We Farm Tourists - Charlie Sturgis

Charlie Sturgis came west from Chicago in 1973, skied Snowbird in blue jeans during a storm and pretty quickly figured out he wasn’t going back.

What followed is intertwined with the story of Park City itself.

Charlie worked at Wasatch Touring when backcountry ski gear was still being invented. He took over White Pine in the mid-1980s just as mountain biking was becoming a thing. He survived winters when there wasn’t snow until January, opened a shop on a Main Street so quiet you could practically roll a bowling ball down it, and learned that sometimes selling one pair of sunglasses on a rainy day counted as a win.

Then came Mountain Trails Foundation.

Charlie helped take an organization with very little money and approached it like a business: buy the equipment, pay people properly, understand what the work actually costs and build something sustainable. By the time he left, Mountain Trails had money in the bank, its own building, employees with real benefits and a trail system that had become inseparable from the identity of Park City.

But this episode is really about something bigger.

It’s about how communities get built.

Not through some perfectly executed master plan, but by people who show up, solve the problem in front of them, take a few chances, bump into each other around town and occasionally decide, over a bottle of wine, to say yes to the next thing.

This is a little Park City history, a little outdoor-industry history and a lot of Charlie.

Maybe someday he’ll actually write The Book of Charlie.

Until then, this is a pretty good chapter.