24 minute read
Golden Age
Telluride Ski Resort | Aurelie Slegers
FIVE DECADES OF THE TELLURIDE SKI RESORT
Fifty years ago, on Dec. 22, 1972, the ribbon was cut on a new ski area. Nestled in the northern San Juans of southwestern Colorado and gifted with stunning scenery, lighter-than-air powder and a community certain that its mountain was something special, the upstart Telluride Ski Area, as it was called then, has since evolved into an award-winning resort that somehow never lost its rough-around-the-edges charm or the closeknit community at its core.
The following pages detail each of the five decades of the Telluride Ski Resort, bringing together the characters, vision, hard work and grit that was needed to show the world what anyone who has ever skied or snowboarded Telluride knows to be true: It’s the best place on earth.
Senior Mahoney Collection
Freedom and Possibility
BY JENNIFER JULIA
In the early 1970s, Telluride found itself facing an uncertain future. With mineral prices falling and only one mine left, some businesses were boarding up and some residents were packing their bags. It would take a unique breed of individuals to transform this dusty little burg into a bona fide ski resort, but that’s just the type of people this valley seems to attract. Scrappy, resilient, innovative and loaded with heart is probably the best way to describe the early advocates of the Telluride Ski Resort.
By the late 1960s, locals had already been skiing recreationally for decades. Telluriders like Billy “Senior” Mahoney, his son, Bill “Junior” Mahoney, and Johnnie Stevens spent their free time getting hauled up Firecracker Hill on a homemade rope tow powered by an old car mounted on blocks. They also climbed the mountains on foot to ski the vast backcountry and weren’t opposed to skiing pulled behind cars for the fun of it. So, by the time Joe Zoline came to town in 1967, his think-outside-the-box intellect found a like-minded energy here, and a long-standing local dream to create a ski area would finally become a reality. Zoline was the son of Ukrainian immigrants and a successful, selfmade corporate lawyer. His wife, Janice “Jebby” Zoline, also recognized Telluride’s potential and shared her husband’s adventurous spirit. Together the couple purchased enormous tracts of land in what would become the heart of the ski area and Mountain Village, ultimately acquiring more than 4,000 acres in 17 transactions.
The Zolines knew that preserving the intimate scale of the town was critical in developing what they were certain would one day become an international destination and worked with the Town of Telluride and San Miguel County to put protective measures into place. “My dad was a progressive person,” his daughter Pamela Lifton-Zoline explains. “He was a thoughtful planner and he was very concerned that Telluride and the Telluride valley would be ruined by growth, and he came up with the idea of a mountain village connected to the town by a gondola as a planning mechanism to save them.”
The Zolines joined forces with Mahoney, whom they hired as a consultant for the emerging ski area and obtained the necessary U.S. Forest Service permits. By the summer of 1970, a group of hearty, passionate locals began cutting the first trails and Mahoney was named the ski area’s mountain manager. Over the next two years, with the critical aid of Swiss financial backers, the team purchased and installed five chairlifts and built a day lodge. It was a massive undertaking with a momentous result: on Dec. 22, 1972, a ribbon was cut
BY THE SUMMER OF 1970, A and the Telluride Ski Area was GROUP OF HEARTY, PASSIONATE officially open. (The Telluride
LOCALS BEGAN CUTTING Ski Area would become the TelTHE FIRST TRAILS. luride Ski Resort in later years. For a brief period in the resort’s planning stages, consultants gave it the provisional name of “The Big T”, although the more conventional moniker is what stuck.) From the get-go, the fledgling resort proved itself a magical place to slide on snow. Marti Martin Kuntz, who moved to town in 1976, describes the landscape of those initial years: “Ski runs were very narrow then, especially the Plunge. And the lifts didn’t go to the top of the runs — you’d take Chair 6, then hike up to Mammoth and ski all of that powder. It was spectacular.” Six years after her arrival in Telluride, Martin Kuntz would break the women’s speed skiing record and be lauded internationally as the fastest woman in the world. Her recollections of Telluride’s early days describe its spirit of freedom and possibility. “Everything was fun and new, and everyone could find a place within it,” she says with a smile. “Telluride was affordable. It was doable. It was a place where forward thinkers brought their smarts and invested them into building Telluride.”
