Celebrate Father’s Day at CBMR

Join Crested Butte Mountain Resort to celebrate Father’s Day this Sunday, June 19. With the purchase of a child’s ticket, the father gets a complimentary ticket for use on Father’s Day. Also, please note that the BagJump opens June 29.

Spruce up local trails

Join the Crested Butte Mountain Bike Association this Saturday, June 18 at 10 a.m. to work on 401 and next Wednesday, June 22 at 4 p.m. to work on the Green Lake Trail. And don’t miss the Not2Bad (bike) movie premiere this Saturday after the workday at 5 p.m. at Butte 66, presented in partnership with CBMR. Raffle prizes, sweet movie, benefits to CBMBA! Come support the club that supports shreddy track!

Adult soccer tournament

The Crested Butte Kickers will be defending their home fields against teams from throughout the state Saturday and Sunday, June 18-19. The Kickers play at 8:30 a.m. at Rainbow and 11:30 a.m. at the school field. The championship game will be on Sunday at Rainbow at 1:30 p.m.

Celebrate Summer Solstice

The Summer Solstice is on Monday! Practice the Yoga Mala 108 to mark the sacred juncture of spring into summer at Yoga for the Peaceful. Modifications are offered to make this practice accessible for EVERY body! There is a suggested donation of $20 and refreshments will be served after the practice. Please come join us in the new studio space at 326 Elk Ave. on June 20.

Drum and dance at the Pump Room

Join special dance and drum classes. Dancers are encouraged to take drum class to experience and internalize the rhythm. Drummers are encouraged to play for dance class, putting their knowledge to work. The same rhythm will be explored in both classes on Thursday, June 16 at the Pump Room. Drum with Salim 5:30 to 7 p.m. and dance with Mecca 7 to 8:30 p.m. Classes are $15 each or $25 for both.

Encore Entrepreneurship at Crested Butte Library

Are you wondering how to discover and implement what you want to do with the next scene of your life? Local entrepreneur Deborah Tutnauer returns to Old Rock Library on Thursday, June 23 at 6 p.m. with a workshop for retirees or those dreaming of transitioning from their current career to something new. Call (970) 349-6535 to reserve your spot for this workshop.

Gunnison County Republican dinner

Remember to reserve your tickets for the Gunnison County Republican Lincoln Dinner on Friday, June 24, from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. at the Multi-purpose Building at the Rodeo Grounds. Call 349-7744 or email jmcgop@q.com.

Birthdays:

June 16- Hilde Nachtigall, Hope Wheeler, Sam Lumb, SusanMarrion, Jay Barton

June 17- Tamara Ayraud, Nan Lumb, Margo Covelli, Chris Zeiter

June 18- Mark Phwah, Ava Lypps, Chuck Cerio, John Banker, Heather Paul Featherman, Dave Penney, David Baxter

June 19- Polly Huck, Nolan Probst, Jimmy Faust

June 20- Heli Peterson, Margot Levy, Bill Frame, Jr., Vic Shepard, Lindsay Kopf, Alana Dietrich

June 21- Kathy Freed, Ward Weisman, Jake Jones, Jackson Melnick,

June 22- Mickey Cooper, Sandy Sullivan, Bess Baskfield, Tom Cutler

What is your favorite wildflower?

When Mercury is in retrograde, we tend to notice more issues in the areas of communication, in the way we interact with others and in our surroundings and neighborhood. It may also show up in our travel, the way we get around and in our interactions with our siblings.

—from the Knower of All Things, the Internet

I’m not saying that it’s the weather or Mercury in retrograde or just life—but a lot of people seem a lot on edge. Or not very motivated. Or not communicating very well. With the exception of the cheery folks extolling the virtues of a One Valley Prosperity Project final plan that will be released this coming Wednesday, there seems a fair amount of grousing in the neighborhood.

Examples of the grousing and possible impacts of Mercury in retrograde:

—It was clear at the last Town Council meeting, the town of Crested Butte appears to be having some issues with Gunnison County and certain contracts and agreements.

—Which means the county is apparently having some issues with town over communications, contracts and agreements.

—At least one member of the RTA was disgruntled about the new “Air Command” and its extensive authority. By the way, calling that group the “Air Command” is a really bad name unless George W. Bush is running the new subcommittee.

—The Lake Irwin Coalition is having issues with Eleven and the Forest Service. (Although I don’t think that blame can land on Mercury or the weather…)

—A new member of the Mt. Crested Butte Town Council was in a tizzy over how planning commissioners are selected.

—I wrote a news story and screwed up the political position of a councilman and his stand on the plastic bag ban. (Thank goodness I have something to blame for screwing up…)

—The plastic (and paper?) bag ban itself is now getting people a tad up in arms in some quarters.

—People are leaving or changing their jobs—examples include the Chamber, the Town, KBUT, CBMR, the Music Fest.

—Anyone having computer issues of late?

—Trump.

We in the upper valley are used to blue skies and warming temperatures this time of year. So days and days of rain, snow or sludge put a bit of a damper on the joy of living at 9,000 feet. Even those indefatigable soccer moms griped about not being able to feel their digits before halftime of last weekend’s Gunni games. I heard someone say the trails were too wet to ride bikes and the new snow too heavy to ski so they might as well drink. I suppose Happy Hour is one way to find “happy” during a rough couple of weeks. But be careful with that route. Or just go all in and buy that soccer mom a 2-for-1 drink while you can.

From the Internet: “The second Mercury Retrograde of 2016 occurs in Taurus on April 28 at 5:20 p.m. Universal Time, 1:20 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time and at 10:20 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time. Mercury goes direct in Taurus (14^o 20 minutes of arc) on May 22 at 1:20 p.m. Universal Time, 9:20 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time and 6:20 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time.”

In other words, we have a few more weeks to deal with Mercury in retrograde. Snowflakes are fading from the forecasts.

And finally—again from the Internet—“Mercury retrograde does serve a purpose: To help you review the recent past and catch up on your work. If you allow yourself to slow down, Mercury retrograde can be a very healing and revealing time.”

So there you go. We just need to slow down. That’s good advice most of the time anyway. And given the weather—what choice do we have really? Be patient. The Internet weather forecast indicates more blue than grey is just around the corner. So let’s ride this one out. Soon, according to the world-wide web, the kumbaya will return and spread to more than just the OVPPers.

Thank goodness.

—Mark Reaman

Carries bike into and back out of the Grand Canyon

by Than Acuff

Team Griggs Orthopedics rider Neil Beltchenko is back at it. This time, he decided to take on the Arizona Trail Race (ATR), a self-supported bike race, a.k.a. bike packing, crossing the state of Arizona from south to north. Beltchenko covered the 750 mile–long course in a time of six days, 12 hours and 28 minutes for the win and set a new course record in the process.

Beltchenko is no stranger to races like this. Last summer he committed himself to the mother of all bike packing races, the Tour Divide, covering the 2,745 miles, and 200,000 vertical feet of climbing, in a time of 14 days, 12 hours and 22 minutes, to finish in third place.

Beltchenko also has a couple of Colorado Trail Races under his belt, winning it two years ago, and he had competed in the shorter version of the ATR before, but this was his first foray into the full course.

“There’s a small group of bike packers who have coined doing the Colorado Trail race the Tour Divide and the Arizona Trail Race as the triple-crown,” explains Beltchenko. “So it was kind of a no-brainer for me to finish off the triple-crown.”

Each one of the aforementioned races is a bit different and the ATR has its own challenges unique to the course.

“In general it’s really rugged, sharp rocks, sharp plants, definitely more technical riding,” says Beltchenko. “Mile-for-mile it’s a much more demanding course.”

So much so that Beltchenko had extended stretches where he had to stay out of the saddle, stand up and mash on the pedals.

“My butt was so chafed that I didn’t want to sit down,” says Beltchenko.

Then, there’s the Grand Canyon.

“No wheels are allowed to touch the inside of the Grand Canyon,” explains Beltchenko. “You have to strap your bike to your back.”

On the fifth day of his race, Beltchenko hit the south rim of the Grand Canyon, strapped his bike to a makeshift backpack on his back and proceeded to hike for 21 miles down the south Kaibab Trail and then up the north Kaibab Trail.

“It’s horrible,” says Beltchenko.” Forty-five pounds of horribleness on my back and trying not to hit your wheel on a rock and fall off a cliff and die. It was treacherous for me.”

Beltchenko dropped in to the canyon at 7 p.m. and emerged the next morning at 11 a.m., tossing his bike to the ground to take a break. Unfortunately, the bugs had hatched and his respite was short lived.

