Breckenridge

I had to be in Breckenridge, Co. for a couple of days over Labor Day Weekend, and while there I had a couple of thoughts about resort towns in a high mountain environment.

My first thought was, can’t we do it better? Do all ski resorts have to spawn endless square miles of second home developments and miles of roads with ancillary businesses, parking lots, traffic lights, and all the congestion and look-a-like charm of the brick and glass generic strip malls of the suburbs and the cities people think they are escaping when they visit the mountains? Yeah, I know, people like me have been griping about this for years now, but nothing is usually done and ever more beautiful mountainous landscapes are turned into high altitude versions of Los Angeles or Long Island. Let me be pompous, and repeat, can’t we do it better?

This is just a lowly blog post and space prevents a lengthy discussion of the motivations and reasons we are trashing the beautiful mountain environment we as skiers thrive in, but don’t we all owe it to ourselves and our children to work harder to keep the mountains and crucial valleys wild, beautiful, and healthy?

My second crumudgeonly thought was, what were they thinking, when the developers built the monstrousity that is the Beaver Run Resort and Conference Center? I’ve seen waste treatment plants and prisons with more charm and grace than this hideous knot of ugly buildings. The inside fails to redeem the the exterior’s assualt on architectural taste and the forested environment in which it is set.

It was a great relief to hurry away from Beaver Run and return to the original town of  Breckenridge’s Main Street with its cheery restored Victorian era storefronts, flower festooned porches and sidewalk gardens and amazingly, a main street that is lined with native aspen and spruce trees. Where Beaver Run had been eerily quite and empty except for what looked like a small gathering of people in a wedding party, Main Street was alive and bustling with people thronging both sides of the street for blocks and blocks.

Here’s a what if. Suppose Breckenridge was only an hour’s high speed train ride from several train stations in the Denver area. It would be no sweat to hop a train for a day’s skiing in the winter or a day of mountain biking or just casual window shopping and dinning in the summer. No hours stuck in streeful traffic on the interstate, no need to invest hundreds of thousands or millions in a second home and its furnishings, a lot less money spend on gas, and a mountain environment that looks, thirty years later, very much like it did when you first saw it as a wide eyed kid. All the fun things we love about the mountains could be there, minus the crap.

Tags: Breckenridge, ski resorts, ski towns
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