Crested Butte Magazine Summer 2016

summer 2016 complimentary

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s’16 CONTENTS SHORTIES Learning by design by Dawne Belloise In partnership with the Town of Crested Butte, middle and high school students hope to plan and build a small, sustainable home for affordable housing.

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The kindest wedding gifts by Rachael Gardner Thanks to The Wedding Pink and local vendors, Lauren Parks and Matt Spicer will celebrate her breast cancer victory by getting married on Crested Butte Mountain.

16

18 The neighborhood (indoor) farm by Dawne Belloise

Crested Butte South’s new Tassinong Farms grows

hydroponic produce all year inside recycled shipping containers.

4

22

Garden of wonders by Sandy Fails Mountain Roots’ new Sensory Garden, designed for children with special needs but open to all, will “stimulate the senses and calm the mind.”

24

Taking care of Paradise by Claire Karban For 25 years, the Crested Butte Land Trust has encouraged smart growth by preserving lands critical to wildlife, recreation and working ranches.

26 Bagging the habit

A young nature-lover hopes to convince consumers to

bring their own shopping bags and nix the plastic.

28

Coming home by Kathy Norgard Public Policy Forum speaker Ernest House belongs to the Ute tribes, who were some of Crested Butte’s earliest summer residents.

30

Opening acts by Sandy Fails This summer will be key for both the Center for the Arts’ proposed community arts facility and the Biery-Witt performance/conference center.

FEATURES 34 Something old, something new by Sandy Fails

Global citizens Gabi Prochaska and Scott Desmarais transformed a tiny 1890s cabin into an eclectic home base.

44 Social hiking by Joanne Reynolds

For these organized hiking groups, the beauty of the backcountry is partly in sharing it with other people.

55 The quiet champions of our water by George Sibley

The apolitical, science-based Coal Creek Watershed Coalition: “Let’s just fix it.”

60 The Philosophers’ Mountains by Brian Levine

A fictional journal follows a reconnaissance party into Ute Country in 1873, as tensions flare between native Utes and encroaching miners.

68 “The earth laughs in flowers”

A celebration of Crested Butte’s floral bounty and the Wildflower Festival’s 30th birthday.

80 Birth, death and earaches by Sandy Fails

Crested Butte native Dr. Laura (Holder) Villanueva returned home last October, and she doesn’t just wear her stethoscope on Halloween any more.

89 Time traveler by Sandra Cortner

An extensive rehabilitation gives Crested Butte’s historic railroad depot new life as a small events venue.

94 Capturing the Spirit by Beth Buehler

Rosalind “Roz” Cook, whose sculptures adorn Elk Avenue and the Mountain Wedding Garden, casts in bronze her delight, whimsy and faith.

108 The neuroscientist turned map wizard by John Norton

Derrick Nehrenberg’s map apps keep mountain bikers from getting lost on the valley’s 750-plus miles of alpine singletrack.

132 A sampling of “firsts”

The Crested Butte Mountain Heritage Museum reveals some little-known debuts from the valley’s history.

FIRST PERSON SINGULAR 116 The ride by David J. Rothman

A benighted mountain biker keeps calm and rolls on…into a moment of transcendence.

123 Mini me by Stephanie Maltarich

What’s better than camping amid nature’s wonders? Seeing your awe mirrored in the eyes of a six year old.

126 Picking through the bone pile by Cara Guerrieri 134 Calendar | 138 Lodging | 140 Dining | 144 Photo finish John Holder

A family’s graveyard of old ranch equipment bears witness to the sweat and ingenuity that shaped the valley’s meadowlands.

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Vol. XXXVIII, No. 1 Published semi-annually by Crested Butte Publishing & Creative PUBLISHERS Steve Mabry & Chris Hanna EDITOR Sandy Fails ADVERTISING DIRECTOR MJ Vosburg LAYOUT AND DESIGN Chris Hanna ADVERTISING DESIGN Keitha Kostyk WRITERS Dawne Belloise Beth Buehler Sandra Cortner Sandy Fails Rachael Gardner Cara Guerrieri Mel Harte Claire Karban Brian Levine

Stephanie Maltarich Laurel Miller Kathy Norgard John Norton Joanne Reynolds David J. Rothman George Sibley Sara Simonson

PHOTOGRAPHERS Nathan Bilow Bob Brazell Trent Bona Jack Brauer Sandra Cortner Raynor Czerwinski Dusty Demerson Petar Dopchev

Xavier FanĂŠ Cara Guerrieri John Holder J.C. Leacock Rebecca Ofstedahl Lydia Stern Tom Stillo

COVER PHOTO Trail 401 John Holder ONLINE crestedbuttemagazine.com E-MAIL sandyfails56@gmail.com ADVERTISING 970-349-6211 mj@crestedbuttemagazine.com Copyright 2016, Crested Butte Publishing. No reproduction of contents without authorization by Crested Butte Publishing & Creative.

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Editor’s note

Big medicine

I just read about a Pennsylvania hospital that decades ago demonstrated what we feel instinctively. A researcher studying recovery rates among gallbladder patients over almost a decade discovered that people in certain rooms averaged noticeably less pain, fewer complaints and shorter recovery times than those in nearby rooms. The procedures, medics and treatments were the same, but the rooms associated with faster-healing patients offered views onto a courtyard filled with trees. The patients who healed more slowly and reported more discomfort looked out their windows onto a brick wall (Scientific American: “How Hospital Gardens Help Patients Heal”). Since this study, many others have found similarly striking effects: just looking at nature improves our mental and physical wellbeing.

Most of us who live in or visit Crested Butte won’t be surprised by National

Petar Dopchev

Geographic’s recent assertion (“This Is Your Brain on Nature”) that “nature makes us healthier, happier and smarter.” Still, it’s fascinating to watch scientists, mystics and major media explore how and why that happens.

The National Geographic article notes the “medicalization of nature” around the world. South Korea has three official healing forests, with 34 more slated by 2017. You can get a job there as a health ranger or earn a university degree in “forest healing.”

Japanese culture encourages “forest bathing,” and Germany urges citizens to exercise in outdoor settings, since that lowers blood pressure, pulse and cortisol levels (stress markers) more than indoor exercise.

Certainly I feel clearer, healthier and less stressed when I spend time outside. Getting a canine hiking buddy was a better fitness AND mental health strategy for me than

guilt-tripping myself to the gym. But why?

Another article (Daily Good: “How Nature Resets our Minds and Bodies”) looks at how our brains work differently in various arenas. The writer distinguishes two types of attention: directed and involuntary. For the most part, participating in the human-centric world involves directed attention: perform these work tasks, drive through traffic, check Facebook, look here, do this, now look there.

In contrast, being outside often invites involuntary attention. When we walk, camp or hang out in nature, we let our attention off the leash – to hear, smell, see, feel and explore at will. While directed attention eventually drains us, involuntary attention rests and refreshes us, the author writes.

(Of course life requires balance. I loved traipsing the hills and thinking expansively about how we’re nourished by nature. But it 7

Photos by TippiePics

Editor’s note

8

took some reductive, directed attention to put those thoughts into 800 correctly spelled words to fit this space.)

In the comments following that online article, I found another interesting observation: that time spent in nature also shifts us from an ego-centered perspective.

In human-created environments, we generally lend importance to what we do or own, how we appear, and how we compare to others in circumstances or gifts. That fosters a sense of separateness and the need to differentiate ourselves from others; to compete against, judge and label. The ego’s favorite pastimes.

The commenter wrote, “Something I love about ‘nature’ is that it’s not about me. It generally asks nothing of me, it doesn’t care about me, it doesn’t react to me, it has no opinion about me.”

The rain falls on us all, regardless of our sex appeal, net worth or IQ. Likewise, there’s no VIP seating for viewing a rainbow.

Outside, we typically pay less attention to human trappings and judgments.

Gathered around a campfire beneath the vast stretch of stars, with greasy hair and dirt-caulked fingernails, we connect with each other and our surroundings in a deeper, more authentic way.

This is what makes a place feel spiritual to me, be it a church, meditation corner or mountaintop. It invites me to set aside ego and unleash my mind to become expansive, inclusive and inspired. Sometimes when my writing muse has gone mute, I need to abandon the computer and just take a walk.

I also find that human-made spaces start to shrink when I spend too much time there. I tend to get more fearful, protective and isolated when I’m too long inside walls.

Then it’s time to throw open the doors and expose that mildewed perspective to sunshine, fresh air and happy curiosity, so I can once again greet life as an open exploration.

This issue of the Crested Butte Magazine honors the big medicine that surrounds us here. As you gaze on those glorious nature photos, may your shoulders relax and your cortisol levels go down, down, down.

And may you remember to find balance.

If you spend much of your time inside walls finding the value of X, may you also wander outside to find the value of a breath, a sunset, a life. —Sandy Fails, editor

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PASSION

Learning

By Dawne Belloise

by design

In partnership with the Town of Crested Butte, middle and high school students plan to build a small, sustainable home for affordable housing.

When Habitat for Humanity issued a house design challenge this winter, few expected the winners would be teens who might not do their own laundry yet, let alone own their own homes. But that’s what happened. Students in the Crested Butte Community School’s building design classes took awards for the best small house design (not to exceed 900 square feet), best tiny house design and the people’s choice award for the tiny house design.

Even better news: teacher Todd Wasinger and his students received preliminary approval from the Town of Crested Butte to build a small house (800-1,000 square feet) on one of the designated “micro lots” on the northeast corner of town.

“The idea is that we will offer a year-long class next year devoted just to designing the small house to go on that lot,” Wasinger said.

“The kids will design it and then, provided all the funding is stable, it’s the intention of the Town to have the students build this house in the summer of 2017.” According to initial discussions, the Town would put in the foundation and hire subcontractors like plumbers and electricians, and with the guidance of experienced builders and architect Gary Hartman, the students would construct it. Wasinger said 12

the Town intends to use it as an affordable employee rental house.

The hub of this architectural work is a second-floor STEM (Science-Technology-Engineering-Math) classroom, where 3D printers whirr; erector-set robotics wait to be cranked, turned or spun; and students learn the elements of design and engineering. The two architecture-focused classes, for middle and high school, were added recently to expand the successful STEM curriculum.

Wasinger pointed out that Americans spend more than 90 percent of their lives inside designed spaces: cars, shopping areas, workspaces and homes. “We’re born into a culture surrounded by objects and systems. We just sort of take it for granted. It doesn’t occur to us that it’s extraordinary or there’s something special happening.”

He recalled his excitement watching his students wrap their heads around concepts when he first taught his green architecture class. “We were sitting in a designed space, where someone thought intentionally about how this space was put together: the light, the colors in the room, the ceiling, the layout, the furniture, the computers.”

He began to note changes in the students’ perspectives. “It was fun to see them start to realize these spaces that we occupy are actually

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thought about, so they started to engage, to notice buildings in new ways. They also noticed spaces that were uncomfortable or didn’t work well and learned from those experiences too.”

Looking through their new lens, the students formed 16 teams and tackled the task of designing small and tiny houses for the Habitat for Humanity challenge. In today’s world, and especially in Crested Butte as it faces an affordable housing shortage, there’s a need for more compact and economical shelters, sustainably and aesthetically designed. But how did these young people with no experiential knowledge of living in efficient houses, who perhaps never thought about spatial relationships or kitchen and bath functionality, plan practical, appealing living spaces?

Wasinger explained, “When we teach design, it brings up things the students haven’t thought about, like a kitchen’s working triangle. If you open the oven and the dishwasher at the same time and they bang into each other, you have a problem.

If you open the refrigerator and no one can get into the kitchen, there’s a problem. The kids had to look and think. Architect Andrew Hadley generously donated his time and interacted with students in the classroom to critique and improve house designs. It was great that students got to have feedback from a talented, professional architect and then rethink their plans.” Wasinger would like to involve all the local architects in the future.

He hopes the planning and construction of a sustainably built, beautifully designed house will become a model program, with students learning an array of skills and sustainability practices. And their efforts will create not just a cell, but a pleasing, nourishing space they’d want to live in.

“I feel like I have a design studio,” Wasinger said. “I have all these talented designers who come into my world, and I get to show them the tools. They apply those tools, ask questions about how to use them, then they get to teach me as well. It’s really this nice collaborative environment.”

Educators around the country are starting to realize the far-reaching benefits of handson design curriculum. It makes students think logically; encourages their reasoning ability; and teaches them to fix things, make things, and figure out how things work.

Beyond house or engineering design, those skills empower young people in many arenas of their lives.

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The kindest

By Rachael Gardner

wedding gifts

Thanks to The Wedding Pink and local vendors, Lauren Parks and Matt Spicer will celebrate her breast cancer victory by getting married on Crested Butte Mountain.

Weddings and cancer are generally not subjects brought up in conversation together. It’s simple – cancer is sad, weddings are happy.

But happy things can rise from sad places, and The Wedding Pink is a fine example.

The Wedding Pink is the brainchild of Cheryl Ungar, a talented wedding photographer as well as a 25-year breast cancer survivor.

The Wedding Pink gives a free wedding each year to someone impacted by breast cancer. Any legal U.S. residents can apply to be Wedding Pink recipients if their lives have recently been touched by breast cancer and they are engaged or soon to be engaged at the time of submitting their stories. The free part comes from a myriad of donations solicited from industry professionals in the host town, which changes every year. On its fifth anniversary this summer, The Wedding Pink will take place at Crested Butte Mountain Resort.

This year’s recipients are Lauren Parks and Matt Spicer of San Diego. Lauren was 23 when she was diagnosed with breast cancer.

As an EMT (emergency medical technician), Matt is also no stranger to cancer. Cancer spreads, and for Matt it transferred from his professional life to his personal with the diagnosis of his father’s 16

Photos Trent Bona

brain cancer. It was a two-year battle that Matt’s father eventually lost. Lauren and Matt didn’t know each other at the time, but the winding road life takes us on has its own sense of irony.

Lauren, a recent college graduate, took a job at a local bank

and was preparing for the GMAT when cancer up-ended her life. In a showing of personal strength and awareness, she decided continuing her career would not only keep her much needed health insurance intact, but also prevent her from staying home and feeling sorry for her situation. As the stage 3 diagnosis unfolded, Lauren quickly underwent chemo, a bi-lateral mastectomy and radiation. The great news was that Lauren went into remission and beat breast cancer.

The crappy news, which we often gloss over in the relief of remission, was that her re-entry into regular life didn’t go quite as smoothly.

Lauren found dating difficult after the diagnosis. Over-protective mothers warned their sons not to get involved with her because she might die. Other potential romantic partners told her she had too much baggage. Some were simply not interested in dating a woman whose future ability to have children was uncertain due to treatments.

After nearly four years of that, Lauren, understandably, gave up on dating. She did not, however, give up on love – she got a dog. Three weeks later she met Matt. They were each playing the role of wingman for friends fueling a budding romance. On the way out the bar door that night, Matt asked Lauren for her number. His first phone call was on a weekday from the fire station where he worked, checking in to be sure her doctor’s appointment went well. Lauren knew Matt was going to be different. Their friends’ romance didn’t last, but Lauren and Matt will walk down a mountaintop aisle on June 9, 2016, in a town they hadn’t even heard of until recently.

Matt summed up his attitude: “Life should be lived moving forward. The ‘what ifs’ only serve to hold us back. I’m glad people passed on Lauren. Their loss is my gain.”

The two will be married at Ten Peaks on the ski slopes, with Crested Butte Events doing the wedding planning. Vendors will provide everything from flowers, wedding dress, catering and transportation to a minihoneymoon at the Taylor River Lodge. (See cherylungargives.com for vendors.)

Arranging for a complete wedding (valued at more than $40,000) to be donated asks a lot of local businesses, but Crested Butte’s wedding vendors were eager to answer with a yes. Donations are needed in so many areas in the fight against cancer, but it’s also gratifying to donate to a victory celebration for a battle won. Instead of an assist so people will beat cancer, it’s an assist because they did beat cancer.

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17

The neighborhood

By Dawne Belloise

(indoor) farm

Modern-day farmer Kate Haverkampf: no tractor needed.

Crested Butte South’s new Tassinong Farms grows hydroponic produce all year inside recycled shipping containers.

It’s like a one-acre farm in a box. Walls of green stretch up and branch out, the plants looking very happy even in February, despite outside temperatures dropping to single digits. Inside the metalwalled container (once used to ship freight across oceans), lettuces, basil, kale and a variety of herbs are nourished by hydroponics and LED lights. It seems an unlikely match, farming in radical weather at high altitude, but Kate Haverkampf launched her business, Tassinong Farms, on a small commercial lot in Crested Butte South this past winter.

With twins and a four year old, Kate and Andrew Haverkampf moved to the valley from Chicago in 2007. They wanted to live in a place focused more on activity and outdoors as opposed to material things, and Andrew knew the area from attending Western State College. Because they’d always wanted to relocate to Colorado, they put their Midwest home on the market and never looked back.

After twenty years working in Internet technology, Kate wanted to do something more meaningful. The two explored many options, but the one that stuck was farming. Kate grew up with the farming life; her family has worked their Indiana farm for nine generations, since the early 1800s. Her grandmother, still active at 98, will be the 18

Photos Lydia Stern

last to run Tassinong Maples (the original name of their farm), as the family readies to close it down. Kate named her new endeavor Tassinong Farms to honor all those generations of family farmers.

Kate set out to grow sustainable, year-round, healthy food, and to keep it local. Her produce is picked and delivered the same day.

Not only is it healthy, she said, but it tastes like no other produce because of its nutrients and freshness. Growing anything at this altitude (town is at 8,885 feet) and in this extreme climate (it often plummets to sub zero in the winter) seemed daunting. Kate found hope in Freight Farms out of Boston; the company offered not only hydroponic, sustainable growing containers but also days of training

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at its farm to help guarantee success.

Although multiple companies recycle various containers, Kate chose Freight Farms because the company put so much research into making the components work. The farm comes with ninety percent of everything that’s needed to grow and maintain the crops. Kate explained, “Everything’s vertical.

There are four vertical rows that produce the same amount as in one acre of land, so with two containers I basically have a two-acre farm in a very small footprint. I’d like to grow more and make the produce accessible to the whole Gunnison Valley, but right now I’m focused on Crested Butte.”

All of her crops are free of pesticides and herbicides, and the method uses ninety percent less water than traditional outdoor gardening.

Tassinong Farms is the only enterprise to farm year round at our high altitude in this type of container, and although Kate has met plenty of challenges, they are not insurmountable. The insulated system is so efficient, the only heat needed is the LED lights that hang down around the plants. If the lights were on and the cooling system was off, the temperatures would rise to one hundred degrees even in the middle of winter. The LED lights also draw little electricity.

The two containers that form the indoor farm are recycled (having been retired from shipping) and have insulation material between their outer and inner metal walls. The containers were brought in by truck, then off loaded by a High Mountain Concepts crane and put into place on the Haverkampfs’ lot.

Every week Kate plants new crops, which are ready to harvest in about five weeks. She had been running the farm solo, but now that it’s all growing so well, she’s hired people to help. She’s delighted at the response to local, fresh and tasty greens. “I have stuff selling at stores, and restaurants are buying our produce. It’s been amazing.”

The farm is located at 241 Gillaspey Avenue in Crested Butte South, where Kate and Andrew plan to build an office building with apartments on top. For now, Tassinong Farms is an indoor green oasis where locals can purchase greens and herbs by ordering from the website (tassinong farms.com) and scheduling a pickup. This summer, you’ll also find Tassinong goods at the Crested Butte Farmers Market. Kate hopes to eventually add more containers to provide ever more produce for her valley neighbors.

