This is the 50th anniversary of the summer that Stuart and Isabel Mace built Toklat —their home and lodge and restaurant and kennel and art gallery high in the Castle Creek Valley. And in the half-century since then, the Maces have seen birth and death, success and failure and, through it all, two constants: One is change and the other, again above all, is family.

"Life at Toklat has allowed us to mature and to raise a family in tune with the rhythms and responses that surround us in this glorious alpine valley we call home," wrote Stuart Mace. "We do not need to seek immortality. It is a gift we all receive. We only mark it as we can control our massive egos and reach a peace with the whole of our family."

Whether as a lodge, dogsled touring operation, restaurant, gallery or home base for a fierce stewardship of the Castle Creek Valley, Toklat has meant different things to the thousands who have crossed its threshold over the past half-century. One constant, however, has always been the uncompromising way the Mace family lives and works at Toklat.

"They're one of the most remarkable families I’ve ever known," said Dick Simmons, star of Sgt. Preston of the Yukon, which was filmed in Ashcroft in the 1950s, featuring the Maces' dogsled teams and the gorgeous mountain background. "It's been a great inspiration to know the Maces, and I believe anyone who has gotten to know the family really well must feel the same way."

"We have followed a strict policy in the development of Aspen to encourage only those whom we consider tops in their line," wrote Paepcke about the company the Maces would be keeping if they accepted his invitation to live and work at the Four Seasons Club. But Paepcke didn't get what he wanted—not quite because Stuart and Isabel had already fallen in love with the area surrounding the ghost town of Ashcroft in the Castle Creek Valley. They struck a deal with Ted Ryan, who owned about a thousand acres up Castle Creek. The trade was a lifetime lease on 2.7 acres in exchange for their stewardship of a valley that had been stripped clean by overgrazing.

So in 1949, the Maces, with two kids in tow and one on the way, rolled up their sleeves and got to work. The fruit of their labors was the lodge they named Toklat, the Eskimo word for a glacial mountain valley. Mace and his family built Toklat out of recycled materials, including stone from the old school, logs from an old coal mine and marble left behind at the closed quarries.

At the beginning, Toklat served as a lodge, the Mace family home, and headquarters for the new stewards of the Castle Creek Valley. Also making their home at Toklat were 20 malamutes, brought from Boulder, the hearts and souls of the Maces' dogsled tours. Carried over from his World War II days, Stuart could no more have left the huskies behind than one of his children. A conscientious objector who refused to carry a gun, Stuart served in the war by training sled dogs who could help rescue wounded soldiers in alpine conditions.

For Stuart the mountains, valley and forests of Castle Creek were the ideal backdrop to raise the next generation of Maces. "I wanted to give my kids a place to build their mind, body, imagination, and artistic sense," said Mace in an episode of Bill Moyers' Journal, an acclaimed public television series. "You can't appreciate your fellow man until you appreciate nature; without that you can't feel any wholeness."

In half a century Toklat has undergone a series of evolutions. Stuart and Isabel Mace opened Toklat as a lodge and dogsled touring operation. But tucked away in the recesses of the Castle Creek Valley, their financial survival depended on sensing when it was time to try a new approach. So every decade or so, Stuart and Isabel, with the help of however many of their five children were old enough to lend a hand, devised a new way to tempt people to make the trip out to Ashcroft. "This is our home and place of business and always has been," said Lynne Mace, the only daughter among the five Mace children, who now manages Toklat the gallery. "It's not about commerce, it's about people."

But whether Toklat stood as a lodge, a wilderness touring operation, a restaurant or a gallery, guests would be greeted by at least two members of the Mace family and depart with a feeling of having been—for a little while—a part of something larger than themselves. "All my life I've felt that there's something about Toklat, an incredible sense of place," said Lynne. "I think other people feel it too. There's a connection here that can't be duplicated. If Toklat wasn't here, it would just be another retail store but it's not."

Simmons, as the human star of the Yukon series, doesn't resent the prominent role the huskies played on the show. In fact there's no question the dogs proved hardier than many of their human co-stars.

"We'd often get up at 4, 4:30 in the morning and drive up to Ashcroft from Aspen. Very often it was 40 below at that hour with snow clear over our heads. We'd joke with the new guys and say, ‘Don't step off the trail or we won't see you 'til next spring,’" Simmons said. "It was a really successful series but many times we'd call up actors and ask them to come back on and they'd say, ‘No, thanks.’" To this day, with 60 films and three TV series to his name, Simmons is most recognized for his role as Sgt. Preston. In fact he still gets mail from fans both the young and old who watch the show on syndication.

