Top left, Frank B. Wilson and a friend with the town of Telluride in the background. Date unknown. Photo courtesy of the Telluride Historical Museum, all rights reserved.
22
telluride.com | 855.421.4360
Ryan Bonneau
D
eb Pera and Jamey Schuler’s childhoods were idyllic. The pair are old friends who grew up in the Telluride of the very late 1950s and 1960s. They remember a childhood spent playing outdoors in summer and skiing a rope tow in winter. It was a small, close-knit community back then. Recalls Pera, laughing, “If there was a stranger in town, we all knew it.” Says Schuler, “The thing I remember most about Telluride in those days is that it was like a dream world for a kid.” When she was in sixth grade, Pera remembers that she began to hear talk at the dinner table and in her parents’ hardware store of something new to their community: a ski area. “I was a kid, so I wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but it sounded exciting,” she says. A few years later, in December 1972, a ski area in Telluride opened, but how that momentous event went from dinner-table talk to reality is a story that began decades earlier and has its root in the unshakeable belief of a group of locals that their backyard had all the makings of a world-class ski resort. >>
