Mountain town radio station broadcasts unique lost and found bulletins

Inside of the KBUT studio, the station’s 1 p.m. volunteer DJ sorts through color-coded pieces of paper, pre-reading them carefully, making sure the writing is legible.

“This is 90.3 KBUT Crested Butte,” he announces through the microphone.

He and dozens of other volunteer DJs provide the daily soundtrack for the 10x10 block town inside of the Marshal's office.

“Often people will just say, ‘the radio station’. They don’t have to say KBUT,” says Eileen Hughes, the station’s general manager. “So we’re very connected to the community. People look to us for pretty much anything.”

Including when they’re looking for help through a uniquely small-town type of service KBUT provides each day at 1 p.m. and 9 p.m.

“KBUT’s Lost and Found is a daily service that helps reunite lost items in the Gunnison Valley to their rightful owners,” the DJ says into the mic, looking through pieces of paper that say ‘lost’ and ‘found.’ “If you have lost or found an item, please call us.”

A lost and found. Really.

Despite what people find when they move here — a strong sense of community — Chad Reich, KBUT’s news director, says many people do lose something too — or many things, actually.

“Often they go places with things and when they get home, they don’t have them anymore,” Chad says. “Whether it’s from a trailhead or a local fundraiser or they drop something in the backcountry while they were eating their lunch. Or maybe they were hitting the tavern for an evening and not everything they took out came home with them.”

“Dogs and cats, of course. A rancher once reported a goat,” Chad explains. “There have been turtles in the lost and found.”

A turtle in its shell is always home — except this was a box turtle, not native to the area.

“It was alive and it was moving very slowly and I was like, ‘Is this a turtle in my yard?!’” Kelly Jo Clark says of the turtle her children found in the backyard. “No one ever claimed the turtle. Weird.”

“Somebody lost a Hello Kitty body pillow with sentimental value. Someone found a pyrex container full of salad,” Chad continued. “Somebody reported losing 80 pounds of apples from their front porch.”

“It’s unbelievable what people put on the lost and found. … We don’t even bat an eye. It’s like, alright. We’ll put it on,” Eileen says. “We’ve had, you know, dentures.”

Dentures. Seriously. Found outside by the local librarian on the sidewalk.

“Just looked on the ground and there were some teeth and there they were. So I picked them up figuring, it was dark, it was the evening, that someone would want their teeth,” she says, and you guessed it — no one claimed them. “It was too interesting and hilarious of a story to really throw them away and apparently, I hear, they’re expensive, so maybe I can sell them?”

Then there’s the chinchilla that was found.

“It was reported wounded but not dead,” Chad says. “I don’t even know what a chinchilla is.”

Someone turned it into the local veterinarian’s office, which called in to report it.

“We put it on the found and we’re running it for about a week and then she came back … and she said, ‘Well I gotta take that off,’” Eileen says.

“So we got online and Googled what this particular animal should look like. It was not a chinchilla,” says Mo Finney at the vet’s office, laughing to herself. “We found out that he was a woodland packrat. “So native species to this area. Very cute, but long pointy nose, not a small smushy chinchilla face. Not a chinchilla.”

Perhaps the biggest phenomena of all is the so-called “Barmuda Triangle.”

“The Barmuda Triangle is just on those three blocks and that’s probably where majority of stuff gets lost,” Chief Marshal Tom Martin says.

The Marshal’s headquarters are in the same building as KBUT.