Who would argue that chocolate doesn’t taste really good? There is a bit of a mood bump and there are all different varieties with all sorts of treats included inside a good chocolate bar. But I know if that were all I ate, I’d be a 350-pound walking zit with acid reflux issues. So I think about how much chocolate I consume and try to plan for what eating chocolate does to me. I ride my bike and eat some fruits and vegetables too. Actually, eating a Brussels sprout makes the chocolate taste that much better.

The point here is that too much of any one thing comes with consequences that aren’t always good. Not thinking about what that one thing will result in, is simply not smart.

When it comes to the North Valley right now, everyone appears focused on the chocolate that is affordable housing —rightfully so as workers are forced from their rental units and businesses are struggling to find workers living close to the jobs.

There are at least three major projects being discussed for the North Valley (Whetstone, Sixth and Butte and the North Village) and all should help with what is indeed a critical housing need at the moment. While I don’t think anyone “deserves” to live in Crested Butte I do believe it is in everyone’s best interest to get a broad economic swath of people living in a place together. And I believe there are multiple benefits to people living near the place they work. Feeling secure about where one lives is a good thing as well from a human standpoint. It may not be a “right” to live here but it is, in my opinion, the right goal to have and makes Crested Butte a better place. But it only stays a better place if the effects of the increased housing are considered. What does having that much more chocolate mean for the community? Does it taste good tomorrow but turn us into a big walking zit in a year?

There is finally some public conversation emerging about the reality of dealing with the ramifications that come with more housing. Bringing in hundreds of people living in deed-restricted units on top of the increase of people buying and building free market units up and down the valley comes with impacts we cannot ignore. As we have seen, the traffic is getting more crowded everywhere. The CB Community School is beyond capacity…again. The trailheads are packed with cars. It is harder to spontaneously pop in to a restaurant for a bite to eat.

The conversation was touched on Monday at the Crested Butte council meeting. Councilmember Mona Merrill bemoaned the fact that with more and more density being discussed, we are morphing from small town to small city. Town community development director Troy Russ called it the danger of ‘incrementalism’ where good individual projects add up to have cumulative unintended consequences, some of them not so good.

So that leads to the needed discussion to not just throw deed restricted housing at every empty space north of Round Mountain from wetlands to alleys to empty fields. Is there a limit to the number of people that can comfortably live here? Are actions being taken to bring along the needed infrastructure to accommodate that new density? If not, it’s a mistake.

Again — where does the new school building at this end of the valley go? I’d suggest the Corner at Brush Creek. Who pays for better trailheads including needed parking and signage? The Tourism and Prosperity Partnership is doing some of that now and I’d look for ways to maximize their contributions even more. Where are the lift ops going to sleep? I’d say Vail Resorts with its fat bank account should purchase existing units or property and put the workers in places where they can walk to the ski area. Using public-private partnerships to look at the big picture can lead to a unique future. The evidence is in the success of the Crested Butte Conservation Corps and our backcountry mitigation. More of that is needed right now. The hostel effort is another potential success.

Housing is important but so is a public amenity like another playing field for the kids who will eventually live in that housing. There were rumblings Monday that Mt. Crested Butte was making decisions about the future without talking to their partners and that decision would end up bloating them on chocolate and forcing their partners to again provide the mitigation for eating too much. Instead of using a parcel everyone had labeled as being for a recreation facility like a soccer field, word was that it was now being looked at for more housing. The confusion again showed the need for good partnerships.

The initial conclusion Monday evening seemed to be that active regional collaboration was the best next step. It’s not all about stuffing more workers in a bed so they can wait in line at the CB Post Office between shifts – it’s about working together to give all of the people who want to live and work and visit here a real quality of life. To give them something different than the other places struggling with the same issues. That’s what they deserve. To achieve that means thinking about capacity and taking action that not just brings more people here but provides a place that people want to live. It means eating more than just chocolate and doing the things like consuming the occasional Brussels sprout so that the chocolate tastes even better.

—Mark Reaman

[  By Dawne Belloise  ]

James Newton is a self-proclaimed beach rat, having been born on St. Simon’s Island off the coast of Georgia. Bouncing between there and New Orleans, his father finally settled James and his sister Renee in Wilmington, North Carolina. So now working in Crested Butte is a 180-degree turn from what he grew up with.

The son of a boat captain, James spent a lot of time outside at the beach – surfing, riding bikes and swimming. Because of his father’s work and frequent moves, James says, “I didn’t care for school so much at the time. Growing up, I was always the new kid, so school never really sat well. I was having to meet people all the time, and never really had time to make friends,” he says. James recalls going to three different schools in one semester.

“At a certain point, I just kind of wrote off people. I learned to be alone a lot, not that I was lonely, there’s a big difference.” In Wilmington, James grins, “I was really big into jet skiing, and doing all the things inquisitive teens did back then.” He graduated in 2004.

He got a job working for a dredge company doing beach renourishments, which is pumping sand from riverbeds onto the beach to enlarge it and help thwart hurricane erosion. “I liked being on the beach, but it was 14-hour days in steel toes and a hard hat and it’s pretty hot there. I saved a bunch of money and took some time off to figure out what I wanted to do. I never really came up with an answer for that,” he laughs, so he figured he’d just have a good time and take a break from growing up.

He got his first bouncer job when he was 19, at the Soapbox in downtown Wilmington. “It was a punk venue with hardcore punk rock music and mosh pits. There were so many people on the floor, but there were no major problems there, just the normal throwing people out, people being too aggressive, hitting people outside of the mosh pit and you don’t do that. It’s a different breed,” he muses.
But the sea called him back and he started working on a tugboat along the Hudson and East Rivers along the New York coast. “We did channel deepening for cargo ships, and moved recycling, trash and scrap metal to cargo ships, which they’d then take to China for sorting because it was much cheaper than doing it here in the states,” he explains. “We lived on the tugboat. We had a crew of five and we’d be on there for two to three weeks at a time. This job made the bouncing job look safe,” he says. “It was just dangerous. I’d be working in -20 degree weather in a snowstorm at 4 a.m., six hour shifts with six hours off, so midnight to six a.m. You’re walking alongside barges that are covered in ice, tying lines up, making sure the captain can see ahead, because I’d be his eyes,” he explains.
James says the tugboat would be pushing a 240-foot long barge and he’d be positioned on the bow looking out. “The weather up there is crazy– ice storms, snowstorms, and you’re on the water. Salt water doesn’t usually freeze when it’s moving but when the spray hit the barge, it would ice over. I’ve been cold here in Colorado but never as cold as I’ve been on the boat in New York.”

He withstood those elements for three years and then decided it was time for a change. “I was running myself ragged. I had money saved, but my health wasn’t good. It’s a rough life out there. I can’t tell you how many times I almost died when lines snapped, tied up to a barge in bad weather and they’d just snap. So you’ve got a 60-ton boat carrying a massive amount of cargo weight and the cable snaps, it can kill you. You can hear when it’s about to happen and you get the f— out of the way.”

His sister Renee had already moved to Crested Butte, so James headed west too with the idea of growing the Colorado green gold, which he did for many years with his medical license, selling to dispensaries through 2017.

He had visited Renee on vacation in February of 2010. “It was my first time in the mountains, having never been west of the Mississippi. I fell in love with it immediately. I had such a good time. It was completely different than growing up on the beach. I had started snowboarding at 16 when we took family vacations at Snowshoe, West Virginia, which was like skiing on ice,” he recalls. “When I arrived to snowboard here, it was absolutely insane! The mountains are huge. It was a new sense of awe. I had never seen that much snow.”

