The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
The feeling hasn’t changed much, even if the lift ticket prices have
By Cayla Vidmar
There are tourists, there are second homeowners and then there are long-distance locals—people so influenced and shaped by a place visited once or twice a year over the course of their lives that the place becomes more like an extension of family than a dot on a map.
Such is the case with 83-year-old Jules Bohnn, who began his frequent sojourns to Crested Butte in 1966, back when a family ski trip would run you $500 or $600 and a lift ticket would put you back $18. Jules was tipped off by a neighbor in Houston who told him Crested Butte was “really cheap” for family ski vacations, and so began a 53-year relationship with the town at the end of the road.
Three generations of life-long visitors of Crested Butte sat around the table last weekend listening to Jules tell his Crested Butte love story, while piping up with their own tales of yore. Ski boots made of leather, the Fantasy Ranch summer camp song, sung from memory, and the “hairy” road winding in a hair-pin turn from Crested Butte to the ski resort were all part of the story, as vibrant as if “Crested Butte” was actually a distant cousin made of flesh and bone.
Memories bubbled up to the surface for everyone sitting around the table, and while the tales looped and jumped years and tellers, beginning in one person’s mouth and finishing in another’s, it was obvious each person had been shaped by Crested Butte in one way or another.
Jules’ love for Crested Butte was passed to his siblings, children, step-children, wives and their families, creating an extended family whose remote outpost remains to be the Alpine condo he purchase in 1968 or ’69. He may very well be the last original owner of the ten-unit condo complex, one of the first buildings to go in on the mountain, now sitting directly across Gothic Road from the Lodge at Mountaineer Square.
Chandler, Jules’ daughter, told of her two children, Hampton and CC, who asked for a mountain-top baptism performed by Tim Clark from the Union Congregational Church. “This choice seemed to also resonate a deep sense of connection, belonging and spirituality with them,” she says.
Le, Jules’ son, recalled ice skating on Peanut Lake as a kid, the inevitable snowball fights he had with Chandler, and the sense of reconnection they have as soon as they arrive to the valley.
Chandler and Le chided their father about not taking the opportunity to purchase the resort from Dick Eflin for a million bucks when he had the chance back in the day. He smiled, and told tales of Dick being his first ski instructor, back when the base area ended in straw and mud, and you never had to make plans on where to meet—the answer was always at the bottom.
Jules nodded toward the hooked peak of Mt. Crested Butte, which glowed in the full moon light through his kitchen window, and with tears in his eyes and scotch in his glass, said, “I’m not a very spiritual person, but you go up there and you pray with your eyes open.”
It’s these small moments in the face of such profound beauty and wildness that is just one reason the family has been coming back year after year, regardless of an extensive list of global ski vacation destinations under their belts. Another reason, they say, is that Crested Butte feels like a “real town,” and a “homey” place. Jules’ sister Bonnie recalled a moment that doesn’t sound too far off from current events, when they misplaced their toddler, who wanted to walk back home from the base area and ended up at a neighbor’s making a snowman and drinking hot cocoa.
It can still be said that Crested Butte is both homey and real, the road winding up to the resort can still get hairy in a two-wheel drive during a blizzard, and people are often misplaced and then found playing in the snow with strangers. Though much has changed in the 53 years Jules has been coming to his favorite mountain town, we can all agree when he says his favorite moments here are “when it’s quiet and snowflakes are coming down.” That’s when Crested Butte takes on a special life all its own.
