This is a little piece of paradise, it's contagious, now this place is in my blood
now. It's a national treasure, this is church for me to become what it is today.
Mishawaka needed to go through the light and the dark. It was 1916 when musician
Walter S. Thompson rode his motorcycle into the pristine and remote Poodle
Canyon, west of Fort Collins, Colorado.
Walter was so moved by the area, he set out to unite his love for music and
community with the inspiration and grandeur he found in the idyllic canyon.
Named after his hometown in Indiana, Walter built Mishawaka. He built roads,
cabins, summer rentals, and a general store. Being an avid musician, he built a
rustic old dance hall where his family would play music together nearly every
night. To this day, music still echoes out of that old dance hall Walter built
and continues to bring people together just as he envisioned. But it wasn't
always this way. As a little girl, I remember coming and just having a great
time fishing and sleeping in this cabin and kind of a rustic atmosphere and
going to the dance that night. It was wonderful and then as the years went by
it changed. When Walter retired the Mishawaka went through quite a few
owners until the 1970s when it settled into the capable hands of Jimmy Core.
Core had big plans for Mishawaka. Whereas Walter had sustained his music scene
inside, Jimmy Core turned the Mish into a major music destination by building an
outdoor stage along the river and the Mishawaka amphitheater was born. After
Jimmy Core moved on, the bands and crowds grew even larger. However, the Mish
found the dark side of that success. Mishawaka guide everything that he wanted
in terms of success on that on that level of music and that level of business
and the amount of people coming up here. It's too adsorbed down. The youth, the
drugs, the alcohol, you know 20 years of it just getting crazier and crazier and
crazier. It had become a negative influence in the community. Less of a
place you'd want to take your family. I'm sure there's a lot of people who just
would have been happy that the Forest Service spotted, bulldozed it over,
basically turned into a parking lot. That's exactly what they were going to
deal with it. In 2010 the music in Mayhem was silenced and the Mish was
shut down.
When we acquired Mishawaka in 2010, it had a shred of love left in people's
hearts but generally it was a dump. It was me and the dark Mish.
You know like what do you do and this place is dirty and it's drugs and it's
sex and I said no it's not. Over the years I've seen people come that said
they were gonna change things and if there was a change it was for the worst
instead of the better. Yeah I mean we had to not only start from the basic clean
repair, electrical work, fixed doors, broken windows, then we also had to
repair the hearts and minds. The physical aspect of rebuilding this place is
nothing. The reputation aspect of rebuilding is completely different. You
have to really get it into the mindset of the people that don't come up here
anymore because you want them to start coming up here. You want them to feel
free to bring their families up here again. I think when she first came and
and really tried to involve the community that was step one. I mean my vision for
Mishawaka is that that thread of music and community will continue to be in
everything that we do. Each time I came I could see change. Place was doing well,
the energy was fine, the place smelled good, the place looked good. You know we
were on a roll. The kitchen was running well, the food was great, the menu was
set up. People were starting to recognize when they came up to the Mish
they're gonna have a great experience. I'm sitting in the office working away and
the phone rings, it's reverse 911. Evacuate.
It all came to a standstill. Every day you'd hear that the place burned down, the next day you'd
hear that it was still there. That was one of the worst months of my life. We
just spent hours looking at computer screens, watching you know the map that
has Mishawaka actually pinpointed like a city and the fire line blows right over
and past the Mishawaka and you know I look at my phone it says I think the
mish is gone and it's from a reporter. There were homeowners who were much more
in need of information than I was. It didn't seem very fair for me to be
asking about the Mishawaka. I had a house here seven miles down the road. I
didn't really care about that. I was more concerned about Mishawaka. I was
really really concerned about Mishawaka.
We got a call that said we're gonna let you guys head up to the Mish. You know
we're all like whoo here we go we're heading back up to the Mish but then
all of a sudden creeps up that you really aren't quite sure what you're
gonna see when you get up here. It looks like a war zone. There's still smoke
rising from the hillside and from behind the cabins you know it's the
eeriest thing. Then we drove up and it was still standing. It was all there. It
took four days of their vigilant efforts to keep the flames away. When I
finally got into the kitchen where the employees where they handed me a letter
that had just been sitting on the bar and they said you better read this and
it's from the guys who were protecting the Mish. The firefighters left me a note
and at the end of the letter he just wrote long live the Mish. It was a moment
where everyone dropped the crap about the reputation. People said oh yeah I love
this place. And when we come back up after the fire we got to really focus on
where we wanted this place to be and how we wanted this place to operate and
that's really when we hit our stride. We were thriving on many levels that I
hadn't even expected. The weddings that were taking place here and you know the
symphony was up here. I mean that's incredible. Well it's a hundred years old.
There's lots of history here. Some of it good some of it not so good but we can't
take a bigger race or any race history. I think that at its hundred year mark
this walkout is back to that dream that Walter had in the beginning on a vastly
bigger scale. At 100 years we have come full circle. We're back right where Walter
thought we should be.
And in my wildest dreams we were sails up in the meck just blowing in the breeze.