James got hired on as a Kochevar’s bouncer when Jason Vernon took over the saloon in 2012. “Bouncing there was like night and day,” he compares his previous punk club bouncer days. “There were no mosh pits. I didn’t have to deal with military people from Ft. Bragg, and the work environment and the scenarios were different. I mean, there were still problems at Kochevar’s. I’ve been stabbed and had knives pulled on me,” but he smirks and calls those aggressors all amateurs. “But I was lucky it didn’t puncture anything.”

He compares it with being the new kid at school when he was growing up. “I never went out looking for problems and I’d much rather talk it down than escalate but I’m not the type to back down either. I’d rather deal with a conflict than let a patron at the bar have a bad night. I just like to make sure that people are having a good time and everybody’s safe. That’s my thing.”

Just to change up the scenery, James took a second job at the Talk of the Town in late December of 2017. “Kochevar’s has always been the earlier night crowd and more tourists, and the Talk has always been the late night crowd. It’s been a nice change since Mary Boddington took over. She’s cleaned the place up a lot and made it more comfortable for women to be at, and for more people in general.” Recently, James took a position running security for all the events at the CB Center for the Arts and he’s pretty happy about working music events again. “It brings a different type of person out. It’s not just sitting around drinking, it’s people listening to music. And I’m not there till 4 a.m.,” he says.

James recalls that finding a place to live when he moved here a decade ago was no big deal. At first, he lived with his sister and then an opportunity came up in 2014 to move to Lost Canyon in Almont. “I have the best landlords ever. I got really lucky with that. It’s a beautiful spot and my landlords said as long as I want to rent it, I can stay. I’ve known so many people who had to leave because they don’t have anywhere to live. Living in their cars in the winters, it’s rough. This town has an insanely high turnover rate for residents, like they move here and can’t sustain it and have to leave. Obviously, we need more housing. At this point it’s been more tourists coming into town and less locals able to afford living here or don’t have anywhere to live. Not many people can float $3,000 for a two-bedroom house. It’s not sustainable at this point. Now you have businesses closed two to three days a week because they can’t run full hours. It’s sad to see.”

These winters, James has traded in his board for sticks. “I like it better than boarding, I love to ski.” Summers find him once again outside, doing all the things he loved to do as a kid growing up on the beach. “I love doing anything on the water, rafting, SUP boarding, just hanging out by the water.” And he claims Crested Butte as his home. “I grew up moving around a lot and I never really had a sense of community. Now, doing what I do, I’ve met so many people and made a lot of good friends. And I’ve also got a couple people who don’t like me at all,” he laughs. “But it’s the nature of the job. I’ll be that guy. I’ve been called worse names by better people and I’ve found a way to not take things personally. I can’t come home and dwell on it. You have to be able to put it aside.”

Grace in Resilience

[  By Dawne Belloise  ]

“I’m living out of my car and couch surfing,” Alysha Joaquin says with an entirely big smile. Not that it’s easy, nor, she feels, should workers have to live without basic necessities like a bathroom, shower, running water or a roof over their heads, but for now, this hard-working Buttian will keep the blinders on and continue. “We’re the people who interact the most with the tourists,” she rightfully claims.Born in Wheat Ridge on the Front Range, her parents moved her to Bemidji, Minnesota, a little town that has similar aspects to Crested Butte, she says, because there’s tourism, lakes and woods and lots of outdoor activities. “But there are no mountains,” she laughs. “I’ve always lived in cold places my whole life and always dreamed of being a beach bum, but it’s never happened.” As a toddler, she lived in the Bemidji State University dorms while her mom attended school there. After graduation, her parents moved to Lansing, Michigan, then Iowa, where her parents went their separate ways and Alysha went back to Minnesota with her mom, spending holidays and summers with her father in Colorado.

Back in her small-town country life in Bemidji, Alysha spent many days on the lake. “I’d visit friends across the lake by taking the canoe out,” she remembers, and at 10 years old, she’d be jumping off a bridge into the lake with friends, or tubing behind a boat or playing in the Mississippi River headwaters at Itasca State Park. “I’d ride my bike on all the trails. You could eventually make your way into town. One of the similar aspects I see between CB and Bemidji is that the kids are free range and independent. I basically raised myself. I was self-sufficient because mom was working a lot.”

She also spent much time with her grandmother who lived an hour north. “We’d go out on the dock every morning with peanut butter and mayo sandwiches and spend the whole day out there.”

She was 12 when she moved to Colorado with her father, visiting mom in Bemidji for holidays and summers. “Dad was more strict. It was the middle of a school year and I was put into Catholic school with about 20 kids in my sixth grade class,” she explains.

Alysha was in culture shock after her independent upbringing. ”I was probably this little demon that my dad didn’t understand,” she says.

By the end of the school year, she was adamant about never returning to the parochial school. “The nuns said I was teaching the other kids (things good Catholic kids shouldn’t know) and corrupting them. They didn’t want me back either,” she laughs. She and her dad came to a compromise and she enrolled at Frontier Academy, a charter school in Greeley. “It was a lot more comforting than the Catholic school. I had really great and inspiring teachers there and that had a lot of impact on me.”

Alysha jokes that she has the gift of gab, and through deep discussions about life, the universe and everything with her teachers, she also discovered her interest in understanding people and their cultures. When she graduated in 2010, she decided to take a gap year, moving in with her bestie and working at a pizza joint in Greeley. When her family offered to pay for some college, Alysha signed up for summer classes. ”I didn’t know what anthropology was but the description sounded cool. I really liked it, but I still wasn’t ready to go to college. I was a little hippie during this time,” so naturally she scored a second job at Mellow Yellow, a head shop, and went full-time there in 2011.

Alysha felt the need to head back to a place she could connect with – a place of water, forests and mountains. She applied to Western State College (now Western Colorado University, WCU). “All the reasons that I had for not attending college were still valid.” But she says, “I wanted out and didn’t have a ton of money saved up because I spent it all on concerts and festivals.” She notes that this was especially easy growing up in an area with venues like Red Rocks and Mishawaka Amphitheatre. “Something was appealing about going somewhere I didn’t know anything about,” she says of Gunnison, arriving in the summer of 2013. “WSC has an excellent anthropology department,” she states. She graduated in 2018 with a BA in Anthropology and a minor in Sociology.

Alysha began working at the Secret Stash in the spring of 2014. “I had never skied before, but after my second year here, friends got together to get my equipment and I was able to learn to ski. I’ve never met anybody who tries skiing and doesn’t like it.” With most of her friendships built outside of the college, Alysha started to think about whether she could find her place in this community. “At this point in my life, I’m looking for a home rather than just a house. I’m asking, do I fit in here? I’m not a rad ripper or a business owner, or a community leader or even an uber athlete, so sometimes, I feel as though I’m challenged to justify what I’m doing here.”

The deciding factor for her was that many aspects of the area reminded her of the North Woods she grew up in. “I feel safe here and there’s a lot of like-minded people. I like to travel and having the off-seasons. I like the slow-moving lifestyle. CB time is like five minutes later, it’s not hustle and bustle. I have time to sit with my thoughts. I’m able to walk everywhere. There were no issues finding a place to rent when I moved to CB, although the rise of that issue had already started at that point but there were still available and affordable places you could find.”

