition to elevated backcountry education, several organizations expressed Covid safety concerns from an operational standpoint. Crested Butte Nordic wanted to figure out how to continue providing rentals without putting staff at risk with face-to-face interactions. The purchase of iPads for rental agreements coupled with the mobile trailer to transport gear to lessons allowed CB Nordic to stay afloat.

For this winter, many of the organizations look forward to carrying over the lessons, resources and energy from last year. Peterson believes the benefits of the Met Rec partnership will extend beyond the Covid era. “Bringing together multiple partners to address community needs has helped Met Rec encourage collaboration and broaden its impact,” said Peterson. “We’re excited to continue this momentum and play a more involved role in addressing key community recreation needs.”

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Photos this page, left to right. The potica almost rolls up by itself, with a little help from Trudy Yaklich. Jenica Barrett and Andy Heiser use rolling pins to stretch out the dough. Onalee Barrett Guzy and Mason Suda with pans of rising potica.

Opposite. Cindy Yaklich puts her creation in the oven. The first rise and the finished product, ready to slice and devour. Potica master Bob Oberosler. A tabletop of dough and filling.

Photos by: Cindy Yaklich, Sandra Cortner and Ruth Guerrieri Barrett

ALL ROLLED INTO ONE

WHETHER YOU CALL IT POVITICA, POTICA OR SLOVENIAN NUT BREAD, THIS SWEET, FRAGRANT MAINSTAY OF OLD CRESTED BUTTE REQUIRES HOURS OF WORK AND “A HANDFUL OF LOVE.”

By Sandra Cortner

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“IT’S POVITICA!” she exclaimed as she carefully opened the foil inside the box from her aunt. It was 1967, and Nettie Kapushion, my college roommate and a Crested Butte native, generously shared her gift with me. We devoured slices of the delicious bread – cinnamon scented, buttery, melt-in-your-mouth and unlike any I had tasted before. Since then, I’ve successfully sought povitica at many potluck tables in Crested Butte. Yet I’ve never seen it in any of my mainstream cookbooks.

For the early settlers of Crested Butte, povitica – or potica – was the quintessential food of Crested Butte, and some variation of this strudel or nut roll was baked for Christmas, Easter and sometimes special occasions. Women of different nationalities – Slovenian, Croatian, Italian, Czech, German – handed down their povitica recipes through

the generations, Nettie’s aunt among them.

That’s when everyone in this small mining town ate povitica and klobase (pork sausage) and polka danced together despite differences in culture.

Povitica is a sweet, yeast-raised bread/ pastry, stretched thin, usually filled with walnuts, cinnamon, honey and butter, but alternatively with apple, cream, rum, raisins, cheese or even cracklings. The filled dough is rolled into a slender log, curled into a snail shape, baked in a 10- to 12-inch pan, and then cut into flaky, sweet, moist slices. Cindy Yaklich, born and raised in Crested Butte, described it as “commercial cinnamon bread on steroids.”

Michele Veltri, who co-authored The Crested Butte Melting Pot cookbook with his mother Myrtle Veltri, explained, “Poviti is Italian for ‘something rolled.’” He pronounces the bread poh-vee-TEET-sah. Many shorten

it to puh-TEET-sah. The Veltris’ cookbook (published in 1973 and revised in 1986) is a 144-page collection of dishes from early immigrants, and it includes recipes for two strudels and seven poviticas. Those include recipes from sisters Cindy and Trudy Yaklich’s Slovenian grandmother and their great-aunt Karolina Kochevar.

Cindy has their mother Leola’s basic handwritten recipe. “But she made it from memory, and the recipe doesn’t say how long the dough should rise. I found a Slovenian website that filled in the blanks. Growing up, I helped spread out the filling. Daddy’s job was to crack all the walnuts (two pounds!) and get them out of the shells and grind them. I still have their last nutcracker.

Thank goodness I can go to Costco and buy a huge bag of nuts. Now I use my Cuisinart to grind them. I believe there is a reason for invention,” said Cindy.

“We had it Christmas morning with klobase sausage. It’s extra special for me because of the history and tradition wrapped up in it. When Mom passed, I thought, ‘I want to keep the tradition alive.’” Cindy added with a grin, “So I told my son’s fiancée she’d have to learn to make it.”

Trudy is a purist when it comes to walnuts. “I use an old-fashioned meat grinder.

It releases the oils in the nuts to help keep the bread moist. You can never have too many nuts or too much cinnamon. I like to take the best from the recipes – the ones that call for the most butter and nuts. But not raisins! Our whole family hated raisins. Except for Aunt Karolina, who gave us one with golden raisins each year.”

Cindy experiments with orange or lemon zest. She also pricks the roll every several turns with a cake tester to help eliminate air pockets. “I make two a year: Christmas and 35

Rhett Griggs, MD

Blake Clifton, MD

Better Than Before

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Sandra Cortner

Trudy Yaklich and Nel Burkett with three poviticas they baked for Vinotok.

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one other special occasion.” One of those occasions was her 40th anniversary party, where she served slices of her three poticas; I was a lucky guest and potica sampler.

Bob Oberosler, on the other hand, sticks to his mother Angelina Tomsic Oberosler’s recipe. Of Czech heritage, Angie raised three girls and four boys in Crested Butte and once marveled, “In all the years I baked potica, I only found one child who could make it.” According to Bob, the recipe was all in her head. “If I hadn’t watched her so many times, I couldn’t have done it.” And his first attempts after he married “weren’t so good,” he confessed.

Bob indicated the four- by two-foot table in his dining room where he rolls out the dough on a tea towel every year to make seven or eight poticas to freeze as Christmas gifts. That’s down from the 14 or 15 he used to make for the Gunnison Elks Lodge’s Oktoberfest celebration. The octogenarian uses his Kitchen Aid mixer, unlike his mother, who got eight cups of flour hand stirred and kneaded into the dough along with the eggs, milk and butter. Bob shared Angie’s secret of edging the dough with sour cream before rolling it up around the filling to help keep the cinnamon, nuts, honey, butter, raisins and orange zest from spilling out.

Bob showed me the photo of his mother in the Veltri cookbook where she is rolling out her third potica. Two others are rising in pans in the foreground.

While Bob’s wife was being cared for by hospice, a volunteer watched him make a potica and wanted the recipe. “I told her I couldn’t give her the recipe but we would make one together, reminding the volunteer that in every potica you make, you put in a

handful of love. Unless you’ve worked with someone who’s made one, it’s just too hard.”

Not for Susan Anderton, a local artist who arrived from England in 1969. “I was inspired by an upcoming museum function honoring Croatian foods. While searching for a suitable recipe, I looked in the Veltri cookbook. My neighbor Betty Spehar (a Crested Butte native with Croatian parents) told me how to pronounce it.”

Susan followed Donnie Dussart’s raisinrum recipe. “I tried it out on Betty and she exclaimed, ‘It’s perfect!’ The older ladies weren’t up to it any more, so I picked up making it.” She confessed to substituting plain water for the potato water (the slightly starchy water saved from boiling potatoes) called for in the recipe. Yet she did mix the dough by hand. “If you have a whole day, they are fun to make,” she said.

Michele Veltri is also a fan of the Dussart recipe. “I was on the eating end, not the baking end,” he joked. “Crested Butte men were pampered. By the time I was ready to be a student, my mother’s back was hurting too much [for her to teach me].”

Michele, a sharp observer, sampled food from his neighbors of different nationalities as he grew up. He and his late mother collected more recipes than they could include in The Crested Butte Melting Pot.

Cara Guerrieri’s great-grandmother immigrated from Italy to Crested Butte, also bringing her recipe in her head. “My family pronounced it povitica (puh-vuh-TEET-sa), and it was a wonderful treat,” said Cara. “My Aunt Pauline [Simillion], Dad’s sister, would make it for us every Christmas. A HUGE half-round of it would arrive at the ranch, and we would eat it for days. With seven of

Rhett Griggs, MD

Blake Clifton, MD

Better Than Before

TM

Ruth Guerrieri Barrett

Donnie Dussart’s recipe from the Veltri cookbook; Onalee Barrett Guzy and Mason Suda finish their roll.

us in the family, that amounted to a large amount of povitica. I remember eating it for breakfast, snack and dessert.

“I think traditionally povitica is rather dry, but my family likes the nut filling to be really rich, thick and sweet. The dough itself is soft and a little sticky compared to other breads. In my sister Ruth Guerrieri Barrett’s family, the annual povitica baking is a family event, which is a pretty good idea because it is quite a lot of work. I put raisins in it, a variation my family likes.”

As I interviewed the bakers, I was puzzled. Some rolled the dough out and others, like Trudy, swore by stretching it.

“Too much rolling makes it tough. It’s meant to be stretched to an oval to cover the table in the middle of a room. Women walking around stretch with the back or side of the hand until it’s so thin you can almost see through it,” she said.

Polly Oberosler, Bob’s sister-in-law, elaborated. “It is an art handed down. I am guessing in their home regions and even here in the early 1900s, some flours responded to kneading in maybe vastly different ways.”

In the Scientific American article Polly sent me, I learned that the gluten (protein) in the dough can vary from flour to flour, depending on wheat grains grown by farmers. Decades ago, once the baker figured out which flour gave the best rise or responded to either stretching or rolling, that’s how the recipe was handed down.

“Either way,” Michele said, “after filling, start the roll with your fingers and as you lift the cloth, it rolls up by itself.”

According to Trudy, local women used to judge each other by their potica – whether it was tender enough or tasty enough and

not too dry – “just as they were judged by how early they got their laundry out on the clothesline.”

Making potica can be a solitary affair – Cindy shoos out her husband and son until she’s done – or a group effort, as in Ruth’s annual family project, where four people roll the dough out on a large table. Or it can be a learning experience, like when Trudy asked me to help her and Nel Burkett, former curator of the Crested Butte Mountain Heritage Museum, make her traditional potica, combining Slovenian recipes from her ancestors: Marija Kochevar, Karolina Kochevar, Leola Yaklich and Frances Yaklich.

We spent the day at her house creating – and dirtying many of her mother’s pans and utensils, all of which I carefully washed and Nel dried. It was a gift to the Vinotok Frank Orazem Storytelling Night. And a gift to me.

Nel had helped Trudy the previous three years, but I, being the newbie, started by observing and asking questions. Before long, I was grinding the two pounds of walnuts, taking turns stirring in eight cups of flour and then holding the bowl while Trudy stirred, marveling that all the ingredients fit into one bowl.

Crested Butte natives sometimes describe eating this defining food of early Crested Butte as an addiction. All agree that keeping the old traditions alive – and connecting with family memories – is worth a day’s hard work.

Read more in Sandy’s books, Crested Butte Stories...Through My Lens and Crested Butte…Love at First Sight. You can find them and the second edition of The Crested Butte Melting Pot at the Crested Butte Mountain Heritage Museum.

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CINDY YAKLICH’S POTICA RECIPE INGREDIENTS YEAST: 1 large cake compressed yeast (2 oz.) ½ cup lukewarm milk 1 tablespoon sugar

DOUGH: 1½ cups milk ¾ cup butter (1½ sticks) 5 egg yolks ¾ cup sugar 2 teaspoons salt 1 tablespoon vanilla 7 to 7½ cups all-purpose flour (sifted)

WALNUT FILLING: 2 pounds walnuts (ground fine) 1 stick butter (¼ pound) 1 ½ cups milk or half and half cream 2 cups sugar ½ cup honey 1 tablespoon vanilla Grated peel from 1 orange or 1 lemon 5 egg whites Cinnamon

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Dissolve yeast in milk; add sugar and combine. Cover and let rise in warm place, about 10 minutes.

Scald milk; add butter. Cool to lukewarm. In small electric mixer bowl, beat egg yolks, sugar, salt and vanilla until lemon-colored. In large bowl, sift 3 cups flour. Pour mixtures of prepared yeast, milk, butter, eggs and sugar into mixing bowl with 3 cups of flour; beat with electric mixer until smooth and elastic. Then keep adding flour and mixing with a wooden spoon until of consistency that dough can be handled without sticking.

Place on floured board and knead for about 15 minutes, adding flour as needed, to make a non-sticking dough. Place dough in well-greased bowl; turn to grease top. Cover and let rise in warm place for about 2 hours until double in bulk.

Grind walnuts in food chopper with finest blade. Melt butter in large saucepan.

Add milk, sugar and honey; cook to rolling boil, taking care not to let it boil over. Pour hot mixture over walnuts. Add vanilla and grated peel. Mix thoroughly and allow to cool. Beat the egg whites until stiff and fold into the cooled nut mixture.

Sandra Cortner

ROLLING AND BAKING:

Grease well the four 12” x 4” or five 9” x 5” loaf pans. Roll out dough on table covered with cloth, sprinkled well with flour (this amount of dough can be rolled to about 50” x 32”). Spread cooled filling evenly over entire dough, sprinkling generously with cinnamon. (If desired, raisins may be added at this point.)

Start rolling up dough by hand (jellyroll fashion) from the wide side, stretching the dough slightly with each roll. Keep the side edges as even as possible. Prick roll about every several turns with a thin knitting needle or cake tester to help eliminate air pockets. Continue rolling by hand to opposite edge. With edge of flat plate, cut desired lengths. Seal ends more securely by gently pulling dough down to cover ends and tucking underneath when placing in pan. Cover and let rise in warm place until double, about one hour. Bake in preheated 325-degree oven for 1 hour until medium brown. If a glossy top is desired, brush each loaf with 1 egg yolk beaten with 1 tablespoon milk 15 minutes before potica is done.

