Waking up in paradise

By Dawne Belloise

“I love living in a small town,” smiles Tom Miller, a Texas transplant with an appreciation for real community. “I love community. I love building community and being a part of community. I’ll admit to being the stereotypical Texan. I know how that rolls, but I’m not ashamed of it. If you’re going to be about community then you are who you are, and I am who I am. And let’s figure out how to do life together,” he says as one who has reached through barriers, resolved conflicts and built friendships.

Tom was born in Nebraska to a farming family. His mother was a small-town Nebraska girl and his father was in Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC). The young family moved to the Dallas-Fort Worth area when Tom was only two years old.

The four sibling brothers had similar interests, says Tom. “We were a big sports family, baseball and football, all through high school. It really shaped our family. I was the oldest and we were effectively raised at ballparks. Mom never missed a game and dad coached,” he says, affirming that he was basically a good kid. “There are no high school yearbook photos that would incriminate me,” he grins. He graduated from a Waco high school in 1979.

With sports such a prominent part of his life, Tom thought he would become a football or basketball coach. He enrolled at Baylor University as an education major with a sociology minor, and graduated in 1983. He coached and taught physical education at Grapevine High School in the DFW area for three years, during which time he married his college sweetheart, Catherine Coyle, in June 1983. Their first son, Ben, arrived in 1989 and their daughter, Elizabeth, in 1991.

Tom had always had the mindset of an entrepreneur. “I had a paper route when I was 11. When an ice storm would hit Dallas I’d go grab my father’s chain saw and go door to door to clean up the trees. In college, I owned a used car dealership,” he says of the origins of his first professional endeavor. To get a used car sales license at that time in Texas, he says, you had to pay $50 for an auto dealer’s license, and had to have a phone, a parking lot and a sign.

“I had my home phone and my house was next to a Pizza Hut parking lot so I took a Polaroid of the parking lot facing my house, so they couldn’t see the Pizza Hut and put my ‘A-1 Auto’ sign in my house window, sent the $50 check in to Austin and prayed it wouldn’t bounce.”

Back in those days, Tom says, the word “entrepreneur” wasn’t used. It was more “I need money.” And he didn’t have any to start up a business or to buy cars at dealer auctions, so he donned his suit, bought a Parker pen and a notebook to make himself look like a seasoned businessman and headed to the loan departments of several banks in Waco.

Tom says, “I went to five different banks and all of them smiled and said no. I widened my circle and went to Riesel, Texas,” where he knew the sons of the guy who owed the bank and the banker knew his father. “He lent me the $5,000 and I was in business. For two years, I bought and sold cars. I ended up getting through school and paying off that loan but I knew I didn’t want to do that the rest of my life. It was just a means to get me through school. My strength was in ideas and the execution of ideas.”

The last car he sold was in the fall of 1982. “I had to sell a car to buy Catherine’s engagement ring,” Tom grins proudly, “so I tease her that she’s wearing a 1974 yellow Ford pickup with a gooseneck hitch in the bed.”

After his coaching job, Tom decided to take a sales job selling training packages to corporations, which entered him into the business world. “We sold packages—video tapes and print-base training for certain trades,” he explains. Two years later he was working sales with a large company, Balfour, selling recognition awards to corporations. “And that’s the business I ultimately left to launch my own company in 1991, Symbolist. We worked with corporations in employee engagement, selling systems and technology and recognition awards. In more than 25 years, the industry changed from awards, rings and plaques to creating solutions for employee engagements.”

In 2009, Tom opted to deepen his expertise for his company, and while waiting at LaGuardia airport for a delayed flight, he picked up an Economist magazine and what unfolded was a back-page ad for an intensive international program run by two schools, HEC in Paris and Oxford in England—Consulting and Coaching for Change. He signed up for the master’s degree program and spent six weeks at each university over the course of 18 months.

“It was designed for people who worked,” Tom says. “It was a wonderful experience and it did exactly what I wanted it to do. It broadened my perspective in culture, on why people do what they do, and gave me a better perspective on how people from different parts of the world really think.” He graduated in 2009 with an MSC, basically, a master of science degree. “It was life-changing for me and it was cool to go back as middle-aged and do that sort of work.”

Tom had been in many university classrooms as a guest lecturer, and he felt it was time for a change. “I like working with young people and I like teaching. I had taught in Iraq and spent time in Kurdistan. I have training in conflict resolution. I was invited by the Kurdistan government and gave a lecture to their faculty on conflict resolution at Duhouk University. Kurdistan has very tight ties to the USA and they are very pro-American. At the time, the security was tight but not restricted in 2011, so I could leave the hotel and go for a walk. I felt safe and it was very safe then. Northern Iraq was far away from the turmoil. Now it’s not.”

That same year he also went to Afghanistan. “There’s a really cool organization called the Institute for Leadership Development. They work inside of Afghanistan, working with locals, training them in a nine-month course. These people are just like us, but oppressed, and they can’t get out. I just wanted to teach students and help.” Tom has taught across the globe.

“About 2012, I decided it was time to make a real transition. I was done. I was tired of running a company. It was really hard to walk away and it took a couple of years to jettison from my own company, but I got it done and I’m very happy that I did.” He felt the need to find his purpose and turned to the idea of being a college professor.

“I had actually been a guest lecturer at Western Colorado University [WCU] around 2013. I talked to schools where I thought I’d be a fit, where smaller classrooms were prevalent. Talking for 50 minutes off a PowerPoint deck is not the way I teach,” he says.

In 2016, Tom chose to teach business at WCU. “I teach marketing and I’m director of the professional selling program. Research shows that 80 percent of marketing majors will go into sales right out of college, and 40 percent of business majors will have a selling role right out of college. What’s happened is that more progressive business schools are beginning to teach professional sales. I’m very grateful to Dr. Pete Sherman, dean of the business school and Dr. Greg Salsbury, president of WCU, for enabling and supporting the program,” he says of the brand new curriculum.

“We’re now placing graduates into Fortune 1000 companies. It’s a brand new channel of career opportunities for our students. I think this is the most important work I’ve done,” Tom says.

Perhaps in a new paradigm, Tom feels business school students are now shaping their perspective on who they are and what a career looks like for them, thinking culturally and holistically. “They’re looking at a career instead of a job,” he says. “It’s nuanced but I think a very important nuance. We’ve got eight major companies visiting WCU this spring for recruiting. We’re in national publications that write about our students now. Western gets to stand on the stage with the big schools but we’re a small school and I’m proud of who we are. I think our students are great and this program gives them a chance to compete for the same career positions as students from CU, CSU and other big schools.”

Tom’s wife, Catherine, flies back to their other home in Texas every two weeks to manage their other business, a co-working space called The Lift Office, which Tom defines as, “A temporary office, a drop-in and work—it’s a rent-a-conference room [theliftoffice.com].” But the two are never apart for more than five days, he notes. The couple didn’t just happen upon Crested Butte. Tom’s family had discovered it when he was in college and the rest of his siblings were still living at home.

“The only time we had to take vacations was at Christmas and Mom and Dad decided to make it a family ski trip. It’s a pretty classic Texan story, actually,” he laughs. “We found Crested Butte accidentally, going to other ski resorts first. We ended up here because a friend of a friend referred us to this place. We always stayed at the San Moritz. Over time, as Catherine was added to the family, she and I enjoyed skiing up here so much that when we had children, we wanted them to grow up skiing here, too. Christmas up here was all they knew growing up. We still gather here at Christmas now.”

In 2013, they bought a house on an alley in town, the decision made when they sat down on the front steps to get a feel for the neighborhood. Tom recalls warmly, “It was not more than 45 seconds and Jen Nolan rides up on her bike and says hi.” What ensued was a 15-minute conversation extolling the wonders and joy of alley living and Tom and Catherine felt they were home.

Having lived here for awhile, they now feel even more enchanted by their chosen community. “It’s where I work and I love the community and the diversity of its thinking. We all have a personal lens and my lens, coming out of urban Texas, it’s like looking through a kaleidoscope here—the individual perspectives, the community collective, in this little valley, even in this alley here, you’ve got renters, owners, a world-class mountain guide, the typical Texans, the new young family, all the different people working through all phases of life. I like that. It’s interesting, fun and different for me. This home here is intimate. We can see life going on. I can wave to my neighbors. And if you want to meet somebody for dinner, you walk three blocks or hop on your bike. I love living in this small town.”

Sugaring

By Dawne Belloise

Very soon Krista Powers will walk among the newly waking trees, deep into the Vermont forest where three generations of her family have tapped the majestic maples for their sap and then transformed hundreds of buckets of it into sweet, sticky, earthy syrup every spring.

Snow is still on the ground, the nights are chilled and the treetops are leafless when the taps are pounded into the trees, but with the winter days warming into spring, the sap begins to flow from the roots, drawing water from the ground, and into the buckets to be collected and taken to the sugar shack. This is when Krista leaves her Crested Butte home and heads east to her family’s sugaring farm to produce her Vermont Sticky organic maple syrup, which she brings back to Crested Butte to sell.

Born and raised in Lowell, Vermont, Krista says throughout her childhood her entire family made maple syrup, “mostly for our own consumption and some friends, along with a few contracts along the East Coast. It was a very, very small business. Lowell is a small community in the Northeast Kingdom.” She says “Kingdom” is a term of endearment describing the northeastern part of the state, the cold belt of Vermont that’s about 15 minutes south of the Canadian border.

When Krista was a child, “We played outside all the time. My memories are of the outdoors, either playing or cutting firewood or working in the garden. I was always swimming in our pond in the summer and ice skating on it in the winter. Basketball was my passion throughout junior high and high school. As a family, we cross-country skied. On occasion, we’d go up with the school to ski J Peak.”

Krista recalls that her childhood was, “a lot of living off the land. We had a large garden. We made apple cider in the fall and put up a lot of produce from our garden, and in the spring we made maple syrup,” a life that revolved around the seasons, each unfolding in its own special beauty.

Krista attended a tiny elementary school with two grades sharing each classroom. “There were only 15 kids in my grade. I went to what was called a union high school, North Country Union High School. Because there were a lot of small towns, all the kids bused to the one school.” She graduated in 1995.

“I was excited to go to college and move on,” Krista says. She enrolled at the University of Vermont in Burlington and majored in environmental studies with a focus in sustainable international development. “I wanted to experience something other than small Vermont so I studied natural history, ecology, human history and tons of Mayan history abroad in Belize. We’d stay with local families half the time and the other half with the group,” she says of her time studying marine ecology and the headwaters of rivers that flowed into the ocean.

Krista graduated in 1999 with a B.S. in environmental studies. “I wanted to go west and explore. I wasn’t on a career track right away. I thought I’d come west for a year with no place particular in mind but I wanted a ski town.” She headed off on a two-month road trip adventure to the northwest—Colorado, Utah, California, Washington, and Oregon, camping and backpacking with a couple of friends. “We were looking for a home for the winter, particularly to ski, and Crested Butte was our last stop. We knew a couple people here and we came over Kebler pass and ended up camping on the river in Almont. It was October 10 and it snowed four inches. We got up and went to the bakery where Pitas is now. It was off-season so there weren’t many people around,” but coming into town on Highway 135 she felt the elation of seeing the snow clad mountains that surround this valley, and thought, “I want to be on top of every one of those peaks!”

At the bakery, everyone was exhilarated with the early dumpage and the prospect of an excellent snow year. Krista recalls, “There was a truck being towed up Elk Avenue by a rope and I was watching all this over a cup of coffee and I felt like I was home. And I just stayed.”

After landing a place to live, which was far easier back then, Krista started working at the Brick Oven and Mountain Colors. “I was scraping to find whatever job I could and I was teaching snowboarding at Crested Butte Mountain Resort,” she says. She had learned snowboarding her sophomore year in college with her season pass to Stowe, Vermont. “My brother taught me to snowboard, but I learned a lot more while I was working for CBMR. I still teach riding but I’m definitely a skier now. I was telemarking back then too,” she laughs about her vintage equipment, skinny 210s with leather boots. She still skis the Al Johnson every year.

After a smattering of restaurant and coffee shops jobs in 2004, Krista was hired by Adaptive Sports as a ski and snowboard instructor while also working at Marchitelli’s Gourmet Noodle, a job she held for nine years from 2005. “I started a landscaping business called Deep Rooted Gardening in 2010. I loved gardening. I grew up loving it, and I wanted to be my own boss. I was gardening by day and working Gourmet Noodle at night. Then in the winters, I was at Adaptive and Gourmet Noodle. When I decided to start Vermont Sticky in the winter of 2016, I stopped landscaping to focus on the syrup business.”

She had been sugaring since she was “knee-high to a grasshopper,” she laughs, and adds, “It had been something I had been talking to my dad about for years.” With her father’s blessing and encouragement from her husband, Dodson Harper, Krista went for it in May 2016. “It’s pretty fun that I get to do this with my family. I feel so lucky that I’ve been able to learn the art of sugaring from my father and grandfather.”

Krista’s grandfather, Archie, started the family business in the 1950s and Krista’s desire for Vermont Sticky is to bring new life to an old tradition.

“Our world is clamoring for healthy alternative sweeteners. Maple syrup, besides having an earthiness of flavor, is an unrefined sweetener—it’s not processed and bleached like sugar,” explains Krista. Even organic sugar is still processed. Maple syrup is low on the glycemic index, lower than honey, and it’s full of naturally occurring vitamins and minerals. It’s the healthiest sweetener for cooking, baking, and all sweet cravings. Sugaring goes back to the Native Americans, when, in the spring, they’d put a slash in the tree and collect the sap. It would naturally evaporate, and render like a hard sugar and they’d use it in cooking and as a trade commodity. The natives passed their knowledge on to the white settlers.”

Krista’s Vermont Sticky is a single-sourced product, meaning it goes directly from their farm to the consumer. “We have a forester who comes out and checks our forestry, making sure that we are tapping our trees in a sustainable way. To be certified organic, there are very specific rules. Even when I was young, Dad would only tap larger trees, never from a sapling.”

The tapping starts in February, and depends solely on the temperature, when the days are above freezing but the nights are below freezing. It’s then that the sap begins to run. It takes 45 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup. “We’re tapping some of the same trees that my grandfather tapped,” Krista notes proudly. “We do 1,800 taps and with the bigger trees, you can have two taps in it. When I was a child, the sap would run into buckets, and we’d have to walk to every single tree, through the vast forest, 100 acres of maple trees, and collect all the buckets. We’d have a sled or sleigh and when I was too little to collect the sap, my father had me drive the tractor. I was six years old.”

The sap is boiled in an evaporator and when all of the water is boiled off, it leaves the sweet, thick tree nectar.

“If there’s a snow or it’s cold then the sap stops running. But when it’s running then you’re constantly going to the holding tanks, collecting the sap and making maple syrup,” Krista says of the labor-intensive sugaring season. The season is over by mid-April when the weather warms because, Krista explains, “As soon as the nights stop freezing, the sap goes through a metabolic change and it’s no longer sweet.”

And in case you were wondering, tapping the trees does not harm them. “It’s such a small amount of sap that we’re harvesting each season,” says Krista. Additionally, the tree replenishes its sap as the roots draw from ground water.

This past April 2018, Krista launched a new product: maple sugar. “It’s just maple syrup that’s reduced into a granular sugar and can be used in lieu of any sugar.”

One day, while biking at Hartman’s, Krista came up with a hydration concept, “to make my own sports hydration with that maple sugar and that’s when Tree Juice was born. I got the idea from my grandfather, whose generation drank a drink called Switchel. Before the farmers would go out for their day’s work they’d mix maple syrup, apple cider vinegar, salt and a flavoring, maybe lemon or ginger, whatever was available, into their water jug and that was their hydration for the day. So I borrowed that recipe but made it more accessible for today’s consumer by making it in powder form.”

She flavors her Tree Juice in lemon-lime and raspberry-lemon. The product debuted this summer at the Crested Butte Farmers Market and can be ordered on the Vermont Sticky website (vermontsticky.com). Her latest product, as of October, is hot cocoa, an instant powder mix made with maple sugar and organic Dutch cocoa.

Krista says, “I can’t imagine starting this business anywhere else. The community’s been so supportive. I moved here for the adventure but I stayed because of the community. I go back to Vermont and the community’s not the same as here… Here, you can be whatever you want, whoever you want, and the community embraces it without judgment.”

By Dawne Belloise

“My life was like The Wonder Years and I was Kevin Arnold. I was a hippie-jock. That was my life in Southern California,” smiles Cindy Petito, the youngest of the long-time, locally beloved Petito Sisters. When she was just ten years old, the family moved to San Pedro, California, leaving their parents’ hometowns of Port Dover, Ontario and Niagara Falls, N.Y.

Her dad, a pharmacist, had gotten a job in southern California because he was tired of shoveling snow. Cindy and her two older sisters, Lynda and Bonnie, have dual citizenship in Canada and the United States. She became excited about the West Coast move when she realized, “I was going to learn how to surf, mostly body surfing. The adjustment was easy and I remember that people at school thought I had an accent. I made friends quickly and we had a good, fun neighborhood.”

Cindy was one of two from her sixth grade class to receive the President’s Physical Fitness Award. “I had a certificate signed by Richard Nixon and won a year’s membership at the YMCA,” she says. Cindy would load up her bike, swimming fins dangling from her handlebars and a raft bungied to the rack, and ride down to the beach after classes. Afterwards, there were wet suits and sand strewn across her bedroom floor, which she recalls fondly, would keep the family cats entertained.

Cindy played volleyball and skied throughout junior high and high school. “I learned to ski on the hillsides of the Palos Verdes, in southern California, by the beach,” which seems like an odd and impossible feat for the warm climate there, but she explains, “They brought snow in by the truckloads and we learned to ski at night since it would get too warm in the day. We also had a ski club and we’d get used to our skis by practicing on the grass.” The ski club took trips up to Big Bear resort.

“I was also interested in acting, but I was shy. There was a clique of theatre kids in high school but I finally auditioned in my senior year. They were doing improv, which I was not good at, so I didn’t get a part. But, I was invited to be part of a class movie project.”

Following graduation in the bicentennial year of 1976, Cindy and her sister Bonnie took a cross-country road trip, visiting sister Lynda who was living in New York City at the time. “I thought I was going to be an artist because I was always interested in art, drawing and painting,” she recalls. Cindy wanted to focus on becoming a commercial or graphic artist, but a field trip to an ad agency changed her mind when she realized how stressful the job was. “I felt the intensity running around me.”

She worked odd jobs, working in a greenhouse, babysitting, cleaning houses. Lynda had moved to Crested Butte in June 1978, and Cindy moved to Crested Butte site-unseen. “I had known about Crested Butte from my ski magazines and also, my sister was here. I remember driving into town in Bonnie’s VW bug and thinking ‘Wow, this is the wild west.’ The streets weren’t paved and there weren’t many people around. I was 20 and I felt like I was on the set of a western movie,” she laughs.

Cindy moved into a house on Sopris that had been moved down from Irwin in the late 1800s. “You could see through the cracks in the exterior door and the house was always cold,” she recalls of Crested Butte’s more rugged days. “Lynda’s room had icicles hanging from the ceiling.”

She had the various Crested Butte jobs, serving breakfast at the Wooden Nickel, working at Chez Porque, a BBQ place where the Talk of the Town is now located (and upstairs was Lawrence of Oregano). “I wasn’t 21 yet but I was serving alcoholic drinks with the food. I played softball on the Final Blows team, a Cinderella team because we won and we were a women’s team. They filmed our championship games and played them on cable TV. I absolutely loved it here. I loved the winters. I got a job cleaning condos where I had the ‘Most Ski Time’ award, which means I forgot to clock out and went skiing.”

She also became an avid mountain biker. During her early days as a new Crested Buttian, Cindy worked for the Crested Butte Chronicle doing the layout and paste-up and became the sports writer as well, using the byline Lois Lane.

In her first summer here, Cindy became involved with the Crested Butte Mountain Theatre, designing sets, costumes, and posters. In 1982, she acted in her first play, the summer production of Bleacher Bums. She had been reluctant to audition but her sister Lynda insisted. After that first performance, she was hooked, unstoppable and couldn’t stay off the stage, acting in three more productions.

Cindy decided to pursue completing her college education and moved back to California to attend school for four years. “It took me eight years after high school and four years of school to get a two year degree in technical illustration,” she laughs. “I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it but I got a job right away drawing airplane parts. I was working for a company in the Redondo Beach area that drew up engine drawings and airplane parts.”

Cindy had met Pepi Valian when they taught skiing together in Crested Butte and they married in Las Vegas in 1984. The couple had their first daughter, Hanna, in 1986 in Anaheim. They returned to Crested Butte the following year and their second daughter, Bailey, was born in Gunnison in 1989. In the 1990s, Cindy had her own drafting business, mostly doing house renovation plans in Crested Butte. She was also manager of the Crested Butte Mountain Theatre. “I put the phone in because we didn’t even have a phone back then.”

When the couple went their separate ways in 2001, Cindy moved to Denver with the girls, in order to expand their experiences. “The spark to move was that there was a girl’s hockey team there,” she says, and both her girls played.

In Denver, Cindy first worked at the public libraries, as well as the costume shop at the Denver School of the Arts and developed a drafting curriculum for set design for the Denver School of Arts. Cindy immersed herself in directing plays at her daughters’ school and she notes that Crested Butte teaches you to be a creative Jack-of-all-trades. “When I lived in Crested Butte I did everything from stacking wood for the mountain condos, to cleaning those condos, to drawing floor plans for homes built in the 1800s, and waitressing.”

In March 2011, Cindy relocated to Colorado Springs when she remarried, and was employed at both the public library and public school library. In 2015 she moved to Las Vegas, “to check out some warmth for a change, working in school library there. I found there are actually a lot of beautiful areas in the Las Vegas valley that I didn’t know about. The mountains aren’t as high but Nevada is the most mountainous state. I did a lot of hiking, because there’s a lot of hiking you can do there. You can’t go out in the summer because it’s 116 degrees for at least three months.”

During her time in Las Vegas, Cindy began to develop her own line of jewelry and ornament design, which she now sells in the Crested Butte Heritage Museum.

The spring of 2018 brought changes once again for Cindy when she and her husband split and she decided to return to Crested Butte, the place she felt was home. With her sisters and their families residing in town, it was a good move. She worked part-time at the Crested Butte library before getting hired last August at Western Colorado University (WCU, formerly WSCU and WSC) as an administrative assistant in the Communication Arts, Language, and Literature Department (CALL).

“Basically, I serve 25 faculty members and I love it. I’m learning a lot of new things. Everyone’s very supportive,” she says of the learning curve. “I wouldn’t have even applied for the position if it wasn’t for the free RTA bus,” she says of the 45-minute free shuttle ride from Crested Butte to Gunnison.

“Starting over at 60 was scary, so I returned to the town that I felt was my home. I’ve lived in quite a few places, but I’ve never lived anywhere that felt like a community that everybody is a part of. I have roots here that I don’t have anywhere else. I moved here 40 years ago and there was something about that time that bonded all of us. I was always connected to this place and people would say ‘Welcome home’ when I came for a visit. I’m inspired by the older, strong women in this town, especially now at this point in my life. It’s very motivating to be surrounded by all these strong women.”

Cindy feels that here at the end of the road and seemingly far from the outside world, “You push yourself to do something you didn’t think you could do and you surprise yourself because you learn that you really are more than you think you are. Not everybody can live here. That first winter I spent here, I really loved that feeling, that it was so extreme and not everybody could be here. It was such a magical time, back in the era when I first arrived. I’ve always been drawn to the cold and yet I also consider myself a beach person. I went from one side of the country to the other and ended up in the middle,” she says.

“Walking around town on the side streets with the snow coming down, it was so peaceful and quiet, even though the tourists were raging over on Elk Avenue,” she chuckles. “It’s really important to me to have family here. I love being involved with the UCC [Union Congregational Church]. It’s another part of the family for me. I feel so welcomed coming back even though I was gone for so long. I don’t ever want to leave again. At this place in my journey, I just want to live here.”

A Driving Force

By Dawne Belloise

Bill Kastning is a fourth-generation Coloradoan, with his roots in Delta County. He was born the son of a preacher man, his father a Baptist minister, and both maternal and paternal ancestry arrived with the second land rush.

He tells of a long family history steeped in coal mining and employed by CFI, the same coal mining company that essentially owned Crested Butte back in the days when winters were colder and deeper, and a grey pungent mist hung in the air from coal fires that heated the homes.

Bill’s dad grew up in Cedaredge. He retells his father’s tale, “He’d ride the train to Crested Butte to play the Crested Butte basketball team and they were afraid to win because the Crested Butte community was all there and the Crested Butte kids were tough. The train was the only way to get to Crested Butte in the 1930s for the Cedaredge kids. Tony Mihelich had told me that they didn’t plow the road between Crested Butte and Gunnison until after WWII, so you had to take your car down to Gunnison to park it for the winter if you wanted to get out to go anywhere. Otherwise, if you left it in town, it’d get buried in the snow.”

Bill grew up in a few places, but he graduated from high school in Trinidad in 1964, “which was like a sister community to Crested Butte because when they closed the Big Mine here they relocated all the miners who were willing to move to Trinidad. A bunch of my classmates there had the same surnames as Crested Butte families, like Somrak, Stadjuhar, and Niccoli. Between cattle and coal, Trinidad was huge with its diverse ethnic population.

“Growing up there was like a scene out of American Graffiti,” he continues, speaking of all the cool cars cruising the strip that was once the road for cattle drives.

“Through the hamburger drive-in and downtown and back around,” he says, it was especially busy during the Friday and Saturday night cruise scene.

After high school, he enrolled at Ottawa University in Kansas with a hefty curriculum of biology and chemistry classes because he loved science, and earned his degree in that discipline. But it was during the era of drafting young men for war by a lottery number system. Bill says after graduation in 1968, “With the Vietnam war hanging over me, I chose to avoid killing people by going to seminary school in Berkeley, California.” He enrolled at the Graduate Theological Union, an interdenominational school. “I loved it but I had no desire to be a minister,” he laughs about having grown up as the son of one.

After two years of seminary he took an internship with Campus Ministry at CU Boulder in 1971, helping to run several programs like social justice, student congregation, and draft counseling. In 1976 he started a senior citizen program in eastern Boulder County, basically Louisville and Lafayette, driving the elderly around to places like Trail Ridge Road in the Rocky Mountain National Park and the Ice Capades in Denver. “The seniors were mostly Italian miners’ widows from the Louisville coal mine. I had a weekly dinner that I organized and they all came to,” he says with affection for those mostly “little old Italian women,” who made his first bus driving experience so memorable.

In 1977, he was living in Boulder, across the street from Mo Siegel, who was just starting up Celestial Seasonings. Mo hired Bill as a salesman but, Bill laughs, “I sucked at it. So he put me in charge of the very first Red Zinger bicycle race as a promoter and I also worked in the warehouse. I organized the Red Zinger route logistics and got all the necessary permissions,” he says. But when the race got really big, which it did very quickly by 1978, Mo hired a professional.

One of the things Bill is exceptionally proud of is his role in the Rocky Mountain Rescue Group of Boulder.

“It’s the busiest mountain rescue organization in the state because of areas like Boulder Canyon, Eldorado Springs Canyon, and Rocky Mountain National Park, where there are a lot of lost or stuck climbers or mountain tragedies like plane crashes.” The percentage of live rescues to body retrievals, the latter being far more common, was devastating to Bill and he tells of the emotional hardship of almost a decade of service from 1972. A hardy hippie sort of mountain man in his own right, Bill explains, “I’ve always loved mountain climbing, mostly mountaineering. I was more into using an ice ax and crampons and climbing mountains around Colorado, Wyoming and the Northwest.”

Bill and his cousin, Roy Kastning, decided to open a photography studio in Boulder in 1978, ColorWest Photography. “We did a little of everything from freelance photography to developing slides, prints and film.” Roy, who had attended Western State College (WSC, now Western Colorado University), always wanted to move back to the Gunnison valley and in 1979 finally convinced Bill of a grand life there. The duo started out behind Mario’s Pizza in a building that they bought and expanded, converting it into a huge studio and lab for portraits and processing film. However, the timing wasn’t in their favor.

“The recession took us down in 1982,” he laments, and they lost the Gunnison building but hung onto the business by moving it to Crested Butte. A couple of years later, they sold the business to Dusty Demerson.

Bill had met Carol Schlaile when they were both working at a summer camp in the Black Forest, north of Colorado Springs in 1966. “She was still in high school and I was…older… and in college,” he smiles. Carol is the daughter of a German immigrant, born and raised in Boulder, and she had never lived anywhere else until Bill brought her to Crested Butte. “Our first date was to climb Long’s Peak. It started as a friendship but we wound up getting married in 1971.” Eleven years later in 1982, their son, Andrew, was born, and daughter Amelie followed in 1989.

Bill built his family a home in Crested Butte South in 1982. To help keep food on the table after they sold the photography business, Bill did a lot of construction before he went to work as a driver for Alpine Express in 1988. At the same time, he enrolled in education courses to get his teaching certification at WSC. Afterwards, he was hired by RE1J schools as a third grade teacher at Blackstock Elementary, where he stayed for 19 years. He retired in 2012 and became a school bus driver when the superintendent of the school district, Jon Nelson, begged him to drive one of the Crested Butte routes.

Bill agreed to stay on only until Christmas break because he could make much more money at Alpine Express, especially with the tourist season kicking in. Six years later, he’s still doing the school bus route because, he smiles, “I fell in love with the kids and especially the sports teams. It was fun to cheer them on and they love me because I don’t just sit in the bus, I go into the event and cheer them on. The highlight, to me, was when I got to watch a bunch of teenage boys have an experience they’ll never forget as long as they live.”

He’s talking about the playoffs and final championship of State 2A soccer that the Titan boys won last fall. “It was the first time a big team sport won the state championship,” he says. Bill enjoys all the teams he transports. “I really enjoyed watching the girls volley team as well. They played the best I’ve ever seen them play this year. I also love watching track and have gone to the state track meets several times. Basically, I just love everything about extra-curricular sports.

Bill is involved with students another way, too. He and Carol initiated the four-day archeology excursions to Four Corners every autumn with the Crested Butte Community School sixth graders to learn about ancestral Puebloans. He also takes the eighth grade class on a three-day cultural and history experience that he started. They camp at the National Sand Dunes and then travel down to San Luis to see Fort Garland, the oldest Army outpost, which dates to the Civil War Era. Then they go on to hike to the top of a hill to tour an ornate Catholic Chapel with life-sized bronze sculptures.

“The rest of experience is just having fun outdoors, climbing the sand dunes, and playing in the water at the bottom,” Bill says. He also drives the yearly excursion of fifth graders to the Denver Museum and fourth graders to the Keystone Science Camp in Summit County.

This coming summer, Bill and Carol plan to drive to Anchorage, Alaska, to visit their son and his three daughters, and explore along the way. “From Crested Butte to Alaska is scenic. Everything about Alaska is like Crested Butte on steroids. Moose will stomp you, grizzlies will eat you and the mountains start at sea level so they look much bigger than ours.”

No matter how stunning Alaska is, Bill will always return to Crested Butte because, he feels, “With all the experiences we’ve had here, we can’t think of another place in the world where a community has your back in every way, whether it’s a wonderful success story like the boys soccer team or a horrible suicide tragedy, the highest of highs and the lowest of lows—this community has your back. This community is strong in its support system and we have an enormous network of friends from living here 40 years.”

Although the community has changed in some aspects, Bill also reflects on the positive. “There are still wonderful things and long-time locals and people to focus on and block out the fact that we’re now owned by a huge resort conglomerate. But we’re happy to live here and we don’t see ourselves living anywhere else.”

“There is so much we are doing, and there’s still so much more to do”

By Katherine Nettles

When most people think of a small mountain town with an internationally famous ski resort, they might not consider the issues below the surface, such as hunger and poverty. It isn’t always obvious that many of the people working to operate the resort live elsewhere, commuting during the darkest hours of the day and managing their own challenges outside of plain sight. When having a brief exchange with someone in a service industry, it might not occur to us that he or she could be experiencing food insecurity.

But according to the Gunnison County food pantry, Gunnison County residents have the highest rate of eligibility for food support services in the state of Colorado, with one in 10 Gunnison County residents considered “food insecure.” Yet the county’s population has very low enrollment in those resources, which means that among the people who qualify for government assistance, there is a huge gap in those using it.

The pantry is working to alleviate these problems in several ways through daily distributions, an emergency food box program, senior services, and children services.

Cassidy Tawse-Garcia, who just recently left the position of executive director for the food pantry, sat down with me on a cold day in early December to talk about how the pantry has evolved over the past few years. Tawse-Garcia was at the time preparing to step away from the position she held with the pantry in order to pursue travel, her Hispanic heritage and the food systems in developing countries of Central America.

Tawse-Garcia had spent the past few years with the food pantry creating the Gunnison Valley Resources Guide, a living document that Gunnison Valley Health and Human Services uses and offers to others as well. This includes everything from the Roaring Judy Fish Hatchery fish giveaways, churches that offer soup dinners, and even a road kill list, which distributes meat from deer and elk struck and killed by cars in the area. She organized the first Stone Soup event, which has now become an annual fundraiser and community-building event for the pantry. Tawse-Garcia speaks candidly about the problems facing low-income residents of Gunnison County, of the connections between a higher cost of living and fewer economic opportunities, and of the undertakings the pantry manages throughout the year.

Citing a study in 2015 which found that Gunnison County has the highest concentration of children living in poverty in the state, Tawse-Garcia said this is “mostly due to the rural nature of our county.”

Furthermore, 36 percent of Coloradans make just enough income that they cannot qualify for social food programs—so if they get caught in between affordability and access, they sometimes might have to choose between groceries and paying their heating bill, said Tawse-Garcia. In those cases, the food pantry can be their only option.

It is a misconception, says Tawse-Garcia, that as the economy improves, wages keep up with the cost of living. Twenty-seven percent of renters in the valley spend 50 percent or more of their income on housing, she says.

Tawse-Garcia, who has been immersed in food in various ways throughout her life, from growing up on an organic farm in Boulder to making cheese in Vermont, first came into contact with the food pantry while working on her master’s thesis, examining how the immigrant community in the Gunnison Valley engages with the food system.

“For me what was so appealing about working for the food pantry was just the people that it serves,” Tawse-Garcia said. She focused her time on the availability of nutrition for those who the pantry serves, describing the concept of nutrients over calories and the struggle to procure fresh produce, nutrient-dense food, and teaching people how to make healthy choices while working with donation items and a very tight budget.

The pantry itself serves anyone who walks in the door. Its stated mission is to provide food to anyone who asks, regardless of age, race, gender, class, or origin. No questions asked.

The daily distributions are a major undertaking in their own right. The pantry is open three days per week at its small storefront on North Main Street in Gunnison, and it served 3,500 people last year.

The average visitor uses the pantry an average of five times per year, says Tawse-Garcia, often during off-season times or before paychecks for a new job have started kicking in. Additionally, the pantry works with the community to specifically target issues for children, seniors, immigrants, anyone in an emergency situation, and those who can benefit from more knowledge of food.

