Profile: Jason MacMillan

By Dawne Belloise

Jason MacMillan says that he’s proud of the things he accomplished while serving on the Crested Butte town council for four years, especially having passed an all-electric code for new builds in town for carbon off-setting, which CB was the first in Colorado to pass. When he and his wife Brooke built their new house at Roaring Judy Ranch, they felt it was essential to do an all-green build and net-zero electric house. They’ve been living there since April of this year and since he no longer lives in town, he had to resign his position from town council. Jason admits that living out of town is somewhat bittersweet, having always lived in town, however, he says they absolutely love living the rural life. “It’s magical,” he says, although he does miss being on town council. “It was fulfilling. We had a good dynamic and I really enjoyed the communication, deep thinking and problem solving that it afforded.” 

Jason’s been part of Crested Butte since the mid 1990s when his mom, the late and much-loved local Mary Gordon, moved to town from Vero Beach, Florida, where Jason was born, raised and stayed until he went to the University of Colorado-Boulder. Jason’s childhood days were idyllic as he could walk or ride his bike to the beach, hang out with the other beach rat kids in the neighborhood and surf. 

“Vero Beach was sort of a sleepy town, bigger than CB, but was easy to move around. From a very early age, I was on my bike and at the beach. It’s similar to CB in some ways, but instead of going skiing you’d go surfing and it was safe, our parents never worried about us. We were quite independent,” he recalls. Jason played a lot of sports, but tells, “I was never hyper focused on one sport, I literally did everything.” He graduated from high school in 1998.

Although he applied to CU Boulder, Jason wanted to go to UC Santa Cruz. “But mom wouldn’t let me. She knew I’d just surf the whole time,” he grins. Jason’s mom was living in Crested Butte where he’d visit on breaks.

When Jason was in tenth grade in high school, he had volunteered as a teacher’s assistant in a Head Start program doing activities with small groups of kids. That planted the seed, he says, to consider becoming an educator. He had found Head Start really rewarding. “Service has always been in my repertoire of things.” At CU, he studied Humanities with a focus on English and music. “I always loved music, I only learned to play guitar later in life. My mom had a big record collection that she always played. Music was the strong influence in our group of friends at CU. In Boulder, we’d go to concerts – hip hop, reggae, jazz – I really appreciated all those different styles and genres.” Now he’s learning to play piano alongside his eight-year-old daughter Charlotte. 

Half-way through his courses at CU, Jason began to consider teaching as career because with his Humanities degree, he didn’t feel there were a lot of opportunities. He graduated in 2003.

 Jason taught a combined second and third grade classroom at the Friends School, an alternative Boulder school. “It got me into a paid internship there. It was an amazing experience and I was able to do that and get a master’s degree in Educational Psychology from CU Denver while I was working.”

He earned that degree in 2005. “It was a wild 16 months as a full-time teacher, getting the teaching experience while going to school.” 

Then, Jason decided to move to CB. “My brothers had a room to rent, and I was feeling caged and anxious on the Front 

Range. I was ready to leave.” 

When he was growing up in Vero Beach, his mom had made it a priority to bring Jason and his twin brothers, Seaton and Colin, to the mountains for vacations. He was five years old when his mom strapped skis to his feet and pointed him down the mountain at Crested Butte. It was his first time skiing, skiing CB, and his first experience in the mountains. “As a five-year-old I fell in love with my ski teacher,” he smiles. “I also have these flashes of getting off the old Keystone Lift. It was otherworldly and it had a big impression on me.”  

It was late summer when Jason moved here, and he was hired as a substitute teacher at the Gunnison Elementary School. He immediately landed a full-time position there teaching second grade. Because he was living in CB and traveling to Gunnison, the following year he swapped Gunnison for Crested Butte Community School with a teacher who was living in Gunnison but working in CB. Jason taught second grade at CBCS for five years. 