YIELD: Four 12” x 4” loaves, or five 9” x 5” loaves.

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From old family traditions, Krista Powers found a new way to fuel. Other athletes are catching on.

By Stephanie Maltarich

Biking Hartman Rocks on a gorgeous day in April 2018, Crested Butte athlete Krista Powers had an “aha” moment. It was her first real adventure after a month-long stint working 16-hour days on her family’s sugar bush land in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont.

Sweating and pedaling the rocky trails, Krista began thinking about switchel – “this drink my grandfather used to make. I’d been making my own version of it.” By the end of her ride, she had a plan.

Switchel is an “old-timer” drink made from apple cider vinegar, maple syrup, lemon, ginger and salt. Krista’s grandfather, Archie, and others in his generation drank it to stay hydrated during hot summer days while working in the hayfields. As she rode, Krista thought: Why not market her version of the drink to endurance athletes?

She could convert the concoction into a powder form while adding electrolytes.

Krista was no stranger to putting her spin on family recipes.

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In 2016, with her father’s blessing and her husband’s support, she created her own brand of her family’s organic maple syrup: Vermont Sticky. Her product became a quick favorite in Gunnison Valley restaurants, in natural food stores and among Crested Butte locals.

Adding an all-natural sports drink to her product line seemed a perfect nod to her Vermont heritage while filling the need for a natural energy drink for area athletes. From Gunnison to Crested Butte, the valley is sprinkled with world-renowned ski mountaineering racers, mountain bikers, ultra-runners, professional skiers and Olympians.

Soon after her idea-inspiring bike ride, Krista got to work. She spent three months in her kitchen experimenting and playing around with recipes. She found the perfect combination of ingredients: apple cider vinegar, dried whole fruit such as lemon, raspberry or lime, sea salt, magnesium, potassium and electrolytes. To sweeten the drink

Petar Dopchev

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Krista Powers in her element: adventuring outside.

Petar Dopchev

mix, she used maple sugar, derived from her family’s maple syrup.

Maple Tree Juice, a hydration drink mix, was born. Krista started taking it out in small packets on bike rides with friends. In turn, she asked for their feedback.

“It’s a unique drink,” said Krista. “It’s not like Gatorade or other sports drinks that are super sweet and leave a sugary film on your tongue.” Using maple sugar as a sweetener creates a low glycemic index and provides a longer and more sustained source of energy.

Still, it’s not for everybody, she said; some find it too bitter.

Krista has long been a competitive athlete, and her own experience fueled her desire to experiment with all-natural energy foods. Growing up in Lowell, Vermont, she played more traditional sports. “Basketball was my first love,” she said. She spent many days water skiing, and her hobby of climbing maple trees set the stage for 42

her adventures in Colorado.

When Krista moved to Crested Butte in 1999, the abundance of adventure sports wowed her. She took advantage of any opportunity to play in the mountains. “I said yes to every invitation and over the years tried as many different sports as I possibly could.”

She eventually settled into the mountain bike scene, because she loved that it allowed for many miles of adventure in a single afternoon. Also an avid skier, she spends long days in the backcountry searching for Crested Butte’s cherished powder stashes.

Eventually, she started racing. She spent years training for endurance ski and bike races such as the Grand Traverse, Gothic Mountain Tour, Alley Loop, Growler and other 12- and 24-hour bike races around Colorado’s western slope. Through her own experience as an athlete, and learning about the experiences of others, she started to realize the importance of nutrition while racing.

Krista’s husband, Dodson, also learned the benefits of apple cider vinegar. While competing in mountain bike races, he would often experience intense knots in his legs for up to three hours after a race. A local orthopedist, Dr. Rhett Griggs, recommended apple cider vinegar to alleviate cramping. Dodson recalled, “I used to cramp super bad, but Dr. Griggs had a recipe with apple cider vinegar, and it totally worked.”

That was before Maple Tree Juice. Dodson no longer has to make his own concoction, because he loves Krista’s hydration mix – whether it’s in a water bottle in the summer or a warm thermos in the winter.

Long before developing her hydration mix, Krista stumbled on organic maple syrup as an energy food. While training for races, she often found it challenging to find foods that were digestible while also providing energy. “I tried all different kinds of ‘goo’ products, and they would always leave me with an upset stomach,” she said.

One day, she tossed some maple syrup and sea salt into a squeeze bottle and took it along on an adventure. She quickly realized it was the perfect fuel for her. “It gave me a burst of energy without a tummy ache.”

As with her hydration mix, she started handing out squeeze bottles of her syrup with electrolytes, and now she also adds flavors such as espresso, key lime, raspberry, chocolate and salted maple.

Krista’s energy foods, rooted in her family’s tradition of tapping sap from trees, are slowly catching on. Often, her maple syrup and hydration mixes stock aid stations at races around the valley. Krista finds value in sharing her product with the valley’s nonprofits; through Vermont Sticky she proudly supports the Adaptive Sports Center, Gunnison Trails, the CB3P, Crested Butte Nordic and other organizations.

Krista stopped racing when she realized she couldn’t dedicate enough time to training to remain competitive. She’s replaced racing with frequent, long and exciting explorations. Whether she’s on a snowmobile searching for a great ski line out one of Crested Butte’s iconic valleys, or pedaling high into the alpine in search of an epic descent, Krista always craves a great adventure.

“Nothing fills my bucket like spending a day outdoors adventuring with good friends, seeing new places, or even seeing a different light on the same place,” she said.

To fill her bucket this year, Krista has a lot of plans. In addition to ski, bike and river exploits, she’ll head back to the Northeastern Kingdom of Vermont as winter turns to spring. There she’ll continue the traditions of her father and grandfather, filling buckets of sap to make the elixir that fuels her life: organically sweet maple syrup.

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By Karen Janssen

Our town is surrounded by sentinels.

Crested Butte Mountain, Gothic, the Red Lady – noble-sounding peaks. We gaze up Paradise Divide, hike the striations of Teocalli and delight in the waters of Oh Be Joyful – names that spark a sense of awe and adventure. And then there’s Snodgrass.

Snodgrass? This 11,145-foot mountain nestles among its more impressive neighbors.

It shares a saddle with Gothic Mountain and seems a mere bump in comparison.

It wasn’t officially labeled until the Gothic topographic quad of 1961. Later there was even a movement by Crested Butte Mountain Resort (CBMR) to change its moniker to something a bit more…alluring? But don’t let its awkward name, small stature or rounded slopes fool you. Its history is as multi-faceted as its terrain.

It’s easy to imagine the native Utes

hunting the forests on Snodgrass Mountain, with fauna and flora thriving. Hardy early settlers eventually homesteaded its flanks, carving out a high-alpine existence. The mountain wasn’t a target for the early miners, though the trees must have provided timber for their structures. In 1896 Perry Snodgrass, our protagonist’s eventual namesake, first entered the Gunnison Valley.

Perry Snodgrass, originally hailing from Tennessee, must have experienced those peaceful glowing paths as he roamed the high country. He lived in Crested Butte for three years, then moved to Gunnison to serve as undersheriff until 1908. At that point, Perry joined the newly founded US Forest Service (formed on February 1, 1905), covering the district of Cement Creek, Crested Butte and Brush Creek. He and his wife Essie lived at the “Rangers’ Roost” up Cement Creek in 47

John Holder

Nathan Bilow

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the summers. In 1915, the well-loved and respected ranger was assigned to the Big Horn National Forest in Buffalo, Wyoming, where he met a gruesome death by lightning. (See side story.) The young man had spent a life of service to his community, and eventually Snodgrass Mountain was named in his honor.

In 1960, the Allen family, which has ranched in the Gunnison Valley since 1886, purchased roughly 1400 acres and began to run cattle on the slopes of Snodgrass in the fall. Numerous other small and large private

parcel owners, Crested Butte Mountain Resort and the Forest Service all had varied parts in its increasingly complicated history of ownership and management. This really began to heat up in the mid-1970s.

At that time, Crested Butte was at a turning point. Disagreements had been mounting in the community between those who were more growth-minded and those who preferred the town remain on a less aggressive, slower track. The ski area had limped along since its formation in the early 1960s, and some felt change was necessary.

Sure enough, it came. In December 1975, a large headline in the Crested Butte Chronicle read: “New Forest Service Plan Okays Snodgrass Expansion: To Be Second Ski Mountain.” A preliminary Forest Service plan, which had been developed over a long period of time with considerable community input, had recommended otherwise. Foul play was even suspected, though never proven, for Howard “Bo” Callaway, the chairperson of CBMR, was also U.S. Secretary of the Army. It seems several local Forest Service personnel who were opposed to the expansion had been transferred out of Gunnison County and soon thereafter the revised pro-expansion “East River Plan” was released. The new plan’s recommendations were diametrically opposed to the original.

The anti-expansion contingent argued that development would limit the public from use of public land. Numerous environmental concerns included Snodgrass’ prime elk habitat and the unstable nature of its slopes.

This group insisted that an undeveloped Snodgrass had more long-term value for the valley than a new ski area would, and argued that the existing resort was underwhelming at best and in need of improvements. The Chronicle’s editor at the time, Myles Arber, was at the forefront of the conflicts. He pushed the issue of Callaway’s influence peddling all the way to the US Senate, garnering much publicity for the town and the area. However, Callaway refused to abandon his $45 million proposal. Eventually the Forest Service reconsidered and rejected this plan and it was tabled… temporarily. The resort revised it and tried again. And again. In 1982 the Forest Service finally granted permission to expand, but the permit expired without action being taken.

In 2004 Tim and Diane Mueller bought the resort and resumed work on permitting, insisting that the ski area needed more intermediate terrain to remain desirable as a destination. The community was split once

Nathan Bilow

again, as it was a time of economic downturn.

Some saw a lift-served Snodgrass as the answer. Real estate agents loved the idea of more ski-in, ski-out terrain. Opponents insisted that the proposed four lift rides (45 minutes one-way to reach marginal terrain) were ridiculous. A far-reaching group named Friends of Snodgrass organized fiercely to defeat the proposal. Vehicles around town sported “Snodgrass Is for the Birds” bumper stickers. Letter-writing campaigns, marches, even croquet gatherings helped spread the mission to keep Snodgrass “Lift Free Forever.”

The expansion was denied in 2009. In 2015 the Crested Butte Land Trust purchased and conserved 92 acres from CBMR, sealing the deal that Snodgrass truly is ‘for the birds’… and the elk, and the wildflowers, and the humans who prefer to power their own backcountry adventures.

Throughout the years, while controversy swirled around it, Snodgrass solidly continued to provide refuge for wildlife and adrenalin rushes for recreationalists. Its appeal is yearround. In winter, snowshoers traipse up the main road and create wide, odd-shaped tracks through meadows. Backcountry skiers seek

Dave Kozlowski

powder on its steep, north-facing gullies.

Folks of all ages stick skins on their skis and climb to the weather station near one of its summits. Locals walk their dogs on the road, and fat bikers churn upwards. Conditions depending, Nordic skiers skate or enjoy the rare experience of two ski tracks disappearing around a corner. It’s one of the first places people try out their new equipment in early season. In spring the well-used road holds snow for a long time, so diehard skiers still have a place to go, while walkers skirt the

slush and get their hiking legs back.

In early summer, the opening of the bike trail, with access graciously granted by the Allen family, is much anticipated. Countless tires have rolled up and over to (or from) Washington Gulch, through majestic aspen forests and lupine-filled meadows. Last summer, while I paused for a water-and-view break, a unicyclist rolled past me. There are runners and hikers and amblers, from octogenarians to toddlers. The wranglers at Fantasy Ranch horse rental establishment 49

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have led trail rides through Snodgrass’ winding trail network since 2001. When the aspens drop their leaves in the fall, those trails turn from ordinary dirt to golden routes snaking through the forest.

I’ve roamed that mountain in all seasons for more than three decades, and it has yet to lose its draw. It’s a go-to when visitors come to town, when time is short, or when weather is horrendous. I’ve wandered through wildflowers after memorial services, powered up the skin track to blow off steam, followed friends’ bike tires winding over the golden carpet. I hug my favorite grandfather aspen most every trip. During Covid I escaped the quarantine of my home and found myself at the trailhead, the only car in the parking lot, seemingly the only human on the mountain.

That day I wrote a tiny Covid story: 4/21/20: I barely make it out the door…the house is a black hole, escape! Boots on, pre-skinned skis, poles, water, the same clothes as always. Make it to the trailhead, climb the well-known path to the well-known destination. Fresh air. Deep breaths.

Slow down. More deep breaths. I climb through the aspens’ silent gaze. More than fifty shades of grey, white, taupe. Spruce forest; shadowy, cool.

I stray from the track, lured by the meadow’s smooth, undulating perfection. I create my own parallel lines. Step, breathe, step, breathe. Listen. I sit cross-legged on newly exposed earth beneath a pine, where I watch tiny green shoots emerge from the moist ground and reach for the sky. I close my eyes and let the sun’s rays, low in the sky, gently wash my face. A solitary bird calls. The stillness is absolute. My heart beats. I know this place… but not like this.

