The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
Last week we looked at people who divide their time between home, here in the Valley, and work somewhere else. This week we’re staying closer to town with people who are finding ways to adapt in a unique mountain economy.
The Veteran
It was 1971, about a year and a half after the Callaway family bought the ski area in Crested Butte. Vacationers from Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas were buying dilapidated houses in town for a few hundred dollars to stay in while they came to fish for the summer. It was cheaper than buying a tent. Just 300 people occupied the north end of the Gunnison Valley year-round, but a transformation was taking place.
Eric Roemer remembers coming to that Crested Butte from New York with hopes of seeing his own success rise with the ski area’s. As someone who had always liked finding and fixing old things, he saw a lot of potential here.
“The idea that we were going to come out here to hang out was not the game plan,” he says. “We thought, at that particular point in time, we’d have some opportunity to grow with the new resort and participate in that in some fashion.”
Nearly 40 years later, Roemer’s participation in the town’s growth has meant adapting to the times and responding to the needs of the community. First it was food at Penelope’s, the restaurant he and a few partners started in the winter of ’72 in a house they’d renovated on Elk Avenue, where Ryce is today.
In rebuilding the restaurant, he “learned to swing a hammer” on his own project and as a laborer at the San Moritz, then the Whetstone Building and Snowfall Point. With the skills he’d gained, Roemer started a framing crew and eventually took work as a general contractor. After building 12 condominium units in town, he was able to sell them all in the same year. In 1981 he bought the Wooden Nickel.
“Between the combination of all those things, I was able to afford a living here,” he says, naming four restaurants and a number of other ventures he’s been involved in. “There’s always been enough going on, but it was never just one thing. Being involved in several things simultaneously is the only thing that has allowed me to weather the storms here.”
And there have been several storms—four periods worthy of being called a “downturn” stand out in Roemer’s mind.
“There have been a lot of people who have packed their bags and left because they couldn’t see another way to make a living and sustain themselves … So they left and it’s a shame,” he says. “We’ve seen a lot of great people come and go out of here.”
When he looks around town, he doesn’t see many faces from the early days of Crested Butte, maybe 20.
But where gaps appeared in the community, he also saw new faces step in to fill them. Over time, he says, the town grew in fits and spurts. He saw growth opportunities for the ski area missed or taken away, and thinks the local economy, and those who depend on it, suffered.
“I always say Crested Butte’s biggest problem is that it doesn’t know what it wants to be when it grows up. Nobody would be in this town today if there weren’t a ski area here. Not one person. When the mines closed they were down to 40 people living here … We’ve got a great attraction and we could make it that much better by allowing it to grow,” he says. “If you don’t grow, you die.”
Settling in for the long haul
Imagining growth in The Milky Way, a bedroom-sized women’s boutique on Elk Avenue, isn’t an easy thing to do but that’s just what Missy Ochs has in mind. But with physical growth out of the question, she’s focused with equal parts analysis and optimism on continuing to build a business she’s been involved with for a decade.
“I’ve worked here at The Milky Way seasonally for a lot of years and I know the store and I know the lines and I love the people we sell to. So for me, the business itself wasn’t scary,” says Ochs, who bought the store last month. In searching for the right place, she separately considered buying four retail businesses along Elk Avenue.
“It’s a very calculated risk for us,” she says. “In talking to friends of mine and family members that are involved in higher finance and out there in the real world, things are starting to look up in a lot of places. If it’s looking up for them, maybe it can look up for us.”
She shrugged off a man who came into the store to tell her what a bad time it was to buy a business. “I said to him, ‘Well, I choose to look at the positive in life so I feel like we’re going to do just fine.’ I think if you keep that attitude you’re going to go a lot further than if you’re just sitting around going ‘Oh boy, there’s only 2,200 people here instead of 5,000.’”
Ochs’ approach to growth is to offer the women who come through the front door exactly what they want.
“It’s up to us to find a product that our customers, who are here, are looking for and I think that’s half the battle,” she says. “If we can do that well then it won’t matter if there are only 2,200 people, if they all come to your store and buy something great.”
Away from the flux in visitor traffic, other business owners are finding ways to grow as technology works to shrink the distance between here and anywhere else.
Divide and conquer
When Gabe Martin and Jesse Weyl started Colorado FreeSkier in 2006, they knew they wanted to take their business online and grow with the industry, without losing a connection to Crested Butte. Three months after opening the doors at the base of Crested Butte Mountain Resort, ColoradoFreeSkier.com went live.
