14 minute read
Pickaxe to Powder
Deb 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. >>
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. Ryan Bonneau
The visionaries who built on Telluride’s mining past to create its ski town future
BY ERIN SPILLANE
They based that belief on their deep knowledge of and love for that backyard. After all, though they worked hard in the mine and elsewhere, many spent much of their free time skiing these mountains every chance they got.
In Telluride, it wasn’t that there were miners before the first skiers, it’s that the miners were the first skiers.
FIRST TRACKS
Early in Telluride’s history, mine workers, often Scandinavian, used skis to move around the high-elevation mining camps and travel to town. Johnnie Stevens, a central figure in the development of the ski area, notes that it was in the 1920s when skiing here began to transition into a leisure activity: “There was a guy, a champion ski jumper in around 1923. He came to Telluride and said there could be a nice ski club because of the elevation and the beauty. There was another fella who ran the drug store. He was a big character around here and his name was Frank Wilson. He was skiing with the Telluride Ski Club back in the 1920s up on Lizard Head Pass.”
In the 1930s, a local teacher built a rope tow behind the Beaver Pond near Town Park. “He got Billy Mahoney and his brother skiing on that thing,” Stevens says, adding, “There was some recreational skiing from the 1930s onward for sure.”
In the early 1960s, a group of locals put an old car on blocks in Town Park to the right of Firecracker Hill. They modified the rear wheel to act as a sheave and ran a rope up the hill to another wheel fixed to a tree above Bear Creek Road. Says Stevens. “We skied that rope tow every Saturday and Sunday in the winter.”
Later, the mining company provided an electric motor and they moved the car to the bottom of Kids’ Hill to erect two rope tows. In those days, Telluriders also skied towed behind cars — Stevens was once towed all the way to Rico, 30 miles away — and enjoyed backcountry skiing, often in groups led by Senior Mahoney. “He was a few years older than me and he’d call my mom and ask if I could go out. We’d go in the spring and summer and we’d climb up and ski these mountains.”
Stevens points out that these years were instrumental in creating a small culture of skiing that in turn got some locals dreaming of a ski area. Chief among those dreamers was Senior Mahoney.
‘ANYPLACE THERE WAS SNOW’ It is impossible to talk about the founding of the Telluride Ski Resort without talking about Senior Mahoney. Mahoney was 2 years old when he and his family moved to Telluride. He was one of five boys who, the story goes, took their dad’s old skis
This page, top, Beth Batcheller skiing on the roof of her house at Tomboy Mine, c. 1907; inset left, Frank B. Wilson and two intrepid skiers c. 1920; main photo, skiers at Sunnyside Mine, 1910. Opposite, bottom, Rope tow c. 1960. Photos courtesy of the Telluride Historical Museum, all rights reserved. Opposite, top, Bill Mahoney, Jr., skiing towed behind a car on Main Street. Photo courtesy of the Senior Mahoney Collection.
and found another pair and between them skied everything they could: snowy streets in town, rope tows, behind cars and, of course, the backcountry.
“Sneffels to Imogene Pass to Bridal Veil Basin, over to Columbine Lake and all the valleys in the Ophir area. Any place there was snow,” Mahoney says in Senior: 82 Winters in Telluride, a 2018 film by Ben Knight and Travis Rummel.
When he wasn’t skiing, Mahoney worked in the mine, beginning as a tram loader at the age of 15 and progressing over the years to mine foreman.
The idea of a ski area seems to have crystallized for Mahoney in the late 1950s, according to his son, Bill Mahoney, Jr. “My mom and I don’t recall that it had anything to do with worrying about the mine closing,” he remembers. “Dad just loved skiing. He grew up skiing and us kids grew up skiing and he thought a ski area in Telluride would be a really great thing.”
He wasn’t alone, Jamey Schuler points out. “There was a whole group of people — Billy Mahoney, Doyle and Betty Ruth Duncan, Deb’s parents, my parents and others in the community — who envisioned and supported the development of the ski area.”
In 1958, locals created Telluride Ski, Inc. With funds donated by the local Elks Lodge, Pete Seibert, well known for developing Vail, came down for a day to assess the area’s suitability for a ski area, but without a financial backer, the effort subsequently fizzled out.
Stevens recalls another initiative from the mid1960s. “Folks said, ‘maybe if we could just get one chairlift.’ They got money together and went to a company out of Denver to design a lift that would go up to Camel’s Garden, where Lift 8 goes now. Whoever the consultant was, he absconded with the money and not a damn thing happened.”
