CBMR shares new master plan with local officials

Teocalli Park provides “the meat,” but more to chew on

Picture this: two brand new lifts running a total of more than 8,000 feet from the Brush Creek drainage to the top of a newly opened Teocalli Park. The North Face lift gets an upgrade with chairs. Beginning backcountry skiers can take an avy class and dip their toe in the backcountry or relax in a yurt on Snodgrass. And changes around the mountain make it feel like a fresh experience for visitors and locals alike.

 That’s what leaders of Crested Butte Mountain Resort (CBMR) hope to see started in the next five years, if the Forest Service accepts the revised Master Plan being vetted before it goes for an official review this spring.
“We are required to resubmit a Master Plan,” CBMR director of planning John Sale told the Mt. Crested Butte Town Council Tuesday, January 3. “This one, we’re looking out about five years, where typically the plans are ten-year plans. But given the situation we’re in these days with everything changing, we thought we’d put together a Master Plan for the next five years.”
Sale said since the resort’s last proposal was denied, due to the proposed expansion onto Snodgrass Mountain, the resort has been hearing the calls to make the most of existing terrain on Crested Butte mountain, thinking of ways to do that and finally leading tours of areas they think could have potential.
New terrain in the area, being called Teo Park, on the Brush Creek side of the mountain, is what Sale calls “the meat” of the new Master Plan. When implemented, the new plan calls for two new lifts—about 3,000 and 5,600 feet long, respectively—serving a hundred acres of “skiable terrain” and another hundred acres of extremes.
By comparison, Snodgrass would have added around 250 acres of terrain.
Alongside Teocalli Bowl on the mountain’s backside is what’s being called Teo Two, which is currently inside the ski area’s permit boundary but hasn’t been developed enough to get skiers back from the bottom of the terrain, even though a lift out of Teo Two was approved by the Forest Service as part of the current Master Plan.
“That [lift] would have been great but it would have only served expert terrain … So within this Master Plan we have a new purpose and need.
This master plan is really about creating additional experiences that will allow guests to stay an extra day or two,” Sale said.
Sale explained the shorter of the two new lifts, covering 600 vertical feet and a little less distance than the East River lift, would drop down from the North Face. The second lift would be longer than the Paradise Lift and would travel from the top of Wolf’s Lair and drop 1,800 vertical feet to a wooded bench above East River.
“It would be a little different experience from what you have on the front side, more of a backcountry and what they call sidecountry,” he told the council. “But where most resorts have hike-to sidecountry, this will be a lift-accessed sidecountry/backcountry experience. You really get this feeling that you’re away from the resort and if you’re an intermediate skier, you’re doing something different from skiing the front side.”
But before the resort can start cutting runs, they hope to expand their permit area 400 to 500 acres. Behind the southeast ridge running toward Brush Creek, Sale said, the expansion would also include lift access to Teo One and Teo Two and expert glades.
But the plan doesn’t stop its expansion of CBMR with 200 skiable acres above Brush Creek. There are also parts of the Master Plan that call for small changes to several other areas of the mountain, like additional terrain below Teocalli Lift. Nor has CBMR forgotten about Snodgrass, although some of the ideas for developing the mountain were tempered by the Forest Service’s 2009 denial of the resort’s proposal.
 “What we’re advocating in this Master Plan is to keep Snodgrass in the permit boundary for the next three to five years. We’d like to investigate low-impact activities over there that could include backcountry skiing and potentially doing powder cat-skiing,” Sale said. “We’ve also tossed around the idea of placing a backcountry hut, similar to the Friends Hut up there … That market is really growing at this point. However there isn’t really an easy experience for beginner-intermediates to get initiated into that backcountry experience.
“We think we have a pretty rare opportunity with Snodgrass compared to other ski areas,” he added. “How to develop a business model for backcountry skiing is kind of the crux of it.”
The resort’s leaders will have the next five years to think about how to develop backcountry skiing on Snodgrass if the Forest Service accepts its proposal.
“These are just concepts at this point,” Sale said. “One of the reasons we’re here is to take any input you may have at this time. And it’s also not limited to lifts and terrain. For the summer operations, if there are any ideas we may want to include in the Master Plan for the next five years… When we do a project-specific proposal we’ll get into details. But there are things we’ve looked at,” he said. There are also economic factors that play a part in the resort’s expansion plans.
 CBMR will be taking the plan to the Gunnison Board of County Commissioners on Tuesday, January 24 at 2:20 p.m. and to the Crested Butte Town Council on February 6 at 6 p.m., as well as getting feedback from the community before the Master Plan goes to the Forest Service for an initial review in April or May, Sale said, which will hopefully come back to the resort for tweaking by the end of the year.
“The NEPA [National Environmental Policy Act] review is a two-year process,” Sale said, “so we’ll probably start in three or four years.”