Dana Reyes: So I want to start with a number. Between 1970 and 1980, Routt County was growing about seven and a third percent a year. Between 1980 and 1990, that dropped to about half a percent a year.

Theo Ames: Wait. Seven-point-three-five to zero-point-five. That's not a slowdown, that's a wall.

Marv Sundstrom: That's what I remember. Not a crash exactly. It just… stopped.

Dana Reyes: Welcome to Back in the Boat. Today's episode is a little different, because we went looking for what happened here in the early eighties, and we mostly came back with that one number and a lot of shrugging.

Theo Ames: Okay, set the table for me. Because I know the postwar story in broad strokes — ranching and ag give way to tourism, Mount Werner planning kicks in late fifties, and the town starts to change shape.

Marv Sundstrom: That's the shape of it. In 1950 Routt County was about eighty-nine hundred people. By 2000 it was pushing twenty thousand. Most of that growth is a tourism economy layered on top of an ag economy that was already here.

Dana Reyes: And the seventies were the sprint. Seven percent a year, compounded. That is a town remaking itself in real time — new houses, new jobs on the mountain, new people every winter.

Theo Ames: And then 1980 hits and the sprint just… ends.

Marv Sundstrom: Ends. Yeah.

Dana Reyes: Here is where I have to be honest with you and with the listener. We went looking for the local story of that decade. Bank failures, foreclosure rates, school enrollment, how many families packed up. And we did not find it. Not in anything readily available to us.

Theo Ames: Nothing? There's a national savings and loan crisis in the eighties. Real estate, risky lending, the whole thing. That has to touch a place like Steamboat.

Dana Reyes: You'd think. And it might have, heavily. But 'you'd think' is not evidence. I can tell you the S and L crisis happened nationally. I cannot, from what we have in hand, tell you which local institutions were exposed, or how many mortgages went sideways in this valley.

Marv Sundstrom: I can tell you people left. I remember who left. I'm not going to name them on a podcast, and I'm not going to pretend my memory is a spreadsheet.

Theo Ames: Marv, that's the part I want to sit with. Because your memory says families were forced out. The number Dana just read — half a percent growth — does that back you up or not?

Dana Reyes: This is the honest point of the whole episode. A near-zero growth rate is not the same as an exodus. People can be leaving while other people are arriving, and the net number barely moves.

Marv Sundstrom: So both things can be true. Families I knew went. And the county on paper looks almost still.

Dana Reyes: Right. The growth rate neither confirms nor refutes what you remember. It's compatible with a churn — some out, some in — and it's compatible with a slower drift. We can't tell from the top-line number which one it was.

Theo Ames: That's frustrating. In a useful way. What would actually settle it?

Dana Reyes: School district enrollment year by year would tell you a lot. Kids don't lie about churn. The full 1980 and 1990 census tables, not just the growth rate. Foreclosure notices and classifieds in the Steamboat Pilot from those years. Property transfer records at the county.

Marv Sundstrom: Those exist. Somebody could sit down with them.

Theo Ames: But nobody, that we can find, has pulled that story together and published it in a way we could reach.

Dana Reyes: Not that we found. And that itself is the thing I keep circling.

Marv Sundstrom: Because the boom got written down. The building of the mountain, the growth years, the arrivals — that's a story people wanted to tell.

Dana Reyes: Booms get written down. Busts don't. The people who stayed tell the story of the place. The people who left are not here to tell theirs. They're somewhere else, telling a different story, if they're telling it at all.

Theo Ames: That's a real gap. Because if you only read the histories that got published about Steamboat, you'd basically go from the ski area getting built to the town we live in now, and the eighties are a hallway you walk through.

Marv Sundstrom: It wasn't a hallway. It was a decade. People lost things in it.

Dana Reyes: And I want to be careful here, because I was a kid then. I remember parents worrying. I don't remember specifics I can put on tape without inventing them, and I'm not going to invent them.

Theo Ames: That restraint matters. It's easy to fill a silence with a story that sounds right.

Marv Sundstrom: Especially about your own town. You want it to make sense.

Dana Reyes: So let me say what we can say. From 1970 to 1980, Routt County grew about seven and a third percent a year. From 1980 to 1990, about half a percent a year. Nationally, there was a savings and loan crisis in the eighties tied to real estate and risky lending. Locally, we do not have, in front of us, the documentation to say exactly how that landed here.

Theo Ames: And what we can't say is whether Marv's memory of families being forced out reflects a wave, a trickle, or something in between.

Marv Sundstrom: I know what I saw. I also know what I saw is not a data set.

Dana Reyes: Both of those sentences are allowed to be true at once. That's the episode.

Theo Ames: So what do we do with an episode where the answer is 'we don't know yet'?

Dana Reyes: We name it. We say out loud that the record has a hole in it. And we point at the shelves where somebody could go look — the Pilot archives, the county records, the census tables, the school district. That's not nothing.

Marv Sundstrom: And if you were here then, and you remember it — that's a thing worth writing down before the people who remember are gone.

Theo Ames: That might be the most honest place we've landed on this show.

Dana Reyes: The growth rate stopped. What we do not have is the human ledger of who that cost, and who it didn't. If you have a piece of that ledger, we'd like to hear it.

Marv Sundstrom: That's Back in the Boat. Thanks for sitting in the quiet part with us.

Theo Ames: We'll see you next time.