Then It Stopped: 1982 and the Question Nobody Wrote Down

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 13:57:54 GMT · 05:30

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## About this episode
The hosts go looking for what happened in Routt County in the early 1980s, when a decade of rapid growth abruptly flattened, and come back with one number and a lot of gaps. This is an episode about the limits of the local record, the difference between memory and data, and what a near-zero growth rate can and cannot tell us.

## In this episode
- Routt County's growth rate: about 7.35% a year in the 1970s, about 0.5% a year in the 1980s
- The postwar shift from ranching and ag toward a tourism economy, and Mount Werner planning in the late 1950s
- County population from about 8,900 in 1950 to nearly 20,000 by 2000
- The national savings and loan crisis, and what can't be said about its local footprint
- Why a flat growth rate does not confirm or refute memories of families being forced out
- The sources that would actually settle it: school enrollment, census tables, Steamboat Pilot archives, county property records
- Why booms get written down and busts often don't

## Hosts
- Marv Sundstrom
- Dana Reyes
- Theo Ames