The Colorado man who has famously spent his life selling souvenirs keeps a few of his own.

“This is one. Look at this thing!” Bill Carle remarks, holding up a thing that is difficult to discern, until several blackened, silver charms become clear.

Tiny, collectible wagons, burros, bighorn sheep, pine cones and more were burnt and molded together in the 1979 fire that destroyed the Crest House atop Mount Blue Sky (then called Mount Evans). The gift shop and restaurant was among iconic tourist stops overseen by Carle’s family going back to the 1890s.

The mangled thing of charms is a rather sad keepsake of his. Something more joyful: the bust of a doughnut from another 14,000-foot mountain.

It is indeed joyous for Carle, 69, to reflect on all the memories and all the doughnuts his family made over a century atop Pikes Peak’s summit house, starting with his grandmother, Helen Stewart. But this bust is also sad: The doughnut, appearing varnished and preserved, is marked as the last under his family from 1992.

Nonetheless, Carle smiles at the odd thing. He smiles at one more keepsake: a public notice penned by his great-grandfather, Helen Stewart’s father, from the early 1890s. The man was giving up on the state’s southeast plains around Manzanola, selling off equipment and animals, noting his “failure as a farmer, and wishing to retire from a noble profession that I have never really been in.”

He added a joke in the signature: “T.B. Wilson, Tired.”

Humor has prolonged the family.

Carle’s family has been called the first family in Colorado tourism. Over 130 years, they made stops at Garden of the Gods, Red Rocks Amphitheatre, Rocky Mountain National Park, Echo Lake Lodge along the road to Mount Blue Sky and the gift shop and cafe at Buffalo Bill Museum and Grave.

Carle isn’t so sure about the “first” title. “I don’t know about first,” he says. “But maybe the last.”

He says it with a chuckle — another half-joke.

After managing Echo Lake Lodge for over half of its nearly 100 years, Carle learned in 2022 the family’s contract with Denver Mountain Parks, the building’s owner, would not be renewed. The agency cited long overdue maintenance and the need for a vision.

Same goes for facilities at Buffalo Bill Museum and Grave, city officials say. This is set to be Carle’s last summer there — ending a run that started with his family in 1956.

The losses further diminish the family’s landmark footprint. In 1992, the city of Colorado Springs turned the Pikes Peak business over to Aramark. A decade later, the corporation beat Carle’s family again in a bid to run Red Rocks Amphitheatre.

Carle had started at the concert venue as a kid in the early ’60s, going on to be the boss securing the liquor license there. That opened up strong revenue potential for the likes of Aramark — the corporation behind some of the world’s great stadiums and destinations with money, manpower and bid-writing know-how that Carle’s family could not possibly match over the years.

Such consolidation across Colorado and America seems inevitable, says Dustin Day. He’s Carle’s nephew, representing the fifth generation involved in the family business.

“I think some businesses have soul. There’s a feeling you get when you go in there,” Day says. “Like, Walmart is a warehouse. … It doesn’t make you feel warm and fuzzy. It doesn’t take you back to childhood memories. You don’t get that personal touch.”

That’s what the family meant with the Pikes Peak doughnut. That’s what they meant by the chili and fudge at Buffalo Bill’s and the pies at Echo Lake Lodge. Those were the specialties of Carle’s sister, Barb.

Carle talks about generations of customers coming back for all of that. He talks about familiar, smiling faces he’ll miss. He sounds sentimental. He sounds bitter, too, for how it’s all gone down with “bureaucracy.”

But he’s quick to shift the focus to other family enterprises: the Ozark Amphitheater in Missouri, stores in Grand Lake and on the other side of Rocky Mountain National Park, including the gift shop and restaurant at the Fall River entrance. Carle’s cousin, George, runs that business.

“Bill’s a realist. He understands the turning-of-the-page so to speak. He’s certainly seen it,” George says. “But on the other hand, these losses for him are part of his life. They’re hard losses.”

Bill Carle keeps reminders. He keeps commemorative coins from one night in 1964 at Red Rocks Amphitheatre. A 9-year-old Carle and Barb worked while the Beatles played.

“My sister still has her ticket around here somewhere,” Carle says. “$6.60 to see the Beatles at Red Rocks.”

The souvenirs are all around the old family home in The Broadmoor neighborhood. The matriarch’s name is honored on the door: Helen Stewart.

However tired T.B. Wilson was from those farming days, he persevered on Pikes Peak. An early 1890s photo shows him and his wife and their little girl outside a cabin, where he printed souvenir newspapers for tourists of the cog railway. Alongside her horse named Brownie, little Helen sold the papers as well as cookies and wildflowers.