Indeed, absolute solitude isn’t the norm. At the height of summer or winter, parking at the trailhead can be a challenge.

Mountain Express runs an hourly bus from the ski area to help mitigate the problem during peak times. Fortunately a portable toilet was installed a few years ago, and the parking areas are continually evolving. It can be quite a scene, with dogs running around and recreationalists donning boots and backpacks while cars flow through headed to the Gothic townsite. Once out of the parking lot, uphillers huff and puff while downhillers whoosh by. Yet when that’s all left behind, the mountain works its subtle magic. It’s been worth championing...a community treasure.

Change and development will occur around it, but thanks to decades of work by many different factions of the community, the unassuming mountain sits as a refuge amid its grander neighbors. Perry would be proud.

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of his coat and shirt across his chest. The fellows at a nearby sheep camp came running and picked Perry up. He said, ‘What happened, boys?’ and then lapsed into unconsciousness.

“(Eventually) they got Perry in a roadhouse in Hazelton, but they would not let me see him until they had him cleaned up a little. They prepared me for the worst but the sight I beheld was dozens of times worse than I imagined. The lightning struck on his forehead, just over his left eye, and came out in the left calf – just like a bullet hole in both places. His forehead and nose and mouth are horribly burned. It jumped his chin and started on his throat and his whole torso in front and legs to the knees are worse burned than anything you could imagine – just thick, yellow, cooked flesh.

His hair is all singed off…. He soon commenced to vomit blood and kept it up until the doctor came at six o’clock. He got so weak and such sinking spells and could not breathe. I thought I would go crazy before the doctor got there.”

Essie Snodgrass’ letter continued: the doctor, fearing a skull fracture, had Perry Snodgrass transported to the hospital – an agonizingly long and jarring trip. There an exam revealed no fracture, and Snodgrass survived a rough night. His wife’s letter was written late the next day as Snodgrass still clung to life: “He knew me tonight and drank a little milk through a tube. He is very deaf, eyesight very badly blurred, and his right arm is partially paralyzed. The doctor thinks it will leave as the electricity leaves his body. Dr. Lewis says it is nothing but a miracle and not one in a million would have lived. They found his watch and belt buckle a hundred yards from where he fell, and where the horse had stood were big holes.”

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Chris Hanna

This is excerpted from a Gunnison News-Champion article in 1915, entitled, “Perry Snodgrass Succumbs to Lightning: Popular Forestry Officer Dies After Brave Struggle Against Dreadful Burns.”

Warning: This account contains graphic descriptions of his injuries.

July 16, 1915: After several messages which raised hopes that Perry Snodgrass would pull through the dreadful lightning stroke, Gunnison people were shocked Sunday morning to hear that he had died, at Buffalo, Wyoming, Saturday night. As to the circumstances of the accident, we quote from a letter received from Mrs. Snodgrass:

“Perry had to go to Hazelton seven miles from where we are camped. He had made arrangements to go with Roy Fobian, the forest guard at Muddy Station. The black clouds commenced to roll up about 11:00 and it thundered and lightened and sprinkled some. After dinner it kept looking worse, but he laughed at my fear of lightning as he always does and left me with a kiss. (Soon) a terrible crash and flash came. My head snapped like a gun and the lightning hit less than a quarter mile from the tents. I heard (Mr. Hulse) say, ‘Snodgrass! Snodgrass! My God, Perry’s horse has been killed under him and he is badly hurt.’ I simply turned to stone, I could not move…

“We later heard the first particulars from Roy. (They) had started from the station when it began raining. They were riding along putting on their slickers when Roy’s horse started to stagger and then fell. When he came to, almost immediately, Perry’s horse was dead and had thrown Perry over his head, and Perry was stark naked, excepting for one sock and the sleeves and ragged portions

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Eric and Ruth Roemer in the well-storied Wooden Nickel.

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By Janet Weil

Eric Roemer’s history has been intertwined with the Wooden Nickel’s for the past four decades. After the celebrated tavern sold recently, Eric shared some favorite memories.

“In the 1970s, Crested Butte was an opportunity to be a pioneer in the modern day and age. You could wake up in the morning and say, ‘Today, I want to be a carpenter,’ or ‘Today, I want to be a this or a that.’ There were no restrictions or limitations to inventing your future, as long as you were willing to work.” This recollection opens the story of Eric Roemer, who reinvented his future here half a century ago.

Eric came to Crested Butte in April 1971 with his college girlfriend, Lynn Heutchy. After graduation, they were both working in New York City. Eric was a senior investment analyst for Equitable Life doing long-term corporate finance.

Lynn had friends who had moved to Aspen in 1969, and they encouraged Eric and Lynn to move out of New York City and come to Colorado, but warned them to stay away from Aspen because it was getting overbuilt. They suggested the two check out this really neat place they hiked to in the summers, a hamlet called Crested Butte.

Rebecca Ofstedahl

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Sandra Cortner

Movers and shakers: Eric Roemer, Allen Cox, Thom Cox and Bill Crank at the Powerhouse in 1988.

Only about 350 people lived in or near Crested Butte. Dogs reportedly outnumbered people, but nobody counted.

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Eric and Lynn came out here the last week of the ski season in ‘71. Eric remembered, “At that time, there were just dirt streets and rundown buildings, but we both liked everything about the town: the old buildings, the antiques and all the vintage things.”

Eric was really taken with the glistening snow, brilliant blue skies and massive green trees. He didn’t see anything like that in Manhattan. After returning home, Eric could not get Crested Butte and all the natural beauty out of his mind. As he became more disillusioned with New York City’s traffic, crowds, noise and congestion, the possibility of living in Crested Butte loomed in his thoughts, but what could a corporate finance guy do there to make a living? Eric came back in July of ’71, camped outside of town and again was quite impressed with the bluebird skies, the mountainsides covered in wildflowers and greenery.

Eric and Lynn decided to take the leap, left New York City behind and moved to Crested Butte. They ended up buying a rundown building downtown (located where Ryce Asian Bistro is now). They lived upstairs in “the old gray house,” as it was known, and thought it was a pretty nice little place.

Like many young people, Eric and Lynn had worked in eateries during the summers and figured running a restaurant couldn’t be that hard. They remodeled the interior themselves with old furniture they rehabilitated. In December of 1972, they opened Penelope’s Restaurant. “That’s how I got started,” Eric reminisced.

Two years later, they built a greenhouse onto Penelope’s, and it became a focal place for locals and tourists to meet for Sunday brunch. People sometimes stood outside for an hour waiting to get a table. In the middle of winter, the greenhouse flowers nicely juxtaposed the snow outside. Less than two years after opening Penelope’s, Lynn and Eric split up, and she became a long-time member of the community as well.

As years went by, more young people came to Crested Butte, got involved in the community and built lives for themselves.

But at that time, only about 350 people lived in or near Crested Butte. Dogs reportedly outnumbered people, but nobody counted.

There weren’t half as many buildings as now.

“Streets were dirt. Elk Avenue had a strip of crumbling asphalt down the center with dirt on both sides,” Eric said. “The level of services was so different from what it is today.”

Eric remembers how the townspeople came together when a water main froze.

Instead of building fires above where they thought the line was frozen (a tactic used a few decades earlier), volunteers built a new water line, using two miles of irrigation pipe, above ground along the Kebler Pass Road, stretching from Coal Creek to the town’s reservoir. They put a hot water heater in Coal Creek to preheat the water before it went into the water line. “It was great to have the whole town come out to help.

Having no water in town was a serious issue,” Eric said. A true sense of community existed then, as it does today.

“The thing that made me feel comfortable here was a real cadre of the oldtimers who were such wonderful people,” Eric added. “They helped their neighbors with anything they needed. They would give you advice on how to get the old coal stoves working, so you could heat your place. They were always willing to offer a helping hand.”

The town continued to grow, the ski business improved, and Eric’s restaurant demanded more attention. He gave up his construction business and started making his living as a restaurateur.

Meanwhile, Dave McMillan and Ron Gott owned the Wooden Nickel, which wasn’t doing well. They were forced to close it in March of ’81. Eric discussed with them the possibility of managing the Nickel when his non-compete agreement, signed after selling Penelope’s, was up in the middle of July ’81.

They agreed, and Eric ran the bar for the next forty years.

When he took over, the bar served two sandwiches, a hamburger and a chicken sandwich, and that was it. The owners gave Eric complete control. “The bar business was something I thought I would be good at,” he said, “and I’ve enjoyed the business.”

Nine years later, he bought Ron Gott’s share of the Nickel. The McMillans and Eric remained partners to the end. “It was a good relationship,” he said.

Eric also opened a restaurant in Glenwood Springs and spent three or four months there getting the business started.

“During that time, I met Ruth, who was a surgical nurse in Valley View Hospital. We dated for two years and got married in 1985,” he said. They raised their two children, Pearce and Alexis, in the Butte.

After Eric had managed the Nickel for four years, a devastating fire hit in August of ’85. “The building was built in 1929 with different standards from today. It wasn’t

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Sharky kept his business jumping by firing a .45 pistol into a stump behind the bar whenever his customers started nodding out.

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insulated or fire protected the way buildings are now. Behind the kitchen stove, which had been in the same place for a long time, the heat generated from the stove continued to dry out the studs inside the wall. They ignited spontaneously, and the fire went up the inside of the wall and got into the attic. It took the whole top of the building off,” Eric said.

On the night of the fire, Eric and Ruth were at a friend’s house in Aspen. They got a phone call at 10 p.m. after they’d been out on the town.

“The Nickel’s on fire,” the caller said.

“Is it out?” Eric wanted to know.

“No, not yet,” the caller replied.

“How long has it been burning?” Eric asked.

“About four hours.”

“Four hours!” Eric shouted.

By 5 a.m., Eric and Ruth were back in Crested Butte to check things out. The fire was still smoldering. Within a day, they started to clean things out. The insurance company wanted to send an adjuster and get three estimates. Eric told them he was in the building business and he wasn’t getting any estimates. He was starting to rebuild that day, so the insurance adjuster better get there or they should be prepared to start sending

money. With the help of the insurance agent, Eric had no further problems.

Amazingly, many local builders that Eric had come to know jumped in to help rebuild the Nickel. They wanted their bar back. The day after the fire, they began working, and nine weeks later, the doors opened again. “It was really quite remarkable on a lot of people’s parts to get the doors reopened so quickly,” Eric said. They did the best they could to recreate what was previously in the building.

They had pieces of the molding and all the woodwork milled to match. Fortunately, when the ceiling fell during the fire, it covered and protected the bar, which sustained only water damage. Eric had the bar removed, refinished and reinstalled. It was the original bar that had travelled by train from Philadelphia to Leadville and then in 1895 was transported by horse-drawn wagon to Crested Butte.

One afternoon, Eric’s friend Jimmy Clark brought in a small sign: “The Liars Corner.”

Eric hung it in a corner of the bar. People started congregating there on Friday nights, just chitchatting. If there was room in the Liar’s Corner, they would squeeze themselves in. There was no particular rhyme or reason to it. Like the local taverns of old, the Nickel was a place where people were accepted,

where they felt comfortable. They could gather and tell stories, recount memories, or discuss politics or town happenings or how lousy their golf game was that week. Any topic could lead to lively banter.

To Eric, the Nickel was special because “it was really an assemblage of all aspects of the community, both locals and visitors. It was always welcoming, whoever you were. I didn’t want it to be limited to one segment of the community, but rather available to everyone.

I’m proud to say that over the years, I feel it worked out that way.”

In a tavern initially constructed around 1880, the Nickel has had its share of colorful characters, and over the years it changed hands many times. Long ago Bill Starika bought it and named it Bill’s Tavern, better known as Sharky’s. Sharky kept his business jumping by firing a .45 pistol into a stump behind the bar whenever his customers started nodding out.

The pub had a coal-fired stove in the rear of the front room and a pool table during Prohibition.

The elk head, still mounted on the wall, is Lyle McNeill’s trophy that he shot out Brush Creek in 1939.

“Jim ‘Suitcase’ Simmons was another legendary owner,” Eric recounted. “He was a wild guy. His nickname was Suitcase because he never stayed in one place. The joke was they called his son ‘Briefcase.’ Suitcase was the most notorious ski bum in the Elk Range.” His winter regimen was to ski all day, bartend until midnight, lock up the Wooden Nickel to the public, hold a private party with friends until 4 a.m., then stumble home to sleep, unless there was fresh powder. If it was snowing, there was no sleep; it was right back to skiing. He was always the first one on the lift. It was a hard life, but if you were a powder hound, it was the reason for everything. Mysteriously, Suitcase disappeared from Crested Butte.

Another much loved owner and friend of Eric’s was Don Bachman. Don was also the ski patrol’s avalanche expert for many years.

When Eric was remodeling the Powerhouse in ’88, the building was just a metal shell with a dirt floor. It had once housed the electrical generation for the town, and several concrete motor mounts were embedded in the ground to hold equipment.