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Garden

By Sandy Fails

of wonders

Harvest time at one of the Mountain Roots gardens.

Mountain Roots’ new Sensory Garden, designed for children with special needs but open to all, will “stimulate the senses and calm the mind.”

Some gardens grow food; some grow flowers. Mountain Roots Food Project’s newest garden will grow wonderment.

The Sensory Garden taking root this summer on the grounds of the Crested Butte Community School (CBCS) will engage all the senses. It’s designed with consideration for children (and adults) with special needs, but Mountain Roots Director Holly Conn envisions an accessible, inviting space for anyone to “stimulate the senses and calm the mind. Or the opposite, depending on what you need.”

Features include a hand-powered waterfall bench, a pentatonic wind chime walkway, birdhouses, and nook-and-cranny discovery zones like willow domes (where the branches of living willows are woven together to form little “hidey holes,” Conn said). Plant groupings will create stations for tasting, smelling and tactile experiences. In addition to a wheelchair-accessible pathway, side footpaths will use different natural materials to explore contrasting textures. Equally important will be programming and training to help special education teachers and others use the garden effectively.

The idea originated two years ago with Conn, who has been working with the school district since 2010 to integrate handson environmental education into core curriculum. Conn has also watched passersby and visitors drawn to the Mountain Roots community garden on Elk Avenue, noting how they seem calmed and refreshed by spending time among the plants. After visiting the 22

Denver Botanical Gardens’ Sensory Garden with her children, she saw an opportunity to connect the sensory garden concept with the education initiatives by creating an alternative learning environment.

“My daughter was in heaven there,” she noted. “It’s easy to see how other children could benefit from an immersion in a natural setting, both academically and emotionally. It counteracts the effects of our fast-paced, high-tech lives.”

Her proposal for a sensory garden in Crested Butte quickly turned into a collaborative project. Community school administrators embraced the idea and will work to incorporate the project into the overall district plan for facilities and grounds. The Sensory Garden project builds on a relationship already forged through the Living Classroom vegetable garden and other joint school-Mountain Roots projects (see page 142).

Teacher Todd Wasinger, who had helped install the vegetable garden, recruited his STEM (Science-Technology-Engineering-Math) upper-level design class. “He’s always looking for ways to get his students involved in something real, not just some hypothetical project,” Conn said.

Industry professional Margaret Loperfido taught the students relevant design principles, such as site planning for sunlight and wind considerations. Working in teams, the students created three designs, researching “layout, plant selection, building materials, energy efficiency, environmental considerations and special features that will engage young visitors in an immersive and interactive experience of fragrance, sounds, color, textures and movement,” Conn wrote.

Sue Gross of the Gunnison Valley Special Needs Network commented, “As a mom of a child on the autism spectrum, who is constantly seeking sensory input of all sorts, I was thrilled to learn about this project. Many of our children require strong sensory

stimulation as a method to calm or regulate their feelings. To have a natural environment where they can engage their senses in a variety of ways will be a wonderful addition to our school.”

As of press time, school administrators and project volunteers were zeroing in on the most appropriate site. Then the design students will be invited to collaborate on a final, site-specific plan. Next, Mountain Roots will draw on the expertise of the Gunnison Valley Special Needs Network and the district’s special education staff for specific details (e.g. “If we want a swing, exactly what kind should we get?” Conn said). Mountain Roots’ Sierra Fairfield-Smith, coordinator of the CBCS garden, will oversee the selection of plants suited to Crested Butte’s elevation and short growing season.

For the ground breaking in early summer, Mountain Roots will host a “Dig In” volunteer workday to tackle much of the heavy work. Conn expects steady progress through the summer, with extensive volunteer involvement, so most of the groundwork and plants and some of the main elements should be installed by autumn. The Mountain Roots education team will also develop educational resources, teacher training and classroom support for using the space.

Because the Sensory Garden will reach its growing peak during the summer and fall and rest beneath snow for much of the school term, Mountain Roots may add summer programming as well.

Through classroom projects, CBCS students will help build many of the special features, which will be completed and installed over time. “The students seem so excited to see their research and design work come to life,” Conn said. “Their excitement is contagious. The project is drawing people in; it’s a truly collaborative effort.”

Mountain Roots received a $5,000 grant from the Colorado Garden Foundation to launch the project. Conn estimated another $10,000 is needed to complete it; she’ll be seeking both funding partners and in-kind contributions of materials and resources.

Conn noted the contrast between student involvement with the Mountain Roots vegetable garden and the experience of the Sensory Garden. “Among the rows of vegetables, the students are generally there with a mission: planting or weeding or harvesting. The Sensory Garden is more about immersion and a space to just let yourself be.”

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Taking care

By Claire Karban

of paradise

Xavier Fané

For 25 years, the Crested Butte Land Trust has encouraged smart growth by preserving lands critical to wildlife, recreation and working ranches.

In 1991, the USSR collapsed; the Gulf War began; and Bryan Adams’ song “(Everything I do) I do it for you” topped the charts.

Here in Crested Butte, a group of community members saw the need to protect the mountains, wildlife and working family ranches that make our valley unique.

Around this time, our global population was barreling towards six billion, and an environmental consciousness emerged that Earth might not have the resources to support that many people. In Crested Butte, the community recognized a need to preserve our quality of life.

“The problem is growth – of population, of development and the resulting impact on environmental quality. There is also the larger linkage between environmental quality and the quality of life,” read a brochure published by the nascent Crested Butte Land Trust.

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This didn’t mean the Land Trust was against all development. “What is at issue here is a new definition of development,” the brochure continued.

Strong communities plan for both development and open space. Looking for that balance, the Crested Butte Land Trust was incorporated in the fall of 1991 and in early 1992 preserved its first parcel: 10.74 acres of wetlands in the Slate River Valley.

A quarter century later, few people remember Bryan Adams.

Our world is now home to more than seven billion people. In fiscal year 2015, Colorado saw a population increase of 1.89 percent, second only to North Dakota. Tourism in our Gunnison Valley has experienced unprecedented growth in recent years. Sales tax figures in Crested Butte attest to the growth our town has seen from tourism, particularly in the summer months. July and August of 2014 saw

record numbers of visitors to the valley.

Sales tax for June and September tallied only slightly lower than for March and December, signaling our shrinking offseason.

The increase in visitors brings both opportunities and challenges, and it sits at the heart of our need for smart growth.

Our economy depends upon tourism, but that tourism is built on the incredible natural beauty that could be threatened by unchecked sprawl. Finding the right balance is both necessary and possible, especially with input from our whole community.

As the Crested Butte Land Trust celebrates our 25th year, our conservation goals remain the same. We exist to protect clean air and water and uninterrupted vistas; create or maintain hiking, biking and skiing trails; and support our ranching heritage. And the need for land conservation in the Gunnison Valley is as urgent as ever.

Over the years, the Crested Butte Land Trust has grown from a grassroots nonprofit into a fully accredited land trust recognized nationally for the high caliber of our work. We have leveraged local funding, bringing more than $7 million in matching state grants into our valley.

We are the only local land conservation organization licensed by the State of Colorado. In 1991, there was no such thing as national accreditation or state certification. By upholding the highest standards and practices, we’ve improved the quality, permanence and pace of the work we do.

In the last 25 years: we’ve made a big impact. From a recent survey, we learned that every year more than 50,000 people enjoy the trails we protect – including the Woods Walk, Lower Loop, Lupine and Snodgrass trails. We’ve saved lands that help other important nonprofits, too, like Crested Butte Nordic and the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab. Open space is more than an amenity; it supports a healthy economy and a strong community.

Just as we did 25 years ago, in the Winter 1991-1992 issue of Crested Butte Magazine, we invite people to get involved with the Land Trust by visiting our website, cblandtrust.org, or by contacting us at outreach@cblandtrust.org.

Claire Karban is the Crested Butte Land Trust’s outreach coordinator.

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...but when I do, I go to the Wooden Nickel.

Molly Eldridge Owner - Broker CRS, ABR, RSPS, SFR (970) 209-4234 molly@redladyrealty.com

MollyInCrestedButte.com 25

Bagging

the habit

Benjamin Swift: distributing reusable cloth bags.

A young nature-lover hopes to convince consumers to bring their own shopping bags and nix the plastic.

Benjamin Swift figures he’s unlikely to convince everyone in town to buy electric cars or install solar panels to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels. But he might get them to bring cloth bags when they go to the store.

The recent graduate of Crested Butte Community School comes by his environmentalism naturally. “My annual week-long family backpacking trip is one of my favorite times of the year, and it’s from excursions like these that my passion for nature began,” he said.

That passion led him to apply last summer for a GenerationOn $500 grant, awarded to

26

one student per state for a community service project. “It seemed like an opportunity to take action on something I feel strongly about,” he said. “Our plastic bag habit is harmful, unnecessary and easily remedied.” He noted that the U.S. annually uses 100 billion plastic grocery bags, requiring 504 million gallons of oil per year and causing needless waste and environmental damage.

He received the grant and created the “Plastic Bag Free CB” campaign to reduce the use of disposable plastic bags in Crested Butte. The National Honor Society (NHS) also contributed funds.

Benjamin purchased 350 reusable cloth bags, printed with a logo he co-designed with classmate Corinna Donovan. Those are available at Chopwood Mercantile, the Mountain Store, Mountain Earth and Donita’s Cantina for a donation of $1-3, or they can be borrowed and returned to the business later.

“The goal is to get them out there and being used,” Benjamin said.

He and other NHS members also placed a collection station at the Visitors Center to recycle used plastic bags; created a display at the school to educate students; and asked the Crested Butte Town Council to consider banning singleuse plastic bags in town. As of press time, that request was pending as Benjamin and fellow advocates, council members and town staff researched the work done by other municipalities. Benjamin suggested local businesses could help educate consumers and, if needed, charge a small fee for alternative, non-plastic, single-use bags, such as compostable cellulose.

“More than a hundred cities, including major ones like Los Angeles, have instituted bans on non-reusable plastic bags,” he said.

So far Benjamin’s efforts have been well received, he said. Most of the original 350 cloth bags are in circulation, and he hopes to order more. Other National Honor Society members will take over after he goes to college.

“As a progressive town, it’s our duty to be an example,” he said. “We can impact visitors to make personal changes or even go back and make changes in their own communities.”

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Coming

By Kathy Norgard

home

Public Policy Forum speaker Ernest House belongs to the Ute tribes, some of Crested Butte’s earliest summer residents.

Licenses weren’t required when Ernest House’s Ute ancestors called Crested Butte home. They roamed freely, hunting, fishing and holding spiritual ceremonies.

The Ute tribes were a nomadic, mountain people whose creation story holds them to the Elk Mountains. The Utes were forcibly removed from here more than a century ago when miners, settlers and soldiers came west and the Utes were re-located farther south to reservations. (See related story page 60.)

Ernest House, Jr., born a Ute Mountain Ute Tribal (UMUT) member and executive director of the Colorado Commission on Indian Affairs, will be the final speaker for the Crested Butte Public Policy Forum series on August 10.

In 1976, the Colorado General Assembly created the Colorado Commission on Indian Affairs, the official government-togovernment liaison between the two Ute tribes and the State of Colorado. The Ute people represent an expanding urban Indian 28

population.

“My wife Jennette is from Irish, Welch and German tribes,” House said. Their two children benefit from the wealth of these cultures – family ties in Colorado Springs and on the UMUT reservation.

Not much dust settles under Ernest House’s moccasins. He received the “40 Under 40” award in 2013 from the Denver Business Journal and the prestigious Historic Preservation Stephen H. Hart Award in 2015.

House serves on the Colorado Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Council advocating for Native American youth. He is also on the Board of Trustees for Ft. Lewis College in Durango. “I can always find a family member or friend who attended that college,” he explained. “Ft. Lewis has an increasing number of Native American students, and it started out as a Native American boarding school.”

House is an active member of his tribal community, frequently commuting from his Denver home to the reservation, where he works on policies and procedures to improve life for the Utes.

“Our tribe opened a new corn-milling facility recently,” he said.

“Soon you’ll be able to buy corn products raised on tribal land.

Contrary to popular myth, casinos are not our largest enterprises.

As a sovereign nation, we have our own government requiring doctors, lawyers, teachers and social workers. We also run our own businesses in tourism, pottery and real estate. Our tribe is expanding its portfolio.”

The federal government recognizes 567 tribes in the United States, House continued. “Our Ute tribes are only two of those.

However, we have some of the best economic development and we are among the top in energy development among the Indian Nations.”

House said he’s looking forward to meeting people in Crested Butte, “to build relationships between us and for you to learn more about the people who once lived and enjoyed the fruits of the area.

It would be wonderful for our tribes to return to Crested Butte and hold some of our native ceremonies.”

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PUBLIC POLICY FORUM 2016 SPEAKERS June 22 Ken Salazar: America and the quest for inclusive politics June 29 Jared Bernstein: Reducing income inequality through

inclusive growth July 6 Richard Schmalensee: Why climate change is the hardest

policy problem July 13 T.R. Reid: Single payer health insurance for Colorado?

July 20 Dr. Timothy Quill, Lois Court: Physician-assisted death:

progress or peril?

July 27 Brian McPeek: The Nature Conservancy’s role in

translating conservation science to public policy Aug. 3 Devon Cone: Migration to Europe Aug. 10 Ernest House: Native American issues

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Opening

By Sandy Fails

acts

Renowned guitarist Frank Vignola, a 2016 Crested Butte Music Festival headliner.

This summer will be key for both the Center for the Arts’ proposed community arts facility and the BieryWitt performance/conference center.

This could be a pivotal year for the arts in Crested Butte. The Center for the Arts has launched fundraising on “an aggressive timeline,” said Executive Director Jenny Birnie, with plans to break ground next May on an expanded community arts campus.

The Mt. Crested Butte Performing Arts Center is also on the home stretch of fundraising for the Biery-Witt Center, a larger conference, performance and events venue and home base for the Crested Butte Music Festival. In the mean time, this summer the Music Festival will host its world-class musicians -- classical, bluegrass, jazz and opera -- in a circular “Mirror Palace.” The movable, 80-foot-diameter structure, known in Europe as a Spiegeltent, sits on the future site of the Biery-Witt Center, at the north end of the current ski area parking lot.

THE COMMUNITY’S ART HEADQUARTERS The Center for the Arts, 30 years after re-purposing the old county shops building near the entrance to Crested Butte, has far outgrown its home. “Our programming has grown phenomenally,” Birnie said, “and we’ve tripled our performance offerings.”

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Xavier Fané

The planned expansion will provide more space for popular community dance programs; the Art Studio’s classes, exhibits and studio space (now squeezed into a separate building on Elk Avenue); and a more versatile, comfortable and roomy theater. With use of the balcony, the theater will accommodate audiences of 330 people. More backstage space, upgraded acoustics, rehearsal rooms and a multi-use auditorium orchestra pit/dance area will make the Center work better for performers, artists and audiences, and the gallery and studios will serve the valley’s many visual artists.

“It belongs to the community,” Birnie said, “and we want to draw people in. There will be lots of windows, a sculpture garden, an outdoor courtyard…very inviting spaces.”

The Center board and staff revised the original plan, shrinking the proposed square footage from 38,000 to 25,000 and incorporating the existing structure instead of tearing it down. After discussions with residential neighbors to the east, planners moved the footprint toward Sixth Street to minimize impacts on the Seventh Street side of the property. The changes reduce the estimated price tag from $15 million to $12.6 million, and as of April, $5.5 million had already been raised from individual donors.

This summer the Center will present plans to the public and seek donations big and small, then apply for grants once 75% of the funds have been secured.

“For now, our lives are centered around BOZAR [the Board of Zoning and Architectural Review],” Birnie said. Creating an iconic arts center within Crested Butte’s historic architectural guidelines presents a worthy challenge, she said. The Center is working

with local architectural, engineering and construction experts as well as firms who specialize in art centers in rural areas, a theater consultant and acoustician.

DRAWING FROM A LARGER WELL In Mt. Crested Butte, the board and staff of the Biery-Witt Center have raised more than $24 million of the projected $27 million needed. Executive Director Woody Sherwood said this phase feels like the last knife-edge ridge of Everest: you’re tired, the air is getting really thin and there’s some big work still to do, but the summit is almost in sight.

The Biery-Witt Center will draw people to the valley by hosting conferences, conventions and other large-scale events and by booking bigger-name entertainers with broad fan bases.

Sherwood noted that the former Grand Butte Hotel (now the Elevation) used to book a good number of conferences and gatherings (e.g. trade association conventions), often during off-peak times. “We can re-cultivate that and make a big difference in the liveliness of our communities, especially in the spring and fall,” Sherwood said. “At the end of the day, the excitement for me is the economic contribution this will make to the community.”

The Biery-Witt Center will have a sophisticated 500-seat theater, conference halls and reception rooms, with grand alpine views and state-of-the-art equipment for everything from catering to the Crested Butte Music Festival’s opera productions.

This summer the board will continue its capital campaign while getting ready to re-enter the architectural design and costing process. Breaking ground in 2017 “would be a tight timeline but not impossible,” Sherwood said.

Representatives from the Center for the Arts and Biery-Witt Center work together well, honoring their differing goals but exploring possible collaborations, Sherwood said. The Center for the Arts focuses on serving its community, while the Biery-Witt Center will generate revenue for the valley by bringing in people from other places.

“We have complementary purposes, but there are probably some synergies that would benefit both,” Sherwood said. For example, the two facilities might share lighting and sound technicians, building maintenance or marketing efforts. “We have some great ideas to explore.”

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Something old something new Words by Sandy Fails Images by Bob Brazell

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A charmingly humble entry disguises the living spaces behind and the full basement below.

Global citizens Gabi Prochaska and Scott Desmarais transformed a tiny 1890s cabin into an eclectic home base.

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An antique-brick partition separates the master bedroom and office/sunroom.

Beyond the vivid flowers spilling from its window boxes and planters, the low-profile log house at 120 Maroon Avenue commands little attention from passersby. But this 1890s-vintage house, like its owners Scott Desmarais and Gabi Prochaska, harbors many a surprise.

Two years ago, Scott and Gabi tripled the size of the miner’s cabin, creating warm spaces for gathering friends and family. Then they adorned the rooms with repurposed antiques and treasures from the five continents they’ve called home. (See side story.)

“It’s a mishmash of all the places we’ve been and experiences we’ve had,” Scott said.

“It instantly felt like home.”

For years Scott and Gabi had pondered how to remodel the tiny, dark cabin. They hired architect Michael Helland to translate Gabi’s ideas into plans and contractor Scott Hargrove to translate the plans into a bright, inviting house.

“It turned into a great partnership, though it probably drove Scott [Hargrove] crazy,” Gabi said.

After tearing into one wall and studying old photos of the house, they assumed the 36

structure had log walls, some of which were covered with tarpaper and siding. But as the carpenters set to work, they discovered only one original log wall remained; strangely, the others had been dismantled and replaced by plank walls inside and out, with little insulation in between. Much of the structure sat on dirt instead of a real foundation. “The whole house was crooked; the floors sloped, and there were no right angles,” Gabi said.

In its historic neighborhood, the house fell under the scrutiny of Crested Butte’s Board of Zoning and Architectural Review.

The board’s restrictions prevented Scott and Gabi from building a second story to gain more room, leaving the more expensive, complicated option of adding a basement.

“We couldn’t go up; we had to go down,” Scott said.

A crew temporarily moved their two accessory sheds across the alley to a vacant lot. They couldn’t relocate the main house there because of powerlines, so they lifted and moved it to the back of the property while the front section of basement was under way. Because the house sat very close to the side property line, subcontractors brought in

special equipment to dig and construct the basement without disturbing the neighbors’ yard. Underground water flow also had to be re-engineered. Finally the basement was finished, the structure re-seated and remodeled, and an addition constructed on the back.

