Stolen sleds found on Craigslist

Local police team up with Pueblo County to find snowmobiles stolen in June

The mystery about snowmobiles gone missing from the Kebler Pass winter trailhead has been solved, thanks to the vigilance of one victim, who found his sled for sale on Craigslist. 

It was the weekend of June 12, after snow fell throughout the spring, that three snowmobiles went missing and two others were inexplicably gone the following week.
“This is happening when the trailhead is moving every week,” Mt. Crested Butte police officer Brad Phelps said, explaining how one of the victims had moved his snowmobile and a friend’s at the time to a trailhead farther up the road. “The next time they go up there, the sleds aren’t at Splain’s Gulch. And they had the serial numbers and registration, so we listed them both as stolen.”
According to Phelps, leads were hard to come by at first and the one that turned up turned out to be nothing. Then the case broke open on Independence Day.
“They called me on the Fourth of July. One of victims saw his and his buddy’s sled on Craigslist,” Phelps said. “Both of them were in the same ad.” The snowmobiles were for sale in Pueblo.
Phelps contacted the Pueblo County Sheriff’s Office, which paid a visit to the would-be seller of the stolen snowmobiles and found even more in the man’s yard. “When [the officers] are in the yard with the stolen snowmobiles, they see two other snowmobiles sitting there and decide to run the registrations. It turns out they were both registered to addresses in Crested Butte, but they hadn’t been reported as stolen.”
Another sled was found in the Pueblo city limits and in the police department’s possession.
According to Phelps, groups from Pueblo who knew one another came to the Gunnison Valley on two occasions to take seven, possibly eight, snowmobiles. So far five of those sleds have been recovered and a case is being built against no fewer than four individuals in their 20s and 30s.  
“This hasn’t all played out yet,” Phelps said. “Right now we’re unsure of how many people we’re going to charge.”
Once the charges are filed, the case will come back to Gunnison County Court.
Beyond the stolen snowmobiles, Phelps adds that this past winter had more petty theft and vandalism of snowmobiles than he has seen in the last 16 years.
“That’s our standard of living and it makes sense to us, even though I know it doesn’t always make sense to other people,” Phelps said of the snowmobiles parked at the Kebler Trailhead. “But we’d all appreciate it that if as soon as the Kebler Pass Road is cleared, the snowmobiles go away.”