“I wanted to get rid of those concrete motor mounts and tried a backhoe, but that didn’t work,” Eric recalled. “Bachman offered to blast them out with dynamite. I was doubtful Don could blow them out, but he talked me into letting him try. Don put some dynamite under one of the concrete motor

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mounts, blocked off the street, and everyone left the building. When the dynamite went off, all you heard was a horrendous noise, which was gravel hitting the inside of the tin building. The building actually wobbled to the point I thought it might collapse. The concrete motor mount didn’t budge. Don wanted to try again with more dynamite, but after seeing the building shake, I thought one shot was enough. If you go into Bonez [formerly the Powerhouse Grill], there’s a step up from the entry level to the dining area. I raised the floor to take it above those concrete motor mounts. They’re still there. I never could get them out.”

Eric was deeply rooted in Crested Butte and wanted the town to grow and prosper.

He served on several boards (such as Crested Butte State Bank, the Center for the Arts and the Crested Butte Academy) and as a town councilman for seven years. “It was a great council, and we got a lot done. We got all the streets paved, which was huge, and we got the town’s streetlights put up.”

He recounted that story: “I was out in L.A. visiting my father. We were driving around Burbank and went by the municipal yard, and I saw all these streetlights stacked up. When I came back to Crested Butte, I suggested to our town planner, Myles Rademan, that he call Burbank and see what they were doing with those old streetlights.

Myles followed through, and Burbank offered us all the streetlights for free. There were a couple of hundred. We didn’t need a couple of hundred streetlights, but the deal was too good to refuse. There was a rancher delivering hay to the L.A. area and he was coming back empty. We got a good deal with him. He loaded the streetlights onto his flatbed and started bringing them back. We realized it was going to cost us some money to install them, and to offset that expense, Myles put an ad in one of the municipal magazines offering streetlights for sale. With the money generated selling streetlights, we basically recouped all the money we spent hauling them back and having them installed. REA [the Rural Electric Association] actually wired them for free. That’s how we got all the streetlights in town.”

The memory has a happy ending. “One night, after all the streetlights were installed, the town council stood up on the hill and we turned the switch on. The lights went on.

The town lit up.” Though the Nickel sold last year, Eric and Ruth will remain rooted here – because for him “the magic of Crested Butte still shines brightly.”

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1950s ski meet at the Rozman Hill Ski Area (looking toward Crested Butte Mountain, across Highway 135).

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Ski jumps & cattle fences The Rozman Hill Ski Area (1949-1960) ushered in a lively ski era for the valley, but as the snow melted each spring, it turned back into John and Mary Rozman’s cattle ranch.

By Brian Levine

Sometimes a story intrigues because of its place, other times because of its characters. The story of the Rozman Hill Ski Area intrigues for both reasons.

As collegiate ski jumping grew in popularity toward the middle of the last century, the Western State College (WSC) Mountaineer Ski Team needed a new training facility in the valley. There was Quick’s Hill, near the base of Red Mountain, but it wasn’t suitable for most ski competitions. Peanut Hill, northeast of Crested Butte, didn’t have appropriate ski-jumping landings.

To be competitive against such formidable adversaries as Denver University (DU) and the University of Colorado (CU), WSC needed steep slopes and safe ski jumps.

Crosby Perry-Smith, the first personality in this relational history, was determined to find solutions. Perry-Smith, born in New Jersey in 1924, was a national ski-jumping champion at age 14. In 1943, he was New

York State’s intercollegiate ski-jumping and cross-country skiing champion. That same year, Perry-Smith joined the U.S. Military’s Tenth Mountain Division and trained at Camp Hale near Leadville, Colorado. While in combat in the Italian Alps, he saved the lives of fellow soldiers and became a decorated hero. He’d been spoiled by Colorado snow, so after the war, in 1946, Perry-Smith enrolled at WSC.

From the moment Perry-Smith’s boots landed on the WSC campus, he pushed to establish an official collegiate ski program. Other veterans on the GI Bill – Thor Groswold, Paul Wegeman, Richard Wellington, etc. – joined his team. Paul Wright, WSC athletic director, also joined the chorus, as did Ed Ford, temporary WSC ski coach. Soon, Perry-Smith was winning meets, with the notice of newly appointed WSC President Peter Mickelson. It grew imperative that WSC find the right ski coach to match

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Perry-Smith’s energy and drive, and then that the college establish an intercollegiate facility.

That leads to the next dynamic personality – Sven Wiik, an Olympic gymnast who’d recently competed in the London 1948 Olympics. Wiik was born in Solleftea, Sweden, in 1921; trained in gymnastics as well as Nordic events; and was intent on emigrating to the United States. While in Chicago taking English lessons, Wiik learned of WSC’s interest in hiring a professional health, physical education and ski coach.

With broken English as his second language, Wiik traveled to Gunnison for an interview.

Knowing he’d have difficulty communicating,

Top Crosby Perry-Smith Middle Sven Wiik Bottom John and Mary Rozman

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Wiik came prepared. Instead of dialogue, he asked – best he could – to see WSC’s gymnastic facilities. Once there, he removed his outer clothing to reveal gymnast’s attire and then promptly executed his best routines.

Mickelson, Wright and Ford were astonished.

Wiik was hired.

The next charismatic personalities, John and Mary Rozman, long-time Gunnison Valley ranchers, were the most crucial to WSC’s creation of a nationally recognized ski training and competition facility.

Standing where I am now – in the Rozman Ranch hay fields, at the base of Wheatstone Mountain (named after English scientist and inventor Charles Wheatstone, with the place name later modified to “Whetstone”) – I imagine Sven Wiik and WSC ski team members Adolph Kuss and Mack Miller at the Rozman home, inquiring about a section of their property. It would make for an excellent jump. Can the team use it? The Rozmans – community-minded and generous – ask them in. With homebaked goods on offer, they sit around the kitchen table discussing the proposition.

John and Mary soon become enamored with Sven. Their resulting friendship forms the foundation for the realization of the PerrySmith/Wiik ski project.

Let me digress here. In the 1940s, John and Mary Rozman were the owners of the Rozman Ranch, located on the eastern base of Wheatstone Mountain, near the tracks of the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad and Slate River. Martin Rozman homesteaded the original 160 acres in 1904 and later married Anna Bajuk of Radovica, Yugoslavia.

Anna Rozman was a strong, hard-working, business-minded woman who, after Martin passed away, recognized opportunities to add another 320 acres to the original Rozman homestead. John and Mary inherited the ranch from Anna; raised Hereford cattle, pigs, chickens and timothy hay; blacksmithed and logged. John was a perfectionist in all matters; even his haystacks had to be neat and well defined. He was honest, had a very strong work ethic, and insisted on labor before play.

Those powerful characteristics earned him the endearing moniker of the Boss among his family. Mary Sedmak, John’s wife since 1938, was of similar character, but added a happiness to home and ranch, especially when serving her renowned baking. Together with their three boys – John, Jr., Richard and Rudy – their persistent labors made the Rozman Ranch self-sustaining.

With this as the background, Sven Wiik

entered the Rozman home on that December day in 1949. The chemistry between him and the Rozmans portended the grand things soon to come.

So now we have the ski-jumping war hero, the gymnast and the Boss.

Only thing was, the Rozmans had always been ranchers and wanted to remain such.

They were adamant their property remained a ranch, at least from spring into fall. In winter, the slopes could be a ski facility, as long as in spring WSC rewired the cattle fences and uncovered drainage ditches. The agreement between the Rozmans, Wiik and WSC was never on paper; a simple handshake consummated the deal. (However, since John was such a perfectionist, he ultimately found it best that the Rozman boys put back the cattle fences.)

This agreement was propitious, not only for WSC’s Mountaineers, but for the entire valley. Soon, others became involved: Chuck Sweitzer and Wes McDermott, supporters of the Pioneer Ski Area, and businesses like the Allen Coffee Shop, Safeway, Gunnison Bank & Trust, Unique Theatre, and Gambles. At first, Rozman Hill was managed on funds less than those for reworking a mine-dump.

Volunteers (mostly WSC students, but also community members) cleared trees, brush and rocks for ski runs and cross-country tracks. In 1950, the first ski jump was little more than compacted snow and only 120 feet long. Next season, WSC provided $100 and more free labor. A ‘permanent’ 150-foot ski jump was built, along with a 550-foot rope tow, soon to be nicknamed Mankiller.

Wiik was not much older than the college kids. But, as a younger athlete, he’d learned a great deal about coaching and training. Once at WSC, he implemented programs based on his Swedish experience, while supervising improvements to Rozman Hill. He introduced European discipline and determination, and he initiated endurance hikes to Aspen and Lake City, foot races up W Mountain, calisthenics, gymnastics and even rugged soccer games. Early Saturday morning, November 3, 1950, Wiik led nine Mountaineers from Gothic through the Elk Mountains to Copper Lake; over Triangle Pass and down Conundrum Creek; across to Crystal Creek and then to Aspen. That Saturday night, Wiik and the team – including Adolph Kuss and Mack Miller – stayed at Glenwood Springs to swim laps on Sunday morning. On March 13, 1951, Mack Miller placed eighth and Adolph Kuss tenth at Boston’s Olympic tryouts.

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Coach Sven Wiik and the Western ski team in 1953

Wiik continued visiting the Rozmans, sometimes after ski training, occasionally while he was in the area surveying for new trail potential. And the Rozmans made sure the young man felt at home with them. Peter Mickelson was so enthused about Wiik’s progress he gave an honorary presentation to John and Mary in February 1951, during WSC’s Winter Carnival festivities on Rozman Hill. Topping off the carnival, Mountaineer Adolph Kuss placed second in the meet, competing against DU, Utah State, Colorado College, CU, Colorado School of Mines and Regis College.

The November 18, 1952, Top O’ The World reported: “A community-wide program to bring the Crested Butte-Gunnison area to a top position among Colorado winter sports areas is under way this week.” The Gunnison Chamber of Commerce hired the Heron Engineering Company to survey the optimum locales on which to begin construction 72

of a permanent ski area. Crested Butte businesspeople A. S. Yarnell, Les Arnett and Mike Verzuh pledged money to encourage this development. Like a fever, Rozman Hill and Sven Wiik’s ski program inspired Gunnison Valley people to consider a variety of ski area possibilities. In the meantime, Wiik continued expanding his ski program. He initiated a ski program for children at Rozman Hill and extended ski opportunities to locals.

He also explored expansion possibilities up Wheatstone.

As I stand amid the old machinery that once powered Rozman Hill – remnants of a 1928 Studebaker, engine and chassis of a 1934 Chrysler, rusted axles and wheelbases, transmission parts – I can still sense Wiik’s drive and innovation. North to south, people in the Gunnison Valley recognized Mickelson had hired a dynamo. Looking up Wheatstone, I can see the faint borderlines of his industry. I consider the arduous work to

clear brush and boulders, to build the judge’s stand, to set up the children’s tow below the slopes named Rolling Bump and Waxing Problems. I can even spy the pine tree where the ’28 Studebaker was once lodged to run the Mankiller; the tree is still growing, yet distorted from years of bracing up that old automobile.

I imagine Lynn Levy, Dick Mize or Mack Miller curving down a trail. Levy and Miller qualified for the 1956 Winter Olympics in Cortina d’Ampezzo after training on Rozman Hill. Miller, originally from Idaho, rose to national champion. Levy, born in Louisiana, attended LSU Medical School after WSC and became a general practitioner. Dick Mize, a WSC Mountaineer from 1953 through 1957, competed in the 1960 Winter Olympics as a biathlon racer. Like John Rozman, their dedication to hard work and perfection paid off.

Expansion continued at the Rozman

Hill Ski Area throughout the 1950s. A slalom course opened for the 1952-53 season. WSC students Frank LeFevre and Wayne Johnson scavenged parts from old lumber trucks at the Albright Camp to keep the tows running.

Mankiller was extended to a length of 1100 feet; despite that improvement, skiers still had to hike to the upper tow. That same season, Mountain Ski Club President Bill Wallin, along with members of the newly formed Junior Chamber of Commerce, raised funds to build a Lok-Log warming hut just northeast of the Mankiller. There the Allen Coffee Shop sold coffee, hot dogs, cake and other confections to skiers and spectators.

Whenever the city of Gunnison got too little snow for winter activities, they were held at Rozman Hill. The 1954 Winter Carnival exhibited its snow sculpture competition there, along with nighttime torchlight downhills, Jaycees’ fundraisers, Mountain Ski Club displays, ski fashion shows and the crowning of a festival king and queen.

Intermountain competitions and other regional events were staged at Rozman Hill, occasionally garnering crowds approaching a thousand people. Wiik believed Rozman Hill and Wheatstone Mountain could become an international ski resort. He diversified his ski programs throughout the 1950s to attract more potential Olympians – racers like Buddy Werner, Dave Gorsuch, Linda Myers, John Burritt, Dick Wellington and Bob Beatty.

The Gunnison Valley drew widespread news coverage, and countless prospective investors visited to explore its possibilities.

In summer 1954, Wiik returned to Sweden to marry Birthe Nielson, his fiancée of several years. That same summer, he released a color film he’d been working on since 1950. This film featured WSC ski team members as they trained and competed at the Pioneer, Rozman Hill and Aspen ski areas.

All the while, Wiik’s ski program continued to attract prospective Olympic skiers: Walter Jackson, Ken MacLennan, Jim Fred Boyle, Jim Mahaffey, Don Zimmerman and Carol Baird -- the first woman Wiik selected for the ski team.

