IDAHO SPRINGS — Mary Jane Loevlie, standing next to twin 135,000-gallon water tanks and a freshly poured foundation for the Mighty Argo Cable Car gondola and a mountain top restaurant and amphitheater she’s building above her hometown, spreads her arms wide and yells.
“It’s really happening. Never give up! Never, ever give up,” she hollers.
Loevlie grew up in Idaho Springs. She grew an international business there and started some 20 other other companies as part of a mission to protect the historic vibe in the town where she and her husband, Kristian, raised two daughters. She recruited 35 of her friends in town to support her plan to build a 1.2-mile Doppelmayr gondola stretching from the historic Argo Mill to the top of a 400-acre city-owned park.
When that group made a $4.5 million deposit in August 2020 to get a construction loan for the project, the owners of a title company took the money and split. The project stalled as a pandemic swept the globe and a civil court in 2022 awarded the investors a nearly $9 million settlement, of which they have seen less than $40,000.
“I tell you, 99% of people would have thrown in the towel,” Idaho Springs Mayor Chuck Harmon said. “But not Mary Jane. She defines tenacity. I don’t know many people with that kind of drive. She knew she was on the right course and nothing could stop her.”
“The silver lining” of this project, she says, is that even though the project stalled for four years, her 35 local investors stayed on board. And she was able to recruit heavyweight European investors who brought $23 million to the project as part of a Doppelmayr-led plan to promote “point of interest” gondola pedestrian transportation systems in the U.S.
The total project now has topped $71 million, up from $58 million when the plan first took shape before the pandemic and before construction costs exploded in Colorado. Loevlie’s mentor and partner, legendary historic preservationist Dana Crawford, passed away months before the gondola towers went up. Despite it all, Loevlie has never wavered in her commitment or enthusiasm for her Mighty Argo plan.
“I’m a hopeful, eternal optimist,” says the 71-year-old. “I couldn’t surrender to that dark hole. If I did, what would my people, my investors have done? They would have given up. And that could not happen. There are too many inspirational people involved in this. I simply could not give up. Dana’s and my motto was always ‘Make shit happen.’ And that’s what we did.”
It started with concrete
In the corner of her historic office building on Miner Street in Idaho Springs, there’s a photo of Loevlie at a table of small business owners talking about trade policy in the White House. Loevlie is gesturing in the middle of a statement. Everyone, including President Barack Obama, is laughing.
“That was because I started the conversation by saying if you can be passionate about concrete, you can be passionate about anything,” she says. “And that is so true.”
Loevlie loves concrete.
Her husband Kristian came up with the technology behind their company, Shotcrete, in his home country of Norway. After they married, they co-founded Shotcrete and moved the business to Idaho Springs. As chief executive of the company she helped Shotcrete become the industry standard for infrastructure work, with its customized, Denver-made machines spraying concrete in New York City tunnels, drainage networks in Mumbai, hydroelectric systems in Ecuador and mine shafts in British Columbia.
“It’s the Kleenex of concrete,” she says.
While captaining Shotcrete with Kristian for more than 40 years, she began buying properties. She owned big hotels in metro Denver and tiny historic buildings across Clear Creek County.
At some point, her real estate development company has owned just about every building on Miner Street. When she and her husband moved back to Idaho Springs from Europe in the early 1980s, half of Miner Street was boarded up. Just how many businesses have you started in your life, Mary Jane?
“Oh, more than 20 I guess,” says Loevlie, whose daughters, Asta Keene and Annelise Loevlie also founded and run their own businesses.
“A force to be reckoned with”
Ethan Mueller joined the Mighty Argo team in early 2025. The former manager of Crested Butte Mountain Resort — owned by his parents, Tim and Diane Mueller, for 13 years before selling it and ski areas in New Hampshire, Vermont and Washington to Vail Resorts in 2018 — was ready to run the Mighty Argo facility in 2020, but the title company debacle derailed his hiring.
He was always intrigued by the Mighty Argo plan. It’s “super unique” that a resort hospitality boss gets an opportunity to move a mountain project from idea to reality, he says. He admits a bit of doubt when Loevlie was forced to suspend the plan in 2020.
“She is a force to be reckoned with,” Mueller says. “Growing up in the ski industry watching my folks build what they did, with creativity, persistence, resilience and vision, and what it took for them to be able to build their business, I see a lot of my mom in Mary Jane. It’s been pretty cool to work with her because I just keep seeing all these similarities with my folks.”