The dreamers remained undaunted, which was just as well, because Telluride’s fortunes were about to change.
ENTER JOE ZOLINE
Joern and Louise Gerdts found their way to Telluride in the early 1960s. Much taken with its beauty, they bought a summer home here and even wrote an article in Skiing magazine extolling its potential as a ski area. The piece, which ran in 1967, finished with the question “Is there a financier in the audience?”
As it turns out, there was and, amazingly, he was seated next to Joern Gerdts on a flight soon after. His name was Joe Zoline, a successful California lawyer and businessman and the owner of an Aspen cattle ranch. In the air, Gerdts talked passionately about Telluride, in particular the Gorrono Ranch, according to Zoline’s daughter, Pam Lifton-Zoline.
Located in the middle of what would become the ski area, the tract was about to be broken up and sold as smaller parcels. Says Lifton-Zoline, “All the land that would be necessary for a ski area base was about to be sold off.”
Adds her husband, John Lifton-Zoline, “Joern told Joe that if that sale took place and if ownership was broken up that way, there would never be a ski area. And Joe did something that was entirely unlike himself, he went and bought the entire ranch sight unseen. They [Joe and his wife, Janice “Jebby” Zoline] drove down to Telluride to see what they had bought and immediately realized that although it was a critical piece of property, it was only a tiny piece.”
Over the next several months, Zoline went on to acquire over 4,000 acres in 17 different transactions, including, significantly and fortuitously, the vast Adams Ranch tract in what is now Mountain Village.
MUSEUM CELEBRATES SKI HISTORY Want to explore further Telluride’s transition from mining town to ski resort? The Telluride Historical Museum has a permanent exhibit in its newly updated Mahoney Gallery, where visitors can examine artifacts from this fascinating period in local history and view We Skied It, a film that looks at the history of skiing in the area from the 1920s to the 1970s. In addition, museum staff are currently putting together next year’s annual exhibit, scheduled to open in the summer, which celebrates the Telluride Ski Resort as it approaches its 50th birthday on Dec. 22, 2022. For more, go to telluridemuseum.org.
Bill Mahoney, Jr.
This page, top left (l-r) Joe Zoline, Senior Mahoney and ski area employee Al Bridges. Opposite, inset lower right, cutting the ribbon on the new Telluride Ski Area, Dec. 22. 1972. Photos courtesy of the Telluride Historical Museum, all rights reserved. This page inset below, Senior Mahoney and Emile Allais on the soon-to-be Telluride Ski Area, 1971. Photo courtesy of the Senior Mahoney Collection. Bottom, Johnnie Stevens skiing in Lena Basin in the backcountry south of Telluride 1968. Photo courtesy of Johnnie Stevens.
BIG MOMENTS
Zoline also wanted to get to know Telluride, and here Bill Mahoney, Jr., takes up the story. “My mom remembers that Joe went down to the Roma, which was one of the few businesses at the time, and went in to get something to eat. He was talking to the owner, Kate Mulvey, about who he should talk to and she said, ‘Well, you should talk to Bill Mahoney because he really knows more about skiing here than anyone.’ They met and it just went from there.”
For a period after that, Senior Mahoney worked days in the mine and every other waking moment as a consultant for Zoline. Then, in the summer of 1970, he left the mine to become the nascent ski area’s second employee (his wife, Twylla Ma-
‘JOE DID SOMETHING
THAT WAS ENTIRELY honey, was the first). Says UNLIKE HIMSELF, HE Bill Jr., “I remember, my WENT AND BOUGHT sister, myself and my mom THE ENTIRE RANCH were all home and Dad came SIGHT UNSEEN.’ in and said that he had been offered a job with the ski John Lifton-Zoline area and was going to quit the mine. That was a pretty big moment that I will never forget. My mom said, ‘You know, Billy, this is going to change everything here.’ And he said, ‘You’re right.’ ” Zoline also brought in Emile Allais, a Frenchman and champion skier who had become a ski area designer, for advice. The Lifton-Zolines say Allais and Senior Mahoney skied together day after day. “We think they were testing each other,” says John Lifton-Zoline, chuckling. “Emile to see how Billy would stand up to Olympic standards and Billy to see how Emile would stand up to the vagaries of the mountain.” Another piece of the puzzle was obtaining the necessary U.S. Forest Service permissions. Senior Mahoney had this task and Stevens, who was another of the ski area’s earliest employees, remembers some quick thinking by Mahoney when a Forest Service official asked him to indicate on a map the boundaries. “I give Billy credit,” says Stevens. “He took a yellow pen and drew the permit boundary that
Sadly, three of the giants of this pivotal period of Telluride history passed away in the past year or so. On Oct. 17, 2020, Robert “Bucky” Schuler died at his Tucson home, just days after his 83rd birthday, survived by his wife of 64 years, Pat; his four children, including Jamey Schuler; and seven grandchildren. A third-generation Tellurider, former town councilmember and volunteer firefighter, Schuler was a highly respected business owner who sold a key property, the Transfer Warehouse, to Joe Zoline and donated the land at the top of Lift 9 where Giuseppe’s sits today.