Every aspect of the ski program pointed toward further developing Rozman Hill. In 1955, at a meeting in Gunnison’s Municipal Building, 76 people unanimously voted continued support of the Rozman Hill Ski Area. At this same meeting, Chuck Sweitzer and Wes McDermott encouraged installing electric-powered t-bars designed by Heron Engineering. Then Wiik used a large chalk

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board to theatrically sketch out possible future plans for Rozman Hill, which included four square miles of expanded ski terrain, improved runs and upgraded facilities. Wiik’s enthusiastic presentation stirred resounding applause.

In 1957, as Mack Miller returned to WSC and Dick Mize was soon to head for the Olympics, the Mountaineers improved their game against rivals DU and CU. More ski resorts were proposed for Gunnison County, like Pershing Hill, Gibson Ridge and Tomichi Dome. In 1958-1959, Robert and Webb Heron of the Heron Engineering Company, who had reviewed the northwest slope of Crested Butte Mountain as a potential ski resort, were in contact with Dick Eflin and Fred Rice concerning the possible purchase of the Malensek Ranch there. The desire to be part of a large commercial ski area had grown within Wiik, and he, too, began introducing potential investors to the Gunnison Valley.

Several were presented to the Rozmans.

But Wiik was surprised that John and Mary desired to retain their property as an active ranch. A lease for winter skiing was fine with the Rozmans, but they had no interest in selling the ranch. Wiik, having been close to them for the last decade, knew the Rozmans were true to their beliefs and respected their wishes. Only lease agreements.

In 1960, Eflin and Rice purchased the Malensek Ranch on the northwest base of Crested Butte Mountain (at one time known as Lone Mountain). They applied for ski lift permits from the National Forest Service and began developing their acreage.

Wiik, still with WSC but now a veteran U.S. Olympic Ski Team coach (1958 and 1960), was courted by Steamboat Springs to open a Scandinavian lodge and training center. The Wiiks moved there in 1968.

Crosby Perry-Smith went on to reshape Steamboat’s Howelson Hill and its skijumping program before retiring in Ouray, Colorado.

In 1962, WSC moved its training program to Dick Eflin’s new Crested Butte Ski Area.

As for the Boss and Mary Rozman, who were by then living part-time in Delta, Colorado, they never regretted their decision. Though pleased to have hosted the WSC ski facility and been a crucial part of the Rozman Hill Ski Area, they were ranchers and wanted to remain such.

John Rozman and his three sons had no qualms putting up cattle fences. It’s what they were.

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Thunderbird

A foot or bike tour of Crested Butte's dispersed public art shows the community's creative side.

By Beth Buehler Photos by Xavier Fané 76

In this birthplace of mountain biking, wheels of a different sort are also spinning: the wheels of creative expression. Public art is popping up around town, the latest being at Big Mine Ice Arena and tiny Henderson Park.

A stroll or townie tour of the dispersed outdoor art gallery shows a different dimension of Crested Butte. “It’s fun to find them on your own and learn about them along the way,” suggested local writer and musician Karen Janssen, whose descriptions of each piece are accompanied by Xavier Fané’s photographs in a virtual public art catalog located at crestedbutte-co.gov.

“Public art really adds to our town’s

identity and cultural value… and it’s free!

People can visit a favorite piece over and over again and may have different experiences each time,” said Janssen. “I feel that art has never been at the forefront of the Crested Butte experience, but that’s hopefully changing as there are some really unique and wonderful pieces located throughout town.”

Many of the works happened organically, prior to the town’s Creative Arts District designation in 2016 and the introduction of a public art policy, noted Crested Butte Town Planner Mel Yemma. “Sean Guerrero’s pieces and other art popped up throughout Crested Butte’s history. The art speaks to the spirit and

Buddha Head

funkiness here.”

Some point to a creatively rich time almost 50 years ago when the totem at Totem Pole Park happened on a whim.

Later the welded chrome sculptures by Guerrero became the backdrops for countless photographs. It’s common to see people snapping selfies by Guerrero’s chrome “Knight and the Dragon” near the south entrance to town, lounging on one of his classic benches around downtown, or pondering his majestic eagle head standing guard between the aspen trees that shade the Brick Oven deck.

Near the Center for the Arts, look for his “Thunderbird” and “Pepsi Horse.”

The art is local, by people who live here now or have in the past. A few, like Guerrero, have moved elsewhere; his studio and gallery are now just over Kebler Pass in Paonia.

Others have brought their careers from places like Tulsa and Dallas, some in their retirement years like bronze sculptor Rosalind Cook, who created “Lillith” and “AMAZED.” Still in the early years of his profession, designer and illustrator Luke Schroeder moved to Crested Butte in 2020 and recently painted the mural “A Mining Town Story” at Big Mine Ice Arena.

And some have moved beyond this life, like Andy Bamberg, who passed away in

2009 and left a public art legacy in his wake.

Recycled metal parts form the basis for his menacing “Spearchucker” outside the Old Rock Library and the bench with chrome wings by the Last Steep Bar & Grill. You’ll also see Bamberg’s green metal benches and angled bike racks around town.

WHY PUBLIC ART MATTERS “By name, public art has as its purpose to interact with the viewer. It can delight, create questions, make a statement, commemorate a person or event, etc. Having public art makes a place or town memorable and adds to the overall ambiance of that place,” said Cook, 77

Pepsi Horse

who enjoys watching people interact with her art. “Lillith” on Elk Avenue depicts the quiet joy of a young girl as she steps from a base of lily pads, while “AMAZED” in the Town Park Sculpture Garden is about the curiosity that happens when a boy encounters wildlife.

“My sculpture of the lyrical ‘Lillith’ provides many opportunities for interaction. Dogs bark at her, and children hug her and have their pictures taken with her. She has worn hats and shawls in the snowy winter and masks during Covid; I have even seen little kids looking up under her skirt!” Cook said. “‘AMAZED’ depicts a little amazed boy squatting on an amazed turtle and holding an amazed frog. Young children are always interacting with this piece, from examining the frog to climbing onto the turtle as if riding it.”

Cook’s favorite public art pieces in Crested Butte include the Center for the Arts’ outdoor mural “Be Inspired” by Narda Lebo and the nearby stainless steel, cast glass dragonfly sculpture “The Spirit of Crested Butte” by Amie Jacobsen at the Town Park Sculpture Garden.

The Sculpture Garden debuted in 2019 through a partnership among the Crested Butte Creative District, Town of Crested Butte, Center for the Arts and Colorado Creative Industries. In addition to the two permanent public art installations by Cook and Jacobsen, the Sculpture Garden showcases temporary public art.

Cook also points to the totem at Totem Pole Park, located at Third Street and Maroon Avenue, as “an iconic part of Crested Butte.”

Local woodcrafter Denny McNeill and George Sibley, then director of the Crested Butte Arts Festival, were considering how to add an interactive art component to the 1973 event.

A crew of six – McNeill, Sibley, Barbara Kotz Sibley, Bill Folger, Jim McKay and Jim Cazer – was assigned the task of transforming a spruce tree in a mere six days, with each person tackling a five-foot section with a chainsaw.

What resulted was a sky-reaching piece, adorned with a troll, mushroom, buffalo head, turtle and more, that was installed on August 12, 1973.

HOW IT HAPPENS

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Some of Crested Butte’s public art is donated, like Cook’s “Lillith” and “AMAZED” and Guerrero’s “Pepsi Horse,” while others are the result of the community’s Arts in Public Places (AIPP) policy or grants from entities like Colorado Creative Industries.

The Crested Butte Creative District Commission and Town of Crested Butte established the AIPP in 2017, which specifies

that two percent of any capital project with a construction budget of $100,000 or more and location within the Creative District or a town park shall be dedicated to the creation of public art.

“Public art policy is a way to add a capstone to capital projects; it makes sure we add something fun and funky,” Yemma explained. “With that policy, there’s a good focus on utilizing local artists to create a variety of artwork around town.”

The first installation utilizing AIPP funding is “Jokerville” by local blacksmith and sculptor Ben Eaton. Located by Mallardi Theatre at the corner of Second Street and Elk Avenue, the graceful forged-steel sculpture honors the 60 men killed in an explosion at the local Jokerville Mine on January 24, 1884.

When the commission was searching for art to adorn a Crested Butte Creative District sign being installed at the four-way stop, it selected Ira Houseweart’s design for three large metal columbines sprouting from the base of the sign. It’s a fitting and fun way to enter the Wildflower Capital of Colorado.

FUN APPROACHES FOR PRACTICAL USES Since this community places a high value on sustainability, Crested Butte’s eclectic art collection incorporates a functional and reuse side. Josh Legere’s Adirondack-style bench at the RTA bus stop in front of the Alpineer was crafted from a recycled mono-ski and repurposed Volant skis and bindings, while Jeff Scott used Nordic skis and a bike rim to fashion the ski chandelier located by the Crested Butte Nordic Center/Big Mine Arena.

At the four-way bus stop, don’t miss the Little Free Library to browse not only the books but also the talent of four local artists: Rob Lindsey, Alex Riedman, Levi Rugheimer and Kate Seeley.

And how about the art literally doing laps around Crested Butte and Mt. Crested Butte? When Mountain Express purchased six new buses in 1983 and called for a new logo design, local artist Barbara Greene suggested taking it up a notch and creating a series of moving murals. The practice of transforming white buses (somewhere around 50 to date) into colorful and cheerful public transportation has continued ever since.

“Public art is an expression of a deeper culture; the time, energy and creativity that it takes for an artist to bring a vision to fruition is really notable,” Janssen observed. “I think there’s something really special about standing in front of a piece of art and absorbing the experience it relays.”

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The latest artful additions Honoring history and playful kids

The changing room project at Big Mine Ice Arena resulted in the most recent project funded through the Art in Public Places policy.

In true Crested Butte style, “A Mining Town Story” by Luke Schroeder was formally unveiled at a roller skate disco party in September 2021.

The mural was created to honor Crested Butte’s transformation from a mining supply hub and then coal-mining town into a hub for recreation and a symbol for conservation.

Based on community feedback, Crested Butte Parks & Recreation went with an art park

theme for the renovation of Henderson Park on Whiterock Avenue, to be completed in spring 2022, utilizing funds from Great Outdoors Colorado. Artists Sarah Beabout, Heather Bischoff, Sarah Broadwell and Ben Eaton, in partnership with the Trailhead Children’s Museum, re-imagined the tiny pocket park to feature a circular metal entryway, games built into tables, mosaic “papers” in the grass and more. Gunnison-based ID Sculpture worked with the artists to make the custom features attractive, interactive and safe for playful kids.

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The ski area just replaced its last double chair lift.

But plenty of these classic lift chairs are still swinging around the valley.

By Katherine Nettles

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

The same goes for Twister. I spent many afternoons bumping through the moguls of Crystal trees, chasing my brother for one lap after another until my legs felt like noodles.

Those lift rides prepared us for the eventual exploration into the Extremes. Twister was the rookery that prepared us for flights down Headwall and Phoenix.

The double lift was home, for a while,

and the memories are etched in my mind like the scratched-in initials and the layers of stickers and paint on those old chairs.

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

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

This past summer, the resort auctioned the last of its old doubles, those of the Peachtree lift. Originally installed in 1971, the 50-year-old lift was pulled down, and 83

Mark Ewing Ben Sweitzer

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

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

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

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

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Ben Sweitzer

Ben Sweitzer, co-owner of Ace Hardware in Crested Butte, also got what he believes is a Twister chair in the 2019 sale.

Ben was born in Crested Butte and lived here with his family until third grade, when they relocated to Austin. Ben moved back to town more than 16 years ago. “I spent a lot of time on that lift over the years, so it’s pretty cool I got one,” he said.

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

Scott Gilman, owner of Cement Creek Welding, has made about ten different chairs for clients in and out of the valley. He just finished his first of the Peachtree chairs that were sold this last summer, and he also refurbishes old chairlift cables into railings.

Some chairs hang from an A-frame with attached tables to hold a book or a drink, and some hang from the rafters of a front porch. “The key,” he said, “is that I make sure your feet don’t ever touch the ground.

So it’s like you’re still in the air up on the mountain.”

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

He refurbishes them and sells them on his Etsy shop, Colorado Ski Designs.

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

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

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

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By George Sibley

There’s nothing like dry times to make us think about water. For most of us, access to water is so convenient (it comes out of a faucet) that it’s easy to take it for granted – until we’re told that there’s cause to start worrying about it.

Thus our awareness of water is usually worrying about it, which is too bad; it’s worth contemplating in itself – here on our planet that, had we seen the planet first from a satellite’s perspective, we would probably have named “Water” rather than “Earth.”

The first thing to think about is the fact that we live on a planet at just the right distance from our sun to enable water to exist 88

simultaneously in its solid, liquid and gaseous states – the three lives of water. A few million miles farther from the sun, toward Mars, our water would all be frozen in its solid state. A few million miles closer to the sun, the water would all be a gaseous cloud mass suffocating the planet. In neither of those situations could life as we know it exist; all life on the planet depends on water in its liquid state.

