On a crisp early October morning in downtown Crested Butte, the aspens are doing their thing, radiating gold and fluttering audibly in the breeze. Sunshine warms the shoulders of couples strolling along Elk Avenue—dogs on leashes, coffees in hand—against the backdrop of the town’s eponymous peak. Planters overflowing with fall blooms gild pastel-painted Victorian buildings, and handwritten chalkboard signs beckon passersby to pop through the open doors of storefronts.

The whole vibe is impossibly quaint—perhaps more so because of the quirky free-spiritedness that makes the charm feel genuine. There’s the legendary Camp 4 Coffee, a caffeine cabin shingled with discarded license plates. Antique mining relics tuck into nooks between sagging 140-year-old buildings. Lost-and-found ski gloves cap each picket on a fence, their middle fingers standing at attention. This sort of cheeky whimsy keeps the town un-persnickety. Un-Aspen, un-Vail. Locals and visitors have long reveled in CB’s gritty, soulful magic, an alchemy that’s elusive in so many other tourist-heavy ski towns.

5280 January 2025
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That is, perhaps, why change comes hard in this former mining enclave in the shadow of the Elk Mountains. Why locals are concerned about uber-wealthy developers displacing the longtime establishments that give the town its stop-by-anytime-for-a-beer-and-a-chat atmosphere. “The dynamics are changing,” says Ben McLoughlin, the owner of Chillberg, a New Zealand–style ice cream cart. Maybe a little for the better and for the worse, says the art teacher turned sweets purveyor, who moved to town in 1992. “But what is the ‘better’? Is it for more people to visit? More people to get to see the town? We’ve always been kind of funky and weird. I feel like we’re losing our character…but we are really lucky to have a community that cares about how we grow.”

Jeff Hermanson mostly comes off as a regular Joe. The longtime Crested Butte local is a partner at Denver-based real estate and development firm Urban Villages and is widely lauded for his transformation of both Larimer Square and Union Station, not to mention the recent debut of Civic Center’s nature-inspired Populus Hotel. On a Zoom call from the home he built when he first arrived in the Western Slope ski mecca five decades ago, he flips his laptop around so the camera pans a stunning mountain home interior, all wood beams and huge windows. “I’d have to hire a forensic architect to recall how many times I’ve remodeled or added on to it,” Hermanson says. “This house is a metaphor for Crested Butte—in how it’s evolved and changed. Quite frankly, it’s infinitely better than it was when I built it in 1973, although in 1973 it surely fit my lifestyle.”

He’s right. Crested Butte didn’t transform from a late-19th-century, end-of-the-road mining settlement into a vacation destination with a median single-family home price of $2.1 million by becoming a time capsule. As Mayor Ian Billick says, “We could argue that it’s been changing since the miners kicked the Utes out.” Both Billick and Hermanson—and, for that matter, many other engaged locals—say it’s not the change itself that warrants concern, but rather how the town navigates and responds to those changes. “There are those people who are going to sit on the curb waiting for the world to come back to the way it was,” Hermanson says, “and those who are going to embrace change and try to make a difference. That’s sort of where I see Crested Butte today.”

The legendary Camp 4 Coffee in Crested Butte. Photo by J.C. Leacock

Hermanson hasn’t been shy about ushering in change over the past few years, especially when it comes to purchasing and transforming properties on Elk Avenue. A desire to remake things is nothing new for the 75-year-old, who opened his first Crested Butte restaurant in the mid-’70s. His most recent acquisitions, all within a few doors of one another, include the Breadery building, still operating as a bakery and restaurant; the Last Steep, a beloved burgers-and-fries joint that re-emerged in late 2023 as the casual Hideout Bar & Kitchen; and the Montanya Distillers Tasting Room, which reopened under new ownership down the street, leaving the original space open for the summer 2024 launch of Two Twelve. The sophisticated open-hearth eatery touts fire-cooked entrées that average $55 (veggie sides are an additional $18).

