By Dawne Belloise

In the original 1960s Star Trek series, the episode titled “Mudd’s Women” had a magic pill, the fabled Venus drug, that enabled women of ordinary, if not haggardly, appearance to super-enhance their looks into stunning beauty, making them irresistible to all men (except Spock, of course) so they could be bartered as brides for lonely and rich men in far-flung corners of the galaxy.

When Captain Kirk discovers the scam, he switches the Venus pill with a placebo but the alluring changes still occur in one of the unsuspecting women. In his notorious swagger, he proves that it’s actually their self-confidence that makes them attractive (they marry their intended marks and all is well).

But the real question is, what does make potential lovers and mates attracted to each other?

From the perspective of evolutionary biology, attraction, along with its consequences of love, is a complex neurobiological phenomenon, hardwired by the forces of evolution from prehistoric times when having both parents stay together to give their offspring better odds of survival gave our species the jump we needed.

Apparently, it worked well because humankind has come a long way, in population at least, from caves into the bars, lift lines and parties of modern-day courting antics. Because we’re a mountain town and ski resort, we follow a different set of rules, if any, in determining what is attractive in a potential lover or even long-term mate. Oftentimes, we don’t even understand what it is that makes that someone so appealing. Sometimes it’s the heat of the night, or cold of the evening, the tall drinks and that last PBR that speaks, and consequently the alcohol influence is too late discovered when that Walk of Shame is initiated in the wee hours of morning reality. Loneliness, reality enhancements and the need to double up on cold winter nights are probably some of the biggest motivators and most powerful aphrodisiacs responsible for hookups up here at elevation.

An aphrodisiac, by definition, is a food, drink or drug that stimulates sexual desire and inspires lust, or a thing that causes excitement. The Romans worshipped the apple as an aphrodisiac. Music can be a strong aphrodisiac. There are herbs and foods known to have peculiar effects on both men and women, and there have been purported love potions throughout time.

Why they’re called aphrodisiacs is confusing since the word is derived from the ancient Greek mythological goddess, Aphrodite, who is born of the severed testicles of the ambushed god Uranus after Cronus, his son, hacks them off with a sickle and tosses them out to sea. Aphrodite is then created from the white sea foam produced by the barbaric action, arrives on a half shell upon the crest of a wave, making oysters one of the oldest aphrodisiacs known to man.

Legend supposes that Casanova ate more than 50 raw oysters every morning to boost his libido, and did so in a bathtub with the woman he was romancing. In the 17th century, bean soup was banned from the Convent of St. Jerome because of its purported erotic qualities. To ancient Romans, the bean’s flower represented sexual pleasure. Pomegranates are considered not only sexually suggestive but are also associated with fertility. Studies have actually shown that many foods possess chemical components that elevate mood, and even create the sensation of falling in love.

So, as for aphrodisiacs—we’re not talking drugs here, although a bowl of the legal green might enhance mutual attraction—evoking interest can take many forms and is entirely different for varying couples. Taste, smell and touch are forceful elements in desirability. Nature created pheromones for a good reason. As one local pub patron smirked, “The smell of the upstairs bathroom of the Talk of the Town at 4 a.m.—works every time,” while one unassuming man only required “a pulse.” Another Buttian noted, “I staked my life on laughter but since I’m still single, it may be time for a change of plans.”

Clearly, it’s not any one particular trait or essence but a combination of elements that will also extend one-nighters into successful long-term relationships, as one woman said: “Kindness and patchouli gets me every time.” Yet another happily married woman said, “Outdoor adventures, like skiing and bagging peaks. Doing things that get the adrenaline pumping and that also require trust in your partner.” One poetic man preferred, “that unmistakable sideways glance that’s an invitation to dancing in the stars,” and in finding true love, all one mountain girl needed was “a powder day and a happy, joyful man with a huge smile.”

The effect of mood, suggestion and anticipation coupled with sharing and desire, more than even medicinal magic, is the true aphrodisiac—the implication that there are more enjoyable things you could be doing alone together, with doors that lock and no children around. When all is said and done, perhaps the most convincing stimulant is the magic of that first kiss and in actuality, it’s a bio-chemical reaction, a taste of compatible pheromones and it determines more about you to a potential partner than you may have realized.

When people pick up each other’s pheromones during a wet kiss, they’ll subconsciously become either more or less sexually attracted to each other depending on what they sense. It’s theoretically believed that kissing bonds couples through the release of oxytocin, a hormone that floods the brain with love and trust when lips touch (real chocolate also simulates this feeling…).

So, whether you’re looking for temporary romance or everlasting love, take your partner out for a succulent dinner, a little bit of libation, gaze into each other’s eyes and kiss long and deeply. Make every day Valentine’s Day.

Ski powder, win silver, surf and continue quest for the Crystal Globe

by Than Acuff

aron Blunck just returned to the competition circuit last weekend to take the silver medal in the halfpipe skiing competition at the X Games in Aspen on Sunday, January 26. It’s his second medal at the prestigious showcase of snow sports athletes having won the gold medal at the X Games in 2017. In addition, Blunck is currently sitting tied for first place in the overall halfpipe ski World Cup standings three events into the season, keeping the coveted Crystal Globe trophy well within reach.

Blunck finished 2019 winning the FIS Freeski Halfpipe World Cup at Copper Mountain in mid-December and placing second the next week at next stop of the World Cup circuit at the Secret Garden ski resort in China. Following China, Blunck returned home to Crested Butte for the holidays with his sights set on other things, most notably powder. And, as it turned out, everything fell into place as he ended up skiing the Crested Butte backcountry and then found himself up North for two weeks doing more of the same, only deeper.

“I was at home and I got a call from some friends in Canada on New Year’s Eve asking how soon I could get up there,” explains Blunck. “The forecast looked insane so I bought a ticket from Grand Junction to Canada on January 3 and was on a snowmobile the next day at 6 a.m. skiing some of the deepest pow of my life. I got to ski pow in Canada and free the mind instead of spending time in the halfpipe training before the X Games.”

Blunck eventually had to get back to business and spent a couple of days training in Copper before heading to Aspen. While the X Games have been some of Blunck’s best times, winning the gold medal in 2017 for one, he also struggled at the event last year as mounting pressure to prove himself and finish on the podium wore him down.

This year though, with a fresh approach to competing and two weeks of Canadian powder skiing under his skis, Blunck came into the X Games just as he had hoped, relaxed. Furthermore, this year’s X Games came with a tweak to the common scoring practices of skier halfpipe competitions. Typically, athletes get three runs in the halfpipe with their highest score marking their final result. The X Games mixed things up this year with a “jam” format that created a different approach for the athletes to their runs.

“You were really judged on overall expression throughout all of your runs,” explains Blunck. “You could throw down a super technical run and then you could do a style run. It was a lot more lenient and I was able to go into it with an open mind. I was all about the opportunity to be more diverse.”

Once the jam session ended, Blunck wound up in second place and then things got even better as he and friend and fellow competitor Birk Irving jumped into a “loaner” GMC Sierra 1500 Denali truck waiting for them in downtown Aspen immediately following the conclusion of the competition. Their bags were already packed and they proceeded to take turns napping and driving watching the sun come up over Las Vegas and arriving in Santa Monica, California just in time to get some surfing in, get fed dinner by Irving’s uncle and then head to Mammoth that night arriving at Mammoth at 1 a.m.

“We pulled a really, really savage move,” says Blunck. “It was a little different celebration than the usual one after X Games. It was all-time.”

While Blunck admits fatigue has now set in following a week of X Games, the road trip and a day of practice at Mammoth, he likes where he is at heading into the next World Cup stop.

“I’m feeling really good,” says Blunck. “This year I have goals but I still want to ski and make it the most fun year yet. Just do my runs and land them for myself.”

Blunck has a day of rest and then starts the Mammoth event with qualifiers on Thursday, January 30 and then drops in for the finals on Saturday, February 1.

Following Mammoth, Blunck returns to Colorado for the Dew Tour at Copper Mountain February 6-9 and will then wrap up the World Cup circuit in Calgary, Alberta February 12-14 where he hopes to lift the Crystal Globe trophy as the FIS World Cup champion.

“That’s the main goal, other than have fun and put together some good film sessions,” says Blunck.

A Northwoods man in the West Elk mountains

By Dawne Belloise

John Polzin’s Facebook pages are filled with photos of high elevation snowmobile escapades, grinning in chest-deep backcountry snow. One shows him hunting wild fowl with smiling dogs; there is the sanctity of his fly fishing and the reverence at the edge of a river, long views of misted mountains and fields of wildflowers, charts of backyard medicinal herbal remedies and his recognizably broad smile on a dusty face in dirt-bike gear. One definitely gets the overall picture of John’s life and it’s all about loving a life in the outdoors.

He was born and raised in the Northwoods, in Oconomowoc, Wisc. The town’s name in the Menomonie Native American tongue means “falling waters.” Oconomowoc is a small city surrounded by five lakes and because of that geologic fortuity, John recalls growing up, “My life was water. We were always at my uncle’s farm, where we had a river we could fish at and catch frogs, and woods where we could hunt small animals for food.”

