Think Big

THINK

Extraordinary innovation and bold ideas are nothing new in Telluride

BY ERIN SPILLANE

One evening in July 1949, George Balderston, a physician at the Telluride Miners’ Hospital, was out on the town with friends when a former patient approached and publicly accused Balderston of being a “butcher”. Accounts from the time have it that the outraged Balderston was so insulted that he decided to prove his accuser wrong — by taking out his own appendix. The doctor, it seems, had been keen to remove this somewhat purposeless organ after experiencing abdominal pains, although it appears that he may also have been motivated by a curiosity to know firsthand what it felt like to undergo the procedure using only a local anesthetic.

In any case, Balderston took only 45 minutes to perform his (successful) self-appendectomy, which he did without relying on mirrors. He is said to have returned to work two days later. There is no account of whether the good doctor’s feat improved his reputation among his patients, but it is believed to be the first and only of its kind in Colorado. Perhaps his act was unnecessary (there were other doctors in Telluride at the time) and somewhat macabre, but it was so daring and unique >>

that it made headlines around the world, from Toledo, Ohio, to New South Wales, Australia, to London, England.

Balderston wasn’t the first Tellurider to think big, nor was he the last. Throughout its long and colorful history, Telluride has had an outsize share of innovators — folks inspired to think boldly and then act, the results often reverberating far beyond the walls of the box canyon and impacting spheres as diverse as science and business, transportation and the environment, medicine and mountaineering. Their accomplishments stretch from the mining era of the late 1800s, through town’s quieter years of the mid twentieth century, when mining activity in the area was winding down, and onward to Telluride’s rebirth as a year-round mecca for outdoor activity, festivals, the arts and more.

A LIGHTBULB IDEA

One of Telluride’s earliest innovators was L.L. Nunn, an entrepreneur who, in the 1890s, owned a share of the Gold King mine just south of the present-day Telluride Ski Resort. Desperate for a cheap, sustainable source of power for his mine, Nunn was aware that some of the other mine owners in the area were using Thomas Edison-championed direct-current electricity. DC was expensive and tricky to transmit over long distances, though. It wasn’t going to work for Nunn’s operation up at Gold King, so he got creative, sending his brother, Paul, a high school science teacher, to the laboratory of George Westinghouse. There, one of Westinghouse’s brilliant young inventors, Nikola Tesla, was busy working on a new format for electricity called alternating current, or AC, that was better suited for transmission over distance. Tesla, who was looking for his AC format to gain some traction in the commercial world, was thrilled to have in the Nunn brothers two people who believed in the viability of AC electricity.

Before long, L.L. Nunn had a Westinghouse generator and a Tesla-designed motor set up in the newly constructed Ames Power Plant, in Illium, west of Telluride, 2.6 miles down a tributary of the San Miguel River from his mine. The result? On June 21, 1891, the world’s first long-distance transmission of AC electricity was achieved in tiny, remote Telluride.

PRESERVING BEAR CREEK

Sometimes innovation isn’t so much about invention as it is preservation. Take Bear Creek Preserve and Rich Salem. A native of New England, Salem found his way to Telluride in the late 1980s. It was a time when land conservation was fast becoming a top priority for locals, who had set their hearts on securing a 320-acre tract in Bear Creek Canyon, the pristine, stunningly picturesque slot canyon just south of town. Their desperation was fuelled in part by the knowledge that privately owned Bear Creek lay outside town boundaries, meaning that there was nothing then to stop the construction of gated, 12,000-square-foot homes in the lower canyon. In addition, the >>

then-owners also held the water rights for Bear Creek itself.

Enter Salem. Familiar with the nuts and bolts of land conservancy and aware that the private landowners were reluctant to sell to a government entity, Salem quietly entered into discussions of his own. After a little more than a year of confidential negotiations, the owners agreed to sell to Salem, who financed the $4 million purchase with his own money. He also had a clever idea to ensure the long-term preservation of the land: Salem founded the San Miguel Conservation Foundation, using it as a vehicle to set up a conservation easement that, vitally, protected the land from future development. The easement secure, Salem then transferred ownership of the land to the Town. The Bear Creek Preserve, which turned 25 in January 2020, remains one of Telluride’s most enjoyed outdoor spaces, an astonishing example of the power of one person to benefit the lives of many.

Happy to have brought about Bear Creek’s preservation?

“Absolutely,” Salem says. “The majesty of that area is so spectacular. I still take more from it than I ever gave. I’m happy our community has this asset and that it’s preserved in perpetuity.”

THE ‘G’

Perhaps one bright idea that anyone who has spent time in Telluride is profoundly thankful for is the spark that led to construction of Telluride’s beloved Gondola. For that, we have to thank Ron Allred and Jim Wells. Childhood friends, the pair purchased ownership of the Telluride Ski Resort in the late 1970s. Determined to grow the resort into a world-class destination, Allred and his wife, Joyce, visited ski areas worldwide “to see what they did that made them special”. The couple noticed that the best resorts weren’t overrun by cars, often because they used cable cars, or gondolas, to ferry people about. Allred had a eureka moment: what Telluride needed was a gondola.

The gargantuan project was unprecedented — the Gondola, which opened in 1996, remains the only public transportation system of its kind in North America — and required both public support and easy access to financing. The problem for Allred and Wells was that, initially, they had neither.

“I think the toughest part was getting the financing [and] Ron will tell you that the toughest part was getting local government approval to build the Gondola,” says Wells. “We got the financing, but it was at a very high interest rate … even then, it involved convincing the bank that we could pay for this transportation system between two towns with real estate transfer assessments collected upon selling each property in Mountain Village.”