Until recently, Alysha was living with three other roommates and three dogs in a cute little condo in town with a tiny yard. Each of the four were paying a reasonable $550 per month. “And I was grateful for that. I was in New Orleans, traveling during off season. I had been there for only three days when my roommate forwarded an email from the condo owner. They weren’t going to renew our lease.”
They were given one month notice, beginning in May this year, to vacate by June 15. Two of her roommates, a couple, found a place to stay until August but are then leaving the valley because, she says, “Housing is hard to find and the vibe of town has changed.” The other roommate luckily found a place in CB South.

Alysha was able to get a storage unit, which is also hard to come by. “I reorganized my whole life and decided what was most important to me and I downsized. I have a couple laundry baskets in my car that have my clothes and immediate toiletries,” she says of her pared-down life. She dropped off her 8-year-old dog at her grandfather’s ranch in South Dakota, ”Where Honeybee can play in the creek and with her sibling,” she says of the furry bestie who’s been with Alysha since she was a puppy.

Essentially homeless, but working multiple shifts, two days a week at Secret Stash and three nights at the Breadery, Alysha’s fortitude is admirable. “You become more versatile. You’re more resilient when you’re more versatile,” she says. She takes showers at friends’ houses and notes, “You don’t have a consistent bathroom or a closet full of clothes, where you can get ready and primp yourself every day, but you realize how little you need to function and be happy.”

Recently, Alysha worked out an arrangement with a second homeowner, an accessory dwelling that mostly sits unused, a place where she can stay sporadically. She was there for a couple weeks in June until family came for three weeks in July. “It helps a lot. It’s less than ideal but it’s something.”

Creatively, Alysha aspires to writing. “I find solace through humor and being able to laugh at yourself. One of my long-time goals would be eventually to perform stand up comedy. One of my favorite things to do is laugh with my friends.” Laughter, she feels, is the universal language. “Laughing has a lot of benefits to your metal health and it’s a really good way to communicate and understand people.”

Alysha admits she has no idea of what she’ll do when winter arrives if she still can’t find an affordable place to live. She talks about the possibility of fulfilling that beach bum dream, perhaps in Costa Rica.

”There’s a lot of uncertainty and instability and not everyone, given this unique situation, would be able to make this work for them. But Crested Butte is the first place I built a home for myself. I found it on my own. I like the lifestyle here, the seasonal changes, and my biggest interest in life is traveling, being able to leave, to see other cultures and then being able to come back and regroup in a place that feels like home.”

By Dawne Belloise

Jennifer Read says she’s definitely a Hoosier, having been born and raised in Tipton, Indiana. Her mother worked in the agriculture industry at a seed company while her father ran an autobody shop and was also an insurance adjuster. Jennifer describes Tipton as small farming community smack in the middle of the state and her childhood home was surrounded by cornfields where the neighborhood kids would play.

A typical all-American midwestern community, the big Friday night event was high school football and she recalls that, “The whole town went to the football games and basketball in the winter.” There was the Pork Festival too, which her town was known for. “We’d eat pork on a stick, which is one giant pork loin. They’d have a Miss Pork Cuisine contest,” she explains, “it’s the beauty pageant in my town.” In her senior year, she actually entered the contest, and she laughs, “In retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t win.” All through high school, Jennifer played tennis doubles and also swam. “But I was terrible in swimming. I would always come in last.” However, she still managed to snag the senior class president title as well as vice president of the student body. “I liked to be in charge,” she smiles.

Jennifer graduated in 1994 and with a few ideas about her future, she enrolled at Indiana University in Bloomington as an English major. “I loved learning and opportunities. If I could be anything for the rest of my life it would be a college student.” She earned her undergraduate degree in 1998. It was just after her sophomore year that Jennifer and a friend took off for a summer adventure, pulling it right out of the pages of a book of summer jobs for college students. “Somehow, we ended up on a dude ranch, at Harmel’s, up the Taylor. I had never heard of Crested Butte. I had never been to Colorado.” One night the crew got together for an outing to the CB bars. “We went to the Talk (Talk of the Town, of course). It was my first time in a bar.” One of the cute local guys walked in and sparked her interest. “I was so brave,” she recalls with a grin. “I walked over and said, ‘I’ve been spending way too much time talking to my friends, so I thought I’d come talk to you.” They talked for hours. She wrote her phone number on his hand. He called the next day to invite her for a picnic up above Lake Irwin. She married that guy, Chris Read, two years later in August of 1998. Chris is the program director for the Adaptive Sports Center.

Fresh out of college, Jennifer got her first job teaching high school English in Durango. After a year, she and Chris had the summer opportunity to travel as crew leaders with the Student Conservation Association, an organization that places teenagers in conservation work in national parks. “We worked alongside of the students at Badlands National Park. It was amazing. We were on the Pine Ridge reservation when they introduced wild horses. We were at that ceremony. We got to go with a world-renowned biologist, tracking blackfooted ferrets and big horn sheep in the park.”

Returning to CB, she worked the front desk reservations at Irwin for a winter season. When another adventure opportunity arose to travel across Europe for nine weeks, she and Chris grabbed it. They started in France skiing, “Then we did a big loop throughout Europe and ended on the southern coast of Turkey for my brother’s wedding.”

Settling down a bit, the two enrolled in grad school together at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley in 1999. “It was the only place in the state that had programs for both of us,” she says. Jennifer earned her masters in school counseling while Chris got his masters in outdoor education. She finished up doing her internship at Crested Butte Community School (CBCS) in December of 2001. Jennifer then took a long-term first grade substitute teacher position at the CBCS. “I loved it. Even though I wasn’t an elementary teacher by training.” The following year she taught second grade at CBCS. When then school counselor, Jordan O’Neil, took a leave of absence, Jennifer stepped into that position. “This is my 18th year as counselor; 15 of those were as counselor for six through 12th grades, then two years ago, we hired a middle school counselor, so now I’m focused on high school.”

With all the restrictions of COVID, Jennifer feels that, “We’ve been lucky to have been fully in session this whole time. It’s a small percentage of kids who’ve been able to be in session full-time,” she says of schools elsewhere in the state and country. “We have all these protocols in place. It’s called a risk reduction toolkit. It’s been really successful.”

As counselor, Jennifer sees her role as helping to identify needs and then develop solutions and programs to meet those kids’ needs. “That could be for individuals, groups or the school-wide community.” For example, she points out, “For individuals, that could be providing social/emotional support, helping them with strategies for school success and brainstorming ideas for pathways after high school, like gap year options, college, military, all those options. For groups of kids, I helped start a collaborative with Living Journeys and Gunnison County Substance Abuse Prevention Project. We provide a high school grief group. Another initiative I started is a Sexuality and Gender Acceptance Club, which is a gay/straight alliance for high school teens. School-wide, as part of a team, I helped to develop our program called Seek the Peak, a positive behavior and intervention support program, basically a system to develop a positive school climate.” She was also involved in the district-wide emergency operation plan, which includes the overall school safety measures.

In general, Jennifer feels that CBCS is an an incredible place to work and learn. “It’s an awesome place to be, the teachers and staff are outstanding, I have incredible colleagues. It’s a true feeling of family here for sure. I’ve been really fortunate along the way to have some really good mentors, like Carol Kastning and Jordan O’Neil.”

When she’s not at work, Jennifer takes advantage of everything mountain living has to offer. “I run, ski and bike and I’ve done several triathlons — the Half Ironman Triathlon, the Imogene Pass run, twice, from Ouray to Telluride, and the Birkie Nordic Race. I did Ride the Rockies with my dad. I’ve climbed all the [Colorado] Fourteeners, except the seven scary ones,” she laughs. “I also do ski mountaineering. Chris is my own personal mountain guide and I’d trust him with my life in the backcountry.”