“I just threw my bike off of me, it was the best feeling in the world,” says Beltchenko. “But the bugs were out and that really sucked because I couldn’t just lay there and relax.”

Other than that, Beltchenko’s race was relatively smooth. He averaged around three hours of sleep a night, temperatures in the desert sections never reached oppressive levels and he maintained a pace that kept him anywhere from five to seven hours ahead of the previous record time.

Beltchenko points out that the ATR course does demand some more serious preparation for water sources but his food intake was similar to other races. The list included gummy worms, nuts, toffee-covered nuts, burgers, milkshakes and three stops at McDonald’s throughout the race. In fact, Beltchenko spent a total of $81.30 over the three stops, peaking with a $44 dollar stop at a McDonald’s in Tusayan, Ariz.

Furthermore, both he and his bike survived the rugged course without a single major issue, no injuries and not a single flat tire.

“I usually get nagging injuries and I didn’t get any of those and I was mentally prepared for this race more than ever before,” says Beltchenko. “Luckily I didn’t get any flats. I put in way more Stan’s than I usually do.”

Following his return to society and some rest, Beltchenko has plans to jump into several local races this summer, including the Growler and the Fat Tire 40. Following those he will return to the Colorado Trail Race in the end of July gunning to set a new course record from Denver to Durango.

“Hopefully I can shave off some time,” says Beltchenko.

After that he hopes to return to the Tour Divide next summer and may jump into the Trans Nevada Race and ultimately he may jump in on the Trans Am Bike Race, a self-supported bike race across the entire country.

by Dawne Belloise

Preceded by her spunky persona, Janet Biggers leaves an almost visible wake of color and a dab of pizzazz as she walks through the door. Today, as she’s done most of her winter days, she’s heading up to the mountain, this time for a late-afternoon ski. Her polka-dot glasses, bright yellow parka and red plaid ski pants are almost no match for her effervescent smile.

As an Oklahoma cattle ranch girl, Janet started skiing at Crested Butte with her family when she was 10. Her father was buddies with the original owners, Fred Rice and Dick Eflin, who started up the resort back in the early 1960s.

“Dad said to mom, ‘We’re loading the kids up in the station wagon and going skiing,’” Janet laughs, remembering the mountain when it was a sparse little resort with just the tiny warming house, the J bar and the gondola, Klinkerhaus and a couple of the condos. They slapped skis on her and put her and her siblings in ski school. “We had a blast when it wasn’t cold.” Janet recalled a day so cold that her fingers were frostbitten. After their first visit, she said, “All our family vacations revolved around skiing twice a year.”

Janet confesses that she was kind of a wild child growing up in Bartlesville, Okla., just north of Tulsa. “I just liked to have fun, go to parties, and I had lots of friends. We lived 30 minutes from town so for me to get to town and have fun was a big deal.”

Her parents sent her to boarding school in Colorado Springs from tenth grade through graduation, but it was Janet’s choice. “I thought it’d be cool, like college, and sort of like being on your own. We chose the school because of its proximity to the mountains.”

She signed up for the Broadmoor Ski Team because, she grinned, “If you could get on the ski team, you could ski train at night, you’d get out of the dorm and you’d get to go hang out with the boys. Plus, we got to travel and go to the ski races for the weekend. We went all over, including Crested Butte. I loved skiing and I was totally hooked by then.” She graduated in 1978.

But she didn’t much like school and like most teenagers, she had no idea what she wanted to do. So she enrolled at Western State College, basically to ski. “I did what I had to do to ski,” but her father intervened with the ultimatum, “This out-of-state tuition and you not going to class is not working out,” so he gave her a choice: she could either go home and attend college in Oklahoma or find a job in the Gunnison Valley.

“I found a job. I started working for Robel Straubhaar teaching in the ski school in 1980. Robel did put me through the ringer. I was sort of a spoiled brat probably in the beginning. He always thought I was gonna break but I never did. If I didn’t do a turn right he’d make me hike back up and perfect that turn. While in a training class, we’d have to demonstrate our turns and how we taught. Robel was tough but sweet.”

The year Janet started was a year of basically no snow, she recalls. “We had to take beginners up to the stables because that’s the only place there was snow. There was no snow at the base area. We didn’t have much work that year, so we skied what we could. They were putting hay down that year, people were skiing through the mud but we still had a good time.”

To this day, Janet still runs into adults on the mountain who she taught when they were kids back in the early ‘80s. “Molly was only 7 years old when I first taught her,” she says, as she remembers a child student. “She showed up in a cute fluffy pink outfit. They’re still coming here and now. Molly’s kids are in ski school, and I get to ski with them [although Janet no longer teaches]. There are still people from back then who I taught that I get to see.”

In the summers Janet would head back home to Oklahoma, staying with her parents and being a lifeguard at the pool but when the seasons changed, she would return to the slopes to teach in Crested Butte’s ski school. In 1982 she met Austrian ski instructor Franz Wiesbauer. They married the following year and spent their summers in Austria.

“It was beautiful there. I did what I could with the language, but it was my first time abroad,” she says of the learning curve of picking up enough German-Austrian to get by. The couple returned in 1986 to live year round, working in Crested Butte Mountain Resort’s marketing department covering the Oklahoma territory and living between Oklahoma and Crested Butte. When they divorced a couple years later, Janet stayed in her home state, although she would come back to ski and spend a month in Crested Butte every winter.

Back home, Janet got involved in teaching aerobics, which was a popular fitness fad in the era. She also went big, as she tells it, and started doing many triathlons. When she returned to Crested Butte to race as part of the Tulsa Ski Club, a faction of the larger Flatlanders Ski Club, she just never returned to Oklahoma.

It was 1990 and she spontaneously decided to stay. It was a good move and she met the love of her life. “I stayed through the rest of the winter. Johnny Biggers was on ski patrol. I was with my girlfriends and we were getting on the Silver Queen when Johnny saw me and asked if I wanted to ride the chair up with him while he ate his lunch. We had known each other at WSC, back in the day. The rest is history,” Janet grins. They married in 1993.

She started teaching skiing again while Johnny was building houses in the summer and patrolling in the winter. After he retired from the ski patrol in 1999, he and Janet started their business, Crested Butte Builders. The company did well, with Janet handling planning and interior design. In between work, they’d hike, bike, and boat but mostly Janet was still into running and spent a lot of time in the gym as well. She proudly takes credit for getting her husband into water skiing, trekking off to Lake Powell whenever they can.

These days, Janet and Johnny have settled into their busy lives, recreating whenever they can get away, but fully taking advantage of the outdoor life of Crested Butte that they love. “We have our small houseboat at Lake Powell,” she says, and they have a home in Grand Junction because Janet loves the heat and longer summer days where she can garden and there are loads of biking and hiking trails.

The milder seasons of the southwestern slope also mean she gets in a lot more golfing and more important, waterskiing.

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“My life is all really happy. We have the best of all worlds. I see still being here in Crested Butte for skiing and our business is here. We’re having fun here as well as Grand Junction, being on the water and enjoying life. Johnny’s family is in Australia, so we go once a year. We’ll be going to Sydney in May. My family is still in the same house I grew up, with lakes and fishing and swimming and I still enjoy my roots in Oklahoma. We’ve got all these great things to do when we spend time with our families. Between all the stuff we do here and running the business, we’re pretty much booked up.”

Janet feels that Crested Butte is truly her home though, having been coming here since the first decade of her life and the beginning of the town as a ski resort. “What I like about Crested Butte is that it’s a small town and I’ve had good friends here for years. This place feels like home since I’ve been coming here since I was a kid. This is home.”

A swashbuckling life of miles

by Dawne Belloise

“It’s all an adventure. I don’t know what’s coming,” Scott Steiner says with a calm that belies his excitement. Having hiked, cycled, sailed, kayaked and driven a Mountain Express bus in circles for thousands upon thousands of miles, Scott seems always ready for the next escapade.

Scott grew up in the suburbs of our nation’s capital. His mother worked for public schools and his father was a rocket scientist; yes, a physicist who designed guidance systems for aeronautics. Scott talks proudly of his father’s work on the Mercury-Redstone, the NASA launch vehicle that carried John Glenn as the first American to orbit the earth in space.

Scott realized early on as a child that he never felt comfortable in the suburbs and admits that he was the misfit in his family, the “black sheep,” as he says. “I was a recluse from the get-go. I knew something wasn’t right,” he says of his suburban childhood, surrounded by concrete and pavement. He had no connection to the natural world while growing up, but when he was 13 his parents got this wild idea to throw the kids into the car and take a cross-country trip. It was a popular travel fad for that ‘50s and ‘60s era when gas and travel were cheap.

