A Colorado man famous for spending his life selling souvenirs keeps some of his souvenirs in storage.
“This is the one. Look at this!” Bill Carl says, holding up something that is hard to discern until some darkened silver charms are revealed.
Small collectible wagons, burros, bighorn sheep, pine cones and more were burned and molded together in the 1979 fire that destroyed the Crest House atop Blue Sky Mountain (then known as Mount Evans). Ta. This gift shop and restaurant dates back to the 1890s and was one of the iconic tourist attractions overseen by Carl’s family.
The messed-up amulet is a rather sad memento of him. Even more pleasing is another of his donut busts taken from a 4,000-foot mountain.
For Carl, 69, it’s a real treat to look back on all the memories and all the donuts his family has made over more than a century in their home atop Pikes Peak, starting with his grandmother Helen Stewart. But this bust is also sad. The donut, which appears to have been varnished and preserved, is marked in 1992 as the last one in his family’s possession.
Nevertheless, Karl smiled strangely. He is smiling as he looks at his other memento. It’s a public notice written by his great-grandfather, Helen Stewart’s father, in his early 1890s. The man had given up on the plains of the southeastern state around Manzanora, sold his farm equipment and animals, and said he had “failed as a farmer and wanted to retire from a noble profession he had never actually held.” .
He added a joke to his signature: “TB Wilson, I’m tired.”
Humor made the family last longer.
Carl’s family is considered the first family in Colorado’s tourism industry. For more than 130 years, they’ve stopped at Garden of the Gods, Red Rocks Amphitheater, Rocky Mountain National Park, Echo Lake Lodge on the road to Mount Blue Sky, and the gift shop and cafe at the Buffalo Bill Museum and Cemetery.
Karl is not so sure about the “first” title. “I don’t know about the first one,” he says. “But maybe it’s the last time.”
He said it with a laugh – half joking.
Karl, who has managed Echo Lake Lodge for more than half of its nearly 100 years, has learned that his family’s contract with the building’s owner, Denver Mountain Parks, will not be renewed in 2022. The agency cited the need for long-term maintenance and vision.
The same goes for the Buffalo Bill Museum and Tomb facility, city officials said. This will be Karl’s last summer there, ending a run that began with his family in 1956.
The loss further reduces the family’s landmark footprint. In 1992, the city of Colorado Springs sold its Pikes Peak operations to Aramark. Ten years later, the company once again defeated Carl’s family for control of the Red Rocks Amphitheater.
Carl started working at concert venues as a child in the early 60’s and later became the boss of the liquor license there. This gives Carle’s family a powerful position at companies such as Aramark, which operates some of the world’s greatest stadiums and destinations, with financial, human resources and bid-writing expertise that have been unmatched for many years. Earning possibilities opened up.
Such consolidation across Colorado and the nation seems inevitable, Dustin Day said. He is Karl’s nephew and represents his fifth generation in the family business.
“I think some businesses have a soul. You feel something when you go in there,” Day says. “Walmart is a warehouse. … It doesn’t make you feel fuzzy and warm. It doesn’t transport you to childhood memories. You don’t get that personal touch.”
That’s what my family means with Pikes Peak donuts. That’s what Buffalo Bills chili and fudge and Echo Lake Lodge pie meant. These were the areas of expertise of Carl’s sister, Barb.
Carl talks about the customers who keep coming back for all of it, generation after generation. He talks about his nostalgic smile. He sounds sentimental. He also seems bitter about how everything turned out with “bureaucracy.”
But he soon shifted his focus to other family-owned businesses, including Missouri’s Ozark Amphitheater, stores across Grand Lake and Rocky Mountain National Park, and a gift shop and restaurant at the Fall River Entrance. . Karl’s cousin George runs the store.
“Bill is a realist. He understands the turning of the page, so to speak. He certainly saw it,” George says. “But on the other hand, for him these losses are part of his life. They are big losses.”
Bill Carl keeps reminding himself. He keeps a commemorative coin of him taken one night in 1964 at the Red Rocks Amphitheater. Nine-year-olds Carl and Barb worked while the Beatles played.
“My sister still has a ticket somewhere around here,” Carl says. “It costs him $6.60 to see the Beatles at Red Rocks.”
Souvenirs can be found throughout the old homes of the Broadmoor area. The name of the patriarch is engraved on the door: Helen Stewart.
No matter how tired TB Wilson was during his farming days, he persevered at Pikes Peak. A photograph of him from the early 1890s shows him, his wife, and a young girl outside the cabin, where he was printing souvenir newspapers for tourists on the cog railway. Little Helen sold newspapers, cookies, and wild flowers with her horse named Brownie.