Hermanson debuted Hideout and Two Twelve in partnership with one of CB’s most prolific and highly regarded restaurateurs: Kyleena Falzone of Secret Stash and Bonez fame. Two Twelve has generated a lot of buzz, and, true to form, on a recent shoulder-season evening, the eatery hummed with chatter while patrons sipped cocktails at the backlit bar. “Five years ago,” a twentysomething bartender said between wine recommendations, “a place like this wouldn’t have made it.” But he believes CB’s evolving nature works. Is it a playground for second-home owners? For sure, he said, but that doesn’t mean those folks are the harbingers of death for the town’s soul. In fact, he’s grateful for the influx of visitors who don’t blink at $400 dinner tabs. “I want my slice of this while it lasts,” he said.

Across the street from Two Twelve, German-inspired Brühaus Mountain Tavern, an indoor-outdoor beer hall concept, also opened this past summer after the previous occupant, locals’ favorite Brick Oven Pizzeria & Pub, shuttered at its 20-year mark in April 2022. Brühaus’ benefactor? Billionaire financier Mark Walter, the CEO of Chicago-based investment firm Guggenheim Partners and part-owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers.

The Brühaus space is just one of a half-dozen Elk Avenue buildings Walter scooped up in 2021, along with the 88-acre Almont Resort down-valley and the largest undeveloped lot in town, known as Sixth Street Station. Under the previous owners, this chunk of prime real estate on the north end of Crested Butte, en route to the ski hill, was the biggest project ever to undergo the town’s entitlement process, a tedious labyrinth of permit approvals that took years to navigate. It was set to become 62,500 square feet of mixed-use space anchored by a new high-end boutique hotel. According to the sellers’ real estate agent, Chris Kopf, they were hoping Walter would see the four-blocks-long project through. But the sixtysomething businessman has let the entitlements expire and has yet to divulge what he plans to do with the languishing lot.

The fates of other Walter acquisitions, like the iconic 1881 Forest Queen hotel building—recently home to the Coal Creek Grill, it has been dark or under construction since Walter bought it in early 2021—are similarly mysterious. Stealth mode seems to be the MO for the notoriously media-averse mogul, who did not respond to multiple attempts to contact him for this story. And while Walter isn’t new to town—he purchased a vacation home in Mt. Crested Butte in 2009, and he bought the historical Grubstake Building in 2011—he reintroduced himself in a big way with this sudden spate of pandemic-era purchases. The buying spree has become cause for speculation and guardedness. “Mark Walter is used to doing things a certain way,” says Crested Butte News editor Mark Reaman, who has repeatedly and publicly implored the investor to at least hint at a plan for the future. “He’s probably a great businessman…. I don’t think he’s out to change or destroy [Crested Butte]. His error is that he’s not taking community feedback. That doesn’t go over well in a small town.”

It’s not that folks don’t welcome the infusion of capital into their little piece of high-elevation paradise. Few mom-and-pop teams could afford to purchase and remodel an original Victorian building in a way that meets the town’s stringent preservation requirements and caters to the modern sensibilities of well-heeled tourists. An amenities-based economy needs the attention of investors like Hermanson and Walter; some just regret the loss of intimacy.

Downtown Crested Butte is not—or, at least, it hasn’t been—a place that’s detached from those who live there year-round. Residents fondly recall the times they could pop by a patio on Elk Avenue after a trail ride and know the guys slinging beers behind the bar. More recently, some of those places are manned by strangers—or they sit empty waiting on a developer to share his vision. “The problem with [Walter] not being an owner-operator is that he doesn’t have any urgency,” Mayor Billick says. “[He] has this huge portfolio, and for a guy who owns the LA Dodgers, being delayed a year or two on opening a restaurant in Crested Butte probably isn’t something that keeps him up at night.”

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No matter how big their bank account is, one thing everyone in Crested Butte can agree on is the ballooning crisis of affordability. After the ski resort joined the Rocky Mountain Super Pass (the predecessor to the Ikon Pass) in 2014 and then the Epic Pass (Vail Resorts bought Crested Butte in 2018), skiers previously tied to I-70 corridor mountains began filling up local Airbnbs on long weekends. Add to that a marketing blitz for Crested Butte’s mountain biking allure, the paving of Cottonwood Pass in 2019, and a surge in visitation fueled by the work-remote, play-outside culture of COVID-19, and it’s easy to see why there’s been an uptick in Front Range tourists.

