SNOWMASS VILLAGE — The beautiful thing about having a short history is that everybody is still around to attend the big anniversary celebration.
That was the case yesterday during a party at Snowmass Village’s new town hall, feting both the grand opening of the building — which has been in business since January — and two important milestones: the 40th anniversary of Snowmass Ski Area and the 30th anniversary of the town’s incorporation.
The spacious atrium was packed with multiple generations of Villagers, and all afternoon the old timers told one story after another about the planning, building and first years of Snowmass. Tales abounded of skiing on the Big Burn years before the ski area opened, last-minute scrambling to get the resort ready for its December 1967 debut, stumbling through all the necessary steps to incorporation, and all the raucous parties throughout those early years.
Sparking several of the conversations, and pulling all the disparate bits and pieces of Snowmass’ history together, was the screening of “Mountain Spirit: Voices of Snowmass,” the first documentary film ever made about the history and people of the Brush Creek Valley.
“We’re trying to make the case that there’s a community here,” said Greg Poschman, an Aspen filmmaker who produced the 17-minute documentary for the town as part of its anniversary celebration. Poschman added that while he was already familiar with the history of Snowmass — he’s a lifelong Aspenite — he was impressed with the breadth of stories his interviewees had and in particular with their passion. After several years of planning beginning in the late 1950s, the men who built the resort at a frenzied pace of less than a year “all say it was the highlight of their careers,” said Poschman.
A true mountain community
“Mountain Spirit” begins with a series of skiing and snowboarding clips from past and present. It’s this foundation — the ski mountain — that is a constant throughout the film and formed the basis of a tight knit community.
After nearly a century of small-scale ranching in the Brush Creek Valley, Snowmass’ mountain was “discovered” by former Olympic skier Bill Janss, the resort’s original developer who came from a prominent California development family.
“Bill spent a lot of time looking for a great ski area in the late ‘50s,” said Snowmass’ first director of marketing, John Cooley, in the film. “And he said, ‘My God, I think I’ve found it. It’s Snowmass. It’s huge.’”
Around that time, some locals were skiing Snowmass via Tommy Thomas’ float plane. Dramatic, rarely before shown footage from the late 1950s shows the plane landing on top of the mountain — going uphill to slow down — and letting out skis and passengers, who then had some 4,000 vertical feet of untracked snow before being picked up by the plane again in a flat area lower in the Brush Creek Valley.
“That was the first mechanized skiing in Snowmass,” said Poschman. “Your own private powder skiing; it makes me jealous.”
For about four years before the ski area opened, snowcat tours operated on the Big Burn, and cost $8 including lunch, guides and all-day powder skiing.
Tom Marshall, a former powder guide with the operation who was interviewed for the video, remembers that time fondly.
“We skied powder all day, had a great lunch, drank wine, got tips, and got to do it again,” said Marshall, who still lives in Aspen with his wife. “Powder guiding were the best years of my life.”
Snowmass opened for business with great media fanfare in December 1967, and the film shows classic footage of Olympian Stein Eriksen, who was tapped to head the ski school, and his band of Scandinavian instructors skiing in formation down Fanny Hill.
Many of the original instructors still live in Snowmass, and many of them still teach.
“When you are in heaven, you don’t want to leave,” said Per Guldbrandsgaard, one of those instructors.
But skiing wasn’t the only thing that held the community together. “Mountain Spirit” documents the origin of Anderson Ranch Arts Center, and also focuses on the Snowmass Chapel, which became a focal point and gathering place for a growing but still nuclear community.
Gracie’s cabin — a rustic wooden cabin conceived as a European style hut that guests would cross-country ski into, have home-cooked meals and spend the night — also makes an appearance in the film.
And so does the Timbermill, Snowmass’ most fondly remembered bar and dance hall (part of it is now the Cirque), where skiers danced in their ski boots late into the evening and some of the most memorable (or not so well remembered) Mardi Gras celebrations were held.
The film goes on to take the viewer through the town’s incorporation — which was partly a result of the growing communities’ desire to get out from Pitkin County’s shadow and shape its own destiny — and briefly touches on some of the changes that have led to the present day redevelopment of Snowmass by Related WestPac. But rather than getting bogged down in pervasive land-use and construction issues, the film’s last vignette spotlights an example of the town’s future: High Society Freeride Company, a ski and snowboard company started in Snowmass by a group of 20-something entrepreneurs.
The film wraps up with comments on how it’s the people who are passionate about Snowmass that deserve the true credit of building the community. And if the up-and-coming generations of Villagers show the same energy, spirit and spunk of Snowmass’ pioneers, commented Snowmass developer Jim Light, the opportunities are there for them too.
For many of the Snowmass originals in attendance, the film stirred up some emotion.
“It made me cry,” said Gracie Oliphant, of Gracie’s Cabin. “It made me think of so many times that we otherwise wouldn’t have remembered. And it made me wish we could all get together and sit around the fire and tell stories again.”
Many in attendance didn’t need a campfire to tell some of those long-forgotten stories. Groups of Villagers swapped tales late into the afternoon — of the Timbermill floor dipping and bending from the strain of hundreds of ski boots, of beer dripping through the floor of a bar into a daycare center below, of long nights spent discussing and planning and learning what it means to be a town.
After watching reels of old footage and sifting through 15-20 hours worth of interviews, Wendy Harris, the film’s editor, had the hefty job of deciding what to cut and what little to keep. Harris, also a longtime Snowmass resident, has worked on the film for the past year but the level of intensity rose dramatically in the last month when the bulk of the editing was done.
Reflecting on what she calls a “labor of love,” Harris said she’s proud of the film. “I raised my family here; we like to ski and we love this place. You can do whatever you want to develop the town, but the mountain is still the main focus.”
She added, “Now I have an understanding of this community and how proud we are — we’ve got it all.”
lutz@aspendailynews.com