The main floor of the house has two sections. The living room, kitchen and dining area (which opens onto a flagstone patio and bocce lawn) easily host social gatherings.

From there, a hallway leads past a study and guest bedroom to the master bedroom on the south end of the house. Rusted metal I-beams span the ceiling of the bedroom, with its adjoining Moroccan-style bath area and Turkish steam shower. Plants fill the southfacing sunroom, separated from the rest of the master bedroom by a half wall of old bricks that had been part of the cabin. The sunroom windows look out onto backyard tomato plants and landscaping, a detached garage and workshop.

The cozy rooms hold a hundred intriguing details. From a loft in the guest bedroom, a secret window opens into the study. The living room ceiling showcases the

The open basement contrasts the smaller intimate spaces upstairs.

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Global mementos and modern decor blend with repurposed planking, old doors, mining relics, even antique electrical insulators.

38

weathered planks that once formed the home’s exterior walls. Imaginative lighting, designed

by Eric Naughton, includes recessed LED rope lighting to highlight the varied textures of wood and brick.

“We put something original and surprising in each room,” Scott said.

From the kitchen/dining area, a staircase (with its handrail made from a reclaimed mine track) steps down to a more contemporary world. The spacious main room of the basement, larger than the entire original house, serves as an entertainment hub with its pool table, bar, media center and shelves of books, games and photos. This becomes the social center during visits by the couple’s three grown children.

From this large room, a red antique door opens to a cozy “bunkroom” filled with bunkbeds “perfect for the small bodies that might be part of our lives some day,” Gabi said.

“This house holds a future as well as a past. It will contain all kinds of permutations…and it’s ready.”

The house also honors the continuity from past to future with its clever use of outdated items. Its old ceramic wire insulators now serve as anchors for modern cable LED lighting; iron window latches make whimsical closet door pulls; and antique locker doors cover the newly built storage closet.

Gabi said, “We’d find these crazy salvaged items and [carpenter] Lars Bickford would say, ‘Yes!’”

For years Gabi had searched architectural salvage sites and collected antique doors, which she incorporated into the Maroon Avenue home. For the master closet opening, two antique doors slide along a reclaimed metal track. For a playful touch in the kitchen, an old glass-panel door to the pantry bears a blackboard where the glass used to be.

But this is no museum or moosemotif cabin; it’s an eclectic blend of old and new. Contemporary bar stools rest beneath the crooked old ceiling timbers in the kitchen. Scott and Gabi furnished the house with a favorite couch from Argentina, giant bench from Indonesia, black and white travel photos in modern frames, and keepsakes from their lives around the world.

They also (somewhat wistfully) covered the interior of the beautiful log walls with insulation and sheetrock and tightened the many air leaks to make their home as energy efficient as possible.

An avid gardener, Gabi mapped the sunlight throughout the day in their well-shaded yard and then chose flowers,

shrubs, trees and grasses to suit each part of the property. “Eventually I hope we have an explosion of natural landscaping,” she said.

She planted herbs in a small sunny patch and bright annuals in the Swiss-influenced window boxes. Next on her agenda: a “gutter garden,” with rows of raingutters mounted on the garage wall filled with shallow-root plants like lettuces. Gabi also volunteers at the community garden around the corner on Elk Avenue, with fresh produce as her reward.

Living in downtown Crested Butte offers Scott and Gabi the near-idyllic lifestyle they’d hoped. An occasional bear naps in their backyard tree, neighbors wander by and stop to chat, and their morning strolls often end at one of their favorite coffee shops.

“I absolutely love living in town,” said Gabi. “There are weeks when I don’t get in the car. It’s like Switzerland; I’ve returned to the village in the mountains.”

Creating a comfortable home from an outmoded cabin was a “great journey,” she said. “It’s not a good economic idea; it’s a labor of love. We could so much more easily have built a new house. But I wouldn’t have traded it.”

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Global lives centered in Crested Butte The international miscellany of their home tells the life story of Gabi Prochaska and Scott Desmarais.

Gabi, born in Germany to a Swiss mother and Czech-American father, notes that she has “always had a foot on both continents.”

She met Scott at Colorado College, where she studied biology. Intrigued by how colonized nations adapted the ruling countries’ science texts to their own environments, she planned to teach through the Peace Corps. At the time she spoke four languages; now she speaks eight.

Scott grew up in Boulder and attended Colorado College on a Boettcher Scholarship, studying international politics and economics.

He, too, had an eye on distant horizons.

The young couple applied to the Peace Corps, married quickly so they could be posted to the same place, graduated from college and packed for Botswana. Gabi taught science and Scott taught math in the small country that deepened their fascination with Africa.

Over the next two decades, Scott and 40

Gabi and their three children lived in Africa, Indonesia, Southeast Asia, Europe, South America, the Middle East and the United States.

“Home became wherever the family was,” Scott said.

Scott earned an MBA in international finance and relations and became a consultant, working independently, for corporations, and for some of the largest consulting firms in the world. After seeing the impact of AIDS and ebola in the Congo, Gabi earned her masters degree and worked in public health.

The family’s connection to Crested Butte began in the 1990s, when Gabi’s sister taught at the Crested Butte Academy (though Gabi remembers a childhood visit to Crested Butte, where her dad played accordion and her mom danced with the grizzled old-timers).

Eventually Scott and Gabi bought a house at Meridian Lake, outside of Crested Butte, and

during the children’s prime school years, they settled there fulltime. Gabi taught French at the Academy, and she and Scott helped start a soccer program for younger children. They also began scheming about living in Crested Butte’s historic downtown.

“I wanted a place with ghosts,” Gabi said.

In 2004, they bought the old Maroon Avenue cabin and rented it out for several years, first short term, then long term. As their youngest child prepared to head to college, they decided it was time to remodel that house and move downtown.

Scott has returned to the consulting world and now balances time in Crested Butte with high-impact projects overseas, such as helping international leaders create emergency operations centers, eradicate polio and improve power production.

“It’s hard to give that up, but this is really my home,” he said. “Our connections to Crested Butte run deep.”

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FOR THESE ORGANIZED HIKING GROUPS, THE BEAUTY OF THE BACKCOUNTRY IS PARTLY IN SHARING IT WITH OTHER PEOPLE.

By Joanne Reynolds

therE you are in the depths of Crested Butte’s backcountry.

You’ve picked a perfect bluebird day to hike into a basin held in the grip of rugged peaks, some still wearing their winter white. You’re surrounded by bright yellow glacier lilies, nodding their heads in the gentle breeze.

“It can’t get any better than this,” you think.

Oh, yes it can.

You could be in that idyllic spot with friends and engaging strangers who’ve made the trek with you.

One of Crested Butte’s summer delights is social hiking. Throughout the season these groups of newcomers, visitors and longtime backcountry enthusiasts hike together, continuing a legacy born nearly three decades ago.

Nathan Bilow

45

High Country Conservation Advocates (HCCA) hosts group hikes on summer Wednesdays.

There are plenty of reasons to explore with a group. Local resident Lucy Hecker, who coordinates outings for a women’s group, likes social hiking because otherwise it’s sometimes hard to find another person or two to hike with. “It’s helped me get to ‘know the territory’ from other hikers, and it gets me out of myself to be with other people.”

For Roger Henson, a summer resident from Madison, Wisconsin, it’s the company as much as the walk: “Day hiking in the Gunnison Valley is great for body, mind and spirit. The coming together of folks from all over, with the common bond of hiking together, sharing memories and supporting one another when the load gets a bit too heavy, is special. As much as the natural world is awe inspiring – and it is – it’s still the people that bring to life those special moments when you’re blissfully roaming in a meadow of wildflowers.”

Sue Navy, who has led the High Country Conservation Advocates (HCCA) Wednesday hikes since 2008, sees how appreciation of the backcountry bonds people in ways that might not be possible in other settings. “People tend to form really interesting friendships that they might not have made otherwise,” she observed. “I hear them discussing a wide range of topics, some of which they are surprised to find they have in common.“

The main hiking groups can trace their 46

Author Joanne Reynolds (second from right) with Friday Hike friends Barbara Crawford, Reggie Masters and Bets Carrico on the Mill Creek trail.

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origins to the late ‘80s and early ‘90s with the founding of the Butte Beauties and the launching of the Senior Hikes sponsored

by HCCA. Those outings are now officially known as the Don Baker Legacy Hikes to honor the man who created and originally led them.

The Beauties came first, started in the winter of 1986 by two local women who wanted to ski with other women over the age of 40. The informal circle grew exponentially, leading to two developments – the raising of the age limit from 40 to 50, and expansion into summer hiking.

While the women share at least two larger group hikes each summer – and a handful of social events with and without significant others – they have settled into three smaller groups based on the physical demands of the hikes.

The HCCA hikes came next, originally billed as Senior Hikes for people over the age of 55. Baker began leading them in 1992 to spread appreciation for and understanding of the backcountry and HCCA’s work there. He turned leadership over to Navy in 2008 and passed away in 2010.

Ruth Berkshire moved to Crested Butte from California in 1998. “I was looking to meet some people, so I went to the Chamber

of Commerce office,” she recalled. “I found a flyer about the Senior Hikes. I thought they might only be going around the block, but I decided to check it out. There was no walk around the block. We would meet at 8:00 a.m., and Don wouldn’t quit hiking until 3 p.m. That was the rule. They were great hikes and I met a lot of really interesting people, many of whom I still hike with now.”

A third popular hiking group, aptly named the Friday Hikers, can trace its origins to Buttians who bonded through both the Beauties and Senior Hikes. Several of these folks, including the Berkshires, had gathered for a barbecue in the spring of 2000 to plan a summer of exploring local peaks and some of Colorado’s 14ers (peaks rising to more than 14,000 feet). Don Janney, the original Friday facilitator, recalls that Lash Hansborough jokingly asked who was going to be hiking “the 9ers.”

“That gave me the opening to suggest that some of us no longer could get a bang out of doing 14ers,” said Janney, a retired nuclear scientist. “I suggested that anyone who might like less strenuous hikes should give me their e-mail address so that we could set up irregularly scheduled ad hoc hikes. By the end of the beer and burgers, 20 people had signed my list.”

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That list has grown to about 80 names of locals, tourists and summer residents, and their excursions are now regularly scheduled on Fridays so as not to compete with other social hiking days.

Les Wilbanks, originally from Los Angeles, heads for the backcountry with any group he can find. He notes how various outdoor groups have formed – and some disappeared – out of these original three.

“I facilitate a four-wheel, off-road group that, at times, includes a short hike such as Gunsight Pass, Daisy Pass, Mt. Antero and Mt. Tilton.”

He points out that the Thursday hiking group led by Roger Cramm has morphed into a mountain bike group, and that winter ski groups, such as the Gray Hairs crosscountry skiers or the ROMEOs (Retired Old Men Eating Out) downhillers, grew from the same soil.

Most of the hiking groups, and certainly the ancestral three, are open to anyone who wants to join. (See adjoining box.)

The HCCA hikes are listed in advance on-line and require registration. Navy explained that group size is limited by wilderness area regulations, so preregistration is a must.

The Beauties publish a list of the season’s jaunts to their members in May of every year. The Friday Hikers go on a weekby-week basis; the crew that shows up for one hike picks the next week’s trail.

“We go out in June as soon as we can find clear trails – usually at lower elevations,” said Barb Crawford. “And we keep going well into October.” Friday hikes are not led; they are facilitated by a member who knows a trail she or he wants to share with the others. But certain routes are almost mandatory. “I can’t imagine a summer without the Friday Hikes doing Oh Be Joyful, Rustlers Gulch or West Maroon Pass,” Crawford said. “In fall, we have to hike Beckwith Pass and Mill Creek for the autumn color.”

Regardless of the group, they all gather people from a variety of geographical and professional backgrounds, one of the pluses of social hiking. On any given trek, you might be walking along with a retired New Mexico scientist like Janney or a college professor from Texas, a physician from Atlanta or a forensic psychologist from the Midwest, a federal judge from New York, a journalist from Washington, D.C., or a retired motorcycle cop from California. The mix often includes geologists, birders, flower

experts and mushroom specialists, adding even more spice to the outing.

The latest generation of social hiking was born at Union Congregational Church, located at Fourth and Maroon. Fellowship Hikes occur on summer Sundays after church to provide a venue for further spiritual discussion. No registration is required, nor are the hikes published in advance. The volunteer leader of the trek usually picks the trail.

“We started this in 2014,” said Chris Ward, a Houston resident who has led the hikes for two seasons. “Sometimes the ‘discussion’ becomes sharing expressions of gratitude for the blessing of being in this incredible place.”

Martha Walton is one of the original members of the Butte Beauties, and after several decades she still regularly hikes with them as well as the other groups. In addition to being in nature, she loves group hiking because of “the Good Samaritans on the trail – people helping each other by sharing sunscreen, poles, meds, technical items and knowledge. That’s important.”

Roger Henson sums up the delight expressed over and over by social hikers: “If you’ve hiked the Gunnison Valley for many years, you realize that no matter which direction you head, there is a scene that will have you snapping pictures and reveling in the wonder of it all. The joy is in the company as much as in the scenery.”

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FIND YOUR HIKING BUDDIES Hiking groups that are now open: Butte Beauties (open to women over 50) Lucy Hecker, luhecker@crestedbutte.net Don Baker Legacy Hikes through HCCA www.cbhcca.org Friday Hikers—Joanne Reynolds, jsreynoldscb@q.com Fellowship Hikes—Nancy Church, Union Congregational Church, nancy@ucccrestedbutte.org.

There are also hikes that require fees and registration, organized through the Crested Butte Wildflower Festival, www. crestedbuttewildflowerfestival.com, and Wednesdays at Western, through Extended Studies at Western State Colorado University, www.western.edu/academics/ extended-studies.

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CONSENSUS FAVORITES AMONG CRESTED BUTTE’S HIKING GROUPS TOP TRAILS FOR WILDFLOWERS

TOP GUIDEBOOKS

•

•

A go-to guidebook is Anne and Mike Poe’s 65 Scenic Day Hikes, Crested Butte, Colorado. This is a full-color guide with topographic maps and a detailed analysis of the quality and difficulty level of each hike. Easy or strenuous, near town or at a distance, views, flowers or forests, it’s all clearly presented.

•

Another well-written and detailed book is Timber, Talus & Tundra: Hiking Trails and Mountain Peaks of the Gunnison Basin by Mary Anne Tarr. This book lists many more than 65 day hikes, as it also includes peak climbs and multi-day trails. It covers a huge area stretching from Crested Butte and the Paradise Divide to Powderhorn and the Cochetopa, Taylor Canyon and Lake City.

•

The less extensive Hiking in Heaven by Denis B. Hall is useful for concentrating on the trails of the Upper East River Valley. Published in 1990 and re-issued in 1999, the book has some out-of-date details.

•

Caves Trail in Cement Creek Canyon is close to town, south on Cement Creek Road. One mile out, you will have climbed almost 1,000 feet, but it’s worth the effort. In addition to the flowers on the way up, as you hike gently down toward Walrod Gulch you’ll be in acres of bright yellow mules ears and blue lupine, along with assorted others. Best in late June to mid July.

West Maroon Pass trailhead is far from town, almost an hour’s tough back-road drive, but the hike is amazing mid July to late August. You climb out of a watershed into a valley that leads to the pass. It will be covered with a mind-boggling array of flowers.

TOP TRAILS FOR VIEWS

Nathan Bilow

•

Top of Silver Queen Chair to Saddle is close to town and has nearly 360-degree views. You need a pass to ride the chair. The best views are from the top of Crested Butte Mountain, but that requires bouldering.

It is less challenging to stay at the Saddle.

•

Trail 401 from the Schofield Pass trailhead to Rustler’s Gulch requires staging vehicles or a willingness to hitchhike from Rustler’s back to the trailhead.

None of these books covers hikes in Cement Creek Canyon, which is a pity as there are half a dozen good trails in the lower- and mid-canyon areas. One reason for this universal lapse may be that the canyon is a mecca for dirt bikes, which don’t always mix well with hikers.

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The quiet champions of our

By George Sibley

The apolitical, science-based Coal Creek Watershed Coalition: “Let’s just fix it.”

55

Left to right: Zach Vaughter measures Coal Creek stream flow; Nicki Devanny and Bill Hoblitzell check water quality near an abandoned mine; Tara Tafi collects water samples from the Slate River.

WE SHOULD get used to the word “Anthropocene.” It’s the tag for a geological epoch marked by significant longterm, human-caused changes to the planet itself: e.g. climate-changing carbon additions to the atmosphere and habitat crowding leading to plant and animal extinctions. But there is also a more positive – and more humanly scaled – way to look at the Anthropocene Epoch: it is the time when the humans who precipitated these changes on the planet became conscious of their impacts, and began organizing to identify and fix some of those problems.

Organizations like Crested Butte’s Coal Creek Watershed Coalition (CCWC).

“Water quality is our mission,” said Zach Vaughter, executive director of the Coalition, but a lot of complex activities crowd under that umbrella. In a region whose motto might be the often-heard “Touch water, touch all,” carrying out a water-quality mission might include, all in the same day or two: trekking along a stream to collect water samples, checking in at a site where a contractor is plugging leaks from an old mine, overseeing the placement of a portapotty at a barely legal camping area used by workers who can’t find affordable housing, and then attending the evening meeting of a potential funding organization to ask for money.

Vaughter is a quiet, lean and bearded young man who blends right into Crested Butte; he came here to ski for a while, but his idealism is implicit in his B.A. degree in Sustainable Development from Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina.

56

That could be a sister school to Western State Colorado University in Gunnison, where Vaughter is enrolled in the new Masters in Environmental Management program. But the Coal Creek Watershed Coalition is his prime focus.

The CCWC was organized in 2003 to address water problems in the Coal Creek watershed, the stream that flows through the town of Crested Butte and also provides its water supply. Now the Coalition is expanding its reach to encompass the upper Slate River watershed, from its Ruby Range and Paradise Divide headwaters down to its confluence with Coal Creek, just upstream of the Gothic Road bridge.

The Slate River watersheds are still geologically dynamic. Its headwaters are constantly being carved by water in some of its more “shock and awe” manifestations like avalanches, landslides and debris flows. The fast-moving streams then move that debris as sediment downstream into a broad floodplain that the Slate rearranges in ever-changing loops and meanders. The Coalition does not try to tame the natural chaos of these watersheds; but human efforts to carve livelihoods from the valley – with its metals to be mined and grass to be grazed – are mixed in with the natural chaos, and these uses have left some mendable problems that impact the quality of the water and the streams’ ability to support life.

Ashley Bembenek, the Coalition’s technical coordinator, does most of the analysis of the watershed problems that are fixable. A graduate of Montana State

University with a B.S. in Environmental Science, she focuses on the viability of the water and soil: “Give the biota a reasonable habitat and it will be okay.” (Presumably including that part of the biota that is us.)

The Coalition is essentially a down-onthe-ground, non-governmental action arm for a group of government partners at all levels.

Slate River watersheds are mostly public land, managed by the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management – two consistent partners. The Town of Crested Butte is another.

But the Coalition also depends heavily on a number of state and federal organizations.

Since the late 1980s, the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been making funds available to local watershed organizations through amendments to the 1972 Clean Water Act addressing “nonpoint source” pollution and degradation problems. As opposed to “point source” problems, traceable to single municipal or industrial facilities, nonpoint source problems are the often-diffused consequence of many small actions over long periods, like nutrient-laden runoff from agricultural fields or metal-laden runoff from abandoned mines. These problems are often ingrained in the local culture and economy, and the EPA administrators grappling with nonpoint pollution decided that local organizations were best suited for such remedial and restoration work. Nonpoint source federal funds are distributed to local organizations like the Coalition through state agencies such as the Division of Mining, Reclamation and Safety,

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and the Water Quality Control Division of the Department of Public Health and Safety.

