I want to be clear, right from the start, that I know better than to claim Crested Butte, a town I have never lived in permanently, as any kind of home. I grew up in Incline Village, on the north shore of Lake Tahoe, a town much like Crested Butte — there was a special bus that we could take to the ski hill after school, a locker room in the lodge where local families could store their gear. My mom worked at the resorts when I was a kid, teaching beginners to ski in the winters and leading horseback trail rides in the summers. When I was old enough, I worked there too — ski check, ticket sales. The horses, for me, did not take.
I worked at the local gas station instead, and though I endeavor to be generous, I am still shocked at the number of people who asked me, straight-faced: Where is the lake? Lake Tahoe is not small, and while you couldn’t see it from the Shell station, there was no way you could have arrived there without seeing it. I am sure all Crested Butte locals have stories like these. I understand life in an economy that both depends on tourists and resents them, and I accept my place as an eternal outsider, even as I have ties there that matter to me, and that have made me who I am.
I came to Crested Butte for the first time in 1993, back when the resort gave out free ski passes during Thanksgiving week. I was 18 years old, a freshman at Colorado State, living on the specially designated “Outdoor Adventure” floor, which had turned out to be a disappointment, less trail running and rock climbing than hacky sack and weed.
I did not know the guy who was organizing the trip but signed up anyway, and because I didn’t have a car, I was assigned the lap of a different guy I did not know for the five-hour drive. It was the nineties. This was fine with me, all part of the adventure. It was my first- ever trip through the South Park Valley, and I was charmed by the full-moon magic of the place — snowshoe hares tracking across the glittering expanse, the wind ghosting snow across the road. The condos, once we arrived, were just as packed as the cars, maybe 15 of us in a pair of neighboring two-bedrooms. It can’t be true that there were no other women on that trip, but I don’t remember any. I spent the entire time skiing with two guys I did know, Mark and Matty, both from Pennsylvania, both living their Colorado dreams HARD that week. I had a little crush on Matty, and Mark had a little crush on me, but nobody kissed anybody, and by the end of the trip, all three of us had become good friends.
During that trip to Crested Butte in 1993, I was questioning my own Colorado dream. It hadn’t been easy to transition to lecture hall classes with more students than my entire high school, and I hadn’t really considered the fact that not owning a car would keep me stuck on the Fort Collins flatlands. I had immediately changed my major from agriculture to exercise and sport science and was already considering changing it again, which made me wonder what I was doing in college at all. It’s not that I was a bad student, quite the contrary, actually. It’s just that I was so interested in everything that settling on any one thing felt intolerable. I was homesick and pissed at myself about it, because though I had no real direction, I wanted to live forward, to launch, to do as-yet-unspecified but definitely cool things.
Crested Butte felt like home, but it wasn’t home, and the possibility that this was the true adventure I was seeking sparkled like the snow.
Over pizza somewhere in town, I suggested to Mark and Matty that the three of us should drop out of school the following winter and move to Crested Butte. We could be lifties, I said. We could sell tickets. We could ski all the time. A year later, Matty and Mark were living in a filthy cabin at Three Rivers Resort in Almont. Matty was a lift op on the Silver Queen, and Mark was cleaning rooms in a hotel. I didn’t go with them. I had discovered the potential of studying abroad and realized that dropping out of college might, in fact, be an impediment to my half-formed international travel goals. I had changed my major to Undecided, enrolled in classes on international relations and poetry, and to save money, had gotten a job as a clerk in the cheese department of Alfalfa’s Market. We made our own hand-written name tags back then, and mine read: Claire. Cheese.
I visited Mark and Matty a couple of times that winter, and though I have been an inconsistent journaler all my life, I do have an entry from one of those trips, in January of 1995. I made a note that the Gunsmoke truck stop somewhere along the Arkansas River was selling hot fudge-flavored condoms for 75 cents each, which meant we must have driven west on Highway 285. Those were the days of paper road atlases, and there was not always a way to gauge the best or fastest route, no Siri to compare them for you. You had to drive them yourself, or, put another way, you got to drive them yourself. I wasn’t interested in direct routes. I wanted to travel every possible road.
In that same journal entry, I copied a note that was posted on the bulletin board at Butte Bagels: Colin O’Powell, call home as soon as possible, #718-XXX-XXXX, Wheaton, Illinois. That note hits me differently now that I’m a mother, but in 1995, I was jealous of Colin O’Powell, rooting for him. Fly free, I thought, live! Matty was still cute. We still did not kiss. When I eventually did study abroad, we wrote each other postcards, which sounds romantic, and it was. But it was also a necessity — neither of us had email accounts or cell phones, and neither did anyone else we knew. We planned to move in together, as friends, when we both returned to Fort Collins. That plan fell apart, thank goodness, because I don’t think our friendship would have survived it. I was still too flighty, still searching for something I could not name. The friendship that did survive became one of the most important relationships of my life. Matty and I did get together and have been married since May of 1998.
We brought our kids up to the resort as often as we could when they were learning to ski. In the summers, we camped along the Blue Mesa Reservoir and hiked down to the river. We visited the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park with both sets of grandparents. In 2016, my youngest and I joined the Siskadee Conservation Group to view the Gunnison sage-grouse on their breeding lek, and we watched the first beaver she’d ever seen swim around its lodge off the Neversink trail. I wrote part of my first book, Site Fidelity, over coffee in Rumors while Matty and the kids skied. When it was published, Matty and I came back to Crested Butte together for my reading at Townie Books, and then again the next year for the Mountain Words Literary Festival. We left our kids at home for those trips, and we kissed plenty.
In 2023, thirty years after that first visit, I lived in Crested Butte for a month as a Mountain Words Writer-In-Residence. It was a big snow year, which feels important to note in light of this winter’s horrific drought, and for all of that May’s slow thaw, I spent hours every day working on my novel, Appraisals. In the evenings, the other residents and I walked up past the Gronk to watch the beavers on Peanut Lake. While I was there, Matty and I celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary, and he joined me once again for the festival weekend. I thought a lot about the adventures and experiences that not moving to Crested Butte in the nineties left space for. In some ways, I am the same as I was then — I still want to know everything, I still resist specialization — but I have come to understand these inclinations as assets to my career as a writer, which I finally managed to become.
I am sure we are not the only people who have come and gone through town who were so deeply affected by the experience, and the only sad part of this story is that I don’t think it could happen now. Housing is a lot harder to find. There is no more free skiing. The idea that a teenager could show up in town with fifty bucks and a dream and survive a winter feels impossible. I’m grateful to have made the most of the years those experiences were available, and for the friends we’ve made and care about. Crested Butte might not be home to us, but it has been an important touchstone in our lives, a place we feel tied to, a place that always calls us back. I hope that same connective tissue pulled Colin O’Powell back to Butte Bagels and the note his family left for him. I hope he also had some fantastic adventures, and I hope he called his mother.
Claire Boyles’ new book Appraisals comes out in August 2026. Find her first collection, Site Fidelity, at Townie Books.