giant
steps Telluride, and the path of innovation
by Roger Toll
G R E G VO N D O E R S T E N
Telluride, and the path of innovation
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by Roger Toll
From the top of Telluride’s Revelation Bowl
— at 12,570 feet, it’s the highest lift station on the
mountain — there is a cat track, wide and groomed
and a mile long, which climbs the ridgeline to Gold Hill
Chute 8. The climb is gradual, only 300 vertical feet, making it more of a high-alpine amble than a hike, and along the way, signs
indicate drop-offs into Gold Hill Chutes 1 through 7. For a first-timer,
Above Chute 8, the ridgeline meets the start of the serrated headwall of Palmyra Peak. A steel stairway scales a rocky knoll that falls off precipitously both right and left. This is the route to Chute 9, the last of the Gold Hill Chutes and the least-daunting access into a wide, open, sparsely skied bowl that, for good skiers, is manna from the gods. The locals have come to call it the Stairway to Heaven.Y “Gold Hill Chute 9 is the easiest way into Palmyra Basin,” says Jeff Proteau, former mountain operations manager and now Telluride’s executive director of planning and sustainability. “The challenge was getting to it. Before we put the stairway in, a lot of people who had the ability to ski Chute 9 were wary of risking a possible fall climbing along the knife-edge ridge of that rock face on all fours. It was quite an adventure, and it stopped a lot of people who could have skied that chute.” A small team of Telluride Ski Resort mechanics measured and marked the rock in late 2009, drilled holes and concreted 40 rock bolts into them, and then built the 124-foot stairway to measure, tightly tailored like a Savile Row suit. Being winter, they worked much of the time in sleet and snow on the rock’s thin layer of ice. Finally, they were able to helicopter the stairway into place in March and bolt it down. “It was precarious,” says Proteau. “Everything had to be hiked in, and we had a million logistical challenges working at 13,000 feet in winter. Such a project is not very common in the States.” Some readers will recognize the Stairway as an incredible piece of engineering. Others, like myself, will recognize it as an apt metaphor for Telluride’s revolutionary remake in the past half-decade.Y Telluride is a leader in ski-industry innovation, all of it directed toward serving its customers, be they the legions of local expert skiers or those for whom a good ski day includes a leisurely, wine-laced lunch with a blue-sky view. I transition effortlessly from the company of the first to the company of the latter on a beautiful Sunday in March when I clicked out of my skis and walked onto the deck of Bon Vivant, a new, open-air restaurant perched on a knoll at 11,996 feet. Tom Watkinson, a born Tellurider and a resort executive I’d met two days earlier, is taking a break from some hard skiing with friends on his day off and invites me to join them. Jake Linzinmeir, the resort’s culinary director, and his wife are among the 10 of us sitting around a large table, and platters began dropping in like planes into JFK. We each take a few bites, then 94
From the engineering wonder of the Gold Hill Stairs to the refined intimacy of Alpino Vino, there’s no part of the mountain experience that Telluride isn’t committed to improving.
f ro m l e f t: s c ott W. S m i t h ; G R E G VO N D O E R S T E N
dropping into any of them is an act of faith; the rollover from the ridge to the 40- to 45-degree steeps below the horizon makes it impossible to see the dizzying descent until you are already committed to it.
