PROFILE: Anne Moore

“I was conceived in Crested Butte,” Anne Moore smiles, then pours herself a glass of Champagne and nestles into the couch after another fast-paced day of serving plate after plate to happy Last Steep customers. Definitively on the snappier side of Crested Butte fashion, her lemon miniskirt topped with a sweater emboldened with a larger-than-life felted letter “A” defies her mountain girl upbringing.
But make no mistake, she’s the real deal, take no BS, no whiners, live your life woman. Her parents, Lynn and Buddy Moore, met on the Paradise chair lift in the early 1980s. Today, Anne laments, “How am I supposed to meet anybody with these high-speed lifts?” To give you an idea of the slower pace of the lifts back then, her dad had ripped his jacket getting on the chair and Lynn whipped out the sewing kit she carried in her backpack and stitched it up right there on the way up.
“That’s how we have to roll up here, be prepared all the time,” Anne says of the Buttian way of life.
Her parents went on their first date to Donita’s, where a liter pitcher of margaritas went for $2, back when it was in the Elk Mountain Lodge. “It was game on from there and shortly afterwards I was conceived, probably at the Talk of the Town on New Year’s Eve since I was born in September,” she notes with a grin and adds, “I can do the math on that. In the delivery room as I was being born, my dad said that when he caught me, I opened my eyes and looked straight at him and he knew he was in for it with me.”
Anne points out the young couple had moved to Wyoming to be close to Buddy’s family. “They were babies having babies. I was six years old when we moved back to Crested Butte,” but not before they lived in other ski towns—Frazier, Copper Mountain, Summit County. “I met John Elway in his heyday in the elevator at Copper Mountain. He had a suit on and his teeth were huge. That’s what I remember at five years old,” Anne chuckles.
When the family arrived back in Crested Butte, Anne enrolled in first grade with the nine other children in her class at the old stone school, which is now the town offices.
“It was tough growing up here for me. I was a bit of an outcast. I was chubby, poor and had a bit of a bad attitude. Freshman year was the first year the new school opened. We were the first class in 35 years that didn’t have to leave Crested Butte for a high school education,” Anne says, noting that the private Crested Butte Academy was too expensive for most.
“Our class broke ground for the new Crested Butte Community School with our little shovels. The first thing this school ever won was a Knowledge Bowl in Telluride and I was on that four-person team. It’s so funny—I can look at every mural, all the paint, everything that’s in the old stone school building now and remember when it happened. We used to be the Crested Butte Huskies but when the new school opened, the students voted our new mascot to be the pug.
“We were all in humanities, reading the Iliad and the Odyssey,” Anne says, explaining that the person who suggested the pug had read that all the historic warriors from Genghis Khan to Napoleon preferred pug dogs. But pug dogs don’t exactly instill fear into the opposing team and the cheers just sounded silly ending in “We’re the Pugs!”
“Everybody who had a voice—PTA, parents, teachers—said absolutely not. We re-voted the mascot to the Titans,” she smiles.
Anne learned to ski at Copper Mountain, a four-year old on huge moguls. “I skied through adolescence. In Crested Butte, Dad was a snow maker and cat driver. By the time I was in middle school Dad was a full-time ski patrol and mom was putting a bookkeeping business together and working several jobs.”
Around 1995, her father decided it was time for him and his daughter to do something adventurous—take up snowboarding, which at the time wasn’t popular. “Both my parents are natural athletes. I remember having a panic attack on Houston because the learning process on a snowboard is brutal, but once you get it, it’s easy.
“Around this time I decided I wanted to telemark ski. Everybody’s got a different motivation when they go skiing…. some want to find powder stashes or hit jumps or pound it straight to the bottom, but for me, my motivation was to make the prettiest turns possible. I could write poetry on my telemark skis.”
