Gothic – When Dr. Ian Billick came to work in this ghost town turned research center in the 1980s, he said it felt like the middle of nowhere.
The Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, at an elevation of 9,483 feet, sits up a narrow twist of pocked dirt road from Mt. Crested Butte, and very few backcountry travelers ventured by back then. But now Billick shares a problem with urbanites as well as with the marmots, birds and butterflies being studied here. There is too much traffic – so much that local officials are considering a bus line up here.
“It would have been hard to believe 20 years ago that it would be like this,” Billick said as he surveyed the slopes where miners made a short-lived stab at gold-and-silver riches in the 1880s and scientists from around the world now carry out research that depends on Gothic’s out-of-the-way ecology.
In the peak summer season, sport utility vehicles, motorcycles, all-terrain vehicles, four-wheel-drive caravans and even sedans whiz along Gunnison County Road 317 and onto the U.S. Forest Service portion of the road above Gothic, raising choking clouds of dust and sometimes running mountain bikers off the road.
They are headed up to biking and hiking trails in the Gunnison and White River national forests, to Schofield Pass and a scattering of private cabins. Or they are just out for a look around. Billick has photos of paralyzing traffic jams and cars parked along the road for miles on busy holiday weekends.
Too many drivers ignore the orange traffic-calming barrels and 15 mph speed-limit signs set in the middle of the road where it cuts through this collection of historic and rough-hewn buildings surrounded by wildflowers and by the nets, gauges, tanks and heat lamps of sensitive research projects.
That research raises this traffic problem to a level beyond a common love-it-to-death annoyance.
Johannes Foufopolous of the University of Michigan has been studying breeding birds here for years. He wrote in an e-mail from Hungary, where he is currently on a research trip, that birds have abandoned nests near the road because of increased noise and dust.
The traffic is increasing for a number of reasons.
Mt. Crested Butte, home to the Crested Butte Mountain Resort ski area, has grown – and grown closer to Gothic – over the years. When the laboratory was established in 1928, Mt. Crested Butte and the ski area were decades from even the drawing boards. A planned subdivision of 1,000 homes now will bring Mt. Crested Butte to within 3 miles of Gothic.
Tourists driving around the butte easily tool up a road that is jarring and narrow but is better than the rain-rutted mess it was decades ago when lab founder John Johnson would go before Gunnison County officials and make an annual request to “keep the road poor.”
“Surely it is not selfish to hope that one area of Colorado can be largely set aside for biological study and research,” Johnson wrote to the county in 1953.
Several weeks ago, officials from Gunnison County, the ski resort, Mt. Crested Butte, the local transportation authority, the Forest Service and the laboratory jounced up the road in a shuttle van while discussing what might be done about the problem. They are planning a task force to study the issue.
“Some fragile ecosystems require new and different ways of protection,” said Gunnison County Commissioner Hap Channell, who was on that trip.
Channell and others are looking across the mountains to Pitkin County for an example. The Maroon Creek Road southwest of Aspen is closed to traffic during the day in summer, and buses shuttle visitors to Maroon Lake, where the spectacular Maroon Bells loom in the distance.
But the Gothic area is more complicated.
Maroon Creek is an in-and-out trip. The Gothic road goes over Schofield Pass and into Pitkin County. Private properties dot the forest lands above Gothic.
There is talk of paving the road for easier bus access, and closing it to all traffic but property owners and lab workers.
The particulars of a plan may take several years to hammer out and be implemented, but all the agencies involved already agree on one thing: Gothic should be protected.
Staff writer Nancy Lofholm can be reached at 970-256-1957 or nlofholm@denverpost.com.
Population surged in past 15 years
Year-round population figures for Crested Butte and Mt. Crested Butte (incorporated in 1973) since the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory was established in 1928 in nearby Gothic.
Crested Butte
Year Population
1930 1,251
1950 730
1970 372
1990 878
2000 1,529
2005 1,546
Mt. Crested Butte
Year Population
1980 272
1990 264
2000 707
2005 756
Source: U.S. Census Bureau
