Jeff Crane ’85 and the North London Mill

To some, Jeff Crane ’85 may, by his own admission, come across as a “daydreaming hippie,” but the nearly 10 years of very real labor, fundraising, and advocacy he has poured into turning the derelict North London Mill site—an historic late 1800s gold milling site situated at 11,400 feet on Mosquito Pass outside of Alma, Colo.—into the state’s newest and possibly most unique backcountry destination for recreation and the arts prove that the value of daydreaming shouldn’t be underestimated.

Since first stumbling across the decaying buildings of the North London site—including the 1893 North London Mill and the 1883 Mining Office—on a mountain hike while visiting Alma with his brother, Dan, and friends in July 2016, he has been “mesmerized” by the place, he says.

An artist, musician, art history professor, and ski instructor, Crane explains, “For me, the Mill is sculpture. Technically, I suppose, it’s industrial architecture, but in a state of ruin, it’s experienced as art—just as the ruins of the ancient world were destinations for 19th century Romantic artists.”

Crane himself may be more surprised than anyone to see this Colorado historic site, which reflects the very origins of the state and its gold-mining legacy, living, breathing, and open to the public for the first time in its 150-year history. “I’m not very good at perseverance,” he jokes. “There were many times when I felt like giving up.”

 

But with his longtime partner, North London Executive Co-Director Kate McCoy—an academic, musician, and skier—by his side from the moment the two decided to create a nonprofit to take on the “NoLo” project, they have, somehow, just kept going: jumping through innumerable legal and regulatory hoops—at the private, local, county, state, and federal levels—and enduring everything from surprise snowstorms to the work of zealous beavers in order to push their idea to completion. 

 

Raising the over $2 million in historic preservation funding and other grants that have so far gone into the endeavor was “the easy part,” notes Crane. In fact, significant funding for the project came through another CA alum, fellow ’85 graduate Pam Criswell, who sits on the board of the JM McDonald Foundation. She reached out to Crane, her old classmate, when she saw what he was up to and offered to help. “We could never have finished the NoLo Office without Pam’s support,” according to Crane. 

NoLo’s first major accomplishment was the complete rehabilitation of the 1883 North London Mining Office, which opened in 2024. Originally built for wealthy East Coast investors and mine managers, the building boasted tongue-in-groove floors and plaster walls which have been faithfully restored. In ruins when Crane found it in 2016, it is now arguably the most comfortable, accessible, and high-tech of all Colorado’s several dozen backcountry “huts,” with its own website and booking page on Airbnb. Its modern amenities include hot and cold running water, wood and propane heat, shower, indoor flush toilet, solar electricity with propane backup, propane-fueled cookstove, and Starlink WiFi; the Office sleeps 6-8 for year-round overnight accommodation. 

 

Like the other sites in Colorado’s extensive mountain hut network, NoLo welcomes backcountry skiers throughout the winter months, when the only way in is skis, snowshoes, or snowmobile. During the summer, a county road brings day visitors and overnight guests who hike, fish, mountain bike, explore the site’s historic structures and mining artifacts, participate in educational programs, and enjoy arts and music events, like September’s “Backcountry Jamboree,” organized by the nonprofit.

 

“That’s kind of what NoLo is,” Crane states. “It’s about revitalizing a beautiful, historically significant place, not just for the sake of preservation, but to repurpose it and give it a whole new life.”

“Part of our mission is to encourage people to be stewards of the land and history, to leave things better than they found them,” he continues. “We call it a ‘Community of Shared Stewardship’—a model for how to be a good citizen in our society.”

Putting it all together

Crane’s journey to NoLo began even before he came to Colorado Academy in Sixth Grade: The mountains had been the bond between him and his father since he was first put on skis at age two. His mother took him to art galleries and museums, and a passion for art as a CA Middle Schooler was encouraged by Bert Hansen, Photography Teacher and Chair of the Fine Arts Department, who introduced him to the Western photography of Ansel Adams. Later, in the Upper School, the abstract paintings of Jackson Pollock revealed a specific trajectory to this creator with a love of the outdoors. 

“I remember in Nancy Hannum’s art class, I was just making what I thought was a mess one day with acrylics on a large piece of artboard. Nancy took a look at it and told me about Pollock, whom I had never heard of. I was amazed—I thought, ‘This is a thing you can actually do?’ It was a huge permission slip for me.”

Crane had the opportunity to work for Hannum at her own studio, learning how to stretch canvases and how to fill them. “Nancy showed me that being an artist was something a person could do.” By his Senior year, he had his own small creative space on the CA campus. Mentored as well by former Studio Art and Photography Teacher Beverly French, he was also experimenting with photography in CA’s darkroom—it was “a really special space—mysterious and private—where you could dream and create. The freedom to explore photography was so important for me at the time. I loved the process of it.”

 

The essential ingredients of CA’s current, six-year-old mission statement—“Creating curious, kind, courageous, and adventurous learners and leaders”—were easily recognizable those four decades ago, says Crane. “They weren’t stated explicitly at the time, but I can recognize that those have always been the qualities that CA fosters because of the people here.”

