The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
“The event was nice, but I hate for us to be their playground”
The Mt. Crested Butte Town Council got an earful from a few residents after Roost the Butte, a second-year snowmobiling event, extended its two days of competition into more than a week of cacophonous X Games practice at the base of Snodgrass Mountain.
Goldlink homeowners Janet Harvey and Beth Wegbreit attended the Mt. Crested Butte Town Council meeting on Tuesday, January 21 to voice their frustration over the event and the lack of responsiveness from the town after they spoke with town manager Joe Fitzpatrick.
“They started on January 10 practicing with their snowmobiles, going well into the evening. It’s very loud, so loud we could hear it in our houses,” Harvey said of the January 17 and 18 competition. “It’s not good neighbor practice at all. It’s incredibly invasive.”
Harvey said she had talked to a number of backcountry skiers who had steered clear of Snodgrass during the week, when custom semi’s and spectators’ cars filled the available parking spaces at the trailhead.
“The noise has been horrible. Imagine having buzzing bees, really loud buzzing bees, for six and eight hours a day,” fellow Goldlink homeowner Beth Wegbreit told the council. “I’m a Californian and we’re here half-time and I don’t want to be here. It’s just too noisy and too invasive and I don’t think my town cares about how we feel. The concern is strictly for CBMR.”
But unlike other types of events or a band that can turn down the volume, a snowmobile’s sound is a byproduct of performance and with some of the competitors bound for the X Games in Aspen the weekend following the race, there was no shortage of performance or noise.
Fitzpatrick said, “Once this thing was in the process, it was in the process. There wasn’t much we could do.”
The town welcomes the event in mid-January, when things generally slow down around town.
“They went out to restaurants and bars, they went to shops, they stayed in hotels and they did provide stimulus to the local economy,” Fitzpatrick said. “That was one of the driving factors in having them here in the first place.”
The event was also the first occasion the town has had to issue a special event permit, since the town doesn’t host many events that have an impact on town resources.
At Tuesday’s meeting, Councilman and Mayor Pro Tem David Clayton told Harvey and Wegbreit that the permit was granted through an administrative process that did not involve the council, but rather the town staff, who needed to know the logistical details of the event.
“In the past, we’ve had most of our events in the history of the town on CBMR property in the base area,” Clayton said. “That’s been expanding beyond the base area onto town property and private property around the town, which has an impact on the town’s public works department and police department.”
Fitzpatrick said since the event was in its second year and did have an impact on the town, the town decided to go through the permit process. But, he said, while the town could shut down the event or provide a police presence, it couldn’t do much beyond that on the basis of the permit.
“If we were going against anything we had agreed to … we could take action,” Fitzpatrick told the council. “But part of the agreement to have this event come here was also to allow them the ability to do some more training and machine-tuning for the X Games. So to get them here, the front and back end were a part of that whole package. And that’s something we’ll look at in the future.”
Town attorney Kathleen Fogo said there were no complaints related to the event on which the town could take legal action.
Councilman Danny D’Aquila spoke up to point out that Mt. Crested Butte is a tourist town and events like Roost the Butte are one way the town can help raise its own profile among tourist destinations. That said, he felt the town should have put stricter parameters on the times snowmobilers could roost Snodgrass, and should have kept the event confined to a day or two surrounding the competition.
“I thought the event went really well. It was noisy but it was a good event. But to lead up to the event for a week and then after the event for several days, why did we consider a permit that would go for such a long period of time?” D’Aquila asked. “I didn’t know the lead-up would be so impacting and that’s what I’m concerned with.”
D’Aquila also was disappointed when he learned that the snowcat activity taking place on the property was not to cut Nordic trails from the Snodgrass trailhead.
“I thought the snowcats were finally cutting trails for our cross-country. But it wasn’t being cut for cross-country. They were starting to move snow around for the event,” D’Aquila said. “So I’m extremely disappointed that, here we are this far into the season and we have no cross-country trails, but we didn’t have a problem getting snowcats out there for 10 days grooming a course for snowmobiles.”
Fitzpatrick was planning to meet with CBMR representatives to discuss all the things that went right, and wrong, with the event before a second snowmobile event comes to the mountain the weekend after the ski area closes.
