Area businesses enjoying summer season success

July was a trip back in time, and hopefully a look at the future, for some

It’s well after the Monday morning commuter rush and there’s still a steady line of seven or eight cars working their way through the stop sign at Belleview on Hwy. 135. Farther on, a solid wall of parked cars scatters a family trying to go into the Alpineer and Elk Ave. looks like a two-lane parking lot with appropriately placed sidewalks and bike lanes.

But the real action is happening inside.
With a French knife in his hand, Spencer Hestwood, co-owner and chef at the Ginger Café, cubes chicken breast while there’s a lull in the tempo of the kitchen. “It’s been good,” he says. “I shouldn’t be cutting chicken right now.” There was a lot to do.
For many of the merchants in town, this has been a summer reminiscent of years past and a chance to get back on track after a couple of slow summer seasons.
Hestwood says this July, sales at the Ginger have returned to the levels they were at in the summer of 2007, before the recession started to take its toll on the valley. Now he’s hiring more staff throughout the season and finding plenty of people with the skills to do the job.
“The people are awesome,” he says. “Everybody’s eager to work because they know off-season is coming.”
Across the street at Rumors Coffee and Tea House and Townie Books, the coffee shop is 15 percent up over past seasons, says co-owner Danica Ayraud.
Since opening the bookstore, Ayraud says, “Things have been great. It was a good year to open.” With the wet spring and the wildflower displays that followed, she has seen hiking and wildflower field guides go fast. “We’ve sold 200 of these,” she says, holding up a book about local dayhikes. “There were a lot of wildflower people this year.”
Since taking the store over from its previous owner, Ayraud says Townie Books is offering, and finding a market for, new books as opposed to just used ones. She’s finding the new releases going mostly to tourists, “because they’re on vacation and want to relax and they know exactly what’s popular. So they’re looking for the new books.”
Photographer JC Leacock opened his storefront a year ago and he’s happy he did. “Throughout the summer, business has been good,” he says. It’s also been a good year to be a photographer, and although art sales aren’t as high as they might have been before the economy slowed down, Leacock speculates, there’s still a market for the photos being taken this year.
Leacock, like many of his neighbors on Elk Avenue, has seen a lot of people in his gallery visiting from Texas and Oklahoma, but the number of people browsing his art from the Front Range is higher than he expected it would be.
Acknowledging that he doesn’t have the “perspective of merchants who have been here for 20 years,” he says, “My take on it is that we’ve had more people here from Denver than perhaps some other years previously. It seems like Colorado is beginning to discover Crested Butte.
“There are still a lot of out-of-town people,” he continues. “I think it’s interesting that the Front Range people seem to be more of the art-buying type, at least in some respects.”
Scott Pfister, owner of Pfister’s Handworks, Alley Hats and Pooh’s Corner, has seen the shift in clientele too, with more people coming from the Denver area. “A lot more curious people from in-state who have gotten lost trying to find Breckenridge are ending up in Crested Butte,” he jokes. “People are coming in from Denver and saying ‘This is a really cool place.’”
But he also says the people are a sign of summer and it’s still too early to call it a resurrection of the good old days.
“People get excited and think that’s it’s stronger, but it isn’t. It’s always strong in July and August. It’s summer. But my June was the same as last year,” he says. “July could be up. It feels really good, but I don’t know.”
And up on the mountain, GJ Santelli, co-owner of Flatiron Sports says things in June were down and July wasn’t much better, even though the crowds have been right outside.
“There’s been good activity up here,” he says, “but it’s still pretty thin [in the store]. Bike rentals are definitely off this year even with the amount of people and traffic on the mountain.”
Santelli is happy to see people lining up for the zip line and bouncing all day on the bungee trampoline.
“There are definitely more people and I really like that. For all parties involved—the chamber, the ski area, mountain biking—whatever’s going on we’ve got to keep that going,” he says. “Eventually more people will come up to the mountain and more people will shop.”
And the crowd that has been coming through Flatiron also represents a wide swath of the country, from the Midwest to the Southwest, or “everywhere it’s really hot,” as Santelli puts it. He’s also meeting a lot of families from the Front Range who have never been to the valley before, but like what they see.
“That’s good stuff,” he says.
Pfister agrees and thinks the East River Valley will always reach out to a new audience and keep people coming back.
“We’ll always have the draw [to tourists],” Pfister says. “We’re a real unique, special part of Colorado.”
That draw has had an impact on many local business owners that looks and sounds a lot like relief and it trickles down to the towns.
Town of Crested Butte finance director Lois Rozman says the sales tax collection from June was 7 percent higher than it was a year ago, or nearly $180,000. July is Crested Butte’s biggest sales tax month of the year, which hasn’t always been the case, changing from winter to summer in the mid-90s.
In Mt. Crested Butte the peak season comes in the winter but town manager Joe Fitzpatrick says sales tax collections for June were up about 3.1 percent, to more than $66,000, without collecting it all. A strong month in lodging was enough to balance a drop in revenue from retail sales.
“June is way low,” Fitzpatrick says, comparing the month’s sales tax receipts to months like January, February and March, which brought in $194,000, $219,000 and $326,000, respectively.
“The town of Mt. Crested Butte has a long way to grow up to meet winter revenues,” he says, adding that June is still a good indicator of how businesses will do in July.
And down in town, Hestwood was happy to see an effort at bolstering the slow seasons with Crested Butte Bike Week shrinking the spring season slightly, but said, “I think it may have gotten a little overblown.”
 Pfister also wants to see some action taken to push the town during its slowest months. “It’s the shoulder season that I’m concerned with because they’ve been softer than they have in the past,” he says. “I think [the bike race] is great. Anything we can bring to our town to attract people is positive and it’s a real positive for everyone who lives here and everyone who visits.”
And already, for some, it’s hard to accept the coming change in the season. For Leacock, it’s a feeling that even if the easy living of summer has to end, it might linger like the spring snow.
“August is usually when things start to slow down. But I just feel like there’s more of a buzz about this place and I think it might go a little longer than it normally does,” he says. “But maybe I’m just being optimistic.”