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NOT SO LONG AGO, FOLKS IN CRESTED Butte, Colo., so loved to brag on their hometown that the town council once spent $3,000 to blazon the name on a hot-air balloon for meets down in Albuquerque. But that was before Michael Keaton bought land here and before Jimmy Carter began hosting Celebrity Ski, a charity fund-raiser sponsored largely by the town's ski area. These days locals complain loudly to outsiders about the bitter winters that bury "The Wildflower Capitol of Colorado" under an annual 30 feet of snow, and Mayor Jim (Deli) Schmidt has confided to NEWSWEEK that Crested Butte has a skunk problem. "I wish," said Schmidt, "you wouldn't do this story at all."
What Crested Butte no longer wants the world to know is that it's a splendid place. This 19th-century mining town with its rainbow-hued Victorian houses sits nearly 9,000 feet up in the Rockies, surrounded on three sides by 12,000- to 14,000-foot peaks and thousands of acres of national forest. The skiing may be the best in Colorado, with many runs rated "extreme" for their steep, ungroomed terrain. And that's the problem. A town with such attractions is a natural target for what people in Colorado call Aspenization: the upscale living death that fossilizes trendy communities from Long Island's Hamptons to California's Lake Tahoe. Aspen was a splendid place, too, before it was discovered by the rich and famous--and the greedy and entrepreneurial. Now it's a case study in overdevelopment. Its lavish second homes sit empty for most of the year while three quarters of the work force, who can't afford to live there, commute from 40 miles down-valley--a two-hour trek at rush hour.
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Crested Butte began to catch on in the mid-'80s, when the Crested Butte Mountain Resort spent $1.2 million guaranteeing airlines a profit if they'd fly into Gunnison, the closest airport. On a busy day, some 8,000 people now storm the slopes, and the resort plans a second ski mountain. "You can have a high-quality resort without the glitz," says co-owner Ralph (Bubba) Walton. "If it becomes overcommercialized, we haven't done our job." But telltale signs have appeared. The Princess Wine Barlocals call it "the Aspen bar"--has $200--a bottle champagne and a $10,000 espresso machine; in another room they sell distressed (i.e., beat-up) tables for $1,300 and rusted iron bed frames for $1,650. Some folks won't go in the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory--a franchise, God forbid. Californians--"real" Westerners' least favorite people--are coming in and, as town manager Bill Crank says, building the way they did back home, on precarious slopes and ridges, making the houses hard to get to and cluttering up everybody else's scenery.
More than half of Crested Butte's homes are now second homes, vacant most of the year. Developers have bought an estimated quarter of the surrounding ranchland in the past 10 years, subdividing it into 35-acre plots and building Jacuzzi-equipped "troppy homes" costing $400,000 and up. "Aspenization doesn't have anything to do with the wine bar," says Lee Ervin, editor of the Crested Butte Chronicle & Pilot. "It's people coming in who don't need to live here." It's also being damned if you do and damned if you don't. If Crested Butte could stop all development tomorrow, that would only drive up prices of existing homes still further beyond the reach of locals; if it expands development to include more lower-income housing, it ceases to be a small town. And if Mayor Schmidt takes decisive steps to solve that skunk problem...he's a bigger fool than we take him for.
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