Ideas

Aspen has an Ideas Festival. Crested Butte has cocktail parties, barbeques and community concerts where people chat and brainstorm. Sometimes throwing out ideas makes things better. For example, after last week’s editorial, Tourism Association executive director Pamela Loughman and I communicated. I sent her a suggestion of what I thought might be a more appropriate greeting for the TA website landing page. She took those suggestions and improved on them. Thank you. Ideas can sometimes move things in a positive direction even if those ideas ruffle feathers along the way.
Look, everyone has an idea and here are some I’ve heard over the past few weeks. Some are good, some might be bad, some certainly seem a bit too baked in our summer sun. But most are at least interesting enough to chew on…

Promotion ideas: Tout the area as a:
—Wedding destination: check.
—Green (as in not burning) destination.
—Festival (music, art, wildflowers, film) destination–in the works: check
—Ski area–in the works: check
—Stop promoting summer altogether. It’s packed. Ouch.

Out of the box ideas:
—Get the summer visitors who are here now to consider coming back in the winter. Incentivize them while you have them. If every room in Mt. Crested Butte and Crested Butte is booked on weekends this summer, offer winter lift tickets to those guests. Partner with the ski area and for every two-day stay, maybe charge an extra $30 per room and include two lift tickets good for the upcoming ski season. Get those people back here when we need them. Give never-evers a super-screaming deal on top of the screaming lift ticket deal.

—Turn two blocks of Elk into a pedestrian mall between Second and Fourth Streets. We’ve all heard this one before. It would certainly make that area a more pleasant experience but it would no doubt end up impacting Sopris and Maroon in terms of parking. But this idea was thrown out by homeowners on Maroon who would feel the impact more than anyone. The idea was primarily for summer since more people use the bus in the winter and people tend to go inside when it’s –20 outside as opposed to 70 and sunny.

—Second only to the two words “traffic light,” “parking garage” might be right up there with the local cringe factor. But the idea was thrown out to construct a medium-sized, 100-space or so underground garage at the Four-way behind the Visitor’s Center. Dig down so that it isn’t big and still fits into the scale of Crested Butte. Start saving now for a needed project five years from now.

—Turn the pedestrian bridge on the northwest side of town on Butte Avenue into a bridge that can handle vehicle traffic. Right now all traffic heading to that north side of town has to go up Elk Avenue or Maroon before swinging around on Second Street. Making that a vehicle bridge would take a lot of neighborhood traffic pressure off of Elk Avenue, thus lightening up the main business district. This idea would certainly change the neighborhood characteristic over there and there would no doubt be some pretty upset property owners, but hundreds of local cars would be diverted from the center of town.

—Get RMBL and Western State to co-host an annual international symposium on climate change. Get the best and brightest to come here (some are already here) to discuss the real issues and potential fixes. Bring in the scientists and press and make it a real discussion about the future of the planet. It appears to be an issue that isn’t going away and this place already has some scientific ties to the research in that realm.

—Put one great north valley Arts Center with a 500-seat performance hall—somewhere. Maybe it’s in the gravel pit space behind the school. Maybe it’s by the new parking structure in Mt. Crested Butte. But make it a place that draws community, attracts local artists, entices national touring acts and can accommodate our current festivals. Do what is needed to make it a community art center and world-class performance hall. But the idea that was bantered about is to do it once and do it right. Sort of the old fireworks argument.

—Use the resources of the area and the university to expand on high-altitude research. That concept has always been an idea in the area. Being that Crested Butte sits at 8,800 feet and attracts people of all ages, begin studying the effects of high altitude on people and how to best acclimate to a place people want to come to and spend time. In that vein, develop the area as a high-altitude training center for world-class athletes. Granted, some of that is already happening, but push the concept.

So there you go. A handful of ideas of varying value and freshness. It’s something to chew on during these nice, long, warm days…and maybe something interesting will emerge as a result.