From Coal Camp to Ski Town
Near Crested Butte, Colorado
When the Big Mine closed in nineteen fifty two, Crested Butte teetered on the edge of vanishing. The railroad tracks came up, longtime families drifted away, and by the mid nineteen fifties only a couple hundred people held on year round. What saved the town was snow.
In nineteen sixty, a Kansas born ski enthusiast named Dick Eflin and his college friend Fred Rice bought a ranch on the flank of the mountain and set out to build a ski area. The Forest Service granted a permit, and in the winter of nineteen sixty one and nineteen sixty two the new resort opened with a generator, a T bar, and a rope tow borrowed from an older ski hill nearby. In nineteen sixty three they built a gondola from the base, only the second gondola in Colorado, after Vail.
As the lifts turned, a very different crowd began arriving, ski bums, artists, and self described hippies who bought up abandoned miners' cabins for almost nothing. They threw uphill telemark races and chainless downhill bike races, organized, and swept the local elections, essentially taking over the town. They rebuilt the ramshackle buildings, kept the old character, and turned a dying coal camp into what many now call the last great Colorado ski town.
