The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
“It was a rough weekend”
A big skier-turnout over the President’s Day weekend, combined with an untimely dearth of parking in Mt. Crested Butte, pushed more than 200 cars onto Emmons Road last weekend.
Town manager Joe Fitzpatrick told the Mt. Crested Butte Town Council at a meeting on Tuesday, February 18 that he had opened a section of Emmons Road to parking last Saturday after it became clear that the number of cars coming to town were not going to fit in the available legitimate parking spots.
One level of the parking garage at the Elevation Hotel was closed for a sprinkler system issue, leaving the town to open its Snowmass parking lot to Elevation’s guests.
“That starts a domino effect. The number of spaces [Elevation] thought they needed and the number of cars they had were quite different,” Fitzpatrick said. “They had a need for a lot more than we had originally talked about.”
Fitzpatrick also said, “Crested Butte Mountain Resort was not ready for the need for parking. They had not cleared the upper deck of the new parking garage and they hadn’t plowed [the town] lot they park on. They were using it for snow storage and they have an additional area on the east side of the parking garage that has been historically used for parking … but they’ve been using that area to store snow from the parking garage. All of that combined together, I estimated about 200 cars were displaced … and maybe as many as 250.”
Mountain Express carried 7,011 riders on Saturday and 5,750 on Sunday. For any time of the year, that is a lot of people moving toward the mountain.
To accommodate the number of skiers coming into town on Saturday morning, Fitzpatrick allowed parking on one side of Emmons Road, which he acknowledged narrowed the road to one usable lane and could have created tight quarters in which emergency vehicles might operate.
“I allowed people to do it for Saturday and Sunday because I wasn’t sure if CBMR could deal with the snow they had in their parking lot,” he said. “
Fitzpatrick said he met with representatives of CBMR over the weekend to discuss the parking problems, adding that the resort had cleared the upper deck of the parking garage by midday Saturday, and by Sunday had cleared snow from some of their parking lot space.
With fewer skiers in town on Sunday, Fitzpatrick thought the available parking would have been adequate, but said, “What happens is, you allow people to park on the street for free that close to skiing, they do it again very early the next morning.”
By Monday, February 17, “No Parking” signs were placed along Emmons Road to “retrain” the public.
But the Prater Cup is coming up this weekend, starting February 21, and Fitzpatrick said the Elevation and the Grand Lodge are starting to fill up. He expects the parking congestion to return at some level. And if the season continues to go as it has so far, the parking problems could persist beyond February and into Spring Break season.
Community development director Carlos Velado said repairs on the Elevation’s parking garage could start as soon as March, but probably wouldn’t happen until April, after the ski season ends.
Councilmen Danny D’Aquila, Dave Clayton and David O’Reilly pushed Fitzpatrick to enforce the town’s agreement with CBMR to provide a manned station at the driveway to the parking lot on Emmons Road to turn people away who would otherwise drive to the end of the road, often to drop skiers off close to the base area.
“That conversation has been had with [CBMR] but I haven’t gotten a commitment from them that they’re going to do that,” Fitzpatrick said.
“It was a rough weekend,” D’Aquila said.
