Even for the US Postal Service, delivering mail to the end of the road at 9,000 feet is a challenge. Home delivery is out of the question: in Crested Butte, Colorado, you need a PO box, no matter who you are. As a consequence, a trip to pick up packages at the Post Office is something you make a day out of, and each member of the disparate factions that make up life in our...
Editor’s note: This is the third essay in our series, “Letters to my younger self.” Lauren Fleshman provided the modern locus classicus for this genre, while John Wood and Adam Verrier kick-started the series on FasterSkier. When the private school at which my husband teaches offered him a sabbatical for the 2020-21 school year, we quickly began to fantasize about the ski town(s) in which we’d spend the following winter. A February 2020 trip to...
Tucked deep into snowy valleys, the tiny iconic Colorado mountain towns of Aspen and Crested Butte are separated by a mere 40 miles by foot, but roughly 200 miles by car in the winter. Separating the two is the expanse of the rugged Elk Mountain range, which features six of Colorado’s 14’ers, peaks that reach above 14,000’. Now meccas of outdoor recreation, the two towns were historically established as profitable coal and silver mining sites,...
Rounding the final turn off Butte Avenue toward the Slate River Valley at the start of the second and final lap, I had my eyes peeled for a ride. There: the man dressed in a Birkebeiner-esque sweater with suspenders fastened to his Swix pants just beyond the — is that the Jamaican bobsled team? This is Crested Butte’s Alley Loop, titled a “Birkie qualifier with a twist”, a moniker that falls far short of capturing...
While many in the nordic community flock to West Yellowstone each November, this New Mexico master describes what Thanksgiving skiing in Crested Butte is like, with individual attention and a homologated 5 k loop on the edge of town.