Steve Glazer – Crested Butte resident since 1969 and former director of the High Country Citizens Alliance (HCCA) Water Program – realized the potential of the nonpoint source funds for help in cleaning up Coal Creek (beyond the good work of U.S. Energy’s Keystone Mine treatment plant).

In 2003 he initiated a HCCA study of water quality in Coal Creek, which occasionally ran with fairly colorful water, and discovered levels of heavy metals – zinc, cadmium, lead, iron and others – in excess of safe standards.

Glazer had little formal training in water quality issues but had educated himself through the 1990s to become one of the state’s most knowledgeable “citizen-scientists” on such matters.

A local organization was needed to access the EPA funds through state agencies, but Glazer felt that HCCA had too much scar tissue from its strong positions on local issues to have the broad community support the government partners required.

So in 2003, following the HCCA Coal Creek study, he assembled a citizen board and created the Coal Creek Watershed Coalition – an apolitical, not-for-profit, science-based organization that exists to address local water quality problems irrespective of whose fault they are. The Coalition’s goals, Glazer said, “are to only deal with the science, and to work with the broadest possible group of stakeholders.” He has served as board president since the beginning.

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Consistent with the science goal, the CCWC’s work is grounded in monitoring the streams. Coalition workers have been collecting quarterly water samples at a dozen sites along Coal Creek since the 2003 study (with another 16 sites monitored in the spring runoff). They now collect quarterly samples at another 18 sites in the rest of the Slate watersheds. The water samples are analyzed by the state office of the EPA.

To address concerns identified by the monitoring, the Coalition board and staff developed long-range remediation plans. They take on projects as they can line up partners and funding.

One of the Coalition’s first projects was the long-abandoned Standard Mine on Mt. Emmons (up-valley from the town’s water intake), which has been leaking water laden with heavy metals into Coal Creek for a century. The EPA designated this as a “Superfund site” and has poured considerable resources into cleaning it up. But the Standard was a fairly large mine with several levels, and a decade after starting, the cleanup remains a difficult and occasionally frustrating Coalition/ Superfund project.

In 2012, the Coalition completed a study on how the Slate River’s changing course was “eating” its way into Peanut Lake, which it would then have drained. In addition to the potential aesthetic loss, Peanut Lake hides a lot of nasty mining residue that doesn’t belong in a healthy river. The Crested Butte Land Trust used that study to prioritize the subtle re-route of a small section of the Slate. The new course will be monitored closely because dynamic mountain streams can thrash back and forth across their floodplains.

Much of the project planning gets done in meetings of a technical committee the Coalition has assembled. This committee includes the “water people” from most of the Coalition’s partner organizations – the federal land management agencies, the EPA and Colorado Water Quality Control Division, the state Division of Mining Reclamation and Safety, the Crested Butte Land Trust, Trout Unlimited, HCCA (whose name has been changed to the High Country Conservation Alliance), the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab, the Town of Crested Butte and others in an ad hoc way.

The Coalition is gearing up for a major project in the summer of 2017, dealing with the old Daisy Mine on the backside of Mt. Emmons, near the Gunsight Pass road, and with its ore-processing area on the valley floor, near the Gunsight Bridge. This will be an expensive project, and Vaughter and Bembanek

have already lined up federal funding from the state Division of Mining Reclamation and Safety and the Water Quality Control Commission, and the Bureau of Land Management (Andrew Breibart of the BLM is a “national resource” for the Upper Gunnison).

This summer the Coalition is working on a less technically complex but no less important project. In late June and July, workers will restore a wetland along the Kebler Pass road, about four miles above town. They will put in plants that “eat” dissolved heavy metals, removing them from the water – essentially restoring the watershed’s capacity for taking care of problems nature’s way.

That task will lend itself to volunteer work more than the Daisy Mine project, and Vaughter regards this as important, as did his predecessor in the job, Anthony Poponi. Poponi observed, “It’s a lot easier to hand a professional company a check for doing the work than it is to organize putting volunteers in the field with them. But the gain [from volunteer involvement] is not just community building; it’s building a more intelligent community.”

Vaughter’s job is as much putting people and money together as it is putting ecosystems back together. The federal nonpoint source money is readily available, but it is only good for 60 percent of project costs; the other 40 percent has to be made up in matches and in-kind volunteer work.

The job involves a lot of grant writing and community organizing.

As is usually the case with such organizations, operating funds, like staff pay and office expenses, are harder to come by than specific project funds. The Town and the Upper Gunnison River District provide some steady support, but the Coalition depends heavily on events like its monthly “Dine Out with CCWC” at the Last Steep, fundraising parties hosted by local supporters, and the random kindness of strangers. (It is a 501(c)(3) organization; see www.coalcreek.org.)

In the Anthropocene Epoch, as the global dialogue stretches on about who is responsible for planetary changes and who should do what to fix them, organizations like the Coal Creek Watershed Coalition (80 in Colorado alone) are just getting on with it. Vaughter said of the Coalition staff, board, technical committee and volunteers: “We just keep our heads down and quietly carry on.”

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The Philosophers’ Mountains

By Brian Levine

A fictional journal follows a reconnaissance party into Ute Country in 1873, as tensions flare between native Utes and encroaching miners.

This reconnaissance map shows Lone Mountain (now Crested Butte) and other West Elk peaks as named by the explorers in 1873.

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For centuries, the Ute Nation occupied the Elk Mountain region surrounding what is now Crested Butte. Of the seven Ute tribes, the Tabeguache were most comfortable in this central part of Colorado. They were generally peaceful—until incursions by white men into their territory became ever more aggressive. Mineral wealth and property were the Caucasians’ main interests, and the U.S. government promoted white men’s rights above all others. Initially, the Utes, under the leadership of Chief Ouray, found it advantageous to cede land to the encroachers. But the federal government broke one treaty after another between 1849 and 1868; and further mineral discoveries in the “San Juan Mining District” incited more confrontations with the Utes.

Another treaty, negotiated in 1873, pushed the Utes into the White River (Northern) and Los Pinos (Southern) agencies. To precisely survey these new land demarcations, the U.S. War Department commissioned a reconnaissance, headed by Lieutenant Ernest Ruffner, Corps of Engineers, into the Ute Country. The following is a fictional perspective of an assistant photographer on this 1873 expedition based on Ruffner’s report.

CAMP 2, MAY 10, 1873. Once again we’re in conflict with the Utes. Yet another “wild flood of white men” has rushed into their lands with no regard for their “guaranteed rights.” Chief Ouray’s words, not mine. And vehemently said, to Secretary of War William Belknap. Not directly, though; rather, through Charles Adams, the Los Pinos Agent. That was last August, after Ouray and his men refused to give up any more mountains to “invading” miners.

Since then, countless mineral discoveries have been staked out in the San Juans and Gunnison country, putting ever more pressure on the Utes. Result: the 1873 Brunot Treaty; and this mission. I therefore submit this journal, in compliance with the instructions of Lieutenant Ernest Ruffner, leader of the reconnaissance, and my duties as assistant to expedition photographer Thomas J. Hine.

However, let me respectfully preface with what the Lieutenant said at Camp 1: “We need perform our duties with the utmost diplomacy and accuracy as the consequences of war with this powerful and intelligent tribe – the Utes – could not fail to be dire.”

PUNCHO PASS. Near the head of the Arkansas, we break camp and move into the San Luis Valley. Unfortunately, we’ve started this survey without the proper barometers;

instead, we’re making do with the profile made by Captain John Williams Gunnison back in 1853. So far Gunnison’s profile has proven valid. But leaving without proper instrumentation exhibits the time pressure we’re under to survey the lands around the 107th Meridian.

FORT GARLAND, MAY 20. Lieut.

Ruffner is finally in possession of the two much-needed survey barometers. Thomas Hine also received his complement of photographic equipment. That means another camera to carry, as well as hundreds of dryplates, all packed in specially made wooden boxes. Now we’re using both wet- and dryplate equipment…and more time….

CAMP 18. From Fort Garland, we enter San Luis Park, then journey to La Loma. Our wagons are no longer useful in these rugged mountains so we’ve assembled a train of 13 pack mules. We’ve also gained a military escort.

To my good fortune, both Ruffner and Hine enjoy a good hike, which breaks the boredom of the daily march. Near Del Norte, we ascended a mountain – sublime in its mass – at the source of the Rio Grande River, all hauling photographic equipment. Hine carried the wet-plate stereoscope and tripod; Ruffner the glass-plates and aneroid. Me, the chemistry and dark tent. At the summit, Hine took views of the river, Uncompahgre Range, and Wagon-Wheel Gap. I processed the lightsensitive collodion with iron sulfate, then fixed the images with potassium cyanide and stabilized them with clear varnish. Meanwhile, the Lieutenant acquired sextant readings.

CAMP 21. Ruffner, Hine, and I are like kindred spirits, what with our mountain accessions and scientific interests – discussions of electromagnetism and electrochemistry, the telegraph and Wheatstone’s Bridge. It’s quite invigorating.

In Antelope Park, we traveled over a wagon road made by the Little Giant Mining Company. Wrecked machinery and dead animals all over. The road was treacherous, but refuse was worse. Easy to see why the Utes find our presence an anathema.

Later, high above the Rio Grande Valley, Ruffner and assistants officially name the two rivers below us: Hine’s Fork and Pole Creek. I wonder what the Utes call these life-giving waters. Certainly something more appropriate.

CAMP 22, JUNE 8. Near catastrophe.

In a steep and narrow gorge between high crags, Tom’s mule fell through snow crust.

He and the beast sank near ten feet. We dug for several hours to extract him. Fortunately, no serious injuries, just a twisted ankle.

However, there was minor breakage of the photographic images. Mule frightened, but uninjured.

CAMP 23, JUNE 9. Caught in a snowstorm on Mt. Canby. Lightning strikes and thunderous shocks. Wondering how Messrs. Faraday and Maxwell would’ve reacted.

CAMP 24. Hamilton’s Creek. One of the regions causing contention, with rich discoveries in Animas Valley, Cunningham Gulch, Mineral Creek, Galena Mountains, Eureka and other places. Convenient appellations we’ve bestowed, unlike what the Utes would’ve imagined.

CAMP 33. Animas Park. Trekking along the Old Spanish Trail. Bright red sandstone, sheer rock columns, terraces covered in lush, vibrant reds and greens …slopes like pyramids…Animas gorge a stratum of feldspathic granite…then, dry ridges, pink and crimson, blossoms purple and yellow.

Grand substance for the camera’s eye.

CAMP 47. Lower Canon of Lake Fork.

At a crossroads, a large Indian camp of 20 or so lodges has recently been dismantled. We pass through cottonwoods and willows on a grassy plain, then find a sagebrush-lined trail heading toward the Los Pinos Agency.

We encounter a party of western Utes, well armed, well mounted, well dressed…clean, smiling, civil; short men, broad shoulders, sun-darkened. Curious fellows.

CAMP 51. We raise our tents on a small tributary to the Los Pinos. Camp pitched on a grassy, aspen-laden slope a mile from the agency. Intense sun. Azure sky. No clouds.

Dusty contrasts.

We’ve camped along a popular trail and receive visits from many local dignitaries, including Chief Ouray, Agent Charles Adams, Sub-Chiefs Johnson, Pi-ah, Jack, Antelope, as well as the Saguache entrepreneur Otto Mears. Chief Ouray continues to speak of his reticence to give up this mountainous region, saying many of his tribe oppose yet another breach of contract.

Thereafter, Mears, a close friend of 61

Clockwise from top left: Chief Ouray and frontier entrepreneur Otto Mears; the reconnaissance party on the Slate River, with Lone Mountain (Crested Butte) in the background; Utes Ouray, Chipeta, Piah and families with officials in Washington, D.C. to sign the treaty of 1873; Ouray’s house on the Los Pinos Agency.

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Ouray’s, speaks of the telegraph and the extraordinary changes it heralds; how it brings the words and great achievements of distant British scientists and philosophers -- Thomas Huxley, Richard Owen, William Benjamin Carpenter, John Stuart Mill -across the Atlantic to influence us here in the American wilderness. How wondrous, yet what a clash of cultures it is instigating.

After a time, Hine and I become concerned about the fading light. So Hine asks Ouray’s permission to take pictures at Los Pinos. A mile or so by horse and we’re there, cameras prepared to photograph adobe and pine buildings and buffalo-skin lodges.

Most of the Utes are cooperative; only a few resist our lens.

CAMP 52. Near the Tumitchie [Tomichi].

We meet Chief Ouray and Sub-Chief Johnson

again. Ouray tells us about a site we need to visit, referring to a vast amphitheater of tall, majestic mountains northwest of Los Pinos; a place of significance to the Utes, near the Bah River, where the “ideas and words of great men continue to echo.” Ouray has us believing the geological amphitheater of which he speaks is the most monumental of locales, a sacred site of grand philosophic proportions. I, like the rest, am anxious to see these “philosophers’ mountains”; but we must return to Fort Garland, to close out our survey line.

CAMP 56, JULY 19. Disaster: 30 glass-plate negatives were shattered today.

A wooden case was thrown from a military wagon, along with several heavy packsaddles.

The case was crushed, and we’re still not sure which images were lost. There was nothing

FORT GARLAND. We closed our line on the 107th Meridian on July 21, then received new orders. Belknap wants the Lieut. to locate and survey the various entrances into the Ute Country via the Arkansas Valley.

Once again we’re in a rush to leave, knowing winter blankets the high country early. But our amended reconnaissance is delayed due to confusion concerning pack mules, wagons, and supplies.

On August 23, we finally head north toward the headwaters of the Grand [Colorado] River.

CATHEDRAL ROCKS, SEPTEMBER [a.k.a. Castleton, or the Castles formation northwest of Gunnison]. We travel old ground here, and the late-summer scenery looks much different from just a month ago.

While moving up Ohio Creek Valley, I note the astounding rock formation six miles from Camp 13. Although this formation – approximately two miles of rock columns and spires rising four hundred feet from base rock – is march-stopping, I don’t mistake it for Ouray’s royal amphitheater. Rather, the cathedral-rock formation appears an extensive castle in ruins, the capitol of an empire long since conquered by the region’s extreme elements. A western Ozymandias buried to the eyes in sand.

After taking wet-collodion and dry-plate images, we continue up the steep grades of Ohio Creek, into dense brush and aspen copses, fir and spruce forests.

CAMP 14. To quote the Lieut., “The ascent of the Ohio Creek…brought us among the high peaks of a spur of the Elk Mountains.

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left but shards.

Back in October 1871, all Tom Hine’s Yellowstone photographs disappeared in Chicago’s massive fire. Tom had taken a big risk to begin with, leaving his previous employment. But similar to this survey, Tom wanted the opportunity the Yellowstone expedition presented. He took the first photographs of Wyoming’s astounding geysers, and had his glass-plates not been destroyed, Tom would’ve been presenting his images of Old Faithful to Congress instead of William Jackson.

Instead, Tom experienced Maxwell’s entropy – “irreversible loss.” Something Chief Ouray and the Utes know quite well – although they wouldn’t call it entropy.

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timber, challenged a closer examination, and the party made a detour for this purpose.”

Our ascent of man.

We tent Camp 15 on what we call Anthracite Creek. Professor F. Hawn, Tom Hine, and I head off to examine a coal vein.

We climb through waves of vegetation and under aspen canopies. The deposit we locate resembles the fine and lustrous anthracite found in Pennsylvania coalfields.

Not far from the creek head, an alpine amphitheater rises dramatically from the lush over-growth. Yes, we’ve found the Philosophers’ Mountains! And they are just as Ouray had painted them, perhaps even grander: a magnificent arena of snowcrowned peaks. Lieut. joins the awe. It’s an enormous and astonishing scene. The mountainous curvature stretches north and west for miles, appearing so vast as to encompass all human experience. “Striking,” Ruffner says, near breathless. “Worthy to bear the names of those philosophers and scientists whose works helped form our century.”

Tom and I are dumbstruck yet somehow find the nerve to take photographs as Ruffner and the others suggest names for the majestic peaks.

CAMP 16. Prof. Hawn, his assistant, Tom, and I ascend the newly-titled Mount Mill [re: John Stuart Mill]. It holds the same power as its name.

CAMP 18. We tent near Lone Mountain [now known as Crested Butte], an isolated peak between Washington Gulch and East River. The Lieut., Tom, and I scramble over broken rock heading for the barren, syenitic peak, using pack animals to carry cameras, chemicals, and other instruments. Just over halfway, we unburden the mules, then backpack our photographic equipment to within several hundred feet of the summit.

From there, we focus down valley, on the confluence of the Slate and Taylor rivers.

To the southwest is yet another gigantic syenitic mass, a mountain we all agree should be named after one of the 19th century’s most influential men, Professor Charles Wheatstone. [A peak later known, mysteriously, as Whetstone.]

FORT GARLAND, OCTOBER 2.

As I complete this journal, I realize we never asked Ouray what the Utes call the Philosophers’ Mountains. But then, I think, how typical of invaders.

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“the

earth laughs in ” flowers.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nathan Bilow

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That “Wildflower Capital of Colorado” label isn’t just a marketing ploy. The valleys around Crested Butte really do host an inordinate number and diversity of wildflowers.

Although our first impression is visual – a cascade of colors shimmering against grand peaks – these microcosmic worlds intrigue on many levels. Scientists, poets, gardeners, hikers, naturalists, healers, artists and just about everyone else can find their preferred brand of magic here.

The Crested Butte Wildflower Festival celebrates its 30th anniversary this year with two weeks of concentrated events in July, plus activities throughout the summer. In honor of that anniversary and Crested Butte’s floral bounty, we offer this bouquet of photos plus writings from some of the festival’s perennial instructors.

As one teacher commented, “We’re so awed by the beauty of these flowers – and there’s nothing wrong with that – but there’s so much more going on.”

Happy 30th, Wildflower Festival!

During the official Crested Butte Wildflower Festival, July 11-23, approximately 250 events will span the floral gamut: hikes, jeep tours, cooking, plant medicine, botany/ conservation, birding and butterflies, garden tours, plus an expanded arts offering. Several dozen other activities will start in June and stretch into September.

“We’ll have awesome hikes for every speed and skill level,” said Sue Wallace, festival director. More than three-dozen hikes will include treks to Aspen, a walk up Cement Mountain with Glo Cunningham to see fairy

slippers and learn about Colorado’s first ski area, and a Land Trust hike up Cumberland Pass with locals Vinnie Rossignol and Lian Canty.

Longtime instructor Susan Evans, known for her sense of humor, will teach about herbal uses of wildflowers, from making soap to growing and using herbs in cooking.

“The most exciting thing this year is all the art,” Sue said. The Art Studio helped put together many of the classes, which include painting, linoleum block carving, drawing, clay/silver jewelry making, prayer flags and

John Holder

a two-day program in journaling. Among the extensive photography offerings, Dusty Demerson will lead a master class and Jan Runge a 5 a.m. sunrise photo workshop.

Concurrent with the festival, Crested Butte Wellness will host a relaxing retreat, with such activities as Wine at Treeline.

On July 18, the 30th birthday party is open to all, with a poster signing by artists Karen Divine and Kathy Amen and a gathering of some of the festival’s early supporters.

For the complete schedule, see crestedbuttewildflowerfestival.com.