John’s father was a rural letter carrier for the U.S. Postal Service. His mom worked for the Milwaukee Journal as a proofreader and office assistant, and she was also an artist, hired to hand-color photography portraits. He tells a story of his grandparents’ and parents’ generations coming through the Great Depression as hunters and gatherers, homestead farmers with a huge garden. The family canned and pickled and made their own wine and root beer, and the latter John would sneak a bottle or two from the cellar. 

“I bought my own shotgun when I was 12, a 20-gauge pump Winchester, and afterwards, I’d go down to the farm and hunt pheasant,” he says. It was the best life, a close family of German descents living wholesomely off the land with all the woods and lakes for an adventurous kid to explore.

John was a month old when his parents brought him to the small cabin that his dad built on three acres on the shores of Two Sisters Lake in McNaughton, in far northern Wisconsin. He and his sister, cousins and friends would all sleep outside in pup tents, with a fire pit raging outside and lots of roasted marshmallows. He fondly remembers spending entire summers at the lake. “We’d sneak out at night and do flashlight woods exploring,” he recalls.

Back home in town, John was appreciative of his father’s schedule and companionship. “It was really cool that Dad would always be home when I got home from school because he worked from 5 a.m. to 2 p.m., then we’d go fishing or hunting.”

He tells a story of when he was 8 years old, in the car riding down to the local bar with his dad and grandfather. Granddad was a card player, and a good one at that, John recalls. He was told to stay in the car while the adults went inside, but they instructed him to be attentive and if they were walking out the door, then everything was fine but if they came running out of the bar, he was to quickly start the car. “They came running out the door. Grandpa had lost and couldn’t pay his tab so they got kicked out of the bar.”

John went to a Catholic elementary school. “I had to go to church twice a week. Now I’m an agnostic,” he laughs. “And I question everything. There are three things you can’t trust—somebody’s driving, religion and politicians.”

He adds a fourth: “Never let anyone tie a fly on your fishing rod. I learned to fly fish at 14 and it’s my religion. When I’m on the water, it’s such a life-changing sport because of what you have to know. There’s so much that you need to understand. Casting is one thing, learning to tie knots is another, but you have to understand the entomology and what your river system supports as far as its insect life. There’s so much life underneath the water, and you have to know how to figure out the hatches and present the fly in its life cycle stage that the fish are feeding on at the time. It’s almost a science. It’s what grabs me. It’s not just the beautiful places you hike into, it’s also understanding and applying all that you’ve learned. That’s what I love about it. And every day it changes.”

In grade school, John played basketball and football. In high school he was third baseman. While in high school, he worked for his uncle in construction and he had a paper route. He graduated in 1982 with a baseball scholarship at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. “I ended up with a degree in finance although I wanted to go into history but I knew I couldn’t make a living off it,” he says, but he minored in history.

In college, John worked for three years for an aircraft parts manufacturing company, running shipping and receiving. In 1985, he figured it was a good time to explore and travel, and hung out in Los Angeles for a couple of months, where, he declares, “We were all Deadheads. I went up to Berkeley after that, later hitchhiking up to Tahoe. Up in Tahoe I ran into these people from London who were traveling around the world working odd jobs.” John joined them to find work at a ski resort in Vermont.

“We drove a drive-away car to Boston, a new BMW 525 with the plastic still on the seats. We partied in it for six days and when we got to Boston, we parked it and ran, hitched to Vermont and got jobs at Mt. Snow.” The resort had bought Big Bear in California and offered the new lifts operations position to John. He and his college roomie bought a hand-painted purple VW bus that they painted flames on and headed west.

“We were burning so much oil that a guy pulled up next to us on I-80 and stuck out a can of oil as he was going by us. He had so much oil on his windshield from driving behind us.” Notoriously wind-challenged, the VW couldn’t go faster than 40 miles per hour with those Kansas headwinds, so they left the interstate for the two-lane highway backroads. “We went to war with tumbleweeds in the middle of pitch-black nowhere going through farm land.” They never made it to California.

They detoured to Crested Butte to visit a couple of Milwaukee friends who were working at Crested Butte Mountain Resort with the student program and John remembers the arrival well. “The night we pulled in, it was dark and snowy and there wasn’t a single street light on. The only light we could see from the Four-way Stop was at Kochevar’s. There were no cars on Elk Avenue. We pull up in front of Kochevar’s and it was packed. That’s when I met pretty much the entire town. And within a hour, Whitey had taken my last $10 in a pool game.”

Outside, their VW bus wouldn’t start so they pushed it up First Street and down the alley by the old Sign Guys building, plugged in an electric heater and spent the night there. They hadn’t even met up with their friends yet. The next night they got a bunk room at the Forest Queen for $12 a night and it included breakfast. It was October 1986 and they wound up staying a month and a half.

“Alan the owner had us working off the rent by shoveling, cleaning the kitchen, mopping the floors, helping Thelma doing laundry, shopping and making beds. I learned who everyone was, and who was nice and who was naughty, by watching out the window with Thelma. We sat for hours.” Meanwhile, John’s employers from Mt. Snow were frantically calling his parents’ house to see where he was since the lifts were going to start running soon. “I told my father to tell them I’m stuck in Colorado and I’m not leaving.”

He took a job as lift op on Paradise at CBMR. “Crested Butte was mind blowing and I really liked my bosses at lift operations.” He took a second job washing dishes at Casey’s, saying, “That’s where everyone hung out and I’d get a meal.” Between the two jobs, he was able to survive that winter, moving into the four-plex behind the arts center for $225 a month. John turned down the opportunity to purchase it at $39,000 because he thought, “I’m not going to be here for that long.” Eight years later he decided to move down the street.

Jim Talbot was one of the first people who was influential in John’s first winter. “Jim had some hunting camps on the front side of Whiterock Mountain in Perry Creek. He asked if I wanted to help pack out some hunting camps.” Afterwards Jim became John’s tile mentor. “I became part of the Midnight Tile crew. All of us learned from Jimbo.” John became a wrangler for Fantasy Ranch in 1989, which Jim co-owned. “There’d be days we did tile all night and then ride all the next day.” John now has his own company, John Polzin Tile, that he started in 2000 and he admits that his contractors keep him quite busy.

John has a fondness for Irwin, where he spent three years. “I loved it. I loved the solitude, the rawness. What I loved the most was the nights with the crazy whiteout blizzards. I would have the fire lit, playing my guitar and just hanging out watching the storm rage and the snow pile up my deck, knowing the next morning I’d have to break out my 900 mod snowmobile and break track for everyone going down.”

At times, John’s experiences here overwhelm him. “I was taught everything that is available, like skiing, snowbiking, dirt biking, hunting and fishing, by different people,” he says of those who showed him the way of these mountains. “The first time I went to the Gunnison Gorge in the spring of ‘87 was the most epic thing I’ve ever experienced. Thirty-something years later it still blows my mind.”

John understands the connectivity of this community. “We struggle, we fight and we bitch but when I stare at what’s surrounding us, I think, this is me—our houses with the bikes hanging on the fences and the ski gear laying on the snow in front, just those little things mean so much. In the summer, you see the wildflowers and it blows your mind.”

First and foremost, he feels, “When we need each other, everybody’s there. I try to explain this to friends who live in other places—the community, friends, family, hugging each other wherever it may be and the intimacy of the relationships we all have with each other here. It’s so important to me. It’s the most special thing to me about Crested Butte—I love the views but without the people the views wouldn’t be as full.”

Town, RMBL and Alvarez family to develop 160-acre parcel

By Kendra Walker

The Mt. Crested Butte Town Council has agreed to begin the process of entering a three-way partnership with North Village owners—the Alvarez family—and Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL) to develop the 160-acre North Village parcel between Town Hall and the Snodgrass trailhead.

Mt. Crested Butte owns 17 acres adjacent to the parcel, called Common Area F, and the North Village owners have considered using it for an affordable housing site. Alvarez would need formal support from council to allow the property to be included in the overall design.

Over the next four months in a due diligence period, council will determine how to incorporate their land into the site plan, along with other community objectives they wish to include, such as affordable housing, town amenities and recreational opportunities. A series of open houses will also be held for public input on the project, with the first one slated for as early as February.

If town decides after the four-month due diligence period that it would like to enter into the partnership, the three groups will then jointly develop a financial model and site plan for a layout to serve all parties’ needs and goals as best as possible. The development team has estimated this part of the process to take six months.

The Alvarez family and RMBL will then manage the formal Planned Unit Development (PUD) application, a process estimated to take another six months. Town will be separated from the application, as the review authority determining whether the PUD meets town code compliance standards.

“The idea and objective behind this offering from the Alvarez family is to help enable the town to take advantage of what I think everybody sees as a once in a lifetime opportunity to master plan this community,” said North Village project manager Crockett Farnell during a January 7 Town Council work session. “As council and staff, that’s your driving mandate, to direct the development and establishment and standards of town and to define its future.”

“In regards to a courtship, we’re talking about dating now,” said council member Nicholas Kempin.

“If you want to eat Italian and I want to eat Mexican, what happens there?” asked council member Michael Bacani, continuing the dating analogy. “The Alvarezes are very generously allowing this partnership. What happens if town and RMBL have a different vision?”

“At the end of the four-month period, that’s when we want to have worked through those types of concerns,” said Farnell. “We’ve spent a lot of time thinking what makes sense from both sides. That’s what we’re trying to work toward.”

He continued, “I’ve never had a client like this. They’re not looking to have 100,000 feet of commercial space. They’re more concerned that it’s a beautiful place, it’s well developed and it keeps the quality of the valley as is.”