MINERS & SKIERS
The idea that the Telluride Ski Resort brought a ghost town back to life isn’t entirely the case. It’s true that by the early 1970s there was only one mining operation left in town, the Idarado, but, according to local writer Samantha Tisdel Wright in her 10-part series, The Mine Next Door, the discovery of a rich ore body, ironically the same year the resort opened, meant that by “the end of 1974, Idarado was the second biggest mine in Colorado.” She adds that at this time “the mine had almost 500 employees and was milling a whopping 1,800 tons of ore per day, with 21 miles of active tunnels underground.” Spiraling costs eventually overtook profits, however, and in 1978 Telluride’s last mine closed permanently. All this means that for a half-dozen years skiers clomped down main street, skis hoisted on their shoulders as they headed to the slopes, while the busy mine’s trucks trundled to and fro. A snapshot of 1970s Telluride.
1970s
Poster above, map facing page, poster page 33 all courtesy Colorado Snowsports Museum & Hall of Fame
Linde Waidhofer
Doug Berry
Doug Berry
Fulfilling the Dream
BY JESSE JAMES McTIGUE
The vision Stevens refers to started in 1978 when development partners Ron Allred and Jim Wells, who had previously developed land in Avon, beside Beaver Creek Resort, bought a majority interest in the Telluride Ski Resort. Says Stevens, “Ron knew he couldn’t expand the mountain unless he had real estate. He knew a lot. We were a good band.”
Allred, too, praises “the band” from those early days, which included Senior Mahoney and Stevens, who would go on to become the mountain’s chief operating officer. “We were all learning, but we got to the point where we knew what we were doing and we worked well together. We were a good team.”
However, as the team got to work, they quickly learned that having a vision was a lot easier than executing it. For instance, it would take approximately five years to get over 25 approvals from local, state and even federal government entities like the U.S. Forest Service before they could begin work on Mountain Village, then a planned-use development. Recalls Stevens, “The politics were a blood bath. A lot of the concerns people had were legitimate, but the battles back then were just as extreme as today.”
In addition to the legal hurdles, the ski resort lacked sufficient infrastructure. “We put in snowmaking in ’80, but the runs all had western exposures and were bare, the lifts were in the wrong places and we had no bed base,” Stevens muses. “When you looked at us in ’81, it didn’t seem like we’d make it.”
At the time, skiers had to take five lifts and a short hike to reach the top of the mountain, which then went as far as the top of what is now Lift 9. The main mode of transportation be-
tween the town of Telluride and Mountain Village was buses. Stevens remembers a trip to Europe in 1981 to look at detachable lifts, a relatively new technology, with Allred; his wife, Joyce; then-Mountain Manager Terry Fernald; engineer Ike Shisler; and the resort’s then-president, Brian Rapp. Five years later, in 1986, Telluride got its first detachable, Lift 10, the Sunshine Express. The lift travels over 10,875 feet and at the time was the longest chairlift in the world. “When we built Lift 10, everyone made fun of it,” Stevens says. “Everyone called it the lift to nowhere. It made sense later on when Prospect went in. But, when I look at ‘WHEN YOU LOOKED the ‘80s, that is when we started to fulfill the
AT US IN ’81’ IT dream.”
DIDN’T SEEM LIKE Further moves came with improved
WE’D MAKE IT.’ snowmaking, the addition of four new lifts in the summer of 1985 alone and the Johnnie Stevens construction of Giuseppe’s restaurant. The resort was also instrumental in the planning process for the Telluride Regional Airport, which opened in 1984 and saw commercial service begin in 1985. “We knew we had to have an airport,” Allred says. Stevens recalls that Allred and Wells had a 20-year plan to develop the infrastructure necessary for the Telluride Ski Resort and the communities of Telluride and Mountain Village to survive and thrive. The 1980s saw the completion of the early stages of that plan. Says Stevens, “But for the natural beauty and the pure potential of this place, but for the landowners who sold to Joe Zoline, but for Joe himself, Billy Mahoney and Allred and Wells — and but for all the laborers and workers. We just kept the vision. Everything was worth it. It was just a long journey.”
NAME GAME
Telluride’s history lives on in its trail names thanks to Senior Mahoney and Johnnie Stevens, who pushed to have many of them pay tribute to the area’s fascinating past, in particular its role as a mining town. Other times, the story behind the trail name is more personal, like Kant-Mak-M. Ron Allred explains that each of the seven kids in his and wife Joyce’s blended family asked to have a run named for them. So, