My Year in Summit County: Reflections on Life as a Local

In April of 2024, I left Broomfield for a job in Summit County. I had spent 33 years living on the Front Range, and I was ready to try life in the mountains. For close to a year, I did my nine-to-five at 9,100 feet, in one of the defining regions of the Colorado Gold Rush. I met some wonderful people, and a few people who would have made the most hardened prospector or card shark curl into a ball.

For those who have wondered what mountain life is like, sit down and let me tell you all about it.

A photo from when I visited the “Gay Basin” event at A-Basin in May. Quite a friendly crowd.

The most enjoyable part of life in Summit was how walkable it was. From my apartment in Silverthorne, I could walk to groceries, the post office, the library, and restaurants. This was a far cry from my life in Broomfield, where nothing was within walking distance. Where I lived on the Front Range was a food desert; the closest food was a gas station out by the interstate. A few towns in Summit have these dense, walkable town centers, and I was happy to leave the urban sprawl behind me. 

Summit has an active and healthy press. There is a quality newspaper, the Summit Daily, which can be found on every street corner. I liked living somewhere with a newspaper big enough to cover local issues, and small enough to print wildlife photos from readers. Unlike Boulder’s Daily Camera, most of the articles are not AP wire stories. When private equity is draining the blood from local newspapers and picking over the bones, the Summit Daily reminded me how things ought to be.

It was hard to beat the views. I didn’t have to pray for rain to be free of the brown haze that hangs over Denver; every day, the peaks appeared clear and close. I loved staring up at the shadowed walls of Tenmile Canyon. The drive past Green Mountain Reservoir, where the hills open up to flatland, has a peaceful, subtle beauty to it. There was an unusually good leaf season last fall, and the hills outside Frisco were bathed in gold. It didn’t compare with the rugged San Juan Mountains near Durango, or the Sand Dunes of Alamosa, but it was pretty darn good.

I saw bighorn sheep and mountain goats almost every week. I saw golden-haired porcupines waddling fearlessly along the road shoulders. At the turnoff for Peru Creek, where the road gets really hairy, I could always count on seeing a family of deer. I saw hawks riding thermals, and a herd of three dozen elk in the moonlight at Beaver Creek Golf Course.

A porcupine spotted along Montezuma Road.

I would tell friends that I lived in a dangerous neighborhood. I wouldn’t want to walk around there at night–because of the moose. After sunset, Summit belongs to the moose. Moose would run ahead of my car on Montezuma Road, go out for family meals in Keystone, or haul themselves dripping wet from a pond after a late-night swim. A moose and its calves once blocked traffic in Breckenridge because even a juvenile moose is over three feet tall and can outrun a human. 

Whatever you do, don’t call the moose “local”; they were imported from Utah and Wyoming in the late 1970s. In Summit, there is a relentless focus on the word “local”, such that even the moose might not qualify. There are Locals in Summit, and “non-locals” who are, at best, tolerated. In the summer of 2024, the Summit Daily ran a front-page story about the sale of a coffee shop in Silverthorne.

The article, in breathless verbiage, related that this was a local coffee shop being purchased by another Local. It was not the new owner’s success in the coffee biz that qualified them, but their localness. I thought this particular shop’s drip coffee was quite good, but I will note that a) I have enjoyed refreshment and a good book in many-a Starbucks, b) Their baristas could be just as aloof as the non-local variety, and c) The locals still treated the shop as an economy workspace, camping with their $3,000 MacBooks for the price of a scone.

I remember the day I started to realize how deep this Local supremacy went. A coworker had asked me for help with log cabin restoration. I immediately suggested Jeremiah Log Homes in Dumont. If anyone knew about log cabin logistics in the Colorado mountains, it’d be them, right? I watched my coworker stare off into space, as if Dumont, west of Idaho Springs, was as far away as Nome or Jakarta. Finally, they replied, “Let’s try to find a place in Summit County.”

The definition of Local is also incredibly narrow. Before moving to Summit, I thought of “mountain people” as a category, whether you lived in Estes Park or Telluride. Boy, was I wrong. In Summit, the “Front Range” means anything east of the Eisenhower Tunnel. If you lived in Georgetown or Idaho Springs, you lived on the Front Range. People from Fairplay were honorary locals because the winters in Park County were harder. Folks from Kremmling in Grand County were also honorary locals, but less so than Fairplayers. I observed that the people who felt strongest about being local were not necessarily people who were born in Summit. Local supremacy was strongest among wealthy people from Texas or Arkansas who had vacationed in Summit for many years before retiring there.