Children services

The pantry reports that 25 percent of the students in Gunnison County School District qualify for Free and Reduced Meals (FARM), a federally assisted school meal program.

The pantry supplements the government program by also providing snacks to school nurses to give out at their discretion, rather than requiring yet another set of enrollment program forms and the possible stigma involved for the children who need to ask for a snack during school hours.

“It’s not enough that they are on the FARM programs, or that their families are eligible for other assistance,” says Tawse-Garcia. If the pantry wanted to provide government-funded snacks, it might lose many recipients due to the process, she says. “I would rather err on the side of providing one child a snack that they don’t technically need, than the opposite scenario,” she said. So the pantry provides the snacks at its own cost.

Senior services

The pantry serves a group of approximately 100 seniors on a consistent basis, says Tawse-Garcia. Many of them are homebound and limited in their mobility. “So this gives them a social aspect and sense of community.” Senior Day at the pantry becomes a weekly chance for people to greet one another, and it gives them something to look forward to as well, she says.

Immigrant services

A unique aspect of the Gunnison immigrant population, explains Tawse-Garcia, is that the largest groups of Cora immigrants in the United States reside between Gunnison and Delta. Cora is an indigenous population from the Sierra Madre Occidental Mountain range in northeastern Mexico that speaks its own language, also called Cora. Spanish is a common second language for Cora to speak, but coming from a very rural, agricultural-based area, many of the people who immigrate here do not have formal education and therefore may be able to understand Spanish, but not read it.

Among this population, visits to the pantry are actually lower. “We felt it was important,” says Tawse-Garcia, to improve the Spanish signage and begin offering translators to make the pantry a less intimidating prospect. “There is a need, but the comfort level needs to be there,” she says.

In 2018 the pantry instituted Spanish-language hours on Wednesday evenings, from 5 to 7 p.m., in order to address this.

Emergency boxes

For those who find themselves in immediate need of food, the pantry offers emergency boxes at 25 locations throughout the county. There are two types: one is for an individual, and one is for a family of four. Each contains enough nonperishable food to last three days, and the Marshal’s Office, the Crested Butte Library, the Almont Lodge, and the Crested Butte/Mt. Crested Butte Chamber of Commerce are among the locations. The pantry reports that there is generally an uptick in the demand for these emergency boxes during summer months, and, notes Tawse-Garcia, “We gave twice as many to Health and Human Services in 2018 as we did the previous year.”

An emergency box can be obtained by calling the local police dispatch.

Education

The pantry food distribution and emergency box programs are not meant to be a long-term resource for someone, of course. In order to increase the self-sufficiency of its visitors, education and outreach programs are also in place.

There is a problem of having access to food, explains Tawse-Garcia, and then there is another issue of having access to and understanding of nutrition. To this end, the pantry works hard to provide fresh food choices to people, and it also does extensive outreach to build up people’s self reliance.

Some food pantry patrons become volunteers as a way to contribute, which can build up their sense of helping others and sharing information. The pantry also offers six-week cooking classes, which teach attendees how to shop for and prepare a well-balanced meal for a family of four for less than $10.

“If we are going to work together as a community…we need to be able to offer them the skills to be self sufficient,” says Tawse-Garcia.

Funding

The connection between the Crested Butte community and the food pantry is that while only 15 percent of food pantry visitors reside in the northern end of the valley, many of the visitors commute to and work in the northern end of the valley. For this reason, the pantry has for the first time in 2018 attended Town Council meetings in both Crested Butte and Mt. Crested Butte to request funding from each entity.

“It’s all connected, and I think as we consider affordable housing, we should be thinking about food security as well,” says Tawse-Garcia.

“The food pantry works to address food insecurity throughout the county, which includes Mt. Crested Butte,” Tawse-Garcia said in November, as she presented the pantry’s work to the town.

“We have had 9,902 visits to the facility this year, which is about on par with last year. It is obvious that people who reside in your community are using it,” she said. Crested Butte Mountain Resort, which employs approximately 1,000 people, told Tawse-Garcia they anticipate that about half of the employees live in Gunnison.

The pantry has to raise approximately $40,000 per year to purchase fruit, vegetables, meat, dairy, and eggs for its visitors and for its school snacks program.

“We could all work more collaboratively to encourage people who qualify to enroll in these programs. We are asking for funds from all entities,” Tawse-Garcia said.

The pantry plans to begin tracking places of employment for visitors on its intake forms in 2019 in order to identify where people spend their time in the valley as well.

Among improvements are a new $35,000 refrigerated van granted from Wal-Mart, LLC, which enables pantry volunteers to pick up produce from backyard gardeners, low-income CSA programs, restaurants and other donors.

This is the first year the pantry has paid staff, having taken on two part-time staff members. With Tawse-Garcia’s departure, pantry manager Angie Krueger is currently running the program with volunteers. The pantry’s board of directors has decided to maintain that for the near future.

John Felix, president of the board, said he feels good about where the pantry is headed for now, and plans to add a few board members in the coming year. “We have not yet determined any specific direction for next steps or for changing roles,” he said of the non-profit organization. “This is the time of year when people are thinking about us, which we appreciate. It’s a great time of year to think about the pantry and ways you can help.”

“Part of the appeal of working for the pantry,” says Tawse-Garcia, “was the people it serves. Its mission that is so vital. In a resort community, it’s easy to forget that people are struggling.”

For more information on how to donate items, time (as a volunteer) or money to the pantry, visit: https://gunnisoncountryfoodpantry.org

Bringing improvements to the upper valley

By Katherine Nettles

The town of Mt. Crested Butte has accepted a funding request for $5,000 to help bring mental health services to Crested Butte through the Gunnison Valley Health Foundation (GVH) and the Mental Health Center. The center is planning renovations to a unit in the Ore Bucket Building at Sixth Street and Maroon Avenue that will allow it to establish a full-service mental health clinic there, and Mt. Crested Butte’s contribution was the final addition needed to reach its funding goal.

Dr. John Tarr, chairman of the board for GVH, addressed the council at the meeting alongside Kimberly Behounek, regional director of the Mental Health Center.

“This remodel will enable the presence of a full-time mental health clinic in the upper valley, which in my opinion will be a very important service to people suffering from mental health conditions, who will then be able to access services from the mental health center without the overhead of an hour and a half commute down valley and back,” said Tarr.

This latest contribution completes the capital campaign goal of raising $50,000, as part of the total estimated need of $262,420 to be raised for the renovation by January. GVH owns the Ore Bucket space and has entered into an agreement with the mental health center to provide the space for a clinic. GVH also contributed $30,000; the center itself has contributed $30,000; Vail Resorts also agreed to contribute $30,000; the town of Crested Butte has made a $5,000 contribution; and another $100,000 is expected from a grant through El Pomar Foundation, $52,420 from Caring for Colorado for programming. The renovation includes structural changes and the addition of a bathroom.

The clinic expects to benefit the community by providing a full complement of mental health and substance abuse treatment services more locally.

“I don’t think I need to tell anybody about the number of tragedies that have occurred with individuals taking their own lives in the upper valley this year, of which I believe there have been five. Whether or not these would have been preventable by a more easy access to mental health services is obviously speculative, but it could have done no harm,” said Tarr.

The mental health center has also received a grant to provide funding for the services it will offer at the clinic.

Behounek discussed the plans for service at the clinic. She said the 700-square-foot space would allow for a reception area, a bathroom, and three counseling spaces. There will be three professionals in the clinic, and it will be open Monday through Saturday. Practitioners will include a nurse practitioner, a psychiatrist, and a licensed addiction counselor, as well as a primary care physician co-locating in the same building to facilitate a “warm hand-off” for referrals.

There will also be a peer specialist, which Behounek described as “a person with lived experience in mental health and substance use,” who will be circulating throughout the community, introducing the service and hosting sober living events on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays for those who need or want to live a sober lifestyle.

“This grant will support their income, and then long-term it’s my obligation and role to figure out how I can roll that into the fiscal year budget,” said Behounek.

The center already has 314 active cases in the 81224 and 81225 zip codes, and Behounek said she is confident that even a 20 percent in service capacity increase, “just by being present,” will give the center the ability to continue staffing the clinic full-time.

The center also plans to make the clinic available to law enforcement officials at all hours in order to activate a mobile crisis management team when necessary to allow for telephone and video platforms and receive support without leaving the community, unless it is determined someone needs a higher level of care. Law enforcement gets multiple mental health calls per month, said Behounek, and currently emergency medical services have to drive people in crisis to Gunnison Valley Hospital, which necessitates both an ambulance fee and hospital admission fees, even if they are just in need of connecting to telehealth services.

Mt. Crested Butte Town Council member Nicholas Kempin, who works for the local EMS, said he has seen the problem first-hand. “There are so many costs … It just compounds their problems,” he said.

