GUNNISON — In the basement of the new Paul M. Rady engineering school at Western Colorado University, professor Greg VanderBeek directs six students using a horizontal bandsaw to cut 2-inch steel tubing. “Remember, perfection happens at the welding table,” VanderBeek says as the students measure. Soon the students are grinding corners and welding a frame […]
Gunnison County
Posted inBusiness, News, Outdoors, Outsider
Jeff Hermanson, developer of Denver’s Larimer Square and Union Station, is investing big in Crested Butte
There’s a new heavyweight investor buying up properties on Crested Butte’s historic Elk Avenue. But this time it’s not a reclusive billionaire from afar. Jeff Hermanson, who transformed Denver’s Larimer Square and Union Station, has lived in Crested Butte for 48 years. And he’s buying commercial properties on what he calls “one of the greatest […]
Posted inBusiness, Growth, Housing, News, Outsider
As record-setting real estate sales continue in Colorado resort towns, buyers are now looking way down valley
The blistering pace of real estate sales is continuing in Colorado’s high country, with every resort community setting new records in each month this year. “It’s been crazy,” Crested Butte broker Frank Konsella said, “way past everything in 2019 and 2020.” Last year saw record numbers of home buyers paying highest-ever prices for properties in […]
Posted inBusiness, Coloradans, Economy, Education, Housing, News, Outdoors
Crested Butte lured an outdoor publication to town as a tourism bid. Now overrun by visitors, the partnership must evolve.
CRESTED BUTTE — The headquarters for Blister, an online publication known for longform outdoor gear reviews, occupies a converted conference room in the Elevation Hotel and Spa at the base of Crested Butte Mountain Resort. Built-in racks ringing the room store dozens of skis for reviewers to take out. The slope-side location allows Blister’s editor […]
Posted inColoradans, COVID, Environment, News, Outdoors
Crested Butte’s new camping rules are restoring resources and producing few complaints — so far
CRESTED BUTTE — On a Saturday morning at the end of July, Aaron Drendel, a recreation staff officer with the U.S. Forest Service’s Gunnison Ranger District, walked through Musicians’ Camp, a group camping area along the Slate River. Recent rain seemed to have scared some campers away, leaving several sites empty, but Drendel was focused […]
Posted inBusiness, Coloradans, Economy, Environment, Growth, News, Outdoors
Off-highway vehicles are revving up locals (in a bad way) in Colorado’s remote mountain towns
When Teri Havens bought two acres tucked in a thick stand of aspen on a hill south of Marble in 1995, it was her bit of backcountry nirvana. Yes, it sat along a popular jeeping trail ̶ a county road leading to the historic Lead King Loop. But she could live with four-wheel-drive vehicles jouncing […]
Posted inBusiness, Housing, News, Newsletters, Outsider
Developers working on affordable housing in Colorado’s mountains offer suggestions for pending wave of funding
The unprecedented housing crisis in Colorado will soon see an equally extraordinary flood of cash. In Colorado’s high country, where affordable housing is a decades-long issue that exploded into a catastrophe last year, an army of developers on the front lines of a complex campaign to build workforce housing are ready to help guide the […]
Posted inCOVID, Health, News
A solid No. 2 surveillance tool: How a year of testing Colorado’s coronavirus poop has gone
A year ago, testing sewage for COVID-19 was a new fringe science with an attention-grabbing gross-out factor. The words “poop” and “coronavirus” were making headlines across the country. So, what has happened in the interim to all that human-waste sampling and its potential to predict where COVID-19 is spreading? The short answer is that it […]
Posted inBusiness, Growth, Housing, News, Newsletters, Outsider
Record-breaking real estate frenzy is changing the culture of Colorado’s mountain towns as locals are priced out
Brianna Anthony and her boyfriend, Keenan Montague, have lived in three homes over the past six months in Telluride. The five-bedroom house that the local bartenders rented with friends sold last fall, and the new owner, an East Coast doctor with a home in nearby Mountain Village, launched a major renovation. They moved into another […]
Posted inHousing, News
Extended-stay motels quietly fill the gaps in Gunnison’s chronic housing shortage
By Nick Bowlin, for The Colorado Trust Drivers entering Gunnison from the east will pass a number of motels off to the side of Highway 50, which runs down into town from Monarch Pass on the Continental Divide. Many travelers seeking adventure in the Rockies—or carrying on to Utah—pass this way. The next substantial town […]