She later married Ollie Stewart, one of the brothers responsible for the early mountaintop homes atop Pikes Peak. She died in 1939, leaving Ollie with Helen and three daughters.
It was a time of economic recession, compounding the plight of single mothers running businesses, not to mention the prejudice against women in the industry. Fortunately, Helen Stewart was ahead of her time.
“She operated in what we would now call a man’s world,” says George Karl. “She kept her eyes peeled and took action when opportunities presented themselves.”
The move from an apartment to the most exclusive district of the city marked a rapid rise for the woman. At her family’s home on the Broadmoor, Bill Karl pointed to a regal portrait of her in a fur coat. “Things must have gotten a lot better after World War II, because look at my grandmother here.”
A store in the Garden of the Gods, the Hidden Inn, and a store called The Cub next to the Bruin Inn in North Cheyenne Cannon expanded the women’s empire throughout the 1940s. Carl’s daughters, including her mother Barbara, helped.
She married a man who drove tours at Pikes Peak. Bill Sr. became the point person at Summit House. He delivered his goods daily on winding dirt roads, fried thousands of donuts each day, and insisted on selling them fresh and hot.
“When I was little, I would hear him leave the house at 7 in the morning and come home at 11 at night,” Carl says.
He followed that man along with the hard-working women of his family. As they expanded their business north, including the Buffalo Bills before Red Rocks and Echo Lake Lodge in the ’60s, young Carl stepped up.
The expansion began with a crest house atop Mount Evans.
“When I was 19, they sent me there to run the store,” Karl says. “Because my manager was struck by lightning and quit.”
Further disaster awaited. On Labor Day 1979, a propane gas spill caused a fire that destroyed Crest’s house.
Carl, who saw black smoke in the distance from his house atop Pikes Peak, tells the story of his father driving out quickly to find safety for himself and everyone else. When his father stopped the car, young Karl stood dejectedly next to the rubble.
“My dad rolled down the window and handed me a bag of marshmallows,” he says.
There was that humor again. After 1992, it would be hard to laugh.
As Bill Sr. lay on his deathbed, he listened to his son recount the day’s troubles at Pikes Peak. The man listened and nodded.
“He took off his (oxygen) mask, looked at me and said, ‘If there’s a restaurant in heaven, I’m not going there,'” Karl recalled.
The man died that year, and the family lost their contract at Pikes Peak that year. Carl’s nephew Day reflected on this recently.
“I don’t know if it’s a family curse or what, but these business events always seem to coincide with a death in the family,” Day says.
His mother, Barb, was the one who baked pies at Echo Lake Lodge, the one who went into the mountains in the middle of the night to feed search and rescue teams, and the one who was always thinking of the perfect gift. Every Christmas, there are staff. She passed away from cancer in 2021, mourned by her staff and customers near and far. A few months later, Day and Carl received word that the lodge was closing.
Barb passed away before she could meet her grandson. Day recently welcomed baby Riley into the world.
Day thought Riley would probably grow to represent the sixth generation of the family business. The thought made him sad in a way.
“There’s just something he can’t do,” he says.
Generations ago, people can tell you they slept in bunk beds on Pikes Peak or Mount Blue Sky, huddled in those lodges during storms and ate donuts and pies. They saw the best sunrise. They poured tourist coffee and watched the morning light in the Garden of the Gods. They saw the Beatles at Red Rocks.
Carl has seen the rise and fall of businesses. He was always on the lookout for opportunities, just as his grandmother was. Not long ago, he promoted his Monarch Crest store along Monarch Pass. Karl said it was “natural” that he went to a nearby ski resort.
“I’m always listening,” he says.
And it’s partly out of a sense of duty and heritage, he says, remembering what his grandmother and parents built against the odds. “I don’t want to mess it up,” he says.
Pikes Peak, Red Rocks, Echo Lake Lodge, Buffalo Bills — every loss hurts. But no one is sadder than the loss of a sister.
“I never thought about it before, but there wasn’t a day that went by that we didn’t talk to each other about business, for five days,” he says.
He and Barb also talked about some funny things that happened. They laughed together because, after all, this was crazy business. “Man, I miss that part,” Carl says.
Memories are around old houses. Grandma Helen’s 70’s box her TV is still here. “Barb couldn’t let it go,” Carl says.
Perhaps miraculously still working. Carl flips a switch, turns it on, flips another switch, turns it off. Or so he thought when he found the old TV still on. He resorts to pulling the plug. Or so he thought again.
All he can do is laugh. “Oh my god! It’s still going on!”
