COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.—There’s an old, Zen-like bumper sticker plastered to the rental counter of Mountain Chalet that might explain why the little mountaineering shop, which recently celebrated its 40th anniversary, has outlasted every competitor in the region to become the oldest outdoors store in Colorado.
The sticker reads: “We’re all here because we’re not all there.”
Of course, there is more to it than that. The owners have been shrewd businessmen. The laid-back clutter belies precise computer inventories. The staff’s knowledge of the outdoors is unparalleled in the region.
But when it comes down to it, a quirky oddness has enabled the shop to transcend not just gear trends and business cycles, but generations.
“The place just has personality,” said Kent Kane, who founded the store in 1968.
“Yeah,” said Dan Foster, who bought the place from Kane in 1984. He rolled his eyes.
“That’s one way of putting it. We’re funky.”
Employees goof around. They can spend an hour talking with customers about nothing in particular. They sometimes throw things. And they’re normal compared with some of the dedicated customers who have been shopping at the store for decades.
“If you want to know what makes Mountain Chalet what it is, it’s guys like that,” manager Mike Miller said, pointing to a disheveled figure clomping down the stairs toward the basement gear-rental counter where Miller stood on a recent afternoon. It was Bruce Hamilton, who for years ran Pikes Peak Alpine School out of a beat-up white Subaru.
“Guess where I’ve just been,” Hamilton said as he handed over a rented ax. “I was taking a client up Y Couloir (on Pikes Peak).”
His white hair was as wild as the branches of a bristlecone. And he wore a maniacal mountain goat grin.
“You know that car that’s down there?” he said, referring to a wreck from this summer when a suicidal teen drove his car off of the Pikes Peak summit and rolled 1,000 feet down the couloir. The boy was rescued. The car was left.
“It still has the stereo in it,” Hamilton said, laughing. “I tried to bash it out with my ice ax.”
Miller laughed, too, then asked, seriously, “How was the snow?”
Hang around at Mountain Chalet long enough and you start to understand that the lifeblood of the store is the uncounted moments like this one, where friendship, knowledge, passion and an appreciation of the weird all click together like a Fastex buckle.
When Kane opened Mountain Chalet in what was then a tiny shop on Tejon Street in 1968, he was worried that his landlord wanted a two-year lease.
“I just wasn’t sure it was going to last that long,” the 75-year-old said with a chuckle recently when Foster, 56, who took over the store after working for Kane, invited him to lunch to talk about the old days.
“At the time Acacia Park, right across the street, was sort of the Haight-Ashbury scene for Colorado Springs,” Kane said. “There were all kinds of folks smoking pretty much everything imaginable. Next door to Mountain Chalet was a head shop called Maudy’s.”
“That’s probably how I first found the Chalet,” said Foster, who was 17 when the shop opened.
Foster, who has a long ponytail, a big, wispy mustache, and a habit of telling bad jokes, was one of the millions of baby boomers discovering the outdoors at the end of the 1960s. The demographic wave drove the climbing and backpacking market from the fringe to a thriving industry.
Kane had worked for Boulder-based outdoors clothing maker Gerry Mountaineering before opening his shop.
“At the time there was no shop like that here,” he said. “You had to go to Denver.”
As soon as he opened, people started coming in. Strange, long-haired people.
“You have to understand. At that time, climbing was considered a sociopathic affliction,” said local climber Don Doucette, who has been a customer and on-and-off employee of the shop since it opened. “So the climbers coming in to shop were just a parade of weirdos. Kent is a straight businessman, but he was smart enough to hire people who could understand his funky customers.”
The shop sold Kelty backpacks, Gerry jackets and European climbing gear—at the time there were few American manufacturers. Slowly, it expanded from 2,000 square feet to the current 8,000 square feet.
As the outdoors industry grew, competitors moved in.
“There was Holubar, The Cobbler, Bristlecone,” Kane said.
“Grand West, Mountain Miser,” Foster continued.
Many were bigger, cheaper and had free parking. But all are now gone.
How did Mountain Chalet survive?
Both men shrugged.
“I think people just have a warm fuzzy spot for the place,” Kane said.
The soul of Mountain Chalet—why it exists—Foster said, is hard goods: ropes, ice tools, haul bags—hard-core mountaineering stuff most people will never buy or need.
The heart of Mountain Chalet—how it exists—is soft goods: Life is good T-shirts, day packs, fuzzy socks, and sandals—fun lifestyle stuff that casual outdoorsy folks buy all the time.
“That’s what really pays the rent,” Foster said.
He keeps his eye out for trendy sellers. A few years ago, before everyone was selling Crocs, he was. In the 1990s it was Vasque Sundowner boots. In the 1980s it was brightly colored shorts.
“I don’t remember what it was in the 1970s,” Kane said. “But people have always wanted to look the part. That hasn’t changed.”
Both owners say success owes a lot to weather. A snowy winter sells skis and jackets more than any advertising could.
Some years, the store barely made money, though it lost money only once, in 1995. Since the Hayman fire in 2002, which closed Pike National Forest, sales have risen steadily, and last year was the store’s best.
Customers say it’s the employees who make the difference.
“They’re just cool. They know what they are doing,” said Steve Wood, a local climber and artist who has been a customer since 1980. He acquired much of his gear in trade for drawings that grace vintage Chalet shirts and mugs.
“The thing about Mountain Chalet,” he said, “is everyone who works there does all this stuff. You can ask them about climbing routes on some obscure crag, and they’ll know them.”
In the days before Web forums, the store acted as a cork board version of craigslist.org.
For anyone who wanted to buy or sell used gear, or find hiking partners, the bulletin board in the basement was the best bet.
The whole place still has a feel of a hippie co-op—one where several people can tell you firsthand about Kilimanjaro. People who get a job there often don’t need it.
Bill Houghton, a retired Air Force officer who works at the store part time, said, “It’s not the money, it’s the friendships.”
Foster said no employee has quit for six years. The store employs 25, full and part time.
“You practically have to cut someone’s brakes to get a job here,” said Ramone Dupree, one of the newest workers (he knew the owner’s son).
Of course, it’s not all fun and games. The outdoors industry has become much more competitive in the past decade. National chains and online retailers have made competition fierce. At the same time, mom and pop businesses up and down Tejon have folded.
“Mountain Chalet is in no danger of going out of business,” said Rick Creekmore, who managed the Colorado Springs REI store for years and now manages a store in Washington. “It’s a different mix. We target the enthusiast, the beginner. Once customers get a bit more advanced, they might look to Mountain Chalet. Plus, Dan has a great gang there. I remember, when we opened, they sent us flowers.”
Miller said that if the shop is going to survive, it will need a Web site that can compete—the current site shows only a fraction of the inventory, and the “news” on the main page hasn’t been updated for almost a year.
But, he said, the core mission of providing the best gear and knowledge in a “cool, mellow place” won’t change.
“If you wrote down this business plan on paper it would never work,” he said. “But we’ve never been very good about following the rules. And maybe that’s why it does work.”
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