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“That is terrific expert terrain out there, and a lot of our customers are expert skiers.�
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pass them on, sampling pretty much everything on the menu, which inzinmeir describes as “strong on French comfort food.” Coupled with L the best Belgian beers on tap, the tasty preparations — spiced with stories, laughter, and dramatic views of Black Iron Bowl and Palmyra Peak just up the canyon — keep us there for much of the afternoon. This is a lunch like I had enjoyed on the terraces of Swiss and Austrian mountain chalets, of fine local wines and gamey stews and exceptional cheeseboards, of warm conversations and friendly laughter: that pleasurable sense of gemütlichkeit so evident in the Alps. Living large, Euro-style, was not the Telluride I had discovered 20 years ago on my first visit. Then it was more rooted in the old mining town, lodged deep in a remote box canyon of Colorado’s San Juan Mountains, where Butch Cassidy had launched a notable career when he pulled off his first bank robbery in 1889. In 1972, the first lifts of the nascent ski area started running above a town colored by a recent migration of long-hairs who were attracted as much by its jewellike setting as by the cheap real estate that marked the end of its mining days. Its daunting ski trails, often blanketed with moguls the size of Volkswagen bugs, cascaded into town. This was a rugged, independent-minded, hard-skiing kind of place. Food was strictly a burger-andbottle-of-beer proposition. “There are still plenty of skiers here who’ll pull out a nutrition bar or grab a hamburger for lunch,” says Linzinmeir. “But the culture is shifting from the ‘eat-to-ski’ mentality to a more European-style ‘ski-to-eat’ ethos. People want to enjoy the finer things in life. Good food and wine are a big part of that. In Europe, skiers plan their whole day around which chalet they want to visit. They sit on a terrace with big views or in a charming old barn, drink wine, enjoy each other’s company, and laugh a lot. We want to recreate that spirit here. It’s our own Slow Food movement.” Linzinmeir super vises nine restaurants, most of them on the mountain, and two more concepts are in the works. “You know, Telluride’s unique: remote, hip, its roots in a counterculture mind-set. It’s full of hard-charging expert skiers, the most dramatic landscape in Colorado, and visitors who come here just to be in Telluride. Maybe it’s the independent nature of this place. They like its small size and intimacy. They tend to be younger, and they want what’s new, what’s hot.”Y Linzinmeir is having a good time creating a New World expression of Europe’s chalet restaurants. “The way to do it is through smaller, more intimate restaurants,” he says. “We’d rather have 10 restaurants of 50 seats than one big food court of 500. No matter how good the restaurant, it is hard to maintain a fine culinary level if you’re wandering around with a tray in your hands hunting for a table.” Among his collection is the highest restaurant in North America. The resort bought two private houses down-ridge from Revelation Bowl, the legacy of old mining claims, and one of them, situated at just under 12,000 feet, has been made into a high-end restaurant named Alpino Vino. At lunchtime, it offers firstcome, first-serve table seating; at night, guests arrive in a comfortable snow-coach for a five-course meal with paired wines.Y About half a mile farther down the ridge sits Giuseppe’s, which Alpino Vino demoted to North America’s second-highest restaurant. After our lunch at Bon Vivant, Watkinson guides me to some of the steep, hike-to terrain that lies in the shadow of Palmyra Peak, on the ridge across Palmyra Basin from the Gold Hill Chutes. Runs off the two 98
Whether hiking to the bounteous backcountry or simply dropping into lift-served areas in Prospect Bowl, there’s no shortage of great terrain for adventurous skiers.
G a b e roge l . o p p os i te : s c ott w. s m i t h
“Telluride’s unique: remote, hip, its roots in a counterculture mind-set. It’s full of hard-charging expert skiers, the most dramatic landscape in Colorado.”
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ridges comprise the bulk of Telluride’s double-diamond terrain. Besides the 10 Chutes and a few hairball runs off the peak, there are about 20 drops off the ridge we are now hiking up. The view is spectacular: four FourteenersY and a long palisade of 13,000-foot peaks. “It’s an adventurous backcountry experience without the backcountry danger,” Watkinson said. “You don’t normally get this kind of terrain within a ski-area boundary. There’s a ton of skiing up here, and it’s all pretty raw.” With the sharp peaks looking downright Alpine, the European experience extends even to the landscape. I asked Jeff Proteau about avalanche danger. Though the 300 acres of steep terrain under Palmyra Peak had been inside the resort’s permit area for years, some argued for keeping the steep, hike-to terrain closed, fearful that committing what it takes to patrol the avalanche-prone terrain on a daily basis would be too expensive. “In the end, we decided that is not our way,” he says. “That is terrific expert terrain out there, and a lot of our customers are expert skiers.” When I wonder aloud if they were not taking customer service too far by grooming the ridges to make hiking easier, Proteau laughs that it’s not just for that the convenience of guests: Compacting the snow makes it last longer into spring, and if someone