Summit County must account for half of all Cybertruck sales. They were everywhere.

In June of last year, I mentioned to my coworkers that it had been twenty years since the Marvin Heemeyer rampage. In 2004, Heemeyer drove an armored bulldozer through Granby, destroying much of the town. It made the national news, and I can still remember where I was when I heard about it. Granby is one county over, but my boss, a fierce, hardcore Local, had never heard of it. The entire event was news to them. 

On a different day, my boss was talking to me about the Snake River, which runs from A-Basin down into Lake Dillon. I casually mentioned that it wasn’t *the* Snake River, of course.

“What’s that?” asked my boss.

“You know,” I said, “the Snake River in Wyoming and Idaho? It goes through the Teton Range and into the Columbia?” My boss stared back at me. “The river from that Ansel Adams photo?” I continued, “The photo of the Snake River with the Tetons in the background? It’s one of the most famous photographs of all time?” Finally, I brought up the photo on my office computer, the photo that embodies everything remote and wild about the American West. My boss looked at the photo for a moment before giving their assessment: “Huh.”

If Vail was ever mentioned, it was with a sneer of contempt. Vail people were pretenders, stealing attention away from Summit’s superior ski resorts. Beaver Creek was beneath all consideration, and Monarch or Wolf Creek may as well have been on other planets.

In addition to wildlife, Summit is a great place to see income inequality. The inequality is by no means the worst in the world, but I’ve never seen it so pronounced firsthand. There is a very clear distinction between the wealthy who call the shots in Summit and the large underclass who keep things running. In Summit’s public schools, roughly 40% of students identify as Hispanic, and 25% speak Spanish as their first language, but this is not reflected in Summit’s tourism branding. The locals’ sense of identity, divorced from any real demographics, is focused on gold miners, resort builders, and winter sports athletes. 

I remember walking back from a hike in Keystone and finding a makeshift wooden shelter just off the path. These shelters are called “wook nooks”, built up branch-by-branch over the years against the bitter cold. Just across the road from the wook-nook was a string of million-dollar homes, each with its own antler chandelier. 

A “wook nook” shelter spotted near Keystone.

Lastly, Summit can be a lonely place. I had more than one coworker tell me how difficult it was to find friends there. One reason is the high cost of living. It’s so expensive to live in Summit that you spend most of your time working to make rent. In my experience, $1,800 gets you just over 400 square feet of living space. As of this week, gas was $3.33 in Silverthorne, compared to $2.75 in east Boulder County. 

The high cost of living and gas prices are compounded by long commutes. I was fortunate to live close to work, but long drives are taken for granted up there. Here are a few real commutes from people I met in Summit: Acorn Creek to Frisco (19 miles), Georgetown to Dillon (25 miles), Leadville to Dillon (35 miles), Silverthorne to Kremmling (37 miles), Black Hawk to Silverthorne (48 miles). These drives come with whiteout blizzards, black ice, traffic jams, road work, and runaway trucks. Weather, road repairs, and unprepared drivers regularly close the Eisenhower Tunnel, turning I-70 into a parking lot for hours at a time. A 40-hour work week, plus hours of driving every day, leaves very little time for socializing. I found society with a book club in Silver Plume, and late nights playing pool at the Snake River Saloon or the CO Bar in Frisco.

I also lucked out with a co-worker who invited me to join a tabletop roleplaying game. I pretended I was a talking mushroom aboard an insectoid airship, alongside a reincarnated captain, an iron golem, a sentient spider nest, and a demented goblin. I felt blessed for our adventures together. It reaffirmed for me that when relationships are scarce, you value the friendships you do make even more. 

By the end of March, I had moved back to the Front Range, the real Front Range, where you can look west and see fourteeners. You would be amazed how much can fit in a Subaru hatchback. 

The Front Range is my home, and if not for my time in the mountains, I don’t know if I would have learned that. My time as a “local” also taught me: how to clean a shower drain, how to repair a bicycle, how to typeset a book on an IBM Executive, how to take apart and reassemble a bed frame, how to get a box-spring up a narrow staircase, how to apply for a TWIC card, how to play pool, how to think on my feet, how to fill out a DND character sheet, and a smattering of dirty jokes, courtesy of Dee at the Mint Bar & Grill. Most importantly, I learned what Eleanor Roosevelt meant when she said, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” Another story for another time.

And no, I didn’t learn how to ski, or snowboard, or snowshoe that year. Why do you ask?

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