One man’s castle appears to be another’s “debaucherous hovel,” at least when it comes to the popular — but unauthorized — smoke shacks sprinkled through the woods at nearly every ski area in North America.
Surprisingly, in this age of milquetoast euphemisms, the name has stuck, and although they won’t freely admit it, that might be why U.S. Forest Service rangers try anew every few years to convince people that the funky lean-tos and tree houses represent some sort of threat to public health and safety, not to mention natural resources.
But when Breckenridge ski area, at the behest of the federal agency, set about dismantling one of the Hobbit-like shelters a few years ago, it triggered a flurry of letters to the local newspaper. It was, as such things go, a relatively civilized discourse, with pleas for tolerance, as well as a general recognition that leaving garbage around the shacks is not cool.
Civilized, that is, until a reader named Sally Baron barged in, applauding the resort for working to restore the “purity” of the mountain, and claiming that “smoke shackers” are unwelcome leeches on honest, tax-paying citizens.
Baron went on to invoke the 10th Mountain Division in her anti-shack tirade, then described how property owners face “an expensive, humbling and tenuous process,” fraught with regulatory pitfalls and financial hardships, all to make Breckenridge “one of the loveliest places to live.”
It probably wasn’t Ms. Baron’s grammar that riled up the so-called smoke-shackers. More likely, it was her description of the shacks as “debaucherous hovels” that triggered a flood of letters defending the structures.
Stung by the outcry, Forest Service rangers backed off for a few years. But the push to remove the shacks seems to be back on the front burner this winter, especially after rangers and Breckenridge ski area officials discovered a two-story tree house with more square footage and style than many of the shoe-box rooms in the exceedingly ugly condo-hotels that litter private lands at the base of the mountain.
In what appears to be a sort of reverse Potemkin Village cycle, the Forest Service announces a crackdown, resorts make a show of dismantling one or two of the shacks, then it’s back to business as usual for a while. But on the other side of the equation, what motivates people to go out in the woods and spend several hours doing manual labor, building and maintaining the shacks?
“There is some logic to it. It goes back to kids building a fort in the woods,” says Alan Henceroth, the Chief Operating Officer of Colorado’s Arapahoe Basin Ski Area.
“It’s nice to have some secret spots to hang out and regroup, a place to meet your friends before going back out there,” says Dave Gelhaar, a Breckenridge local and co-owner of Fat-ypus Skis. “Shelter’s a good thing.”
Perhaps it’s also a reaction to the pathological over-development that has marred the landscape at so many resorts in the past few decades. Or maybe the shack-builders are just reaching back for a simpler time, when a hut on the mountain was really a hut, not a three-story glass-walled bistro with laser tag. If that’s the case, then trying to remove all the smoke shacks is a fruitless attempt to deny that past. Yet in all the news reports, Forest Service rangers keep charging that the shack builders are not only illegally cutting trees, but trashing the forest as well.
The reason their arguments don’t stick is because most people with the slightest bit of common sense know that cutting a few saplings and stacking up some dead logs poses no environmental threat whatsoever. Mountain town residents know the real environmental threats to public lands are greedy developers who cut thousands of trees to clear the way for golf courses and lame, low-angle ski runs serving over-priced slope-side condos.
“Just cutting trees for one ski run at any resort in the West would provide enough trees to build smoke shacks until the end of time,” says Breckenridge resident, writer and television jester Jeffrey Bergeron.
Bergeron says he visits some of the shacks in Breckenridge from time to time to “clean his goggles,” and discounts the Forest Service argument that the majority of the shacks are trashy.
“They’re better maintained and cleaner than the home I live in,” he says.
Still, Forest Service rangers won’t deviate from the party line. “There are a lot of them … and there have been various efforts to deal with them,” says Ken Kowynia, who heads up the agency’s winter sports program for the Rocky Mountain region.
Kowynia lists natural resource damage as the primary concern, followed by public health and safety issues and potential violations of state and federal laws.
“A lot of people would like to have a nice little cabin in the woods. We just don’t allow it. I can say, the ski industry and the Forest Service are concerned about the violation of any laws,” Kowynia, adds, addressing the issue of illicit drug use in the shacks. “Don’t get me wrong. Some of them are cute, clever little Hobbit houses. And when we find them and take them down, people just keep rebuilding them. But they are unlawful and we need to deal with them as we can. It’s not the most pressing issue, but we can’t ignore them.”
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