Still Crazy After All These Years

Photo by Christian Murdock, The Gazette.

Crested Butte Turns 50 

by Dave Philipps, The Gazette

Extreme skier Caleb Mullen sipped his coffee as the sun crept over the fang of Mount Crested Butte. In the blue shadows, he pointed out seemingly vertical swipes of snow on the peak's face that are named runs: The Banana Funnel, The Peel, Paradise Cliffs, Spellbound, Bodybag.

"I've skied all over the world - Jackson, Chile - nothing scares me like this place," said Mullen, who grew up in Crested Butte and placed third at the U.S. Extreme Freeskiing Championships here in 2010.

He smiled and added, "It's steep. It's rocky. It produces some of the best skiers in the world."

He set down his coffee and stood up to begin a day of dropping cliffs and rocks in Crested Butte's legendary expert terrain. First, though, he pulled on hard plastic body armor, complete with a spine protector.

Crested Butte celebrates 50 winters of skiing this year, and over those decades the ski resort has grown into a legend that has helped transform the valley around it and the sport as a whole.

Its owners never envisioned it as a place for extreme skiing, and a number of times they have tried to court tourists more interested in cruising blues, but the mountain has resisted most of those changes. And that's how many folks like it.

A trail map of Crested Butte is a study of extremes. It is family-friendly groomers or double-black diamonds, and not much in between. The mountain is regularly rated top 10 for steeps by ski magazines. It is not unusual to see orange signs at the top of abrupt plunges warning, "Falls may result in serious injury."

But it did not start out that way.

Crested Butte, like almost all mountain communities that later became ski towns, was a mining town. Like the others, the pay dirt had long played out by the time the ski industry got going, leaving residents hungry for anything that might bring jobs.

Crested Butte was different though. It started with silver in the late 1800s, then moved to coal in the 1900s. The mines were still humming here in the 1940s when Aspen Mountain, Winter Park, Arapahoe Basin and other pioneering ski areas started.

Then in 1952 the coal mine closed. Most of the workers left town.

"It was on its way to becoming a ghost town," said Dick Eflin, who was a 27-year-old retired Air Force pilot from Kansas with a passion for skiing when he first visited in 1960. He was immediately struck by the splendor of the jagged mountains surrounding the small town.

Now 78, Eflin remembers the main street almost deserted, with only a tiny grocery, a post office, a dilapidated boarding house and a bar called Tony's Tavern.

He'd sat down at the bar, where a few old miners were nursing beers.

"God, this is a beautiful valley," he'd said.

"Maybe so," he remembers the bartender saying, "but you can't eat scenery."

Turns out you can, in a way. That year, after scouting around for the right terrain, Eflin and a wealthy college friend, Fred Rice, bought the 880-acre Malensek Ranch that now makes up the base area of Crested Butte Mountain Resort.

"We stood on top of Mount Crested Butte and looked down, and I just had a vision of the whole resort, with a village at the bottom," Eflin said.

In November 1961, they set up a borrowed rope tow and T-bar, and the ski mountain opened for business.

Even after the mountain installed one of the state's first gondolas in 1963, the operation was small and tame by today's standards. The base area had little more than a rustic warming house, ski shop and bar. The gentle rolling slopes through aspen groves included less than half the terrain the mountain now claims, and none of the expert runs.

"I never had any idea people would be skiing the kind of terrain they are now," Eflin said. "It just seemed out of the question."

Eflin and his partner ran the ski resort until 1967, when a change in federal farm-subsidy policies forced his partner, who was heavily invested in grain storage in the Midwest, into bankruptcy.

Georgia businessman Howard "Bo" Callaway and his brother-in-law, Ralph Walton, bought the ski area in 1970 and owned it until 2002.

During those decades, Eflin said, the mountain evolved into the extreme ski destination it is today.

"It was really driven by the locals and college students from Western State, not the owners," he said.

In the late '60s, he said, locals started ducking ropes and poaching the steep bowls off the back side. As the resort opened more trails, ski patrol had to bomb head walls above the trails to prevent avalanches.

"Then they started letting the local kids ski those head walls," Eflin said.

For decades, if skiers wanted to brave the steeps, they had to hike. Then in 1987 the resort added a platter lift to access a staircase of bowls and cliff bands known as the North Face. In 1991, it brought even more steeps that had long been secret stashes into the resort with a T-bar called the High Lift that accessed a string of double-black diamonds known as Teocalli Bowl.

"It was the influence of all the young people who wanted more advanced terrain, and Crested Butte thought this would be a great selling point," said Duane Vandenbusche, a Western State College history professor.

The wealth of crazy terrain created a new kind of skier - the "extreme" skier - and made Crested Butte the natural choice for the first-ever U.S. Extreme Skiing Championships in 1991.

But the bounty of steeps turned out to be a blessing and a curse. True, the terrain regularly garnered ink in ski mags and made Crested Butte a legend, but it also kept some skiers away.

"Crested Butte is a destination resort," Eflin said. "If you can ski the steeps, it is the best place in Colorado. But if you can't - say if you are a family from the Midwest - you will probably only visit once. You can find more intermediate terrain somewhere else. That has always been a challenge."

Skier numbers started slipping in the late 1990s as other destination resorts expanded intermediate terrain.

In 2004, new owners Tim and Diane Mueller tried to meet the challenge by adding blue runs and lucrative slope-side housing accessed by the Prospect Lift. They also tried to expand the resort to include 276 acres of mostly intermediate terrain on nearby Snodgrass Mountain, which they projected would increase skier numbers by a third.

In 2009, the U.S. Forest Service, which manages Snodgrass Mountain, denied Crested Butte permission to expand, killing the plan, at least for now.

That leaves Crested Butte much as it has always been - a mountain that rewards gutsy skiers.

"You get good skiing here, you have to," said Mullen after taking the lift to the top of Teocalli Bowl. "This mountain attracts real skiers and because we don't have all the crowds it remains a real ski town. They call it the last great ski town."

It was a sunny day. The white caps of the West Elk Mountains reflected in Mullen's goggles. Without another word he took off down a chute, turned sharply, launched off a rock and sailed 20 feet through the air.

Photo History