The center also hopes to begin hosting sober living events as part of the upper valley presence.

Both Behounek and Tarr addressed the council’s questions regarding anonymity, given the somewhat prominent public location of the Ore Building, and about the nature of the walk-in experiences.

“It’s a very visible corner,” said mayor Todd Barnes.

Kempin agreed that lack of anonymity is a problem in the valley.

Behounek said that has been considered, as has rebranding the center altogether, or making the space more of a community gathering place.

“All of those things can be on the table, but at the same time … our preference as an agency would be that we continue to reduce stigma,” said Behounek, noting that there are already other medical practitioners in the building, and mental health is an aspect of healthcare that deserves the same kind of attention and care as any other.

“What you describe in your question gets to the heart of national issues,” said Tarr. “There are national deficits … This is not just a local problem. This is a national problem.”

Tarr said it is important not to let perfectionism get in the way of making improvements.

Behounek also described the walk-in experience as welcoming, with plans for the atmosphere to be warm and inviting. She said decor will use warm color palettes with local artists and possibly artist co-ops, but there will not be front desk receptionist initially.

The council was very supportive of the project, and Kempin said, ”I am thrilled about the prospect of having this in the valley.”

Barnes asked if anyone on the council wanted to offer additional funding as well, and other members of the council agreed. Council member Janet Farmer encouraged the foundation to return to the council to request additional funding if construction costs exceed expectations.

The social media firestorm of what some people think about Vinotok is an irritating kerfuffle. A politically incorrect action is not that unusual in Crested Butte—but actions do have consequences. The fact that the Grump was an effigy of Trump is not that surprising in a small liberal ski community, and it should also not be surprising that it offended some people. When I hear in the midst of the hubbub that some with the organizing committee deny now that it was a direct Trump effigy and meant to be just a faceless politician that anyone could interpret, I believe that as much as I believe my head of hair has never been fuller or less grey.

My quick thought is that it wasn’t necessarily necessary to do and ultimately it generated grumps for some instead of burning them. Being an advocate of free speech, I support the idea that the choice was made. At the same time, those who did it and might be offended if a group of right-wingers burn an effigy of Hillary in protest have little cause to be upset with that. What goes around comes around.

For the visitors who felt compelled to write the county, town and Vail (huh?) and tattle while expressing shock and dismay and “threatening” to not spend any more money in town—that’s cool. This place probably isn’t for you. You probably should find a less edgy place where you might feel more comfortable to spend your money. Believe it or not, Vinotok is a lot less wild than it used to be, but the underlying theme of celebrating the equinox while sticking it to “the man” remains. It has evolved to honor more people in the community throughout the week while being more than a simple, big-ass fire (which I miss). As one of the local marshals mentioned in the middle of the mumming, “This is part of who we are.”

For those visitors who were offended, if you look beneath the veneer of the tourist façade, this place is one where people are normally pretty friendly but a bit different from those in the “real world.” People here are loud and unashamed. People yell and fight—with each other and with those they disagree with on the state and national level. People are passionate about the local environment because it is their backyard. Some men here regularly wear dresses. Some women here have more testosterone that an NFL lineman. Dressing up is not just for Halloween and long before pot was legal in Colorado there were what we call Townie Takeovers that almost always start at 4:20 (Google it). People work really hard but less normal hours than you might. Most people here don’t feel comfortable in a cubicle and might take a run or bike ride on single track at lunch instead of sneaking in a martini.

I could go on (and have in the past) but you get the idea. Not every place is supposed to be the same with a common bottom denominator. We abhor gentrification. Most of those living here fiercely fight that idea, so I don’t expect it to change. Given that, you might enjoy an all-inclusive resort experience in Florida more than Vinotok or Flauschink or the Chainless or the AJ or some other “interesting” weekend in Crested Butte. These types of events are a big part of the community that makes Crested Butte what it is. They aren’t always pretty for everyone but they sure are unique. If they make you uncomfortable I can understand that. No offense—and none taken.

On a topic that might be more than a kerfuffle but in some ways speaks to the same conflict of change and outside perception, the community is debating how to handle humans in the Upper Slate River in the spring. Because some unusual wildlife is part of the landscape and SUPs (standup paddleboards) have recently made entry to that area more accessible at high water times, there is some conflict. A gathering of community has been meeting for months to discuss the situation and this Thursday evening that group will officially present their findings and suggestions.

The early report seems to me to be too much of a compromise—but that report is still in a draft form so can be tweaked. The blue heron and the elk that live there are as much a part of this community as us humans. We should be choosing to do what we can to make sure they remain part of this community. That might involve more stringent action than the draft report is suggesting.

As Crested Butte grows and changes, I can accept most of the change as long as we stay true to our ideals. One of those ideals is doing what it takes to keep us different. I still trust that we will make choices that protect the unique elements of our community—whether it be Vinotok or the blue heron.

—Mark Reaman

A slice of life in paradise

By Dawne Belloise

There’s no doubt that Mike Larson is a mountain dweller through and through, with his love of the outdoors and his fervor for mountain biking, although he laughs that he hails from “redneck stuff,” growing up in Watchung Hills, N.J. His dad gave him a love and respect for hunting and fishing and Mike even dabbled in taxidermy until around the age of 15, when he became aware of the imbalance of the eco-system.

“At a certain point, hunters were part of the ecosystem but I don’t consider humans as part of the natural ecosystem any longer, not like the Native Americans who lived in harmony with nature. I try not to be a hypocrite—I do eat meat and I’ve butchered everything that’s ever flown, swam or walked in my lifetime as being a pro cook.”

He clarifies though that he’s not referring to sustenance hunting. “I’m basically talking about the trophy hunters. I had these hunter roots but I never felt that great about killing a deer.”

All through high school, Mike had the idealistic vision of wanting to save the world and figured he’d become an environmental scientist. After graduating in 1982, he attended Ramapo College in northern New Jersey for a year, which he felt was just a stepping stone, and afterwards transferred to University of Wyoming in Laramie. The reality of having to take a stifling amount of math and chemistry deterred his ambition of being in the science field and he switched to industrial education. “Those are the degrees they offered to the football or basketball players so I became friends with them. It was a laughable, outdated program even then,” he says.

Mike had discovered his love for road biking and racing at 15 and joined the Somerset Wheelman Club for racing, touring through the undeveloped lands of New Jersey. Unfortunately, later, while at the University of Wyoming, his bike was stolen, but it became the turning point for him as he bought his first mountain bike.

“Then I fell in love with the mountain bike trails, and in winter I’d cross country ski those same trails at Vedauwoo, east of Laramie, in a very rocky wilderness area not unlike Taylor Canyon.” It wasn’t long before he switched to Montana State University in Bozeman because they had a better program in industrial education. “I ended my college career there. I got my first season pass in 1983 at Bridger Bowl, where I started telemark skiing. The rest is history,” he smiles.

From Bozeman, Mike moved to Steamboat Springs in 1985, but only for one winter season, skiing and dish diving before moving on to Jackson Hole, Wyo. “I wanted to experience the Tetons. I always had an affinity to Wyoming—less than a half million people, it was the least populated state in the U.S. In fact, it was losing population. From there, I had an inkling that I could become a cook because I had what I felt was a natural ability to cook. I fibbed my way into my first cook job at Teton Village at the ski area, telling them I had been cooking at an Italian restaurant in Steamboat and within a couple of months I was running that Teton kitchen. You don’t have to be a great chef to be hired as a cook in the kitchen.”

Mike feels that a good work ethic is the key to success. “I’ve put my time in as a line cook and whoever’s running that kitchen will teach you what you need for that menu and you should be grateful for what you’ve learned in that particular kitchen.” He was at Jackson Hole for three years, where he also worked as a cook at the Mangy Moose and the Blue Lion.

When John Byrne, who owned the restaurant Mike had worked at in Jackson Hole, bought the Eldo in Crested Butte in 1987, he offered Mike a cook job and Mike also assisted in getting the restaurant and bar open. He arrived in town in August and, having never been to Crested Butte, he was awed.

“I couldn’t believe that this place existed. There were so few people here and it was super cool. I had come over on Kebler Pass and it was about four months before I even left to go to Gunnison,” and getting there, he recalls, “The highway wasn’t even an improved road, it was almost a single lane.”

Mike became even more of an avid cyclist. “I was way into mountain biking and it was because of that—Crested Butte was an up and coming mountain bike destination.” He quickly fell into the small community of skiers and cyclists here. “There was a tight group of people and we were all friends. There were only about 500 people living in town then, we were a close community. In the summer, we’d camp to save money and in the winter we’d move into a house with five other people because that’s how we did it, that’s how ski bums do it, isn’t it?” he laughs.

After two years at the Eldo, Mike moved on to work for Crested Butte Mountain Resort from 1990 through 1995 at their fine dining restaurants like Jeremiah’s and Giovanni’s, where Club Med eventually had their dining facility. “In the summer, they’d send me down to their country club at Skyland. During off-season, which was a lot longer back then, I’d go ride Moab and just enjoy the freedom. I was literally living the life.”