On the very same day that Schuler passed away, the Telluride community lost another prominent member: Jack Pera at his Telluride home, also at the age of 83. Pera was survived by his mother, Allene; his wife of 64 years, Davine; three daughters, including Deb Pera; six grandchildren; and a great-grandchild. Pera is remembered for his passionate support of the Telluride High School basketball teams; his founding of Sheep Mountain Alliance, a local conservation nonprofit; his association as both participant and organizer of the Imogene Pass Run; the colorful columns he wrote for the local newspaper; and the hardware store that he and Davine opened in 1969.
And, in January 2021, Senior Mahoney passed away at the age of 92, leaving his wife of more than 70 years, Twylla; two children, including Bill “Junior” Mahoney; three grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. Lauded as the driving force behind the successful founding of the ski resort and the embodiment of Telluride’s mining past and its ski resort present, Mahoney, who was the ski area’s first mountain manager and served on Telluride Town Council for a number of years, was inducted into the Colorado Ski Hall of Fame in 1997. The highest run on the Telluride Ski Resort bears his name, a gnarly double-black known simply as “Senior’s”.
went up to the top of Plunge Lift, up to the top of Gold Hill and Palmyra Peak, down the west side of Prospect Basin and Bald Mountain. Once he did that, it meant that we could be world class because of all the terrain. That, to me, was a miracle.”
A FLURRY OF ACTIVITY
Beginning in the summer of 1970, a number of locals that included the Mahoneys, Stevens, Jim Gowdy, Alan Ranta, Ed Bowers and more began cutting trails. Says Stevens, “We were obsessed with getting runs cut and maybe somehow Telluride would become a good ski resort.”
Bill Mahoney, Jr., recalls early trail work on terrain today served by Lifts 2, 4 and 10, as well as on the “front side”, the Telluride side, of the mountain, in part to facilitate snowcat skiing, which the still-developing ski area offered in the winters of 1970-71 and 1971-72.
Then came the summer of 1972. The ski area was scheduled to open the following December and Bill Mahoney, Jr., describes a magical, but tiring, time: “When the whole thing was happening and the chairlifts were ordered and we were cutting lift lines and digging holes for foundations and the companies came in to build the chairlifts and we had some French-Canadian loggers come in to help with trails and we were building the day lodge, the excitement was incredible. The fact that we got five chairlifts up and operational in one summer and hired all the people necessary for a ski area — we all worked very hard, but I think Dad’s enthusiasm just rubbed off on the rest of us.”
OPENING DAY
The Telluride Ski Area, as it was then called, opened on Dec. 22, 1972 with a ribboncutting ceremony. It was a momentous day.
“When those first chairlifts starting going around and people were getting on them and skiing, that was a very exciting moment for Dad, for all of us,” Bill Mahoney, Jr., says.
Recalls Pam Lifton-Zoline, “My dad was joyous. I think he felt like it was a huge accomplishment. An awful lot of people who start these visionary projects don’t have the stamina to carry them through, but my dad had the smarts and the grit.”
Like so many others, Johnnie Stevens had spent the last few years doing pretty much anything needed to get the ski area open. (Stevens would go on to work as a ski patroller, then patrol director, before rising through the ranks to ultimately become chief operating officer in later years — roles that would earn him a place in the Colorado Ski Hall of Fame.) “I’ll never forget Opening Day,” he says. “It was emotional, incredible.”
Stevens muses on that time and adds, “We were so lucky. The fact that Joe was able to buy all of the land and had a vision for a ski area. The fact that we who were raised here had such a passion for this project because we knew this was an opportunity that would allow us to stay in the place we loved. We worked damn hard to make it happen. And what a ride it was.”
Pam Lifton-Zoline