Not surprisingly, like most Buttians, Jennifer loves a good polka. “I discovered my love for it when I moved to CB and my favorite Crested Butte holiday is Flauschink. Pete Dunda (local legend polka accordionist) played at my 40th birthday,” she says proudly.

Her husband Chris is a huge part of her life… “And the most amazing human I know. We love to adventure together. We’ve built a beautiful life together. One of the main things I love about Crested Butte is the community ethics. The dedication to community service, not a lot of communities have that. There’s a commitment to physical fitness and the appreciation for the natural environment is something I love, and it’s a really strong ethic here.” And probably most importantly, she says, is, “the compassion for each other.”

[  By Dawne Belloise  ]

I wasn’t always the most well-behaved kid,” Malcolm Boyce grins, “But I loved to read. I’d absorb info and my surroundings and I loved science. I watched a lot of nature documentaries, astronomy, the universe. I always liked to be challenged academically. I was a sponge for info.”

Most of his memories are from his birthplace, Cape Girardeau, Missouri, but he spent the majority of his early childhood in Illinois and Kentucky, returning to Cape Girardeau for middle and high school. Malcolm grew up a happy kid in a great family and town, playing neighborhood baseball, camping and riding bikes around the neighborhood with his buddies. “I was close to my grandfather. We’d watch National Geo together,” he tells of his grandfather who grew up as a sharecropper and was a major influence in Malcolm’s love of learning. His family was close-knit and he was raised with two younger siblings by his mother, who was a high school English teacher and his stepdad who was a truck driver.

In high school, Malcolm played basketball, football and he notes, “all the traditional midwest things you’d do as a kid.” Although he claims, “I liked to party like the rest of the dazed and confused high schoolers, I kept the same interests, always fascinated with math and science. I’m also a big fan of history, particularly military history, from Babylonia, Greeks and Romans to seeing how the world evolved from one super power to the next.” He is a self-proclaimed dweeb, “I’m big a nerd when it comes to sci-fi.” During his high school days, Malcolm became intrigued with micro and macro economics. “Mainly macro. It’s really curious when you look at America coming from the Great Depression to WW2 and then coming out as this global juggernaut in regard to production and national productivity and how we became this massive superpower.” He graduated from high school in 2006.

Malcolm enrolled at the University of Illinois, thinking he wanted to pursue economics and math, but things didn’t go as planned for the freshman who still liked to party and he was put on academic probation. He transferred to Southern Illinois University in his junior year when a brewer friend convinced him to take a microbiology class. The class was basically filling a needed elective but Malcolm liked it so much that he switched his major. “Being the sponge, it felt like the right move. The class covered microbial ecology, bacterial and viral genetics.” The bonus was that Carbondale, where the college was located, was laid-back, “There was tons of hiking, biking, lakes, it was more like Crested Butte.” He earned a Bachelors of Science in molecular biology and bio chemistry in 2012.

Malcolm had a couple internships lined up at the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, and at Washington University in St. Louis. Having just lost his stepfather, he felt that he was at a crossroads in his life, “I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I had a dozen or so close childhood friends in Crested Butte,” and he’d been to CB several times before with friends beginning in 2009. “I enjoyed coming out here so much and I felt comfort here, having lost my stepdad. My original plan was to travel around and then get back to those internships, but I wound up staying in CB,” he says of his move in March of 2013.

He got jobs at the Majestic Theatre and Donita’s and tried both skiing and boarding, “I’m still not very good at either,” he laughs. I do mainly summer activities. I love whitewater rafting and I camp quite a bit. I try to spend a lot of time rafting in the Salida area.” After he left the Majestic and Donita’s closed, he went full-time into his other project, “I had also been working to open a CBD extraction facility with one of my friends. I did the build-out of the building, designing the facility down to all the details.”

Malcolm became a partner in that business, Axtell Labs, in 2020. “We’ve been working on it since 2018 and finally got into production in June of 2020. We had to deal with applying for special health permits to operate. It was a challenge because we were in COVID and a lot of stuff we needed to operate as a lab was also needed in the pandemic,” he says and explains, for example, PPE and ethanol (hand sanitizer). Since travel was restricted because of COVID, getting their biosources was difficult, but Malcolm credits their good relationships with vendors in helping to get the lab up and running. As lab director, Malcolm handles the day to day operation of the facility which runs Monday through Thursday from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. “We’re a start-up and every new day is a challenge but it’s exhilarating. We have refinement purification equipment coming in that will allow us to have a bigger market share. We’ll be able to produce more and a better quality product than most have.”

Although Malcolm confesses to being somewhat of a keep-to-himself kind of person, he also admits, “I’m a very social extrovert kind of guy as well. But the one thing about the pandemic that I enjoy is being able to touch base with my introverted side and not have to make a bunch of social engagements.” He quarantined with his friends early on when the group all came down with COVID. “We were a quarantine pod. We all got sick around the same time, all the symptoms, so we created our own pod and stayed within that group.”

Malcolm would love to someday own his own home in the valley. “I would love to build something or just own something here but that being said, the valley has changed since I first got here. Prices have gone up, availability of housing is hard. I’ve had to grind multiple jobs while working with my partners to get our facility up and running,“ but he feels that the community has been there for him. “In times when I’ve been the most down, I’ve had great mentors who have guided me out of that darkness. There are other places I’ve gravitated to, like Salida and Durango, but for the foreseeable future with this company, I’ll still be here because there’s no better place to go than Crested Butte. It’s definitely home and special to me. It’s helped me heal in so many ways and come to terms with things I didn’t necessarily know about myself and that’s made me stronger as an individual. I’m thankful for my loved ones here, my employees for their hard work and just overall grateful to live in a place like this.”

Fighting for sanctuary

For all the many times Susan Kerns has moved and all the places she’s lived in, Crested Butte has always seemed like home. With every move to warmer climes, she was drawn back here. And it is here that she is focused on bringing housing to working people because as she says, “having sanctuary is important.”

Raised in Marin County, California, and later Solano, she is the second eldest of four children. Her childhood in Marin was spent in a typical suburban neighborhood where the latest fascination of the era was tetherball. Susan recalls, “I was really into riding my bike and exploring the open land surrounding us,” where she remembers there were cows, pastures and fields. “When I was in sixth grade, mom decided she wanted to live in the country,” she says, so they moved to Suisun Valley in Solano, an agricultural region with fruit orchards. “Peaches and cherries are really the big thing there. I loved it,” she says. Her parents even bought her a horse, “And we had every kind of pet. We were all in 4-H and Gymkhana. It was all about gardening.”
1968 was the time of the Love Generation and Susan recalls, “I was a kid when the tumultuous Haight-Ashbury happened but I remember driving in the Haight with my family and thinking, I wanna be free too. People were running away, and there were free concerts in the park. I got to see Hair (the musical) live at Orpheum in San Francisco. I went to Fillmore West with my dad,” she says of the many concerts her father took her to.

All through high school, Susan had jobs so she could care for her horse. “I had to buy his food and pay for vet bills and horseshoeing. I did babysitting on a cattle ranch, which was super fun because they had horses that we could ride. Also, I was busy cleaning houses.” She had time for few other interests but did enjoy jogging and biking long distances. She graduated in 1975.