“We had a Pontiac sedan and we all crammed into this prairie boat and drove to the West Coast and back. I saw the Rocky Mountains and the rest is history.”

Between a rocket scientist father, a mother in education, the wonder of seeing the Rocky Mountains, and getting totally hooked on traveling, it’s easy to understand how Scott became an overachiever to accomplish his dreams.

Two years after the family’s bi-coastal excursion, at the age of 15, Scott and a school buddy trekked off on his first backpacking trip on the Appalachian Trail, where, he laughs, “We got our asses handed to us. It was cold, rainy, hypothermia weather. It was November and my parents had given me the incentive that if I did well in school I could attach a few days to our Thanksgiving vacation so we could have more time to hike. We were frozen and miserable and I loved it.”

By the time he was 17, Scott and his friend did a 600-mile backpacking trip on the Appalachian. “At that point, my life’s destiny had already been determined. Two years later, at 19, I did a solo 1,500-mile and completed the Appalachian Trail.”

Scott was the 601st person to complete that hike that more than 16,000 people now boast to have completed. As a section hiker—that is, one who does the trail in segments over time—he recently hiked it in its entirety again.

After high school, Scott enrolled at the University of Maryland, earning a degree in parks and recreation in 1981, after which he got a job as a ranger in Vermont on the highest mountain in the state, where he was introduced to environmental education when one of his co-rangers got a job in California’s Redwoods teaching the subject in public schools.

“He helped me make the transition out to California to teach at this school, too. It was there I decided I was going to become the director of that school but I needed an education degree, so I went back to Vermont, enrolled at the University of Vermont, and got my education degree in 1985.”

However, he changed his course, never making it back to the Redwoods because he ended up in the backcountry as a park ranger.

“I was the Capital Peak Ranger in the Maroon Bells. I came to Colorado in 1986 because I was a telemark skier in Vermont and my mentor told me if I was going to be a tele skier there was only one of two places in the world for me—Telluride or Crested Butte,” so he came west to the Crested Butte Mecca of free-heeling, where he felt he belonged.

Meanwhile, back in his ranger tent pitched at Conundrum Hot Springs, he’d fill out job applications nightly, seeking a school teacher position in Colorado, because, “I started feeling a little bit like living my whole life in the backcountry was a little too isolated and choosing to be a teacher was a challenge to my lifestyle, but I chose it because it would meet all my needs. I could help children learn and continue to adventure during summer breaks.”

So, on his days off as a ranger, he’d head down to the post office and mail out those applications, pinballing between Aspen and Crested Butte. His very first job interview netted him a teaching gig with Gunnison’s Blackstock Elementary sixth graders.

“I taught social studies, English and reading. At one point, I left the classroom to be the school counselor, working with troubled kids for 10 years,” Scott says. His tenure at the RE1J school started in 1986 and lasted for 20 years. While he was at Blackstock School, he decided to further his education, taking night classes at Western State College (WSC) because, he grins, “Just for something to do because in those days, there was nothing to do Gunnison. I didn’t know anybody and they were offering graduate classes at WSC.” He earned his master’s degree in school counseling over two years and graduated in 1989.

“If there was a way to summarize my life, it is a life of miles,” Scott reflects thoughtfully. “I have backpacked 20,000 miles and bicycled over 100,000 miles. When I sold my boat four years ago, I had logged 20,000 miles of sailing along the Alaskan coast.” He had sold his live-aboard sailboat to finance his 5,000-mile bicycle trip in Scandinavia, which he called his Viking trip that took three months.

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“I circumnavigated Ireland, Scotland, and rode the whole length of Norway. I got 400 miles north of the Arctic Circle on my bike and then rode all the way around Iceland,” says the über-cyclist.

His passion is melding with the outdoors, riding along and becoming part of the landscape. He says of his journey, “It all depends on what you feel you need to get out of it. While some people need to go to museums or theater, or whatever touristy thing, I just see it by being outside every day, all day, in the countryside, just soaking it in. Also, my whole mode of travel is self-propelled, long, slow, distance travel… or LSD,” he laughs of his wanderlust. “All my trips, whether sailing, kayaking, hiking or biking, I’m moving slowly through the countryside just absorbing everything, so I don’t feel I need to stop and see special things because it’s coming in to me all the time.”

Scott, whose trail name is “Old School,” claims to have slept with grizzly and black bears, stepped over at least a dozen rattlesnakes, forded ice cold raging class five rivers; he’s been hurt, dehydrated, exhausted, dirty, hungry, and beaten to a pulp, but he always gets there. He points out that when you spend enough time in the wilderness, stuff happens.

And he’s definitely spent more of his life out in the wild than many, as a Triple Crown hiker (a combined 8,000 miles of the Appalachian, Pacific Crest and Continental trails), having hiked the Pacific Crest Trail twice, the Appalachian Trail twice, the Arizona Trail, the Colorado Trail that winds 500 miles from Durango to Denver, the Long Trail in Vermont twice, and the Grand Enchantment Trail from the Grand Canyon to Albuquerque.

Scott’s climbed into his kayak to paddle 1,000 miles in Alaska. He’s also built eight wooden kayaks. He rode his bike to Fairbanks, Alaska, and back all the way from Jackson Hole—that’s 5,500 miles—and then topped that by biking 7,000 miles from Seattle to Newfoundland in four months.

“I was a machine that year,” he grins.

Scott will take off on his next adventuresome feat this summer for a 300-mile mountain biking trip riding the Continental Divide. “I walked it. Now I’m going to ride it,” he says excitedly. “In the not so distant future, 2017, I’ll be doing the toughest trail in America, the Heyduke Trail in Utah and Arizona. It’s totally remote desert wilderness for 850 miles,” he says of the trail named after the character in Edward Abbey’s Monkey Wrench Gang.

When he retired after 20 years of teaching, Scott became a Mountain Express bus driver since it catered to his travel lifestyle, and he felt like he needed something to ground him. Otherwise, he jokes, he’d be trekking 12 months out of the year. And the problem with that, he realized, is that Crested Butte is such a wonderful place and he needs to spend a little time here between his wanderings, although he also realizes the dichotomy that he finds day-to-day town life to be a bit monotonous and unfulfilling.

“The reality of it is, I can’t ski anymore due to injuries.” He accepts this as a sacrifice in favor of being able to still do the other outdoor things he loves. However, winters will see him return to drive the bus. If he has his way, his future will include another live-aboard sailboat so he can return to a sailor’s life in Alaska.

“During the 10 years on my boat, I experienced eagles, bears, whales, and incredible scenery. I mean, if that’s the life you’re seeking then that’s the place you want to be—so that’s where I’m headed.”

Scott has chosen his life and followed it with verve and a gusto for whatever comes across his path. “I have never swayed from my course and I have no regrets. I’m a searcher. I keep roaming around. I have a bucket list with every one of these things that I’ve done. It’s infinite. Searching is what I am—it’s not what I’m looking for, it’s what I do and it’s what I am. I’m just gonna die out there somewhere, someday, on some trail. That’ll just be the end of me. And that’s where I belong.”

Aloha Spirit

by Dawne Belloise

Toni Todd’s smile fills the room almost as much as the aroma wafting from her oversized travel thermos filled with steaming coffee, brewed with beans she grew on her small coffee farm on the island of Hawaii.

Coffee and writing go hand in hand. It is said that behind every successful writer is a substantial amount of coffee and perhaps, unbeknownst to Toni, that is where the caffeine connection serendipitously came about. She had always wanted to become a writer and from her very first decade she created stories about the stuff that whirls around in the minds of children.

“My mom says I’ve been making up stories my entire life,” Toni says of her mother’s kidding. “Stories were something I was drawn to when I was a kid and I loved writing.”

Born and raised in Salem, Ore., Toni attended a tiny Catholic school. Her parents paid for piano lessons for a few years but Toni admits, “I wasn’t into it. I would rather be on my bike or outside playing sports and besides, no one in my family was a musician so I didn’t have any real role model encouragement.” However, now her passion is ukulele.

Toni was 13 when she started her skiing addiction and realized she could become a serious ski bum. “There was a bus that went from Salem to Mt. Hood and I begged my parents to help me learn to ski. I started taking lessons and kept going back. After three years, this tiny ski school ran out of lessons and classes to put me in, so they offered me a job as an apprentice.”

She was 16 by then and getting a free ski pass for instructing, “and then after that I was getting paid.” Toni grinned and collected that paycheck while she skied free and taught. When she graduated in 1977 Toni had no idea what she wanted to do but had high hopes. “I figured I’d get discovered for my creativity and make a whole lot of money.”