According to Wells, after two years of successfully making loan payments, the pair were able to replace that expensive initial financing with more reasonable, lower-cost financing. Later still, they were able to get federal government funding toward more gondola cabins to increase the Gondola’s capacity.

Today, Telluride’s iconic “G”, which is free and disabled-, stroller- and pet-friendly, carries 3 million passengers a year (and has transported more than 50 million since it opened nearly 25 years ago). >>

CONSERVATION CARRIES ON

Bear Creek was just the start for the San Miguel Conservation Foundation, which went on to preserve almost 10,000 acres of land in the county, including the Valley Floor Conservation Easement that protects the beautiful and unique 570-acre parcel adjacent to Telluride’s west end. Support the work of SMCF at

smcf-landtrust.com.

Inspirational innovators. Opposite page, from top left: A 1949 article about George Balderston from the Sunday Pictorial of London, England; L.L. Nunn and Nunn’s engineers at the Ames Power Plant, dates unknown (both photos courtesy of Telluride Historical Museum, all rights reserved); Bear Creek Canyon in the mid-1990s with a less-developed Telluride Town Park in the foreground. Above: Rich Salem at Lower Bear Creek Falls, summer 1999 (photo by Eileen Benjamin); right: construction work on the Gondola’s San Sophia Station before its opening in 1996 (photo courtesy of Telluride Historical Museum, all rights reserved).

According to the Town of Mountain Village, it would take 21 passenger buses operating on the 7.2 miles of road between Telluride and Mountain Village to maintain the Gondola’s capacity of 1,070 people per hour. Over the years, the Gondola has transported multitudes of skiers and boarders, festivarians and mountain bikers, commuters, sightseers and leaf-peepers. It has even hosted a wedding or two. In June, restricted from holding the usual large-scale graduation ceremony, Telluride High School’s Class of 2020 rode the Gondola with their families to the San Sophia mid-station to receive their diplomas.

“I would say it is an overwhelming success,” Wells says of the Gondola. “I am very proud.”

MOVING MOUNTAINS

Telluriders thinking big is not a thing of the past, either. Local Hilaree Nelson has achieved a number of “firsts” in the world of mountaineering, with each expedition seemingly more innovative than the last. In 2012, for instance, Nelson became the first woman in the world to climb two 8,000-plus-metre peaks in 24 hours, when she scaled Lhotse and its neighbor, Mount Everest. The mother of two has also achieved the first ski descent of Papursa Peak in India, the first female descent of Makalu La couloir in Nepal and is the first to have skied all five of the sacred peaks in the Altai range of Mongolia.

In September 2018, Nelson got creative again, this time climbing 27,940-foot Lhotse and then descending the summit on skis, with her climbing and life partner, Jim Morrison — another “first”.

It was an expedition that took 18 days from base camp to summit, according to Nelson, who adds that a number of factors came together serendipitously to help make the venture a success, including the decision to climb in the fall, instead of the more typical, and therefore busier, spring. This gave Nelson, Morrison and their support team the route all to themselves. The second factor was snow. “Lhotse has a genuine ski line, a plum drop straight from the top at 28,000 feet to the bottom at 21,000 feet. Thankfully, it was totally filled in. There was way more snow than I could possibly have hoped for. It meant that we could put our skis on at the top and never have to take them off.”

The weather helped too, but Nelson’s bold idea required hard work and courage, too. “We were punching through wind crust. We got about 2,500 feet up and got in the couloir and were post-holing to our knees. We got oxygen on at that point and that for sure helped, but it still took several hours. We were under a pretty intense time crunch, because the forecast was changing. The winds were going to pick up by mid-afternoon, which greatly affects temperature, snow conditions, everything, even if it is sunny. By the time we left the summit, which is in the sun, the wind wasn’t too bad. When we started skiing, it was >>

ONE INNOVATOR INSPIRES ANOTHER

Hilaree Nelson notes that fellow innovator Rich Salem played a role in what inspires her: Bear Creek. “I have spent so much of the last 20 years in Bear Creek, in the summer, in the spring, in the fall, pregnant, after having babies, training for the next thing, healing after my divorce. That place is not only a physical training center for me, it is my spiritual center too.”

Top: The Gondola on a Colorado bluebird day. Photo by Ryan Bonneau. Above: Hilaree Nelson on Lhotse, Nepal, September 2018. Photo by The North Face/Nick Kalisz. Opposite page: Nelson takes a breather on Lhotse. Photo by Jim Morrison.

windy, but we were protected in the couloir.”

With her and Morrison’s descent of the 7,000-foot line that begins just off Lhotse’s rocky, triangular summit, Nelson added to an already lustrous career. Outside magazine has described her as “one of the most accomplished expedition leaders and ski mountaineers in the world” and National Geographic named her one of their Adventurers of the Year for 2018.

Inspiration for these incredible achievements? Telluride, Nelson says, both the people who live here and the place itself. She points first to the abundance of locals who on the surface seem ordinary enough, but who often have incredible side gigs as accomplished artists, writers, academics, athletes and more: “You just find so much passion in the people who live here, and that inspires me to keep pushing with my own loves and the things that I want to accomplish.”

Her “home office” of Telluride’s backyard isn’t too shabby either. “Yes! This terrain, this geography, this landscape! It’s super rugged, which is perfect for me. Obviously, I have an affinity for high altitude and this place is one of the more unique places in the Lower 48 where you can live high and train high. I get as challenged here as I do on the expeditions.”

Adds Nelson, “And, the beauty of this place. When I am away from town for a while, when I come back, I am just blown away by how beautiful it is. It inspires me to go out and be in it and explore it and know it. I consider myself so lucky.”

NELSON’S BOLD IDEA REQUIRED HARD WORK AND COURAGE.

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