With the cold, the snow and the dogs, there are quite a few stories about the making of the series. But it's the people behind the canine stars that Simmons remembers from his time in Ashcroft. "Stuart Mace was an all-time great guy in my book," Simmons remarked. "And Isabel, she was unbelievable on the set. They don't make women like that anymore."

But the Maces were hardly just Hollywood parents for their beloved huskies. They had a lodge to run too. And judging from the volume of food Isabel helped prepare for the guests, the Maces' hospitality didn't want for recipients. "Baked grains was your starch for a meal," Isabel Mace recalled. "People loved it and I'd have to prepare a hundred pounds at a time. I couldn't really do that in the kitchen so I scrubbed out the bathtub, disinfected it and made it in there."

From the beginning, Toklat was a family affair. Greg, Alan, Kent and Bruce learned to mush dogs when other little boys learned to ride bicycles; and Lynne helped out in the lodge restaurant before she hit her teens. "The boys all worked with the kennels and learned to drive the dogs and Lynne waited on tables when she was 11," Isabel recalled. "We thought it was important that they be a part of something, part of the family."

The surroundings were, and are, picture perfect. Majestic. But sometimes, just once in a while, did cabin fever set in? "I was too busy to even know," Isabel remarked. "I was raising children, managing the kennels, doing the book work, and helping in the restaurant. I couldn't have cared less whether other people were around."

Lynne recalls her childhood as "wonderful" and wouldn't trade it for the world. But sometimes isolation was too kind a description for growing up at Toklat. "I did feel lonely, being the only girl with four brothers and macho dog drivers for company," Lynne said. "But what I really remember was that we were a part of something. It was a family business, run by all of us—all seven of us."

In "Living Free in the Rockies," the episode of Bill Moyers' Journal, made in 1974, Stuart told Moyers an ethic of hard work and self-reliance were the bequests he wanted to leave his children, rather than earthly goods. "I tried to leave the children a heritage of inner strength.... Anything they get from me they'll get before I go."

In 1959, the Maces got out of the lodge business and decided to concentrate on just food—and, of course, dogs. The building in Ashcroft became just the Mace home, for both human and canine family members, and the name Toklat served to cover both the continuing dogsled operation and a new restaurant the Maces built in downtown Aspen, on Durant Avenue. A restaurant seemed a natural evolution from serving three meals a day for lodge guests, noted Isabel. And Lynne suspects another reason for the switch was that the kids were growing and "could no longer live in cubby holes" in part of the lodge

The restaurant did all right, but after 10 years the Maces headed back to Ashcroft full time. "We were running a restaurant during the hippie age and couldn't count on any help. Stuart and I would sometimes put in 20-hour days and we couldn't keep that up. So we had to give it up and come back where we could depend on people," Isabel said

In 1969, the building at Ashcroft— once a lodge, then a family home and dogsledding center—was transformed again and the two branches of Toklat were reunited as a joint dogsled touring/fine-eating establishment. The Maces' restaurant in Aspen is now the Chart House.

Everything, however, wasn't back to what it had been. Most absent was the helpful patter of little feet. The Mace kids were growing up and embarking on their own adventures away from the Castle Creek Valley. By 1970, only Kent and Bruce Mace were still living and working with their parents in Ashcroft. That's when Dan MacEachen began working at the Toklat dogsled operation. Stuart thought of the dogs as part of his family, said MacEachen, but he wasn't getting any younger and sledding is a tough business. So when MacEachen expressed a desire to take over the dogsled tours, Stuart put him on a four-and-a-half-year apprenticeship.

In 1975 Stuart gave MacEachen his dogs, in a handshake deal, with a 10-year condition. The condition being: If Stuart didn't like the way MacEachen was doing things, at any point in the next 10 years, the huskies would come back to Toklat. "It was not a gift taken or given lightly," MacEachen recalled. "I mean he literally gave up one of his loves."

MacEachen passed the decade-long review and the dogsled business is now called Krabloonik and has moved to Snowmass Village. But the spirit and heritage of Toklat's tours hasn't disappeared. "I think the legacy lives on at Krabloonik," MacEachen noted. "A lot of people come with grandchildren who first had tours up at Toklat remark how similar they are."

Then after three years of Toklat being just a restaurant, the Maces again reinvented the family business. This time the final reincarnation of Toklat—into an art gallery—would last more than the decade-long cycles of its predecessors. In fact it's 21 years and still running for the gallery.