She went on to marry Orrie Stewart, one of the brothers responsible for the early summit house atop Pikes Peak. Orrie died in 1939, leaving Helen and three daughters.

This was at a time of economic downturn, compounding the struggle of a single mother running a business, not to mention a time of acute prejudice toward women in the sector. Fortunately, Helen Stewart was ahead of her time.

“She was operating in what they call now a man’s world,” George Carle says. “She had an eye for the opportunities as they came along, and she took action.”

The move from an apartment to the city’s finest neighborhood went to show the woman’s fast rise. At the family’s Broadmoor home, Bill Carle points to a regal portrait of her in a fur coat. “Things must’ve gotten really good after World War II, because look at my grandmother here.”

A shop in Garden of the Gods, Hidden Inn, and another called The Cub beside the Bruin Inn in North Cheyenne Cañon expanded the woman’s empire through the 1940s. Her daughters helped, including Carle’s mother, Barbara.

She married a man who was driving tours on Pikes Peak. Bill Sr. became the point person at the summit house. He’d haul merchandise daily up the winding, dirt road and fry thousands of doughnuts a day that he insisted on selling hot and fresh.

“When I was a little boy, I’d hear him leave at 7 in the morning and get home at 11 at night,” Carle says.

He took after the man, along with the hard-working women of the family. As they expanded business to the north — Buffalo Bill’s before Red Rocks and Echo Lake Lodge in the ‘60s — young Carle stepped up.

That expansion started with the Crest House atop Mount Evans.

“They sent me over there when I was 19 to run the store,” Carle says, “because the manager had been hit by lightning and quit.”

Another calamity awaited. On Labor Day of 1979, a propane gas spill sparked the fire that burned down the Crest House.

Having seen the black smoke in the distance from Pikes Peak’s summit house, Carle tells the story of his dad driving out in a hurry to find him and everyone else safe. Young Carle stood dejected beside the rubble as his dad pulled up.

“My dad rolls down the window,” he says, “and he hands me a bag of marshmallows.”

There was that humor again. It would be hard to laugh later, in 1992.

Bill Sr. lied on his deathbed, hearing his son recount the day’s problems on Pikes Peak. The man listened and nodded and quipped yet again: 

“He pulls his (oxygen) mask off,” Carle recalls, “and he looks at me and goes, ‘If there’s a restaurant in heaven I’m not going.’”

The man died that year, the same year the family lost the contract on Pikes Peak. Day, Carle’s nephew, has reflected on this lately.

“I don’t know if it’s a family curse or what,” Day says, “but these business things always seem to coincide with a death in the family.”

His mom, Barb, was the one who baked those pies at Echo Lake Lodge, the one who’d be on the mountain in the middle of the night to feed search-and-rescue teams, the one always coming up with perfect gifts for staff every Christmas. She was grieved by staff and customers near and far in 2021.

She died from cancer. Months later, Day and Carle got word the lodge would be closing.

Barb died before she could meet her grandson. Day recently welcomed baby Riley to the world.

Maybe Riley will grow to represent the sixth generation in the family business, Day has thought. The thought has made him sad in a way.

“There’s just things he’s not gonna get to do,” he says.

Generations before can say they slept in bunks on Pikes Peak and Mount Blue Sky, huddled together in those lodges during storms, munching on doughnuts and pies. They watched the best sunrises. They poured a tourist’s coffee and watched the morning light in Garden of the Gods. They watched the Beatles at Red Rocks.

Carle has watched businesses come and go. He has always watched for opportunities, just as his grandmother did. Not long ago, he made a push for the Monarch Crest store along Monarch Pass; it went to the nearby ski area “rightfully,” Carle says.

“I keep my ear to the ground,” he says.

And that’s partly out of a sense of duty, of legacy, he says, thinking back to what his grandma and parents built against the odds. “I don’t want to mess it up,” he says.

Pikes Peak, Red Rocks, Echo Lake Lodge, Buffalo Bill’s — each loss hurts. But none like the loss of his sister.

“I never thought about it before, but there weren’t five days that went by where we weren’t in contact with each other talking about business,” he says.

He and Barb talked about funny things that happened, too. This was a crazy business, after all, and they laughed together. “Boy, that part I miss,” Carle says.

The memories are all around the old family home. Grandma Helen’s box TV from the ‘70s is still here. “Barb could not throw it away,” Carle says.

It still works, perhaps miraculously. Carle flips a switch to turn it on and another switch to turn it off. Or so he thought, finding the old TV still on. He resorts to unplugging it. Or so he thought again.

He can only laugh. “What the heck! It’s still on!”