“It sounds like we’re all good with trying to make this work,” said mayor Janet Farmer. “There’s obviously going to be lots of questions about the finances and what’s expected of us. To have a non-profit, a private developer and the local government all working together will really look good for funding on an application.”

Farnell stressed the importance of determining the realities of finances from the town’s perspective, as well as making sure things move forward in the process. “It just can’t be a never-ending floating experience,” he said.

Alvarez and RMBL goals

Owner Claudio Alvarez has reiterated in discussions with council that he wants a low-density development that focuses on community values rather than financial returns, which includes affordable housing and recreational opportunities while maintaining open spaces and views.

RMBL hopes to address its employee housing needs and create infrastructure for public education and additional research and lab space. RMBL executive director Ian Billick also said RMBL is interested in establishing more K-12 programs, which would be more feasible at the North Village location.

“We really see this as a unique property strategically located between an urban area and the Gothic townsite,” Billick told council.

“I would love to say Mt. Crested Butte is the home of RMBL as well as Crested Butte Mountain Resort,” said Farmer.

Council priorities

Several members of council agreed that rental housing is the number one priority while looking at their 17 acres and the North Village. Other possibilities include town facilities, commercial space, postal annex, a boutique hotel and parking, all while keeping in mind transportation, parking and public access to the Snodgrass trailhead.

“As a council we need to think about our piece of land and allowing that land to be planned with the whole parcel in mind,” said council member Lauren Koelliker. “Maybe our affordable housing might not be on that whole 17 acres—maybe it’s spread throughout the whole development.”

“The first question we really need to ask is where our commercial center is,” said council member Roman Kolodziej. “Once we decide what that is then these decisions will be a lot easier. We already have a base area that could use some work.”

“I think it’s a nice idea to have a big commercial center up at Snodgrass, but if we can’t get people to stay in Mountaineer Square already I think that trying to create a second commercial district in Mt. Crested Butte might not go as well as we hope,” said Koelliker. “We already have the issue of people leaving Mt. Crested Butte every night to go into [Crested Butte] for the nightlife and not staying up here, so to further spread people out across Mt. Crested Butte between the base and Snodgrass, I just don’t know if we have the population base to make that a reality.”

When the topic of a postal annex came up, Kolodziej added, “I’d like to caution having everybody drive through the entire town of Mt. Crested Butte to North Village to get their mail. Perhaps the best place for an annex would be the base area.”

The Alvarez party has also presented the idea of a lake reservoir, which CBMR has reserved water rights for storage and snow making. Farmer said town staff is looking into the legalities involved and the potential of building a dam. “Hopefully we can get enough people involved so it’s not an overwhelming burden for any one group,” said Farmer.

“I’d like to get as much public input as early on as possible,” said Kempin, speaking to town’s four-month due diligence period. “The way these things tend to go is public input comes very late in the game when it’s least useful.”

“The best luck I’ve had is the open house process,” said Farnell, who was involved with the open house process for the Center for the Arts.

“I think we also want to make sure that everyone knows it’s not public land,” added Koelliker.

“That’s the benefit of doing those open houses—getting that information out ahead of time,” said community development director Carlos Velado.

“I’m all in,” said council member Steve Morris, a sentiment voiced by all of council throughout the work session. Council member Dwayne Lehnertz was not in attendance.

“It’s deep and it’s a lot of hard work,” said Farnell on next steps. “We appreciate your attitude towards it.”

The three entities will finalize a memorandum of understanding (MOU) under a working group of representatives from each partner, which includes council members Kolodziej and Kempin on behalf of the town. Council will look over the MOU during their next council meeting on January 21.

“Our purpose is to establish a baseline”

By Kendra Walker

The Mt. Crested Butte Town Council attempted to set the fees for town’s short-term rental (STR) licensing program during their January 7 council meeting, but was unsuccessful in achieving a majority vote and will try again at the January 21 meeting.

Council has already enacted Ordinance No. 9, Series 2019 to create a licensing program to regulate STRs in town, and the next step is to adopt the fees for the licensing, regulation and inspection of those STRs based on town administrative costs and time.

“With the growth of rental by owner throughout the community, we found it necessary to establish a short-term rental licensing program,” said town manager Joe Fitzpatrick, “first of all, primarily for life safety issues to ensure that places that are used for short-term rentals have things like carbon monoxide detectors, smoke detectors, fire extinguishers and proper access to egress.

“The VRBO challenges throughout the community include things like parking issues, need for local contact, impacts on neighborhoods with parties … trash and recycling challenges. All of those things put together, we need to get a better control and better handle of what’s going on with short-term rentals throughout the community.”

Fitzpatrick explained that after looking at other STR licensing programs, staff has estimated an initial annual cost to run the licensing program for 2020. “The STR license from town’s point of view is just the cost of the license whether you’re a condominium or single-family home,” he said. “The fee will be reviewed annually once we have an actual year under our belt. Understanding what it really does cost for administrative time, etc., we will be able to adjust the fee.”

Staff has suggested a $200 fee for each short-term rental unit that is not a hotel (based on approximately 867 non-hotel STRs in town) and a $500 fee for each hotel, the Elevation and the Nordic Inn. For comparison, the Town of Crested Butte has a two-year rolling license that requires two years of fees paid in advance at $1,500 the initial year, and $750 each following year.

Because each hotel has only one owner, town will inspect a sample of the hotel rooms. “If we start inspecting a sample and find problems, then we’ll inspect every one,” clarified Fitzpatrick.

However, based on public input letters and comments received prior to the January 7 meeting, council members had some issues with charging owners an inspection fee as part of the license cost when units vary so much in size. Additionally, many STR owners already pay for and go through an inspection by a management company, like Crested Butte Mountain Resort for the Grand Lodge.

“If I put myself in their shoes that’s a tough nut to swallow,” said council member Michael Bacani.

“It’s similar to a business license,” said Fitzpatrick.

“To me in my head it’s not,” replied mayor Janet Farmer. “My building that’s so heavily inspected versus some home that might take a lot more time … I have issues charging everyone the same amount.”

“But the inspection is only a portion of that budget,” said Fitzpatrick. “There are multiple different managers within that building … We won’t know until after we’ve been able to go through all of these units and see if any of these violations exist. Once we’ve been through we’ll have answers to that and we can adjust accordingly.”

He continued, “In the first year the goal is to share the burden of the cost evenly across the board. It gets extremely complicated to figure out a fair distribution for all these different complex configurations.”

Public comment

Many Mt. Crested Butte STR owners attended the meeting and council opened the discussion to public comment.

Joel Benisch, owner in the Grand Lodge West who also serves on its HOA board, explained his issues with including an inspection fee in the short-term rental license. “Everything you’re talking about charging us for is already done as part of our HOA dues.”

“Are you advocating for a reduction in the fee or for remission from the program?” asked council member Roman Kolodziej.

“The [inspection fee] would be a duplicate payment on my part … because we’re already paying for it through our HOA dues and providing adequate documentation,” said Benisch.

“Could there be an option to have your STR privately inspected?” council member Nicholas Kempin asked Fitzpatrick.

“We’re not suggesting it or recommending it,” said Fitzpatrick.

Town attorney Kathleen Fogo offered additional clarity, “One of the issues that has come up is life safety, but also where are people planning on putting people.” She explained that units often have lofts or futons that get included in the room/pillow count that shouldn’t be. “I don’t think it’s necessarily a standard inspection,” she said. “That is one of the main reasons the town wants to see the units.”

Kim Aronson, owner in the Grand Lodge East and member of its HOA board, suggested town charge the STR units per square foot or have all the CBMR-managed units at the Grand Lodge be charged $500 collectively, as if a hotel. “If they are not, they have to pay the individual [$200] tax,” she said.

Barbara Haas pointed out that owners being managed through CBMR aren’t allowed to bring in additional furniture, pillows or décor to their units that haven’t been provided by CBMR. “We really count on CBMR to do the maintenance. We’re paying 50 percent [of the nightly rental fee] basically for that. We don’t have the option. We’re totally different from a home. CBMR keeps very good track of us.”

“It does seem like there could be a mechanism for a third-party inspection,” said Kempin.

“How can we say CBMR is doing a good job but Crested Butte Lodging isn’t?” said Kolodziej. “We have no way to base that.”

“We’re establishing a baseline. We’re not going to inspect every year,” said Fitzpatrick.

“People don’t always tell the truth,” said Fogo. “The goal is safety and also the proper taxes being paid for what they’re renting. People will rent a two-bedroom unit as a three-bedroom unit. We’re trying to protect people and we’re also trying to protect the town.”

“While I still think there’s a lot of huge questions here we have the opportunity to go with this for one year and evaluate,” said Farmer. “I would charge the hotels more,” she added before voting on the resolution.

With council member Dwayne Lehnertz absent from the meeting, council was split with a 3-3 vote, which ultimately killed the resolution to set the STR license fee. Council members Steve Morris, Kolodziej and mayor Farmer voted yes; council members Koelliker, Bacani and Kempin voted no. Staff asked for more direction, as the licensing program has already been enacted and a fee needs to be set as soon as possible.

“I would like for the opportunity for the inspection to be carried out by a third party,” said Koelliker.

