Ward's Hotel Columbia is open for business

Today, we’re featuring an episode from our sister podcast, Shay Castle’s Boulder Valley Frequency, about a pair of mountain women breathing life into Ward’s Hotel Columbia, which just opened its doors after a year and a half of renovations. 

A few months ago, Shay paid a visit to Hotel Columbia and its new owners, Masyn Moyer and Gurjeet Gill, to find out what possessed them to renovate the  old building. It’s a story of perseverance and preservation — two things that the town of Ward is certainly known for. 

Also

• Black Hawk bans cannabis businesses
• Gilpin fourth graders lobby Central City for playground improvements
• Billy Giblin, Topher Donahue appointed to Nederland Board of Trustees
• The Vault opens in Nederland

Read Shay's full story about Hotel Columbia here.

Our theme song is courtesy of singer-songwriter Brittney Wagner. Stream her record Better off Dead here.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

It's not often the words ward and destination are in the same breath. But the tiny mountain town off the Peak to Peak Highway used to be just that. It was once home to five hotels and considered an epicenter of the Colorado Gold Rush. Now, a couple of local business owners are bringing that history back. Welcome to the Mountaineer Podcast. I'm Tyler Hickman. Today we're featuring an episode from our sister podcast, Shea Castle's Boulder Valley Frequency, about a pair of mountain women breathing life into Ward's Columbia Hotel, which just opened its doors after a year and a half of renovations. Before we get to that, here are this week's top headlines. Blackhawk City Council banned all cannabis businesses within city limits at its May 13th meeting. The council voted unanimously to repeal prior code that allowed medical and recreational cannabis sales as well as consumption lounges. While the city previously chose to legalize weed businesses, no licensed facilities currently operate in Blackhawk, and there are no pending applications. A group of Gilpin County Elementary School fourth graders took to the podium at the May 19th Central City Council meeting with a heartfelt request to fix William C. Russell Park. Students appealed to council with a slideshow and detailed list of concerns, urging council to restore the park they say is in disrepair with the photo evidence to prove it. They asked the city to fix ripped rubber matting, paint over graffiti, and replace broken and unsafe playground equipment, adding that several of their classmates have broken bones from falling off the structure. Their demands did not fall on deaf ears. Mayor Jeremy Fay said he supports having city staff draw up a proposal for upgrades to the playground and extended an invitation to the students to return to city council chambers to hear their recommendations. The board appointed former Mayor Billy Giblin and former trustee Topher Donahue to its two vacant seats. Gibblin, who was unseated by current Mayor Nicole Sterling in Ned's recent election, and Donahue, who served on the board from 2014 to 2018, were sworn in after the trustees voted to select candidates from a field of five applicants. And finally, make sure you check out Netherlands' brand new shopping center, the Vault, just off the Peak to Peak Highway downtown. They had their grand opening this past weekend for all the businesses inside, several of which are rehomed after being destroyed in the Caribou Village fire last fall. The building, which is also owned by the publisher of this podcast and the mountaineer, Christian Vanick, used to be an old bank, hence the Vault moniker. It's a big deal for the town. So stop by if you have some time. Those were this week's top headlines. As always, you can read these stories and so much more in this week's print edition or at the MDNEAR.com. Now it's time to take a trip up the Peak to Peak to the somewhat insulated community in Ward. A few months ago, Shea paid a visit to the Columbia Hotel and its new owners, Mason Moyer and Gurjee Gill, to find out what possessed them to renovate the dilapidated, crooked old building. I was lucky enough to tag along and photograph the new space. And I have to say, it's genuinely beautiful in only a way that century-old buildings can be. It's a story of perseverance and preservation. Two things that the town of Ward is certainly known for. Welcome to Ward's last surviving hotel.

SPEAKER_02 4:28

I think what I tell the most is the lineage of women in these mountains. Because we always talk about the mountain, the miners and the men. They're really quiet around here, but the women in this town are just as fierce. People are sh would be shocked the contribution women have had on this divide. It was almost predominantly owned by all females from the south side of the mountain on the over here, all the way up to Meeker. You could get 300 acres and you had three years to homestead this up. And some of the women that came up here to do it were then denied even after they did the homesteading until a man went to Washington to stand up for them and said they need to get their land. Just phenomenal stories. The women who built the Continental Divide Trail, the first mule train that was operating up here by a woman. Like the stories of the women and the fierce independence up here are so impressive of what they were able to do.

