Thirty-four years ago, Glo Cunningham swapped her Vietnam War protest signs for a pair of skis at Crested Butte Mountain Resort. At the time, the ski hill was just a handful of glades carved into the steep face of Mount Crested Butte at the end of an isolated valley in western Colorado. Just down the road was the busted mining town of Crested Butte, population 500. The skiers arrived along with the hippies, and Cunningham found camaraderie in both groups. Unlike nearby Aspen, Crested Butte was still hardscrabble, its ski runs catering to the hardcore, void of the glamour that was beginning to shimmer across Colorado’s ski country. Cunningham, a bell-bottom-wearing 26-year-old with long thick braids, was a typical Crested Butte contrarian — instead of pursuing a career or a husband, like others of her generation, she worked odd jobs when she needed cash and spent the majority of her time immersed in the mountains.
Soon after her arrival, though, Howard Callaway, majority owner of the Crested Butte Mountain Resort, announced plans to expand his empire onto 2,000 acres of U.S. Forest Service land on Snodgrass Mountain. He saw money in the mellower slopes and stunning views that could lure skiers of all sorts to the remote valley.
That awoke Cunningham’s rabble-rousing civil disobedience from its altitude-induced slumber. She and a group of buddies formed a group to fight the expansion. Wildflowers blanket Snodgrass in the late summer, and streams roll off the mountain’s flanks in the spring. And in the winter — then and now — the snow-covered slopes draw scores of snowshoers and backcountry skiers. The anti-expansion contingent argued that developing the place would break up this intact ecosystem and its elk migration corridor and also restrict the public from public land. They insisted that an undeveloped Snodgrass had more long-term value than a new ski area would. Besides, they were unimpressed with operations at the existing resort and believed that Callaway and his co-owners needed to take better care of what they already had.
We weren’t a top-notch ski resort at the time,” says Cunningham, now 60 and still a Crested Butte resident. “From day one, the people felt we needed to have a quality experience at the mountain that was already here, already built.”
Cunningham and company crowded Forest Service meetings on the expansion proposal and passed hours in folding chairs offering public comment. Cunningham even attempted to sway Callaway personally.
But he wasn’t interested. His $45 million expansion proposal would draw scores more tourists to the valley, he said, and he wasn’t going to abandon the effort because of some hippie opposition. Do you want to remain an insignificant, unknown outpost? Callaway asked. Or become a world-class ski destination?
Ultimately, the decision came down to the Forest Service, which rejected Callaway’s plan. The ski resort retooled its proposal and tried again. And again. In 1982, the Forest Service finally granted permission to expand. But the resort’s owners at the time failed to act, and the permit expired, taking Snodgrass temporarily off the block. That did little to ease the anxiety of Cunningham and her crew, however.
“It never was solved,” says Cunningham. “And I always knew that new owners for the resort increased potential that a Snodgrass expansion would rear its head again.”
And so it has. In 2004, Tim and Diane Mueller bought the resort, and again started working on the expansion. After four years of navigating the bureaucracy, the resort will formally propose a Snodgrass expansion plan to the Forest Service this spring. If it succeeds, new lifts could be running by the winter of 2011.
And while the Friends of Snodgrass, a group formed specifically to fight expansion, still think it’s a bad idea, today the resort may succeed, thanks in part to an unlikely ally: the depressed economy. While the staunchest opponents will never support expansion onto Snodgrass, others in the anti-expansion crowd are feeling a strong financial pinch as their jobs are cut back or vanish altogether. If the resort can sell the expansion’s immediate economic benefits — the jobs created by cutting runs and building lifts, and construction at the mountain’s base — and also convince the community that it will deliver more long-term economic stability, well, the resort may finally have found its window of opportunity.
Expansion onto Snodgrass is critical to the ski area’s financial success, and Crested Butte’s winter economy depends on a successful ski area, says Ken Stone, the ski resort’s chief operating officer. Stone stops short of capitalizing directly on the recession. But his suggestion that a Snodgrass expansion could serve as a stimulus for the local economy rings true for many in the area.
With the recession keeping tourists at home and discouraging boomers from buying second homes, sales tax revenue is falling, and there are fewer jobs for year-round locals, says Joe Fitzpatrick, manager of Mount Crested Butte, the incorporated town at the ski area’s base. Developing Snodgrass will also spur a building boom on resort-owned vacant land at the mountain’s base.