“We are attempting to protect the town by doing the inspection as a town,” replied Fitzpatrick. “We have a building department, we have a building code that we live by. Our purpose is to establish a baseline. We need to do the inspection, not the third party.”

By the end of the discussion, the majority of council appeared amenable to the $200 STR and $500 hotel license fee figures if staff could clarify that the fee, especially the inspection portion, will be revisited annually. “It will look like it does tonight with the addition of that sentence,” said Fogo.

With mayor Farmer out of town for the upcoming January 21 meeting, council faces the possibility of another split vote.

A king among ski instructors

By Dawne Belloise

Dave McGuire’s Crested Butte Mountain Resort name tag says he’s “David” and tourists will swear that he wasn’t their ski instructor because the guy they skied with was “Mac,” the nickname McGuire was given as a kid in Little League. Born in Deer Lodge, Montana, Mac grew up at 10,200 feet elevation in Leadville, Colo. until he was 12. His dad worked in mine safety and heath. When Mac was young, the family took hikes, explored, climbed, and by the time he was 7, Mac had already summited Mt. Elbert, the highest point in Colorado.

Both Mac’s parents worked at ski resorts on weekends. His mom, Gwen Nixon, was a ski instructor at Cooper Hill and his father was ski patrol at the now-defunct Meadow Mountain ski resort in Minturn. Naturally, Mac was skiing before he was 2 years old. “We had a long driveway that the plow guys would leave snow mounds and Mom would pack it and smooth out a run for us to ski on until we were old enough to get on the ski areas. I was 3 when I got to the resorts.” From the age of 5, Mac was on a ski team and says, “I continued to do that the rest of my life.”

One of Mac’s favorite things to do during summer was learning about trains. “Dad always took me out to watch trains go by. The tracks are still there on Tennessee Pass,” out of Leadville, Mac says. “There’s a tunnel at the top of Tennessee Pass, which is where Ski Cooper is, and on the other side of the tunnel is Camp Hale, where the 10th Mountain Division trained.”

Mac remembers how excited he was as a kid feeling the rumble and roar of those trains going up the pass. “It was a steep grade of the pass and one time in the 1960s, there was a train that came over that had 18 locomotives pulling that one train and that’s a lot of noise and power.” The last train went over Tennessee Pass around 1989, he recalls.

When his parents split, his mom packed up the kids, moving to San Juan Island in the Puget Sound. Then when she remarried a friend from Leadville, they moved to Aspen. But in 1973, Mac explains, “Aspen was too expensive for dual parents working, so we moved back to the Pacific Northwest, first to Seattle and Belleview and eventually back to San Juan Island to a town named Friday Harbor.”

Mac felt that living on an island was uniquely cool, but isolated. “You’d have to park your car in a line and wait for the ferry to the mainland, and then you’d have to drive for a few hours.” Because of the time and distance to ski resorts, Mac became a beachcomber instead. “I became an enthusiastic agate finder. I’d walk with my head down for hours on the beaches,” he says. The water acted like a stone tumbler and polished the rocks. “They’re beautiful, all different colors. Mom would take us to all these great beaches to hunt for agates.”

Island life dictated that Mac couldn’t be on an organized ski team, “but I took many an island friend and taught them to ski,” he says. He graduated from high school in 1979 as valedictorian, and had become a successful competitive runner in school on the cross country team, running distance and track. “There were a few northwestern colleges interested in both my academics and running, but my stepdad, Jack Nixon, told me about a school in Colorado called Western State College right near a great ski mountain.” And with that, he turned down all the scholarships and applied to Western because he wanted to get back to ski racing.

In that era, Western had the strongest team in years, competing for national championships. Mac hadn’t raced in years so his game was off and he didn’t make the team; however, Western created their first B team. “So I got training and was able to stay on the team. We couldn’t compete collegiately, but we B teamers took on other competitions. We’d try to qualify for pro races all around the state— unsuccessfully,” he laughs.

He started successfully competing in the Colorado Pro Mogul Tour in the early 1980s, making it to round eight several times for prize money. He also ran for Western cross country and track team for Duane Vandenbusch. In his junior year at Western in 1981, Mac got a part-time job at the Crested Butte Mountain Resort ski school and says, “My upper education took a backseat to working at a ski area after that.”

He left college to work full-time at CBMR. During the summers he worked on construction crews on Mt. Crested Butte that built Elevation, The Plaza and Wood Creek. “I ended up on a pile driving crew driving steel H-beams over 100 feet into the ground to produce stable foundations.” When the golf course was proposed in Skyland, Mac got a job landscaping and after its opening, he became greenskeeper (and golfer) for the next eight summers, utilizing his high school experience when he worked on the San Juan Island golf course. For about six years in the mid to late 1990s, Mac became a carpenter apprentice, building custom homes for Bob Huckins.

Mac met his wife, Kelly Ervin, back when the Crested Butte male to female ratio was five to one in 1988, “So every guy in town was after her,” he laughs. “I had had my first major ski injury, a blown ACL, and was walking to work at the ski school every day on crutches. Kelly would drive by me every morning and wave until finally one day she stopped and offered me a ride. One thing led to another and we were married in 1989.” Their son Connor was born in 1991, and daughter Ali came along in 1996.

Mac decided to really push his skiing career. “I knew I could always have a career in teaching but I knew I could take it to another level.” After getting all his instructor certifications he became an examiner for Rocky Mountain Professional Ski Instructors of America (PSIA) in 1993, and he was still a ski instructor.

A close call in the late 1990s had Mac reexamine his race choices. Extreme skiing had just cranked up and Crested Butte hosted the first National U.S. Extreme Championships. “I competed in the first eight, making the finals every year,” Mac says. The eighth year competition was held in Big Hourglass, “which had never been open to skiing and is still closed today because it’s just really, really steep and doesn’t hold snow real well,” Mac explains. But it was an ideal venue for the championships finale. “It was in that event that I took a fall in Hourglass that ended me in a bad spot clinging to the edge of a cliff. It was like a hallway of rock and there was no way up or out on either side. I realized the only way out was to drop down. The crowd was silent, and one person yelled out, ‘You’ve got kids,’ which I heard very clearly. So I dropped in. I hit the snow, which immediately shot me back into the air, and as I was flying through the air, through the walls of the rock hallway, my right ski edge caught the rock wall, putting me into a horizontal spin 30 feet into the air. I flew back into crowd view, having missed all of the trees, landed in the snow, got up, skated to finish line and signaled that I was done competing for the rest of the day. Thus ending my career as an extreme skier.”

The impact of the rock wall at that speed jammed his leg up into his hip socket so severely that it split the socket. Ten years later, on his 50th birthday, he had that hip replaced with a steel one.

The outdoor mountain life is hard on a human body and Mac’s had more than his share of injuries, reconstruction and replacements from skiing, mountain biking and softball—a few ACL surgeries, both shoulder reconstructions and replacing that steel hip with a titanium one in 2018 when he fell on it so hard while running bases that it came apart. Last ski season, he realized that his left knee wasn’t holding up on the slopes, so that was also replaced this New Year’s Eve.

“Then last June, I signed up to do Ride the Rockies, roughly 500 miles. I rode really strong and felt like the next chapter in my skiing career was off to a good start,” but, he tells, “I went back to playing softball and got taken out running the bases when a player fell on me.” That incident dislocated and fractured his femur and tore the meniscus, cartilage and knee ACL. He’s recovering from that July surgery and says defiantly, “I should be skiing by February… but I think I’m done with softball.”

Mac has been a ref and coach for soccer and hockey for over 20 years. He also coaches and refs Little League as well as adult softball. “I’ve done that for 30 years because I want the kids to be able to play and they can’t without officials. So all you parents out there, think about becoming an official,” he encourages.

His early childhood love of trains has led to Mac’s hobby of being a model railroader, with an extensive layout in his attic with hundreds of cars and locomotives and tracks. He’d like to see this history installed in the Crested Butte Community School, like “an opportunity to put a small train layout in there that kids could run that might build more interest in what I think is a very fun hobby.” He was one of several who put together the popular train diorama at the Crested Butte Heritage Museum, which he dreams of expanding to include the Floresta breaker and the Anthracite turntable someday.

Mac has gained an honorable fame from last year’s 2019 Flauschink celebration when he was crowned King Dave. “At the end of every ski season, I usually go work in Vail and other ski resorts after we close so I’m never around for Flauschink. But this year, being injured, I was,” he says, which created the opportunity for the Flauschink committee to snag him. “I couldn’t ask for a better Queen, Queen Krista. We’ve done all we can to outdo all other royalty by being at as many events and activities as possible. We’re having a blast doing it. After all, it won’t be too long before we’re Royal Has-Beens.”

Having been a local for quite some time, Mac feels, “I’ve always loved the fact that Crested Butte is harder to get to; thus, people who really wanted to come here maybe have that same desire to get away from the masses and be someplace they can explore.

“And it still always comes down to the great people I’ve gotten to know and live with all these years and the effort involved in living here,” he says of the community and challenges of living at 8,885 feet. “Everybody who can do that has what it takes to be a Crested Buttian.”

By Dawne Belloise

Jeff Dautrich presides over the opals and lapis, the labradorite and the turquoise, a structured amalgamate of stones, texture, color and iridescence that is embraced by the fine silver and beads of his jewelry creations at the Paragon Art Gallery. A longtime member of Crested Butte’s only artist co-op since 1991, he tells of a love of rocks from the time he was old enough to dig them up, just a tad past toddler. Inspired by his grandfather, a consummate rock hound and jewelry lapidarist, Jeff was introduced to the wonder of geology and gemology on the coastal range of Oregon where he was raised under the ever-present gaze of Mt. Hood.

