CRESTED BUTTE — Living inside a snow globe makes people say strange things.
“I hope it stops snowing,” said Scott Gates, a lifelong ski bum hoping for the briefest of reprieves in the storm that would help ski patrollers open more terrain “I can’t believe I said that.”
In the middle of an epic storm cycle that has made Crested Butte the snowiest spot in Colorado — more than 90 inches of new snow has fallen in the past 10 days — buried ‘Buttians are digging. In the early mornings, they shovel. By midday they are furrowing the deepest tracks in recent history at Crested Butte Mountain Resort. Then it’s back to shoveling.
This snow, while a hassle, is a blessing. Locals call this the best storm of their lives. They high-five strangers on the hill. They chatter about “Snowmaggedon” and “Snowpocalypse.”
“I feel like it’s Groundhog Day,” said Arianne French, a passionate skier who has spent each of the past 10 days skiing and shoveling the roof of a downtown trailer listing under nightly deposits of deep snow. “Every morning, Teddy is telling me where to park, Mindy is shoveling her roof, Pinball is smoking on his deck. I love shoveling. Dealing with all these sketchy moments. Then I go skiing.”
It has been a historic week in the Gunnison Valley. Western State Colorado University in Gunnison closed for two days this week. The school in Crested Butte closed for the first time in more than 20 years. Even the ski area shut down its lifts midday on Monday.
“That was all about safety,” said ski patroller Krista Hildebrant, noting that when an ambulance fetching an injured skier was unable to reach the slopes, resort managers made the decision to close early. “In my 27 years of patrolling, that was the most epic workday ever. It was amazing to be a part of it. It’s what we live here for.”
Doug Collin helped a town crew working from dusk to dawn to load more than 170 dump trucks with snow carved from the 15-foot banks flanking Elk Avenue downtown.
“We had to wait until it stopped snowing before we could move everything. We ended up waiting a long time,” said the eight-year maintenance worker for the town’s parks and recreation department. Collins is supposed to work 10-hour shifts, piloting a snow-scooping Bobcat and, more often, a shovel up and down sidewalks and side streets. Those shifts lately have been closer to 15 hours.
“It’s been crazy. I’m so sore after work. But these days on the hills are so good for me,” Collin said, riding the Silver Queen chairlift Tuesday. “It makes me fall back in love with snow.”
The overwhelming affection for fresh snow was strained this week as cars were stuck, roads became impassable, avalanche hazards increased and Crested Butte battled to stay a step ahead of the weather. That step was shrinking as piles rose past second-floor windows, alleys became canyons and descents to first-floor doorways became a sort of snowy spelunking.
The sun made one of its first appearances of this year around 2 p.m. Tuesday, but it was gone in an hour, as yet another pulse from the Pineapple Express dropped 10 more inches.
At bars packed with die-hard skiers, the once-sacrilegious lament about too much snow was not uncommon.
“Come on. Really. Enough!” said one pie-eyed patron stepping from the raucous Kochevar’s Saloon into a blizzard late Monday.
The town has motored through its snow-removal budget for the season and has tapped a $100,000 reserve that can handle the storm of a lifetime. The town’s bosses — like the director of parks and public works — have been manning the plows during the day to give nighttime drivers a break.
“For so many municipalities, snow is a financial burden. For us, it’s a financial windfall,” said Mayor Glenn Michel, a custom-home builder who spent Wednesday shoveling the roof of a client. “We are going to have people coming from all over the world to Crested Butte because we have the best snow in all of Colorado right now.”
Crested Butte’s swelling snow dumps — great piles of ice and snow fed by a seemingly endless parade of snow-toting trucks — are growing at a rapid pace. The town is identifying more sites to pile hundreds of tons of snow, while hauling snow from storage areas to more far-flung destinations outside town. Both the town and residents are surrendering terrain to snow storage. The town will recycle some of that snow for the Alley Loop race through downtown and other events on Elk Avenue.
Frantic that their roof is collapsing, homeowners are calling anyone with a shovel. The ice layer on roofs is shedding avalanches from all overhangs, shearing chimneys and vents. The morning DJs on KBUT radio detail the extreme avalanche hazard in the backcountry and warn listeners to look up and beware of roof avalanches as well.
Milo Wynne’s Armstrong Shoveling Brigade has been busy. The crew of hardcore skiers — men and women — spends its off-hill hours moving snow off roofs.
“This has been relentless. We are tired. Skiing is our rest time from shoveling and now we are shoveling to recover from skiing,” said Wynne, who named his shoveling team Armstrong “because we put our backs and arms into it, saving our legs for skiing. These past couple weeks have been an endless Jenny Craig weight-loss program.”
At Clark’s Market, Crested Butte’s big grocery, Bruce Ost was spreading his fish and beef across a barren display, making up for a lack of chicken. The fowl comes from Nebraska, through a warehouse in Salt Lake City. That’s a lot of travel on snowy roads.
“It’s quite a supply chain, and when one link breaks, well, we run out of stuff,” Ost said. “I’ve only been here 26 years, but I’ve never seen it like this. It just keeps coming.”
Up at the ski area, patrollers are battling an avalanche threat that grows with each inch of snow. Since Jan. 1, the Crested Butte ski patrol has hurled 1,402 pounds of 2-, 4- and 6-pound explosives into hanging fields of deep snow, triggering avalanches before skiers do.
Antsy locals pester patrollers about openings. On Wednesday, the first time patrol has been able to open the area’s famed steep extreme terrain, an army of powder pirates pillaged the bounty during blinding winds, relentless snowfall and explosive blasts that echoed across the entire valley.
Before the mountain opened Wednesday, patrollers lobbed more than 130 charges into the area’s Headwall and North Face areas.
The wet snow has been a challenge for patrollers, said Frank Magri, a patroller for 23 years.
“It’s really hard to get something to slide in damp snow, so explosives are our only alternative,” Magri said.
The resort needed an emergency shipment of explosives delivered from Tennessee last week. Another emergency shipment is on the way.
“This is the winter we all moved to Crested Butte for,” said local educator and radio DJ John Hopper. “You just have to embrace every shovel load.”
Standing in a sideways wind of blowing snow at the packed North Face Lift line, someone started a chant Wednesday. Soon everyone was lauding life in a snow globe.
“Shake it again!” they shouted. “Shake it again!”