In 1995, he hooked up with Geo Bullock, as a cook and partner, and the two entrepreneurs moved to Moab to start the Gonzo Café. “It was a dream of both of ours, to have our own restaurant. We had dirt-cheap prices, doing breakfast and lunch and catering to the sprouting bicycling community of Moab. Mountain biking was just starting there.”

Ah, but, Crested Butte called them home, as it does for so many who try to leave and once it’s under your skin, you long to return no matter where you are. “So we came running back here, but not before learning a lot about the restaurant business, and we had a successful business.”

He returned to start up the Buffalo Grill with partners Cathy Benson and the late Jimmy Clark. Mike had just become a father to Maya, his daughter, in 1996. Club Med was ruling the town at the time, Mike says, and he felt it affected Crested Butte. “It was the first inkling of change in the mid-90s. Crested Butte had grown.”

Club Med brought an international exposure and their clients ate at Buffalo Grill when they came to town. Buffalo Grill sold in 2001 and Mike ran his Happy Trails Café out of the Eldo for five years, working with Ted Bosler and Mike Knoll.

“I had a pizza dough recipe in my wallet, that my dad’s friend in Florida had shared with me. When the spot over by the skateboard park became available in 2007, I knew we could create a small pizzeria there and feed the locals,” Mike says of the place they’ve sold slices and pies out of for 11 years.

That same year, he married his partner, Mary Hayes, and the two opened Mikey’s Pizza. “There’s a lot more to running a restaurant than meets the eye and my partner-wife, Mary, does the paperwork and the business part of it, all the other stuff that you don’t see. I met Mary in 2005, when I was cooking at the Eldo and she was visiting here, checking out the Mountain Heart Massage School. We’ve been happily ever after ever since.”

They opened the Gunnison branch of Mikey’s Pizza in 2012, and successfully sold it in 2017. “We put that in the ‘been there, done that’ category,” he grins, and he didn’t miss the 60 miles of round-trip driving.

Through all the hard work and long hours of restaurant ownership and cooking, Mike still found time to ski and bike. “I find enjoyment in the simple things. You don’t have time for everything, so you have to choose what you’re going to focus on. I’ve always loved the ease of being able to access the backcountry wherever I was.”

But less than two years ago, in 2016, Mike had a life-altering, life-threatening situation slam him. After a remarkable week of biking Moab, he went to ride the Palisade Rim trail. “I felt a numb lip, lost balance and felt nauseated, but I was in denial.” Ignoring the danger signs, he went on a 25-mile ride in Crested Butte and it happened again. This time, it was same symptoms but with a thunderclap headache, “like somebody hitting me over the head with a club, and I had to lay down on the side of the trail.” He was airlifted out and taken to Swedish Medical Center in Denver, where he spent five days and was told he had aneurisms. “They put me on baby aspirins.” He shrugged and went on to have a good ski season that winter.

But one year later, last year, while riding solo on the Secret Trail that connects to Carbon Creek Trail, he was hit hard again. “It was 6 p.m. I took the ‘Don Cook motorcycle trail’ [Para Me y Para Te Trail] up to the Green Lake trail. I wasn’t feeling great and it’s not an easy trail. I rode down to Mikey’s Pizza and at that point I knew it was happening again, but I thought I could fix it myself, by taking a bath.” Mike was in complete denial.

“Mary knew I wasn’t right and took me to the hospital, where I got another helicopter ride to St. Mary’s in Grand Junction. By the time I got there, I was experiencing triple hiccups, loss of swallowing, I couldn’t walk and I was unable to form sentences. I had lost all motor control, I had a feeding tube and I couldn’t even brush my teeth. It brought me to my knees.”

He spent an entire month at St. Mary’s where, at one point, he was close to death, having also contracted pneumonia. Mike’s correct diagnosis was vertebral artery dissection, a blockage in his artery, essentially, a stroke. “I’m still recovering, which they say will take about two years. It’s been a year and I’m still healing. I still have some symptoms—my face is numb and I can’t feel hot or cold because my nerves got fried.” He also experienced a rare symptom of the condition called Wallenberg Syndrome, which he explains as “a lower brain stem stroke, specifically the loss of swallowing, with hiccups and vertigo.”

Mike always knew that Crested Butte would someday be discovered but he felt, “Leaving wasn’t an option for me. I wasn’t going to be displaced,” and he was fortunate enough to scrape together enough to buy a condo.

“The trails have become better so there are more people here enjoying it and that was inevitable. You can’t stop the change. Population has increased throughout the world and Crested Butte was going to be discovered at some point, especially with the information age. The internet has really opened things up and people show trophy photos of this great place. That’s what I feel has really opened Crested Butte up to the rest of the world. As far as losing our soul, the high price of land and the second homeowners whose houses are dark most of the year have displaced locals. I didn’t move here to make money or get rich, I came here to live. It’s unrealistic to think that Crested Butte was going stay like it was in the 80s. I think it’s still a great place to be, as long as we evolve with the change. You can’t let the trust-funders or the big money coming to town get you down. We can’t let that diminish our love for this place, for these mountains, for this town. You gotta roll with the changes. I don’t know of any place that is better or able to escape the evolving reality of the world.”

Bryan Wickenhauser is onstage with several of his employees, rigging up lights and gauzy white curtains and tweaking the sound system for a wedding at his I-Bar Ranch. An enormous U.S. Air Force C17 cargo plane roars low overhead. “They like to do take-offs and touchdowns at the Gunnison airport, where they can practice their high-altitude maneuvers because it’s all different at altitude,” he explains and nods toward the plane as it makes a tight turn. “They’ll be back around.”

Tables are organized into rows and a rubberized dance floor is being unfolded in the tall-roofed, open-sided structure that looks like it’s always belonged there in the middle of the verdant Tomichi Creek valley, sitting among long-time ranching meadows and fields.

The 14 acres of I-Bar Ranch were annexed into Gunnison as “Gunnison Rising” by its owner, Dick Bratton, who had the original vision of dinner and music in a gorgeous country setting. “

Dick built this complex in 1992, purposely to be a chuck wagon dinner venue for the I-Bar Wranglers, Bryan says, recalling the house band that twanged up post-dinner dancing music. “It was the standard fare—you got a chuck wagon dinner and you got a show from the Wranglers.” The venue ceased business in 2004 and sat dormant until 2013, when Bryan had his own vision for the place.

Bryan’s story with the I-Bar Ranch starts in 2004 when he got married to Jennifer Michel and the two had their reception at the ranch. He had met Jennifer through the Tune Up bike shop in Gunnison.

“My roommate in Crested Butte South was working there and invited Jennifer’s girlfriend up for a Friday night fish fry,” Bryan says. The fish fry is a popular tradition in his home state of Wisconsin. Jennifer came along with her girlfriend and the rest, as it’s said, is history. They married three years later in 2004 at the I-Bar Ranch.

When Bryan took over the I-Bar in 2013, he changed its concept. “I wanted to predominately book concerts and weddings. We cater the food because I didn’t want to get in to the food aspect, just beverages. The place doesn’t have the kitchen capabilities. I felt that through music and weddings, I could have a viable business out here. I saw a need for both in the lower end of the Gunnison Valley.”

Bryan originally moved to Crested Butte in 1997 as a ski coach for the Crested Butte Academy at the suggestion of his buddies, Kevin Krill and Kevin’s brother Brian. “I was living in Summit County. Vail had just purchased Breckenridge and Keystone. Brian was the athletic director at the Crested Butte Academy so he suggested I apply for the job. I had a place to live and a job and I also brought with me a location-neutral business, Midwest Leasing,” he says. A location-neutral job, he explains, is like a traditional corporate job you would have in the city, except you could work remotely from anywhere since internet and fax were just then being developed. Bryan brokered commercial leases and loans from Crested Butte.

Bryan says, “The light bulb moment for me was going to Lake City in July 2012 to see Asleep at the Wheel. Lake City is way small and they were bringing in performers like Michael Martin Murphy, Dean Dillon and Asleep at the Wheel at Hutch’s Backyard BBQ, a small 200-seat venue that didn’t even have a roof over the crowd. I was impressed because it was packed and they were bringing vitality to this itty bitty town in the summer, giving the people some cool culture.”

Bryan saw an opportunity to both expand the Gunnison culture and make a living. “I saw how the music was taking off at the north end of our valley, and I saw the wedding business flourishing up there and in other similar mountain towns. I realized that tourism was going to keep getting stronger as a staple to our economy. I saw all those factors as opportunities to enhance the cultural vitality of the lower end of the valley because there was a missing element that wasn’t being met. The tourists were all being serviced at the north end of the valley and southern end of the valley was being deprived. The identifiable music venues in Gunnison back then were the Gunnison Arts Center, the Last Chance, the Timbers and the Elks Lodge.”

