The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
“It would give us a place to put either a permanent stage or a moveable stage”
The town of Mt. Crested Butte is starting work on 26 12-by-12-foot tent pads as part of improvements to the 17-acre campground it operates on Snodgrass Mountain.
Fitzpatrick told the council the town is getting ready to open the facility to the public for the summer season after opening for the Bluegrass in Paradise weekend three years ago.
The pads will be the first permanent improvements on the site, where dispersed camping has been allowed intermittently for years, ushering in a new vision for the future. It’s also a significant investment and a first step toward bringing more entertainment amenities to town.
“If you add time and money to build 26, and calculate our labor plus the rate we would bill out our machines at and the materials, we’ve got $25,000 in this project,” he said, adding that building bathrooms on the site would be an equally sizeable investment. “But right now I think it’s going to work. Right now we have 48 reservations for tents and more than 160 people [for Bluegrass in Paradise].”
While patrons of Bluegrass in Paradise don’t pay anything to camp at the site, no price has been set for public access once the campground opens.
Fitzpatrick said there were plans to add more sites next year and potentially a music venue at some point in the future, “where you can have more people than the base area itself can accommodate and it would give us a place to put either a permanent stage or a moveable stage.”
Before that could happen, the town would have to run utilities to the site and a road to access it.
“This campground is currently a walk-in only campground,” he said. “But we could look at designing it for a little more vehicular access and possibly allow campers, etc. But the way the lay of the land is out there, it is a perfect natural venue with a stage and a sloping hill overlooking the incredible backdrop to the west of the mountains … And that could be an investment for the future.”
The council was enthusiastic about the prospects, if not the potential costs, of making the improvements.