It’s also worth noting that all of us land-based life forms depend entirely on a very small portion of the planet’s water. Most of Planet Earth’s water – 97 percent – is too “salty’ with dissolved solids for land-based life; we need “freshwater,” distilled as vapor

from the salty oceans, then drifted in clouds over the land, condensing as it cools, and dropping as nearly-pure precipitation. But at any given time, only two to three percent of Earth’s water is freshwater – and two-thirds of that in the present age is “frozen assets” in glaciers and ice sheets, remnants of much larger “solid water” masses caused by a mere wobble and tilt in the planet’s relationship to the sun.

Most of the remaining third is invisible groundwater, some of which is accessible for plants through roots and for humans through wells. But the visible liquid water we think of as “our water resource” – the rivers and

Dusty Demerson

streams, lakes and marshes – is only a little over one percent of that two to three percent of the planet’s total freshwater. Our freshwater resource is an almost ignorable fraction of the planet’s total water resource.

So there’s not a lot of freshwater to start with, and here in the upper Gunnison River basin, we are not ideally situated to get a share of it. The main source of the water we get in the Southern Rockies is water vapor evaporated from the tropical Pacific Ocean a thousand miles west. That warmed water vapor rises, cooling and condensing to liquid or solid precipitation, some of which is carried east and north by the trade winds

into the so-called Temperate Zone. There, prevailing west winds push it toward the West Coast’s coastal ranges, causing it to rise again and cool further, condensing to “orographic precipitation” that falls on those mountains.

Flowing down the mountains’ east slope into the Central Valley, it warms again and absorbs moisture rising off the irrigated fields. Then it encounters the steep young Sierras, where the rising, cooling and precipitating cycle happens again, often with massive dumps of snow and rain.

Between those two California mountain ranges, most of the Pacific moisture is squeezed out of the air. Descending the lee

slope of the Sierras, the air warms again and “recycles” whatever moisture it can absorb in its long trip over the arid Great Basin, where small rivers form in the small uplifts of that basin-and-range region but eventually just disappear, either evaporated back into the air or soaked into the ground.

Finally, nine hundred miles inland from the West Coast, the air reaches the Southern Rockies, and only two factors make it possible to squeeze the remaining moisture out of that mostly dried-out air: the great height of the mountain ranges and the deep winter cold at those elevations.

Thus the majority of the precipitation 89

Rebecca Ofstedahl

for the entire Colorado River region falls in the winter as snow on the headwaters basins of the Southern Rockies, above 8,000 feet elevation.

It is a fraction of what falls on the California mountain ranges: some readers will remember hearing of a storm in January 2021 that dropped nine feet of “Sierra cement” on the Sierras; but by the time the remaining moisture got to the Southern Rockies, it only had a foot of “Colorado champagne powder” left for us – a relatively dry snow that only yields an inch of water from a foot of snow. Well, we go with what we get and are grateful for that.

Snow falling on the mountains is just where our water story starts, though. What happens to that solid or liquid water after it falls? In 2020 a group of scientists at the Western Water Assessment, based at the University of Colorado in Boulder, published an in-depth report on the Colorado River (“Colorado River Basin” link at https:// wwa.colorado.edu). The report states that approximately 170 million acre-feet of water (enough water to cover an acre of land one foot deep) fell over the Colorado River Basin in an average 20th-century year, and 85 percent of that fell in the river’s headwaters basins, like our Upper Gunnison country above the 8,000-foot elevation, the majority of it as winter snow.

Colorado River records show, however, that only about 10 percent of that large quantity of precipitation actually makes it into the Colorado River by the time the river has collected its major tributaries. Where does the rest of that precipitation go – 85-90 percent of it?

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Mary Schmidt

Almost all of it goes back into the atmosphere in its gaseous state – a lot of it pretty quickly, before it even gets down to where humans begin living off of it. As much as a fourth of the total precipitation that falls as solid-state water (snow) is sublimated by wind and sun – water taken from its solid to its gaseous form without even going through the liquid stage. Windblown snow in the high rocks-and-ice region loses part of its mass to sublimation; snow caught on the darkcolored branches of conifers in the mountain forests is vaporized off the branches as the sun warms the dark branches under the

snow. Sublimation is sometimes even visible – “steam” rising from the edge of a snow mass on a sunny day, even when the air temperature is below freezing.

When the snow melts and turns to water, water that stays on or even near the surface of the land is vulnerable to evaporation by sun and wind. Less evaporates in the higher elevations than lower down in the hot, dry deserts, and the mountain forests and grasslands help protect water from evaporation; nonetheless, evaporation returns a significant portion of water back into the atmosphere, even in the high country. (In

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the summer, some of the water evaporating out of the Colorado River system reservoirs is carried back up to the peaks and orographically cooled to fall again in the river basin as showers and thunderstorms – natural recycling.)

Plant shade protects some of the snow or water from evaporation, but the plants themselves give even more water back to the thirsty atmosphere. Plants transpire groundwater up through their roots and stems to every leaf; a fraction of that water is used by the leaf for its own vitality and for the photosynthesis processes that ultimately feed us all. But at least 90 percent of what a plant carries up from the groundwater is transpired through leaves into the atmosphere as more vapor to cool their immediate environment. This can be quite a lot of water. A mature lodgepole pine transpires around 10-12 gallons of water a day, depending on temperature; an Engelmann spruce transpires 18-20 gallons a day, and a mature cottonwood (below 8,000 feet) more than 100 gallons a day. Not only does water not “grow on trees”; trees substantially diminish the supply of liquid freshwater, just like we do.

Between sublimation from the solid state in the high country, and evaporation and transpiration of the liquid state everywhere, water does show a disquieting tendency toward its gaseous rather than its liquid state – the more disquieting as we warm up the global climate.

Temperature obviously drives the dynamic transitions among these three lives 92

Trevor Bona

of water, solid, liquid and vapor, leading scientists today to distinguish between dry droughts, when the atmosphere carries insufficient water vapor to condense as precipitation, and heat droughts, when precipitation has occurred but high temperatures escalate the vaporizing processes and quickly return more of the water to the atmosphere. We’ve experienced both types in the 2021 water year. Current estimates are that each one-degree increase in average temperatures will reduce the amount of freshwater collected in arid-land rivers and lakes four to eight percent.

But that gets into a larger story – one in which we will all be involved for the foreseeable future. My hope here, beyond fueling readers’ curiosity, is to convey a stronger sense of why that involvement needs to be wholehearted and serious.

Freelance writer George Sibley has been watching the water in our valleys since the mid-1960s and his time on the Crested Butte Ski Patrol (skiing on water in its solid state).

He has followed “our” water from the high alpine to where, after many uses and abuses, it finally disappears in the desert cities and fields of the deep Southwest.

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‘RIVER ABOVE THE RIVER’

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SLIPPING INTO THE OH BE JOYFUL FLOW – ON SKINNY SKIS.

By Leath Tonino

Oh Be Joyful – the stretch of steep, rambunctious creek, the daisy chain of waterfalls spilling from designated wilderness, the secret little swimming holes and mossy boulders and polished slabs and glittery veils of spray, the intricacy and dynamism and power. Of the valley’s innumerable beloved landmarks (watermarks), OBJ ranks at the top of my personal list. Accordingly, I’ve tried again and again – compulsively, enthusiastically – to engage it, explore it, make visceral contact with it: body, mind, soul, spirit, etc.

Camp beside OBJ during the spring melt, listening through my dreams to a thousand singing voices in the surge? Been

there. Wade barefoot up OBJ when the water is low and the summer sun is bright, scrambling the cascades, sloshing through the slippery pools? Done that. Read ancient Zen texts about sweet achy ephemerality – about change being the sole constant – while sipping dark beer on a golden autumn evening, breaking now and then to gaze into the eddies and foam? Yup. Shy of kayaking the rowdy rapids (above my pay grade, though I do relish the vicarious thrill of witnessing friends huck their meat), I’ve experimented with darn near everything.

Or so I thought. Then came one of the best Sundays ever: last April, tail end of a decently snowy winter, gauzy clouds 95

Photos Sasha Chudacoff

and zero wind, solitude out the wazoo.

Riding my skinny, floppy, half-delaminated, decidedly wrong-tool-for-the-job pair of Rossignols... I nordorked it! Cross-country skied it! Flowed atop it and flowed with it!

Classic style! Yes, classic is indeed an apt word to describe this personal first descent, this revelation, this new version of the cherished, familiar creek. Unforgettable.

Awesome. Instant classic.

River rats sporting neon life jackets and scuffed helmets sometimes refer to OBJ as OBC – Oh Be Careful – due to the relentless grade, the copious logjams and the general risk of carnage, but my run, which commenced where kayakers typically put in, a mile above the confluence with the Slate, wasn’t gnarly, adrenalized, dangerous or extreme. Reason: drifts, pillows, soft powder’s mellow angle of repose, the way it fills in rough spots and smooths off hard edges. Inside the gorge, below and between the white fluted walls, the creek was buried, June’s vertical plunges and September’s bony ramps transformed, each infamous pitch a slow-motion arc, a goofy attempt at telemarking, a silky ahhh.

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Actually, let me amend the previous paragraph. There was in fact an extreme quality to the descent: an extreme beauty, an extremely impressive and unexpected aesthetic force. Intermittently, windows appeared to my left and right, potholes in the snowpack, portals to black stone and a thin, sheeting, otherwise hidden current. Missing a pole plant and tumbling into one of these surreal wells (four feet deep, trashcan lid- to trampoline-sized) would definitely have been bad news, but they were easy enough to skirt, hardly concerning. Craning my neck, peering, aware that curiosity – nay, that mesmerization – was the biggest risk, I slid past them, slalomed through them, astounded by the juxtaposition of solid and liquid, of old winter becoming newborn spring.

The descent lasted a mere 15 minutes, max. Conifers, blue-gray sky, exposed rock faces and rock faces hoary with frost. All was still, frozen, perfectly pristinely paused – all except for my gliding body and the gliding water.

Okay, leap ahead a year. By chance, the very day that I sat down with my laptop to begin writing this essay, I happened to also

read the following mysterious, tantalizing lines in a poem by Ursula Le Guin: “There is a river above the river / like the dreaming or the breathing of the river.” What that means, even within the context of the rest of the poem, is totally beyond my ken (poetry is intended to be absorbed, not understood).

Nevertheless, the image registers as somehow true, somehow accurate.

Recalling my initial, unforgettable OBJ ski, that classic, that mini-tour I’ve since repeated and plan to repeat whenever conditions permit, I realize that in this case the river above the river (the creek above the creek) is twofold: there’s the snow superimposed over glinting, glistening bedrock, and there’s the man shussing and quietly laughing over the snow. As I put it earlier: flowed atop it and flowed with it.

And though it may smack of woo-woo econonsense, I’m tempted to add that I have flowed as it, gravity working on me, tugging on me, pulling on me, a man made of watery cells – watery brain and heart and muscle and bone.

Oh me, oh my, Oh Be!

Utterly freakin’ Joyful!

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The Guerrieri kids await the day’s ranch assignments from their dad.

WHAT YOU MIGHT MISS FOUND IN THE OLD RANCH SHOP: A PIPE WRENCH, A FUNNY MEMORY AND A LITTLE LUMP IN THE THROAT.

By Cara Guerrieri

Last spring I searched the ranch shop for a pipe wrench, trying to puzzle out what Dad meant when he told me, “It’s in them old shelves, up high, the ones your grandpa built, just below where I used to hang the calf pullers.

You can’t miss it.” Well, all the shelves looked old and homemade as if Grandpa could’ve built them, and there were no obvious calf puller brackets.

After 70 years on this Gunnison ranch, Dad knew the shop like the back of his hand, but I hadn’t been a full-time resident in the valley for decades. I went from tool bin to tool bin, looking above, below and inside, and saw no sign of a pipe wrench. I sat on a bench and looked around, remembering many days of this very type of confusion. Each morning when I was young, after Mom’s breakfasts, Dad gave five wide-eyed kids his you-can’t-miss-it instructions.

“Saddle up yer horses,” he’d say. “Cara, you can ride that sorrel mare. Head up above the house to the bull pasture. Give that brocklefaced heifer with foul foot 50 CCs of penicillin.

She’s holed up in the willows by the creek. You can’t miss her.”

While we mulled over his words, he’d slide his long legs into hip-wader irrigating boots and continue, “Then I suppose you better check them older cows, too. That red shorthorn was sure a-bawlin’ yesterday. Ride up there and see if you can find her calf. He’s the one that had bad pink-eye in the spring. Last I seen the cow she was up on that hillside in the quakies.

You can’t miss her.”

As he walked to get the freshly sharpened shovel leaning against the cabin, we’d trot along behind, trying to catch every word.

“While you’re up that way, check on that lone bull. He’s been run off by the others. Might as well bring him on in. He might drive better with a couple pairs. Then just leave him in the corral and turn that other young bull out, the one I bought in Delta. You can’t miss him.”

He’d head toward his John Deere tractor, still finishing his instructions. “Say, and before you unsaddle, ride up and fix the fence wires on the north end of the forty above the horse 99

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pasture. I lowered them last winter so the snow didn’t bust ‘em. We’ll move the yearlin’s up there sometime this week. You’ll need those yellow fence stretchers. They’re in the lower barn where Uncle Jim stored that old generator. You can’t miss ‘em.”

One of my brave older brothers would ask, “That bull, Dad, is it the one—”

The interruption was swift and final.