“Grandpa always had a rock collection and I was fascinated by it. Between that and grandpa being a storyteller about where and how he found them, he piqued my curiosity. So, I’ve been digging up and collecting rocks since I was three,” he smiles. Jeff tells an emotional story of driving out to see his grandfather, Matthew Klein. “I got to spend his last day on earth with him. I told him that I had decided to go into jewelry and he was so thrilled to hear that.” His grandfather passed sometime that night. Jeff was grateful for having spent that wonderful day with him, and as a tribute, says, “I changed my jewelry business name to Jeff Klein Creations.”

Growing up in Brightwood, Oregon, and later in the town of Zigzag, Jeff laughs remembering his childhood escapades. “As a child I ran amok. We lived in the woods. I was surrounded by campgrounds in the mountains at the base of Mt. Hood. I grew up a ski bum with a season pass at Mt. Hood Meadows.” Jeff would, of course, skip school to go skiing but even with being absent for a good chunk of his classes he still made honor roll. In fact, he was in the top 5 percent of his graduating class.

At 14, he already had a part-time job and by 15 a full-time job, allowing him to earn enough so that the following summer before his senior year, he took off to explore Alaska for an entire month by himself. Mostly, he wanted to check out the University of Alaska at Fairbanks (UAF) and he fell in love with the area. After high school graduation in 1981, he enrolled at UAF to take geophysics and earth science. Although his high school studies were a breeze for him, college was an awakening. He says, “I took 18 hours of all 200 level classes in my freshman year. It spanked me. I lasted a year and a half.” Plus, he discovered that all the geology classes were oriented to the oil industry, which was not what he was interested in.

Jeff became a restaurant manager in Fairbanks. It was 1982 and he recalls, “It was a wild place back then. Fairbanks was the tail end of the pipeline. It was the Wild West with a lot a young people who had a great deal of money because they were working on the pipeline. You could make $35k in two months on the pipeline but I wasn’t a roughneck. I was much better as a waiter and a chef and managing the Food Factory,” the restaurant he worked at.

His skiing revolved around the resorts of Cleary Summit and Ski Land, both outside of Fairbanks and both had only rope tows and T-bars. When the temps hit 45 below for 45 consecutive days, Jeff decided to head to the warmer climes of San Diego for several months. After visiting his friend Brian Wilson in Crested Butte in May 1985, Jeff says, “There wasn’t the remotest doubt in my brain that this was going to be home.”

He had met Joanna, his then wife-to-be, in Fairbanks in 1987 and the two moved to Crested Butte in 1989. They had their daughter, Alyssa, in 1990. Brandon, who Jeff raised as his own son, had been born in 1984 to Joanna and Michael Wedgwood. Arriving in Crested Butte, Jeff worked at various restaurants, mostly waiting tables at the Artichoke on the mountain (now the Avalanche). “I was in survival mode, raising kids, working again at various restaurants that culminated as manager at Giovanni’s for several years before moving into the Princess Wine Bar as manager and night bartender,” he says.

However, he didn’t feel challenged by his work and he was bored. He needed a change and he wanted to see his family more, which meant switching to a day job. Jeff began training to be an appliance repairman. “I was building walk-in coolers for commercial refrigeration in addition to appliance repair but I came to my senses pretty quickly,” he says. Four years into his new endeavor he was getting about 50 calls a day for jobs, “And that’s when I stopped doing commercial appliance repairs and project installations. It beat my body up. I specialized my business to just doing domestic appliance repairs in order to give better service.” Twenty-three years later, his business, East River Appliance, is still going strong.

In 2008, after their kids were grown, he and Joanna went their separate ways. Throughout this entire time Jeff was a jeweler, creating works of art. Back when he was in Fairbanks, he was working exclusively in natural gold nugget jewelry. He had mining claims and was prospecting in the Fairbanks mining district, at one point co-owning 320 acres, eight claims that were part of a 4,000-acre claim block. “I was the guy with the four-wheel-drive pick-up, a chain saw and the interest in geology so I was the one surveying our mining claims,” he says.

He identified three specific spots for potential, and the first dig produced a vein of antimony, an ore, and this one carried 20 ounces of gold per ton. “The vein was three feet wide by 100 feet wide and to an unknown depth,” he recalls excitedly. The two partners were on the verge of leasing the claims to a large corporation when life dictated that Jeff move to Crested Butte. He quit claimed his share of the claims to his partner and received royalties for the next 25 years. “It was a fun experience. We’d go out and camp, survey and hunt for dinner. All this was only 40 miles from Fairbanks so we could drive to our claims. The largest gold nugget in the world at that time was found two miles down from our claims.”

Although the love of rocks was imparted by his grandfather, Jeff learned his jewelry trade in Fairbanks from his mining partner, later honing his skills in Crested Butte at Zachariah Zipp. He’s a self-taught gemologist through avid reading. He started to work on his silversmithing skills when he arrived in Crested Butte, since previously he had been working primarily in gold. His creations displayed at the Paragon showcases his wire-work design and gems. Jeff also ran the popular Labor Day Peoples Fair, produced by Paragon, for 20 years.

Gardening at his home in Crested Butte South has also been a passion for Jeff for the past decade, canning his own food from his garden and learning fermentation. “I got into fermentation because my daughter and I like kombucha and that opened the door to everything else.” He now makes kimchi, sauerkraut, pickles and he proudly states, “I’m a bona fide garlic farmer, growing 590 heads of garlic last year. It’s my personal mission to figure out what you can grow in the upper Gunnison Valley and it turns out you can grow a lot more than I thought.

“Other than all that, I’ve been living and surviving in the Butte. You ski every weekend in the winter and hike every weekend in the summer. It’s a no-brainer for me,” he says of living in paradise. “I couldn’t conceive of living anywhere else. I love this place. I’m not a people person, I’m a woods/mountain person and I’m at my happiest when I’m at the top of a mountain.”

Fashioning a rich life in the mountains

By Dawne Belloise

Missy Ochs was rather British until her second birthday, when her military family moved from a base in England to Lowry Airforce Base in Denver. Her father had been in three wars—WW2, Korea, Vietnam—and the invasion of the Bay of Pigs in Cuba. Her mother, Missy says, was a worldwide ski bum who wanted to retire in a place that she could pursue her love of the sport, so Missy grew up skiing Vail, Breckenridge and Winter Park. As a child, Missy was quite athletic, kicking a soccer ball around and putting in a lot of pool time as a swimmer. Her mother imparted the love of art and culture, motoring the kids out to events in a VW pop-top camper all over Colorado because she loved to go places.

When Missy graduated from Arapahoe High School in 1990, her first college choice was Western State College in Gunnison (now Western Colorado University). “It was the closest to a ski area and I received a scholarship for academics,” she says, which all fit perfectly into her future plans to study sports-related kinesiology as applied in sports performance. She took many classes in recreation, biology and physiology, also figuring a business minor would complement her studies.

“I wanted to do physical therapy for sports. I was skiing five days a week with the college freestyle team. We skied Monarch, where we trained twice a week, and on weekends and Wednesdays.”

She was on a “Western Scholars Year,” which is essentially a semester system that stacks classes all summer so students could get in as much skiing as possible during the winter semester without having to deal with a loaded class schedule. “The team competed under the United States Ski Association [USSA] and traveled around the state,” she explains, noting that it’s a competition of mogul, aerial and ballet skiing, although none of the team did ballet. Missy also judged the freestyle skiing for the USSA for an entire decade, from 1995 to 2006. She graduated with a bachelor of science degree in kinesiology in 1994.

After graduation, Missy chose to stay in Gunnison. “I didn’t want to leave,” she confesses, because she loved the area. She was working as the assistant manager at Joseph’s, a restaurant east of Gunnison, and in the summer she was slinging burritos and scooping ice cream while silkscreening tee shirts at the Seabar in Gunnison. Surprisingly, Missy wasn’t a mountain biker yet. “At the time it was so new—and it hurt!” she laughs. “We were still riding rigid frame hard tails.” But she was skiing, working and hanging out with friends, living the mountain town dream at 21 years of age.

The following year she moved back to Denver to continue her education but, she discovered, “It was very competitive to get into physical therapy school. You were wait-listed. Spas were just starting to become a viable business opportunity, so my focus was spa development, which essentially covered needs assessment to operational start ups.” She received her master’s degree in hotel and resort management from the University of Denver in 1996 and did her internship with the Oxford Hotel and Spa in Denver.

“I worked for Dana Crawford, who was involved in the development of Larimar Square, the Union Station revitalization and the loft concept of LODO. It was such a great start,” Missy says of her three years there before moving on to Hotel Monaco to help with their start-up when they opened a spa in 1997.

Cramming in as much mountain time as her demanding corporate jobs would allow, she was snowboarding with her buddies, doing the I-70 corridor ski resorts on weekends when one day, she hit the wall. “I totally bonked on the corporate vibe. I was driving in traffic to get to work, and from 1994 to 2000, I worked in four different hotels. All of a sudden, it all felt empty to me and I just wanted to travel,” she says.

