The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
“It really is going to be pretty awesome”
Traffic-diverting roadwork is rarely a thing of beauty. But watch a car weave through a cadre of bikes and baby strollers along Gothic Road in Mt. Crested Butte and the Recreation Path extension project in that town gets cast in a different light. Soon, it seems, there will be plenty of room for everyone.
The town of Mt. Crested Butte is in the throes of constructing the 10-foot-wide cement Rec Path extension that will eventually link Marcellina Lane and Winterset Drive with the goal of giving pedestrians a smooth surface from the Forest Service land at the Snodgrass trailhead to the town of Crested Butte.
“Everyone will be welcome,” Mt. Crested Butte Town Manager Joe Fitzpatrick says. “It’s envisioned as a path for all non-motorized forms of travel.”
Work on the .83-mile section being paved this summer, including the major reconstruction of the road in front of the town’s offices, got started last June and is on schedule to wrap up by the end of July. “About three-fifths of the expense of the entire project is in this section, with the retaining wall and the whole mess,” Fitzpatrick said. “Every utility that we have out here, except phone, needed to be moved.”
The task of moving the gas, water and power lines was compounded by the vertical step-up to the road in front of the town office, where a red block retaining wall has gone up in a few short weeks. The wall is just the façade on engineered earthwork that allows the roadway to be wide enough to fit the Rec Path.
Fitzpatrick is close to getting a dozen easements across private property needed to complete the path. “Folks have been very generous,” he says. “So what they’ll get is a paved path across the front of their property that will be landscaped and maintained by the town.” A rock-lined channel parallels the path as it follows the course of Gothic Road. Street crossings will be brick red to set them apart from the surroundings.
“What’s really nice is the separation between the vehicular traffic and pedestrian traffic,” Mt. Crested Butte Councilman David O’Reilly says. “We’ve been lucky that no one has gotten hurt.”
The town has already committed the $780,000 for this part of the project, although a standing agreement with Crested Butte Mountain Resort would cover half the cost once they sell a set amount of real estate. “That’s a ways off yet,” Fitzpatrick says. “But this is so needed, especially this stretch. There’s no place to walk, no place to ride your bike.”
But soon people attending events in town, like Bluegrass in Paradise, will be able to pitch a tent in the town-owned campground and walk to the show “without getting run off the road,” Fitzpatrick says.
In 2010, Mt. Crested Butte voters passed a $2.45 million bond to improve and maintain the town’s roads and build the $1.8 million Recreation Path extension. When it’s complete, the path will provide a much-needed recreational amenity as well as a way to showcase the town, providing what many hope will be an economic boost to the town as well.
“It really is going to be pretty awesome,” O’Reilly says.