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Floral seduction, combat and survival

Every wildflower has fascinating stories to tell about its life, often involving its intimate, manipulative relationships with bees and other pollinators. Different orchids, for example, attract only certain insects, often luring them in with sexual scents like femme fatales, and sometimes entrapping them temporarily, like the Calypsos do. Every orchid species has a unique fungal friend in the soil upon which it depends. Wildflowers “text” their pollinators with colors, letting select pollinators – be they insects or hummingbirds – know when to visit and how to hook up.

Flowers also try to poison predators and parasites. A whole world of microfungi lives within wildflowers, sometimes changing entire ecosystems by their presence. Insects court, mate, lay eggs and engage in mortal combat, prey against predator, on wildflowers. It’s a world of sex, violence, intrigue, survival and cooperation, and it’s all happening out there on the flowers!

The Ziegfeld Follies show of Rocky Mountain wildflowers reflects a unique, quick-changing display of floral fireworks adapted to a short mountain summer: an early cornucopia of yellow, red, violet, blue and white – columbines, larkspurs, violets and buttercups, to name just a few – quickly segues into the myriad yellow, white and orange daisies later on.

Wildflowers are already feeling climate change, our 26-year-old Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory field experiment shows. The wildflowers will eventually cede to sagebrush, collapsing this colorful show, if we don’t switch to solar, wind and other renewable clean energy sources soon.

I’m always learning something new about wildflowers, and the more I know, the more connected I feel with my home, Earth. Crouched to the ground, meeting new wildflowers on any continent, I instantly have an understanding of how they and their pollinators are surviving, reminding me that I’m home, wherever I am in nature. –Mel Harte

Mel Harte is a longtime summer resident biologist at the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab and worldwide explorer of wildflowers.

She writes the weekly “Climate Change This Week” column at the huffingtonpost.

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Jack Brauer

Jack Brauer

Raynor Czerwinski

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Butterflies: Expect the unexpected

Carolyn Jones

Raynor Czerwinski

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We gather for the Wildflower Festival at the same time each summer, but the butterflies we find are never exactly the same. Sometimes magnificent western tiger swallowtails patrol along streams and fly high in the forest canopy, and crowds of tiny blue spring azures sip salts from mud puddles along the trail. In other seasons, skippers dart around the dry meadows, wood nymphs flutter as we pass, and clouds of bright orange fritillaries sip nectar from towering purple blooms.

A deep winter snowpack and mild spring conditions tend to favor both butterfly and wildflower populations, but the environmental predictors are complex.

Researcher David Inouye and colleagues at Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory have tracked our wildflower populations over more than four decades, documenting an advance of several weeks in the dates of flowering and peak blooming. Long-term datasets show this longer growing season doesn’t always mean more flowers. When the snowpack melts earlier, many plants produce buds earlier, but a hard frost in May or June will still kill them, resulting in fewer flowers.

In 2012, a late-spring frost had damaged buds across the East River Valley. On my butterfly tour of Cement Creek, we noted the relatively scarce flower displays as we walked through parched meadows. To our surprise, we found not just one or two butterflies at a wildflower, but dozens. At a single patch of aspen daisies, we found more than ten butterfly species gathering nectar. A blooming yellow rabbitbrush shrub was so crowded with the winged beauties that it seemed to be

in motion. At our destination, hundreds of thirsty butterflies swirled around the hilltop, one of the perching behaviors butterflies use to find and attract mates. It was my best ever “powder day” for butterfly watching. We lost all track of time witnessing the awesome Lepidopteran event.

Unfortunately, our fantastic butterfly viewing might have signaled a seasonal mismatch in timing of the flowering plants and their pollinators. The late frost might have affected the flower buds more than the butterflies, or at least the butterflies were easier to find with fewer flowers available for their nectar shopping. Various plant species respond differently to climate changes and weather events. Potential pollinators (such as bees, butterflies, hummingbirds and bats) also have drastically different life stages and seasonal timing. Some migrate to our area across continents; others complete their life cycles in a single meadow. As each species responds to climate shifts, the seasonal patterns in wildflower blooms might not always match the timing of animal visitors, a growing concern for both conservation biology and agriculture.

Amid this unfolding drama, one thing is certain: we’ll see some amazing butterflies this summer in Crested Butte!

–Sara Simonson

Since completing her master’s degree in butterfly ecology and conservation at Colorado State University, Sara Simonson has worked on research and teaching projects involving Colorado’s native wildflowers and pollinators. She has led Crested Butte Wildflower Festival butterfly tours since 1999.

“Enjoy, preserve, protect”: After irresponsible humans damaged some fragile alpine meadows last year, the Wildflower Festival board decided to emphasize its stewardship message. Several local organizations are collaborating on a “Here’s the deal” campaign, reminding people to stay on roads/trails and take great care of the delicate alpine ecosystems. For all their vibrant beauty, these plants face short growing seasons and marginal conditions; up here, life is tenuous and recovery from disruption difficult. Human carelessness can destroy in a moment an ecological balance achieved over decades.

Dusty Demerson

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Raynor Czerwinski

“Ethical wildcrafting”

To Christina MacLeod, a wildflower meadow isn’t just beautiful; it’s healing.

An herbalist fascinated by the medicinal properties of plants, Christina finds the Woods Walk and other local hiking areas “loaded” with great examples. She shows her Wildflower Festival students fitweed (Corydalis caseana), so named because pioneers used it to treat palsy and epilepsy, and elephants head (Pedicularis groenlandica), whose complex chemistry can have sedating effects.

This is a subtle and delicate world, she points out, not for plucking and chomping.

Some plants have poisonous lookalikes; other medicinals work best combined with plants that have harmonizing qualities. And all plants, she said, pick up properties from their environments (so, for example, calming pedicularis thrives along the tranquil banks of the East River).

A personal favorite of Christina’s: osha (Ligusticum porteri), used for respiratory ailments like bronchitis. It’s nicknamed “bear medicine” because bears often dig it up and eat it in the spring to stimulate their sluggish bodies out of hibernation. If Christina feels a cold or sinus infection settling in, she makes herself an osha root tincture or some tea steeped overnight and sweetened with honey.

Another common local medicinal: the monument plant, or green gentian (Frasera speciosa), whose bitter root can help the belly. “When something bitter touches the tongue, the cells in the stomach produce hydrochloric acid, stimulating and aiding digestion,” Christina said. But this root is “cold natured,” so she recommends blending 74

Why such floral diversity? The Crested Butte area’s dramatic geologic history, from volcanoes to glaciers, violent upheavals to slow-layered ancient beaches, shaped diverse soils, altitudes and sun/wind exposures. Abundant water and sunshine nourish the several hundred wildflower species that have taken root in the sagelands, alpine meadows, forest floors and high tundra.

it with other herbal remedies. The root must be harvested before the monument plant blooms (because its energy then turns toward blossoming). So herbalists must harvest conscientiously because they are interrupting the life cycle of the plant.

Christina collects only what she needs, from private property where she has permission to harvest or from reputable organic companies, and she encourages people to grow their own medicine gardens.

“There are lots of rules of ethical wildcrafting,” she said.

Christina invites her students and clients to a deep, respectful connection with the earth, not a use-it-up attitude.

She emphasizes the interconnectedness of plants, soil and other organisms. “When you pull a plant, the whole micro-environment changes. There’s a whole network of dependence under there.”

Christina MacLeod is an acupuncture practitioner and herbal healer/teacher near Westcliffe and a ten-year instructor with the Crested Butte Wildflower Festival.

John Holder

UNCOMPROMISING ATTENTION TO DETAIL satisfied clients come from meeting schedules and budgets, communication and honesty

Nathan Bilow

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Late blo omers

Two favorite personalities of the Crested Butte Wildflower Festival are a retired dentist and a retired industrial engineer. Both seniors are fit, funny, knowledgeable and enthralled by wildflowers. “They connect with everyone and make sure every person who comes here has a good time,” said Sue Wallace, Festival director. “They’re not just teachers; they’re ambassadors.” Here are the paths that brought them to Crested Butte’s hillsides and meadows.

DAVE EBNER (PICTURED TOP RIGHT): How did industrial engineering lead to an interest in botany and wildflowers? My wife is the guilty party. Carole’s Master Gardener Training offered by State Cooperative Extension Services led to the replacement of grass in our Cincinnati landscape by flowers, shrubs and ivy. The result was pretty cool, so I followed her lead and took the Master Gardener Training. That led to about 10 years of coordinating work in an inner-city community garden.

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J.C. Leacock

As my for-pay work life ended and the community gardening started, we came to Crested Butte to ski. We got hooked on the down-to-earth feel and beauty of the place.

Then July introduced us to the flowers and the Wildflower Festival.

My interest in science generally, introduction to botany through Master Gardening and a lot of self-study were the building blocks of a passion to keep learning about the wildflowers. Wildflower Festival leaders encouraged my involvement and helped me learn. I’m in heaven when I’m with our festival guests discussing the characteristics of plant families, the anatomy of the flowers and their reproductive and survival strategies. The complexity of the flowers and how they have co-evolved with the critters that pollinate them is a neverending source of awe and fascination.

GARY RAINWATER (PICTURED WITH WIFE FRAN): I practiced dentistry in Dallas for more than 40 years. On anticipation of

retirement, my wife Fran and I scouted out potential retirement areas and fell in love with the beautiful scenery in this valley. We moved here full time in 2005.

I was a Scout Master and have enjoyed hiking all my life, but I was never particularly interested in flowers; that sort of crept up on me when I moved here. It started as a game, wondering what the flowers were, which led to me seeking more and more information. I taught myself with a lot of help from Kathy Darrow’s book, Wild about Wildflowers. What keeps me intrigued is realizing I’ll never know everything about the wildflower community; there’s always something else to learn!

I’ve been a group leader for the Wildflower Festival for 11 years. I take wideeyed participants on hikes to show them the large variety and extremely beautiful flowers we have here. Along the way, I also explain our coal-mining history. I honestly feel I gain more from this than the people I’m taking out. I see this valley and the surrounding mountains through the eyes of my participants. Most of them are struck speechless; they’ve never seen such beauty before. It reminds me how fortunate I am to live here.

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Art provided by local artists J.C. Leacock and Susan Marrion.

Please visit J.C. Leacock at J.C. Leacock Photography Gallery in downtown Crested Butte at 326 Elk Avenue (next to Donita’s Canitna).

Please visit Susan Marrion at Ingham Fine Art Gallery at 403 Third Street.

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Ben Somrak introduces daughter Avery, a sixth-generation Gunnison Valley baby, to her new physician, Dr. Laura Villanueva.

Birth, death earaches

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By Sandy Fails

John Holder

Crested Butte native Dr. Laura (Holder) Villanueva returned home last October, and she doesn’t just wear her stethoscope on Halloween any more.

Back when Ben Somrak and Laura Holder knew each other as teens running track (he in Gunnison; she in Crested Butte), they might not have predicted that 15 years later Ben and his wife would be handing their newborn daughter to her new physician, Dr. Laura (Holder) Villanueva.

“It’s a testament to the tight feel of this community that with full trust and faith you could turn your most prized possession over to someone you knew as a kid growing up,” Ben said. “You know the fabric of the community that shaped them.”

Still tall and lanky, with straight blond hair and big blue eyes, Laura looks much as she did in those high school track days.

But when she talks of the “sacred space” she enters with her patients, she sounds wiser than her 32 years. Laura returned to the valley last October to serve as a family practitioner, hospitalist and emergency room doctor.

Laura remembers wanting to be a doctor from her childhood years in Crested Butte

(though at times acting and dancing lured her as well). Her father, John Holder, went back to school to become a Physicians Assistant when she was 12, but he was a plumber when she was younger. “Being a doctor might have been on my radar before it was on my dad’s,” she said with a smile.

There was certainly foreshadowing of her medical career – like that time when a very young Laura tried to resuscitate a pheasant (presumed dead until it started moving around in the car) on the drive home from a father-daughter hunting trip.

Or all those Halloweens she trick-ortreated in surgical scrubs and stethoscope.

Or when she helped her dad stitch up the family dog or some softball player who caught a ball in the face – the adolescent assistant steadfastly observing while her mom turned away queasy.

“Laura always had the compassion to be a good doctor,” her father said. As a high school Nordic ski racer, she would stop to help a 81

The Holder clan: Mary, John, newlyweds Laura and Michael Villanueva, Rachel, and Paul with wife Shannon and their sons.

competitor who fell – and then cross the finish line alongside her newfound friend. On the volleyball team, she was the one to pull a new student into the circle or build cohesiveness among the players.

Laura feels that growing up in Crested Butte, with the genuine, caring way its residents interacted, helped shape her ability to connect and communicate with other people. Her mom, Mary Holder, laughingly agreed that communication was never an issue with young Laura. Though she evidenced the family’s athleticism, Laura’s award in her preschool learn-to-ski program was “best conversationalist” for her chairlift chattiness.

A stellar student throughout elementary and high school, Laura also loved art, dance and theater. She did performing arts camps in the summer and won a coveted Mountain Theatre Marmot award at age 14 for her portrayal of Juliet.

Gradually dance and drama gave ground to sports: volleyball, basketball, track and Nordic skiing in high school, plus softball, alpine skiing and hiking.

Medicine came to the fore when Laura headed to Colorado College. She earned her bachelors degree in Spanish and biology, spending a semester in Ecuador, where she ended up delivering babies in the understaffed maternity ward though she wasn’t even in medical school yet.

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After college she took a year to bartend at the Last Steep and catch her breath in Crested Butte. Through softball and volleyball she’d met Michael Villanueva, Crested Butte furniture builder, and they began dating. As she plunged into medical school, that relationship became ever more important.

Because Laura eventually wanted to come home to Crested Butte and was intrigued by full-spectrum medical care, she applied for and received several scholarships aimed at attracting doctors to the rural West. Among those was a Gunnison Valley Health Foundation scholarship based on her agreement to return to the valley to practice medicine.

At the University of Colorado’s medical school, Laura chose the rigorous rural-track program, designed for doctors going into remote or international settings “where it’s you or nothing; you’re trained to handle all types of medical situations,” she said. The program covered everything from ultrasound to putting in chest tubes, pediatrics to rheumatology.

Her residency took her to Ventura, California, where she delivered babies, treated a diverse array of patients and worked in a highlevel trauma center.

Michael Villanueva moved there with her, toting his furniture-building equipment and surfboard. Laura knew he was fun loving, artistic and spontaneous; the California years showed her also how patient and understanding he could be. After a long, intense shift, staying solid for her patients through births, deaths and gunshot wounds, “sometimes I’d come home and see Michael and just start bawling,” she said. “He never knew what would be coming in the front door.”

To propose marriage, Michael plotted a romantic kayaking trip to an island. As their planned departure approached, Laura was tending a patient whose erratic labor alternately sped up and slowed down. Laura kept calling Michael: I don’t think I can go… No, I think I can make it… Can you pack a bag for me?… I’ll meet you at the dock. Her patient finally delivered a healthy baby, and after the requisite care and celebration, Laura screeched to the dock, pulling up as the boat was preparing to cast off.

“I’d been awake so long, I was hallucinating.

Michael had packed for me; he’d picked out the funniest clothes, like socks and flip-flops.

He ended up proposing to me on the trip I was thirty seconds from missing. He has put up with a lot.”

The two married in 2014. Their first child is due in early summer, probably coming into the world in the same hospital where Laura was born, in the room where she has already

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delivered her nephew and a host of other local babies.

This child was part of the motivation to return to the Crested Butte area last October.

“Doctors make less here compared to many other places,” Laura said. “But this was an awesome place to grow up. I want to provide that same environment.”

Laura joined the Gunnison Valley Family Physicians clinic and also works as an emergency room doctor and hospitalist for Gunnison Valley Health. “It’s tough to make a living just as a general practitioner,” she said.

“Family practice is an endangered species.”

Laura loves it, though, for the variety of care she can give her patients. “In the same 24 hours, I could deliver a baby and be there when someone takes their last breath. And in between tap someone’s knee or do a pap smear or help a kid with an earache.” Though she particularly enjoys obstetrics, she was surprised to find that bringing dignity and ease to the end of life feels equally sacred and meaningful.

As a primary care doctor, Laura can also look after patients from birth to old age, building trust and getting to know each person’s circumstances and the factors that might affect their health.

“Thank goodness for medications that save people’s lives,” she said, “but sometimes you need people to be on board to change something with their lifestyle. You have to have a relationship to do that, to understand what their life is like every day, so you have something more valuable to offer than pills.”

Of course, being a doctor in a small town requires particular adherence to patientdoctor confidentiality, Laura noted, especially when you might run into your patients on the ski lift or at a potluck.

Often Laura’s workdays are intense: interacting with more than a dozen patients, “being present with each, in sorrow, joy or fear.”

By contrast, she said, the “sad, dirty truth about medicine” is the mountain of computer and paperwork involved, charting and billing and pushing the right buttons “to make sure you get paid and don’t get sued. The system is kind of broken in that way. It takes time away from being with patients.”

Returning to the valley as a doctor has been fascinating, Laura said. She has adjusted to having her hospital commute occasionally delayed by cattle drives. She also notices a distinct difference in the types of patients she sees here. She might treat a rancher in

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his nineties, active and tough as nails. In general people here take more responsibility for themselves, as opposed to some of her California patients who were “ticking time bombs,” living on medication but unwilling to change unhealthy diets or destructive lifestyles.

Laura has felt almost universally welcomed by local medics and the larger community. With her state-of-the-art training, she has been careful not to step on toes.

One of the best aspects of coming home has been being close to her parents, brother Paul and his family, old friends, and sometimes her younger sister Rachel.

Michael’s parents, aunt and uncle also live in Crested Butte, so baby Villanueva will be welcomed by a large family circle.

“My mom is my biggest cheerleader,” Laura said, “and my dad understands those big moments – like after my first C-section or the first time a patient passed away. And he’s so smart I can bounce ideas off of him and get his thoughts on how symptoms might connect.”

The admiration is mutual. John Holder said of his daughter, “She’s a very good doctor.

She was trained well, and her residency was one of the best in the country. She’s a neat lady.”

Kate Somrak didn’t know Laura before daughter Avery was born, but chose her as little Avery’s physician based on the recommendations of friends and other doctors. Her husband Ben applauded the idea of his old friend Laura becoming his baby’s new doctor. “She’ll take good care of us and our daughter,” he said. “She’s professional, fresh out of school and training, experienced but not burned out.

And there’s that personal touch. That’s what this valley is about.”

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A seven-year, $600,000 project to rehabilitate Crested Butte’s old railroad depot will culminate in a grand opening late this summer.

The Depot, as it’s affectionately known, is one of Crested Butte’s largest public buildings, and the rail tracks that once ran along its east side linked the town with the outside world and carried coal from local mines to national markets. Built in 1883, the Depot anchored the lower end of Elk Avenue near Seventh Street. It is still distinctive with its graceful curving eaves and support brackets. Its unique gable faces, unlike any other historic town building, feature a 89

Lead contractor Kevin Donovan.

Photos Sandra Cortner

Queen Anne-style sunburst motif and fish scale shingles.

In 1972, Billie and Ralph Clark, Jr. (parents of Gunnison’s Ralph “Butch” Clark III) purchased the building. After doing some restoration, the Clarks gave it to the Crested Butte Society to be used as a “civic center” and meeting space. In 2005, the Society transferred the deed to the Town of Crested Butte in hopes the building would be renovated.

Funded in part by grants from the Colorado Historic Society’s State Historical Fund (SHF), the rehabilitation kept the building’s historic character while repairing damaged areas and adding as much energy efficiency as possible. “Though we were not required, we planned for the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) access,” explained Molly Minneman, the Town’s historic preservation coordinator. Even with all the improvements, the Depot looks pretty much the same as it has for its 133year life span.

