There's more to Colorado than Aspen and Vail.
The state has 26 ski areas, ranging from mini-mountains like Howelsen Hill (vertical drop 440 feet) to mega-resorts with all the trimmings. One of the megas is Crested Butte.
Crested Butte Mountain Resort, in southwest Colorado, sits high in the Elk Range of the Rocky Mountains.
It's just added its 13th lift this season, which opens a new expert bowl, bringing skiing terrain up to 1,150 acres and vertical drop to 3,062 feet.
The town, which lies 230 miles southwest of Denver, is best known for its extreme skiing, that is, suicidal plunges down terrifying cliffs, cirques, crevasses, cornices and couloirs. One skier's terror is another skier's fun.
But its terrain is diverse enough to make all skiers happy: gentle beginners' hills, a NASTAR race course, long-groomed steeps and vast ungroomed areas for extremists to be extreme.
Hotshots ski the double-diamond runs on the North Face. Intermediates play on the long, broad Ruby Chief and Treasury trails. Beginners learn around the Ski School Lift and practice on High Tide and Rustlers Gulch. Because Crested Butte has an annual snowfall of 229 inches and augments it with an extensive (especially for Colorado) snowmaking system, all three groups are likely to enjoy good conditions.
If you tire of Alpine skiing, the resort specializes in telemarking, a Nordic-Alpine cross that is sweeping the country and that got its start -- or, more precisely, was rediscovered -- at Crested Butte.
Telemarking is an ancient ski technique, now adapted to modern equipment and practiced on lift-serviced slopes. Telemarkers wear skinny skis (though not as anorexic as pure Nordic skis) with bindings that don't hold the heel down. To turn, telemarkers lower themselves into what looks like a hamstring stretch on skis. The sport requires the balance of a ballet dancer and the thighs of a gorilla.
For those seeking real solitude -- or something more sedate than extreme skiing or gorilla thighs -- down in town, some 30 kilometers of Nordic trails are maintained for cross-country skiers. The trails pass by old mining camps, under giant firs and above the checkerboard grid of Crested Butte. You can go on your own or, for very little money, hire equipment and join a tour. It's an interesting way to see this part of Colorado.
For those looking for something really out of the way, just 12 miles from Crested Butte, Irwin Lodge offers just that. It was built by an eccentric millionaire whose idea of the perfect ski lodge was one completely inaccessible by car. Consequently, the only way into Irwin Lodge is by snowmobile, Snowcat or cross-country skis.
The lodge, which is 10,700 feet above sea level, has no phone, no network TV . . . and no lifts. A small fleet of Snowcats transports about 50 skiers a day up to the resort's 1,200 acres of deep powder. Fifty or so skiers on 1,200 acres means that Irwin Lodge not only has no lifts, it has no lift lines.
If this isn't exotic enough, Fantasy Ranch offers winter horseback riding through the Colorado countryside. Or you can rent snowshoes. Or a snowmobile. Or take a sleigh ride behind a team of horses. Or a sled ride behind a team of huskies.
However you travel in Crested Butte, beneath your feet lies a rich vein of American history. Under the sparkling Colorado powder are layers of minerals and more layers of historic drama.
Like other Colorado and Utah mining towns that became skiing resorts, the story of Crested Butte is a tale of epochs: exploration, exploitation, recreation and protection. It's also a story of conflict: cowboys and Indians, fights over land claims, labor wars and environmental battles.
What is now an upmarket ski resort was once a grimy, soot-darkened mining town. Through the last half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, miners extracted gold, silver, lead, coal and molybdenum from the mountains that now draw skiers and sightseers to their pristine beauty.
There was little beauty in living in a mountain mining town. Explosions, exploitation, starvation and largely unsuccessful strikes punctuated the miners' lives. The towns were choked with smoke; the hillsides stripped of trees. The rivers were polluted -- some still are -- with the toxic residue of mining. And winter turned this bare-boned life into an annual agony.
Rumors of gold first lured non-natives to the Elk Mountains in the 1860s. The Ute Indians were less than welcoming -- in two raids they killed 19 pale-skins. But the gold-seekers kept coming, taking Indian territory and "giving" the Utes land on nearby Kebler Pass. When mineral deposits were found there, the intruders took back what they had given.
While gold and silver went through boom and bust cycles, coal remained the mainstay of the region. In 1881 the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad laid tracks into Crested Butte, and the population soared from 400 to 1,500. By 1882 the town boasted three livery stables, five hotels, 12 restaurants and at least a dozen saloons. Crested Butte was a place to make a fast fortune.