gets hurt, patrollers can have a snowmobile out there in minutes. But the main reason is that big snowcats spend a lot of time on the ridges winching a roller up and down the precipitous slopes that fall from it. “You have to get on new snow early and break up the layering to prevent avalanches,” Proteau explains. “Getting a lot of patrollers to go out there to boot-pack the snow is too time-consuming and dangerous on such steep terrain. Rolling it up and down from a winch on a snowcat sitting on the ridge seemed the way to go.” Mark Bosse, a longtime Telluride mountain man and the ski area’s ace mechanic, is the creator of this wonder, and has been perfecting his invention through six iterations over 16 years. “The early ones seldom got deep enough to really mix up the layers, which is what you have to do to keep the snow from sliding. And they just went up and down in a straight line, which was okay for some of the gentler slopes we rolled back then, but not for the rock-banded steeps above Palmyra Basin.” Over time, he put the roller on wheels that penetrated the snow and, finally, two years ago, found a way to steer it into avalanche-prone pockets of snow. The current iteration is a technical marvel created for Telluride’s specific conditions. The snowcat sits on the ridge, a cable attached to the roller dangling from a boomlike winch. On a facing slope, a ski patroller holds a small yellow box, similar to a videogame controller, which operates a hydraulic arm that steers the roller. To raise or lower the cable, the patroller directs the snowcat driver sitting in the cab, who cannot see the roller over the steep drop-off. Through years of experience on the mountain, the
With its picturepostcard downtown and legendary locales like the Bear Creek backcountry, Telluride has long held a lofty position in the ski world, and it’s getting loftier.
“People want to enjoy the finer things in life. Good food and wine are a big part of that.”
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patroller — or “spotter,” as they call him when he’s operating the control — knows where the snow accumulates, where it gets windblown or sunbaked, and where it is likely to sheer off, and he can drive the roller diagonally to those spots. Thus, a wide expanse of mountainside can be churned and rolled without the snowcat having to change positions. Telluride skis bigger than its 2,000 acres, thanks to its extensive advanced-and-expert t errain. However, the slopes directly above Mountain Village — a modern ski and residential community seven miles and a 20-minute drive from town— offer ample beginner and intermediate trails, making up 60 percent of the resort’s total terrain. With a green run down from the 12,000-foot top station of Prospect Express, beginners enjoy high alpine views that usually belong only to better skiers. Telluride’s instinct for innovation first showed itself 15 years ago when it needed a better way to link the town of Telluride with Mountain Village. In the early years, guests staying in Mountain Village felt cut off from Telluride, and complained of little night life and few good restaurants. A free gondola that runs between town and village from 7 a.m. to midnight was the solution. Not only did it eliminate a long drive (convenient after drinks at dinner) and carbon dioxide in the clean mountain air, but it saved on gasoline. Both town and village gondola stations are central, and the ride over the mountains is beautiful, especially in the moonlight. In those same years, the company realized that the huge moguls on its signature runs that dropped steeply into town were scaring newly arriving guests. It realized it needed to come up with a way to groom them, but they were too steep for snowcats. They figured out that the solution was to attach a winch to an anchor at the top of a slope, and the groomers could winch themselves up and down the slopes. “Telluride was instrumental in finding a way to groom steep, black runs,” Proteau says, “an innovation that has helped revolutionize skiing in resorts all over the country. Many skiers love those steep runs … as long as they are groomed.” Here, where the challenges of the terrain met with the needs of the public, innovation blossomed. Relatively few Telluride customers hike up the Gold Hill ridge and ski Chute 9, but the Stairway to Heaven stands as a symbol of what differentiates Telluride from other ski resorts, and says a lot about the resort’s priorities. By putting in the stairway at considerable cost and labor, it chose to serve the needs of a small group of skiers, just as the restaurants serve another group of skiers looking for a unique experience. “They are all extensions of our brand,” Proteau says. “We try to set ourselves apart by creating unsurpassed experiences for our guests, whether it’s a delicious meal on an outdoor deck with amazing views or the run of a lifetime down Gold Hill Chute 9 into Palmyra Basin. If it takes putting in a stairway up a precipitous rock wall or inventing a maneuverable roller that can make challenging runs safer for skiers, then that’s a smart investment for us.” It’s an investment in making sure that skiers like me come back. Yes, for the food, and certainly for the skiing, but also just to see what they’re going to think of next. S
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Terrain accessed from the Gold Hill Steps and in Revolution Bowl bring out-of-bounds thrills within reach of skiers who aren’t looking for an all-day adventure.
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