Eighteen years ago, a startled Kevin Kinzley came face to face with a curious fox on Snodgrass Mountain – and had his camera at hand to capture the moment. Many years and miles later, that image circled back to Crested Butte via another chance encounter, this time with a human.
Kevin lived in Gunnison from 2006-2008 and worked at the Crested Butte Mountain Resort (CBMR) ski rental shop. One day during his second winter, he’d injured his knee and couldn’t snowboard, so he spent his lunch break snowshoeing around Snodgrass.
“I spotted this fox about a hundred yards away and took my pack off to get out my camera. As I was crouching down in the snow, the fox bee-lined toward me. It was almost unnerving. I guess it thought I had food. By the time it got about five feet away, I had my camera ready. We were pretty much eye to eye. It watched me for a minute, circled me a few times and then trotted away.”
Kevin’s fox shots wowed his buddies back at the rental shop and revived his flagging interest in camerawork. He had dropped out of a photography program, but he eventually returned to his studies and earned a photography degree. He married and moved to Red Lodge, Montana, where
his wife had a nursing job. In 2016, he opened the Kinzley Gallery there, and the
fox photo, which he titled “Staredown,” joined his other landscape and wildlife images on the gallery walls.
Last fall, he took little note when several women came into the gallery to browse – until one woman gasped audibly.
“That’s Crested Butte!”
The woman was Sally Vulich, who’d lived in Crested Butte from the late 1990s through 2010, overlapping with Kevin’s time here, though the two never knowingly crossed paths. Sally and her husband, Tom, a former electrical engineer, masterminded CBMR’s advertising through their agency, Lone Peak Creative. They eventually moved to Reno so their child could attend a school for gifted students. Still, Sally continued working for the resort until 2017, as Tom, once a strong, bright athlete, faded to young-onset Alzheimers.
A friend offered Sally the use of her house in Red Lodge for a respite as she cared for Tom near the end of his life. Red Lodge felt similar to Crested Butte and became a place of comfort for Sally. Last autumn, almost five years after Tom’s death, she joined friends there once again. On a stroll downtown, they wandered into the Kinzley Gallery, where Sally ran into Kevin’s fox photograph. She was immediately struck by the photo, with the iconic summit of Crested Butte Mountain as a backdrop.
“The image touched me so much,” she said, “to see the Butte in this unexpected place, after such enormous losses. Crested Butte was a huge, beautiful part of my life.”
In the gallery, she and Kevin started talking, comparing their Crested Butte experiences, and Sally took a phone photo of the fox. After she returned home to Reno, the image lingered in her mind. She sent her phone photo to the then-editor of the Crested Butte Magazine, Sandy Fails, with whom she’d worked during her time in the valley.
Kevin’s photography career now has him “chasing wildlife” in Montana, but the fox interaction on Snodgrass still stands out to him. “It was a trip,” he said – as is having the fox featured in the Crested Butte Magazine almost two decades after he encountered it.