“I wanted to study ornamental horticulture. I loved gardening and plants. I had worked for a nursery when I was in high school,” so she enrolled at California Polytechnic at San Luis Obispo, however the department she wanted was already filled. Instead, she declared fruit science as her major and planned her schedule around the sun. “We called it prime suntan hours. I’d ride my bike to the beach and then come back for afternoon labs.” Encouraged by one of her professors, Susan transferred to UC Davis in 1978 during her sophomore year. Having studied viticulture in her freshman year, she decided to dive into it again but the curriculum, as she says, “Kicked my butt. I had to learn how to study. I had to get tutored to learn how to learn. I flunked all my classes first quarter.”

Although she did better during the next semester she opted to take some time off to go to Paris to study French at the Sorbonne University. “It was a culture shock for the little blonde chick from sunny, friendly California,” she laughs. “I was 20 years old. I was hired as an au pair by a French family. I took a few cooking classes while I was there,” because, she laughs, she had no experience in cooking and those French children wanted sauces with their meals. “I grew up on PBJs.”

After the first semester, her romance with Paris ended. “It was cold. I was living in a tiny student room, a walk-up on the seventh floor, with no shower. I wasn’t happy.” So she returned to her west coast home where her brother had discovered skiing in northern California. “I went with him a few times and I was all about it,” Susan declared of her new love for snow. She spent that winter alone at the family cabin in Grass Valley, conveniently about an hour or so from Truckee and Sugarbowl ski resorts.

In the spring of 1979, Susan went back to school, and by the fall of the following year, she was in an internship at Englenook in Napa Valley, the wine company which was later bought by Francis Ford Coppola. In the summer of ‘81, Susan moved to Sonoma County for a job at Alexander Valley Vineyards. “Wine is really beautiful, it’s art, it’s science, it’s gracious living and microbiology. Wine making is very seasonal, and you have to be there, just like farming. I had to make a choice between being adventurous or being tied to the land.”

She decided to take a winter off to go live, work and ski in Aspen, noting that, ”In Aspen, you can work and ski, or work and party but you can’t do both. That’s how I eventually ended up in Crested Butte.” But at the end of winter she went back to Sonoma to work Clos du Bois, as a wine chemist for the fall crush. She eventually earned a BS in Fermentation Science in 1985.

When Susan married her then boyfriend, Bill Eskew, they moved to Venice, Florida, bought a boat and learned how to sail all summer. “And we learned how to baby,” she grins. “Lily was born that fall, after which, we packed up the van and moved to Crested Butte, Thanksgiving 1984. Our lives were really about skiing and sailing and I really wanted to live in a mountain town.” Susan got a job waitressing at the Plum Restaurant (now the upstairs of Talk of the Town), but her husband, she recalls, never really loved CB. “He wanted to be moving all the time. He was gone a lot with his three veterinarian clinics in California and one in Florida. People actually thought I was a single parent.” Still, she admits, “We had a pretty good lifestyle.”
They moved constantly for 15 years, from California to Florida and back to Colorado, keeping their home in CB. “We’d be here for six months to a year and then move again to spend time in the other places. CB was kind of the home base, even though we weren’t here full-time.” Their second daughter, Chloe, was born in 1988 in Santa Barbara.

With college expenses on the horizon for her daughters, Susan decided to continue her own education at Western State College in 1999 (now Western Colorado University) with the goal of becoming employed as a teacher. “I felt I had to support my girls for college so I enrolled in the teaching program as a secondary science educator.” But her daughter Lily began to have emotional issues in high school. “No one could put a finger on what was going on with her but I could see something was happening. We took a year off and sailed around the Bahamas,” Susan felt the change would be good for Lily. “But returning to Crested Butte, nothing had changed for Lily. She didn’t really want to come back and neither did her dad.” Susan returned to Western to finish her course work and the family once again moved, this time to the Outer Banks of North Carolina where Susan did her student teaching to receive her degree in biology, secondary licensure.

She was hired to teach earth science and biology in the little southern town of Edenton, however, between the southern culture and the destruction of hurricane Isabel, Susan was ready to move on. Lily had graduated and Susan returned to Crested Butte in 2004 as a full-time resident, with Chloe enrolled as a sophomore at the CB Academy and Bill moved to Florida. “What skiing and sailing have brought to me is that you have to be flexible and adaptable, you have to be able to pivot and change course, but perseverance and being present is half of it,” Susan felt of her changes.

Lily, who had been having emotional issues all through high school and college was diagnosed as schizophrenic. “She had been hearing voices. It was horrible. It’s a severe mental illness. To have someone that you love fall apart is unbelievable. I didn’t want to believe it. I went to the National Alliance for Mentally Ill, there were all these people with horrible stories and I thought, how do reasonable people cope? You can’t give up on people. The changes of waves and mountains of sailing and skiing is nothing compared to the challenges of the journey of a severe illness.” Lily’s learned how to cope with her mental illness but she still needs so much support, Susan says. Lily now lives in an assisted living facility in Grand Junction.

For the past decade, Susan has managed long and short-term rentals, “I have strong feelings about housing. In tumultuous times, having sanctuary is important. I still like finding housing for locals, people who work in local restaurants and teach skiing. I do have a handful of vacation rentals, the extended Crested Butte family who typically have been coming for years and consider CB their second home. I’ve seen kids grow up, go to college and come back with their spouses. I’d guess the flip side of earning a living from housing is to volunteer to help create decent homes for those who need a little help in the valley,” she says of her work with Valley Housing Fund (valleyhousingfund.org). My dream is to build housing where people could age in place among their friends and family. No one plans to get old, or injured, or sick, but it will happen to all of us, and that’s why I’d like to see housing designed to not only fit in architecturally, but with universal design for accessibility.”

Susan also volunteers with Adaptive, “Having the Adaptive Sports Center as a central part of our local scene is a shining light for inclusiveness. Volunteering with this group for a couple years really opened my heart, to shed the shame of illness and injury and move to adapting to a new reality to continue living our best lives when Lily became ill.”

Susan feels she’s had a lot of opportunity to do many different things. “I coached skiing, wrote for the different local newspapers, volunteered for CBMR guest services, worked for the Nordic Center, started the Trails Commission and was on the town planning board. CB gives you the opportunity to learn to do anything you want to do. That’s who we are — it’s the people, the community and the setting.”

STORY BY
Dawne Belloise

PHOTOS BY
Nolan Blunck

Although Shamai Mushen Buckel is the big sister in her family, Shamai actually means “little sister” in Chinese. Her mother arrived from China at four years old, while her father grew up all over the world. Shamai was raised in Gardner, Colo., on the east side of the Sangre de Cristo range in the San Luis Valley. Her mom is a medical doctor and dad was a ski patroller at Cuchara Resort, outside of La Veta.

As a kid, she’d hike over Mosca Pass to the Great Sand Dunes with other kids and families and for school outings. In the winter, she skied three days a week since her school had Fridays off, and on other days, the family would Nordic ski. When summer rolled around, they’d grab innertubes and float down the Huerfano River, which, Shamai says, was her favorite thing to do. During her childhood, she recalls that Gardner was home to several large hippie communes, so there were lots of kids to play with. “We’d go to different commune gatherings and parties,” she says.

There wasn’t much of an economy in Gardner, and though her parents had separated, they both moved to Santa Fe. Shamai was 10 when she arrived in her new home in New Mexico. She skied both Santa Fe and Taos. School, Shamai recalls, was just school. “I was a good student, mostly in AP classes.” In her junior year, she had the opportunity to visit China for two weeks, tagging along with her brother’s track team. “I had a great time. It was a fun adventure to be with 50 other kids in a foreign country and going to track meets.”