Mueller sees the Mighty Argo plan as an opportunity to help Idaho Springs “redefine itself in a great way.” He sees parallels in the private investment alongside publicly owned land to what’s happening in northwestern Arkansas, where Walton family scions are building a recreational mecca around Walmart’s headquarters in Bentonville.
“There’s not really many examples of such a dynamic private-public partnership,” Mueller said. “Coming from the mountain resort world, this is fairly unique in that sense too. It’s an opportunity to be a different definition of a resort town.”
Strolling the freshly poured concrete that will anchor the Sun and Moon Saloon, named after a mining claim a few feet away. Above it will be the Gold Bar. There could be a speakeasy, possibly named Loevlie’s or Mary Jane’s. The 300-seat terraced amphitheater she’s calling the Outpost at Miner’s Point. There’s a children’s play zone where kids can learn how miners scoured ore for gold. A trestle will reach out toward the horizon, “for the Instagram moment,” says Loevlie, who spent several years quietly buying about 30 acres of mining claims atop the mountain before unveiling the Mighty Argo plan.
“Sometimes I forget how beautiful this is,” she says of a vista that includes the Continental Divide and four 14ers. “This used to be for only gold miners. We really want to share these views as well as interpretive opportunities around that mining history and the feeling of discovery and excitement that surrounded these mining claims. A lot of people don’t really know what was really involved in this mining.”
A lot of people don’t really know much about her town, either, she says. She’s hoping to change that.
Historic preservation with economic growth
Loevlie graduated from Clear Creek High School, as did her daughters. She went to college in Vermont and after school she worked in Europe, promoting Up With People. That’s where she met Kristian, who was peddling his new technology that enabled wet concrete to be sprayed.
They married and moved back to Idaho Springs in the 1980s to run Shotcrete. The city was suffering back then with few businesses thriving and not many visitors. The construction of Interstate 70 and the Eisenhower Johnson Memorial Tunnels in the decades earlier had plowed through the middle of the historic town, leaving behind tired huddles of mobile homes hastily assembled for the highway’s tunnel builders.
“Back when I was a little girl here in the ‘60s and ‘70s, I-70 wasn’t here,” she says. “We had bumper-to-bumper traffic through town and we sold rocks and worms on the side of the road to tourists.”
Travelers passed through town on the way to Loveland ski area and the now-gone Geneva Basin and Berthoud Pass ski areas.
“The federal government was able to totally destroy a third of our town and bifurcate it and now the water wheel that was downtown is on the other side of the highway and all people see are our back doors and construction trailers built for I-70 workers,” she says.
When the feds said it was time to add more lanes to I-70 and take more of Idaho Springs, Loevlie joined in the fight to protect her community. She was among the first people to form the I-70 Coalition, arguing that any transportation projects need to balance historic preservation and community needs. She pushed to better protect Miner Street, cajoling struggling business owners to help pay for historic sidewalks and streetlights.
“Wow she was demonized by many for that sidewalk idea,” says Harmon, the town’s mayor. “She wanted those Victorian streetlights and really giving our downtown a facelift. Reflecting back, we all appreciate it. She was unrelenting. She said, ‘people can call me what they want but I have a vision and this is the right thing to do.’”
She’s been asked a lot but never considered public office. She says “I don’t really fit” into either of the major parties. She sees herself “as more of a Libertarian type person,” she says. She often quotes Whole Foods founder John Mackey’s “Conscious Capitalism,” sharing the idea that businesses should serve community and business leaders should champion historic preservation to support economic vibrancy for all residents.
Protecting historic legacy is the underlying premise of the Mighty Argo plan. It’s a page from the playbook of the late legendary historic preservationist Crawford. Not many minutes can pass in a Loevlie chat without her mentioning her friend.
The two about a decade ago made a bid for the tired Indian Hot Springs, which have been soaking visitors since 1865. Their bid fell short. A broker approached her and Crawford about buying the Argo Mill. That was the spark.
They initially thought maybe that hulking red structure could be a boutique hotel that honored the thousands of miners but once they really dug in, Loevlie said they decided to protect the mill as it is, where a 4.2-mile tunnel stretches to Central City, draining some 100 gold mines once renowned as the “richest square mile on Earth.” The mill processed an estimated $100 million worth of gold between its opening in 1913 and the fatal flood in 1943 that shut it down.
