The wild early history of the North Face.
Imagine skiing and riding Crested Butte without the North Face Lift (NFL). No good-luck fist bumps or pole taps with Telly. No standing in line on a sub-zero snow day while gale-force winds ripple Gore-Tex and freeze toes and cheeks. No Viking-esque roars when the lift operators finally open passage to a place many hold sacred. No getting heckled with a “Back of the line!” by a boisterous crowd when you fall off the T-bar.
Before the first lift was installed for the 1987-88 season, the North Face could only be accessed by human power, climbing and traversing to the Notch Entrance, into the great unknown. Traffic was light, and fresh turns were plentiful. Ski Patrol did avalanche mitigation, but otherwise the experience was more akin to backcountry skiing than banging bumps and carving corduroy inbounds.
Jill Barr arrived in Crested Butte in 1978. An avid telemark skier, she did many a North Face traverse to get the goods before the lift was installed. “There were always some of us that were really into making the hike as quick as we could,” she said, laughing. “It was so wonderful back there.” Likewise, Kay Peterson Cook was a regular North Face skier before the lift went in. “You had to work for it — and only a certain number of people were willing to. People would just be hammering up that hike to see who could get up the fastest. Me and my girlfriends, we’d like to get right up on some guy who was just suffering, suffering, suffering,” she said, laughing. Meanwhile, in the mid-1980s, the resort was trying to compete with larger resorts in the intermediate skiing game, which featured sprawling freeways of green-circle and blue-square ski runs. Terrain like the North Face wasn’t on the radar, and it certainly wasn’t being marketed.
Coming from the corporate marketing scene in New York, John Norton joined the team at Crested Butte Mountain Resort as VP of marketing for the 1985-86 ski season. Despite the resort’s far-flung location and limited beginner and intermediate terrain, Norton says visitation grew over the next couple of years. But more than 75 percent of surveyed guests said they didn’t plan to return.
“In my first couple or three years here, I got a chance to ski Keystone, Vail, Snowmass, Steamboat, and others,” Norton said. “I quickly realized we could not go toe-to-toe with any of those mountains in the intermediate market… But we did have that steep terrain that very few other places have, and none of it was developed here or other places.”
As Norton tells it, he went to Ralph Walton, the CEO at the time, and proposed installing a lift to access the North Face terrain. He was repeatedly rebuffed until Walton finally had had enough and said, “Look, if you want it so badly, then just pay for it out of your marketing budget.” So that’s exactly what he did.
The resort acquired a used Poma lift (similar to a T-bar, but using a circular disk and a pole between your legs) from a defunct ski area and installed it in time for the 1987-88 season. Bob Gillen was running communications for the resort at the time, and during his press interviews, he was confronted with claims that opening the North Face terrain was dangerous, irresponsible, and immoral — and that the resort would get someone killed by opening lift access. “Gillen gave them some great quotes like, ‘We don’t plan on taking people out of there in a body bag,’” Norton recalled. “And so that’s where [the trail names] Body Bag and Dead Bob’s came from.”
Still, ask anyone who’s found themselves hung out over Dead End Chutes’ mandatory air, and they’ll tell you how tricky and intimidating it can be to navigate the North Face’s uncharted waters. According to Kay Peterson Cook and Jill Barr, it was Donnie Cook (RIP) who first proposed assembling a group of North Face guides to accompany guests through the resort’s extreme terrain. The guides, many of whom also worked with Donnie and Kay at their restaurant, Donita’s, provided their services to the resort in exchange for season passes. They just had to show up at the bottom of the NFL twice a day — at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. — in case guests were looking for a tour. Barr joined the guide team, and by that time, she had transitioned from skiing to snowboarding. This was during the early nineties, when snowboarders were still few and far between.
“I would be standing at the bottom of the North Face Lift at 11 o’clock, waiting for the tour to show up,” Barr said. “I’d look over and see a group of people standing there, looking for the guide. They’re looking everywhere but at me. “I’d let them stand there for a while, and then I’d finally walk up to ‘em and go,‘Hey, are you guys looking for the guide?!’ Most skiers had never taken a run with a snowboarder, never mind being guided by one.”
Michael Blunck was one of four NFL lift operators during the 1988-89 season, his first winter in Crested Butte. Blunck talked about how being a lift op at the North Face that winter made him an “instant local.” “Back then, there were very few locals who didn’t ski,” Blunck said. “They lived here for one reason. To ski. Everyone came and skied the North Face, so I pretty much met everyone in town. And to this day, I’m still friends with quite a number of ‘em.”
Blunck said that to pass the time, they created the “Poma Olympics,” which consisted of three events. In the Poma Long Jump, skiers competed to see who could jump uphill the farthest after loading the platter. For the Slalom, they would create a course out of bamboo poles up to Tower 1 and see who could ski it the fastest. And for the Javelin Throw, they would launch bamboo poles into a snowbank — whoever threw it the farthest, and stuck it into the snow, was the winner. For Blunck, one year working the NFL has led to living here for nearly four decades, and raising a family in Crested Butte.
Many of the original guides still live and ski in the valley, although three legends have passed on. Rest in peace, Donnie Cook, Frank Magri, and Jon Johnstone. Looking back at the gamble they made to bring the NFL to Crested Butte, Norton said, “At the time, I was certainly betting my career that this was all going to pan out. Because if it didn’t, if I gave up half my marketing budget and the airline programs failed that year, and the North Face was too steep to ski, it probably would have been a career-ending mistake. So, I put it all out there, and it worked out even better than I thought it would.”