When fame and fortune didn’t materialize immediately, she enrolled at Lewis and Clark College. “It was the only school I applied to because I never knew you were supposed to apply to more than one. I went there until I ran out of money and had to pay them back. I wasn’t a serious student and it was a very expensive school to not be a serious student. I was spending more time on the mountain than in school.”

Honing her inner ski bum, Toni traded up for the real deal, relocating to Vail, and, as she puts it, “Squishing all of my belongings into a 1972 VW Bug.”

Midway through her second season as a Vail ski instructor, she crashed and burned, breaking her neck in three different places at her C6. Luckily, the break remained intact, but she was out of commission for a while and decided it was a good time to get serious about going back to college.

“I made my way back to Portland in 1985, where I met my husband, Ron Niederpruem—which is why I did not take his name,” Toni laughs, pointing out that they’ve been together for over 30 years and all dinner reservations are made in her surname. “He actually goes by Mr. Todd because it’s easier,” she laughs.

They ended up moving to southern California where Toni went to California State University at Northridge. “That was a good decision to go back to school, but the major I chose was a bad decision.” She blames her friends who told her that a business major always gets a job out of college. “But that’s not where my heart was, I was a writer.”

Nevertheless, she graduated in 1989 with a BS in business and promptly went to work as middle management for a Fortune 500 company for seven years, “Doing all the stuff you learn to do when working for a Fortune 500 company… I learned to play golf, co-ed league softball, and roller blade at the beach. I liked living there but it was so big and I’m not a city person.”

One day, both Ron and Toni were slapped with the disillusionment of their large company jobs and California city life. Ron wanted to go into business for himself and Toni still fancied herself a writer.

“So we sketched out a plan that in three years’ time we’d go to Colorado and maybe I’d pursue a degree in journalism and he’d start his own business.”

The very next morning fate took over. “I was at work and I got a message from Ron on my office phone,” she tells. “He had just gotten laid off, so we decided to move to Colorado right away.” They were packed and gone in three weeks instead of three years.

“We moved to Lakewood in Denver. Ron became a certified financial planner in his own biz and I went to DU and got my master’s in mass communications, which is essentially the study of the media and persuasive communication.”

But ultimately, Toni still wanted to be a journalist, so she started applying to small-town newspapers. “One of the towns we had passed through in exploring Colorado was Gunnison. I wrote a letter to the then editor, Steve Reed, and sent in some samples of my academic writing and said, ‘I think I can write.’ He said, ‘I think you can write too and if you come to town I can keep you busy.’”

The cub reporter started out as a stringer for several months before she spotted an ad in the paper for a news reporter at KBUT. They interviewed, then hired her. “I kept doing some freelance for the paper, but I was the news director at KBUT for 20 hours a week and I loved it.”

Toni stayed with KBUT for five years and also hosted their radio show, Town Talk, which was a live call-in public affairs show. When she received an offer to become a full-time staff writer at the Gunnison Country Times, she left her beloved community radio job.

Somewhere between their dreaming and waking realities the couple got a wild hair and thought it would be a great idea to move to Hawaii. That was 2005, and shoveling snow in that epic year may have helped play a part in their decision. “We had been going on vacation there off and on for a couple of years, exploring the non-touristy parts mostly on the Big Island. We found this little place in the rain forest we thought we could afford so we bought it. And moved.

“Meanwhile, we kept our cabin just north of Gunnison,” Toni says, but they eventually discovered why their Hawaiian house was so affordable. “It was in the rain forest. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest so I thought, how bad can a little rain be? As it turns out, there’s a big difference between the 180 inches [average rainfall] in Hawaii as compared to about 45 inches where I grew up. And it’s miserable,” she laments. “It’s always raining. It’s not like it’s just always a little misty… it’s pouring rain day after day after day. And then, when the sun does come out, you’d think everyone would go to the beach… but no … you mow your lawn or weed whack because it might be another three months before you get another day again so you do yard work and then it starts raining again. You don’t get a winter break, because yard work… it’s always there! And there’s mold everywhere, always… and rust, everything rusts, it doesn’t matter if it’s indoors or outdoors, it rusts… the toaster, the refrigerator… if it’s made of metal it’ll rust! A dehumidifier is a great idea until you realize how expensive electricity is in Hawaii.”

And furthermore, Toni realized, they were located only ten miles from an active volcano, in Volcanoes National Park. Although they weren’t close enough that lava would reach their home, they had the pleasure of discovering the uniquely Hawaiian “vog,” or volcanic smog.

“Depending on how the winds are blowing, the vog can be bad when you live close to an active volcano.” She wrinkles her nose in considering the full scope of the situation. Her tale is laced with a mixture of headshaking, reality and comedy, like an unwritten I Love Lucy Goes to the Rain Forest episode, but they persisted and endured and nobody voted them off the island.

Fighting boredom and wet sandals, Toni headed off to the farmers market where she picked up a couple of small coffee trees with the intention of growing just enough for their own morning brews. The one thing they had going for them, in addition to all that rain and natural composting, was that their property had deep, rich volcanic soil, instead of lava with shallow soil. The coffee trees thrived after planting, and the encouraged Toni picked up a couple more trees, which thrived as well so she planted two more.

One day, they noticed that the dropped seeds from the half dozen planted trees were sprouting new baby trees. In such a lush environment, things develop pretty quickly and their small grove blossomed to 500 trees, suddenly becoming a tiny coffee farm that now produces anywhere between 80 and 200 pounds of beans a year.

Toni brings the coffee back to Gunnison with her to sell privately and online on the Gunnison Marketplace on Facebook.

Meanwhile, the recession had hit and the couple’s income suffered, as it did for many people, including their local Gunnison renters, who ended up having to leave town. “So there we were with reduced income and two houses. I came back to temporarily live in the cabin with the intention of selling it,” Toni explains, taking a banking job to help pay the mortgage.

It was 2011 and the market was still really depressed and Toni and her husband were competing with all the foreclosures, which meant offers for their cabin were unacceptably low. They decided to hang on to the house a little longer until the market improved.

“I got an email from a friend associated with the college [now Western State Colorado University] who asked if I wanted to teach a class. I quit my full-time bank job to teach one class, which was crazy in the middle of a recession, but it worked into a full-time job there,” she says of her teaching position as a communications and media writing lecturer.

Toni’s temporary stay turned into a most-of-the year resident with summers and extended holiday trips back to Ron in Hawaii, who’s keeping the coffee beans going and running his own small CFP business. Last summer, their beans were voted Best in the Creative Class at a local competition.

Now fully entrenched in Gunnison valley life, in 2012 Toni was offered the Aloha Connection radio show on KBUT and has been hosting it since, which led to her love of the ukulele.

”A musician friend said if you get a decent instrument you’ll sound better and you’ll be more inclined to pick it up and play. So I got a nice tenor uke from Castle Creek Guitars in Gunnison and sure enough, because it sounds better I play it more. I play whatever, expanding my core repertoire so I play a lot of different things. Last year for my birthday, Ron bought me a sweet little mango wood soprano ukulele, so the collection has begun,” she smiles.

Toni also hosts The West Elk Word on KBUT, “which is wonderful. I love being back and more involved in radio. I’m a community radio junkie. I say I don’t have time for writing but I usually squeeze in a story here and there for publications in the valley.”

Additionally, Toni’s been president of the Gunnison Arts Council board for three years and is co-founder of the Headwaters Poetry Festival, a fest she and David Rothman started last spring, bringing poets from the Western Slope.

“I go back and forth [to Hawaii] when I can but who knows what the future will bring. We feel pretty fortunate to have come out of the recession as well as we have and still be able to have that connection between the mountains we love and the islands we love. I love my job at the university. I love the students, they keep me on my toes. And I love the sense of community here. I have always felt a part of the Gunnison community,” Toni says.

Toni carries the Aloha spirit, which in the Hawaiian language means much more than hello and goodbye. It is definitively a way of life that embraces the joyful (oha) sharing (alo) of life energy (ha) in the present (alo).

Part three:  Industrial Manufacturing

By Adam Broderick

Editor’s note: It’s not easy making ends meet in mountain communities that rely heavily on cooperative weather and seasonal tourism. In this winter series, reporter Adam Broderick explores different experiences of business owners who live and work in the Gunnison Valley, yet whose work is mostly seen and sold elsewhere.

The pristine backcountry, the stillness in the valley, and the family-oriented community. These are the underlying reasons most people choose to live here. So when a local company grows and the opportunity to leave this place for somewhere more conducive to expansion arises, what stops motivated businesspeople from hitting the road? It seems those same factors apply.

