Quite a few of us in the valley today came for the winters but stayed thanks to the summers. I was one of those: came in the mid-1960s to ski, but was captured forever by my first summer here in 1968. I can still remember the day, the moment, when the valley persuaded me that I was probably here for the duration.
I’d just bought a bike from someone in town, an old ten-speed, and had cranked up the hill to the divide, past what’s now the town of Mt. Crested Butte, and out to the first big overlook where the East River meanders several hundred feet below. It was early June, still dirty lumps of dragon-belly snow melting here and there, and the road just beyond the current ski area entrance was still unpaved, so I had a nice cooling streak of muddy water up my back from the rear wheel.
I hadn’t expected that overlook, and just sat there straddling the bike for a long spell, stunned by the magnificence of it all — the ‘lost’ river below, finding itself by meandering through its own creation, new-green slopes rising to the red rock of mountains whose names I didn’t yet know, a sky more deep than high. And wondering why I would ever want to leave here.
As may be true for many of us, the summers since have never surpassed the first one — that summer of discovering summer in the upper valley, and up in the valley embracing the mountains.
The summer of discovery was made possible by the beginning of my first quasi- career position: on-the-job training as a newspaper editor and journalist. The full story of how I became a newspaper editor with no previous experience or training is for another day. Suffice it to say here that I was just a guy who thought he wanted to be a writer, and took on this editorship because a) some of my friends thought the town needed a newspaper, and b) no one who knew anything about the newspaper business would touch a four-page weekly tabloid in a town of around 300 people with maybe a dozen actual year-round businesses. But I was naive about such basic things and needed something to do, some excuse to stay through the summer.
So I became a newspaper editor, and loved it. I had license to talk to everyone about anything, and I also had license to sound off in editorials. No part of the paper was free from editorializing; in fact, I knew so little about real journalism that I didn’t know the news reporter was supposed to stay out of his news stories.
Thursdays and Fridays, after the paper was done and mailed (I was chief mailer, too), if there were no other odd-jobs lined up, I would head for the hills. Day trips to the local lakes and up the mountains, getting outfished with my sports editor, Botsie Spritzer, or one weekend, over East Maroon Pass to Aspen for an afternoon on the lawn outside the Music Festival tent, then hitching to the Conundrum Pass trailhead, camping in the woods, and back home the next day.
What surprised me most about Crested Butte that summer, however — and for several summers following — was the array of higher educational opportunities on offer in the upper Gunnison Valley. There was, of course, and still is, the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL) based in the old Gothic townsite, even then a field station with an international reputation – where else can you go from high desert ecology to alpine tundra in half a day?
Knowing nothing about RMBL in 1968, but being charged with informing the public, I drove up there one afternoon and tracked down the director, Dr. John C. Johnson, Jr. — ‘Chris,’ I soon learned, upon introducing myself and my purpose. He, in turn, took me on a tour of the ‘lab’ — that wonderful amalgam of old mining-town structures on the outside and well-equipped laboratories inside. I met people from all over the United States, many of whom became good friends over the years as they came back year after year.
In town, Dr. Hubert Winston Smith from Oklahoma and Texas hosted the Law-Science Academy of America every August from 1958 until his death in 1971. The Academy brought lawyers and doctors together to elevate the courtroom convergence of law and medicine to a more science-based level. It brought 40 or 50 lawyers and doctors together for working mornings in the old Croatian Fraternal Hall on Second Street, afternoons playing in the mountains, and evening sessions open to the public in which attendees would give talks on their favorite topics. I recall that first summer, a talk on the legal and medical uses of psychotropic substances brought out all the hippies in the valley, then a week or so later, a talk on the Shroud of Turin brought out a lot of the Catholic old-timers.
Meanwhile, down in a Cement Creek campground, Dr. Vincent Nelson of the University of Kentucky brought his geology students for several weeks, for a field course roving over the valley’s incomparable geological diversity. He had been bringing future geologists since 1948 and would continue to do so until his retirement in the early ‘70s. By the time I first visited in 1968, their campsite was foreshadowing ‘glamping,’ with three-person tents and a rigged-up shower. They even had a guest tent for visiting rock hounds and marched proudly in the Crested Butte Fourth of July parade.
summer to present nightly theater throughout the sixties and seventies.
Photo courtesy of the Crested Butte Museum.
Finally, in this higher-ed splurge, a troupe of students from UCLA Fullerton, the California Players led by professors Herb and Bev Booth, presented melodramas upstairs in the Old City Hall building (now the Mallardi Theater) nightly for a month — among other benefits, this brought the Reycraft clan to town, led by Diane playing the ingenue.
All of this gave my incipient inner journalist much to write about, and occasionally I would follow a troop of biologists or geologists around the hills with my camera. But it also gave my inner (and outer) young single male sensibility lots to pursue. Between them, these organizations brought 40 or 50 college-age students, very co-ed, to the valley for extended periods.
They spent their days in the Apollonian pursuit of down-on-the-ground learning; then at twilight, most of them descended on the Grubstake Bar to get their Dionysian ya- yas out. The Grubstake had a good jukebox, and some nights the floor and the whole building would shake to “The Dawning of the Age of Aquarius” and “Summer in the City.”
I ended several stories that summer with variations on “Crested Butte is lucky to have such people here.” No number of “day tourists” can approach the value of smart people working in the valley, pursuing their own higher education and sharing their findings that benefit us today.
Thinking about how much I enjoyed that summer, how rich it seemed, I have to remind myself how poor I was then, financially. I look at my Social Security record from the newspaper years, and wonder how I didn’t starve or die of exposure, homeless. How I got by without ever applying for food stamps.
The answer, really, was the fact that most of the people in town, old-timers as well as newcomers like me, were not much better off. Nobody I knew (including me) had health insurance, but — maybe partly for that reason — a visit to the doctor or even the hospital did not yet cost ‘an arm and a leg.’ The era of unaffordable housing (that sits empty most of the year) had not yet begun, so there was not the wealth-flaunting that defines a poverty line.
When nearly everyone is poor, no one really feels poor, even though there isn’t much money. The challenge, as Ed Abbey said, is to have a rich life without needing much money.
We were all living off the natural richness of the place, the moneyless natural economy surrounding us, and somehow, it infected us with an ‘ecological economy’ in which not everything depended on money. We took care of each other; those with functioning cars told friends when they were going downvalley to the Safeway and laundromat, and there were erratic but relatively frequent open ‘feasts’ when someone or another stumbled into a little money (often undoubtedly drug-related). In addition to giving me a place in the economy independent of my financial situation, the newspaper gave me some bartering action in the moneyless part of the local economy — trading ad space for everything from a beer tab to partial rent. More goods and services were exchanged everywhere than were reported to the IRS.
All of that, of course, was easier to bear in the summer than in the depths of January — unless there was good snow; a morning in the fresh made one forget the hardships associated with living the dream. But nothing beat the right kind of summer day in the upper valley to make one rejoice in being in the right place at a right-enough time.