Since 1975, affable Warren Schechter’s Currant Creek Backpackers Hostel has extended an open invitation to hikers, cyclists and other passers-by looking for an inexpensive night’s sleep. His family property outside Guffey, 6121 Route 9, between Hartsel and Canõn City, is right on the Trans- America cross-continent bicycle route. In what might be Colorado’s best budget-lodging deal, he offers campsites ($5) and two solar-powered bunkhouses ($10 per bed).
-Claire Martin
Q: How did you get into the hostel business?
A: When we started out in 1975, I had a 16-foot-diameter tepee where the campground is now. Then we went to the bunkhouses.
Q: And you built the bunkhouses?
A: Yes. I’m a carpenter by trade. I built them, and the outhouse, and enclosure for the bucket shower.
Q: A bucket shower?
A: It’s a laundry-detergent bucket with a spigot and a shower head on the bottom. You fill up the bucket with water, and the sun heats it up. Then you lift the bucket onto a shelf in this outdoor shower, and turn the spigot.
Q: Wow!
A: Europeans love it. It’s real rough. Americans seem to get nervous about roughing it. We had a group of American cyclists coming through. They looked around, but they didn’t stay here.
Q: Are you a cyclist, too?
A: No! I’m a hitchhiker, not a bicyclist. I hitched across North Africa, worked and hitched around Australia, South America, Central America.
Q: How do people hear about your hostel?
A: I’m in a couple of books — a lot of people read about me in Donna Lynn Ikenberry’s “Bicycling Coast to Coast” — and I think I’m listed in the Adventure Cycling maps.
Q: Are you ever filled to capacity here?
A: Never. We see a lot of cyclists who stop here to look around, but not many of them stay. We’re pretty primitive here.