Crane went on to become a working artist and art history professor in New York, but the mountains of Colorado, the outdoors, and the power of historic places kept calling to him. When the North London Mill project seemed to fall into his lap, it may have been fate in more ways than one; without knowing it at the time, Crane’s CA experience had already connected him to the well-established Colorado culture of exploration embodied in the backcountry huts scattered across the Rocky Mountains.

 

The visionary most responsible for transforming CA from a military boarding school for boys into a coeducational college preparatory institution that prizes adventurous education was F. Charles “Chuck” Froelicher, an avid outdoorsman who was CA’s seventh Headmaster and a founder of Outward Bound in Colorado. Froelicher’s brother, Sangree Mitchell Froelicher, had been killed in action in Italy during World War II as a member of the 86th Mountain Infantry, one of the many men who trained for war at Camp Hale in central Colorado with what was known as the 10th Mountain Division of the U.S. Army—the namesake of the organization which today manages the system of 38 historic shelters in the Colorado Rockies. 

And just six miles as the crow flies from the site of the North London Mill, across Mosquito Pass, the Sangree M. Froelicher Hut offers shelter as part of the 10th Mountain hut system, all thanks to a fundraising effort led by Sangree’s brother, Chuck.

Many threads seem to come together 11,000 feet up in Colorado’s mountains. Observes Crane, “The thing that makes this place successful ‘as’ art is that it’s not ‘art.’ Everything that happens here is aesthetic: backcountry skiing, fly-fishing, hiking. We’ll be hosting our first artist’s residency in a few weeks, and there are the other art and music events, educational events, the mining history, even the story of gold, with its connection to art and adornment—everyone finds something different here, and no one doesn’t like it. Putting it all together like this—it’s very similar to the way academics, the arts, and athletics came together at CA.”

It’s clear, Crane says, that what he’s found in his roundabout journey from CA back to the mountains he’s loved since childhood is “the thing that I’m going to do for the rest of my life; I think this is the art that I’ve always wanted to make.” There’s a German word, he notes, that was originally associated with Richard Wagner: Gesamtkunstwerk. “It means, ‘total work of art’—like opera, a work that synthesizes all the arts and creates an entire world. I think of NoLo that way.”

Curveballs be dammed

Crane is quick to point to the unending dedication and support of his partner, Kate—essential to NoLo’s survival as a one-of-a-kind project of living, historic preservation. “Everybody’s got their strengths and weaknesses, and the best thing about having a partner in your life is that you balance each other. I’d go to bed one night freaking out about some new challenge, but the next morning Kate was always there to say, ‘No, we’ll just keep doing the next thing.’”

 

There were plenty of curveballs and plenty of nights and mornings spent wondering if they’d ever finish what they started, relates Crane. But somehow, things always seemed to work out.

There were the beavers, who dammed up the large culverts built into a new creek crossing on the site to channel the North Mosquito Creek. The solution? Creating what’s known as a “distraction dam” upstream from the culverts to encourage the beavers to move on. “What we learned from that is that beavers are always right. You can’t keep them from doing what they do—and what they do is incredibly beneficial to the land. You have to figure out how to work with them.”

 

Another, equally confounding native resident in this part of the Rockies: neighbors whose politics might lie at every possible point along the spectrum. For Crane, the self-described hippie, developing working relationships with landowners, contractors, and local officials could be challenging at times. “But actually having to work side-by-side with someone with a radically different world-view on a project that you’re both excited about creates space for hope.”

There will likely be many more curveballs to come as Crane and McCoy continue to restore other parts of the NoLo site with funding from the State Historical Fund, the Gates Family Foundation, JM McDonald Foundation, and other funders. For several years, they’ve been working to stabilize and rehabilitate the enormous timber-frame Mill as a “monument to itself,” as well as to make it safe for use as a large performance, exhibition, and event space. They’re close to being able to purchase the four-acre mining parcel on which the NoLo Office sits, and they’re working on a deal between the landowner and the United States Forest Service to transfer the land under the Mill to the National Forest. 

But what’s certain, Crane and McCoy determined early on, is that their goal to rehabilitate the historic site was not going to be viable as a for-profit venture. “Fortunately, Colorado has incredible historic preservation funding through History Colorado State Historical Fund, which gets its funding from limited-stakes gambling—not taxes—so it’s not so politicized.” All the two ever wanted, adds Crane, was for the project to be sustainable: “to create enough revenue for it to sustain itself and sustain our ability to keep doing it. By that metric, we have been wildly successful.”

Plenty of visitors and other observers have looked at the project and congratulated Crane and McCoy on their “labor of love.” But, says Crane, “I kind of hate that expression. It often sounds condescending. And I think all labor is love—or, at least, it should be.” 

If NoLo is defined by the love and passion that have gone into it, then Crane himself is certainly defined by those passions and pursuits that began early and came to fruition at CA and beyond. Recently back on campus for his 40th Reunion, Crane reunited with classmates in the student band FIASCO, covering ’80s hits like the Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer” and the Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated.” 

“I found myself thinking, ‘Wow—these people are so great!’ The guys in that band really are still some of the best guys I know.” Rehearsing for their Reunion gig, recalls Crane, the four performers—Crane, Paul Robbins, and Chuck Newman, along with Class of 1986 graduate Chuck Hornbrook—immediately took their places and picked up where they had left off  as teenagers. “It felt like no time had passed. It really triggered a new appreciation of how special that time at CA had been.”