Through all of Toklat's transformations, however, Stuart Mace also played the role of "fierce protector" of the Castle Creek valley. "If he saw anyone doing anything harmful to the environment, he'd screech to a halt, jump out and let them know if they didn't stop they'd have him to deal with," recalled Tom Cardamone, director of Aspen Center for Environmental Studies (ACES). "There was nothing gentle about his approach." As a founding trustee, Stuart was "right up there with Elizabeth Paepcke as the most instrumental in shaping ACES," Cardamone said.

Stuart is described often as "larger than life" and "ahead of his time" regarding his views and conveyance of those views about the natural world. Apparently he didn't pay much heed to the stereotype that people who truly cared about the environment were supposed to be mild-mannered in their approach. "With his bushy eyebrows, penetrating eyes and brash and raspy voice, he electrified people. He stopped people dead in their tracks," said Nancy Wood, a poet and longtime friend of the Maces. "Stuart could talk anyone into anything. He was so passionate. He had this energy, this aura. You never said ‘no’ to Stuart."

Stuart Mace didn't let anything get in his way when he played the role of steward of the land. But he recognized in himself a tendency to feel his own self-importance. In this regard, Stuart observed, nature is not only worth protecting, but also knocks you down a peg or two when you need it. "The mountains cut a man down to his proper size," said Stuart in "Living Flee in the Rockies." "They're a constant reminder of where I belong, where I fit into the pattern of things."

And where was Isabel while Stuart was off slaying dragons or fighting windmills in the name of preserving nature? "Isabel was the rock. She kept the home balanced and secure while Stuart went into battle," Cardamone said.

Always interested in photography and crafts, Stuart ushered Toklat into its current embodiment as a full- time gallery. There was always a gift shop at Toklat, but in 1978 the operation's entire focus turned to displaying and selling arts and crafts. "After 30 years of cooking big meals, I call this retreading ... instead of retiring," said Stuart Mace to Aspen Times reporter Mary Hayes at the opening of Toklat as a gallery. "We hope it will give us time to do more of the things we enjoy, like making furniture, doing pictures with pieces of inlaid wood. I've been squirreling away wood for years, getting ready for this time in my life."

Isabel fondly recalls that Stuart had a touch, a gift for almost any medium of art. He was an avid photographer and worked well with wood, stone and paint. "He could do anything he took a liking to," Isabel said. "He could just watch someone do something and then do it."

The gallery served as a peaceful and rewarding place for Stuart and Isabel to enjoy their golden years. "Stuart really understood artists. He had a real gift for meeting people and getting them excited about art," said Eddie Running Wolf, a sculptor who has shown his work at Toklat since 1980. "He was a fantastic photographer and really jump-started-me with my own work in wood.... But was he known more as an artist or a gallery owner? I'd say he was more known for being Stuart Mace."

But it has been during the gallery years that the Mace family has endured its hardest blows. In 1986, Greg Mace died in a climbing accident on the Maroon Bells. Seven years later, Stuart Mace passed away from respiratory failure at age 74. Bruce and Lynne Mace took over the management of the Toklat gallery in 1993. Then, in 1996, Lynne took charge and has kept things running smoothly. Alan, Kent, and Bruce now all live in different parts of southern Colorado. According to artist Eddie Running Wolf, Lynne not only carries the Toklat torch beautifully, she has added her personal stamp to the gallery's operations.

"Lynne has a real head for business. I suspect Stuart opened the gallery because he wanted to look at and be surrounded by the things he loved. In contrast, Lynne really knows what the market will hold and what clients want," Running Wolf said. "But they both really believe in what they're selling."

As the Maces celebrate a half-century's worth of milestones and accomplishments, however, the survival of Toklat itself is uncertain. The Ryan lease with the Maces extended through the lifetimes of Stuart and Isabel. After that, the land reverts back to the Ryan estate. Lynne has been trying to purchase the 2.7 acres Toklat stands on since 1992, with no success. When the Maces took over stewardship of Ryan's thousand acres, the land was "decimated" by overgrazing. The valley was grazed down to dust," Isabel recalled. Now that the valley has been returned to its lush, brilliant splendor, Lynne Mace is fighting for the chance to turn over Toklat to a third generation of Maces—a generation that still carries the imprint of the family patriarch.

"The image of my own small hand lying in the palm of my Grandfather's is etched into my memory. He always seemed to appear larger than life. He spoke to me of nature's goodness and the wisdom of growing things," wrote Alana Mace of her grandfather, Stuart Mace, in an essay for her application to University of Colorado. She's now a junior at C.U. in Boulder.

"I'll never forget the look of pure sadness that shone in his eyes when once I plucked a fistful of spring columbines. His lessons of deep respect for Mother Earth are a part of who I am, what I will be, my legacy to my own children."