PROFILE: MICHAEL BLUNCK

[ By Dawne Belloise ]

By the time you read this Michael Blunck will be on the road from Denver, peddling his Dragon one-speed townie through the high mountain plateaus, up Cottonwood Pass, dropping into Taylor Canyon and on into the Adaptive Sports Center’s base camp during their Bridges of the Butte fundraiser in town. During test runs Michael exclaimed, “I keep blowing up my rear hub! The coaster brakes get hot and lock up and then you have to take them apart and rebuild and re-grease them,” and he’s a bit nervous about that, but really excited about the challenge.

Hailing from Winnetka, Illinois, a northern suburb of Chicago, his dad was an Air Force doctor during the Vietnam war who was stationed at Holloman AF Base in New Mexico. After completing his service obligations, the family moved back to Chicago. Michael’s mom was a homemaker, caring for their three kids on the shores of Lake Michigan.

Michael and his friends and siblings lived, played and rode their bikes by the beach. He recalls really big waves on the lake from those nor’easter winds, but he grins, “It was the Midwest, we weren’t into surfing. I guess it was the whole landlocked thing.”

Michael played a lot of sports growing up and when he was a Little League kid, his dream was to play centerfield for the Chicago Cubs. In his teens and through high school he played baseball, football and hockey. “After my sophomore year, I went to a tryout for the Kansas City Royals. They told me to stick with school…” he shrugs with a grin. 

Michael’s life changed drastically just before his 16th birthday. His father died in a plane crash on his way to a dream hunting trip with two long-time high school friends. “They never made it to Smithers, British Columbia. They didn’t clear the mountain pass.” He graduated in 1984 and enrolled at the University of Wisconsin–Madison mostly because, “back then the drinking age in Wisconsin was 18.” 

Michael thought he was going to be a doctor, like his late father, and he enrolled in pre-med classes. He had six hours a week of chemistry lab where his table was right next to the ether tank. “We did experiments using ether and when I got home I couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t focus on studies. I realized toward the end of the semester that the vials were always open and the fumes were right there,” he says of the ether buzz he constantly sported. By the end of his freshman year he decided he wasn’t cut out for the medical profession.

During college, Michael was working as a runner for the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. He would take the orders from the desk to the brokers, the brokers then filled the orders and returned them to the runners who took them back to the desk to have them completed over night. “My grandfather was one of the original members of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and he was able to get me and my sister a job.” Michael also worked for the Chicago Board of Trade where he was an arbitrage clerk. “I worked for a broker and the phone desk would communicate to me, via hand signals, what and when they wanted trades done then I’d turn around to the broker behind me and tell him what needed to be done.” 

He was really enjoying the work and thinking he could quit school and continue at the exchange until one day, “We were dealing in treasury bonds and my broker boss purchased some for himself because he thought the price was going to go up. One of our responsibilities at the end of the day was to make sure our trades were balanced.” But his boss made a crucial mistake that cost him a tremendous amount of money and he told Michael he couldn’t afford to pay him anymore. The ordeal convinced Michael to stay in college where he graduated in 1988 with a Bachelor of Science in Economics and Political Science. 

“Crested Butte found me,” he smiles and recalls that back then Crested Butte Mountain Resort had a student recruitment program and Michael interviewed and was hired. “I had a job and a place to live before I even knew what Crested Butte was. I had been to Aspen, Breckenridge and Steamboat but never CB.” Michael had started skiing when he was 11 as part of a ski club called “The Snowflake Club” that took excursions to Wilmot Resort in Wisconsin. “It’s a Vail-owned Epic resort. It’s just a little hill, only 250 vertical feet that might have originally been a landfill. They made snow. If you skied at Wilmot, you ride the lift all the time since it only took maybe 10 seconds to get down the run. Think Peachtree Lift, that’s the top of Wilmot. And it was like greased lightning,” he laughs. His family took ski trips throughout his teenage years. “I fell in love with the mountains and the beauty.”

Michael began his post college job at CBMR in November of 1988. “I loaded up most of my belongings as a 22-year-old, like my stereo, skis, bike and some clothing and I drove out in my old Jeep Cherokee. I distinctly remember looking in my rear-view mirror as I was leaving the Chicago area and thinking, I don’t think I’m coming back.” He laughs about driving through Gunnison and thinking, “Where do they ski around here?” but that revelatory view came into sight as he headed up the valley and as the expanse of it unfolded, he felt, “I made a good choice.” 

Michael’s first job was the lift op at the North Face, before the High Lift was around and you had to hike to Headwall. He remembers that it was really cold, but not a humid Chicago cold where the wind chill blowing off the lake dropped it to 70 below. Working the North Face Lift, Michael got to know the locals and quickly became friends with everyone in town. “I was loving it.” 

In January of 1989, he remembers very well striking up a conversation, “under the moose at the Talk with one Lisa Straubhaar and I guess we’ve been dating ever since.” He comments that it was fortunate that he actually liked Lisa because CBMR lift maintenance supervisor Dave Oberosler took him aside one day after he discovered Michael’s fondness for her, sized him up and declared, “If you do anything bad to her, I’ll kick your ass all over the hill. My kids grew up calling him Grampa Dave.” Michael and Lisa married in 1992 and their son Nolan came along in 1994 and Aaron in 1996. 

In spring of 1991, Michael was hired as an accounting clerk for CBMR, a full-time year-round job with benefits. The following year, CBMR implemented an Oracle software program. “They gave a bunch of us ski bums computer books so we could learn how it works. It didn’t go well at first but some of us learned a lot.” 

Having learned Oracle, Michael was hired by Berger and Company in downtown Denver in 1995. “We ended up moving to Conifer and I started my computer consulting career. I love playing with computers, people and software.” Although he liked his work, Michael didn’t love Conifer so they moved to Evergreen. Still, Michael says, “It wasn’t Crested Butte.” The Oracle consulting became competitive and it was evident he’d have to start traveling to continue work. That was the opportunity they took to move back to CB in 2000. “I wanted Lisa to be comfortable and have friends when I was traveling for work. Nolan was going into first grade and Aaron was only four.”

 Michael traveled all over, helping companies install and use the software.  “Once it was ready to go they got rid of the consultants,” he discovered but notes that some projects lasted longer than others. “I quit the consulting company I was working for and went out on my own as an independent in 2002,” calling his new business Whetstone Consulting Solutions. His clients were large corporations and governments, like the State of Colorado, the City of Detroit, and the State of California. Michael spent four-and-a-half years traveling, Sunday through Thursday, traveling to Seattle to work for King County. He also worked for more than five years for a gold mining company, teaching computer classes for them in Tanzania and Chile. “I’d love to go back to Tanzania. The people I was working with were great. In Santiago they start late…at 11 p.m. they are just getting warmed up. They know how to party but I had classes to teach in the morning, so I lasted to midnight and that was it,” he tells. With all his traveling, Michael laughs that, “Flight attendants and airport people knew me on a first name basis.” He had so many frequent flier miles that he used to give them away.

Michael still has his consulting business but took a job last year as an Oracle consultant with Garlock, an upstate New York company that makes industrial seals for everything from nuclear physicists to pharmaceutical businesses. During COVID, Michael was able to work full time from home, which led him to believe, “Life’s too short not to go out and ski during my lunch break.” He got in more than 100 days of runs the last four ski seasons. 

Like a lot of locals, Michael says, “I came here to ski, but I stayed because of the summer. When I first moved here, summers were so much fun because we had the whole town to ourselves. Summers weren’t busy but, like most locals I still have my places in the busy summers where I can go that I won’t see a single person. That’s what keeps me here, and it’s my wife’s hometown.”