Bill Carle has been dreading the end of 2024 for the past 15 months.
On Dec. 31, he must vacate the Pahaska Teepee Gift Shop and Café beside Buffalo Bill’s Grave atop Lookout Mountain, which his family ran for 48 years. Denver Parks and Recreation has decided to shutter the 103-year-old building and leave it vacant in 2025. In doing so, the city will put an end to his family’s 68-year run as concessionaires at various Colorado tourist spots.
“It’s going to feel horrible,” said Carle, 70. “Of the organizations I’ve worked with, I’ve liked them all, but my heart lies with Denver Mountain Parks. There are friendships I’ve had for my whole life. My first job was in Denver Parks, right here at Buffalo Bill’s. I got my second career, doing food and beverage at Red Rocks. I’ve had the best life.”
Carle also is losing his home. He has lived upstairs above the gift shop since 1993. When it closes, he plans to buy an RV and park it at Grand Lake, where his company owns three gift shops.
Carle and his family have been through this before. Denver Parks and Recreation closed the 98-year-old Echo Lake Lodge, at the base of Mount Blue Sky, in 2022 because of a septic system failure and it remains vacant. In September of 2023, Carle was notified that the Lookout Mountain operation would meet the same fate at the end of his contract with the city.
Denver’s system of mountain parks includes 4,000 acres, 22 parks and 24 conservation areas located in the foothills outside of the city limits.
“The Pahaska Teepee building is over 100 years old and has significant limitations on its structural and mechanical systems that need to be addressed to facilitate continued use and preservation,” wrote Happy Haynes, then the executive director of Denver Parks and Recreation, in the official letter notifying Carle of the city’s intentions.
“Beginning in 2025, DPR will implement an interim operations period that will include a thorough condition assessment of the historic facility, operational changes that reduce pressure on mechanical systems … and expanded programming that acknowledges and celebrates the diverse heritage associated with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and the city and county of Denver.”
Deterioration in its “operational uses”
The Buffalo Bill Museum, in an adjacent building that opened in 1979 and is staffed by city employees, will remain open. An email from The Denver Post to Haynes’ successor, Jolon Clark, was forwarded to Stephanie Figueroa, spokeswoman for Denver Parks and Recreation.
“The Pahaska Teepee has seen a lot of deterioration in its operational uses — the plumbing, septic system, things like that,” Figueroa said in an interview.
“We need full, unobstructed access into the building in order to look at all of that and see how much it can hold. It’s been an untouched septic system pretty much since it was built,” she continued. “It’s very old. We are working with a historic preservation architect to conduct these assessments and better understand maintenance needs, opportunities and limitations.”
Carle says the septic system seems to be working fine and has shown no signs of failing the way the one at Echo Lake did. He doesn’t understand why the building has to be vacant to evaluate it.
“This is manageable with portable (toilets),” Carle said. “It’s crazy to think that you have to vacate these buildings to look into a sewer problem. … They just want us out.”
Carle’s nephew, Dustin Day, worked at the fudge counter when he was 8 and began washing dishes at 10. Now he’s the father of an 8-month-old son.
“He’s not going to get to have these experiences that I had growing up, working in these places,” Day said about his grand-nephew. “He’s not going to get to serve fudge here. He’s not going to be able to sell a cinnamon roll up at Echo Lake. I grew up exploring around Echo Lake. If I wasn’t working, I was walking around the lake, fishing, being a kid. It was a great upbringing. He’s not going to get to have these experiences that helped shape me. That’s kind of tough.”
A five-generation legacy
Pahaska was a Native American name for William “Buffalo Bill” Cody, one of the most colorful figures of the Old West — and one of the most controversial these days.
A blowup of The Denver Post front page from June 3, 1917, on display at the museum, describes Cody’s burial day. “Buffalo Bill is laid at last rest,” the headline blares. “25,000 journey to Lookout Mountain top to pay final tribute at rock hewn shrine of ‘Col. W.F Cody, nation’s beloved hero.”
A sub-headline notes: “Thousands of vehicles surge over mountain road to final resting place of frontiersman on lofty peak of Rockies standing sentinel over sweeping prairies and scenes of birth of wonderful west.”
But Cody’s legacy has long been called into question by people who feel that he did more damage than good, both as a marksman credited with killing more than 4,000 bison in the late 1800s, and as a showman and actor who often depicted himself killing or scalping Native Americans as part of his famed Wild West Show. Local groups have said in the past that the museum on Lookout Mountain glorifies that history.
In recent months, Carle removed rubber tomahawks he was selling “to avoid any criticism and hard feelings with Denver Parks,” although he says no one from the city told him to do so. “We sanitized it, trying to think how they think. Having grown up here and being surrounded by cowboys and Indians my whole life, it just doesn’t hit me that any of our items are insensitive.”
The Carle family’s legacy as concessionaires dates back even further than Cody’s burial, however, to 1893. That’s when Carle’s great-grandparents printed souvenir newspapers with the names of visiting tourists at Mountainview on the Pikes Peak cog railway, halfway up the mountain, where there was a water station for the train.
Carle’s grandmother, Helen Stewart, sold those newspapers on the trains and later became a Western Union telegraph operator at the summit of the mountain. In the1920s, she and her husband, Orrie Stewart, took over operation of the Summit House. After he died in 1939, she managed it — a single mother with three daughters during the depression.
Business was good after World War II, and she added the old Hidden Inn at Garden of the Gods in 1948. In 1956 she picked up the Buffalo Bill concession on Lookout Mountain and the Crest House atop what is now called Mount Blue Sky (then called Mount Evans). The family added the Red Rocks Trading Post in 1963 and the Echo Lake Lodge in 1965. Red Rocks Amphitheatre was added to the company’s Trading Post lease in 1994. Carle secured its first liquor license in 1998.
The first big setback came on Labor Day in 1979 when the Crest House burned down following an explosion caused by a propane delivery man. Carle was living up there at 14,260 feet. His father and mother, who were on top of Pikes Peak at the time, saw black smoke rising from the top of then-Mount Evans and rushed to the scene. By the time they got there, the fire was out and the Crest House was a pile of rubble. No one was hurt.
“I’m 22 maybe, and my humor wasn’t good,” Carle recalled. “My dad rolls down his window and he hands me a bag of marshmallows.”
Over the years, concession contracts were not renewed for various reasons. When the septic tank system failed at Echo Lake, it was the beginning of the end there. Carle’s last day was Nov. 4, 2022. The building remains closed.
Since then, according to Figueroa, the city has made a number of repairs that include replacing a 75-year-old propane tank, installing new heating units and conducting architectural and mechanical assessments. She said the city hopes to replace the septic system next summer.
Final days on Lookout Mountain
The Pahaska gift shop is crammed with T-shirts, books, coffee mugs, key chains and Native American jewelry. There are posters of Native American chiefs and one of Gen. George Custer, who was killed in the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876.
Beginning Sunday, Dec. 15, items in the gift shop will be on sale for half price.
Thousands of Buffalo Bill visitors have signed a petition urging the city to keep the gift shop and café open, leaving comments such as “Keep it open,” “Please stay” and “Will miss greatly.”
Carle said copies of the petition have been sent to Parks and Rec officials, the mayor’s office, the city council and Gov. Jared Polis. None responded, he added.
Plenty of memories will remain, though. His grandmother put in the knotty pine paneling and wood floors. Carle shoveled snow off the roof perhaps 100 times over 30 years to keep it from collapsing.
“You feel like you belong here,” Carle said. “You feel like you’ve earned it. You know you’ve saved it, either from fire or collapse. I don’t think I could fill an 8×10 envelope with letters of complaint. I could fill a wheelbarrow from people thanking us for the little things we do. The roof’s not leaking, the building is warm, the toilets are flushing.
“You don’t need to shut this thing down to think about the future.”
