Gray Hares turn 30

By Dawne Belloise

It’s a magical, beautiful morning as the sun warms up the air to a delightful heat wave of 25 degrees at 10 a.m., enough to have the Gray Hares stripping down to their shirtsleeves at the Town Ranch groomed Nordic track. That is not an uncommon weekly site around the Nordic trailheads in the valley these days. This year marks three decades of the senior Nordic skiers’ group known as the Gray Hares, who are affiliated with the Crested Butte Nordic Center and they’re having a potluck party on February 19 to celebrate the anniversary. 

Jane Banks has been one of the volunteer organizers and guides for the Gray Hares since 2013 when she and her husband would visit CB for six weeks in the winter. Jane sets the location for the weekly Wednesday morning ski and sends out the group emails. “I look at the forecast several times, then Sunday night I’ll email the plan for Wednesday out to the 70 people on my list. We have skis on and we’re ready to go at 10 a.m. I vary the location, sometimes it’s backcountry, like Cement Creek or Spann Ranch. Once a year, we try to include McCabe’s outside of Gunnison since we have a couple of Gunnison skiers in the Gray Hares,” she says. 

The group also skis the CB South trails, Town Ranch, Gulch Connector, Rudy’s Rollers, up to the CB country club, and all the Magic Meadows trails. “Some will head up to Oh Be Joyful campground, which isn’t groomed but people still ski it,” Jane tells, and adds that an annual favorite is the ski to Gothic. 

“I try to have options for people because we have older, less aggressive skiers,” she says. But there are also about a dozen newer skiers who Jane notes are a lot stronger, “because they’re a younger 50-ish.” There are several skiers over 70 and a few octogenarians as well. “As we get older, age is just a number,” Jane professes. “Despite the pains and aches, you’ve got to keep moving. It gets me out, it’s social and I enjoy skiing.” Jane also feels that her participation allows her to do something nice for the community.

Cathy Frank was the person who created the Gray Hares in 1995 when she was the Nordic Center director. She was hired in November of 1994, arriving from Boulder, and was handed the keys to the storage shed. At that time, the CB town offices were being remodeled and were temporarily being housed in the Nordic Center. 

“Everything that the Nordic Center owned was out of the building and into the shed and the shed was a mess,” Cathy recalls. “There were snowmobiles, skis and all the paperwork was stuffed into one storage unit. I was new to town and started plowing through stuff trying to get a handle on trails and everything.” She remembers there were only two beater snowmobiles and a really old snowcat, “which was really just a golf course lawn thing that they had adapted to groom trails, but it had no power so it only groomed downhill and couldn’t groom uphill. That’s what we started with,” she laughs.

After tons of hours organizing and moving back into the Nordic Center building, Cathy says she was absolutely fried when a couple of older people came in wanting a ski lesson. Although she was exhausted, Cathy took them out. “It was so nice to get outside that I thought we should do this every week.” Cathy really enjoyed her time with those elders, and they decided to meet once a week. “We came up with the name Gray Hares relatively quickly. We started with five people, and we made it free with free lessons. It was an opportunity to meet the elders,” she says and set the minimum membership age at 50.

Lou Beckman was one of the skiers in that first lesson. “She’s now 87 and she’s still skiing. She’s a die-hard and skis a lot, mostly Town Ranch,” Cathy smiles and notes that the bulk of the seniors who skied with the Gray Hares over the years have done so with everything from knee and hip replacements to heart issues. “And they were real pioneers to be out there trying stuff and we respected that.” Many of those first Gray Hares are now in their 80s. 

Charley Dumas would take one group while Cathy would take another. Sometimes, Charley would take over for Jane as well. The group also added a category for the Grand Traverse, the Grandest Team Award which goes to the team with the oldest combined age. “We always get a plate made to be awarded in Aspen at the end of the Grand Traverse,” Cathy says.

In the summer, they have a softball team, also named the Gray Hares, which they started in early 2000. “We had the biggest celebration after we won our first game. We had runners, of course, and some really skilled and some not so skilled players.”

In the last 19 years, Cathy has missed only two days of Gray Hares skiing. “We’d go out regardless of the weather. As it got bigger, we’d separate the groups into skate or classic ski or snowshoe,” Cathy tells. Today, the group consists of an average of 10 people for the tours and she says that it was always “come as you can.” There are rental discounts for seniors and the Nordic ski passes are free for the 70 and older crowd.

“One of the best things about the Gray Hares is the people who are visitors or who have just come to town and would meet people in the group. I watched that blossom into these friendships and camaraderie.” Cathy says that those friendships go beyond skiing as well. “Independently, people did trips together, like to Moab, Europe, and people come from all over the country, sometimes they’re second homeowners and others who have made Crested Butte their home. The Gray Hares also do a lot of volunteering at the Nordic Center and those elders, those Gray Hares, became a huge source of funding and volunteerism.” 

On February 19 the Gray Hares will gather at the CB Nordic Center at 10 a.m. for a ski on the Bench area and afterward, around 11:30 a.m., the party will head upstairs at the Nordic Center for a potluck lunch. The public is invited to the event where there’ll be lots of memorabilia and some of the more seasoned skiers will have stories to tell. 

For more info about the Gray Hares, Nordic Center programs, trails and the 30-year Gray Hares potluck party, visit cbnordic.org