In discussing outbound business with local professionals, some ups and downs of operating a company locally have been revealed. This week we speak with two manufacturers who fabricate industrial products before shipping them out of the valley. As with anyone featured in this series, they live here because this is where their hearts are and they’ve chosen to deal with any issues that come as part of that package deal.

Andris Zobs, ID Sculpture

Some people never let go of their obsessions with playgrounds. These recreational areas are fun when we’re kids and can still be captivating as we age, as long as they get progressively more technical or subjective.

Take a climbing wall, for example. It’s essentially a playground for both adults and kids. As the guys at ID Sculpture (IDS) know, it takes being a parent or somebody who watches kids play to really know how to make the ultimate playground. Most of the staff at IDS have kids and want to create playground sculptures that inspire imagination and leave the canvas, if you will, open as to how kids can play on them.

Along with the creation of new safety regulations in past years, the team at IDS feels the playground industry has become standardized. A slide is just a slide, and activities have become programmed. ID Sculpture is trying to break away from that paradigm. They believe conventional playgrounds are too easy to navigate and that art and playgrounds should coexist so that a piece of art can also be something to play on.

Andris Zobs is director of operations and business development at IDS, formerly known as Integrated Design Solutions and founded by cutting-edge rock climber Ian Glas. In 2009, Glas was focused on climbing the world’s toughest routes and in the off-seasons he molded climbing holds for various clients. He founded IDS in 2009. In 2012 he partnered with Zobs, who was an architectural designer before he was director at the Office for Resource Efficiency (ORE). Zobs is still on the ORE board of directors but his full-time gig involves creating art with a playful purpose, and vice versa.

IDS began as a climbing feature fabrication company with just a few climbers and designers, but soon evolved into a major manufacturer of sculptural concrete playground equipment, public art and exhibits. When Glas started the business, climbing walls were mostly made of steel and plywood and cement coatings were rare. He wanted to add a new level of realism and creativity to artificial rocks, so along came IDS.

The company now has 13 employees and does everything from designing to manufacturing to shipping from a Gunnison warehouse. Glas is CEO and lives in Gunnison. Zobs and several employees live in Crested Butte and make the daily commute.

Zobs’ work in sustainability has encouraged him to use 100 percent recyclable materials and to recycle all waste. All steel fabrication is done in-house. The concrete mix IDS incorporates into playgrounds and climbing structures to “a sculptable cementitious coating that can be applied to a contoured structural armature” was an expensive investment to develop but is now ideal for playing and climbing.

Together the team digitized the process of designing projects with computer aided drafting and manufacturing (CAD/CAM), “and now we have really cool digital sculpting tools,” Zobs says. They use 3D scanners and printers.

Zobs feels they really excel when they get to work with landscape architects to make custom sculptures. IDS operates on the belief that every project should be designed with place in mind and that everything they build should be timeless, in terms of both design and durability.

They designed and built the climbing boulder you’ve probably seen at Rainbow Park, but Zobs says that’s an old project and not a great example of their best work. IDS has constantly invested in the quality of their product, working with concrete mix design consultants and engineers.

Their ability to do custom work lets them localize projects, like the flour silo sculpture they just designed for a place in Utah that is known for a historic flour mill. Or if they were asked to build a 10-foot-tall, 20-foot-long climbable Brontosaurus and ship it to a school in Missouri, they could make that happen. If they were asked to replicate a natural climbing wall in Utah with identical holds, cracks, and overhangs, and set it up in Chattanooga, Tenn., they could do that, too.

IDS recently built a playground at a large public park in Salt Lake City. It’s over 350 feet long and features climbable caves and waterfalls, and utilizes more than 600 unique, prefabricated parts. Shipping the parts from Gunnison and installing it had IDS employees in Utah for almost three months. Zobs says they send a lot of oversized loads out of town, often as a caravan of flatbed trailers loaded with freshly carved sculptures.

Some local businesses might argue that shipping costs hinder business around these parts, but Zobs says that when your products are as unique as IDS makes them, the shipping costs are a small part of the equation.

The company continues to grow because of their ability to customize sculptures and deliver them, as well as the quality of products they export. Currently, about 80 percent of projects are playground-related and 20 percent are exhibits and public art sculptures.

If you were to travel the world in search of awesome playgrounds, you would find IDS products in 22 U.S. states, Canada, and beyond. They’re even in Dubai. Locally, the climbing wall at the Gunnison Community Center was an IDS project. So were the playground at the Gunnison Middle School and the boulder at Legion Park in Crested Butte South. IDS recently donated a piece to Stepping Stones Children’s Center here in town.

Zobs hopes to see IDS grow in size and efficiency in the near future, and to be able to manage growth while maintaining the quality of products and the company’s creative niche in the market.

But he finds some obstacles to doing business in the Gunnison Valley, like finding and retaining skilled, dependable employees. He also thinks improving affordable housing options and diversifying the economy to incorporate more people actually making products in the area to will help improve business here. “Better flights and Internet would be great as well,” he adds. “But while there are challenges to locating our business here, they are not insurmountable, so why wouldn’t we live here?”

Zobs explains that Glas started the business here because he wanted to be here. “We want to be here,” he says. “We don’t feel constrained by the region. We like the Gunnison Valley because it’s quiet and family oriented. [The Gunnison Valley] needs to make its way through economic developments.”

The Sciortinos, LetterFab 

Trea Sciortino found a new love through his involvement with LetterFab, the wholesale manufacturer of aluminum-fabricated, LED illuminated channel letters (three dimensional letters you see on many building exteriors, especially in big cities) based in the Riverland Industrial Park a few miles south of Crested Butte. He fell in love with metalworking, metal art, and blacksmithing, and says he’ll live the rest of his life thanking his company for introducing him to a diverse platform for art. Prior to starting LetterFab from scratch in 2007, he was in construction and carpentry and has always had a passion for arts and crafts.

Warren Sciortino, Trea’s father and the man behind the LetterFab idea, was selling signs in Louisiana for a different sign company before pitching the business idea to his son. Channel letters have been a staple to American signage since the ‘50s, and since LED entered the industry in 2005, prices have dropped significantly. Now LetterFab has endless opportunities in the sign industry. They’ve done 100-foot tall pylon signs; they made a large sign for the basketball stadium in Madison Square Garden; they did the Capital One letters for the Orange Bowl; they work in every state, including Hawaii, and have signs in Canada, the Caribbean, and the Cayman Islands.

LetterFab creates custom illuminated metal signs and other custom sign projects, but Trea says LED illuminated channel letters are their bread and butter. They’ll occasionally consider a local project, like the sign for Montanya Distillers, but LetterFab caters best to big businesses and franchises that need the same sign multiple times.

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LetterFab has 15 people on staff, including Trea and Warren. Trea manages operations while Warren is in charge of sales. The two use their combined knowledge of the sign industry to put projects together. Once Warren sells a project, their crew uses large bending machines to make the letters A-Z out of aluminum. Then they chemically weld what’s called a trim cap, which is basically like a Tupperware lid for the letter bases. Finally, LEDs are installed in the letters, which illuminate the letters against a night sky. The letters are then shipped across, or out of, the country on freight trucks.

Trea says freight options have improved the past eight years he and his father have been in business, which has made it easier to get products out of the valley. He explained that it used to be just FedEx and sporadically other companies, but companies like SAIA and Conway have stepped up their game to compete with FedEx and he’s now happy with all three of those freight providers.

“We’re doing this in the middle of nowhere specifically so we can live in the mountains. We deal with deep snow, a remote location, and everything ships out of here.

“That has been our biggest challenge, along with finding good employees. You know as well as I do that nobody moves out here to work 40-hour weeks,” Trea tells me. “I’m here to not be involved in the rat race. It’s mountains and our lifestyle up here long before channel letters and success in business.”

It’s more expensive for LetterFab to operate here than it would be in a city like Grand Junction or Denver, so the Sciortinos must focus on being efficient and streamlining production. Since all sign materials are incoming and outgoing, getting them in and out of the valley is a major hurdle. Manufacturing in the middle of nowhere is difficult, but Trea says they do it because when they finally get some time off they can enjoy the surrounding mountains and push the reset button. The mountains are precious to the Sciortinos. According to Trea, “This place is gorgeous, with gravity.”

Trea moved here in 1997 to pursue big-mountain snowboarding. He built his home on one of the first deed-restricted lots on the Verzuh Annexation in 2002 and has made all the money he can account for in the Upper Gunnison Valley. He says it’s been a long journey since his 20s, and it hasn’t been easy.

