Seven Generations in Telluride

Deb Pera shares her love for this place through her family’s stories

BY EMILY SHOFF

Growing up as a fifth-generation Tellurider, Deb Pera knew there was no better place to call home. “As a young girl, I would look up at Ajax Mountain and the surrounding peaks and think I must be the luckiest girl to live here.”

Her father, Jack Pera, who spent the first few years of his life in the mining camp at the Tomboy Mine, and who passed only recently in 2020, was a huge part of that relationship to the outdoors and to Telluride, according to Deb. “We lived outside,” she says, recounting the hikes they did growing up. “My dad was essentially a professional photographer. He took that camera everywhere he went, capturing the beauty of the mountains and the wildlife that called it home.”

The Pera family’s connection to Telluride started when Deb’s great-great grandparents immigrated here from Finland. “They were miners, as were

their children,” she says recounting stories from their lives up in Tomboy. “They would listen to the radio; that was their big splurge. It was up high so would capture a lot of stations. Many nights that was their only entertainment.”

Living 2,000 feet above Telluride had its challenges. “My grandparents moved to Tomboy with my dad when he was only 2. In March, later that

year, my grandmother walked down from the mine to give birth to my aunt, returning three weeks later. It was the trip back up that was the hard part, traveling up through the snow, on snowshoes, with a baby on her back and a 2-year-old.”

Although previous generations had all been miners, Jack took a different path, opening up the local hardware store with Deb’s mother, Davine, in

1969 and running it until 1981. Locals knew Jack as an invested community member. “He loved every aspect of his life here,” Deb explains, describing her dad’s involvement with the creation of the Imogene Pass Run, his passionate support for the Telluride High School sports teams and his weekly column at the local newspaper, where he commented on all aspects of town life from politics to the environment. “The outdoors remained his passion for his entire life. He wanted to protect Telluride’s open spaces for future generations,” she says, explaining the nonprofit he helped to found, Sheep Mountain Alliance, a local wilderness advocacy group formed in reaction to proposed logging on Sheep Mountain. “He just could not stand the thought of losing Sheep, his favorite mountain, which he could view from their cabin out at Trout Lake.”

“My parents’ legacy is felt everywhere here,” Deb says, detailing her mom’s involvement with a much-loved, long-running local charity, Angel Baskets.

Deb still remembers the delight she felt when the ski mountain opened. “I already loved skiing on Kid’s Hill, at Stoner [a former ski area south of Telluride] and up at Lizard Head. Having those first few lifts open up was a dream come true.” But skiing back then was not for the faint of heart. “Chair 5 was so long and so cold,” she says. “Then you had to take Chair 6 to get to the top, to See Forever. Then you had to take the bus all the way back to town. Everyone was so excited when they finally opened Coonskin and you could ski the front side” of the mountain, which fronts onto the town of Telluride.

Deb adds that she didn’t understand why locals initially feared the arrival of the ski resort and complained that Telluride was just going to “turn into Aspen.” “To me, as a teenager, this sounded like a good thing; town was very quiet,” she says, explaining that when she was in sixth grade, Telluride’s population was only 500 residents. “I thought we could use a little life here.”

As it was, the changes were slow to come. “For a long time, there was only one ski bus bringing guests up to town, mostly from Texas. You knew it when that one bus arrived. You could feel the difference on main street. There were new people in town.”

She left Telluride for several years to get an education and to raise her two kids. “We lived for a long time in Carbondale, which is another great small Colorado town. But I missed this place.

Telluride’s my home.”

The pandemic gave her an even deeper sense of connection to Telluride. “It gave me a lot of gratitude for this place,” Deb says, reflecting on the many things that make this town what it is: the people, the community, the natural world. “I’ve been trying to carve out more time in my life for gratitude since then. We have so many things to be thankful for.”

These days that’s especially the case for Deb. Her son lives here as do her grandchildren, making them the seventh generation of the Pera family to do so. “The other day, I went skiing with my granddaughter. We were riding up Chair 7 and I was sharing all these stories of how it used to be. It struck me that I was just like my grandmother, who lived until she was 105. This is how we come to love a place. Through its stories.”