“I can’t spend all damn day explaining.

You’se will figure it out. And if you don’t, do something. Even if it’s wrong.” His tone remained matter of fact.

He’d start up the tractor, the loud diesel motor preventing any further questions. Then his crew of kids would do what he asked, more or less. Sometimes we doctored the wrong cow, brought in the wrong bull, or made fence repairs without stretchers. We understood early on that “you can’t miss it” was Dad’s way of expressing his faith in us and pushing us to “use the brains God gave you” to solve problems.

Last spring, with me middle-aged and sitting on the shop bench, Dad pushing 90, it was clear that old habits die hard. His directions were still sparse, and I hadn’t bothered to ask for clarification. After a time, I grabbed a wrench, not a pipe wrench, but maybe it would do the trick. It was something, even if it was wrong.

“Well hell,” he said, looking at the wrench I brought him. “That ain’t no pipe wrench.” Rather than send me back with more instruction, he hobbled to the shop with his walker, on painful knees that had logged too many irrigation miles. He spotted the pipe wrench right away, pointed and said, “It’s right where I told you it’d be.”

I smiled. “It sure is.” I grabbed the correct wrench.

On the way back to the house, I walked close to him, matching his labored pace. The high-altitude sun warmed my back as I took in the familiar view of newborn calves in the meadows, cottonwood trees with fresh limegreen buds, and the picture-perfect backdrop of snow-capped Carbon Mountain and the Anthracites. In a few days I was scheduled to brave COVID and fly home. I had no way of knowing how long it would be before I could safely come back.

“I’m getting slower every day, Cara,” Dad said, and I felt a lump form in my throat.

All my life he’d told me about things “you can’t miss,” but right then, looking around the ranch of my childhood, thinking about Mom and Dad, I felt wholly unprepared for all the things I would miss.

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SPRING FLUX

Tracy Schwartz

LIVING ON THE EDGE OF THE WILDS, THIS WRITER FINDS SOLACE IN NATURE’S QUIET CURRENTS.

By Cosmo Langsfeld

Spring at 9,250 feet above sea level.

Daytime temps hover in the 30s and 40s, occasionally venturing into the 50s. That, combined with overnight freezes, provides a patchwork cover of hard snow and crunchy frozen ground in the morning that by afternoon has become a gloppy, sloppy mess.

One thing about living up here is that when the world goes haywire, which a lot of people argue that it has, it’s easy to shut out the nonsense. A closed road, no cell service, slow and semi-reliable Internet and a landline that cuts out with no apparent

reason – the periodic self-isolation that became many people’s new normal over the last couple of years is, for me, more of a way of life. I’m no hermit, but if I wanted to be, the option is there.

Long days and nights on the ranch.

Weekends see a steady stream of dog walkers and cross-country skiers. Snowmobiles pass with skis or split boards lashed to the side.

Then the road gets plowed. I can’t figure out why. In a few weeks, Mother Nature would do for us what was likely thousands of dollars of machine work. Plus it shuts 103

Photos Don Emmert

off the backcountry access to snow-lovers prematurely. Once that happens, though, things REALLY quiet down. Maybe a dog walker wanders by a couple times a week in the early mornings before the mud softens.

Something else happens then, when all the humans leave and the days get long and quiet, the nights quieter still. When the people move out, the animals move in.

I was in my kitchen when I first saw the two geese. I want to say I saw them come in, gliding down-valley and settling with a 104

flutter on the warm springs-fed pond. My kitchen window looks out at the pond – and beyond it, the barn, cabins, a couple of outbuildings, then the wetland and creek bottom and the view of the mountain up valley hemmed in by opposing ridgelines.

More likely, I probably looked out while making coffee one morning and just saw them there.

I’ll admit, I’ve given little thought to the daily habits and rituals of geese. But I watched them throughout the days and

weeks. They roamed the tall dead grass around the pond, bobbing their heads from time to time to pluck edibles from below.

Maybe snails? A sizeable snail population resides in the warm spring water. Or maybe just grass? Did I mention I don’t know much about geese?

They did their goose thing. They came and went, spending time on the beaver ponds in the pasture. I don’t think they went far, because they always turned up again at the pond, moseying about before bedding

down for a time.

Initially I thought maybe the geese were here to stay. A warm springs-fed pond teeming with minnows and plant life seems ideal for raising a clutch of goslings. But alas, Canadian geese don’t nest in the Gunnison Valley. Seems obvious, given their name, but in the moment, none of that crossed my mind. Mostly I had the voice of David Attenborough in my head, calmly narrating my own private nature show, and nesting geese seemed like the perfect story arc. There was even a nice foil to the geese in the form of the coyotes.

Coyotes are fascinating animals. Greatly maligned by the Warner Bros. and made foolish by roadrunners, the real-life animals are much more graceful and intelligent.

That spring I saw one coyote more than the others, and yes, given enough time on your hands and a little bit of awareness, you can tell the difference between individuals.

She (I came to think of her as female, though I never confirmed this) was a loner, and I first spotted her around the pond. She would come in the evenings and hunt in the tall grass. I watched her catch numerous mice, moles, voles or other rodents and was grateful for her pest exterminating habits.

Once or twice she was there at the same time as the geese, and I watched, not so secretly hoping for some sort of showdown between them (enter again the somber tones of Mr. Attenborough), but that never happened.

Sometimes she howled from up on the hillside. A few times I saw her out in the pasture, yapping away as a dog and its owner went by on the road. She would yap and then run in the opposite direction for a few yards, then stop, yap and feint again. I knew if I skied up the road or out the pasture in the evenings, I would see her in almost the same spot, hunting in the willows. She must have had a den around. Maybe with a litter of pups? Who knows, but I had a lot of time on my hands to craft imaginary lives for my neighbors.

This loner was not entirely alone. Two other coyotes traveled as a pair and moved through the ranch from time to time. I’ve seen them, or two others like them, in the summer, hunting in the higher meadows.

I’ll see one on the edge of the trees sitting, watching. Then the dogs take off in the other direction and the second one I hadn’t seen is running away on the opposite side of the meadow from its partner. I look back and the first one has faded into the aspens, the trunks of which are almost the same color as

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its fur.

The single coyote seemed to be residing on or near the ranch, because I saw her every day, but the pair appeared only intermittently. Notably, once summer came and people returned, I stopped seeing the pair on the ranch and the solitary coyote began hunting exclusively in the pasture.

Inevitably, though, time would pass and I would see them again.

Once the following fall, while walking dogs in the pasture, I saw a lone coyote at the base of a hill. In the dusk, it blended in with the hillside, hard to spot. A moment later, yipping came from the other direction, down in the willows of the creek bed. The dogs ran toward the yipping as I looked in that direction, and when I turned back a few seconds later, the coyote at the base of the hill had moved about 50 yards closer. Why would a wild animal come in on us like that? It hit me like a ton of bricks: the son of a bitch was hunting us. Or more likely hunting the dogs, all the more disconcerting because they weren’t my dogs. I called them back, and we walked quickly up to the house as the coyotes yapped and howled away in the creek bottom.

I’m not crazy. I understand a wild animal is a wild animal and should be nothing else. But still. After everything we’ve been through, you guys would really do me like that?

The animals are only part of the spring flux. There’s a stillness in the spring that is difficult to replicate. The days are so quiet. I watch as the Earth opens up, the living things awakening. I’ll hike up a ridge and look down at the valley bottom and spy patches of green, likely in the springs, showing between the white and brown.

Then, slowly, the color spreads. Birds return. The days get warmer, longer; the freezes shallower.

As the ground melts out, I venture down toward the garden. Till the soil.

Watch as the green fingers of garlic poke up into the sun. The hard-frozen snow in the morning makes for the best crust skiing. I spend my days writing. Cooking.

Skiing. Running. It’s a simple routine and one I dream about during the busier times of year. And even when everything else grows increasingly uncertain, I can always fall back on the ebbs and flows of nature.

Like breathing, or a beating heart, they go on without our input, apart from whatever nonsense is going on beyond the view from my kitchen window.

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A TRIBUTE TO THE TREES

Rebecca Ofstedahl

FOR AIR, WATER, SHELTER, SOLACE: IN SO MANY WAYS, WE ARE TIED TO THE FORESTS.

By Polly Oberosler

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Climate and water are on many people’s minds these days in the West, as our lives depend on them. We’re witnessing ever faster changes to the world climate as the carbon from the Industrial Revolution forward has accumulated enough to saturate our atmosphere. Trees cut for railroads, mine tunnel cribbing, fencing and of course building, to name but a few uses of lumber, have diminished nature’s scrub brushes over the years, and replenishing them will take time. The carbon-to-oxygen exchange of all plants is a big part of our atmosphere, climate and individual wellness – and the large trees of the forest have much to offer in

maintaining all three.

Learning how to take care of the forest has also been fraught with mistakes made with good intentions, like selective cutting where only the finest trees were harvested, which discombobulated the gene pool.

Smaller, less hardy trees have taken the place of the large sentinels that produced far more straight board-feet of lumber, making them attractive to lumber companies. Unbeknownst to foresters 100 years ago, those giants were more efficient when it came to water and soil nutrient use and did so much to control our climate and were givers of the air we breathe.

I’ve spent many years living in the woods

Rebecca Ofstedahl

for my past US Forest Service employment and volunteer work as a wilderness ranger, and the trees never ceased to amaze me for their resilience. In campsites I came across in my travels, I found evergreens girdled by wire that at one time was probably used to contain horses. In some places the trees were stripped of branches maybe 15 feet high, and each camp might contain three or four fire pits.

Where horses were left tied to small trees, the ground was pawed and roots were exposed.

The forest floor, littered with old tin cans at the feet of the giant spruce trees, tells of years of abuse from a time when wild lands were plenty.

The trees have mostly healed in the oldest camps but show the scars in their crooked trunks and hardened sap that once ran to heal the wounds. New growth is slow or nonexistent because of the disruptions of the bark layers that feed the trees. Changes in weather patterns have compromised the moisture needed for healthy forests.

In places the beavers have moved on in search of more water as they struggle to stop the earth from drying. Most camps have several old fire pits, the oldest ones hardly noticeable after being decades unused, but if I found them, I would dig around some of them to discard the scorched earth, replacing

it with good topsoil from the meadows.

Often in a ten-foot radius from the pit center, the roots of nearby trees were scorched; the campfires had traveled underground, sterilizing the soil as it crept.

Trees capture carbon dioxide and give off oxygen as all plants do, but trees are the kings of the forest, and individual conifers can exchange tons of carbon and oxygen per year. They also transfer untold amounts of water into the air that falls as rain to replenish our rivers and adjacent aquifers. There the water is stored underground to be called on by those same trees in times of drought. It is a magnificent cycle, impossible to replicate.

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With the prolonged deforestation of the earth, fewer trees and their close communities of plants are there to clean the air we breathe.

Visitors often remark that the air at altitude smells so clean – well, yes, it is cleaner because the trees can keep up with the local carbon dioxide produced in less populated areas. Trees alone will not offset the large amount of carbon in our atmosphere, but they can keep up with around 25% of it, helping other efforts like discontinuing the use of coal to generate power. Natural gas also contributes to the carbon but has somewhat less impact than coal. The greener power alternatives, at this point, can’t stand alone, needing the bridge fuel of gas until we put serious money into storage or refine nuclear generation. Meantime, we look to the trees for sequestering some of the carbon, a role they will carry on forever unless they fail to thrive.

In the summer of 2002, the long-term drying of the West hit a high point with a whole year lacking in moisture, and it won’t be the last plateau. It was severe, and the forest trees began to show signs of weakness.

The needles turned dull green or brown, and the tree limbs began to droop as less and less moisture came. Years of suppressing fire allowed for an over-mature forest with few young hardy trees in the mix, and the bark beetle came to help Mother Nature rejuvenate.

The tiny bugs infested nearly every tree in some parts of the West, and they’re still out there, creating a barren landscape of brown needles piled high beneath naked trees. It is sad, but if one looks closely, tiny saplings are coming up through the rubble of the old ones lying prone on the forest floor. From death comes life.

Near where I spent much of my time working for the Forest Service, there’s a high ridge overlooking a huge basin, with a series of three ridges below it. The high ridge is known as The Firebox, named for an old wooden box constructed there over a half-century ago to hold fire tools. The area got little use back then and remains remote now. Yet folks were compelled to put out every fire, and the forest never rejuvenated as it should, leaving it open to infestation.

“Firebox” is a term attached to a spot in many forests across the country for the same reason.

I love the trees and was intimately tied to them as I worked. I camped in them for shelter, burned their deadfall to keep warm and cleared the debris from the trails when they fell. They hid my camp and made for softer views for the few who used that

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wilderness.

Choosing that camp was total happenstance. Getting caught in a downpour, we ducked in there and hid, cramped under a low spruce for more than an hour. Even though the horses were somewhat under sheltering trees, they were soaked, as was all their gear. We stayed, and after losing two pack animals to greener grass one evening, we were forced to leave much of the camp gear there. We caught the wanderers 11 miles closer to the trailhead. We returned a couple of weeks later to get the camp gear, and afterward we used that site for twenty-plus years.