“One of the ways we looked at being able to have a ski shop in Crested Butte was by looking at what we were wearing and what our friends were wearing,” Martin says. “You couldn’t buy it here, so everyone bought their stuff online.”
More than five years later, Martin is involved in a tangle of manufacturers and distributors that makes everything in his store available online, which can boost the number of skis going out the door and drop the price to be competitive in a worldwide market.
“It’s a Catch-22,” he says. “Because I want to have the cheapest price online, I have to have the cheapest price in my store.”
Gradually, he says, the growth in online sales—and the ability to weather local storms with an online presence—is giving his business plan credence. This past November, sales were up 23 percent over last year and online sales grew again in December, helping to balance the dip in the number of people going through the door.
“Last year was our best year yet and this year could be even better,” Martin says.
A new place to grow
Montanya Distillers, which opened in town last year, is also seeing more product hit the market, with distillers recently turning up production 50 percent to meet new demand for the Crested Butte-cooked rum in California and Arizona.
After nearly six years building their company in Silverton, Karen and Brice Hoskin moved the distillery—along with Mountain Boy Sledworks, which they started in 2002—to Crested Butte and have found room to expand and meet demand on both fronts.
As entrepreneurs living in the west for the past 20 years, the Hoskins have found ways of building successful businesses in small, end-of-the-road locations.
“For me and Brice, it’s about quality of life,” Karen says. “Neither of us has ever been a city person. If you took us to urban areas and asked us to make businesses, the business might be incredibly vital, but we would be miserable. So if we are going to be entrepreneurs, it’s going to be in a mountain town. It’s just who we are.”
And who they are is also reflected in the products they make, and the products they make reflect the places they’re made in.
Mountain Boy Sledworks, which moved its base to Crested Butte from Silverton last year, got its start with the idea that people wanted a better sled, in places where they could be appreciated on snow-packed mountain town streets. That niche began bridging into the mainstream and the Hoskins have been able to expand sled production ten-fold since 2002.
“My husband had always loved sledding but he had always been frustrated by the Flexible Flyer. So he wanted a sled that performed better,” Karen says. “Then the company grew out of that and things took off from there. LL Bean ordered them the next year.”
Bryce had built only a couple hundred sleds before his model caught the eye of a major retailer that wanted 1,200 of them. Ten years later, Mountain Boy Sledworks ships around 12,000 sleds a year across the U.S. and Canada, Europe and Scandinavia.
The same kind of growth has been seen around Montanya Distillers in Crested Butte, where plans for more still space are laid out on the hardwood floors of the Powerhouse building, right next to a giant copper still that’s already in place.
The increased interest in micro-distilled rum, Karen says, isn’t much different from the microbrew craze that preceded it. “People like to know where things are made. They like to know how they were made and they like to know who made them,” Karen says. “You just don’t get that from a lot of alcohols.”
So people were attracted to the Hoskins’ liquor in Silverton and as they began reaching out to new markets, the reception was pretty much the same. Today their brand is in 30 states and with the help of a recently signed contract, it should be available across the country in the next few years.
The main factor for the growth, Karen says, was “not relying exclusively on customers in that end-of-the-road place. There were only 550 year-round residents. You couldn’t build a brand on that. There was no way.”
But Silverton did have daily FedEx and UPS as well as freight companies that would make deliveries and drop-offs daily, as well as high-speed Internet to make their presence known online and eventually stay connected with a dispersed staff.
After moving to Crested Butte, Karen says, the company found everything it needed here as well—commercial space, infrastructure to move product to market and people who will work hard, sometimes as hard as the owners. The only opportunity she could see as being better in an urban area is warehousing the stored product, since big warehouses are largely absent in towns where real estate prices are at a premium.
“So much is virtual these days, we use the Cloud and a ton of technology to support the way that businesses work these days, and that technology is completely available here,” Karen says, adding that she and Brice were attracted to Crested Butte for more than just the infrastructure and the ability to grow a business or two.
“We were looking for a lot of the characteristics that we loved about Silverton—intelligent people, soulful community, really great backcountry accessibility and incredible natural beauty. So we got all of those things in Crested Butte,” she says.
The attraction is the same for a lot of people who visit the valley and stay for a lifetime. And many find that adaptation trumps the alternative every time.
Next week we’ll look at a few quintessential Crested Buttians who came to play and work wherever they can to stay.