In a 2009 assessment study, funded by a $10,000 SHF grant, local architect 90

Andrew Hadley and engineer Mike Arbaney of Colorado Structural looked at the integrity of the building and determined the level of rehabilitation needed. Their findings provided the basis for a threephase project that required the hiring of Denver preservation architect Slater Paull, who helped the Town learn the ropes and navigate the requirements of the SHF, and, with JVA Engineering of Boulder, developed the construction phases and documentation needed for the grant applications.

Because the SHF had no grants available for amounts greater than $200,000, the project was split into three parts.

“Usually renovation starts at the bottom with the foundation,” said Molly.

“In this case it started at the top because of the water damage to the roof. Icicles in the soffits had allowed moisture into the office of High Country Conservation Advocates (HCCA). Additionally, the brackets holding the eaves were in poor condition.”

During 2011 and 2012, crews replaced the roof shingles and insulated the building

in some places. Custom bracket supports replaced some of the originals and were augmented by the placement of steel posts inside the building.

The second and third phases spanned 2013-2016 with Kevin Donovan’s MB Builders of Crested Butte as the lead contractor. He and his crew, Ian Wrisley, Fernando Prieto and Glenn Michel (Crested Butte’s mayor), repaired the historic doors, including the heavy sliding panels of the freight room; painted the exterior and interior; repaired and refinished some of the floors and outside wainscoting. After discovering that all the operable windows had been painted shut or were in poor condition, they took them out, one by one, to repair and scrape the paint and then replace the broken trim pieces before putting them back in.

They also built new storm windows, then repainted.

Most challenging for him, said Kevin, was pondering how to do things. “There was a lot of head scratching — like with the freight room doors. We figured it out on-

site. The plans were vague, and the project had five designers: the Town, engineer, Historic Society, BOZAR (Crested Butte’s Board of Zoning and Architectural Review) and me.” He grinned good-naturedly.

One of the most complicated projects was the freight room floor, damaged from many decades of trunks and crates sliding across it and nicking out chunks of wood.

“I’d never seen a floor as beat up,” Kevin said.

By the 1970s the log floor had become dangerous to walk on, especially in high heels. Those headed to an evening at the Depot during its early years as an event center knew to wear flats. When Dance in the Mountains rented the space as a dance studio, the instructors added a ballet barre and long mirror and laid new oak flooring atop the 16-inch-wide chipped and marred boards.

Kevin removed the oak flooring, then flipped 30 percent of the original floor boards over. From the boards’ color and scent, Kevin assumed they were made of ponderosa pine, probably milled in Denver.

Ten percent he replaced and one near the door, measuring 15 feet long by 16 inches wide, he kept in its original state. To get the nails out, he had to cut off the heads.

Then he used some detective work to track down almost-exact replicas of the square 60-penny cut nails.

“I found a company online in Massachusetts that had been in the business since 1815. It had been using some of the same machines in the factory since 1840.”

Finally Kevin and crew caulked and sanded the floor.

When the subcontractor scraped the twenty-something coats of exterior paint, Kevin found the once-notorious purple color that had been used during Patricia Dawson’s tenure as the Crested Butte Society’s president in the 1980s. “I left a purple diamond shape on the doors leading to the east side from the hallway.

The Colorado Historical Society says it helps to tell a story of the progression of the building,” he explained. For the most part, the Depot was painted time and again with the subdued brown and yellow color scheme of the Denver and Rio Grande Railway.

Kevin has been interested in old buildings since doing preservation on a building in Virginia that was constructed in 1795. He also rehabbed several old 91

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structures in the town site of Gothic.

“It’s exciting when people come by and say, ‘Oh, you’re fixing it up. I love that building.’” For him the Depot has a special meaning. He and his wife Sonda celebrated their wedding there in 1996.

The final stage of the Depot project was the foundation and crawl space.

The back end of the building was sitting on one log. Vogy’s Moving Company from Montrose lifted the building half an inch to take the weight off so they could excavate for footers. “At that point,” Molly explained, “an archeologist was brought in to monitor the work to make sure we hadn’t disturbed anything historical or prehistoric. We found some old plate fragments and a flask, which are at the museum. The Town will eventually build a showcase to display them in the Depot.”

As to the foundation in the main section, some of the stones were in poor condition and needed to be replaced. The mortar had to be repointed and tested for chemical composition so the new mortar would match. In addition, Kevin laid a vapor barrier onto the surface of the crawl space to help combat moisture, and built six vents to the outside. “We found the beginnings of mold,” he said.

In the fall of 2015, Kevin’s crew poured a foundation and constructed an ADA ramp leading from the front of the building into the freight room, where a new door has been built with a panic bar opener. During the summer he’ll finish the outside stage and ramp on the east side, along with other details, including reseeding the lawn where heavy equipment turned it to mud.

Once the building reopens, complete with a celebration, the Depot will return to its status as a small event venue.

Anyone interested in booking it should call the Town’s recreation department.

HCCA plans to move back in as an office tenant, and Steph White will continue as the caretaker.

“There is so much of the work you don’t see,” said Molly. “But with all this care we think it will stand for another hundred years.”

Read more about the Depot and Ruth Kapushion, whose father was its last stationmaster in the final days of the coal mines, in Sandy’s newest book: Crested Butte . . . Love at First Sight.

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The next historic rehab:

The Crested Butte Mountain Heritage Museum is working to preserve another of the community’s storied landmarks.

Anyone with deep roots in Crested Butte has some memory set in the old Tony’s Conoco building at Fourth and Elk. Until shortly before he died in his nineties, Tony Mihelich presided over the hardware store and gas station, tending his handwritten ledgers in the ancient rolltop desk and shuffling his way out to pump gas for his customers.

Oldtimers gathered to re-tell stories around the potbellied coal stove, and newcomers wandered in for shovels, snowboots and advice. Tony had a gentle smile for everyone.

Today the building houses the Crested Butte Mountain Heritage Museum, which has preserved the interior much as it was during Tony’s long tenure. Since the repair work done in 2003 after the museum purchased the building, time has again taken its toll, and fundraising has started for another round of repair and maintenance.

In the autumn of 2015, the museum used a $15,000 History Colorado grant to do a historical assessment of the building. The extensive report labeled areas considered critical, serious and routine, noting how quickly each area needed to be addressed. Next came a phased plan for taking care of the building over time.

The plan calls first for about $250,000 worth of work on the exterior of the building: the roof, windows, front door and cornice.

“We live in a harsh climate. Since 2003, many of the cool parts of the

building have experienced serious wear and tear,” said Shelley Popke, the museum’s executive director.

She was relieved, however, to learn that the foundation is holding fairly stable, so it’s not yet critical to lift and gut the building.

“We want to maintain the character as it was when Tony ran it,” she said. “People walk in to reminisce about buying their fishing license or getting gas here years ago, and they spontaneously start telling stories. Or newcomers meander in and love the feeling. The longer we can put off the interior work, the longer we can share that character with people.

For now, we just need to monitor and protect the foundation.”

The museum is now applying for State Historic Funding, which helped with the original purchase and rehabilitation of the hardware store. That funding requires a 25% match, so museum staff and board members are hoping to generate $50,000 from donors and fundraising events.

“Unlike many museums whose buildings are owned by their municipalities, our museum owns its building and is in charge of its own maintenance and preservation,” Popke said. “So it’s important to look to different sources of funding.”

She hopes work will begin late next summer, so the museum can serve guests and earn revenue during peak times. In the mean time, the staff will be raising funds, applying for grants and lining up contractors.

“When we originally purchased the building, we had such incredible support,” Popke said. “We hope to see that again. This is such an important building to our community.”

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CAPTURING THE

Spirit Rosalind “Roz” Cook, whose sculptures adorn Elk Avenue and the Mountain Wedding Garden, casts in bronze her delight, whimsy and faith.

By Beth Buehler

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Clockwise from top left: Hal and Rosalind Cook with Poems and Promises; the library-commissioned Legacy of Literature; and Water Lily, renamed Gratitude for her new home in Mt. Crested Butte’s Wedding Garden.

Many locals and visitors have strolled past the bronze sculpture of a young girl whimsically observing the happenings on Elk Avenue. Meet Lillith. Perhaps they’ve encountered another girl quietly watching over celebrations at the Mountain Wedding Garden in Mt. Crested Butte. Hello, Gratitude.

But few know the story behind these graceful works of art and their creator, the energetic and talented Rosalind “Roz” Cook, a 42-year resident of Tulsa and now full-time Crested Buttian.

Living in a place that has both a church and a wilderness area named Oh Be Joyful just seems to make sense for Roz, as threads of delight, whimsy and faith run through her sculptures. Her works range in size from eight 96

inches to monumental, and she has been commissioned to do everything from a commemorative bronze for the 2001 U.S. Open to lifesize sculptures for nonprofits, businesses and public spaces around the world. From Roz’s polish and success, few would guess that her first bronze was not cast until she was 41 years old.

Roz has a natural flair for fashion and décor, and her Skyland home reflects her creativity, faith and passion for art. Works of art she has both created and collected with her husband, Hal, give the home a cozy and distinct feel.

When they were younger, the couple vacationed in the Rockies with their three children and knew that escaping the Oklahoma heat and having a place in the mountains were priorities for retirement.

When friends invited the Cooks to use their home in Crested Butte for a week, they fell

in love with the town’s beauty, intimacy and people. After owning a condominium for eight years, they built their home in Skyland that allows them to host a regular flow of family and friends.

“Both of us were raised in small Texas towns and aren’t drawn to city life. Crested Butte has a family atmosphere, is safe and gives us great contentment. Every minute of every day we’re surrounded by beauty and majesty,” Roz said.

Roz facilitated the 2015 Adopt A Family for Christmas local initiative, and Hal is president of the Skyland Community Association and helps with the Food Bank run

by Oh Be Joyful Church. Both are involved with the church and Young Life youth ministry and often volunteer at the Center for the Arts. “We love hiking, snowshoeing, crosscountry skiing and the ever-challenging game of golf,” she said.

IN THE BEGINNING Roz spent the first seven years of her life in La Oroya, an isolated community high in Peru’s

Andes Mountains. Her mom was three months pregnant with Roz (and her sister was five) when her father accepted a job to manage a million-acre ranch that included 26 separate ranches and spread from the coastal plains to the eastern slopes of the Andes.

The culture was conducive to creativity, with children making many of their own toys, and gave Roz a love for people of various races. In the 1950s, the Peruvian government began nationalization, breaking large ranches into smaller parcels and giving them to native residents, prompting Roz’s family to move to Taft, Texas, population 5,000. There were no art classes at school, but Roz’s mom and grandmother painted as a hobby and Roz went to their art classes.

When it was time for college, Roz’s father insisted that she select a subject that would lead to solid employment, so she put aside thoughts of studying art and at the University of Texas majored in special education for the blind and visually impaired. Teaching children in the Dallas public school system heightened her awareness of texture, shape and form, which would serve her well down the road.

While working, she met Hal on a blind date, and the two have been married for 46 years.

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THE TUG OF ART On becoming pregnant with the first of their three children, Roz left teaching to become a full-time mom. She was bored silly awaiting the birth until a friend introduced her to master artist Octavio Medellin. He showed her the basics of sculpture, and it was the “aha moment of my life,” she said. “I knew that somehow sculpting was what God had intended for me to do.”

Roz worked in Medellin’s studio daily until son Mark was born. Soon after, Hal’s job transferred the family to Ardmore, Oklahoma, and in 1974 to Tulsa. Roz cherished her roles of wife and mother of three, putting art on hold until the urge to sculpt grew as the kids entered junior high.

The family installed a kiln in the garage, and Roz began shaping terra-cotta sculptures of kids and dogs to sell to friends. She then connected with a retired metallurgist who was working in plasteline, an oil-based clay, and casting his sculptures into bronze.

Learning the process from him was a turning point.

The Cooks added a small studio onto their home; yet, as she turned 40, Roz felt conflicted, itching to sculpt but feeling it wouldn’t benefit anyone else. A missionary friend saw her gift and reassured her: “You

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might be missing out on God’s best purpose for you.”

Roz began dedicating three days a week to study and work on sculpture. She filled gaps in her art education, especially in anatomy, took classes taught by sculptors she admired and traveled to Italy to study works of Renaissance masters.

AN ART CAREER LAUNCHED In 1989, Roz entered her first two bronzes in a show sponsored by the Bank of Oklahoma.

Both sold quickly, and a gallery owner asked to represent her work. The ensuing years were like popcorn popping, Roz said, with acceptance into acclaimed shows, sales, gallery solicitation and notable commissions from churches, libraries, schools, hospitals and the headquarters of businesses and nonprofit organizations.

The Cooks added a 1,000-square-foot studio with 12-foot ceilings, big windows, study areas, office, gallery and large workspace. Roz began working with three foundries, taught sculpture at museums and art schools and hired a studio assistant and business manager. “I never could have imagined all that has taken place in my life,”

she reflected.

When Roz was attending workshops, studying and working 12 to 14 hours a day on a commission, Hal kept the household running smoothly. “He knew the importance and loved me enough to cheer me on in my dreams,” Roz said. “After he retired, Hal and I had so much fun going to my teaching and show venues all over the country.”

STORYTELLER In 1990, Roz began creating life-size works, leading to a legacy of 30 bronze sculptures in public locations around Tulsa and 90 significant installations around the country and overseas, including the Vatican and Zelenograd Presbyterian Church in Russia.

Every Rosalind Cook bronze tells a story, with children, religious figures and people of various cultures and races as prominent subjects. She builds in symbolic meaning, such as depicting children barefooted to show their unencumbered and innocent spirits or visually representing an organization’s mission statement.

“My sculptures are an extension of who I am: my experiences, my personality and my faith,” she explained. “My work is most

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recognized by the faces and the flowing forms of my sculptures. My goal is to capture the spirit of my subject, be it joyful, peaceful, animated, etc.”

When all three of the Cook children and their families ended up in Denver, Roz retired from creating large works and monuments, and the couple decided to reside in Crested Butte full time. Hal, an engineer, had already retired from a career in the gas and oil business.

As she was retiring in 2014, Roz released a coffee table book, Capturing the Spirit in Bronze: The Journey and Sculptures of Rosalind Cook, which tells the stories behind many of her favorite and best-known works. The book and some of her sculptures are available at Mike and Pam Mahoney’s River Light Gallery on Elk Avenue. “I had held back several artist’s proofs of my bestselling, soldout editions, and this is the perfect venue to showcase my work, both new and older,” Roz said. “Mike’s painting and my sculpture complement each other.”

Roz has been represented by prestigious galleries in places like Vail, Santa Fe, Scottsdale, Naples and Carmel, and continues to have work at Breckenridge Gallery in

Breckenridge.

TEACHING AND GIVING Some of the most satisfying aspects of Roz’s career have been teaching classes, offering studio tours, accepting speaking engagements and creating sculptures to represent or benefit nonprofits. In 2008, she was invited to the Library of Congress to address students representing the 437 congressional districts at the National Congressional Art Competition.

Teaching allowed her to help others and feed her soul at the same time. In addition to many private venues, Roz has instructed at the Loveland Academy of Art in Colorado, Philbrook Museum in Oklahoma, Scottsdale Arts School in Arizona and Fechin Institute in New Mexico. For these and many other contributions, she was inducted into the Tulsa Historical Society Hall of Fame in 2014.

“I love to encourage women to develop their dreams and talents to fulfill God’s purpose in them, not necessarily for a career but to give them joy and self-fulfillment,” she said. “Sculpting has been a joyful and deeply meaningful discovery of the calling for my life. I’ve been stretched to go far beyond what I could accomplish on my own.”

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Someday, commissioned for the 2001 U.S. Open.

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After studying sculpture in Italy, Rosalind Cook wanted to create graceful and lyrical figurative fountains for galleries that represented her work. Both Lillith and Water Lily (now named Gratitude) came to life in her Tulsa studio.

In 2006, the owners of the courtyard between Casa Bella and At Home in Crested Butte asked Roz to consider placing a sculpture at that location. Last year, Roz and Hal donated the sculpture to the town. “I chose to put Lillith there because she’s a reflection of how my spirit feels when I’m hiking in the meadows with abundant wildflowers,” Roz said. “It has delighted me to see how people and dogs relate to her. I’ve seen dogs bark at her or I’ll see someone has put a coat over her shoulders on a winter’s day or children put flowers in her garland.”

Seven years after Lillith became a regular on Elk Avenue, several donors asked Roz to place a bronze sculpture in the Mountain Wedding Garden. She selected Water Lily. Roz noted, “After the sculpture was mounted, we saw that she’s overlooking the magnificent Snodgrass valley and holding up a water lily as if presenting God a gift with a grateful heart. I knew then that her name must be changed to Gratitude.”

SOME OF ROSALIND COOK’S KEY WORKS

One of Colorado’s finest river ranch properties on 35 acres close to town. 5 bedrooms, 3.5 baths, 4,469 sq. ft., and a 3-car garage with a workshop. Fishing and water rights!

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Creating sculptures for the headquarters of both World Vision in Washington and Compassion International in Colorado. “These Christian international organizations make a huge difference in the areas of relief and development.”

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Translating the Cancer Treatment Centers of America’s logo into monumental bronze; now all seven CTCA hospitals across the country have this sculpture at their entrances.

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Sculpting a commemorative bronze for the 2001 U.S. Open. “I thought, ‘What is it all golfers have in common? The dream to make a living at the game they loved so much.’ The result was Someday: a young man looking over the course with that dream in his heart.”

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EXPRESSIONIST PAINTER MICHAEL MAHONEY BRONZE SCULPTOR ROSALIND COOK AND SELECT COLLECTIBLE ARTISTS

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Derrick Nehrenberg’s map apps keep mountain bikers from getting lost on the valley’s vast network of alpine singletrack.

By John Norton, Tourism Association director

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Tom Stillo

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When we at the newly reformed Tourism Association were looking for a summer hook, we realized the East River and Gunnison valleys offer something that others don’t. We’re raw; we’re big; we have relatively few pinch-points that close access to our mountains. And we have the biggest mountain biking trail network in North America – that’s getting bigger and better all the time.

We could win at mountain biking. And winning at mountain biking is worth doing, as the stats showed us. There are more mountain bikers in the United States than road bikers. In the U.S., mountain bikers spend more on bikes and shoes than alpine skiers spend on skis and boots. A quarter of mountain bikers have even flown with their bikes on biking vacations. Those numbers seemed almost too big to believe. Then we noticed that there are more mountain bike shops in our valley than ski shops. Huh.

We reckoned we had 200-300 miles of singletrack in the valley. While we wanted to invite people to try our product, we also recognized that we had a problem when people arrived who hadn’t ridden here before.

We had pretty good trail maps, but many people had a hard time reading maps out in the backcountry. We had great trails, but many had spotty signage. We had easy trails, great for the uninitiated, but many were hard to find.

We were wrestling with these issues when the County’s Russ Forrest invited us to meet with a guy named Derrick Nehrenberg, described by Russ as “a local guy who’s working with electronic mapping.”

When we met with Derrick, he told us he could map, completely accurately, all the trails in the valley. Even better, with new technology, trail users could download those maps to phones, track their progress and, basically, never get lost again. No phone service needed.

From Derrick we learned that we don’t have 200-300 miles of trails in the valley.

We have 750-plus miles. To put that in perspective, Moab has about 300 miles of track.

So Derrick and the Tourism Association started working together. And while working together, we found Derrick to be a more interesting guy than most…

D

errick Nehrenberg bought his first mountain bike in 1990 in Hawaii, where he served as a Light Infantryman in the Army.