Her father had just passed away, and she took to the highway, driving north to Canada. “I hiked across the Olympic National Park for 27 days with the National Outdoor Leadership School [NOLS]. If I wasn’t going to work I wanted to do something that would be life enhancing so I did two courses,” she says of her gap year.

The second course was a high-end biking vacation experience with a company called Backroads. “We started in Golden and rode to Banff, Canada. It was a six-day trip and it just blew my mind.” She was moved enough to stay on as a guide for two years out of Berkeley, Calif. because she felt, “I loved hospitality, loved having unique nature adventures and Backroads was the number one company in the industry. I guided in Glacier National Park in Montana, Yellowstone National Park and the wine country in California,” where, she grins, she fell in love with wine.

In the winters she skied Jackson Hole, returning to the valley and Crested Butte in 2003, where she was hired to work on reopening the Irwin Lodge. “Irwin was looking for someone to do due diligence, to see if the project was viable. We got far into the process and were close to getting approval when the owner’s business interest took him in another direction,” she recalls. Eleven then bought the property and Missy worked for them for two years as general manager in 2007, handling acquisitions and reviews from sewer and water issues to land boundaries and real estate interests. “It was fast and fun. I really enjoyed working for them.”

But once again, Missy had that same realization. “I bumped my head against that corporate ceiling again. I was working all the time. I don’t live here for that. I would rather be conscientious with my lifestyle than spend all my time working, so I went into real estate during the recession.” Working for six banks, Missy dealt with foreclosures and distressed properties from here to Chaffee County. She still sells real estate.

Milky Way, the high-end fashion boutique on Elk Avenue with its colorful façade and vivid flower boxes, was opened in 1994 by Deb Cheesman. Missy had worked for Deb during the holidays in the shop, helping out during the high seasons, “So I could have access to clothing since I love clothes and fashion. I always have. It was another interest of mine, everything from couture to the new black legging craze.” When Deb decided to sell in 2011, Missy bought the shop. “The timing was right and the package was right for me. What keeps me impassioned by my work is the women I get to work with.”

Missy says she’s intrigued with the intricacy of the work, as trade and materials evolve to more environmentally friendly production and quality. “It’s an ever-changing industry. Fashion is always changing, from color and style to fabrics. I’m trying to focus on environmentally conscious companies. I buy their products and if I’m supporting them, hopefully that will help them continue their products. The fashion industry doesn’t have a very positive carbon footprint in general, but I think it can. It helps if you focus on U.S.-made, fair trade, and eco-friendly companies. And my business practices help. I’m energy efficient, I practice water conservation, recycling, resource management, I ride my bike or walk to work, along with most of my staff, I use alternative transportation. And in business management, meaning how I buy, I try to work with companies who are conscientious. You try to find ways to make a positive impact in life because I feel it’s the little things that make a difference.”

In 2003 she met Dave Ochs while riding in the Cannibal Classic from Crested Butte to Creede. “It was me and 14 guys,” she laughs. “I preferred road riding but then I kind of realized there was only one road here.” When she and some friends gathered to ride the notorious 409 in the spring of 2004, Dave Ochs was also on that adventure. As for the 409, “It was brutal,” she winces. But it was during Fat Tire Bike Week in 2004 when the two actually fell for each other, “and we’ve been together every day since.” They married in 2007 and their son, Ozzy, was born in 2011 with Cadence joining the family in 2013.

“If I were to do my business career over again I’d try to start my own business right off the bat because the rewards then are yours. You are what you put into your own business and I love my business, it’s fun. I get to dress up, learn about different regions of the world, different fabrics. I get to travel and I get to be around women all the time, which is awesome. You shape your own destiny. I’ve learned so many things.

“I love my life,” Missy continues.“I have a good life here and I’m really grateful for my support. I’m doing exactly what I’ve always wanted to do in my life—to own my own business and to live in the mountains. I have a really fine family. I get to bike and ski every day. I have great friends here. It’s community and lifestyle. My lifestyle is my community because the friends I have do what I love to do and are such good people. We share that high alpine value system. Knowing that my friends had an amazing experience in their day as well, whether it’s walking to the Gronk or even just going to the post office, it’s gratitude and celebrating Crested Butte goodness.”

Huntress and bartender

By Dawne Belloise

Andrea Rybarz proudly claims that she grew up in a trailer next to the dunes—the Silver Lake Sand Dunes in the small western Michigan town of Hart. “Mom and Dad are not rednecks,” she grins, “but I probably am. I’ve never owned a truck that didn’t have a lift on it.” Many a day was spent driving on the dunes with her big truck.

Her family has owned and operated Heart Pizza in their little town since 1981. Her mom is basically running the restaurant while her father is getting ready to retire as a computer programmer.

Andrea’s dad was an avid outdoorsman and she grew up cross country skiing and riding snowmobiles, as she recalls, “We get a lot of snow there with the lake effect, more than other areas in the state.” When summer finally arrived, her father would take her fishing and hunting. “My dad got me my first bow when I was eight years old. I’ve been rabbit and deer hunting my whole life on our 40 acres. I try to go hunting with my dad every year.”

She’s still quite the archery huntress, and this year, Andrea was awarded a big horn sheep tag here. “It took me 14 years to get the permit. I went solo. I had friends helping me about four days out of three-and-a-half weeks.” As a conservationist, Andrea feels that all the herds in Colorado need to be managed far better. “The Department of Wildlife [DOW] gave out four big horn licenses but there were only eight rams in a herd of maybe 30. I feel that all of the herds in Colorado are being ill managed and they’re overselling tags because it’s an opportunity state. They want you to come here and hunt but when you don’t put restrictions on it, the herds don’t have a chance to grow. Young animals are being killed prematurely.”

She did not get her sheep. Instead, Andrea became the prey. Having set up a game camera, Andrea quickly realized there weren’t sheep in her unit near Mt. Ouray because there was an enormous mountain lion living in the area.

“I was up there alone at 13,000 feet, without my handgun, and about to hike back to my truck down through a mile and a half of scree and another mile and a half of trail when I heard something in the rocks next to me,” Andrea says.

When she turned, a big cat was coming towards her from 20 feet away. “It stopped. I took three steps back and it came towards me again. It was coming in hot. It was so close I could see every whisker. I knew that I had to be ready to shoot. It seemed that it was not going to let me go, so I took a shot.”

Her arrow missed the cat by one inch. It jumped back but turned and came right back at her. She had only two arrows left. She grabbed her knife. “I got as big and loud and scary as I could be. The cat was behind a low cedar tree and I started breaking the branches off of a downed dead tree, picked it up and started dragging it down the mountain, being as loud as I could. The tree was breaking and popping and making all kinds of noises. I thought, just don’t fall.”

The cat disappeared, but Andrea looked over her shoulder the entire three miles back to her vehicle. “I got back to the truck and figured I should take a few days off hunting. And then I thought, nah, I’ll drive to the other end of the unit. The next morning, I found all the sheep two mountain ranges over. These are native sheep. The Almont sheep are transplant sheep. They’re bred differently. All those sheep you see in Almont were put there by the DOW.”

As for the big cat, she warns, “There are mountain lions living all around our valley now. People need to be aware.”

Back when Andrea was in high school, she was a hard worker from the age of 12 when she began in the family pizza shop. But she confesses, “There were a few years there that I was probably more concerned with partying and socializing.”

However, she graduated in the top tenth in her class of 1999 and by college, claims to have gotten all the partying out of her system. She attended the Illinois Institute of Art in Chicago, earning a BA in fashion design in just three years because she wanted to get out of the area as fast as possible. “I hated Chicago. I hated the big city and the crime. I was poor, and living in Chicago as a poor person is not fun. I had some scholarships but I paid for college myself.”

After college she moved home to run the family business and started her own fashion line, designing and creating clothing for boutiques. In January 2007, she decided to move to Boulder to be closer to her sister. “I lasted there one month and then decided that Boulder was not my people.” She moved to Denver, primarily for work. “I had a whole bunch of crazy jobs. I was bartending and doing visual displays at the Cherry Creek Macy’s, which was three floors of horrible holiday mayhem. I did that for a year before realizing I was only getting paid $10 an hour to carry 50-pound mannequins around and listen to holiday music, essentially a nightmare horror movie.” At the same time, she was also learning to make fur coats for a furrier.

At one point, she was working at Moe’s BBQ and Bowling Alley in Denver. She had worked in bowling alleys and bowled in a league since she was a child. “I was a bartender-bowling technician,” she says, a job title one does not hear often. “I’d be making a cocktail one minute and cracking on machines in the back the next. I met John Bukaty [a former Crested Butte artist] and a couple other guys who lived or had lived in Crested Butte.”

Bukaty was moving to New Orleans and suggested that Andrea should move into his place in Crested Butte South. She essentially moved to Crested Butte site-unseen during the winter of 2009. “I moved here mostly to go hunting and fishing. I wanted to be in the outdoors.” She landed a job at Crested Butte Mountain Resort working in Adventure Services, selling services such as snowshoe outings, snowmobile tours, hot air balloon rides and dog sledding. “But I realized that bartending will always be better money,” she says of tending bar at Kochevar’s and the Brown Lab, and points out that this year marks her 20th year of bartending, although she only works happy hours now and not late shifts.