Shamai’s senior year brought even more opportunity to hit the slopes. “I went to school at 7 a.m. and was done before lunch and so I skied every day.” Senior year is also when she got her first mountain bike. “I started climbing too. I was into the outdoors, so those were the other activities that were out there to do. But skiing was my passion for sure.”

It was during her senior year that Shamai first discovered Crested Butte, when her mom brought her out to ski. “I was super lucky on that trip because it snowed a foot and a half every night.” She found her way up to the High Lift and got lost in the powder on the North Face. “I got to the back bowls. I thought it was just incredible.”

She graduated in 1993 with a plan. “I just wanted to ski,” she laughs. “I wasn’t wanting to work at the ski area. I grew up running amok on the mountain since my dad worked there. It was like our home away from home.”

During the summer after graduation, she took time to travel, adventuring off to Australia, Fiji and New Zealand. “We bought a car in Australia, a ‘75 Toyota Crown and drove it around for a month, camping on beaches,” she says of her three-month journey. Later that autumn, she and friends took a trip down to Costa Rica. “We checked out volcano Arenal, which was erupting at the time. We camped at the base and it was erupting all night. I didn’t think it was dangerous—however, they didn’t have a lot of rules back then. It was real fumy, but you could see the red lava glowing. It’s cool to see it in the day but at night it’s stunningly beautiful.”

Returning to Santa Fe, Shamai enrolled at Santa Fe Community College with no clear path. “I still just wanted to ski all the time. I loved being outdoors so I was still biking, climbing and hanging out with high school friends. We were just enjoying life.” College didn’t hold her interest, so after one semester she left to work the 1994-95 ski season at the Ski Santa Fe Resort in the rental shop, which, of course, came with a pass and ensured daily skiing.

“My brother had gone to school in Missoula, but didn’t like it,” so Shamai convinced him to move to Crested Butte with her in the fall of 1995, thinking they might both attend Western State College sometime. She started working at The Bakery but took a tumble on Twister. “I ended up breaking my leg before Christmas.” Living with her brother and another guy, she thought, “These dudes aren’t going to take care of me,” so she went home to heal in Santa Fe. “It sucked but I recovered and as soon as I could, I started working at two high-end restaurants in Santa Fe, one for lunch and the other for dinner. I just saved money because I knew I had to get back to Crested Butte.” She returned that next winter for the 1996-97 season.

Working at Butte & Co., in the rental and hard goods, Shamai felt that she was “living the life.” She enrolled at Mountain Heart Massage School, “because it seemed like it was a good idea. I’ve always been interested in wellness on multiple levels.” Hers was the first graduating class at the then-new school and with that under her belt, she enrolled at WSC in their health promotion and wellness program, graduating in 2000 with a bachelor of arts degree. “I just wanted to keep learning. I’m a life-long learner and I’ll probably figure out something else to go to school for,” she laughs. “I’m a seeker of information. I was still doing some massage work and still working at Butte & Co. because I wanted all the gear.”

Her mother wanted to take Shamai and her brother to the Great Wall in China, so in 2003 the family trio left for Beijing. “It’s been well maintained and it’s stunning… but it failed,” she said of the wall’s ancient history as a border defense. “We went to other small villages along the Great Wall where the wall was more like a mound of dirt because winds had blown dirt through the centuries. In some places, they had taken the bricks to build homes.”

In 2000, Shamai began dating Joe Buckel. “Joe was a snowmobile guide and king of Crested Butte softball,” she recalls. They married in 2006 and now have two children—their son, Cy, is 13 and their daughter, Kalyn, is 10, and both are enrolled at Crested Butte Community Shool.

“When we were dating, Joe wanted to learn to make wine. It was a hobby at that point.” Joe had gone to different wine regions around the world, doing biking tours while Shamai took care of his dogs. In 2005, Joe asked her to move to California with him so he could learn to make wine. “I had always lived in the southwest and I had always wanted to check out California. We moved to Sonoma County and Joe took winemaking classes at Napa College.”

Shamai put her massage degree to use, working at very high-end spas in Napa. “It was definitely a lot of fun, it paid well and I worked in beautiful places,” she says of the five years they were there while Joe earned his wine making certificate from UC Davis. They moved to Cortez, Colo., when Joe was hired by Sutcliffe Vineyards as winemaker. “It was a transition for sure. We had the coast, amazing food, we went to San Francisco a lot to see friends and go to concerts and ballgames. Cortez had none of that. Our son was a year-and-a-half then. I was lucky enough to be a stay at home mom,” which allowed her time to help start a Montessori charter school.

“The best thing about Cortez is the mountain biking. It was my favorite part. Also, for nine years, we owned a small 10-acre farm with apple orchards. We started thinking about starting our own wine label in 2015. We thought about planting vineyards but we didn’t have the best spot for it. In 2017, we actually got all the licensing and named it Buckel Family Wine.”

By that fall, they had moved back to Crested Butte with both kids in tow. “We had a pretty good idea of how things worked and what we wanted to do with our wine label. When you live in the Four Corners you’re closer to Phoenix, Albuquerque and Salt Lake—Denver’s really far away. When you’re selling alcohol, you sell direct to consumer and wholesale in the state and if your major market is all these out-of-state places, you have to get other licensing. So being centrally located in the state would allow us to take advantage of more regions’ markets within the state,” she surmised, even though Crested Butte is at the end of the road. “Here’s the thing—in the summer, you can drive over Kebler and Cottonwood to get to those markets. We’re pretty lucky.”
Buckel Family Wine gets their grapes from the Western Slope of Colorado, mainly Palisade, but also sources grapes from Hotchkiss and Cortez. “We actually started selling in January 2018. You can buy our wines at all the liquor stores locally in Gunnison and Crested Butte. We have a tasting room in Gunnison, which is also our production space where we make the wines. We make white, rosé, red and a petnat, which is the oldest style of making a sparkling wine and predates Champagne.”

Shamai feels they’ve found their perfect home here. “The friends and community that we have here and the access to the outdoors, the ability to play outside—I don’t see myself leaving any time in the near future.”

The Buckel Family Wines tasting room is at 1018 Highway 135 in Gunnison. Reach them online at buckelfamilywines.com.

Skiing, rocks and science

[  By Dawne Belloise  ]

Although Ben Arwood-Levine started his young life in Cripple Creek, Colorado, he spent the rest of his childhood as one of Crested Butte’s notoriously independent kids. His father, Brian Levine, was Cripple Creek’s historic preservation director so Ben was well acquainted with mining history and casinos, the latter actually paying for the historical preservation throughout Colorado, Ben says. Ben’s mother, Donna Arwood made the move to Crested Butte when he was beginning second grade and although they were divorced, his dad also moved so they could raise Ben together.

Ben began at the old school annex trailer which was next to the Old Rock Library, “I loved it because there was lots of snow and I was excited to ski,” he recalls fondly and tells that his first runs were actually at Monarch because his mother worked for parks and recreation in Cripple Creek and they had passes. Once in Crested Butte, he immediately hooked up with the ski club and began racing. By the time Ben was 16 he was competing in Big Mountain and park skiing, which he did through his sophomore year of college. “When I was younger, I was quite good at ski racing, going to the Jr. Olympics. I did all the races until I was 17. I grew up with Max Lamb and Grant Spear, who was a year older than me.”