The Argo Mill has been an Environmental Protection Agency Superfund site since 1983, with a water treatment plant pulling heavy metals from the tunnel drainage in Idaho Springs.
Building a gondola that roughly follows the line of the tunnel deep below a Superfund site is an added challenge for Loevlie, but, like she says, “We’re putting the fun in Superfund.”
Bouncing back
Loevlie said she leaned mightily on Crawford when two women running the Virginia-based First Title, Inc. stole her investment group’s $4.5 million 2020 deposit for a $32.7 million construction loan to kick off the project. The group sued Sandra Bacon and Chrisheena McGee in 2021, arguing they forged documents to hide their theft, emailing documents to the investment group that added a “$7,1” so a bank statement read as $7,120,803.89.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in November 2023 announced a federal grand jury indictment of the owners of the title company – then 71-year-old Bacon and 47-year-old McGee – on 12 counts of wire fraud. The indictment said the two stole at least $14.8 million from 10 victims, including the Might Argo investment group, by falsely representing entities seeking loans. An investigation by the FBI alleged the two women held advance fees in escrow and used them to purchase properties and pay off earlier victims “in Ponzi-like fashion.”
Bacon and McGee pleaded not guilty and their trial in U.S. District Court in Denver is set for February 2026.
Maybe the investors can get more money from the women after the criminal trial, Loevlie says. But she’s not hopeful. She’s looking forward, not back, she says.
For decades, folks in Idaho Springs and Clear Creek have championed their vistas, trails and outdoor access while wondering why everyone keeps zooming past en route to similar mountain playgrounds farther afield. The trails at the city’s Virginia Canyon Mountain Park, the preservation of historic downtowns and the Mighty Argo plan are an evolution of the county’s vision for drawing just enough visitation, said Kelly Flenniken, the head of the Clear Creek Economic Development Corp. and the director of local government advocate Colorado Counties, Inc.
“I definitely think the Mighty Argo is a big effort and a big lift that will have some really meaningful economic impact on our community,” Flenniken said. “It shows off what those of us in Idaho Springs already know. The views are incredible and it’s easy to forget you are 40 minutes from a big city.”
Flenniken knows her community cannot handle tens of thousands more visitors pulling off the highway. She’s heard concerns about parking challenges in Idaho Springs when the gondola starts drawing more people into town.
“A couple things need to be finessed as this plan unfolds,” she says.
But she expects the Mighty Argo will be “a monumental catalyst” for other projects.
“Think of all the things that could open at the base or at the top or elsewhere in the community. There are some really exciting opportunities for the business community in Idaho Springs to really think about what comes next and what is missing,” says Flenniken, noting how local high school students are studying outdoor recreation business skills that could keep them in their home towns. “Knit all these ways that Clear Creek County is building an entrepreneurial ecosystem that embraces our young people and I see the Mighty Argo as a great opportunity to help our young people as they finish school.”
Colorado’s largest network of lift-served trails outside a ski area
Loevlie and her Evergreen-based development partner Bryan McFarland hired the Englewood-based White Construction Group to build the mountaintop plaza and gondola terminals.
“You remember what it was like when we first came up here?” Loevlie asks Rich Gold, the superintendent of the project for WCG.
“Nothing but a little goat trail,” he says, strolling beneath the top gondola terminal which is not sealed up like bullwheel housing at a ski resort, keeping the industrial feel of a mining structure. “I’ll tell you, ‘These are the projects you wait your whole career for.’”
Below the terminal, 14 miles of freshly carved bike trails built by the Colorado Mountain Bike Association wind through the 400-acre Virginia Canyon Mountain Park, four of them downhill only. COMBA built the trails with $250,000 from the Trek Foundation and another $400,000 from Loevlie’s Mighty Argo group. They are calling them “Trek Trails” at the city-owned park. The bike association is working to raise another $1 million to finish what will be the largest network of lift-served bike trails in the state outside of a ski resort.
This summer the trails have been seeing as many as 1,000 users a day, revealing the growing demand and limited supply of directional mountain bike trails along the Front Range.
Several of the trails are for hikers too.
“I’m going to hike up, have my Bloody Mary and take the gondola down,” Loevlie says.
After a recent tour, Loevlie calls a visitor with a final note. You need to go stand in the middle of Miner Street and look up, she says. You can see the gondola towers from the historic, pedestrian-friendly street.
“It’s like our little town is a European village,” she says.