“I have had a ton of fun bartending in my life but recently the late nights have been really difficult. People are depressed, suicidal and it’s just not fun. I don’t know if it’s a generational thing or what. You see the struggles that the community faces. Why are people always crying at the bar? They’re depressed, they’re emotionally unstable and you’re there serving them alcohol,” she says and feels that bartenders are not qualified to deal with emotionally unstable people.

“During the holidays there are a lot of people without their families here and you feel a bit of pressure to make everybody feel wanted. I want to make sure everybody is having fun. I take a lot of pride in that but sometimes there’s nothing you can do. I’m an extremely strict server. I have no problem cutting people off and asking them to leave. It’s a lot of pressure being a bartender. It’s emotionally and physically draining. You’re everyone’s psychiatrist. The struggle is real some days. For anyone who thinks bartending is an easy job, it’s not. You’ve got to be tough.”

Andrea still sews and does alterations. “I don’t advertise because I can’t keep up. I’m doing it at least 15 hours a week while also tending bar at Kochevar’s and the Brown Lab on the mountain. “I’m not in love with sewing but I’m really good at it,” she smiles. “I made the Flauschink crowns and scepters twice and made the new capes.” Andrea made the red velvet curtains gracing Kochevar’s windows as well. “I’ve tried to stay involved in the community as much as I can,” she says.

The huntress is also choreographing a couple of dances in Move the Butte for this February’s performances. “‘I’m really excited about this. I’ve been dancing my whole life. I’ve had dancing lessons and gymnastics from my childhood and taught jazz dance classes after high school.” This is her fifth year with Move the Butte and for the 2020 show she’s created an all-male dance with a dozen guys working it. “It’s gonna be so awesome. I like to push the envelope and make people feel a little uncomfortable. I’m always doing something borderline inappropriate in dance,” she laughs.

“Just like everybody else, I’ve thought about leaving Crested Butte a million times but I have figured it out here and my quality of life is good. I do something outside every single day, I get to be in nature every day, “ says the multi-faceted bartendress-huntress.”I’m just trying to live life to the fullest.”

THURSDAY 12
• 7-7:45 a.m. Guided Meditation (open level) at Thrive Yoga.
• 8:30 a.m. Women’s book discussion group at UCC.
• 8:45-10 a.m. Prana Vinyasa (level 2) at Thrive Yoga
• 8:45-10 a.m. Vinyasa Flow / CB Yoga Co-op at Town Hall.
• 9-10:15 a.m. Heated Vinyasa (level 1/2) at Thrive Yoga in CB South.
• 9-10:30 a.m. Historic Walking Tour, meet at the CB Heritage Museum. 349-1880.
• 10:30-11:45 a.m. Yoga Fundamentals (open level) at Thrive Yoga.
• 11 a.m. Weekly storytime at Townie Books. 349-7545.
• 11:30 a.m. Duplicate Bridge at UCC. 349-1008.
• noon All Saints in the Mountain Episcopal Church Community Healing Service at Queen of All Saints Catholic Church. 349-9371.
• noon-1:15 p.m. Vinyasa (open level) at Thrive Yoga.
• noon-1 p.m. Ashtanga Vinyasa / CB Yoga Co-Op at Town Hall.
• 1-3 p.m. Tech Time at the Crested Butte Library. 349-6535.
• 2-3 p.m. Therapeutic Yoga (open level) at Thrive Yoga.
• 4-6 p.m. Watercolor & Wine at the Art Studio for the Center for the Arts, 111 Elk Ave.
• 4-5:30 p.m. St. Mary’s Garage, a free thrift store. 300 Belleview, Unit 2, on the south end of 3rd Street. 970-318-6826.
• 5:30-6:45 p.m. Restorative Yoga (open level) at Thrive Yoga.
• 5:30-6:45 p.m. Vinyasa Yoga (level 2) at Thrive Yoga in CB South.
• 6 p.m. Talk to a Lawyer: Free legal information clinic sponsored by the Northwest Colorado Legal Services Project at the Queen of All Saints Catholic Church. 970-668-9612. (every third Thursday of the month)
• 6-7:15 p.m. Restorative & Sound Healing (open level) at Thrive Yoga in CB South.
• 6:30 p.m. AA Open Meditation at UCC.
• 7:30 p.m. Narcotics Anonymous meets at 114 N. Wisconsin St. in Gunnison.

FRIDAY 13
• 6-7:15 a.m. Hip Hop Vinyasa at Thrive Yoga in CB South.
• 7-8:15 a.m. Rise and Align Yoga (level 2) at Thrive Yoga.
• 8:45 a.m. Core Power Yoga Class at the Pump Room.
• 8:45-10 a.m. Yoga for the Flexibly Challenged / CB Yoga Co-op at Town Hall.
• 8:45-10 a.m. Prana Vinyasa (open level) at Thrive Yoga.
• 9-10:15 a.m. Heated Soul Flow (level 1/2) at Thrive Yoga in CB South.
• 10:30-11:45 a.m. Iyengar Yoga (open level) at Thrive Yoga.
• noon Closed AA at UCC.
• 12:15-1:30 p.m. Vinyasa Yoga (level 2/3) at Thrive Yoga.
• 1 p.m. Art group meets at the Senior Center. 641-4529.
• 3-5 p.m. Tech Time at the Crested Butte Library. 349-6535.
• 5:30 p.m. Communion Service at Queen of All Saints Catholic Church.
• 6-7 p.m. Poi Playshop at the Pump Room.
• 6-7:15 p.m. Vin-Yin Yoga (open level) at Thrive Yoga.

SATURDAY 14
• 7:30 a.m. Open AA at UCC.
• 8:30-10 a.m. Vinyasa Yoga (level 2/3) at Thrive Yoga.
• 9-10 a.m. Mindful Flow / CB Yoga Co-op at Town Hall.
• 9-10:30 a.m. Community Yoga at the Sanctuary Yoga & Pilates Studio, Gunnison.
• 10 a.m. Paint Your Own Pottery in the Gunnison Arts Center Clay Studio.
• 10-11 a.m. Hip Hop Community Dance Class at the Pump Room (above Fire House on 3rd & Maroon). 415-225-5300.
• 10:30-11:45 a.m. Slow Flow (open level) at Thrive Yoga.
• 10:30 a.m.-noon St. Mary’s Garage, a free thrift store. 300 Belleview, Unit 2, on the south end of 3rd Street. 970-318-6826.
• 4:30-5:30 p.m. Happy Hour Yoga (open level) at Thrive Yoga.
• 6:30-7:30 p.m. Guided Sound Meditation at 405 4th Street.
• 7-9 p.m. Dungeons & Dragons Mixer at Rumors Coffee and Tea House.

SUNDAY 15
• 8:30 a.m. Mass at Queen of All Saints Catholic Church.
• 8:45 a.m. Slow Flow (open level) at Thrive Yoga.
• 9 a.m. Oh Be Joyful Church Worship Service at 625 Maroon Ave.
• 9 a.m. Worship Service at Union Congregational Church. 349-6405.
• 9:30-11 a.m. Sunday Donation Yoga / CB Yoga Co-op at Town Hall.
• 10-11:15 a.m. Vin-Yin (open level) at Thrive Yoga in CB South.
• 10:30-11:45 a.m. Vinyasa (open level) at Thrive Yoga.
• noon Narcotics Anonymous Meeting at UCC, 403 Maroon Ave. Closed meeting for addicts only. (1st & 3rd Sundays)
• 2-3:15 p.m. Restorative Yoga (open level) at Thrive Yoga.
• 4-5:30 p.m. Therapeutic Yoga (open level) at Thrive Yoga.
• 5-6 p.m. All Saints in the Mountain Episcopal Eucharist at Queen of All Saints Catholic Church. 349-9371.
• 5-7 p.m. Pick-up Adult Basketball. HS Gym, CBCS.
• 6 p.m. AA meets at UCC.
• 6 p.m. Duplicate Bridge at UCC. 349-1008.
• 6 p.m. Evening Service at Mt. Calvary Lutheran Church, 711 N. Main St., Gunnison.
• 7 p.m. Gamblers Anonymous meets at the Last Resort.
• 7-8 p.m. Guided Meditation (all levels) at Thrive Yoga.

MONDAY 16
• 6-7:15 a.m. Hip Hop Vinyasa at Thrive Yoga in CB South.
• 6:30-7:30 a.m. Vinyasa (level2/3) at Thrive Yoga.
• 8:45-10 a.m. Vinyasa Flow Yoga / CB Yoga Co-op at Town Hall.
• 8:45-10 a.m. Prana Vinyasa (level 2) at Thrive Yoga.
• 10:30-11:45 a.m. Iyengar (open level) at Thrive Yoga.
• noon Adult Children of Alcoholics open meeting at Union Congregational Church.
• 12:45 p.m. Bridge at the Senior Center. 641-4529.
• 2-3:15 p.m. Kundalini Yoga (open level) at Thrive Yoga.
• 4-5 p.m. Teen Yoga (18 & under) at Thrive Yoga.
• 4-7:30 p.m. Tang Soo Do classes for children and adults with West Elk Martial Arts, Jerry’s Gym at Town Hall. 901-7417.
• 5:30 p.m. Communion Service at Queen of All Saints Catholic Church.
• 5:30-6:45 p.m. Yin Yoga Nidra (open level) at Thrive Yoga.
• 5:30-7 p.m. Moms in Motion class at the GVH rehab gym.
• 6-7:15 p.m. Prana Vinyasa / CB Yoga Co-Op at Town Hall.
• 6:30-8 p.m. Women’s Domestic Violence Support Group at Project Hope. Childcare available upon request. 641-2712.
• 7:30 p.m. Open AA at UCC. 349-5711.
• 7:30 p.m. Narcotics Anonymous meets at 114 N. Wisconsin St. in Gunnison.

