"This community feels passionately about protecting what makes it so special," says Vicki Shaw, another founding member of Friends of Snodgrass. "Here, that means wild things kept wild. Visitors come here because we appear to be so undeveloped. So we say, ‘What if we became known as the place that chose not to expand our ski area?' "

Crested Butte wasn't always a nature-enthusiast-adrenaline-junkie's dream. During its first seven decades, it was a thriving mining town -- first gold and silver, and then coal. In the 1950s, however, the coal mines shut down, and the village teetered on the brink of bust. Then, in the 1960s, Crested Butte Mountain Resort was developed as part of a wave of new ski areas going in across Colorado. The community had something new to hang its hopes upon.

From early on, however, Crested Butte stood out as  eccentric. Since the 1970s, artists, outlaws and nonconformists flocked to the valley, which is accessible by only one road in the winter. The motley band of locals never tried to recruit the glittering celebrities of other ski towns. Aspen can have the Kennedys; Crested Buttonians want each other, their shaggy dogs and the friendly faces at the local pizza joint, the Secret Stash. Even as the Guccis of the world found a welcome in Vail and Telluride, Crested Butte refused to allow any chain stores (luxury or otherwise) in town. When the town council erected a traffic light about 20 years ago, residents shot out its bulbs until the unwelcome light was replaced by the original stop signs.

Crested Butte locals still like to think they're different. They scorn glitz and glam (even though the old miners' shacks in town now sell for upwards of $1 million). Locals brag about the number of parades, costume parties and stray dogs in town. They're more duct-tape and wool than fur and calf-skin leather.

And many of them don't want development. Period. In addition to rejecting the Snodgrass proposal, they are outraged by a potential molybdenum mine on Mount Emmons, the "Red Lady," which hovers above the town. Like Snodgrass, the mining proposal has been on the table for almost 35 years, and the likelihood of its development fluctuates with the economy. Both resort expansion and mining have formidable opponents in many Crested Butte residents.

"We're not very serious people when it comes to some things," says Wendy McDermott, executive director of the High Country Citizens' Alliance, a group opposing the mine. "But the type of person who lives here is looking for a healthy lifestyle, clean water, great recreation, and being OK with what we have. So we'll fight for that. It's the most important thing we have."

But even ski bums need to pay their mortgages and bar tabs, and an unimpeded view of open space isn't enough to keep a bank account solvent. Given the dismal national economy, the Snodgrass expansion is no longer a black-and-white issue. According to early season data, skier days were down 20 percent in February compared to the same time last year. December sales tax revenues in the town of Crested Butte were down 11 percent. At Mount Crested Butte, the incorporated town at the ski resort base, the December sales tax was down nearly 20 percent. In January, the ski resort "reassigned" about 15 ski instructors to other jobs because of a lack of business, according to Stone. And the local paper featured only six employment ads in January, compared to 40 last year.

Carpenter and town council member Dan Escalante says he's let go of his assistants and seen his remodeling business go from "overload" to "squeaking by." He used to have four or five jobs lined up at a time. Now he's lucky if he has another to start when he finishes the current one. It's a potentially stressful situation.

"Right now, living day to day is helping me simplify my life, which I appreciate," says Escalante, a former Outward Bound instructor. "But I don't know if I can handle it two years from now."