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Ski Resort Pioneers
Pioneers SKI RESORT
Courtesy Johnnie Stevens Courtesy John & Joni Knowles
40 telluride.com | 855.421.4360 Norm Clasen
Courtesy Telluride Historical Museum, all rights reserved
The story of the Telluride Ski Resort is as much about the people as it is about the mountain
BY JESSE JAMES McTIGUE & EMILY SHOFF
Bill ‘Junior’ Mahoney BILL ‘JUNIOR’ MAHONEY
“Telluride was your world,” longtime local Bill “Junior” Mahoney says, reflecting on life in the box canyon as a child during the 50s and 60s. “You didn’t go to Montrose to do your shopping, you bought everything here. There were three grocery stores. That was enough.” There was another reason for not traveling far, he adds: “The road Down Valley was treacherous. Far more winding and dangerous.” Yet, he continues, it was also just part of the mentality. You just didn’t travel as much. Everything you needed was right here. “Kids would play outside together all day. We had the freedom to roam. There was no place we couldn’t go. You could ride a bike to Society Turn and not see a single car.” Like others who’d grown up here, Bill never thought he’d live in Telluride as an adult. Both his father, Bill “Senior” Mahoney, and his grandfather worked in the mines and he knew how hard the work was. The Telluride Ski Resort’s opening changed everything. “I didn’t finish the last semester of college in order to become a ski patroller. My mom still hasn’t forgiven me for that.”
Bill worked as a patroller for 22 years before becoming the Town of Mountain Village’s director of operations. He retired in 2007, but spends part of every year in Telluride. “My favorite run is Dynamo face.”
Those early years as a patroller are still some of his favorites ever. He recalls how the patrollers would pick cards to determine which runs they got to sweep. Highest cards got top choice. “Everyone wanted the front hill side [facing the town of Telluride] sweep because it was the best snow, and it meant you finished first,” he says, explaining that back then there were no Lifts 7, 8, or 9. “In order to ski the front hill side, you had to take five chairs to get to the top of 6, ski to town and take a bus back to the day lodge. You would do it because it was great snow, but it took a long time.”
For John and Joni Knowles, the Telluride Ski Resort is the reason they are married. “There are so many highlights in my life in Telluride, but the biggest is that it brought me to my wife,” John says. “We were married here in ’83.” Both joined the ski area’s staff in the early years. Joni started working in 1973, first as a lift operator in the winters and in the Powderhouse, a restaurant where Esperanza’s is today, before eventually joining the Telluride Ski Patrol. “The managers were good to us then,” she recalls of her time as a liftie. “If it was a powder day and the mountain was slow, they’d watch the lift for us so that we could take a few laps.”
Unlike most who worked on the mountain, Joni found it silly to take the bus to the day lodge in Mountain Village (the only section of the mountain that had lifts in the 70s.) “I preferred to Nordic ski up Boomerang Road,” she says, referring to an old mining road that runs up the south side of the Telluride valley. “Then I could just ski home at the end of the day.” True to old-school Telluride form, Joni once used those skis to ski Zulu Queen before anyone else had been on it. “It was as soft as a cloud.”
John, who’d discovered Telluride when he was ski-bumming around the West, found a different solution to Telluride’s 1970s-era housing crisis. “I lived in the Gorrono cabin for four years,” he explains, adding that friends ribbed him for pulling the ultimate hippy move, but that he loved it. “Built a loft in there and it became my Swiss Family Robinson home.”
Like Joni, John worked a variety of jobs on the mountain, everything from trail crew and lift services to ski patrol and mountain operations. Eventually he had the opportunity to be involved in the early days of the terrain park. John finally retired from the resort in the summer of 2008. “I was the lucky one,” he chuckles, reflecting on his time with the ski area. “I had so many opportunities. I rarely said no to work, or maybe I didn’t know how to.” While researching ski areas, John traveled all over Canada and Europe. “I never would have thought that a kid who dropped out of college would end up leading the life I’ve had,” he reflects. “I consider my work for the Telluride Ski Resort my college education. Opportunities abroad. Working with ski area personnel, San Miguel County, Forest Service, local communities and industry professionals. It all comes down to relationships.”
