All of us who grew up in Colorado during the 1950s have a similar memory and a hunger for something that will never, ever come again.
It was a summer camp I attended on the western slope of Colorado in the 1950s. I was an awkward 13, too young for girls and tired of boyish games.
I had previously been sent away for a couple of weeks to the Episcopal camp, Geneva Glen, not far from Denver. Church camp was harmless: indoor BB gun target ranges, outdoor bows and arrows, dorm rooms with a caring counselor, and a dance on the last night where I clutched my first girlfriend in a clumsy embrace.
Skyland Camp was different. Far from home in the rugged high plains of the Western Slope, it was a working ranch in Gunnison County right below 12,000-foot Crested Butte and beside shimmering Lake Grant. It was run by an elderly couple, and the man could do just about anything outdoorsy. Fish. Hunt. Trap. Tie flies. Shoot a bow, rifle, or shotgun. Ride horseback. Hike. Drive like a bat out of hell down twisting gravel roads. We did them all alongside him.
Our days were governed by the same schedule: rise at dawn; breakfast; make lunches (peanut butter sandwiches) or clean latrines; then projects. We might try to tie flies, using fur, feather (“hackle”), and thread; or practice setting traps; or shoot on the rifle range, standing, sitting, kneeling, prone, aiming a 22-caliber bolt-action single-shot rifle at targets about 16 feet away. The more daring learned gun safety, handling the man’s 12-gauge double-barreled side-by-side shotgun, the culmination of which was the firing of both barrels, with the terrified tenderfoot being propelled back and downward as soon as he pulled the triggers.
In the afternoon, if you were lucky to have a day trip, you might fish in the Gunnison River, standing knee-deep in the cold, clear water, casting your freshly tied flies for the hungry rainbow trout, hoping that you would bag one before your fly began to disintegrate, unraveling into fur, hackle, thread, and naked hook. You might hike, usually after a short drive up a dusty gravel road in the camp’s Power Wagon. Sometimes we would walk just a little way into an abandoned ghost town up in the mountains, scouting out memorabilia among the scattered boards, broken glass, and rusted metal: a shoe; an old newspaper, barely legible; a nail; a bottle; some unidentified cloth. Or we would walk into the hills to set our traps for raccoons, or bobcats, or (perish the thought) skunks.
Or we would go hunting for marmots (derisively named “whistle pigs”) with our .22s on the rocky slopes.
Or the hike would be arduous, as we made our way up the crumbling, rocky slope of Crested Butte itself, panting and slipping, sliding, grabbing any handhold to make it up to the top, 3,000 feet above the camp, looking down at it, small, insignificant, orange and green blot below us.
Or, as a grand finale of one hike, sliding a half-mile down an abandoned coal chute, the trees whizzing past, your butt growing hot, coal dust kicking up, everyone screaming, landing in a heap at the bottom.
Some days there would be nothing to do. I recall lounging by Lake Grant on a drowsy summer day, watching the dragonflies whiz from reed to reed, watching them pause, translucent wings spread, ready to launch over the still water. I do not remember swimming, boating, or even wading in that lake. It was not the same as the lake at my Boy Scout Camp Tahosa, where one swam and boated vigorously for merit badges and even ice-skated in the winter, holding a handmade sail for speed.
No, Lake Grant was just a quietly splashing source of calm in the midst of our vigorous wilderness education.
There was a girls’ camp over the hill, forbidden to us boys during the day but revealed on the weekend, where we would meet inside one of their (deluxe) houses for square dancing. And every evening we would climb the hill toward the girls’ camp for a nighttime campfire. I still remember the raucous songs:
John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt
His name is my name, too.
Whenever we go out
The people always shout:
There goes John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt
DAH DAH DAH DAH, DAH DAH DAH (sung successively more softly, but with the same screaming chorus)
There were probably some pretty spectacular girls in that upper camp, and if we’d had a decent slow dance instead of those hectic and harried hoedowns, I probably would have fallen in love. Yet except for one particularly beautiful brunette I spied at a campfire and longed for afterwards, I can report no co-ed experiences.
No, it was all male. We boys slept in covered wagons. Inside there were two double bunk beds and room for luggage. I recall packing a small trunk for storing my clothes and belongings. Each wagon was covered in orange canvas with wooden staves holding the top up over wooden wheels and a rough wooden floor. I wouldn’t be surprised if they could be towed by oxen.
In fact, there were large cows roaming the property (this was a working ranch after all), and sometimes
a bull got loose, to the consternation of everyone.
There was much to recommend a covered wagon as a temporary home. The roof was high, the floor was solid, and the whole structure was sufficiently raised above the ground that rain or raging bulls could do little damage. It got a little cold at night. It wasn’t unusual to wake up to frost on the ground, even in late summer.
But, oh my, the nights: starlit and quiet. The Milky Way was a real path, marking one’s route to the outdoor privy, or just hanging there, slicing across the sky among millions of stars. Once on a camping trip high in the mountains I lay in my sleeping bag and counted the falling stars, meteors plummeting to earth, pieces of eternity breaking off and dropping, descending, disintegrating into vapor, the sky so bright with stars it hurt my eyes and I had to close them, finally drifting into sleep.
I loved fishing, even though my flies quickly deteriorated in the cold rushing water. I also loved to shoot and quickly earned Marksman, then Marksman First Class, medals I proudly wore for years.
I was less skilled at trapping. I hated it. Too often we would catch an animal that either chewed off its leg or lay there panting and wounded, waiting for someone to finish it off with a gun. Occasionally, however, a sort of bestial revenge would be achieved when some naïve kid would trap a skunk and, god help him, try to release it. The smell would waft down from the hills, filling the camp with a vengeful stench: We knew that someone had bought it big-time. Sure enough, the poor stinking kid would soon be escorted into the main cabin, disrobed, scrubbed, and quarantined. There is no smell in the world like skunk; I understand that wearing it is even more confounding.
I can remember no particular faces or people from that month-long experience. I have vague memories of the owner and his wife, of the enthusiastic camp counselors. I see most vividly the covered wagon we called home and the green, four-seat privy into whose holes one was required to drop lime. I can remember the camp vehicle, a sort of forerunner of the minivan, but rough and tough, like the environment.
I remember the smells of sage and cow manure, the dust and rocks and the clear, cold waters of the Gunnison. I recall thunderstorms, marching downriver as we fished, and night, falling suddenly in the high mountain valley.
Most of all I remember days and nights, the air fresh and clean, the mountains stark against the sky, their tops still snow-covered even in summer. Nearby, looming over the camp, was Crested Butte, rocky and forbidding. Dusty roads diverged around it, some ending up in the town of Crested Butte, a one-stoplight cow town where the counselors lived.
The stars were my constant companions at night, the sky bright and the land still, except for the distant lowing of a cow, or the howl of a coyote. It was rugged but wonderful; hardy but lovely; difficult but rewarding.
At least that is what I remember, now over 50 years removed from the events. I can still see in my memory a vivid picture of the rocky hills where the marmots lived, hear the crack of rifles on the range, watch myself casting a homemade fly out over the rushing waters of the Gunnison River. Faces have left me, but hands and hearts remain—the hands of the camp’s owner as he cradled his shotgun, or offered it to my own trembling hands; the hands of professional and amateur fly tyers or fishermen or trappers; the goodness of the owner and his grandmotherly wife as they served dinner; the enthusiasm of the counselors as they led us on yet another mind-boggling excursion.
I’m always seeing these movies in my head, but are they real or cartoon simulacra? I did run across one dim picture of one of the covered wagons on a Facebook post, but nothing of the camp, the people, the setting, or the valley. It’s all gone, except where it lives, here, behind my eyes in these endlessly repeating film loops.
I tried to resurrect the environment by Googling “Crested Butte,” which produces this:
Visit Crested Butte, Colorado
Crested Butte skiing, accommodations & lodging, weather, ski report, real estate, shopping, dining, and more.
According to 100 Best Ski Resorts of the World, Crested Butte “is known as the last great Colorado ski town,” the mountain known mostly for its “extreme skiing,” boasting “perhaps the most radical in-bounds ski terrain in the country.” Google images show the mountain carved into a multitude of challenging (black diamond and double-diamond) trails, and the town illuminated by quaint streetlights, blanketed in freshly fallen snow.
I look in vain for the rocky, forbidding slopes my memory climbs, seeing instead chairlifts whizzing uphill, daring skiers flying down. Even in summer, the eternal time of my reveries, Crested Butte is now home to bikers, hikers, and even the Crested Butte Music Festival, a four-week event featuring not only bluegrass but classical and jazz, as well.
Perhaps Googling “Crested Butte Camps” will produce something more useful to my memory, but that search turns up:
The Women’s Camp at Crested Butte
Nordic Training at Crested Butte
Yoga Expeditions at Crested Butte
Camp4Coffee at Crested Butte
I narrow the search to “Skyland Camp at Crested Butte” and get:
Skyland – Homes for sale in Crested Butte Colorado
20 acres with home at Skyland – One of a kind!
3 Br’s, 1 Ba, 2 1/2 Ba’s, 1744 SqFt, 20
Crested Butte Real Estate featuring Skyland Golf Course
Land, homes, and condos for sale. And what homes
they are! 873 Skyland Drive, incredible luxury log home located on prestigious Lake Grant at the Crested Butte Country Club, $2,995,000.
Yes, Skyland Camp still exists, but only as a prestigious loop around Lake Grant and Crested Butte Golf Club, bursting with condominiums, duplexes, and luxurious homes. No more cattle, to be sure.
So I am left with these incomplete and fragmented loops of memory tugging me back—from this populous and incongruously elegant mountain resort with million-dollar homes and an 18-hole championship golf course designed by Robert Trent Jones—to the spare and sparse Colorado of my youth, with campfires, counselors, and wild country living.
All of us, I think, who grew up in Colorado during the 1950s have a similar memory and a hunger for something that will never, ever come again. Perhaps my sister, who died in a commune at 9,000 feet in the Huerfano Valley of southern Colorado, had it right—at least for a while. She built her own house, chopped wood for her stove, looked out on a beautiful meadow. I believe she, too, wanted to preserve the feeling of naïve humility in a nature that was unforgiving, sparse, and often cruel. She, too, wanted to wake to the mountains’ vast canvas, to feel the unrestricted sun on a hot day, to revel in the high, pure air, to sense the early chill of winter riding the winds down the Sangre de Cristo Range.