Two years later, the wages of greed were paid -- but not by the greedy. The Jokerville Mine, which had already killed one miner in an explosion, blew up one cold January morning. The force of the blast shook the entire town. Sixty miners were killed, but the mine owners managed to cut short the subsequent investigation and lay the blame on a careless worker.
Through the early years of the 20th century, Crested Butte was a company town. The company, Colorado Fuel and Iron, controlled elections, paid workers in scrip and made sure the miners owed their souls to the company store.
But coal is an exhaustible resource. In 1952 the last of the big mines closed, and the railroad literally pulled up tracks. By the 1960s, mining was all but dead and so was Crested Butte. Its population dropped to 200.
But while Western mining towns were dying, the rest of the country was thriving. Good times meant more recreation, and skiing was among the fastest-growing recreations in North America. With greater discretionary income, ski fever and improving air travel, Colorado became a mecca of winter tourism.
Skiing at Crested Butte began on a small scale in 1961. Today its leading products are natural beauty and white gold, that abundant, fluffy, Rocky Mountain powder snow.
The snow has drawn residents as gold did more than a century ago. Crested Butte has about 1,200 full-time residents, many of whom live in Victorian miner shanties in the old town and work in the new resort on the mountain.
The old town is Wild-West Victorian: straight, gaslit streets lined with wooden, false-fronted buildings right out of a John Wayne movie. The shanties, once the symbol of company-town poverty, are now tres chic, protected from neon signs and golden arches by strictly-enforced building codes. Their owners tend to be young and athletic; their front porches, jammed with skis, mountain bikes and kayaks. And the old houses that aren't residences are filled with eateries and drinkeries, up-market clothing stores, bed and breakfasts and lavishly-equipped ski shops.
The country around Crested Butte is open -- broad, flat valleys reaching into big, sloping hills. The sagebrush and juniper vegetation, the dark canyons and brilliantly-lit peaks, are a feast for Eastern eyes. On the road the traveler is likely to see bald and golden eagles, mule deer and elk. Ascending the mountain you see first aspen trees, then Engleman spruce, lodgepole and a few bristlecone pines, and, finally, Douglas firs.
Today, this fauna and flora are zealously protected. The ruthless exploitation of nature has given way to militant appreciation.
The change came in the late 1970s when the tiny town went up against the mining giant, Amax Inc.
Amax announced it intended to open a massive molybdenum mine on a mountain overlooking Crested Butte. The citizens, led by their mayor, chose environment over the promise of an economic boom and won a protracted war against the mine. They elected to mine visitors instead of the mountain, pointing out that visitors produce little smoke, soot, erosion or run-off -- and once they spend their money, they leave the place pretty much as they found it.
Actually, by choosing skiing over mining, Crested Butte didn't stay the same. By almost any standard, it became considerly better.
If you go . . .
Crested Butte is 230 miles from Denver and a half-hour from Gunnison, the nearest airport. American and Delta fly direct from Dallas and Atlanta into Gunnison, and United Express and Continental Express fly in from Denver. While car rentals are available at Gunnison Airport, consider taking the bus and going car-free at Crested Butte. The free shuttle-bus takes you everywhere in town and on the mountain from 7:15 a.m. until midnight.
Above the old town of Crested Butte is the new town of Mount Crested Butte. The two are connected by a fast (and free) bus.
Mount Crested Butte is a collection of unmatched buildings -- one hotel, condos, stores, restaurants and nightclubs scattered
on the mountainside.
The hotel, the Grand Butte, is unusually handsome and relatively expensive. Many of the well-maintained condos on the hill are less expensive and equally accessible -- less than 100 yards -- to the lifts. In town, the premier bed and breakfasts are the Crested Butte Club, whose rooms come with copper tubs and water beds, and the Claim Jumper, an antique-filled old house. Cheaper accommodations include the bunk-bedded Forest Queen and Red Lady Rentals, a service renting private homes and condos.
Crested Butte sports two excellent French restaurants, Soupcon locally pronounced "soup's on") and Le Bosquet, housed in a tiny log cabin. Slogar's serves a big old-fashioned chicken dinner with all the trimmings for under $10. On the mountain, Cafe Creole is housed in an antique streetcar.
For information: Crested Butte Mountain Resort, P.O. Box A, Mount Crested Butte, Colo. 81225; (303) 349-2333, toll-free (800) 544-8448.
Irwin Lodge, P.O. Box 457, Crested Butte, Colo. 81224; (303) 349-5140.
RTC Fantasy Ranch, P.O. Box 236, Crested Butte, Colo. 81224; (303) 349-5425.