He had met his wife, Brooke Harless, in 2007 when she invited Jason to pop into her birthday party at the Ginger Cafe. “We’d run into each other for like three years and have great mini conversations but never had a date until 2010,” he recaps. When Brooke asked Jason if he’d like to help her chaperone the CBCS prom, he agreed but said, “Let’s go on a pre-prom dinner date,” which they did, with all the high school kids also having dinner around them. “We decided to dress like it was a 1980s prom. We were terrible chaperones,” he laughs. In fact, he recalls that (assistant principal) Bob Piccaro “actually asked us to leave the prom because we were clearly on a date and not paying attention. So we went to Kochevar’s and finished out the date.” They married in 2012. 

When Jason’s mom passed, he had planned on taking off work to travel for a year. “But then I met Brooke, and we wound up falling in love and traveling together. I started my travels with Brooke in Italy, and we properly fell in love. We had started our relationship going overseas, so it made sense that we moved to Istanbul.” Jason was offered an opportunity to teach abroad at a job fair for international schools, and he and Brooke jumped at the chance and moved to Istanbul in 2012. 

“The population was 10,000 times larger than CB, but that was the point for us: it was a wildly different, huge, sprawling, culturally diverse crossroads of the world, immersed in this ancient culture.” The school was a multicultural international school of English speakers, with students attending from all over the world. In Istanbul, they were only minutes to the airport where they took advantage of the inexpensive flights to travel to places like Georgia, Bulgaria and Italy. “The list is endless, all of eastern and southern Europe was at our fingertips.” 

From there, Jason was offered another teaching position in Aberdeen, Scotland, teaching middle school social studies and language arts. “Istanbul was wonderful, but we wanted to start a family,” and Scotland was Jason’s ancestral heritage. They had already spent time traveling in Scotland. 

“We loved the pace and access to nature, it felt like it was back to our CB roots. We had missed the nature and slower pace in Istanbul.” As a beach kid growing up, Jason had also missed the water and felt that Scotland was a perfect mix of the things he loved, unsullied mountains and ocean. “Brooke, being a writer, loved it and neither of us like the heat, so it was the ideal environment. For me, a storm meant good surf. We missed not having much snow but when you’ve shoveled your whole life you can take a break,” he laughs. Their firstborn, Charlotte, was delivered by a midwife there in 2016. “The care and community were wonderful. We had a CB small-town experience there but on the North Sea in a fishing village called Catterline that was Bohemian-like with hippies, artists and fishermen.” Jason says that Scotland values the arts, and they traveled around the country to the many literary festivals and other cultural events. 

After four years in Scotland, they decided to return to Crested Butte in 2018. “We missed CB and we’d been gone six years and with a newborn, we felt pretty far away. We were worried about the hustle required to live here and it was a hard re-entry.” Jason went back to school. 

“In Scotland, I recognized a focus on sustainability and renewable energy that the Scots, and Europe in general, had prioritized. That value stuck with me.” Attending Western Colorado University in Gunnison, Jason earned a Masters in Environmental Management and wanting to give back to the community, he decided to join town council. With his priorities of climate action and affordable housing, Jason says he’s most proud of the building code they passed focused on electrification. He also feels that the Whetstone housing project was hard but worthwhile. “It’s approximately 255 units and it was a big collaboration with the county. It was contentious and was sort of NIMBY (not in my backyard),” he tells, with some of the pushback being that it was too dense and an inappropriate scale. “There’s no easy solution, so you have to compromise. You have to make hard decisions. The lack of affordable housing was all we heard from people. It’s not easy to build affordable housing.”

Currently, Jason is the sales manager and business developer for ID Sculpture, the local company that builds playground equipment, including for the pirate park behind the Center for the Arts. “We make sculptural concrete, public art and nature-based playgrounds.” 

Now in their new home, Jason says the family has doubled down on remaining in Crested Butte and making it home. Their second daughter, Olympia, is now 15 months old and Charlotte is loving her community and school. “I was afforded a really beautiful and supportive community to grow up in and having traveled quite a bit, we recognize CB has remained this very special, unique space and community and there’s no other place like it. We want to give that to our kids. There’s also this connection in this valley and you can make a difference, you have this ability to be part of something to make change. It’s also quite rare,” he feels, “that you can pull these levers of change.”