Crested Butte: The Last Great Colorado Ski Town

You are standing at the end of the road, in a place that has died and come back to life more than once. Crested Butte sits in a high bowl of the Elk Mountains, ringed by peaks, at nearly nine thousand feet. The mountain that gave the town its name is not really a butte at all.

It is a laccolith, a blister of magma that pushed up into soft shale about thirty million years ago and hardened, while the softer rock around it wore away and left the harder core standing alone. A surveyor with Ferdinand Hayden's expedition named it in the early eighteen seventies. Howard Smith laid out the townsite in eighteen seventy eight, and Crested Butte incorporated in eighteen eighty.

This was coal country. For seven decades, miners hauled bituminous coal and coke out of these valleys, first for the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad, which reached town in eighteen eighty one, and later for the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, whose Big Mine anchored the local economy. Welsh, Cornish, Irish, and German miners came first, then Italians, Greeks, and Slavs from southern Europe.

When the Big Mine closed in nineteen fifty two, the railroad pulled up its tracks and the town nearly emptied. Only about two hundred fifty people stayed. It could easily have become a ghost town like so many others in these mountains.

Instead, a ski area opened on the mountain in the early nineteen sixties, and a wave of ski bums, artists, and self described hippies arrived. They bought cheap miners' cabins, won the local elections, and remade the place. Later they would fight for decades to keep a mining company from tearing open the peak above town.

Today Crested Butte is a National Historic District, the officially designated Wildflower Capital of Colorado, and the town that many people call the birthplace of mountain biking. As you drive its false fronted main street, remember that almost every building you see was raised by people digging coal, and saved by people who refused to let the town disappear.