Crested Butte (Colorado)

Crested Butte is a world class resort inconveniently located for most Americans.  It offers 2,775 vertical feet of lift served terrain, plus another 300 feet of hike-to terrain.   It has 1,547 acres, served mostly by high speed quad chairlifts and a couple of T-bars to access the highest peaks.

The terrain truly has something for everyone. There are at least 3 lifts serving long beginner trails. There are long intermediate, blue cruisers, some of them marked as "double blue". There are a few black trails, but there is an abundance of double-black terrain, trees and moguls. If you want challenge, you'll find it here for sure! 

On top of that, the resort is located at a high altitude. The base area is at 9,375 feet, and the summit is at 12,162 feet.  Skiing hard or hiking at that altitude will leave you out of breath very quickly.  But it also means that the snow will be pretty dry and fluffy.

There are just two bad things:  location and atmosphere. 

Location.  The place is hard to access.  It's a long drive no matterr which direction you come from.  It's 228 miles from Denver (a drive of over 4 hours).  Driving from Saqlt Lake City takes about 7 hours.  You can fly into Gunnison airport, but winter flights are notoriously unreliable, and then you still need to rent a car to get to Crested Butte. 

Atmosphere.   For lack of a better word, this is a combination of factors contributing to the overall "atmosphere." of the place.  The place feels like it's made for rich people.  Creste3d Butte is the most "posh" and exclusive of the 12 ski areas forming the Powder Alliance.

Sure, Snowbasin has its beautiful day lodges with the fancy carpeting, but that is all openly shared with everyone equally. It was mainly an effort to put on our best face for the world when the Winter Olympic Games came to Utah.  And, yes, the lift tickets at Snowbasin are expensive at $86, but Crested Butte charges a $98 lift ticket. On top of that, Crested Butte is full of restricted, private parking, private condos, private "clubs", exclusive communities, none of it very welcoming to the first time visitor.

Here are a few more examples of what creates the Crested Butte "atmosphere".

a) The lodging gets more and more expensive the closer you are to the ski area.  Even lodging in the town of Gunnison, 30 miles away, is more expensive than in other local towns, such as Montrose that are farther away. 

b) At the ski area, real estate is at such a premium that you have to pay $10 to park in the public parking.  I can't think of any other ski area that charges for parking. 

c) The buildings around the base area are either retail space (and there are quite a lot of shops) or expensive condos, which probably work best for well to do families with lots of kids who want to park themselves there for a week or two. Sure enough, at the end of the day, as I skied to the base area, I spotted a young family with 3 kids. They all took off their skis and while the dad carried most of the little boy's skis, the boys, ages around 7, 8 or 9, ran ahead, far ahead, out of sight ahead and disappeared into the base village.  They were obviously eager to get somewhere, and they knew where they were going and were familiar with the place, and their parents didn't seem to mind that the kids ran off, one by one, as soon as they were freed from their skis.

d) There are young people (teenagers from rich families) who have obviously parked themselves there for a prolonged period of time and don't feel the need to ski every day, if at all.  You see them walking around, talking, sipping their lattes, probably feeling a bit bored, because there isn't all that much to do except skiing.  This photo was taken within just a few steps of the first chairlift around 11 am, and none of the people in it are dressed for skiing. In fact, they all have a cup of java in hand.

e) Regular adult lift tickets cost $98. 

f) The gas station in the town of Crested Butte doesn't advertise their prices with a large sign, the way most gas stations elsewhere do.  It's almost like they are silently broadcasting the message: "If you have to ask how much gas costs here, you can't afford it."  Oh, and "We won't bother the well to do people with mundane issues such as gas prices."

The village around the base area has grown quite large.  Even the rich have to walk quite a distance from their condos to the lifts.  

The town of Crested Butte is a few miles down the road.  People staying there have to take a shuttle bus to the ski area. The main access road goes right through the heart of town and the imposed speed limit there is just 15 miles per hour. 

A few miles lower down the road, there is a whole other large cluster of houses.  I was a bit confused at first.  Are there 2 or 3 separate towns of Crested Butte?  At the end of the day, as I drove past it again, I slowed down to take a better look.  It turns out that this lower settlement is actually a "club", the Club of Crested Butte, basically a private little town or a gated community, depending on how you look at it. 
  
See what I mean by "atmosphere"?  There is a certain amount of exclusivity in the air, something I am really not comfortable with. 

But the slopes are great.  Especially great for those who want to challenge themselves.  You can spend a week here, finding ever more challenging steeps, moguls, and trees, as well as combinations of all three -- steep bumpy terrain in the trees! 

On this trip, I am trying to pace myself and leave some energy for other ski areas I'll visit, so I wasn't planning to explore the double blacks this time.  But, I misjudged the layout of the terrain and ended up on the steep double black "Headwall".  From below, I spotted a steep but perfectly doable smooth trail that obviously came from the direction of the upper T-bar. But, what I didn't realize is that to get to that trail one has to unload from the lift at the mid-station, whcih quite a lot of people do.  Instead, I went all the way to the top.  I still could have found my way to the slope I was aiming for, but it was roped off for some reason.  So, there was no other way out of the situation other than to hit the double black Headwall. 

It was interesting to notice that except for some die-hard experts who kept pounding the challenging terrain, most of the other trails were almost empty.  It's true that it is getting close to the end of the season, but it is also Spring Break, and the weather was gorgeously sunny and pleasantly warm, and the snow was good. So, where were all the skiers?  It probably has something to do with the fact  tthat getting to Crested Butte is not easy, ... and it's not cheap either. 

By the way, what a difference a day makes in the weather!  It rained the previous day in and around Salt Lake City and Ogden.  The winds were pushing the storm eastward, toward Colorado. There were some very strong gusts of wind along the way.  I felt as if tthe storm and I  were heading east at about the same speed.  So, I was really surprised that the next day turned out to be a completely sunny and calm day.  The storm must have continued its eastbound journey over night, and by morning, all the bad weather was gone.