Then a couple of years ago, Anne locked down her heels to ski faster and more aggressively. “I fought those alpine skis the whole season. It’s different and it was like I was learning a new sport. Last year we had so much snow, I opened up and let myself go. I had a huge breakthrough. I’ve been skiing almost my whole life and I still get so excited about learning something new and I can’t wait to push myself harder and rip this year.”
In Anne’s sophomore and junior high school years she went to live with her uncle’s family in New Jersey, a tremendous culture shock. “I’d never seen so many people or cars. I couldn’t even wrap my mind around it. My second day there and I’m walking around with a map for the school. There were 2,500 kids, more people than were in Crested Butte. I was like an alien. Not that I didn’t have a fantastic time and learn a lot. I learned that the world is a big bad awesome place and you can be whatever you want. It showed me that there was more to life than here in Crested Butte. When there are more options it’s amazing, and it opened my mind.”
When Anne returned to town for her senior year at CBCS, she discovered that with all the classes she had been taking in New Jersey she basically had enough credits to take whatever she wanted in her last year. “The curriculum hadn’t been established here yet. All I actually needed to graduate was three credits. My mom let me drop all of my senior classes except math and I took English through a correspondence class. I went skiing every day, ripping around on my tele skis. It was a blast until the ski area closed and I was bored as hell because all my friends were in school. Every day I drove up to my friend’s mom’s house and used her tanning bed. I was so tan I wore a white dress to prom.”
Attending WSC for business, Anne’s life changed when her dad decided to run for U.S. Senate on an independent ticket and she moved to Denver to manage his campaign. At one point, Anne and her dad were escorted out of a John McCain rally by Secret Service men when her dad stood up from the front row and called McCain a liar, challenging his statement about wanting peace. “We were really fighting for our rights—it was empowering. They always gave me the megaphone on the 16th Street Mall during protests. I could belt it out! Dad bought a 1984 Bluebird tour bus for the campaign that used to be owned by String Cheese Incident. It had orange shag carpet and bamboo floors,” Anne recalls fondly.
“During the Democratic National Convention [DNC] in Denver we were fighting for ballot access. We were literally just learning about it all, we had no idea,” she says of the difficult process of trying to get her father onto the election ballot. “We had a permit to protest at the park across from the Pepsi Center. We had all this space along the highway to line signs with and huge groups of people. The Secret Service was everywhere.” Anne didn’t flinch as a helicopter flew so close above her that it blew her hair around as the people in the copter watched her paint campaign signs.
“When my dad asked me to come on this adventure with him I didn’t know it was going to change my life completely. I just thought for sure everyone was good and when presented with evidence they would make the right choice,” Anne says, but she learned, “We’re too intent on maintaining the status quo, because change is scary.”
Last year the reality of turning 30 hit Anne, but only for a moment. “I thought, ‘Holy sh*t, I didn’t make any plans!’ I had no idea where I thought I’d be at 30. I can’t believe my parents didn’t tell me to plan! It’s always been like, follow the river, follow the path, make good choices, it’ll be fine, no whining!”
But the truth is, Anne feels she’s literally following in her mom’s footsteps. “My mom is my best friend. She’s living the dream that I want to be living. My mom taught me how to ski across this mountain my whole life and she’s still teaching me now. She’s the best—just great company, light and funny.”
Anne says of her life in the community, “I am the participator, I participate in everything. I support my friends, the events that I can and what I believe in. Everyone was so concerned about our integrity in the Whatever event. The only thing we have to do to maintain our integrity is to be nice to each other and to the guests because that’s what people like best about this place. Visitors feel like they belong here and they want to be a part of it. I’m here because I love this town so much, it’s awesome. The grass isn’t greener, I checked it out. I feel like this town is my responsibility: What are we going to be, what are we going to do? We have to make choices. We’ve already decided we don’t want to be a mine, so let’s be a venue. We need to have consistent traffic along with big events that bring in lots of people for a short amount of time and then they move on. That will suit this town the best, but that’s just my opinion. I want to be here and make the world a better place. Why not make it better here?”