In the summers Ben biked and was an avid skateboarder, found regularly at the Big Mine Skate Park. “Like all CB kids, I was pretty independent. I’d ride my bike from the mountain to town all the time,” and with a defiant charm he laughs, “Yep, I was one of those feral Crested Butte kids and my parents contributed to it. They’d drop me off at the skate park and I’d be there all day.”

Time spent with his family centered around camping, hiking and visiting all the old mining sites. Ben inherited his father’s love of history, mining and consequently, minerals, rocks and geology in general. “My dad is an antique dealer and historic preservation director and he’s rooted in history, so he admires the history way more than he wants to sell it. He’s more of a collector than a dealer. I was given an appreciation for all of that. I was so fascinated and influenced by both of my parents that I wanted to become the first mineralogist on Mars,” he smiles and admits he’s more likely to ship out to the red planet as a chemist these days.

Ben graduated from CBCS in 2007 and knew he wanted to go into a science oriented career. “Because my favorite classes were environmental science, chemistry and physics. I always had chemistry sets and lots of Legos growing up so I think that had a science and engineering type influence on me. It’s about working with your hands and creating something.”

He enrolled at CU Boulder that fall after graduation and began with environmental science, geology and intro chemistry however, by his second semester, he switched his focus entirely to chemistry. “I really liked the labs and just the physical aspect of being in a lab. I studied a lot and I also skied a lot… a lot,” he laughs. “CU had a lot of CB people. We had a large mountain town crew, not just CB but Vail, Summit County and Steamboat was the biggest. We all hung out and for the most part, we still do. I did my fair share of partying too.” Ben graduated from CU in 2012 with a BS in chemistry and a minor in bio-chem.

After graduation, Ben came home to CB for six months, working at the Colorado Free Skier shop on the mountain. “We all grew up hanging around that shop.” When an opportunity came up to work for Boulder Scientific, Ben returned to the Front Range. The first three years he was an analytical chemist, analyzing samples for research, development and production, later transitioning within the company into research and development as a process, safety and optimization chemist. “I’d be researching the process to ensure it was safe to run at a larger scale. Boulder Scientific made catalysts for plastic manufacturing and also military applications.” He was with them for five and a half years before taking a position in 2017 with Cordon Pharma in Boulder, “Because it was a better situation and location.”

Ben was the senior chemist and team leader working relentlessly to purify the COVID-19 vaccine. “We’re working with Moderna, making the lipid part of the vaccine. The lipid acts as a delivery vehicle, delivering the messenger mRNA into the body,” he explains. Once delivered, it tells the body to create the spike protein which then enables the body to create antibodies to fight the virus (see story in the 1.1.21 CB News).

“Since I work for this company that makes other companies’ drugs, there’s going to be lots of new projects in the future,” he feels, now that the vaccine is in production and already being administered. “Beyond this project for Moderna, I will probably be moved to a new project soon. I never have any idea of what that project will be. I’ve worked on so many but as far as the future, I’ll tackle whatever comes my way. It’s hard to perceive what’s in the future just because of the nature of the work I’m doing.”

Ben is thinking of going back to school for extra classes in computer sciences since he feels that is the future of most industries, specifically chemistry. “It’s starting to become big in software developing and modeling. I don’t want to be left behind. AI (artificial intelligence) is becoming a thing so a chemistry job could be phased out. What I’m seeing is that there are companies that have invested hundreds of millions of dollars into AI and infrastructure for automated chemical compound discovery. AI and robots can make chemical compounds,” he says somewhat incredulously and adds, ”The University of Oxford in Britain has a robot that navigates in a physical lab environment, making lab decisions on its own. It’s doing the same thing I do, it goes around making new compounds and it’s a thousand times faster than a human. So I want to combine computer science and statistics. I’m envisioning to progress my future because I see those skill sets are going to be very handy.”

Whatever he decides to do in his future, mountains will always be a part of Ben’s plan. “I do lots of mountain biking, dirt biking and trail riding in the surrounding areas.  I fly fish a lot, backpack and camp. I still go to mining areas and look at the mining history and geology, thanks to my parents. I have a huge rock and mineral collection. I just bought a snowmobile and I’m being safe but I do plan on getting out a bit. I would love to come back to Crested Butte but it’s hard to use my skill sets up there. I love that lifestyle. I can never see myself moving away from the mountains. There’s no way I’ll ever go to the beach or out East, I have too much of a mountain lifestyle to change.”

Learning from the community

[ by Mark Reaman ]

“I wish that I knew what I know now when I was younger.”
—Ronnie Lane, Faces

For 31 years, David Baumgarten has been the Gunnison County attorney. At the end of this year, the man who spent four months a decade ago walking around Korea exploring the country and himself, will step down as the county’s top lawyer. He has held the position since 1989, when he cracked beers shortly after his job interview with the county commissioners who hired him, David Leinsdorf, Mario Petri and Fred Field, to discuss his starting salary. Matthew Hoyt will step in to lead the office, while Baumgarten plans to help with the transition and stay home and hang out with his dog and kittens.

Sitting 12 feet apart in the county commissioner’s meeting room and wearing masks (with an exception for photos) for most of an hour, we talked about his time and experience in Gunnison County. The young student who attended U.C. Santa Cruz, Berkeley and the University of Colorado Law School and then worked in Boston, Cambridge, Brooklyn and on Colorado’s Front Range, ended up in Gunnison and is grateful for the experience.

We talked about accomplishments (the Land Use Resolution and no trans-mountain water diversions), mentors (Fred Field, Father Jim) and basic lessons learned over three decades (Go slow. Make things happen.).

Here are some excerpts from that conversation…
During his initial job interview, Baumgarten described Fred Field as having his arms crossed and not smiling for most of it. He left that interview without a lot of confidence but was called back not long after the meeting and offered the job. The commissioners wanted to discuss salary and pulled out a 24-pack of beer. Asking how much he wanted for a salary, he pointed to then county manager Gary Tomsic and said he wanted whatever he made. The commissioners laughed, said no way, and decided to stop salary negotiations and just drink beer.

“Fred [Field] turned into a long-term mentor and friend. He was family,” described Baumgarten. “He said to me early on that it was easy to see that ‘You know how to confuse, delay, obstruct and deny. Those are excellent attorney skills but they’re not the skills that you need to be a county attorney. To be a county attorney you need to learn how to make something happen.’ And the day before Fred died while I was visiting him in the hospital, Fred said, ‘You know how to make things happen. You’re a good county attorney.’ That was like the blessing. To be a public attorney, you have to make things happen. From that one sentence you can see how pivotal Fred was. And I matured into it over a really long period of time.”

Learning lessons
While Fred was David’s primary mentor, there are many other teachers who helped shape the now 72-year-old. One of those was Father Jim Koenigsfeld, pastor of the Catholic churches in Gunnison and Crested Butte. “I remember one day in the old courthouse [Father Jim] came reeling out of the jail. I don’t know what someone told him but it just must have blown his mind. He came by my office and sat down and had a cup of tea. One day the same thing happened when I was wandering the streets between the church and the courthouse in some distress and he came out of the church and asked me to come in and have a cup of tea. And then he said, ‘I won’t do anything. I won’t turn you into a Catholic.’ And so Father Jim in that constellation of teachers was important. He fostered in me some patience and compassion and in the best pastoral way, the obligation of service. And a lot of times if somebody asks me what is the main characteristic of the office, it really is that it is a pastoral job.”

A number of other community people have helped guide Baumgarten in his three decades. The common thread is sewn from his martial arts teacher Andy Tyzzer, who says, “We are at our best when helping others.” All of his teachers have the ethos of being at their best when helping others.