Warren moved here after his son. He was living vicariously through Trea, always asking about his snowboarding and mountain biking adventures. Warren fell in love with Aspen in the 1970s and had always dreamed of living in Colorado, and starting LetterFab enabled him to finally move away from New Orleans, where he’d spent almost 60 years. It was the only way he could move to a place like this and make a living. Warren came up with the idea and Trea took the bull by the horns, as he puts it, and set up fabrication in Riverland.

Warren also works with Guest Services and guides snowshoe tours for Crested Butte Mountain Resort. He rides an electric mountain bike during summer, the only way he can climb the trails here and enjoy the downhills without having a heart attack on the way up.

And that’s no joke. He’s had two massive heart attacks, one from which he died and was brought back to life, and has returned to become an Ironman triathlete. He loves talking to people and will spend the better part of a day teaching the ins and outs he’s learned to a person new to signage.

When they think about all the times they’ve put in extra-long hours and wished they could have crawled into an old mine shaft to get away, thinking about playing in the mountains and appreciating real life (which Trea believes lives in the wilderness surrounding Crested Butte) keeps them going strong. Then again, when business slows from time to time, they’re reminded how it feels to barely squeeze by. But they’re aware many local business owners are in similar situations.

“Sometimes there’s a hole to crawl out of if the phone doesn’t ring enough, but we’ve managed to weather the storms. Literally,” Trea jokes.

LetterFab has a fairly new facility in New Orleans, an effort to grow the company through easier means of shipping. But you won’t find either Sciortino moving there to help out. They’ll be busy expanding in Riverland, where fire suppression resources are now up to code with county requirements so LetterFab’s 1,800-square-foot weatherport will be replaced with a 3,250-square-foot building. Trea says this should greatly improve efficiency. He also says keeping the same employees will boost efficiency as each crewmember further masters their trade.

“I have my dream crew right now,” he says. “I have the guys I’ve been looking for for eight years, and I’d like to have the same crew years from now. Then we’ll be even more of a well-oiled machine.”

Thank you for absorbing this three-part feature story on local entrepreneurs working out of this little slice of heaven. After all, it’s the people who bring all the wonderful features of this place together that make it worth sharing. So as we continue on the trail toward each of our own definitions of success, remember to support local business and the people who work hard to stay here. Like each person interviewed for this series knows, it’s not all about the money. It’s about how we earn it and what we do when we focus on the real prize: the place we call home.

By Adam Broderick

Editor’s Note: It’s not easy making ends meet in mountain communities that rely heavily on cooperative weather and seasonal tourism. In this winter series, reporter Adam Broderick explores experiences of business owners who live and work in the Gunnison Valley, yet whose work is mostly seen and sold elsewhere.

Some people just can’t shake off Crested Butte no matter how long they stay away. This place affects the soul in ways most elsewhere couldn’t imagine—the jaw-dropping landscape, the caring community, even the fact that we have to work a little harder to stay warm, visit loved ones, and make ends meet. It may not be apparent at first, but once it sets in it becomes a part of life. And it’s a life worth living. A life worth taking pride in.

This week we speak with two professionals who found creative ways to return to the place they’re most passionate about and make a living of it. As with anyone featured in this series, they live here because this is where their hearts are and they’ve chosen to deal with any issues that come as part of that package deal.

Jeff Scott, Re-Think and The Idea Launch Lab

“You’d be surprised that the guy who tunes your skis has a Ph.D. or your server at The Last Steep has a master’s degree,” says inventor-designer-tech guru and all-around fun guy Jeff Scott. And right he is. Interviewing him at his Fourth and Belleview shop in Crested Butte was like teleporting to a mini-Silicone Valley, an unusual feeling in a remote mountain town full of overeducated ski bums. I was impressed with his knowledge of ecommerce sales and search engine optimization (SEO), but his resourceful, inventive side is what really caught my attention.

Scott is the board president of the local KBUT radio station, but those airwaves don’t get as much play outside the valley as the products he’s developed. At some point you’ve probably seen dog collars, townie bikes, or flying discs glowing in vibrant colors against a night sky. Those are Scott’s doing, and they’ve become the foundation of his new creative space, The Idea Launch Lab.

It all started with some friendly competition in the dark. Scott and friends enjoyed playing Ultimate Frisbee after work, so he designed a light-up disc for their night games.

When friends suggested he bring the disc to market, he opposed the idea; it was made strictly for their night game amusement.

A few years later Scott was fired from his job in software development and was curious what to do next. He reached out to a friend in Boulder and the two joined forces to produce more light-up discs. The prototype was improved and an e-commerce website built, and soon afterwards they both refinanced their houses and started making the improved products out of Boulder. One day the owner of NiteIze (innovative LED tools, toys and accessories) walked in with a business proposal. The FlashFlight light-up disc has now been on the market for 14 years. It is made in Denver because that’s where injection-molding needs are met, but Scott lives in Crested Butte.

Scott hails from Dallas, Texas. His brother came to Crested Butte for a college ski trip decades ago and returned to tell his dad how awesome skiing was, and that skis were much more fun than motorcycles. Then in 1974, Scott learned to ski here. The next year, his dad moved the family to Aspen and that’s where he graduated from high school in 1983. “Aspen became the place where the rich went to watch the rich,” he told me from across a table piled with product plans and prototypes. “But dad raised us outside and the wilderness became our church, and I knew I wanted to provide the same for my own kids. My brother and family friends are still on the Aspen side, but the glam factor is too much for me.”

Twelve years ago, he, his wife and two children, now 19 and 21, evaluated their passions and began shopping ski towns. Everywhere they looked they compared to Crested Butte. After building a business and securing royalties from FlashFlight products, they were able to move here. They love skiing and being involved in the wide range of unique, small-town events, and the tight-knit community provides great value for his family.

Scott recently moved the Boulder warehouse to Fourth and Belleview, where 3D printers, laser engravers and other high-tech machines are going in to improve and expedite more local design and development. He built the 3D printer, and even uses it to print additional parts for the same printer. He also handles the e-commerce side of things for NiteIze, and is constantly rethinking ways to add more benefit to the community and the environment.

Scott has a lot going on, so read this next paragraph carefully. The Idea Launch Lab is a part of his company called Re-Think, which he uses to throttle up ideas he’s been sitting on. His original business partner is in the process of retiring, so now Re-Think is picking up where PlayHard, the partnership’s company that developed the FlashFlight disc, is leaving off. Now, Re-Think is essentially the design and development business that builds and pushes products. The Idea Launch Lab formed after the number of NiteIze products, combined with Scott’s other endeavors, began enticing more people to learn how he develops products and brings them to market. Scott has been consulting others for a long time, and The Idea Launch Lab is working on a process to streamline peoples’ ideas and determine if they’re short-term or have real long-term potential.

The SpokeLit, an LED bike-spoke light, was developed on Elk Avenue when Scott wanted better lights on his kids’ bikes. It, as well as the SpotLit, a light-up dog collar accessory, both saw 40 percent growth in the past five years.

He now manufactures LEDs himself, and recently put a parabolic curve in a disc called the Hole-In-One, so the removable LED at the center of the plastic disc sends light out to the edges for greater illumination.

His light-up dog ball was getting better feedback as a light-up lacrosse ball, so he remarketed it for lacrosse and saw 4,000 percent growth the last two months.

He’s currently developing a line of LED camping products for another Colorado-based outdoor products company that incorporate better function, atmosphere, and mood using Bluetooth technology that can be controlled by a smartphone.

His Fat Tire Cruiser Bike is in the works, and will soon allow riders to travel both on and off snow-covered roads.

Outdoor sports and family time take priority over work, but recreation can be considered work for Scott since so many ideas come from playing outside. He just released a new product called the GripLit, which goes on bike handlebars to create a better depth perception for oncoming cars. “I like being able to make an item that provides a safety mechanism and if it’s groovy, all the better,” he says.

Scott is a big proponent of repurposing and recycling materials. Re-Think is a B-Corp company, meaning it’s a for-profit corporation that strives to positively impact the local community and the environment. He also wants to help employ people here, and sees having The Idea Launch Lab incubator space in Crested Butte as a great way to bring new business and create jobs. The main goal is to eventually make everything in the United States, using 90 percent to 95 percent recycled materials, and to retain inventory here in the Gunnison Valley so all order fulfillment and shipping can be done from Crested Butte.

A firm believer in helping other local businesses as well as his own, Scott pushed hard to get the broadband initiative on last November’s ballot. Internet speed at this end of the valley isn’t always reliable and having more options for broadband service is seen as a necessary to many professionals who live and work here. Scott sees Internet speeds as one of, if not the largest obstacle to running a smooth business predominantly online.