The Knowles had a son, George, and raised him in their home in Fall Creek. George is a celebrity in his own right — an award-winning independent filmmaker whose work has appeared in festivals the world over, including Mountainfilm in Telluride, where his acclaimed 2014 short 14.c is a locals’ (and critics’) favorite.
Thinking back on their years in Telluride, John and Joni say they have nothing but gratitude for the place they’ve called home for the past 50 years. “It’s a good way of life,” John says. “The hiking, biking and skiing, climbing mountains. There was never a shortage of work for those who wanted it. We are fortunate to call this community home.” — Emily Shoff
TOM TAYLOR
Like many of Telluride’s early patrollers, Tom was living in Aspen when he heard about the opening of a new ski area in the southwest corner of the state. “Everyone seemed to really like the place.” Of his start in
Telluride, he remarks, “It was delightful. That first year there was so much snow, and there weren’t many people skiing.
When we weren’t rescuing people, we were skiing knee-deep, untouched powder.”
His favorite run in those early days was Bushwhacker. “Back then it was closed to the public, only patrol could ski it. It was a beautiful run. North-facing with so much powder, sometimes you couldn’t ski through it.”
Tom wore many hats to make ends meet in town, working most notably as a carpenter during the summers. At one point, he also got training to be a locksmith, only to discover that there wasn’t much need for his services since no one locked their door in Telluride.
As the area grew, though, and newcomers started arriving in town, there was more of a need for secure doors. “Suddenly, everyone needed a locksmith,” he notes. These days, Tom says that he still loves to ski, but tends to stick to Lift 4. “Those bumps on 9 get so hard. I still love doing a front-side lap though. Coming down Lookout, skiing home.” — Emily Shoff
“The view still stuns me,” Tom “Socko” Sokolowski says of the iconic vista of the Valley Floor, stretching east to Telluride and the mountains behind it. “Even after all these years.” And Socko has seen some years in Telluride. One of the resort’s longest-serving employees, this year is his 49th year with the Telluride Ski Patrol. “I was hired the first year the mountain was open, but I wasn’t a strong enough skier yet to work patrol.” In fact, Socko had moved out to Aspen from Michigan and skied just a handful of times when he caught wind of Telluride’s opening. He had visited the town briefly in 1970 and knew he loved the place.
Surviving in Telluride wasn’t easy when he moved to town in 1972, he says. The first summer he made just $2.75 an hour clearing trails. When he started work on the mountain, he took a pay cut. He lucked out when a friend agreed to rent her house out to him.
Reflecting on some of that early work on the mountain, Socko says, “We cleared trees without realizing fully what we were doing. It didn’t dawn on me that we were building a ski area.” That first year, Telluride put in five ski lifts (believed to be the only time a ski area has erected that many lifts in a single year) thanks in part to the determined work crews, including Socko.
Socko says at 77, he plans to continue patrolling. “I work with second-generation patrollers. These are guys I held as babies. I love the work. Getting out there helping people. The views at the start of the day, and at the end of the day. These mountains are just spectacular.” — Emily Shoff
Socko
JOHNNIE STEVENS
“Pure, simple and perfect.” Those are the words Johnnie Stevens, a former ski patroller, patrol director and chief operating officer at the Telluride Ski Resort, uses to describe his childhood in Telluride. “You worked, you skied, you took care of one another,” he says. “It was a real community.” He lists the many immigrants who occupied the various parts of town — Swedes and Finns in the West End, Italians around St. Patrick’s Catholic Church. “Telluride was a very small New York City in its diversity during that time. There were also a lot of widows, women whose husbands had died in the mine. I used ‘You worked, to take them their groceries while working in the grocery stores as a teen, just so they’d have you skied, you some company.” took care of
As a kid, Johnnie wondered if he’d live in one another.’ Telluride when he grew up. Sure, the future of Colorado’s mining industry was uncertain Johnnie Stevens and the work was hard, but he had a deep and abiding love for Telluride and its backcountry, a love shared by his family, including his dad, who worked for a local mine. (“We felt blessed to live here,” Johnnie says.) As a young man, he worked summers in the mine and attended Western State College during the school year, where he studied history. He went on to graduate school before ultimately landing in the Pentagon during the Vietnam War. “It was just sheer luck that a ski resort was opening up and they wanted my help getting it off the ground,” recalls Johnnie, who was named to the Colorado Ski Hall of Fame in 2004.