SPEAKER_04 5:29

That's Mason Moyer, a resident of Ward and another fierce mountain woman. During her 30 years in Boulder County, Mason has lived in or outside Netherland, Jamestown, and Raymond. For the past 18 months or so, she's resided in Ward's last surviving hotel, bringing it back to life after a more than 70-year break in operations. Mason spoke with me during a tour of Hotel Columbia, which officially opened for business last month. A small cafe attached to the hotel will serve healthy breakfasts, lunches, and takeaway meals for day hikers or locals. Just make sure to bring back your organic, reusable containers for the next patron. A hot tub and sauna weren't up yet during my visit, but Mason promised they would be operational by summer, along with more bathrooms. The seven-room hotel, former miners' lodging, shares just one bathroom. The last time Hotel Columbia was operable was in 1950, under the ownership and care of Emma Fairhurst. Emma and her husband Albert opened the hotel in 1901 after a fire burned dozens of buildings in Ward, which was then a thriving and populous town.

SPEAKER_02 6:40

So part of the history, this property goes all the way down to the end of the dirt road down there. And this hotel was the McClancy. And there was about five hotels in the town of Ward, and there was about 5,000 people that lived here at that time. And you can kind of see how clustered it was, but the McClancy was at the end. And one of the maids or somebody put out a box of hot ashes and it burnt down 52 buildings. And it was on January of 1900, December of 1900.

SPEAKER_01 7:15

That area in front of us was heavily populated with homes and people. But now it's just like an empty space, but it's hard to imagine that there were actual homes there.

SPEAKER_04 7:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:26

And they all just burnt in the fire.

SPEAKER_04 7:27

That second voice you heard was Grigit Gill, Mason's partner in Hotel Columbia. Part of an extensive and storied Boulder County family, Grigit most recently owned beloved South Boulder restaurant Tandori Grill, which she sold in 2023 amid a divorce. Mason, too, is an experienced business owner. She currently owns Milk House, a hair salon, but has had a hand in a number of other businesses and political ventures, including being a founding member of the Boulder Progressives. Regular listeners of this podcast will recognize her as an organizer with Big Tent Boko, a group petitioning to add two more commissioners in Boulder County. Both Mason and Grigit were looking for community and a new direction in life when they stumbled upon Hotel Columbia.

SPEAKER_02 8:11

We're both in our 50s and we both have owned businesses and we were kind of done doing what we were doing in respective fields. We both wanted to do another business, but neither one of us wanted to do it alone. And then at one point, when we found this, it had been on and off the market for several years. And I was like, let's go look at it. So this rock wall that's on the back side of here, there was a torrential rainstorm the day that we came. And it literally the water was running through the wall and after. And I took a video of it. I was like, well, that's interesting. How did we like embrace the flow? No. That didn't discourage you though. No, because to me everything looks fixable.

SPEAKER_04 8:59

That ethos was seriously tested by the 125-year-old hotel. That leaking rock wall meant all the floors and part of the walls had to be ripped out and replaced. Mason moved in during the bitterly cold winter of 2023 and 2024, without functional heat or a shower. In January, the main waterline busted. Then the septic line froze and needed replaced. Like the sturdy, independent women who came before them, Mason and Grigit did all the work themselves. Honoring the women of the mountains is an important part of Hotel Columbia. The bookshelves are filled with local biographies and history books. Pictures of the hotel's two owners are front and center in the living room. Emma Fairhurst and her niece, Hazel Schmoll, whose legacy extends far beyond the historic property. When Ward's population dipped to just four full-time residents after World War II, Hazel was one of them.

SPEAKER_02 9:53

So she graduated Chicago University as one of the first female botanists. And she became the state of Colorado's first female botanist. And she came here back here to Ward, where Emma was. But the other cool part of her was that one, she owned a ton of land. Hazel gave the land to the Christian camp that's up on Overland. She owned all that farmland. She never married, never had any kids. She farmed all of it. And I don't know how Georgia O'Keefe found Ward, but she came here and she's got several famous paintings of the church that's directly behind us. And she became very, very close friends with Hazel and lived here a lot after she came back from New York and before she started Ghost Ranch. We just heard a story. We're in Georgia, wanted to attend, so there was no roads, obviously, and they rode horses up to an event at Estes Park, stayed overnight in a tent, and then rode their horses back.

SPEAKER_04 10:58

Yes, it's that Georgia O'Keefe Mason is referring to. The famed American painter does indeed have a painting of the Ward Church located right behind Hotel Columbia. It's unclear whether or not O'Keefe ever visited the hotel during her time in Ward, but it's not unlikely. President Teddy Roosevelt is believed to have stopped there during his 1906 trip to dedicate Mesa Verde National Park. As Colorado's mountain towns went from being the epicenter of the economy to sleepy little hamlets and now tourist destinations, it's important to preserve the history, Mason says.

SPEAKER_02 11:33

Boulder's such a center hub of all of Boulder County, but it wasn't. It was just the stopping grounds, and Gold Hill was the first, and us and the mining communities were where everybody was trying to get to. I love the history of our county. And I feel like it's unfortunate that it's not centered more. What I've realized is that people are fiercely protective of the peace in the history, even though they haven't done a ton of preserving it, it is very important to them. They're very married to the mining aspect of this town and the pull yourself up from your bootstraps and fierce independence. And all of that has been the lineage of this town all the way through. Just like with our parks and services and forests, sharing that without exploiting it is super important.

SPEAKER_04 12:36

Historic preservation can be a tall order in Ward, which has a leave us alone ethos that became very apparent once I started reporting this story. Four different local historians turned me down for an interview, including some who have literally written books about the area's history and one who has a ward mailing address. Mason says there's an unspoken rule to not talk about ward with outsiders. That's why it's been so important to her and Grigit to save Hotel Columbia without ruining the peace and quiet of the town. They envisioned a hotel and cafe as a quiet retreat. There are writing desks, not televisions, in the rooms, and they may even turn off the property's Wi-Fi to give guests a truly unplugged experience.

SPEAKER_02 13:18

The goal was always to have this be kind of a peaceful retreat where people could come and disconnect and sink in and read and write Luddite types, just like big boxes where things get really big and we have the Walmarts and everything else. I think we're on a trajectory where people are recognizing that we have to pull back a little and that world's going really fast. And I want people to come up here and I want to do writing retreats here, and I want people to sit and again read and write. I want people to walk, come back, eat breakfast, maybe soak, hot tub, write, sleep. Um and we're at that pinnacle right now where this town has been able to resist the outside influences for a really long time, and now the pressure is starting to really build. So how do you preserve the history without again ruining it or exploiting it? Which we've seen with every other mountain town, right? Breckenridge, Leadville, all these other places. So how do you get a county to want to preserve, help, and protect without overstepping, dominating, destroying the ethos of a community.

SPEAKER_04 14:50

You can read more about Hotel Columbia in the May issue of Caribou Current, out May 7th, or at cariboucurrent.com. Tune in Friday when we drop an interview with Lafayette's new poet laureate. Her poem And Still is this week's One More Thing.

SPEAKER_03 15:16

A coyote walks onto the half-frozen waters of Wanaka Lake, and the winter sun, as startled as the people circling the shoreline, pauses its slow creep behind the mountain and stares. Its last gasp light, slanted and golden, clings to the animal's coat, turning her form to treasure. Tempting, maybe, to imagine a time when wild things wandered a landscape not staked or claimed or platted or mined, before playground and parking lot, frisbee gulf, and the flock, fuck, flock of pickleballs. Just shh. The sucerant wind drifting across endless plain, first people's footsteps breaking tall, brittle grasses, and a coyote walks onto the half-frozen lake, but the past won't behave, refuses to humor our longing for a landscape that did not exist, and insists that the lake, like history, is man-made. A spring dammed in 1865 for thirsty farmland, and a coyote walks onto the ice. The lake soon, wider, deeper, the keeper of water needed to steampower a plant, electrifying the night, and again a coyote walks onto the ice, and it's easy to imagine pimpricks of luminescence pushing back the darkness from Longmont to Denver, the strength to sustain candescence moored on the south shore of the lake, our lake, its waters half-frozen, tempting to forget the men who hauled coal from beneath our town to feed the plant, its power, the progress, a radiance we can't deny, and its beautiful, our history, ugly too, what we claimed, those we exploited, excluded, the slag piles left behind. Or are they a monument to what we must remember? And still, as a green-winged teal drifts the surface, unaware of danger behind him, not thinking of what comes next, a sun-golden coyote walks onto the half-frozen waters of Wanaka Lake, like it belongs there, like it did before, like it will again, like it will outlast boathouse and pavilions and people circling the shoreline, staring in wonder as the sun slips at last behind the mountain. The past house. The now listens. The future begins to sing.

SPEAKER_00 18:24

Thank you. That episode was from her podcast, Boulder Valley Frequency, covering news and community across Boulder County, with episodes every Wednesday and Friday. She also wrote the story for our May issue of Caribou Current. You can read the fulbees at caribou current.com. We'll also drop the link in the show notes. That's all for today. If you liked today's episode, make sure to subscribe to the show and to the frequency wherever you get your podcasts. And send the episode to your friends, family, whoever. It's the best thing you can do to help us grow. One last thing. You might have noticed some new music at the top of our show. Our new theme song is courtesy of Netherlands' own Brittany Wagner. She also happens to be the Mountaineer's office administrator and a really great music reporter. She wrote a thoughtful little piece about Stanley Jordan and the Caribou Room, which we featured on the podcast a few weeks back. She's a rock star, if you can't tell. So check out her music. Once again, this is the Mountaineer Podcast. I'm Tyler Hickman. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.