“Other teachers really were in two groups that in other communities might be disputants and really might have been disputants, so they both taught me. One of them was the ranching community. It was the Spanns, Lee and Polly and Ken, who was a young man. There is Bill Trampe and the Guerrieri family. Greg Peterson. Wise people, people who speak after doing a lot of thinking. Those folks have an unending environmental consciousness that I think people don’t recognize. The ranching families have kept the beauty of the community that we all take for granted. If not for them we would be the Roaring Fork Valley.

“Parenthetically, one of the biggest victories in which I participated as part of team way back in the day was when Arapahoe County and the city of Aurora wanted to do trans-basin water diversion,” he continued. “We are the only basin in Colorado on the Western Slope that’s not tapped by a trans-basin diversion. We’re the only ones without a pipe in it. Imagine if the water and thus the ranching were gone. For those families to forego that opportunity and also put their land in conservation easements, makes them the real deal. They, together with the environmental community found a confluence to work together.”

It was witnessing that confluence that Baumgarten realized the importance of Fred’s point to make things happen. “Reaching way back, Gnurps [Gary Sprung], was the first recreationist and environmentalist to make the deal with the ranchers. Everyone wanted to ride their mountain bikes all over the place and Gnurps made the deal that the ranchers would let them do it as long as they learned the proper etiquette with the ranchers and the gates. Close the gates. Get off the bike when a horse approaches. Learn how to live with and respect each other. Who is like that now? It is Julia Nania. She’s on the Upper Gunnison River Water Conservancy District. She is an environmentally conscious, smart as a whip kind of person.”

Baumgarten reminisces that John Biro was another teacher. “To watch him in the Fourth of July parade in Crested Butte, fire up his snowmobile and rip down Elk Avenue was great.”

He cites Chris Hensley and how he has helped build the Adaptive Sports program from nothing to a major part of the community. “Doing that speaks of the ethos of our community,” he said. “And judge Steve Patrick. He is, with me at least, patient, ethical, honest and courageous. He is a superb judge and a role model.”

Baumgarten said he has found that while the community might not shy away from a good fight, at the end of the day, everyone will help each other. He has seen ranchers share their water when it is needed. He described the relationship between the town of Crested Butte and the county as sometimes “gruesome” but has no doubt they will support one another when push comes to shove. He used as an example the old county shop being turned into the Crested Butte Center for the Arts. He describes a sense of sharing that permeates the valley. “We’re so far away, and it’s so frickin’ cold and we really are on our own a lot,” he summarizes. “And we depend on our neighbors. We will fuss and fight with each other but at the end, we’ll put it away.”

The deeper job
And while there is a high-profile, public element that automatically comes with the county attorney job, Baumgarten said it is a more unknown element of the position that matters to him most. “The most important thing for me on this job is protecting kids who are abused. One would think that because we’re not urban, because we’re not poor or uneducated that the stuff doesn’t happen here. It happens here,” he said solemnly. “Our office’s most important duty is protecting children as much as we can. To protect them and keep them out of unhealthy situations. People really don’t understand that part of the job.”

He said over the course of his career, the bookends of the board of commissioners in the seats now are similar to those on the board that hired him. “Jonathan and Roland and Liz are smart and popular. And it is because they listen, they think and they try to come up with consensus decisions so that everybody can see themselves in the solution. Like my first board, they don’t do much crowing about themselves. They are good bookends.”

In an Eastern sort of way, Baumgarten sees his and all our tenures as somewhat fleeting. But that presents opportunity. “We have no idea where we came from, we have no idea where we’re going. We’re here for a very short period of time so what’s the point? The point is to make it a little bit better.”

Practically, Baumgarten has some regrets. There was the case where some public access was lost with the Yule Pass trail near Marble. But he is proud that the county was one of the first local governments in the state to regulate oil and gas production. While hard-fought, he sees those regulations as being fair to all sides because of the communication that took place.

Along with helping to keep trans-basin water diversions out of the county, the formation of the county’s Land Use Regulation (LUR) is another team success. “The LUR is performance zoning. It is unique. People hate it. But it requires developers to be creative and understand the values of the place to which they are moving, in order to get a project done. And both the trans-basin diversion and the LUR belong to teams. I was just a participant on the team.”

Looking ahead
As for the future and the transition, Baumgarten is confident the county is in great hands. And he thinks it needs to be, with so many changes hitting the county right now. He feels the fallout from the pandemic will draw people here and big challenges are on the horizon. “My replacement, Matt Hoyt is smarter than me and knows the law better than me. That’s part of what a county attorney does. The other part is relational and how to make things happen. He’s gonna be just fine with that part. I think we’re really blessed by having him become the county attorney. The whole office is great. In our office, we don’t use the word ‘I.’ It’s always ‘us’ or ‘our’ or ‘we.’ The office is made up of extraordinary people. It’s a very participatory office.
“I really have been blessed,” he concluded. “I couldn’t have imagined that this would be the job that evolved like it has. And I absolutely couldn’t have imagined how satisfying in my soul it is.”

Includes CB South rec path, Brush Creek intersection and Slate River Bridge

[ By Katherine Nettles ]

If the grant funding fates align, the county’s capital “wish list” for the next five years could bring extensive road improvements to the North Valley; a recreation path between Crested Butte and Crested Butte South; whitewater park improvements; landfill additions; and/or a new Somerset sewer system, among other projects on a list of priorities approved by county officials.

Gunnison County commissioners approved their updated five-year capital improvement plan for 2021 through 2025 this fall, after holding a work session with community development director Cathie Pagano and county manager Matthew Birnie.

Birnie emphasized that the capital improvement list is a planning document, not an appropriations document, and is not connected to the county budget. Should grant funding opportunities become available, for instance, county officials can use this document to provide guidance and documentation of estimated costs, previous investments and proposed project phases. Projects are also ranked to give a rough estimate of priority.

The updated plan maintains the previous five-year list, with the addition of the Shady Island River Park project, which the commissioners began working on in the past few years. The estimated cost listed is $1.1 million.
Road improvements include maintenance equipment at a cost of $3.1 million; hard surfacing along 14 miles of county roads by the end of 2023 at a cost up to $2.6 million; replacing the Slate River Bridge for $1.4 million in 2022; and improving the Brush Creek intersection for an estimated $2 million.

Trails on the list include a Gold Basin detached trail to access Hartman Rocks Recreation Area for $1 million and a Crested Butte to Crested Butte South recreation path at a cost of $1.5 million, to begin in 2022 or after.

The document describes the rationale for the rec path project: “Crested Butte South is a large subdivision, comprised of single-family homes and multi-family dwellings. The parents work in the Town of Crested Butte or Gunnison, and the children attend school and participate in organized activities in the Town of Crested Butte. There is bus service, but there is currently no safe access for pedestrians or bikers to make the commute.

“The trail will likely be in county road and/or CDOT right of ways and on easements across private land. It will be maintained in the summer and may be groomed for Nordic skiing in the winter. It will be designed to ultimately be surfaced with concrete or asphalt, but will start with an aggregate surface to reduce the cost. Construction will require a trail bridge or approval from CDOT to add a pedestrian lane on their highway bridge.

“This trail is the number one priority of the STOR committee. It is also representative of the statewide initiative identified by Governor Hickenlooper to Connect Communities.”

Other items include a Somerset sewer system replacement for $250,000; landfill improvements to include an additional cell and wind fencing for $1.8 million; updated aerial maps; and a sprinkler system for the county fairgrounds.

Commissioners approved the plan unanimously on October 6.