The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
“It’s not easy”
It’s not easy to make it in the Gunnison Valley, but look around and you’ll see people doing it in more ways than we could ever cover in a series of articles. When you’re out looking, you might also see a few common threads running between these people, like perseverance, creativity and a willingness to go to where the work is. Over the next few weeks we’ll look at a range of locals who collectively offer a broad definition of success, and individually manage to achieve it.
In the weeks before Christmas, Ryan Loflin hurried to get home for the holidays. His search for the prize of reclaimed lumber had taken him away from his home and family in Crested Butte to an aged and weathered grain elevator on the windswept plains of Wyoming.
“It’s my first international sale,” he said on a crackling cell phone. Loflin and his two-man crew were in the process of dismantling the 80-foot-tall elevator and assembling the planks of pine and Douglas fir for transport to a lot in Riverland. Some of it is destined for the floor of a showroom in China; most of what remains will be used in a new house being built on Belleview.
As owner of Colorado Barnwood, Loflin’s been able to stay busy these days storing up wood and selling it where he can. But like a lot of his neighbors in a lot of professions, he’s connecting to the outside world these days to find the money that used to be made closer to home.
Loflin’s finding his clients farther from home too, as the building industry here “is still lagging a little.” But the building hasn’t stopped everywhere and some of what Loflin once sold to a local contractor is now sold online before being packed in shipping containers and carted across the Pacific.
“We’re trying to wrap it up so I can send it off to China,” he says. “Then I can try to focus on some other areas.”
The other areas Loflin finds himself dividing his time between can run the gamut, from sculpting to promoting The Silly Smiley Goose, a children’s book he wrote and illustrated several years ago. Then there is The PassonZ, a ski pass holder he saw a need for while riding the Mountain Express, then designed and had manufactured on the East Coast. “I really haven’t had the time to market it the way I need to,” he says. And that’s a good thing, since he’s able to stay busy with reclaimed wood.
While, for the time being, he’s focused on the best way to make money, all of his creations carry the stamp of Crested Butte, if only from inspiration. And he hopes they all have a life outside of the Gunnison Valley as well.
Since we’re not printing cash here in the Gunnison Valley—Butte Bucks aside—Loflin knows money has to come here with someone, and if the traffic on Hwy. 135 is light, staying home hoping for the best isn’t going to cut it.
Finding success outside the valley is just as vital for Chris Tippie at Maroon, where he and his employees are the product. After moving to Crested Butte six years ago, Tippie created the company to grow his “product” and accommodate a lifestyle here in the mountains. On any given day, he can find himself dropping in as an interim chief executive officer or sending an employee to do anything from managing a project to rolling out a product line.
“We grew and we got to about ten people and we’ve dropped it back down to five now. But I’m the only one that lives here,” he says. “They live everywhere: New York, Seattle, Denver, Knoxville.”
With employees scattered around the country and clients around the globe, Tippie says all he needs to work is a reliable Internet connection, a cell phone and air service to support a busy, and sometimes spontaneous, travel schedule.
The air time (and consequently, the airport time) can be intense. Last year, while he was commuting to Washington, D.C. every week, it was almost too much. From the time he turned into Reagan International Airport to the time he got to his office in Crested Butte, it took about ten hours, the same as if he had lived in Denver and commuted to London.
“It’s physically draining,” Tippie says of the travel. “But when it’s all the time, and not just once in a while, it crushes your soul… But the quality of life here is unparalleled.”
Navigating the local air schedule can make it worse, when he has to leave a day early or come back a day late because of mid-day flights.
“That takes what should be a relatively low-impact thing and turns it into something very painful. If you have family or kids or a spouse or a relationship, you have to be really careful of that. That’s the one thing.”
And Tippie might not have known how good a trip out of Gunnison could be had he not found a convenient Monday flight to Las Vegas recently, thanks to the winter schedule, that would take him to a day-long meeting and back.
“Normally that would have been a Sunday afternoon departure with a return on Wednesday. Because of this new flight schedule, I left Monday morning and came back Tuesday night. That’s like being in Denver,” he said. “If I can be in Denver by 8:30 a.m. that opens up the entire world to me.”
And he’s not alone when he gets on the rare early-morning flight out of the Gunnison-Crested Butte Regional Airport. Remote workers, like him, are an existing and growing segment of the economy. Several letters to the editor of the Crested Butte News over the past few weeks from people reliant on the local air service highlight the impact they have on the valley.
“What really is responsible for this [growth] are the changing attitudes in business. One reason you see more people working remotely is a desire to cut costs. But second is the fact that we have a whole line of managers and senior execs these days who feel that they don’t need to see their people to know they’re working,” Tippie says. “And the attitudes are changing all over the world and that’s really what’s allowing this.”
According to Tippie, there is a fluctuating but consistent group of locals who fly long distances to work and return to be grounded in the valley. “Imagine the absurdity of living in Denver and commuting to London every week. Who does that?” he joked. But he and others do, and for good reason.
“This area has an incredibly high quality of life and people want that,” Tippie says, adding that those able to hold down jobs commuting long distances to do sales and consulting generally have to be reliable, hard-working, motivated people, not bad for populating a small town.
“I think it takes a certain creativity to live here and a certain hardiness. But anyone in this town could take what they’re doing and do it in Manhattan and make more money,” says Shaun Matusewicz, a Crested Butte town councilman who returned to the valley from Manhattan and brought a fully developed set of event management skills with him to use remotely. “But we live here because of the community and the beauty of the place.”
He points out how local values differ from those of people living in cities and suburbs, how people in Manhattan carry platinum American Express cards and locally, it’s more fashionable to get a credit card that offers REI dividends. “So there’s a totally different value system here,” he says.
But the value of being connected to the outside world is pervasive in the Gunnison Valley, even if someone moved here to forget that other world exists, or to be forgotten by it (think Murdoch). It’s what allows tourists to get here to ski and buy real estate and it lets locals look for quarters in someone else’s couch.
“It’s not easy,” Loflin says. “But no one ever said it would be.”
Next week, we’ll focus on people earning a living by owning a business or storefront in Crested Butte or Mt. Crested Butte to see how they make it in an isolated market.