“We’re trying to be realists,” Fitzpatrick said. “We don’t expect much construction now because of the economy. We sell second homes when Americans have discretionary dollars. But if Snodgrass is approved, we’ll see an influx of development dollars.”
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“This community feels passionately about protecting what makes it so special,” says Vicki Shaw, another founding member of Friends of Snodgrass. “Here, that means wild things kept wild. Visitors come here because we appear to be so undeveloped. So we say, ‘What if we became known as the place that chose not to expand our ski area?’ “
Crested Butte wasn’t always a nature-enthusiast-adrenaline-junkie’s dream. During its first seven decades, it was a thriving mining town — first gold and silver, and then coal. In the 1950s, however, the coal mines shut down, and the village teetered on the brink of bust. Then, in the 1960s, Crested Butte Mountain Resort was developed as part of a wave of new ski areas going in across Colorado. The community had something new to hang its hopes upon.
From early on, however, Crested Butte stood out as eccentric. Since the 1970s, artists, outlaws and nonconformists flocked to the valley, which is accessible by only one road in the winter. The motley band of locals never tried to recruit the glittering celebrities of other ski towns. Aspen can have the Kennedys; Crested Buttonians want each other, their shaggy dogs and the friendly faces at the local pizza joint, the Secret Stash. Even as the Guccis of the world found a welcome in Vail and Telluride, Crested Butte refused to allow any chain stores (luxury or otherwise) in town. When the town council erected a traffic light about 20 years ago, residents shot out its bulbs until the unwelcome light was replaced by the original stop signs.
Crested Butte locals still like to think they’re different. They scorn glitz and glam (even though the old miners’ shacks in town now sell for upwards of $1 million). Locals brag about the number of parades, costume parties and stray dogs in town. They’re more duct-tape and wool than fur and calf-skin leather.
And many of them don’t want development. Period. In addition to rejecting the Snodgrass proposal, they are outraged by a potential molybdenum mine on Mount Emmons, the “Red Lady,” which hovers above the town. Like Snodgrass, the mining proposal has been on the table for almost 35 years, and the likelihood of its development fluctuates with the economy. Both resort expansion and mining have formidable opponents in many Crested Butte residents.
“We’re not very serious people when it comes to some things,” says Wendy McDermott, executive director of the High Country Citizens’ Alliance, a group opposing the mine. “But the type of person who lives here is looking for a healthy lifestyle, clean water, great recreation, and being OK with what we have. So we’ll fight for that. It’s the most important thing we have.”
But even ski bums need to pay their mortgages and bar tabs, and an unimpeded view of open space isn’t enough to keep a bank account solvent. Given the dismal national economy, the Snodgrass expansion is no longer a black-and-white issue. According to early season data, skier days were down 20 percent in February compared to the same time last year. December sales tax revenues in the town of Crested Butte were down 11 percent. At Mount Crested Butte, the incorporated town at the ski resort base, the December sales tax was down nearly 20 percent. In January, the ski resort “reassigned” about 15 ski instructors to other jobs because of a lack of business, according to Stone. And the local paper featured only six employment ads in January, compared to 40 last year.
Carpenter and town council member Dan Escalante says he’s let go of his assistants and seen his remodeling business go from “overload” to “squeaking by.” He used to have four or five jobs lined up at a time. Now he’s lucky if he has another to start when he finishes the current one. It’s a potentially stressful situation.
“Right now, living day to day is helping me simplify my life, which I appreciate,” says Escalante, a former Outward Bound instructor. “But I don’t know if I can handle it two years from now.”
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It’s not that a Snodgrass expansion will suddenly jolt Crested Butte’s economy back to the levels of the past five years, when a rampant housing boom kept the valley buzzing. But it is sure to stimulate development. And resort executives deny the charge that it will disrupt the mountain’s ecosystem.
Stone calls today’s expansion proposal “Snodgrass Lite,” compared to the 1982 plan that was approved but never implemented. Four lifts as opposed to 11. Addition of 263 skiable acres instead of 417. Snowmaking on 121 acres instead of 162 acres. And two small restaurants instead of a large on-mountain facility. He promises that the buildings will be LEED-certified.
Still, the resort will have to build reservoirs to provide water for snowmaking, and that could affect the flows in the East River. Critics fear that avalanche control on Snodgrass could trigger avalanches in the mountains to the north, near the town of Gothic, home of the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, and a popular backcountry skiing area. And glades on Snodgrass will break up the forest.