Before Bryan found himself at the helm of a concert venue smack in the middle of sagebrush hills and lush pastoral hay fields, he originally hailed from outside of Milwaukee, raised with his younger sister, Amy, who at one time also lived in Crested Butte for a while. Bryan was somewhat of an über athlete throughout his childhood and life. “We were into ski racing every winter and in the summers it was lake life, frolicking in the water and skiing,” he recalls.

He was an avid skier and soccer player, which he says were his passions. “We were living three miles north of Alpine Valley, which was a major Midwestern summer concert venue and a ski resort in the winter.” He notes that it’s where the helicopter carrying Stevie Ray Vaughn fatally crashed into a 400-foot-high hill, “I was a 19-year-old lift-op that following winter in 1990 and a lot of the older employees and the community were heavily affected by the incident. I was going into my senior year in high school.” He graduated in 1991.

He enrolled at Carroll College (now Carroll University), studying business with a minor in Spanish because the trade borders were being open, NAFTA was just being formulated and there was plenty of commerce between Mexico and the U.S., “and in my mind, Spanish was the language I thought I needed.”

He graduated from college in 1995 and smiles, “I knew whatever I would do, I was going to do it in Colorado,” and he moved out to Summit County two weeks after grabbing his degree. He was a part-time ski coach and working his corporate, location-neutral business from 1995 through 1997, until he felt, “Vail went Wall Street and started acquiring ski resorts and it wasn’t the community I was desiring. [Summit] was already having those challenges with Denver coming up every weekend. You lost your community every weekend. I was looking more for a ski town with a sense of community.”

Bryan had quit ski coaching in 2002 to pursue being a semi-pro endurance athlete. “The first year I moved here was the first year of the Grand Traverse. I had limited ski touring skills at the time but ended up winning the Grand Traverse in 2010, 2012 and 2014 with my partner, Brian Smith.”

Bryan was co-director for the Grand Traverse from 2010 to 2015, and was also president of the Nordic Center board for four years beginning in 2010. From 2002 through 2009, Bryan was a member of Team Crested Butte, an elite adventure racing team that consists of multi-sports events that often span a 100- to 600-mile course, “You travel as a team of four. We were all based in the Gunnison Valley. The events usually took place in challenging conditions like deserts or mountains and included mountain biking, hiking, climbing, kayaking, and orienteering with map and compass. It was one of those niche sports but we’d do races around the world. I traveled quite a bit and had some success.”

Bryan rattles off the various countries he traveled to—Ecuador, China, Brazil, Australia, France, Italy, Spain, Andorra, Scotland, Ireland, Switzerland, and Abu Dhabi. “Then I got into ski mountaineering, climbing up Crested Butte Resort and racing down and up, like a major Al Johnson race,” he says, expanding that to explain it’s more like six Al Johnson races in one.

He went to three world championships in Switzerland, Italy, and Andorra. “I’m retired from competitive athletics because,” he smiles, “life… kids, family, and the I-Bar, my priorities have shifted. Besides, they turn out new 20-year-old athletes every year and I keep getting older.”

Bryan was also one of three partners who started High Alpine Brewing Company in Gunnison in 2015. “I like beer,” he grins, “and I like the aspect of what a craft brewery represents to community. One of the values is that it embraces the community, it’s a place to go socialize, bar stool conversations, and it can host and sponsor events. I was already engaging the community culturally through I-Bar, and I thought Gunnison needed a craft brewery again since the local breweries had gone out of business. The model of a craft brewery is about locally sourcing ingredients—the beer is produced locally, so it fosters community. We bought a historic building on Main Street, repurposed that building and exposed the interior brick to give it that warm feel. We created the first commercial outdoor downtown deck. It fostered the Old Miners decision to also build a deck. Now it’s given the Gunnison downtown a little more vibrancy.”

He sold his partnership in 2018 to focus more on the I-Bar, which had grown exponentially.

The I-Bar keeps Bryan pretty busy from before its opening for events on May 1 and past its closing for the season on November 1. And there’s the couple’s two children, Eliza, who celebrated her golden birthday, turning five on July 5 by dancing to The Wailers live at the Ranch, and Gianna, who turns eight August 6.

Back at the I-Bar Ranch, Bryan continues his day, juggling multiple tasks, directing guests and employees with his big smile as the humongous C17 screams overhead again in its seemingly endless passes.

He pauses for a moment to say that he’s particularly excited about one of his concerts. “This upcoming week is Cattlemen’s Days and Dale Watson and his Lone Stars are playing Thursday, but Saturday is going to be a fun one that I’m personally excited about—Paradise Kitty, an all-female Guns n Roses tribute band,” he grins.

But today, he’s completely focused on preparing the venue to ensure the perfect wedding event against the beautiful backdrop of a sunny day, with Tomichi Creek sparkling like a rhinestone ribbon weaving through the fields.

For more information and schedules to concerts at I-Bar Ranch visit Ibarranch.com. 

OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD! OH…MY…GOD!

by Than Acuff

What do we do? One could get on Facebook and comment about how the Vail buyout will affect the cost of living and impending increased lack of affordability or, one could go to work and try and make some money to be able to afford to live here.

But that’s not why we moved here, to work to be able to afford to live here.

Although… I gotta be honest. How sick would it be if they ran a gondola from the East River Valley floor to the peak of Crested Butte Mountain? There would be two stations along the way where you could load/unload. One at the Paradise Warming House and another at a warming house on top of Paradise Cliffs so we can enjoy our Brie and Chardonnay while watching groms launch Paradise Cliffs before continuing up to a rotating restaurant on the summit for 360-degree views. Plus, we could host World Cup races that start on top of the Headwall.

My armchair assessment of the situation is that Vail wanted Okemo and Sunapee because they want a larger presence in the Northeast, an area where more than 55 million people live. They just had to take Crested Butte, an area where 10,000 people live, as part of the deal and we will remain the redheaded stepchild resort, which I’m okay with. Sure, we get ignored while the other kids get more attention but we also get away with more as a result because no one is paying attention. One potential benefit to us: If you follow the trickle-down economic theory made famous during the Reagan era, the gear is going to get that much better at the annual Crested Butte Snowsports Ski Swap and I will benefit.

I put the ass in assessment, though.

One thing I am paying attention to is the local softball leagues, which just opened another season on Tuesday, June 5. It’s the same local softball league that was here when Dick Eflin and Fred Rice started this ski resort. It’s the same softball league that thrived when the Callaways owned the resort. The same softball leagues that remained when the Muellers took over and the same softball leagues that will continue while Vail is in town.

With that, the 2018 season opened Tuesday, June 5 at fields throughout town and what better way to open the summer of softball then catching some single-wall small-ball action at Pitsker Field.

And oh, what an opening it was. Grills were grilling, beer was flowing, tunes were blaring and Alec Lindeman, aka Bobby Digital, nailed the National Anthem on the microphone.

Oh, the rocket’s red glare!

Not to mention Michael Villanueva, proud father of both Koa and newborn son Rio, tossing out the first pitch.

“I guess it was because I almost died.”

Unfortunately, the game didn’t quite live up to the pregame hype as the Avalanche eked out a 5-4 win over the latest addition to the local softball ranks, the Eleven.

The Eleven is a mix of some new faces and old to the league with a core group of linchpin players. Aforementioned linchpin players such as Andrea Schumacher and Ryan Kay, who each connected for base hits to drive in runs for a 2-0 Eleven lead.

Now the Avalanche is the same ol’ same ol’, except for Mark Reaman, who has opted out of the 2018 season. Yet there’s no shortage of talent on that team as Reaman’s kids, Ben and Sam, remain on the team along with their friends, bringing a wealth of youthful talent to the team once again. The Weil family is on for another season as well, as are the Chlipalas, and Jim Schmidt returns to pace the sidelines in what appears to be a war of attrition between Schmidt and Ronco as to who will have the most years of softball seasons in Crested Butte.

Sam Reaman led off the bottom of the first with a double and scored when Adrienne Weil rapped a double through the infield. Nolan Blunck and Maggie Dethloff combined for back-to-back powerbunt singles to load the bases and Mikey Weil scored two, stroking a grounder up the middle for a 3-2 lead.

Billy Watson and Reaman combined for two base hits in the bottom of the second inning and Blunck added a little sauce to his bat to knock a two RBI double for a 5-2 lead.

The Eleven bats showed some more life in the top of the fourth inning when Ryan Kay led off with a triple high off the fence in left and scored on a double by Josh Schumacher. Katy Kay punched a sac hit to advance Schumacher to third, and a single to shallow right by Grant VanHoose pushed Schumacher home to pull the Eleven to within one.

By the fifth inning the excitement of opening day had worn off as neither team could manage any offense the remaining two innings and the Avalanche did just enough to seal the 5-4 win.

By the way, Vail buying Crested Butte is not the end of the world. But, when the end of the world does come, and it will, cockroaches will be playing softball using plastic bags as gloves and plastic bottles as bats while eating Twinkies, and I will be there to cover it.