Fiddlers Return : Skiers Give Ghost Towns Second Life

Like most mining camps tucked away in the Rockies, Breckenridge was born in the robust spirit of the Old West. With veins of ore and dreams as bountiful as the winter snows, it sprang up out of the wilderness to take its place among Colorado’s grandest boom towns.

As many as 200 prospectors a day poured into this two-mile-high valley in the 1860s, traveling in winter on snowshoes and skis made from the slats of barrels. They dug and panned and prospered, and as their tents and cabins reached out from the banks of the Blue River, they set out to organize a townsite, the first permanent settlement on Colorado’s Western Slope. To speed the establishment of a post office, they named their town in honor of the U.S. vice president, John C. Breckinridge, but later altered its spelling when Breckinridge angered them by joining the Confederacy.

“People of all classes came across the range,” said Methodist minister John Dyer as Breckenridge grew into a thriving town with 2,000 residents, 18 saloons, five boarding houses and four blacksmith shops, “and, of course, the inevitable dance houses, with degraded women, fiddles, bugles, and many sorts of music came too. There was a general hubbub from dark to daylight. The weary could hardly rest.”

Residents Drift Off

But rest would come soon enough. The gold and silver ran low, and the residents drifted off. By 1939 the Colorado & Southern Railroad had ended the last of its daily 11 a.m. departures to Denver. Barney’s Chop House--founded by a runaway slave from South Carolina--had become a ramshackle bar. Main Street was all but deserted.

By 1959, Breckenridge was officially listed in historical registers as a ghost town with a dwindling population of 200 aging souls.

Breckenridge, though, never did quite disappear. Today it is back from the near-dead, the fiddles are playing again in packed dance halls. A new boom has spread through the Rocky Mountain states with all the gusto of gold rush fever. This one yields “white gold” instead of nuggets, and it brings not prospectors but skiers. They are fueling an economic resurgence worth billions of dollars to once- dying little towns stretched out on the slopes of the Continental Divide.

The ski industry is now worth in excess of $6 billion annually to the eight financially troubled mountain states, and in many areas it has replaced mining and ranching as a traditional pillar of the economy.

In Colorado alone, the industry generates revenues of $1.3 billion a year, produces $132 million in state and local taxes and accounts for 44,500 jobs, making it the single largest employer on the Western Slope.

Breckenridge, which was visited by hardly more than a stray coyote three decades ago, now has a permanent population of 1,350 and upwards of 25,000 guests on peak-season winter weekends.

Boom-Town Days Return

“Breckenridge definitely would have been gone today if it hadn’t been for skiing,” said Rebecca Waugh of the Summit County Historical Society. “But with the skiing, the whole boom-time psychology of the Old West has returned, and that makes this a very exciting time to be living here.

“We have all the amenities of the gold rush days--entertainment, good restaurants, merchants of all sort setting up businesses. There’s a huge turnover of people coming and going, of people wanting to make a quick dollar and get out. I called the Summit County Journal the other day and suggested to a reporter that he cover a meeting at the Breckenridge Town Hall, and he asked me directions to get there. It was two blocks from his office.”

Breckenridge--which advertises itself as the secondmost popular skier destination in Colorado and the fourth in the nation--has gone to great lengths to protect its architectural integrity as a 128-year-old mining town, preserving Victorian-style wood and brick buildings, installing turn-of-the-century street lamps downtown, banning neon signs and garish trappings of modernity. Still, an old-time miner seeing the town today would be apt to think he had mysteriously been deposited in San Francisco instead of Breckenridge.

70 Bars, Restaurants

Mrs. Peabody’s boarding house is now a restaurant known as Fatty’s; the bordello on Ridge Street has become Whitney’s Steak House; the home of assayer Lewis Hillard is the Angels Rest restaurant. They are among 70 bars and eating places in Breckenridge, a town that also boasts 30 ski shops, a 208-room Hilton Hotel, a television station, enough boutiques for a good-sized French town and dense clusters of luxury condominiums that seem to have been washed by melting snows down the mountain to the base of the ski lifts.