“Solving product problems and pains, that’s what we’re doing. We have so much going on right now. I’m spending a lot of time raising money, and I want to improve the manufacturing business so we’re producing in a more conscious way,” Scott says. “How can I offset my carbon footprint? Can we improve by 50 percent post-consumer materials on a product? We’re trying to do everything in Crested Butte the best we can.”

Kris Murray, Child Care Marketing Solutions

Kris Murray never owned a day care or a preschool, so it’s a little unusual for her to have created a business out of something she’s never actually done. “At the end of the day it’s about adding value to the customer experience, no matter what kind of business you’re in,” she says. She saw a niche and she filled it, and doing so allowed her to move back to Crested Butte, the place she prefers to call home.

Her office at the Four-way Stop is undergoing somewhat of a makeover to clear space for a growing business, which in six years has been built into a seven-figure company. Child Care Marketing Solutions is the largest provider of coaching and business improvement services for child care centers and preschools across the world. There are only a couple of other companies or consultants that do what her company does.

Murray has five employees total, with three in Crested Butte, one in Iowa, and one in Denver. Clients are mostly in North America, with a few in Australia and the United Kingdom. Only one current client is local, and that’s Paradise Place Preschool.

Murray says the biggest benefit to basing business in Crested Butte and working remotely is the lifestyle it offers. By her working remotely, the company is not limited. “Truly any of us could live anywhere and still be a cohesive team,” she says. “For me, lifestyle-wise, I’m living my dream by being here in Crested Butte. If I wanted to move to Park City, I could. But I don’t.”

Murray spent her whole life in marketing and advertising. Prior to starting Child Care Marketing Solutions in 2009 she was working with her brother’s manufacturing business in Cleveland, Ohio, where she grew up. She ran the marketing side of his company but wanted a way to do her own thing. In 2008 she noticed that none of the child care services she was considering for her own children, ages three and five at the time, marketed themselves well. During the recession the owner of one place she was considering lost a bunch of clients, so she made a deal to help get enrollment back up in exchange for free tuition. She about doubled the business in 11 months.

Since nobody else was helping the business side of child care services, Murray thought a new service was desperately needed. She spent a lot of time in day cares and preschools, watching from both a mom’s and a businesswoman’s perspective, and understood the customer experience.

It didn’t take long for her to realize how to add more value to that experience. “I found what worked for others and basically modeled that,” she explained. “There are other people who do these types of things for other businesses; real estate, dentistry, trainers in various niches. I determined the key drivers that would help child care services versus a dentist or chiropractor. I started out with webinars and books, and the coaching came later.”

Murray’s first book, The Ultimate Child Care Marketing Guide, has sold more than 2,000 copies in the four years it’s been on shelves. The 77 Best Strategies for Growing Your Child Care Business recently joined her first book for sale on Amazon. Her company now runs what’s called the Child Care Success Academy, with a curriculum and events where people get together and share business insights. She acts as the facilitator at those meetings, offering child care providers proven methods for growing business, attracting clients, increasing profits, expanding to more locations, and improving practices with staff and leadership.

She explains that what her company teaches could apply to any small business. “Really, you could take my Ultimate Child Care Marketing Guide and cross out the words child care and put any other business in and the principles would still apply. I’ve used those same principles to grow this business.”

Murray recently expanded into the non-child care area, adding one client who runs a yoga business. She says it’s fun and fresh to start looking at other niches and also to help other businesswomen. She’s acted as a coach for a handful of local entrepreneurs here in Crested Butte. “I’m proud to add jobs to the valley,” she says. “In 2014 we had two employees and now I’m employing five, and I’m seeking to add another one or two positions in 2016. It means a lot to me to be able to add jobs to the valley.”

Murray has been a fill-in DJ at KBUT radio the past several months. She was a full-time DJ between 1992 and 1997 while also marketing for Crested Butte Mountain Resort, and one of her dreams was to come back and DJ again. Of course, she also missed the skiing, biking, and proximity to nature Crested Butte provides.

“Having lived here in the 90s I was always thinking of how to return some day. In 2008 I visited and started thinking harder about how to move back. In 2012 I made it a reality. I feel blessed to be probably one of the few who is able to live their dream lifestyle.”

Child Care Marketing Solutions is growing about 35 percent to 40 percent annually, but the company still struggles in certain ways, as any company does. Murray says Internet speed isn’t quite the issue it used to be because more options have come into the valley, but air travel in and out of Gunnison can be quite the hurdle. She is gone about one week per month on average, and when visiting important clients she needs travel to be reliable.

“Every time I fly I have to look at Gunnison, Montrose, Grand Junction, and Denver, and I drive to Denver often to catch flights. I’m happy about the Alaska Air thing because I fly to LA quarterly [Alaskan Airlines now flies direct from Gunnison to Los Angeles], but not having anything coming here from April to June [the Gunnison airport will be flightless this spring]…that’s not ideal,” she says. “I wanted to do some client visits here and bring more conferences to the valley, but because air service from Hartford, Connecticut, for example, is not reliable…I could be bringing thousands of dollars to the valley if air service were more reliable.”

Despite questionable flight service, business should continue improving. Murray has made a commitment to dedicate the rest of her professional life to helping as many child care business owners, directors, and managers as possible with enrollment, revenue, staff issues, time management, goal-setting, mindset, and more. She’s proud that her two books have helped thousands of owners and leaders become more effective. She’s also proud to live in Crested Butte, and wouldn’t let that go for…well, just about anything.

Check back next week for the final installment of Locals Making Waves in an Entrepreneurial Age. We’ll speak with more businesses in the Gunnison Valley, specifically manufacturers, about the ups and downs of exporting their expertise outside of the community they call home.

Country Doc

story by Dawne Belloise 

I’ve already delivered a baby in the hospital I was born in,” smiles Dr. Laura Villanueva, who arrived in Gunnison some decades ago to parents John and Mary Holder. Her parents had moved to Crested Butte in the early 1970s and Laura grew up as a Crested Butte kid.

“Through seventh grade, I attended the old brick school and then the new Crested Butte Community School. I was lucky to do high school here because I didn’t have to ride a cold bus to Gunnison every day and there were new, young, energetic teachers here at the new school. I was really free growing up here. I could go to the park by myself, or walk myself to preschool. I feel like we were a pack of wild kids running around town. We could go where we wanted and do what we wanted but there was always someone looking out their window after us, it was more like the illusion of freedom since there was always someone reporting back to your parents.” Like many Crested Butte kids, she started out skiing not long after she could walk, guided by Sherry Vandervoort, aka SherBear, after which she participated in the school’s ski program. Laura graduated from high school here in 2002.

“I knew I wanted to be a doctor from when I was tiny. My dad was a plumber but he’s now a Physician Assistant (PA). There’s a lot of parallels between how the body works and plumbing,” Laura says. She grins broadly, but she has no plans to switch careers and become a plumber. Enrolled at Colorado College in Colorado Springs after high school, Laura majored in biology and Spanish. “I tried to take the minimum of what I needed so that I could do other things because I didn’t want to be all science and physics, so to get a broad education I took things like coral reef ecology, which was my favorite class.”

During her junior year at Colorado College, Laura trekked off to study for a semester in an ecology program in Ecuador. “In the last two months of your semester you do an independent study of your choice anywhere in the country and I decided I was going to study alternative medicine with a shaman and I also decided I wanted to be on the coast. I got on a bus and traveled to the coast but when I got there I realized that all the shamans were in the rainforest, not on the coast,” she laughs and relates that she ended up meeting someone who worked at the local hospital in the tiny fishing town of Bahia de Caraquez.

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“They told me they could use extra hands at the maternity ward so I wound up delivering babies there. I was just a college student, not even in pre-med yet, and that’s how desperate for help they were,” Laura says. She felt that the experience confirmed her direction into obstetrics. She graduated with a bachelor of science degree in biology and Spanish in 2006 and decided to come home for a year, “to be a bartender and ski bum, working mainly at the Last Steep,” because she knew med school was going to be pretty grueling.

After catching her breath back home, Laura attended CU Denver Medical School in 2011, and she noted that college, med school and residency takes about 16 years of education and training. When she completed her studies and it came time for her residency, she headed west to Ventura, Calif., having decided that family practice was what she wanted to do and the program there focused on training full spectrum.

