Current Operations

The Museum serves as an educational center for our community and its visitors. In our previous location, visitors averaged 1,800 people in 18 months but in 2009 the Museum had almost 29,600 visitors come through the doors. That was a 20% increase from the previous year!! The building traditionally served as a gathering place for both long-time residents and people new to town.

The Museum is continuing this tradition and in the recent past has expanded its hours and offers exhibits focusing on the following subjects:

Historic Hardware,

Denver Rio Grande Railroad,

Geology,

Mining,

Home Life,

Time Lines,

History of Skiing,

Crested Butte Mountain Resort,

Veterans,

Children’s Experience,

the local festival of Flauschink,

Historic Textiles

and the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame.

We have collections available for the public to see and research in addition to providing reproduction of photographs for the press, private homes, local businesses and publications.

The Crested Butte Mountain Heritage Museum has often been known as the second Chamber of Commerce. Our staff provides information about hiking trails, mountain bike rides, restaurants, and specific stores, as well as camping site information. Of course, our staff has extensive knowledge about our local history and heritage. The Museum serves the entire Gunnison County community of visitors and locals alike and following our opening on Elk Avenue in 2003, the popularity of the Museum has grown exponentially.

The Museum is very fortunate to have a tremendous group of active volunteers. We have over sixty-five volunteers that are Docents (Museum guides), event helpers, caterers, speakers, train model artisans, artists, and calligraphers and of course the Board. The ages of these volunteers range from 10 years old to 80.

In-kind contributions range from electricians to plumbers to heating experts to window repairs, from parents to students and knowledgeable train aficionados as well as financial consultants, computer experts and bankers.

CONSERVATION OF ARTIFACTS AND COLLECTIONS

Our Board has established that our main priorities,besides preserving Tony,s Conoco itself, are to protect our current collection, be ready to accept more items, provide new and fresh exhibits to the public, attend educational conferences, retain interns to help implement projects and move forward with our preservation, all of which, are a part of our Conservation Program.

The Museum has had two summer interns. One was in the final stages of her master’s program in conservation and brought invaluable knowledge and insight for the preservation and organization of our collections. The other, an archivist, catalogued, digitized and properly stored 2,000 images from the “Illuminations Slide Show” which were donated to the Museum by Myles Rademan, the town's former Town Planner, in 2005.

Recent Projects

The Museum has had some extremely successful major projects in the past few years. We would like to highlight a few for you.

Computers

We were fortunate to receive grants from local organizations to move us into the 21st Century, after using Windows 1995 until 2006. We were able to purchase four new computers, a file server and appropriate software with the grant funds.

Dave Clayton, our 2007 Volunteer of the Year, was instrumental in doing all of the “techy” work for the installation and still continues to regularly support the Museum with troubleshooting.

Our Museum Store now has Point of Sale for our customer’s convenience as well as better accountability of store merchandise.

Tony's Conoco was hand sanded and totally painted in the summer of 2008 to be proactive in the preservation of this unique building. This building is so beloved that the painting companies owners Jay Prentis and John La Duke donated $ 2,000 of their profits back to the museum.