In 1990 the Crested Butte mountain bike revolution was well under way but not so for our Pacific neighbor. Derrick’s first ride resulted in a trip to the emergency room, and after that, maybe not so strangely, Derrick was “hooked.”

Around that same time, he began getting hooked on maps and mapping.

Working as a land navigation expert in the Army and using old U.S. Geological Survey topographic maps, Derrick became frustrated with those maps’ inaccuracies.

Leaving the Army, Derrick went to Chapel Hill, where he earned a PhD in behavioral neuroscience. He was “mapping” the neurobiological differences in the brains of mice selectively bred for high and low aggression. Continuing, he began mapping out genetic differences in mice. It was all mapping.

But the apple for his mobile map app didn’t strike his head until he spent a miserable, accidental night out in southwestern Colorado at 10,500 feet and in

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30-degree temperatures. “We were riding, and the reality of the maps we had didn’t match the reality on the ground. I spooned under grass and pine branches all night with a guy whose nickname was ‘The Filth,’ and he came by that name honestly. We had no water, no food, no lighter and no warm clothes. And we had no sleep.”

So Derrick’s experience with mapping— in the Army, as a neurobiologist in Chapel Hill, and as a cold, luckless biker freezing in the mountains—led to his zeal to find a better way of mapping bike trails and ultimately to the formation of his company, Juicy Trails.

He and his wife and their growing family moved to Colorado—first to Fruita (good biking), then to Salida (good biking) and finally to the Promised Land of our valley (the best biking).

From Derrick we learned that we don’t have 200-300 miles of trails in the valley. We have 750-plus miles. To put that in perspective, Moab has about 300 miles of track.

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Then we met. And now anyone with a modern phone can download one or all of 30 bike or hike maps for the valley, always know “You Are Here,” and be directed by that new map app technology right to the trailhead.

Bingo!

And when Gunnison Trails or the Crested Butte Mountain Bike Association builds more trails at Hartman or up-valley, like this summer’s Lupine 3 and Gunsight Connector, the map app is automatically updated.

Derrick’s favorite ride? “That’s tough, sort of like picking favorite songs. My jam now is the new loop of Star Pass from town. It’s the most amazing single track one can pack into a proper loop. It goes Tony’s, Upper, Bridges, Upper Upper, 409, Point Lookout, Doubletop, Walrod Gulch, 403.2A, Waterfall Cutoff, Upper Cement, Crystal Peak, over Star Pass down 400, Death Pass, Farris Creek, Strand Bonus, Canal, Divine, Upper, and then Tony’s back to town. It ends up being around 45 miles and includes just under 10,000 feet of climbing. For lunch, I love the Green Lake trail or riding up to the ski area for a couple of downhill runs and then back to town.”

(Warning: Visitors should NOT make this route the first ride of a trip!)

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Get ready to mountain bike

Since the launch of Derrick’s maps in summer 2015, thousands have been downloaded by bikers living in and visiting the valley. Get them yourself at cbghome.com. His map apps are web based; you won’t find them on the app store.

Find more about the colorful history of mountain biking at mtbhome.com. Crested Butte and Marin County are considered the homes of mountain biking. Marin went to work on building better bikes. Crested Butte went to work on building trails.

We’re blessed by two of the finest mountain bike user groups anywhere. Crested Butte Mountain Bike Association, or CBMBA (cbmba.org), builds and maintains trails in the north valley. Gunnison Trails (gunnisontrails.com) does the work in the south valley. Donations are welcomed at either organization. While both are staffed by volunteers, and a veritable army of volunteers helps with trail building, there’s a cost in materials and equipment to keep 750-plus miles of singletrack in good riding shape!

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A BENIGHTED MOUNTAIN BIKER KEEPS CALM AND ROLLS ON…INTO A MOMENT OF TRANSCENDENCE.

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I’m not the only person who rides the Green Lake Trail, but every time I suggest it to certain friends, they look at me oddly and politely decline.

I can understand. The trail rises up the north side of Gibson’s Ridge, right out of town.

Riders negotiate steep, technical switchbacks through tight forest; then the infamous Baby Head Hill, an old dirt road that climbs the fall line like a bottle rocket; and finally the grind to Green Lake, a pristine pond at 10,600 feet, below the summit of Mt. Axtell.

On the final climb, the trail becomes progressively steeper and stonier, a mountain bike direttissima that drives almost everyone into anaerobic despair. The reward (which requires some walking for most mortals) is a sense of masochistic accomplishment, a beautiful view and, on a hot day, a refreshing, frigid skinny-dip in the lake before a headlong descent back to town like a mud-spattered comet. It’s a Crested Butte classic.

I’ve ridden this trail scores of times, usually two or three times a summer. I can knock it out in well under two hours right out of town at the end of the day. It’s a great place to forget about the more abstract and mundane frustrations of work.

That is how I found myself climbing the trail one day last August, after a particularly maddening round of administrative nonsense.

You don’t want to know.

I started late, but the day was gorgeous – clear, calm and crisp. I did my best to take my frustrations out on the hill. I knew I’d have enough time. There was no threat of thunder, and the trail was mountain-bike caffeine, not muddy but moist enough to be grippy. Even the humidity wasn’t bad, though the trail climbs through a north-facing pine forest reputed to be one of the buggiest in the county. (At times I’ve been riding it in a wet summer and looked down to see six or seven mosquitoes lined up on my forearm like fraternity brothers going for a ski shot of Jägermeister, presenting the choice of either making the hill while suffering significant blood loss, or smearing them off and losing my line. In Crested Butte, these are real dilemmas.)

I knew I’d have enough time, but I knew wrong. When I reached the lake and turned back toward home, through the hypoxic miasma of recovery, I realized I was about to get benighted. Lights were coming on in the valley and, even at this altitude, direct sun was gone. I usually bring a headlamp, but it was hanging on a hook in the mudroom far below.

I hopped back on the bike, but as I dropped toward denser forest and into the

shadow of the ridge, I realized I’d blown it.

No worries – I could always walk down. It’s just a few miles and about 1,700 vertical feet to pavement.

Yet I didn’t get off the bike, and something strange happened. My spiraling descent through the darkening forest became the most beautiful and fulfilling ride I have ever taken in thirty years of mountain biking.

I could see for a few minutes, dimly.

But as both the sun and I descended, colors became outlines of grayscale flashing by, returning briefly in open patches of forest.

Then even those edges began to dim and blur, and I found myself speeding downhill on a pitch of dense forest in deepening twilight.

The trail all but vanished.

Still I didn’t dismount. Something, an ever more articulate voice, told me to stay on; all would be fine. For a reason I can’t explain, I became strangely calm and heeded that voice.

I was in no hurry; I could have walked.

Yet I didn’t even slow down. One voice – the one that sounded like my own – kept telling me this was foolish and I was likely to wind up on a stretcher or a very cold slab. But another, gentler voice that did not seem to be my own kept offering reassurance and encouragement. I know the trail well – I’ve probably biked it 50 times. But it’s one thing to know where you are, and another to know where every tangled root, sapling and rock is in the dark when you’re hurtling through it on a three-foot-wide path. I didn’t know, but I kept going.

I don’t advocate this kind of behavior.

Downhill mountain biking through tight forest in the dark is unwise. I don’t plan on doing it again if I can help it. But on that evening, the darker the path became, the more confident I became. I had a completely irrational, unjustifiable sense that everything was going to be just fine and that I should simply continue in joy, grasp the bike like a two-handled engine of delight, and give in to gravity.

So I did. And some obscure but loving and vital force seemed to draw me safely through and around thousands of invisible hazards. They seemed no longer to be hazards at all – they just were. I could not possibly have known where they were, and yet I evaded them all. No, that’s not quite right.

There was no evasion. We danced.

The lower end of the Green Lake Trail pops suddenly out of the trees and connects to Journey’s End Road on the south side of town. When I hit that spot unscathed and 119

headed for home, the lights of town were twinkling and stars were coming out.

What had just happened to me?

In a justly celebrated TED talk from 2008, the neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor describes what happened to her when a stroke in 1996 disabled the left half of her brain, the rational half that also controls the right side of the body. In the beginning Taylor, despite her training, didn’t realize what was happening: And I’m asking myself, “What is wrong with me? What is going on?” And in that moment, my left hemisphere brain chatter went totally silent. Just like someone took a remote control and pushed the mute button. Total silence. And at first I was shocked to find myself inside of a silent mind. But then I was immediately captivated by the magnificence of the energy around me. And because I could no longer identify the boundaries of my body, I felt enormous and expansive. I felt at one with all the energy that was, and it was beautiful there.

Taylor ultimately recovered from her stroke and resumed her scientific work.

Despite the pain and suffering of her experience, she learned from it that “the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner-peace circuitry of our right

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hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world, and the more peaceful our planet will be.”

My own encounter with magnificent energy was much luckier. On my dangerous plummet through the forest, I didn’t experience an incapacitating stroke. Far from it – that was one of my best days ever as an athlete. Yet somehow the chatter of my left hemisphere became quiet – if that is what happened. Despite spending a lifetime in and around mountains and wilderness, and deeply believing how connected we are to the natural world, I’d never felt that connection so immediately and sensuously, to the point that I was able to navigate in confidence with almost no sense of sight, as if another sense I didn’t know existed were at work.

Everything, every tree, every rock, all of it inseparable from anything else, including from me, seemed to be utterly alive. The forest, the dirt, the rocks, the sky, the bike — all one, with me just another tiny, mortal part of it.

I can’t explain it. What I do know is that I was lucky to have such a moment of faith, transcendence, connection, grace, consciousness, poetry – call it what you

will. Poets have described such moments, preeminently the great California poet Robinson Jeffers in his 1920s poem “Credo”: The water is the water, the cliff is the rock, come shocks and flashes of reality. The mind Passes, the eye closes, the spirit is a passage; The beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient to itself, the heart-breaking beauty Will remain when there is no heart to break for it.

The wilderness is fierce. It kills without warning, with impunity and indifference. It demands respect and skill from us if we wish to encounter it unharmed. And yet on that August night, alone in the dark, I felt the living forest grant me passage and guide me home. I sensed this beautiful place as I never had before, as much as I had studied and loved it for decades. I felt in that moment not merely in it, but of it.

What a ride. I was grateful to feel so powerfully, for those few minutes, the miracle of creation that draws so many of us inexplicably and often inarticulately to live, work and visit here.

Though next time I go to Green Lake in the late afternoon, in addition to bringing a memory of wonder and awe…I’ll also bring a headlamp.

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Stephanie Maltarich and nephew Isaac.

W H AT ’ S B E T T E R T H A N C A M P I N G A M I D N AT U R E ’ S W O N D E R S ?

SEEING YOUR AWE MIRRORED IN THE EYES OF A SIX YEAR OLD.

By Stephanie Maltarich

FROM MY NEPHEW’S BIRTH, I DREAMED OF T H E D AY M Y S I S T E R W O U L D L E T M E TA K E HIM EXPLORING IN THE WILDERNESS. I looked forward to hiking with just the two of us in the crisp mountain air, pitching a tent, watching sunsets and counting the stars.

Last summer, my sister finally gave me the green light. Isaac and I were going on a two-day, one-night backpacking trip. Before our departure, I spent hours poring over maps of wilderness areas and National Park campgrounds near my sister’s house for the perfect low-mileage, high-fun-factor trip.

I eventually decided on the East Portal of Rocky Mountain National Park: 2.6 miles roundtrip, 550 feet of elevation gain, below tree line, with plenty of wildlife-watching

potential. Gift shop and Junior Ranger Program = bonus!

On a late-July morning, I picked him up in Denver with my car packed full of gear.

He brought an oversized school backpack stuffed with too many pairs of underwear and the basic necessities: water bottle, sunglasses, toothbrush, jacket and a sun hat. When I finally managed to organize our food and equipment, we piled into my car for the two-hour drive to the park. During our mini road trip, I glanced into my rearview mirror and secretly smiled at Isaac sitting in his car seat, gazing out the window while his white, skinny legs swung back and forth to his favorite pop songs.

We pulled into the parking lot, and I crammed all our gear into my 60-liter backpack: two sleeping bags and pads, a bear canister full of food, clothing layers, stove, fuel, tent, two headlamps, water bottles, books and whatever else I could jam in there.

While I shoved and compressed to make it all

fit, Isaac ran around the trailhead snapping pictures of everything he saw.

Finally it was time to embark on our adventure, and we slowly started up the dusty trail. I gave Isaac my trekking pole; when not completely extended, it was a perfect height for him. My camera case swung around his neck, he dragged the pole in the dirt, and he held Matilda in his other hand. Matilda was a ratty stuffed pig he received as a gift for his first birthday, and they’ve been inseparable ever since. I wasn’t sure if my sister would approve of Matilda backpacking, but I let her come because she made Isaac happy, and a happy Isaac = more fun for everyone.

Our trail snaked up a small hillside to a little meadow. Once we hit a junction, I realized I had taken us in the wrong direction (and I used to lead teenagers on backpacking trips; yikes!). I casually told Isaac we needed to take a left, and we descended into the trees.

After we were on the trail for a little more than an hour, Isaac flung himself onto a rock,

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threw his trekking pole and demanded, “How much farther is this place, five more miles?!?”

Guilt pinged me as I recalled our minor detour. Instead of taking ownership, I said, “Isaac, it’s only 1.3 miles. You biked 20 miles last summer at Bridges of the Butte; you can do this.” He stood and continued walking.

Phew, I thought. Crisis averted; six year old still likes backpacking.

As our journey continued toward Over the Hill Campsite, we took countless breaks to admire rocks, bugs and trees.

Intermittent snack breaks ensued, involving the consumption of gummy bears and jelly beans. I wasn’t proud; I knew I should have encouraged healthier snacks. But when I asked, “Do you want an apple slice or gummy bears?” he chose gummy bears. Every time.

Isaac’s excitement on arriving at our camp was infectious. He wanted to learn it all. I taught him basic camp craft, like setting up our kitchen and finding the pit toilet. He helped me put up our tent (and of course hit his thumb with a rock while pounding in a stake); he helped cook dinner (though he didn’t eat because he didn’t like the white flavor of mac n’ cheese); we fetched water from the stream and he purified it (but grew upset when his socks got wet). Beyond the minor challenges, his excitement, curiosity and eagerness made my heart sing.

Once we finished cleaning up dinner, Isaac took my hand and looked up with his big blue eyes. “Aunt Steph, want to explore?”

I grabbed my dorky National Audubon Society Rocky Mountain Field Book, and we explored the enchanted forest together.

“What’s that, Aunt Steph?”

“Lichen.”

“What about this?”

“A juniper tree.”

“What’s that?”

“I don’t know.”

We stretched out on a boulder, listened to the crickets chirping and stared up at the fast-moving clouds against the blue sky. It was one of those moments.

After a little more exploring, Isaac was ready to head back to camp. As dusk arrived, I decided it was tent time. We read his favorite book, nestled into our down sleeping bags. When I was ready to call it a night, he whispered, “Can we make shadow puppets?”

Our headlamps set the stage for fierce bears, flying birds and chirping pikas.

My eyelids grew heavy, and I knew sleep was inevitable — when Isaac’s uncontrollable giggles jolted me awake. I finally barked, “Go to sleep or I’ll make you stand outside of the tent.” His giggles roared as I drifted into dreamland.

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hinted morning was upon us. Isaac lay balled up in his sleeping bag, and I was surprised he’d made it through the night without waking me up. He rolled over and we caught each other’s sleepy eyes, and he started the morning as he’d ended the evening: giggling.

We crept outside and re-explored around camp in the morning light. Eventually we could no longer avoid clean-up and pack-up time. As I shoved our tent into my backpack, I glanced up and saw Isaac running across camp toward me. He threw his tiny spaghetti arms around my hips and said, “Aunt Steph, I don’t want to leave! I want to stay in the wilderness forever!” I thought: Me too, buddy, me too.

We slowly made our way through the woods toward the car. As we approached the parking lot on the dusty trail, I blinked away the tears I’d been fighting for the past hour. My love for this little human was indescribable, and this adventure was one of the best I’d ever had. And I’ve had a lot of adventures.

I’ve climbed precarious mountains and led strangers through the wilderness for weeks at a time. But this two-day, 2.6-mile trip was one of the most special journeys of my life. Next summer Isaac wants to go for three days. Next summer Isaac is carrying his own pack.

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Richard Guerrieri on an old mower — and rusty inhabitants of the family’s “bone pile.”

“bone pile,” as my parents call their graveyard of outdated ranch equipment, stands an iconic old Jenkins hay stacker. Out of use for the last fifty years, ever since the days of loose-stacked hay ended, its cricket-like carcass stretches as tall as a tyrannosaurus rex, and it is situated like a majestic sentinel guarding not only the bone pile but the ranch itself.

My dad didn’t see it as majestic, however, one day last fall when we walked to the bone pile, where I was hoping to find an attractive landscaping feature for my new house.

“There’s nothing but a bunch of old junk up here,” he grumbled.

I didn’t argue, because under the guise of keeping things that might come in handy one day (be they majestic or not), my folks had managed to archive not just their own personal history but a bit of the Gunnison Valley’s as well. From the heaps of railroad ties they salvaged from the train tracks that once cut across the ranch on its way toward Crested Butte, to the remnants of horse-drawn sleds used to feed hay to the cattle in the depths of Gunnison’s cold winters, to the coal wheelbarrows left from my grandfather’s days at the Buckley Mine, everything here holds a memory and a story.

As Dad and I walked past the old mower 128

he and Mom pulled from the bone pile a few years back to put in their front lawn, Dad started talking. “You know, I spent a helluva lot of hours on a mower like that. I couldn’t have been more than about seventh or eighth grade when I worked for old Sid Niccoli near what’s now Crested Butte South. Sid had a team of horses about fourteen hundred pounds, and it was rough job, with all the stumps and rocks on that outfit. We’d mow in the morning, and in the afternoon Sid and I would put mounds of hay around the stacker using bull rakes and a fellow by the name of Frank Bruno ran the sulky rake. It was during World War II, and there wasn’t enough help for a full crew, so when the miners got out of work at 3:30 we’d put a couple of them miners up on the stack.

Then just as fast as the stacker horse could go up and back, we’d put up a stack of hay. It was one way ranchers up Crested Butte got the hay put up during the war.”

By the time he finished that story, we were in front of the ribcage-like tines of an old sulky rake, the skeletal remains of a hay tedder, and a V-ditcher. Dad raised his arm in a slow sweep. “Every once in a while one of them fellas comes along wanting to buy all this for scrap metal. Your Ma and I always tell ‘em, no thanks.” He squinted as he talked, even though there was no sun in his eyes. He does that sometimes when he concentrates or when he doesn’t want us to know his true feelings, which in this case might have been his fondness for all that “old junk.”

For 66 years he and Mom had been on the ranch, and it made sense to me that the old equipment meant more to them than scrap metal. Ahead of us was a kaleidoscopepatterned drag Dad made of chained-together wagon wheels. Just to the west, half buried in the weeds, lay a decades-old post stomper he designed and made out of scrap metal. “I used a power take-off and a big clutch old Louie Simillion gave me,” he told me, stooping down to put his broad hand on the toothed cylinder.

“It’s solid steel. Before I made this, I used a 15-pound maul to fence each haystack every year. Talk about work!”

He stood up straight and we scanned the bone pile again. The Jenkins stacker drew my eye, even though it was much too big for a yard ornament.

“How did that work?” I asked, and Dad gave a long explanation of how horses, pulleys, springs, pins and men manipulated the swivel, the kick and the teeth of the Jenkins to build 20- to 30-pound loaf hay stacks. I struggled to picture it in action, but he was already headed toward the remains of a sulky rake.