“It’s more like up here where the doctors are more old school family practice and can take care of you from the cradle to the grave,” Laura says. “That’s a dying art form these days. It also allows you to go rural or international. At some point I want to do some medicine internationally but it’s got to be a sustainable model and it’s got be the right timing.” She explains that some docs want to go to places like tropical Costa Rica for two weeks, bring antibiotics and asthma inhalers but a month after they leave, those supplies are gone and the people still have medical needs. “I want to be able to be part of a sustainable organization that is set up more permanently in a place, and the impact carefully thought through so that it’s positive and sustainable.”

It was during her residency that she fell in love with doing OB—“The idea that I could take care of a woman who was pregnant, get to know her and her baby before it was born, and to be a part of the delivery process.” Laura feels strongly that the delivery is a sacred process, “and then two days later be the doctor of that baby. You’ve known the mother and that kid for nine months prior to its being born, and then I get to take care of that baby hopefully up through however long I’m a doctor.”

Laura knew that when she decides to start her own family, she wanted them to grow up in Crested Butte, “So I knew I wanted to come back here.” She returned a few months ago in October as an MD, FPOB (Family Practice Obstetrics), ready to start seeing families in the valley. “It kind of feels like you got your training wheels kicked off,” she says of finally being in a practice, working at Gunnison Valley Family Physicians. “I’ve been riding that bike for four years.”

Laura says her residency, like many other learning curves in life, was “a little bit terrifying for a moment, but then it makes you realize, oh, I am trained well and I can do this. It’s just that initial moment when you realize you’re riding on your own and you haven’t crashed.” She also works at Gunnison Valley Hospital in the emergency room and as an inpatient doctor, in addition to baby deliveries and such. “I’m all over the place, which is good because it was one of my goals, to do the full spectrum of medicine.” She tells about how good it is to be back home: “Where you don’t have to look over your shoulder… which is what seeing two or three gunshot victims every day in Ventura will do.”

In 2007, before she left for med school, Laura started dating local Michael Villanueva because, she laughs, “I really didn’t think it was going to last or turn into very much.” As fate would have it, they became quite close, chatting for hours on the phone with frequent visits over the various passes to and from the Front Range. “We discovered we were very compatible and he became a main support for me in dealing with medical school. We spent four years driving back and forth over Monarch and at least in the summer we were able to drive over Cottonwood and meet at the hot springs.” Laura’s heavy school schedule didn’t give her summer breaks. “Michael sacrificed and moved with me when I went to residency in Ventura… but I think it had more to do with the beautiful surf beaches.” They married in Ventura in October 2014.

“It’s interesting having a dual relationship, friends or friends of family that you now have a trusting, confidential patient-doctor relationship with, and being able to maintain both those types of relationships with people. People discuss things with their doctor that they can’t talk to with anyone else. And to keep that sacred patient-doctor relationship and then the next day see them on the high lift… it’s interesting. You know your patients personally and you know present issues in the community, which gives you insight into what’s going on with your patient as a whole. For example, a kid can have a stomachache and there could be 900 things that could cause that stomachache that you can find in a textbook, but it helps to know that that kid had a family trauma or a stressful event that triggered it. It’s an insight into your patients’ lives in a small town that you don’t get everywhere. Although you have to be careful to filter that as well, so you’re not arriving at premature conclusions, but on the whole, the more you can understand that person, it gives you clues as to why they may be having the medical problems they have.”

In her spare time, Laura likes to hang with her long-time girlfriends, Nordic ski in the winter, or do summer hiking, and she’s thrilled that her parents are still here, along with her brother and nephews. “There’s so much to do here. From the beginning, my dad taught me that you have to have balance in your life, you have to be able to turn it off, to be a person when you’re not working…. being here, having family here, and being part of the community.”

Laura admits, “I’m feeling a little bit of reintegration coming back. There are a lot of new faces and I’m used to knowing everyone, but it’s also awesome that there are new people to meet. I’m catching up with old friends and people who I used to babysit are now my patients and they’re like 23 and in college,” she says completely amused and enamored by it all.

“I see me here for the rest of my life, because it’s home. I feel like that says it all. People take care of each other here. We were glad we went to California for four years, to do something different for a few years, and we knew Crested Butte would be here when we got back. I always knew this was home.”

Vinotok iron pour and history events

Ever seen an iron pour? Didn’t think so. But you can this Tuesday, September 15 beginning at 4:30 p.m. As part of the Vinotok festivities molten iron will be poured into molds. Don’t miss the chance to see your sculpture poured along with those of visiting and local artists and pieces of the Grump. The Harvest Mother blesses the Pour Vessel amongst a company of Dancing Trolls, Torchbearers, Maidens and Ancient Stories of Fire—all complete with sparks and displays. The viewing area for the Iron Pour site is a natural hillside that is uneven and covered with vegetation at the west end of Elk Avenue on old Kebler Road. And if you are curious about Vinotok lore, join Vinotok founder and master storyteller Marcie Telander to learn the secrets and origins of the local harvest festival. That will take place at the Mallardi Theatre on Monday, September 14 at 7 p.m.

Take one of the original mountain bike rides

Speaking of history and origins – the 39^th annual Pearl Pass bike tour is this weekend. Do one of the classic CB rides. The regular group tour will take off from the Crested Butte Mountain Heritage Museum at 9 a.m. Saturday. There is a gear shuttle and there is an old fashioned klunker tour that will leave Friday. For more info and to reserve a shuttle spot, call Kay at 349-6482.

Kids Cook! Class

Registration is open for fall session of Mountain Roots Kids Cook!, a culinary class for kids and teens. The fall session theme is “Farm to Table” — each week young chefs will harvest food from the garden, combine it with seasonal ingredients from the farmers market, and create delicious recipes for breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and snacks. Instructors Luisa Naughton (CB) and Sasha Legere (Gunnison) will focus on fresh, healthy ingredients, basic techniques, experimentation with recipes, and making nutrition delicious. In Gunnison: Fridays, 4-6 p.m., starting September 4; register through the Rec Center. In Crested Butte: Thursdays, grades 6-7-8, 4-6 p.m., starting September 10, and Mondays, grades 4-5, 4-6 p.m., starting September 14; register through Mountain Roots. Details can be found at mountainrootsfoodproject.org or by calling 970-417-7848. Scholarships are available.

Big Beers for Big Gears at Totem Pole Park

Taste, talk beer, bikes and trails and raise some cash for Gunnison Trails from 4 to 8 p.m. this Friday, September 11, for $30 in Totem Pole Park at the sixth annual Big Beers for Big Gears. Join Dave Weins, Gunnison Trails and 15 breweries for a tasting of some of the best beers in the world.

Beer and Chili on the mountain Saturday

Speaking of beer—the annual Chamber of Commerce Chili and Beer Fest is set for Saturday in Mt. Crested Butte. On a nice day it is one of the fall’s best events with lots of people, music, plenty of beer and hopefully enough chili to feed the masses. Head up about noon and enjoy the day until 4 o’clock.

Birthdays:

September 10- Ryan Swiatek, Debra Bird, Levi Parr

September 11- Rose Radziej, Tracy Williams-Hastings, Mike Molitor, Rob Rossman, Maile Cowell

September 12- Norm Dumas, Josie Byron, Taylor Davis, Marilyn Phillips, David Hunt, Jeff Bivens, Annie Parr

September 13- Bruce Winchenbach, Jamie Watt, John Holder, Kirsten Atkins, Cresson Van Winkle, Katie Lyons, Ben and Blake Babbitt, Bruce Winchenbach

September 14- Jamie Starr, Lisa Councilman, Judy Jones, Ashlee Riemer, Erik Berglund, Bill Ewert, Allyson Taliaferro, Scott Crawford

September 15- Meagan Baim, Ryan Boulding, Heidi Montag, Randy Helm, Lizzy Bernholtz, Steve Patrick, Brett Cram, Henrik Hudson, Anne Moore

September 16- Keith Frates, Martin Catmur, Scott Pfister, Kaitlin Councilman, Marilyn Mears, Ryan Oros, Don Smith, Michelle Cowell

Cameos: How do you like to drink your beer?

A 40 in each hand.

Mike Larsen

Cold.

Mary Young

With a shot of Jager.

Josh Turek

Quickly.

Rob Larsen

One sip at a time.

Jessica Lapham

OPEN HOUSE:  Artist Devin Cone discussed her work at an open house at the Piper Gallery at the Center for the Arts on Saturday, September 5. photo by Petar Dopchev

CONGRATULATIONS:  Tatum Marak and Aaron McDaniel were married on July 12 in an intimate ceremony at the Wedding Garden.  photo by Alison White

CONGRATULATIONS:  Max William Shea was born July 24 to father Bryan, mother Nina, and sister Sylvia.  photo by Lindsey Sierra Gross