Currently, however, hiking and biking trails and even a well-traveled dirt road already mark the mountain. And new homes and shops at Snodgrass’ base are inevitable, says Stone, because the resort plans to develop that land with or without the expansion. But the plans conform to a “smart growth” zoning plan that caps house size at 2,800 square feet and promotes traditional neighborhoods with trails and paths. Stone says the resort understands the community’s desire to stay unique and wants to do its best to acquiesce to local sentiments.
“This is about a sustainable business model we have that supports the city,” says Stone. “It’s about Crested Butte Mountain Resort making sure the way we develop and maintain the things that make us unique.”
The resort is well-positioned to finance a Snodgrass ski area expansion. In December, CNL Lifestyle Properties, a $2.5 billion real estate investment trust with 13 ski resorts, bought Crested Butte, Okemo in Vermont, and New Hampshire’s Mount Sunapee for a reported $132 million. The Muellers — a couple famed for their ski industry brilliance — then agreed to a 40-year lease back of the properties. The deal provides financing options for development that would otherwise be unavailable.
In all, the project will cost upwards of $30 million, estimates Stone, including the cost of the environmental analysis. Resort executives say the investment will position Crested Butte to be a premier ski destination when the economy rebounds. The additional territory will encourage visitors to spend five to seven days on vacation, as opposed to today’s two or three. Currently, Crested Butte’s extreme terrain caters to hardcore skiers, but does little to attract families looking for friendlier runs down mellower slopes. And families are apt to spend more money and even purchase second homes, unlike the classic ski bum living in his truck. The families who come to schuss the mellow slopes of Snodgrass will provide the winter economic stimulus for the entire area, says Stone.
Such an infusion of tourist money could benefit the winter economy, but it might be temporary, counters Joe Marlow, land and resource economist for the Arizona-based Sonoran Institute. Marlow believes local economies need to diversify to survive. Communities that rely primarily on one income source are especially vulnerable to downturns. An economy based solely on skiing, for instance, stands to suffer during a snowless winter.
It’s essential to look at economic diversification now, in a recession,” says Marlow. “If you’re a small community and are suffering from the economic downturn, it is time to look around and see if there is something unique you can do in the community.”
Easy to say. In a high-mountain community like Crested Butte, though, it’s tough to find other options, particularly in the winter. For decades, the local economy has revolved either around tourism or mining. And few Crested Butte residents want to return to mining. Even if they did, the potential molybdenum mine on Mount Emmons has been shelved indefinitely, due to rock-bottom metals prices. Thompson Creek Metals Company, which owns the mining rights on Mount Emmons, announced in February that it would open an office in Crested Butte for community outreach. But even if the mine suddenly decided to pursue an aggressive schedule, it would be another eight to 10 years before shafts were operating. Still, many in the community remain vigilant, determined to continue their opposition to mining on Mount Emmons.
“Is it the type of economy we want to hang our hat on?” asks McDermott. “No. Mining is flat-out boom-and-bust. And when a mine dismantles, then you have environmental damage to clean up.”
Tourism, it seems, will remain Crested Butte’s main moneymaker for now.
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The voices protesting Snodgrass aren’t as loud as they were back during the Carter administration. According to the Forest Service, reactions to the expansion proposal are split pretty evenly today. And a spring 2008 survey conducted by the Crested Butte/Mount Crested Butte Chamber of Commerce showed that 60 percent of 135 businesses supported the expansion.
Michael Kraatz, vice president of planning and development at CBMR, says the resort’s job now is to “convince (opponents) that we have a project whose positives outweigh the negatives. “Does the economy help us? Yeah, maybe a little bit. Since mining left, the economy relies on tourism, and the ski resort plays a big role in bringing people into this area. To the extent that the resort is doing well, that has an impact.”
Yet, as far as the Friends of Snodgrass are concerned, little has changed. Cunningham says people will continue to come to Crested Butte for the same reasons she did 34 years ago: the area’s unique, alluring landscape. If they stay, she says, it won’t be for the real estate. It will be for the people.
“I love my community so much, and I love my backyard,” says Cunningham. “But I don’t buy into the fear factor thing. People will come to Crested Butte just like they always have. Go ahead and develop the land at the base of Snodgrass. But, for once and for all, leave Snodgrass alone.”
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Go Sell It On The Mountain.
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