TUESDAY 17
• 6-7 a.m. Sunrise Vinyasa (open level) at Thrive Yoga in CB South.
• 7-7:45 a.m. Zen Meditation (open level) at Thrive Yoga.
• 7:30 a.m. AA/Alanon Open at UCC. 349-5711.
• 8 a.m.-5 p.m. Free Co-Working Tuesdays at the ICELab at WSCU.
• 8:30-10:30 a.m. St. Mary’s Garage, a free thrift store. 300 Belleview, Unit 2, on the south end of 3rd Street. 970-318-6826.
• 8:45-10 a.m. Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga / CB Yoga Co-op at Town Hall.
• 8:45-10 a.m. Vinyasa (level 2/3) at Thrive Yoga.
• 10:30-11:45 a.m. Yoga Fundamentals (open level) at Thrive Yoga.
• 11:30 a.m. League of Women Voters meeting at 210 W. Spencer in Gunnison.
• noon AA Closed at UCC.
• noon-1 p.m. Open Practice (open level) at Thrive Yoga.
• noon-1 p.m. Fluid Flow Vinyasa / CB Yoga Co-Op at Town Hall.
• 2-3 p.m. Therapeutic Yoga (open level) at Thrive Yoga.
• 4-5:30 p.m. St. Mary’s Garage, a free thrift store. 300 Belleview, Unit 2, on the south end of 3rd Street. 970-318-6826.
• 6-7:15 p.m. Prana Vinyasa (level 1) at Thrive Yoga in CB South.
• 6-8 p.m. Figure Drawing Sessions with live model in Downtown Crested Butte. 349-7228.
• 7 p.m. Alanon meeting at the Last Resort.
• 7-8:15 p.m. Yin Yoga Nidra / CB Yoga Co-Op at Town Hall.
• 7-8 p.m. Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in Sunset Hall, 349 Teocalli Ave. in CB South.
• 7-8:15 p.m. Vinyasa Yoga (level 2/3) at Thrive Yoga.

WEDNESDAY 18
• 6-7 a.m. Iyengar Yoga (open level) at Thrive Yoga.
• 7:30 a.m. The Crested Butte / Mt. Crested Butte Rotary Club breakfast meeting in the Shavano Conference Room at the Elevation Hotel.
• 7:30-8:30 a.m. Sound Healing and Meditation (open level) at Thrive Yoga.
• 8:45-10 a.m. Vinyasa Flow / CB Yoga Co-op at Town Hall.
• 8:45-10 a.m. Kundalini Yoga (open level) at Thrive Yoga.
• 9-10:15 a.m. Advanced Vinyasa (level 2/3) at Thrive Yoga in CB South.
• 9:30 a.m.-2 p.m. Two Buttes Senior Citizens van transportation roundtrip to Gunnison, weather permitting. Call first for schedule and availability. 275-4768.
• 10:30 a.m.-noon Prana Vinyasa (level 2/3) at Thrive Yoga.
• noon Closed AA at UCC.
• noon T’ai Chi for beginner participants in the Town Hall Community Room.
• noon-1 p.m. In the Iyengar Tradition – Yoga / CB Yoga Co-Op at Town Hall.
• noon-1 p.m. Fundamentals of Alignment / CB Yoga Co-Op at Town Hall. (class ends February 26)
• 1 p.m. T’ai Chi for advanced participants in the Town Hall Community Room.
• 2-3 p.m. Iyengar Restorative (open level) at Thrive Yoga.
• 3:30-5 p.m. ICELab tours at Western Colorado University with Patrick Rowley.
• 4:30-6:30 p.m. Parenting Support Group in the Gunnison Valley Health Conference Room, parentingingunni@gmail.com.
• 4-7:30 p.m. Tang Soo Do classes for children and adults with West Elk Martial Arts, Jerry’s Gym at Town Hall. 901-7417.
• 5:30 p.m. Mass at Queen of All Saints Catholic Church.
• 6-7:15 p.m. Heated Vinyasa (level 2) at Thrive Yoga in CB South.
• 6:30 p.m. Alanon at UCC Parlour (in back), 4th and Maroon. 349-6482.
• 7-9 p.m. “GriefShare,” a grief recovery seminar and support group, meets at Mt. Calvary Lutheran Church, 711 N. Main St., Gunnison. 970-349-7769.

Events & Entertainment

Holiday Market in the Gunnison Arts Center Main Gallery, runs thru December 24.

THURSDAY 12
• 5-7:30 p.m. Holiday Party at the Adaptive Sports Center’s Kelsey Wright Building. 349-2296.
• 7 p.m. CB School of Dance presents A Crested Butte Nutcracker at the Center for the Arts.
• 7 p.m. “Well Spotted: The Parks & Wildlife of Southern Africa,” a presentation with naturalist & photographer Arden Anderson at the Crested Butte Library. 349-6535.
• 7:30 p.m. Cinderella plays in the Black Box Theatre at the Gunnison Arts Center.
• 8 p.m. Ladies’ Night at the Red Room.

FRIDAY 13
• 2-6 p.m. Pop-Up Chocolate Shop at Scout’s General Store.
• 3-6 p.m. First annual Holiday Tree Sale at CB Ace Hardware, a fundraiser for the CB Avalanche Center.
• 6:30 p.m. Holiday Family Movie Night at the Crested Butte Library. 349-6535.
• 7 p.m. CB School of Dance presents A Crested Butte Nutcracker at the Center for the Arts.
• 7:30 p.m. Bell, Book and Candle plays at the Mallardi Cabaret Theatre, Community Appreciation Day.
• 7:30 p.m. Cinderella plays in the Black Box Theatre at the Gunnison Arts Center.

SATURDAY 14
• noon-6 p.m. First annual Holiday Tree Sale at CB Ace Hardware, a fundraiser for the CB Avalanche Center.
• 2-6 p.m. Pop-Up Chocolate Shop at Scout’s General Store.
• 3:00 p.m. Cinderella Matinee plays in the Black Box Theatre at the Gunnison Arts Center.
• 4:30-7:30 p.m. Literary Pub Tour de Center with the Literary Arts Department of the Center for the Arts. 349-7487.
• 7 p.m. CB School of Dance presents A Crested Butte Nutcracker at the Center for the Arts.
• 7 p.m. Crested Butte Mountain Heritage Museum’s Movie Night: Snowbeast. 349-1880.
• 7:30 p.m. Bell, Book and Candle plays at the Mallardi Cabaret Theatre.
• 9 p.m. SoDown plays at the Public House.

SUNDAY 15
• noon-6 p.m. First annual Holiday Tree Sale at CB Ace Hardware, a fundraiser for the CB Avalanche Center.
• 4 p.m. CB School of Dance presents A Crested Butte Nutcracker at the Center for the Arts.
• 7:30 p.m. Bell, Book and Candle plays at the Mallardi Cabaret Theatre.

MONDAY 16
• 9 a.m. Mondays with the Mayor: meet with Mt. Crested Butte mayor Janet Farmer at the Coffee Lab in Mountaineer Square.
• 5 p.m. Holiday Crafting Time: Wreath Making at the Crested Butte Library. 349-6535.

TUESDAY 17
• 5 p.m. Family Game Night at the Crested Butte Library. 349-6535.
• 6 p.m. AND Series Event: Watercolor & Wine in the Gunnison Arts Center Main Gallery.

WEDNESDAY 18
• 7 p.m. Panel discussion to explore the rise of sports and recreation in Crested Butte in the ‘70s at the Crested Butte Mountain Heritage Museum.
• 7 p.m. 2019 Christmas Bells Concert at the Union Congregational Church.
• 8 p.m. Ladies’ Night at The Talk of the Town.

Kids Calendar

FRIDAY 13
• 9:30-10:15 a.m. Mickies & Minnies in the Gunnison Arts Center Dance Studio.
• 10-10:45 a.m. Storytime! For All Ages at the Crested Butte Library. 349-6535.
• 4-5 p.m. Tang Soo Do Martial Arts classes for youth with West Elk Martial Arts, Town Hall Fitness Room. 901-7417.

MONDAY 16
• 3:45-5 p.m. Messy Mondays! at the Crested Butte Library. 349-6535.
• 4-7:30 p.m. Tang Soo Do classes for children and adults with West Elk Martial Arts, Jerry’s Gym at Town Hall. 901-7417.
• 4:45 p.m. Tang Soo Do classes for juniors at Town Hall. 901-7417.

WEDNESDAY 18
• 11-11:30 a.m. Baby & Toddler Storytime (ages birth-3) at the Crested Butte Library. 349-6535.
• 4-5 p.m. Kids Yoga (ages 8 & under) at Thrive Yoga.
• 4-7:30 p.m. Tang Soo Do classes for children and adults with West Elk Martial Arts, Jerry’s Gym at Town Hall. 901-7417.
• 4:45 p.m. Tang Soo Do classes for juniors at Town Hall. 901-7417.