Crested Butte: From Coal Camp to Ski Town

Crested Butte: From Coal Camp to Ski Town is a town biography. Duane A. Smith follows the Elk Mountains community from its beginnings as a coal camp to its later life as a ski town. The subtitle states the whole arc, and the description adds that Smith wrote widely on Colorado mining country.

The book traces three forces that reshaped the same few streets. Coal came first, then the railroad, and then tourism. That pattern is the heart of the book's argument: a small mountain place that lived by what it dug out of the ground later lived by what visitors came to do on top of it.

Our catalogue does not list a page count, ISBN or publication year for this record, so we won't guess at them. What we can say is that it is a history of one town from a historian who spent a career in the same region. If you have skied the mountain or ridden the roads through town, this is the story of how the streets got there.

Crested Butte is for people who love the town as it is now and want to know what came before the lift lines. Locals and second home owners will see familiar names in a longer story. Skiers and mountain bikers curious about the valley will get context. Students of Colorado economic history can use it as a case of a mining town that changed its business instead of vanishing. It is a single town history, so it suits readers who prefer a focused subject.

Duane A. Smith is the author, and Crested Butte joins a line of town and district histories he wrote, among them Silverton and the San Juans. Our catalogue holds nine of his books. We cannot offer more about this record than its description, but his author page lists everything we publish by him and what we have been able to confirm about his teaching career.

More about Duane A. Smith →

Wikipedia describes Crested Butte as a home rule town in Gunnison County, a former coal mining town in the Slate River Valley, now known for skiing, mountain biking and outdoor activities. Its post office opened on May 26, 1879, and the Town of Crested Butte was incorporated on July 15, 1880. The 2020 census counted 1,639 residents.

Mining, along with ranching, formed the local economy. When silver mining began to decline, many nearby towns failed, but Crested Butte was better placed to survive because it served as a supply town to the surrounding area. When the coal mines closed, the town began to shrink, and eventually the local high school closed.

The town did not revive until a ski area was built on Crested Butte Mountain in the 1960s, on the former Malensek Ranch in what is now the neighboring community of Mt. Crested Butte. Colorado State Highway 135 runs south from town 27 miles to Gunnison, the county seat.

Source: Wikipedia, Crested Butte, Colorado