Many business owners appreciate the resulting boom in sales but, at the same time, bemoan the changing culture. “It’s a double-edged sword,” Danica Ramgoolam, owner of Townie Books and Rumors Coffee & Tea House, says. “Sales have increased by 20 percent since 2020 and have stayed at this higher level…because so many people from the Front Range are wanting to see the cute town and experience the magic of it. And we’re part of that magic. But it’s a bummer that the majority of the restaurants now are catering to higher-end visitors as opposed to locals. That said, we’d also like to be less expensive, but we’re paying our employees twice as much as we did five years ago to account for the ludicrous housing costs.”

Workforce housing—or lack thereof—has become the single biggest conundrum in Crested Butte’s fragile economic ecosystem, which depends as much on the tourist dynamic as on the teachers, civil servants, plumbers, and nurses who are the scaffolding for a high quality of life in this remote locale. Multiple housing projects are in the pipeline in the valley, including Hermanson’s proposal for a 500-unit workforce housing development in Gunnison, half an hour south. Still, the problem isn’t going away overnight. The last time a household earning the town’s median income—now $87,159 for a couple—could afford a 30-year fixed mortgage on a home was in 2012, according to Crested Butte’s community development department.

“It’s a tough thing to swallow when I continually see that none of my friends’ children are going to be able to afford a house in Crested Butte unless they go off and make it big on Wall Street,” says Glo Cunningham, outreach coordinator at the Crested Butte Museum and a tour guide who’s called the town home for nearly 50 years. While she is excited that Walter and Hermanson are pouring money into historical treasures, she was less than enthused when her taxes inflated after Walter doled out $14.4 million to acquire 10 empty lots across the street from her house. It’s that kind of side effect, she says, that’s driving longtime residents and the younger generation out for good. “That’s a sad state of affairs,” she says.

The issue isn’t lost on folks tasked with charting the best path forward. “We’re being gentrified,” says Troy Russ, community development director for the town. “Gentrification is that paradox where there’s investment coming in and serving a need that’s different than what the community needs. People can no longer afford taxes or groceries because the investment is serving tourism and services. So how do we balance it? We want to make sure that investment is leveraged toward us.”

That’s one reason why the town created a decision-making framework called the Community Compass. The plan, adopted in 2022 after a year of community collaboration, provides a broad manifesto for navigating the rapid economic growth and accompanying changes that are shaping CB’s future. “The Compass is a way to become more proactive and strategic,” says Mel Yemma, the long-range planner for Crested Butte. “At our core, we need to know who we are and what we value. We need a sense of direction. We’re not Aspen or Telluride.”

And locals would like to keep it that way. Neither of those ski destinations has year-round occupancy rates as high as Crested Butte’s, which sits at two-thirds, meaning Aspen and Telluride are even more flush with second-home owners and vacation renters. “One of the things we always used to say: If we make it nice for us, we’ll make it nice for tourists,” says John Hess, who moved to Crested Butte in 1990 and went on to become the town planner for 23 years. And today? “We now seem to attract people with more money. What we used to attract was people more or less like us, who didn’t have money.”

Crested Butte had always been a town by the locals, for the locals. Until it wasn’t. “I feel the funkiness is still there,” says Andy Eflin, who was born in Crested Butte in 1961. His father, Dick Eflin, was one of the founders of Crested Butte Ski Resort. The younger Eflin grew up watching the old clapboards and dirt roads transform over time as lifts and trails spread across the slopes. Today, he’s been priced out of town and lives in Gunnison. “Can it be hung onto?” he asks. “I sure hope so. But you can’t stop the progression.”

From where Hermanson sits—whether at his trendy new eatery Two Twelve or perhaps at the bar of the oldest restaurant in town, the Wooden Nickel (now a part of Walter’s mini-empire)—the key to preserving Crested Butte’s unique spirit is twofold. First, embrace revitalization while prioritizing solutions (see: workforce housing) to the problems it creates. “Change is inevitable; it’s about trying to influence it as much as you can,” Hermanson says. “Mark Walter, I think, will be a good steward. I think he’ll do good things. He may not do it as quickly or visibly as some of the projects I’m doing. But I think his heart’s in the right place.” Second, know that growth can’t alter the spirit of a place if its people don’t let it. “It’s human nature to resist change,” Hermanson says, but he adds that underneath the grumbling, there’s a commonality that unites locals, second-home owners, and visitors: a reverence for CB’s distinctive way of life. And that might be what saves Crested Butte from itself.

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