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130

“A sulky,” I said. “The kind that Gerrie Lou—”

“Yup,” he interrupted, because we both knew the story. My mother’s sister, Gerrie Lou, was driving the sulky with a team of horses when she was 12 years old in 1942.

The team spooked and ran away, and she fell underneath the tines. The tines caught and rolled her until the sulky rake went over a ditch. “Falling into that ditch saved her life.

She was darn near scalped when they got to her,” Dad reminded me. “And after that your grandpa bought John Deere ‘H’ tractors for the kids to drive in the hay field. No more horse teams.”

With the switch to tractors, horse-drawn equipment was eventually consigned to the bone pile. Mowers, stackers, sleds. Bull rakes, tedder rakes, sweep rakes, sulky rakes.

V-ditchers, slip scoops, Fresno scrapers.

Haying tools. Feeding tools. Ditching tools.

Tools that hardscrabble ranchers used to construct the ditches ringing every green meadow in the valley. Miles and miles of ditches and meadows stretching from Gunnison east to Sargents and Parlin and Pitkin, west to the towns of Iola and Sapinero and Cebolla now underwater at Blue Mesa Lake, and north to Almont and Crested Butte and up the Ohio Creek and Taylor rivers.

With renewed appreciation for the work of our forebears, I took some time to look over the bone pile. But I was here on a mission and I also felt like a shopper in a curio-shop of giant antiques. The tedder, with its all-metal frame and creepy-crawly tines, caught my eye. It had advantages as a lawn ornament over some of the other stuff — it was mostly intact, upright and easy to access with a backhoe. Used to fluff up the hay to dry after a rain, the tedder is still the best tool for the job according to my friend Polly Oberosler.

“I’ll take the tedder. It’ll look cute in my yard,” I told Dad.

I’m pretty sure he saw beyond my squinting eyes and knew that the tedder meant more to me than cuteness; it would be my tribute to our family’s long history in the valley. He might even have thought it would be a small monument to the pioneers, miners and ranchers who braved this inhospitable valley and with their sweat and persistence built the pretty meadows and strong communities we love. And, knowing his daughter, he might well have guessed that one day I would write a story about it, too.

b

131

A sampling of

FIRSTS

Though people joke about living in a bubble in Crested Butte, that not much makes it into or out of our tiny corner of the world, history shows that even in the Middle of Nowhere, Colorado, remarkable things can happen. The Crested Butte Mountain Heritage Museum staff put together a few “firsts” that have occurred in this area. Some may take you by surprise.

The first “snowmobile” was built in Gunnison in 1922. The machine, built out of pinewood, telephone wire and canvas, earned the nickname “Monster.” It averaged three miles per gallon of gas and was reportedly useless in fresh snow and uncontrollable on packed snow.

Howard F. Smith, Crested Butte’s founding father and first mayor, sold half of his interest in the town and 1,000 acres of coal land to William Jackson Palmer, the owner of the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad, in an effort to get the railroad extended from Gunnison to Crested Butte. The strategy worked, and the railroad arrived in Crested Butte on November 21, 1881.

The Town of Crested Butte first paved Elk Avenue in 1975; for many years, it remained the only paved road in the potholed town.

The Ute Tribes, who call themselves the Nuche (meaning “the people”), are the longest known inhabitants of Colorado. These nomadic people used the Gunnison Valley as their summer foraging and hunting grounds. The Spanish first encountered the Ute people by 1600, and the Gunnison Valley was Ute territory until 1868.

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Remnants of Paleoindian habitation have been documented on Tenderfoot Mountain, also known as W Mountain, which overlooks the city of Gunnison. Amazingly, evidence indicates year-round occupancy, which would make these prehistoric people the valley’s first long-term residents.

The first mine in the Crested Butte area was Minersville, located up Washington Gulch. Placer mining began there in 1861, with over a million dollars’ worth of gold taken out by the time the miners left in 1862. Up to 400 miners lived in Minersville before they were chased out of the area by the Utes.

The first-ever mountain bike tour took place September 17, 1976, when 15 people rode their homemade “klunkers” over the 12,700-foot Pearl Pass to Aspen, starting at the Grubstake in Crested Butte.

The Crested Butte Mountain Bike Association was the first of its kind.

Established in 1983, it’s the oldest mountain biking club in the world.

Geologic surveyor Ferdinand Hayden named Crested Butte Mountain in 1873. Hayden gazed out from Teocalli Peak and described two “crested buttes,” the peak now known by that name and the mountain we now call Gothic.

The Pioneer Ski Area up Cement Creek boasted Colorado’s first aerial ski lift. The lift, created out of recycled mine cable and completed in 1939, stretched 3,000 feet long and rose 1,300 feet in elevation.

Discover more lively history (or sign up for a historic walking tour) at the Crested Butte Mountain Heritage Museum, open 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. at the corner of Fourth Street and Elk Avenue.

Call 970-349-1880 or see crestedbuttemuseum.com.

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Summer events

JUNE

2016

3

Humming House concert, Center for the Arts

3-5

Women’s mountain bike camp

5, 12, 19, 26

Farmers Market and AWEfest on Elk Avenue

6

Canvases and Cocktails

9

Trevor Hall concert, Center for the Arts

9-11

Crested Butte Mountain Theatre’s 10-minute plays

11

Evolution Bike Park and chairlifts open, Mt. Crested Butte

11-12

Backcountry Bike Academy level 1

13

Trailhead Art & Science Camps begin

16

CB Monthly Film Series: Warren Miller’s “Ocean Tour”

20, 27

Alpenglow free outdoor concerts, Center for the Arts

20

Full moon/solstice at Ten Peaks on the mountain

22

Public Policy Forum: America’s quest for inclusive politics

23-26

Crested Butte Bike Week (Juniors, too)

24

David Grisman concert, Center for the Arts

24

ArtWalk Evening at Crested Butte studios and galleries

25

Artists of the West Elks studio tour

25-Aug. 20

Crested Butte Music Festival (CBMF) performances, soirees, etc.

25, 30

CBMF bluegrass concerts

25-26

Bridges of the Butte townie tour for Adaptive Sports Center

26

Gravity Slave downhill bike race, Evolution Bike Park

27-July 1

Swallow Hill Music Kids Camp (CBMF)

29

Friends of the Library wine tasting: South American wines

29

Public Policy Forum: reducing income disparity

29

Pinnacle Bike Race, Mt. Crested Butte

29

Live! from Mt. Crested Butte, free outdoor concert

JULY Dusty Demerson

Lydioa Stern

134

1, 8, 14

Crested Butte Music Festival performances

2

After Midnight Jazz Band, Center for the Arts

2

Black & White Ball, CB Mountain Heritage Museum

2

SplatterDash Fun Run, Trailhead Children’s Museum

3, 10, 17, 24, 31 Farmers Market and AWEfest on Elk Avenue 4, 11, 18, 25

Alpenglow free outdoor concerts, Center for the Arts

4

Gothic-Crested Butte Run, Walk or Crawl 1/3 Marathon

4

Parade, street games, fireworks

6

Artists’ Book Exhibition, Old Rock Library

6

Public Policy Forum: climate change/policy problems

6, 13, 20, 27

Live! from Mt. Crested Butte free outdoor concerts

6, 13, 20, 27

Pinnacle bike race series, Mt. Crested Butte

8-9

Caddis Cup Fly Fishing Tourney for Crested Butte Land Trust

8-12

Girls’ Getaway Bike Vacation

9-10

Backcountry Bike Academy level 2

11-23

Crested Butte Wildflower Festival

13

Public Policy Forum: single-payer insurance for Colorado?

13-17

Backcountry Bike Academy 5-day bikecation

14

Friends of the Library wine tasting: Janet’s Favorites

15

ArtWalk Evening at Crested Butte galleries and studios

15

CBMF evening: master chef, master musicians

15

Paper Bird concert, Center for the Arts

16

Crested Butte Music Festival Benefit Gala

JULY 20

Public Policy Forum: physician-assisted suicide, progress or peril?

21

Monthly Film Series, Center for the Arts

21-23

CBMF Opera: Puccini’s “La Boheme”

23

Living Journey Summit Hike/Synergy Athlete Half Marathon

26

Elaine Kwon & Friends, Center for the Arts

26-31

CB Mountain Theatre’s musical “Pippin”

27

Public Policy Forum: conservation science to public policy

28-31

Wine & Food Festival for the Center for the Arts

Trent Bona

Rebecca Ofstedahl

135

Summer events 2016

AUGUST

Chris Hanna

1, 8, 15

Alpenglow free outdoor concerts, Center for the Arts

2

CBMF 1930s Mirror Palace Party

3

Public Policy Forum: migration to Europe

3, 10, 17

Live! from Mt. Crested Butte free outdoor concerts

3-6

CB Mountain Theatre’s musical “Pippin”

4, 18

Crested Butte Mountain Heritage Museum speaker series

4-6

CBMF Time Spans performances

5-7

Crested Butte Arts Festival

7

Iris DeMent concert, Center for the Arts

7-8

Crested Butte Open & Gala Dinner for Adaptive Sports

7, 14, 21, 28

Farmers Market and AWE fest on Elk Avenue

10

Public Policy Forum: Native American issues

11-13

CBMF Gypsy Jazz performances

12

ArtWalk Evening at studios and galleries

13-14

Backcountry Bike Academy level 1

14

Chefs on the Edge, Center for the Arts

18

Monthly Film Series, Center for the Arts

18-20

CBMF Gypsy Jazz performances

25

Friends of the Library wine tasting: Colorado wines

26

Museum’s Historic Pub Crawl

Lydia Stern

136

Petar Dopchev

SEPTEMBER All month

September Splendor events throughout the valley

1, 19

Crested Butte Mountain Heritage Museum speaker series

3-4

People’s Fair

4, 11, 18, 25

Farmers Market and AWEfest on Elk Avenue

4

West Elk Bicycle Classic

9

Dancing with the Crested Butte Stars, Center for the Arts

9-11

Women’s Art Retreat

10

Chili and Beer Fest, Mt. Crested Butte

10-11

Pearl Pass Tour to Aspen via mountain bike

13

Frank Orazem Memorial Storytelling

15

Monthly Film Series, Center for the Arts

17

Collegiate Mountain Bike Race

17-18

Backcountry Bike Classic level 2 camp

19-24

Vinotok Harvest Festival

23

ArtWalk Evening at studios and galleries

29-Oct. 2

Crested Butte Film Festival

OCTOBER 6

Community Iron Pour

11

Illuminations slide show, CB Mountain Heritage Museum

20

Monthly Film Series, Center for the Arts

25-29

CB Mountain Theatre’s “August Osage County”

John Holder

Also look for the Center for the Arts’ Tour de Forks fundraising culinary events, monthly culinary classes and artists’ receptions; Art Studio’s receptions, exhibits, paint your own pottery and classes in everything from batik to painting to art journaling; Trailhead Children’s Museum activities; Crested Butte Music Festival events; historic walking tours at the Crested Butte Mountain Heritage Museum; and adults’/children’s programs at Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, Mountain Roots, Crested Butte School of Dance, Yoga for the Peaceful, Gravity Groms, Crested Butte Dance Collective and the town recreation departments of Crested Butte and Mt. Crested Butte. For details, see www.Gunnison-CrestedButte.com/events.

137

LODGING Chris Hanna

ALPINE GETAWAYS Vacation Rentals 510 Elk Avenue Crested Butte

ELK MOUNTAIN LODGE

Cozy B&B with European ski lodge charm.

Homemade Continental breakfast. Hot tub with mountain views. Private baths. Near free shuttle; walk to shops & restaurants.

1.800.824.7899 cristianaguesthaus.com info@cristianaguesthaus.com

Historic inn located in a residential neighborhood of downtown Crested Butte.

Just two blocks off the main street. 19 rooms individually decorated. Some with balconies.

1.800.374.6521 elkmountainlodge.net info@elkmountainlodge.net

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

Crested Butte’s premium vacation rentals. We work with each client to provide the perfect vacation -- arranging accommodations, activities, tours and more.

1.800.260.1935 alpinegetaways.com AD PAGE 66

AD PAGE 139

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

AD PAGE 139

IRON HORSE PROPERTY MANAGEMENT

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From small cabins to luxury slope side homes, Iron Horse has the perfect property for your next family vacation. Let our staff arrange everything so you can focus on fun. Expect more when you stay with Iron Horse!

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The warmth of a family inn; value, convenience & amenities of a hotel. Home-made afternoon snacks, yummy breakfast. Rooms with two queens or one king bed. On shuttle route, stroll to shops, restaurants & trailheads.

1.888.349.6184 oldtowninn.net info@oldtowninn.net AD PAGE 139

Established in 1939, inside National Forest, only 12 minutes from town. 8 clean and cozy cabins, with Cement Creek running through the property. Fully equipped kitchens, comfy beds, fireplaces and more. Dog friendly, open year round.

970.349.5517 pioneerguestcabins.com pioneerguestcabins@gmail.com AD PAGE 139

Vacation Rentals PO Box 168, Crested Butte

AD PAGE 65

138

CRISTIANA GUESTHAUS

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

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139

Petar Dopchev

DINING 9380 • (970) 251-3000

Elevation Hotel, Mt. Crested Butte Spirits and food with altitude. Serving something for everyone, all with subtle twists to intrigue your palate and keep you coming back for more. The large deck with its slopeside fire pit and outdoor bar is the perfect location for an afternoon drink and sunset viewing.

Breakfast / Lunch / Dinner

Ad pg. 142

BUTTE 66 ROADHOUSE BAR & GRILL 349-2998 Treasury Building, Ski Area Base

Experience American cuisine at it finest with our classic roadhouse menu, burger and shakes. Enjoy the casual fun atmoshere complemented by daily drink specials, live music and a large outdoor deck with unbeatable views.

Lunch / Dinner

Ad pg. 143

DONITA’S CANTINA • 349-6674

ELK AVENUE PRIME • 349-1221

Mexican. Down-to-earth eatery specializing in good food, ample portions and fun service. Fabulous fajitas, enchanting enchiladas, bueno burritos. Local favorite for over 30 years!

Downtown Crested Butte on Elk Ave. Serving U.S.D.A Prime Steaks, fresh seafood, wild game and more. Come watch the game on the biggest HD screen in Crested Butte. 16 draft beers and the largest wine selection in the valley.

Dinner

Dinner

4th & Elk, Downtown

Ad pg. 143

LAST STEEP • 349-7007

LIL’S • 349-5457

Sandwiches/soup/salads. Casual family dining.

Affordable menu with Caribbean island flair; Cajun chicken pasta, curry shrimp and coconut salad, artichoke-cheddar soup in bread bowl. Happy hour and daily specials.

Serving the best sushi in town as well as meat, seafood, and options for the kids. We take pride in serving our guests the highest quality of fish which is why we get it delivered 6 days a week! We offer a nightly happy hour at the bar from 5:30 to 6:30. Open 7 nights a week at 5:30. Reservations are recommended but not necessary.

Lunch / Dinner

Dinner

208 Elk Avenue, Downtown

Ad pg. 143

226 Elk Avenue, Downtown

Back Cover

MARCHITELLI’S GOURMET NOODLE • 349-7401

321 Elk Avenue, Downtown

Ad pg. 143

411 Third Street, Downtown

Italian. Offering generations of family recipes in a cozy, relaxed atmosphere. Featuring unique pasta sauce combos, traditional and regional Italian, seafood, veal and elk. Reservations recommended.

Dinner

Ad pg. 142

SOUPCON • 349-5448

WOODEN NICKEL • 349-6350

WOODSTONE GRILLE • 349-8030

Romantic, petite bistro featuring traditional French technique using local ingredients married with the finest cuisine from around the world. Open seven nights a week. Two seatings nightly. Reservations recommended.

Steaks, prime rib, king crab. USDA Prime cuts of beef, Alaska King crab, ribs, pork and lamb chops, grilled seafood, burgers, chicken fried steak and buffalo burgers. Reservations accepted.

The WoodStone Grille offers a generous breakfast buffet to charge you up for the day’s adventures.

Come back to rest by the fire while sipping your favorite drink, and stay for a pub-style dinner suited for the whole family. Serving breakfast and dinner daily.

Dinner

Breakfast / Dinner

Off Elk Avenue on Second, Downtown

Dinner 140

Petar Dopchev

Ad pg. 141

222 Elk Avenue, Downtown

Ad pg. 23, 25, 27

The Grand Lodge, Mt. Crested Butte

Ad pg. 143

A French American Bistro

Seatings nightly at 6:00 and 8:30 For Reservations Call 970.349.5448 On Coal Creek in the alley behind The Forest Queen 127 Elk Avenue #A soupรงon-cb.com

Mountain Roots: planting and sowing

This year Mountain Roots started a CSA (community-supported agriculture) pilot project, pre-selling “subscriptions” to the combined harvest of several area farmers. Consumers pay up front and receive a weekly box of produce (whatever is ready for harvest) for 18 weeks. This fits Mountain Roots’ mission to help support small-scale local farmers, provide more healthy food for the community and reduce “food miles” (the distance food travels from source to consumer).

Mountain Roots organizers hope to get funding to subsidize some subscriptions for low-income residents.

Mountain Roots also oversees these programs.

Farm to School (district wide) including: • two Living Classrooms (educational organic vegetable gardens) • Harvest of the Month and other lunchroom reform initiatives • environmental and nutrition education Roots & Shoots Summer Field Studies (camps for kids) Kids Cook! culinary course for tweens and teens Elk Avenue Community Garden The Giving Garden at Bill’s Park Cottonwood Community Garden Youth Garden at the Gunnison Rec Center Backyard Harvest (a grow-a-row/food rescue program) Cooking Matters (classes for low-income residents in cooking healthy on a small budget) Fresh food donations Farm to Table Dinners (August) Art in the Garden (summers) Teen Farm Overnight Field Trips (summers) Community Farm (under development) 142

Open daily, serving breakfast, and dinner. Open billards table and cocktails by the pool.

THE GRAND LODGE

Mexican fare & Margaritas.

Serving daily from 11 am.

MOUNTAINEER SQUARE BREEZEWAY

Slopeside deck with a walk up grill.

Serving daily from 11 am.

TREASURY CENTER

PHOTO: TRENT BONA

EAT

[ ON THE MOUNTAIN ]

CB’S ONE AND ONLY SUSHI BAR Dinner Nightly 5:30 Happy Hour at the Bar and Sushi Bar 5:30 - 6:30 321 Elk Avenue | 970.349.5457 | l i l s s u s h i b a r a n d g r i l l . c o m

Trent Bona Photography

ridecb.com/eat

AMERICAN STYLE BISTRO CUISINE WITH SPECIALTY MARTINIS AND COCKTAILS Open Monday thru Saturday 5:00 Late Night Happy Hour Thursday thru Saturday 10:00 - Midnight 122 W. Tomichi Ave | Gunnison | 970-641-4394 | B L A C K S T O C K B I S T R O . C O M 143

PHOTO FINISH

Petar Dopchev

144

LET US SHOW YOU THE

BR AVE N E W WO RLD OF LEGAL MARIJUANA Locally Grown

SOMA Grown

2014 CB BLAZER’S BALL

2014 BEST BUDTENDER

2015 BEST NEW BUSINESS

2nd Place Concentrates, People’s Choice

Crested Butte News Best of the Butte

CB/Mt. CB Chamber of Commerce

Prime Dry Aged Steaks, Steakhouse, Fresh Seafood, Large Groups and Weddings Welcome

226 Elk Avenue, Crested Butte 970 . 349 . 1221 elkaveprime.com