“Personally, I liked the town the way it used to be a lot better,” said Theta Brown, 75, who was born in the little white home at 225 Main St. that now stands between a Wendy’s fast-food hamburger shop and the Tigerrrrrags Boutique. She and her husband, Frank, Breckenridge’s former mayor of 18 years, recently turned down an offer of $416,000 for their modest house.

“Everything’s changed,” she said. “Even the snow’s different. Oh, sure, I know you have to have progress. But it’s hard for me living this long and hearing about these robberies and cocktail parties. We never had anything like that. And the huckleberries, you used to pick them by the bucketful and now you can’t even find them any more. The fields are full of condos.”

The new boom has not come without problems for the mountain towns that are its recipients.

Must Meet Peak Demand

Breckenridge, for instance, needs an infrastructure to support its 25,000 visitors, not just its 1,350 residents.

To meet its water needs, it had to purchase water rights to the Clayton Hill Ranch because the waters of the nearby Blue River belong to Denver, 85 miles east.

To control traffic and people, it has built up its police department to 20 people and added a sophisticated communications network.

To oversee building--$90 million worth of residential and commercial construction permits have been issued in the past two years--its planning department has eight professionals, or one for every 168 residents.

Most of the ski communities overbuilt when skiing was at the height of its popularity a decade ago and double-digit growth was the norm. A two-bedroom condo in one of Breckenridge’s top buildings, for example, has dropped in value from $240,000 in 1981 to about $150,000, according to realtor George Molloy, and today some uneasy investors are wondering if the ski boom--just like the gold rush of the 1860s and the oil and coal bonanza of the 1970s--might eventually fade away.

Industry Growth Flattens

Of most concern to the industry is that skiing’s popularity has slackened and its growth nationally has flattened out at 1% a year. As a result, the skiing corporations, which have invested megadollars in snow-making and snow-grooming equipment and in high-speed lifts and in new areas leased from the federal government to alleviate crowded conditions, find themselves in fierce competition with each other and with Snow Belt resorts in their search for new and more skiers.

“Everyone recognizes one significant fact,” said Kathe Dillmann, marketing communications director for the National Ski Areas Assn. in Springfield, Mass. “There are usually two people in households now and they are working. That means that time is a most precious commodity and we have to vie for that person’s discretionary time, as do all other sorts of attractions.”

Skiing came to the United States from Norway in 1841, but did not gain wide acceptance as a pastime for more than a century. Miners used skis to cross the California Sierra during the 1849 Gold Rush and postmen in the High Sierra delivered mail on 12-foot-long skis through the 1860s.

Teddy Roosevelt skied in 1884 in the Dakota Badlands and a handful of enthusiasts were skiing at Aspen, Colo., as early as the 1930s (when a room at the Hotel Jerome cost 50 cents). In 1934, the country’s first rope tow was installed, in Woodstock, Vt., and in 1936, the first chair lift was introduced, in Sun Valley, Ida.

Trends Converge

By the 1960s, skiing had become big business. Among other things, the boost was provided by the completion of the interstate highway system, the expansion of commercial aviation, the opening of posh resorts such as Vail, Colo., and the televised 1960 winter Olympics in Squaw Valley, Calif., which exposed millions of Americans to skiing for the first time.

As the industry grew, the small-time operators were gobbled up by corporations; today in Colorado, Vail is owned by the Gillett Group, Keystone by Ralston Purina, Copper Mountain by Apex Oil, Aspen and the Breckenridge Ski Area by a Chicago partnership. And, as corporations have invested in better facilities and high-speed lifts, costs for the individual skier have risen.

Daily ski lift tickets cost $27 in Breckenridge. Insurance premiums, which have doubled nationally over the past two years, account for about $3 of that figure. On average, skiers here spend $117 per day each, excluding air fare, and anyone who finds a room for less than $100 has discovered a bargain. Ski equipment and a fashionable outfit can top $1,000.

“As the prices have risen, I find myself skiing less and less every year,” said Crandon Gustafson, an architect who moved to Denver from Wisconsin 10 years ago largely because of Colorado’s excellent skiing. “You think twice before you go with lift tickets what they are this year. The mountains and the snow are the same, but everything else has changed.”

Researchers Dallas Jamison in Denver and Nina Green in Los Angeles contributed to this article.