Flight of the snowbirds

It hadn’t always been this way. Once upon a time, Ralph and Janie were happy in their new home.

They had bought their little slice of West Elk Mountains heaven – a tri-level, cedar-sided home high above the town of Crested Butte – in late June. The mercury registered in the high 70s as the pair from Tulsa moved into their piece of paradise, glacier lilies and pasque flowers dotting all 35 of their private acres. More brilliant hues of columbine, lupine and larkspur took over as the summer progressed, and deer, elk and an occasional red-tailed hawk paid visits to their “mighty meadow” as summer drew to a close. After a month of idyllic residence, they christened the mountain mansion “Shangri-La.”

In addition to game room, home theater, commercial kitchen, eight-seater hot tub and conversation pit, Shangri-La boasted a generous “study,” where Ralph could do his lone-eagling and telecommute back to the office in Tulsa. Six bedrooms provided ample space for visiting guests, and the west deck and fire pit offered a perfect venue for cocktailing over sunsets. “It’s good to be the king,” Ralph told Janie jokingly over lamb chops one night.

It was a sentiment Janie shared wholeheartedly. In those months, she affectionately called Crested Butte her little “gingerbread town,” telling friends about the quaint shops and remarking on how friendly the natives seemed to be. Ralph and Janie had a handful of favorite restaurants, hooked up with a matching turquoise bolo for him and earrings for her, donated generously to the local land trust and became members at the Crested Butte Country Club, a tasteful and challenging Robert Trent Jones Jr. layout. In a cosmic coincidence, Shangri-La was visible from the entire back nine.

Thanks to Indian summer, the honeymoon stretched through September and into October. Inspired by the changing colors, Janie gave up on her Kokopelli collection, took up amateur photography and set up a digital darkroom in Shangri-La. Ralph had to fly out to Tulsa a couple times, but he always managed to indulge himself at the club and watched his handicap drop a couple points.

Life was good for the transplants and everything was going according to plan. That is, everything was going according to plan until Nov. 1 arrived and the first snowflake fell. Initially Ralph and Janie marveled at the beauty of the storm, wine glasses tinkling in their hands and the false glow of their gas-fireplace raging behind them. Janie even managed to capture the event digitally and e-mailed her “first snow” series back to the friends in Oklahoma.

But the real monster struck a few weeks later, and the crystal glasses were empty, the “white room” was the only view from the west deck and the snow just wouldn’t stop. Suddenly, life at 10,000 feet of elevation was no longer so rosy. After two days of steady dump, the family Suburban started struggling with the long driveway. Four days later, the pair was house-bound, and the pantry started getting a little bare. In a moment of desperation, Ralph made a run for it, his wife watching fearfully as the SUV left the garage. Not surprisingly, the Suburban found the ditch, and Ralph did what any sensible person does in a time of emergency – he dialed 911. The dispatcher laughed out loud before advising him to call a tow company and take a winter driving lesson.

With only a few days of sunshine between them, winter storms continued to pound the West Elks and Shangri-La’s lower levels were soon buried under snow. Ralph did start to get the hang of winter driving and hired someone to plow the driveway and shovel off the decks, but Old Man Winter wasn’t going away so easily. One afternoon, Janie cracked her tail-bone slipping on an icy sidewalk en route to meet some friends at the Princess Wine Bar. Later that week, Ralph received a dozen lashes from a higher-up when he missed a shareholders’ meeting, courtesy of yet another airport closure. Meanwhile, the quality of the winter produce at Clark’s Market became consistently unimpressive. And their once prompt and attentive snow removal technician started showing up later and later to work, mysteriously arriving after 4 p.m. still clad in ski clothes and smelling of domestic beer.

The moment of truth arrived one night early in that cruelest of all months, January. Sitting in front of their HDTV, Ralph and Janie watched as an attractive woman in tweed stood next to North America in miniature and pointed to a dense concentration of green dots off the coast of southern California. Time lapse hit the map, the woman’s tweeded arm moved in an upward arc, and the green swath expanded and engulfed all of western Colorado.

A couple phone calls, a large credit card transaction and two days later, Ralph and Janie watched the first flakes fall from the window of a Boeing 727, the tri-story, cedar-sided home having just gone back on the open market.

Looking back on their flight from Shangri-La inside a comfortable split-level home in suburban Tulsa, Janie said in her Tulsa twang, “We do miss Shangri-La, and our little gingerbread town. But in all honesty, that winter nearly killed us.”

Janie then paused, took a sip of her merlot and leaned in close. “And just between you and me, Ralph’s got a line on a slightly more civilized Colorado getaway. We’re going up in June to take a look. It’s a quaint Victorian town called Durango, and it’s only a couple hours away from Santa Fe. Best of all, we hear that it hardly ever snows there.”

– Will Sands