January 2006

Is one of the country's toughest mountains going soft? Drop into Teocalli Bowl, the Butte's newest terrain, and decide for yourself.

Read this article at skimag.com

It dumped 10 inches last night, seven the night before, 10 two nights before that. Stand still for any period of time, and a quarter-inch veneer of white accumulates on your ski pants, hats, in every wrinkle of clothing. This may be the best powder day of the best season that Crested Butte, Colo., has seen in a decade. The locals are out in force, hucking cliff bands and powder-pillows in every direction. Gleeful "yee-haws" resound across the valley.

On lower Staircase, a steep, fall-line pitch off Crested Butte's fabled North Face lift, a man tear downs the trail toward our group. As he approaches, everyone ceases the powder-day chatter and gawks. This isn't just another local powderhound reveling in this the orgy of untracked snow. It's Tim Mueller, who, with his wife Diane, bought Crested Butte Mountain Resort in March 2004. And clearly, the guy can ski.

For the residents of Crested Butte, who take their steeps seriously, seeing the resort head-honcho ripping up the extremes is a good sign. When the Muellers took over the area with the stated ambition of making it more user-friendly for beginners and intermediates, there was concern that the pair might not "get" Crested Butte and its defiantly groovy attitude, its over-the-top athleticism and its penchant for pagan parades, public waterfights and naked skiing (a last-day-of-the-season tradition nixed by the previous owners).

It was clear that the Muellers were good at running ski areas. With a hands-on management style and an emphasis on crafting the guest experience down to the last detail, the couple had increased yearly skier visits to Vermont's Okemo Mountain Resort from 90,000 in 1982, when the Muellers took over, to around 600,000 recently. At New Hampshire's state-owned Sunapee, where the couple took over management in 1998, skier visits have increased more than fivefold. The hope was that the Muellers could work the same magic on Crested Butte, which, despite having all the God-given terrain a resort could ask for and a truly authentic Western town a mile away from its slopeside village, has suffered from a near-fatal deficiency of capital, vision and guests--skier visits dropped 40 percent, from 550,000 to 336,000, between 1998 and 2002. Indeed, the mere announcement of the Muellers' purchase of the resort sparked a real-estate speculation frenzy that has seen some prices double in the year after their takeover.

What wasn't clear to some locals was whether the Muellers, in bolstering the resort's bottom line, would sanitize the mountain and neglect the expert terrain that has, deservedly, earned Crested Butte fame as some of the best adventure skiing in the country. There's nowhere like it: bowl after bowl of benchy, precipitous tree-shots and a gloriously European disdain for ropes and handholding--picture La Grave with trees and Wild West kitsch. Wander off the main route down Spellbound Bowl or the Headwall and be warned that the only thing standing between you and mandatory air is a wee orange "cliff" sign nailed to a tree. More cautious types may find such freedom alarming; for Crested Butte types, it's why they're here. "Some people worried they would make it more family-friendly at the expense the terrain that makes Crested Butte what it is," says pro freeskier and longtime local Alison Gannett.

Which may be why, in their first summer of ownership, one of the first moves the Muellers made was to replace the rickety poma lift that had served the expert North Face area with a faster T-bar. Then they completed extensive brushcutting in the resort's "Extreme Limits" terrain, and last January, to everyone's surprise, they pulled the rope on an entirely new expert area--Teocalli Bowl, with 274 steep, tight, don't-even-think-about-it-if you-can't-turn-'em acres--and opened new terrain in equally imposing Third Bowl. While the new steeps may help burnish Crested Butte's reputation as a destination for experts, the mountain has never had a problem in that department. "They're not doing it for the tourists," says Crested Butte mayor Chris Morgan. "The locals are the ones who ski up there."

As the Muellers are well aware, pleasing the locals is also good business. By the time the Calloway and Walton families sold Crested Butte to the Muellers after a long flirtation with bankruptcy and a trail of broken promises, the reservoir of local goodwill had run dry. The Muellers are determined not to make the same mistake. "If you start off on a bad foot it never gets better," Diane Mueller says.

Of course, the couple has also moved forward with their larger plan--to spruce the place up and improve the mountain's bottom line, evident in their efforts to convince tourists that, as Tim Mueller puts it, "You don't have to be an extreme skier to enjoy Crested Butte." Mountain improvements, from repainting the lifts to installing new trail signs to making sure there's toilet paper in the stalls (not always a given under previous ownership), are designed to please a clientele who may never see Teocalli Bowl. The Muellers have also upgraded two on-mountain restaurants, opened a new beginner terrain park and cut a superpipe in the advanced park. But the most noticeable upgrade is the addition of the Prospect lift, a high-speed quad built to serve a new community of ski-in/ski-out townhomes, but which also opens 15 added acres of intermediate terrain.

The Muellers' ski operations expertise, honed on the slopes of New England, may prove especially useful in pursuit of the elusive Crested Butte intermediate. While the addition of the Gold Link, Painter Boy and Teocalli chairs in the late 1970s and early '80s added gentler terrain to the mix, the Calloways' chronic lack of capital hindered efforts to expand intermediate terrain and add the upscale amenities that today's families expect. Mountain operations suffered too--sloppily groomed and even halfway-groomed slopes, where cruisers suddenly transformed into fields of bumps, were common. No longer: under the Muellers, the resort has ramped up snowmaking, replaced its entire snowcat fleet and introduced Okemo's proprietary "mountain tiller," which dredges up nearly a foot of snow to aerate and soften the hardpack. The ski operations team now aims to groom every intermediate run daily, as well as three once-bulletproof bump runs on the front of the mountain. The idea, Diane Mueller says, is to "turn black diamonds into navy blues" and provide more challenging, but not death-defying, routes for intermediates. Even those locals not often found cruising the corduroy have taken notice. "They know how to work with hard snow," pro freeskier Gannett praises.

The biggest changes, however, are yet to come. Last summer, the Muellers began construction on the first stage of a new base-area redevelopment slated to be finished for the 2006-07 season. Mountaineer Square will comprise three interconnected buildings and a pedestrian plaza, a rebuilt transportation center, new restaurants, a spa and conference facility, and more than 200 hotel and condo accommodations. The Muellers are also trying to revive the previous owners' controversial plan to add 400 acres of intermediate and advanced-intermediate skiing at the base of nearby Snodgrass Mountain. Hoping to assuage local concerns about the environmental impacts, the Muellers are pursuing a smaller project (they call it "Snodgrass Lite") with three or four lifts, rather than the original 12, and less real-estate development at the base. They hope to begin the Forest Service permit process in the fall, and initial feedback suggests that the community will be receptive this time. "They have in a very short period produced a lot of good will in the community," Mayor Morgan says.

Still, even the Muellers have their limits when it comes to indulging local traditions: don't expect the return of naked skiing anytime soon. While a few brave souls loaded the lifts in the buff last season (especially foolish considering the blizzard on closing day), "We don't want people riding the lifts and going into the lodge naked," Tim Mueller says.

Thanks, Mr. Mueller, neither do we--at least not before lunch.

END