Looking around on my first few trips, I began to see all the damage to the trees and soil. I believe my working partner and I hauled 35 pounds of nails from that camp. There was no ground cover at all in that overused site, so I vowed to not get my firewood there, instead hauling it an armload at a time from an area that wasn’t desecrated. My perseverance paid off. In that huge bare area with all tree limbs stripped at least ten feet above the compacted dirt, the ground began to fill in, one downed tree at a time. The ground cover began to come back: needles, bark and even grasses stretching for the sunlight.

I spotted a tiny sapling sprouting from a decomposing stump. Somehow the wind had carried a seed to a hollowed-out spot in the rotted wood and life began anew. Old trees and some younger would be snapped or uprooted by the turbulent winds of a microburst, and where they fell, saplings began their journey to becoming the next forest sentinels.

The trees sheltered me, and the calming sounds of wind through their tops nourished my soul. I had one serious close call with falling trees in a storm, and it taught me to keep my rain gear handy so I could suit up and sit in the meadow until a storm passed. I’ve learned that fire is important to keep the forest viable and productive; the lodgepole pines even need fire to release their seeds. Mother Nature is a good manager of our forests, and getting out of her way is best.

Though our lives depend on trees, we are consuming trees from around the world for everything from decking to guitars, to the point where certain woods are rare or gone. We need to remember the trees that wrap our hillsides are part of the systems that clean our air, supply our water and feed our souls. We are tied to the trees.

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Winter 2021-2022 events

NOVEMBER 4, 11, 18

Beautiful Landscapes of the West virtual series via the museum

13

Opening day, Crested Butte Nordic Center

18

Literary Arts & Lecture, Center for the Arts (CFTA): John Hausdoerffer

18

Film Night, CFTA: “School of Rock”

24

Opening day, Crested Butte Mountain Resort (CBMR)

25-27

Thanksgiving Nordic Camp

28

Pinnacle Orthopedics Nordic Community Race Series

DECEMBER Elise Hanna

2

Literary (Pub) Tour de Center, CFTA

3

Sweaty Kids Film Festival, CFTA

4

Avalanche Awareness Night, Crested Butte Avalanche Center (CBAC)

5

Beacon Brush Up, CBAC, behind the school

5

Jam Class with Justin Leflar, CFTA

5

Christmas Community Family Holiday Movie, CFTA: “Home Alone”

9

Kinder Padon Gallery Opening Reception, CFTA: Teri Havens

10

Light Up Night holiday activities, Mt. CB; Rock on Ice all winter

10-12

CB School of Dance Nutcracker performances, CFTA

12

Pinnacle Orthopedics Nordic Community Race Series

16-19

“A Christmas Carol,” Crested Butte Mountain Theatre production

18

December Film Screening, CFTA: “Die Hard”

24

Santa comes to the base area, with holiday activities

30

ArtWalk at Crested Butte galleries and studios

31

New Year’s Eve torchlight parade and fireworks at the ski area

31

New Year’s Eve party, CFTA

JANUARY

114

Rebecca Ofstedahl

2

Film Night, CFTA: “Stop Making Sense”

7-9

“Tiny Beautiful Things” staged readings, CFTA

15, 16

Leftover Salmon concerts, CFTA

15, 16, 30

Pinnacle Orthopedics Nordic Community Race Series

16

ArtWalk at Crested Butte galleries and studios

22

Scottish Burns Supper & Whiskey Tasting, CFTA

28

Shamarr Allen + The Underdawgs concert, CFTA

Constance Mahoney

Chris Miller Constance Mahoney

Raynor Czerwinski

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Winter 2021-2022 events

Constance Mahoney

FEBRUARY 1

Film Night, CFTA: “Heathers”

5

Alley Loop Nordic Marathon

7

Galactic concert, CFTA

10, 13, 22

Pinnacle Orthopedics Nordic Community Race Series

11

The Motet concert, CFTA

13

Poetry + Wine, tasting and reading, CFTA

18

Heartless Disco, CFTA

19

ArtWalk at Crested Butte galleries and studios

20

Historic Pub Crawl, CB Mountain Heritage Museum (CBMHM)

27

Gothic Mountain Tour

Dusty Demerson

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Don Emmert

Mary Schmidt

MARCH

2, 9, 16, 23, 30 Historical Walking Tours through CBMHM 6

Limerick writing workshop, CFTA

6, 9

Pinnacle Orthopedics Nordic Community Race Series

7

Film Night, CFTA: “Cool Runnings”

10

Keller Williams concert, CFTA

13

Chris Pierce concert, CFTA

18

ArtWalk at Crested Butte galleries and studios

18-22

Ladies Session Camp, lessons and fun, Adaptive Sports Center

19

Al Johnson Memorial Telemark Race, CBMR

19

Ski Town Breakdown free concert at the base area, CBMR

24

Anders Osborne + Jackie Greene concert, CFTA

APRIL 1-3

Flauschink end-of-season celebration

2

Pond Skim ski/snowboard contest, CBMR base area

3

Elk Mountains Grand Traverse

3

Film Night, CFTA: “The Fantastic Mr. Fox”

3

Closing day of ski area

For updated calendar, see gunnisoncrestedbutte.com/events.

John Holder

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1890s Crown bottling machine from soft drink operations at the Crested Butte House.

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A local museum exhibit looks at Crested Butte’s culture through its food and libations.

By Jacob Rothman

Copper milk can used locally for distilling alcohol.

Editor’s note: Jacob Rothman, 27, grew up in Crested Butte and studied history in college and graduate school before becoming a grants researcher for Hanover Research. Recently Jacob researched and wrote the “Food and Drink @ 9,000 Feet” exhibit for the Crested Butte Mountain Heritage Museum. In the process, he learned a few things about his hometown.

When I tell people about the museum’s new exhibit on the history of food and drink in Crested Butte, I’m sometimes met with a confused look. Food and drink? What’s so special about that? For a town renowned for its extremes – endless mountain biking, untamed freeskiing, backbreaking coal mining, glorious wildflowers – this topic can seem prosaic. Yet this cultural history of Crested Butte is fascinating, for it reveals both this town’s unique historical development and its connections to the wider world.

It is a story of resilience, innovation and community.

Crested Butte’s original non-native population primarily consisted of midwestern and eastern American transplants, followed

by British and German immigrants. These miners and their families came searching for silver and gold, but by the mid 1880s coal dominated the economy. Following this

transition was a population shift; by 1895, Crested Butte was home to many Southern European immigrants. By 1925, Croatians and Slovenians represented most of Crested Butte’s population. They joined other Slavs, Italians, Greeks, Germans and diverse other immigrants to search for a better life in Crested Butte. All these settlers benefitted from the forced removal of local Ute Indians to Utah in 1881.

For many immigrants, coal mining was a new line of work. They had lived agrarian lifestyles in the Old Country; they were farmers, not industrial workers. However, even when these newcomers encountered Crested Butte’s high-altitude environment and began harvesting rocks instead of crops, they maintained traditional practices of self-sufficiency. Slavic immigrants cured meat and Italian immigrants baked bread; smokehouses, hogs, dairies, ranches and outdoor brick ovens were (and in many cases still are) features of the Crested Butte landscape. Italian women reportedly used coke ovens to bake their bread. Even with the short growing season, people kept neat gardens, raising staples such as lettuce, potatoes, carrots, turnips and cabbage. The Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I) 119

Eleanor Stefanic in her grocery store, 1982

Gal Starika at work in her kitchen, 1969

Sandra Cortner

A classic Crested Butte pig roast

Sandra Cortner

would judge these gardens and award prizes to the best. Hunters and foragers also harvested the land’s wild bounty, like berries, mushrooms, dandelion greens, trout, elk and other game.

These immigrants shared their culinary traditions. Croatian and Slovenian recipes included povitica, or potica, a rolled nut bread especially popular during festivities like Christmas (see story on page 34). Italians made pizza potenza and braciola. Many early residents owned pigs; butcherings were big events, and Italians continued making spicy kielbasa sausage at home. British immigrants preferred baked goods, such as shortbread, suet pudding and pasties. German recipes included cabbage pockets and sauerkraut.

Traditional Mexican dishes were chile rellenos 120

From the museum exhibit

and pollo a la Mexicana.

Many immigrants went into cattle ranching. The Denver and Rio Grande Railroad shipped Gunnison cattle from as early as 1882. Indeed, despite later challenges, in the 1880s and ‘90s Gunnison County was one of the fastest growing cattle centers in Colorado. Ranchers were also able to enter dairying, an industry unto itself. For example, the Mountain Glow Dairy, owned by the Yaklich family, operated 1940-1958 at First and Maroon in Crested Butte. In its heyday the dairy shipped Grade A pasteurized milk – all milked by hand – as far away as Nebraska.

Despite these successes, people living here soon learned that Crested Butte’s isolation and environment are fickle friends.

This place is a beautiful respite from city life

– but imagine surviving here without modern conveniences or transportation! Nor has Crested Butte escaped the vicissitudes of the local and national economy. As a coal mining community, the town was hit hard by strikes, such as in 1913-14 (when anti-striker militia killed 21 in the Ludlow Massacre in southeast Colorado) and in 1927. The community felt the pressures of the Great Depression, too, after the local bank failed in 1931. The town faced massive economic and population decline after the Big Mine closed in 1952.

Such environmental and economic vulnerability forced Crested Buttians to be food efficient. This even applied to the summer when mining work was scarce.

Throughout the 1927 Colorado miner’s strike, townspeople survived for eight

months on hunting, fishing, turnips and sauerkraut. Two items in the museum exhibit, a local 1937 Montgomery Ward pressure cooker and cookbook, illustrate how people preserved food by canning it. In Crested Butte, economic downturn and long winters required planning for potential food shortages.

Stores also helped people get through hard times by offering long lines of credit.

Stefanic’s General Store, owned by Tony and Eleanor Stefanic from 1946 to 1985, was famous for its generosity. The Roth-Glick store grubstaked miners from 1904-1918; instead of paying for goods, miners would offer the store a share of their mining claims.

Surviving here took creativity, grit and kindness, and locals repeatedly lived up to the challenge.

Restaurants and saloons followed industry’s heels in Crested Butte. Saloons especially took hold during the earliest mining days. Kochevar’s enjoyed an early claim to fame when, in 1902, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid stopped for a drink before bolting to escape the law enforcement hot on their heels. These establishments were disproportionately represented compared to the population; 754 people lived in Crested Butte in 1885, and by 1883 the town boasted 10 saloons and three restaurants. In 1899, there were 13 saloons for a population of roughly 1,000. By the late 1920s that number had climbed to 17!

Women were discouraged from entering saloons, but to men the watering holes were community centers for everything from meeting friends to paying fraternal lodge, club or church dues. Nonetheless, even before Prohibition (1916-1933 in Colorado) locals tried regulating saloons. In the 1908 election, the “Citizen ticket” successfully ran against the “Labor ticket” on a law that forbade saloons from operating anywhere except on Elk Avenue, mandated that saloons close on Sundays, and prohibited women from working in or frequenting saloons.

When Prohibition came, bootlegging followed. A copper milk/distillery can excavated from a local home, now part of the museum exhibit, symbolizes the histories of both local dairying and private alcohol production. During Prohibition, the Spritzer bar, located at Second Street and Sopris, was innocently called Spritzer’s Pool Hall and Soft Drink Parlor, even as the Spritzer family secretly made and sold alcohol out back.

After Prohibition, the Pool Hall became an

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official bar, which the Spritzers ran until 1939.

The “soft drink parlor” front was smart, considering soda production’s popularity in Crested Butte from the late 19th to early 20th century. One such business was housed in the Crested Butte House and Saloon (1882), which is now the Public House.

Rancher John Rozich operated the saloon after he left mining in 1887. Sometime before 1898, Rozich partnered with Lucas Oreschnick to operate the Crested Butte Bottling Works out of the saloon. They used William Painter’s 1892 Crown bottling machine, which at 24 bottles a minute laid the foundation for all modern carbonated drink mixing and capping machines. There are only a few original Crown bottling machines left, and one is the machine from the Crested Butte House, on display at the museum for the food and drink exhibit.

Restaurants were also popular from the earliest mining years. They popped up in mining camps like Irwin, Gothic and Ruby before appearing in Crested Butte.

The Ruby Home and Restaurant opened at the Ruby Camp in 1880, for instance, and the Pioneer Restaurant opened its doors in Crested Butte in March of 1881.

Independently owned restaurants, saloons and other businesses ensured that Crested Butte – unlike other “company towns” – was never totally controlled by the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. In years since, Crested Butte’s restaurants have offered a wide variety of cuisines and styles, Swiss to Mediterranean to Nepali. Then and now, the town’s restaurants highlight the diversity that strengthens the Crested Butte community.

The history of food and drink in Crested Butte is a blend of local history, environmental circumstance and outside forces. This combination of intrinsic and external factors – of the particular and the general – is true of any place. That Crested Butte’s culinary history is tied to larger narratives of American immigration, political movements and industry illustrates how this tiny, isolated town has also always been connected to the outside world. Covid-19 has been a stark reminder of this reality. We should embrace this connection while still cherishing those unique “extremes” that brought us to Crested Butte in the first place.

“Food & Drink @ 9,000 Feet: Community, Resilience and Tradition” will be on display throughout the winter at the Crested Butte Mountain Heritage Museum, 331 Elk Avenue (at the corner of Fourth and Elk).

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