Courtesy Johnnie Stevens
Johnnie’s time in the Pentagon convinced him that returning to his childhood town was the right direction. “There were men there who were counting down the time left until they could retire and really start living. Most had at least 15 years more to go.” He knew the same might happen to him if he stayed, and that he’d live a more prestigious life but a far less enchanting one.
“I look back at my life and can’t think of anyone who has had a better ride than me,” Johnnie says, reflecting on the recent transplants to town. “Folks moving here are looking to do what I’ve gotten to do my whole life.” — Emily Shoff
DICK LANNING & ANNIE VARIELLE SAVATH
Aclassic black-and-white picture hangs at the Telluride Historical Museum: seven skiers stretched diagonally, clipped into their skis and dressed in matching Bogner ski outfits (see right). The first in line is Dick Lanning, the Telluride Ski and Snowboard School’s first director. He squints at the camera and has a distinct side part, sideburns and a faint mustache. Enamored with skiing and drawn to a maverick lifestyle, Dick says he was drawn to this place and time: Telluride 1971.
Dick’s love for skiing started at age 12 in Minneapolis, where he skied in city parks. He continued skiing recreationally in college, when he recalls spotting his first ski instructor with a Professional Ski Instructors of America patch on his jacket. Says Dick, “I didn’t even know that [instructing] existed. I said, ‘I got to do that’.”
And so, he did.
That semester in college, Dick convinced a professor to give him credit for earning PSIA accreditation. In 1965, he got a job in Aspen, then, a few years later, he heard a new ski area was forming in Telluride and that they needed a ski school director. He had the certification and experience, and he got the job. “It was an adventurous group willing to take a gamble,” he remarks. “We didn’t know if it would succeed or not.”
While in Telluride in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, Dick also owned and operated a ski store, Lanning’s, which had three locations, and he served on the school board, helping create the Telluride School District’s Winter PE program, which sees local students spend a day a week on the mountain, taking lessons. “It was a shame to be in the town and not be able to learn to ski,” he notes.
About a year after Dick arrived, a young French-certified ski instructor named Annie Varielle also found her way to Telluride. It was the spring of 1972 and she was on a road trip with her then-husband, Pierre, when the pair happened to stop for gas in Ouray, north of Telluride. “The gas station attendant said something about a ski resort on the other side of the mountain,” Annie recalls, adding that they decided to check it out.
Driving into Telluride all those years ago, Annie remembers dogs in the street and boarded-up houses. They stayed at the New Sheridan Hotel and went to the Roma, one of the few restaurants in town then, for breakfast. There, she saw miner-turned-ski-area-consultant Senior Mahoney and his crew getting ready to head up on the mountain. Says Annie, “We went snowcat skiing with them all day. At end, I had a job in ski school.”
Those first years, Annie also ran Chez Pierre, a French restaurant. “People complain how hard it is to make it in Telluride now,” she says. “It was different, but just as hard. Housing wasn’t together, there was no insulation, we heated with coal and there was no business and no jobs.”
Annie eventually sold the restaurant and got divorced before meeting and marrying Robert Savath, a budding local politician, construction worker and ski school instructor. In 1978, Ron Allred bought the Telluride Ski Resort and hired Annie as the director of its ski school, a progressive move for a small resort in a sector where female leadership was rare. “In France there were no women ski school directors,” Annie says. “That was reserved for World Cup-level skiers who were retired. I thought maybe I’ll do it for a few years.” Annie would hold the role until 2001, going on to become a PSIA examiner and creating marquee programming like Women’s Week, as well as teaching for 40 years.
As Annie shares stories about the early days of the ski school in her charming French accent, known so well to locals and her many devoted students, she retains a youthful glow and knowing smile, never forgetting the hunch — prompted by the gas station attendant in Ouray — that sent her to in search of a new ski area called Telluride back in 1972.
“The skiing was fabulous, no lines and no bumps.” she says of her years in Telluride. “And, the ski school, it’s a family, especially the old-timers. There are really good skiers and good teachers here.” — Jesse James McTigue
Courtesy Dick Lanning
Norm Clasen
Annie Savath
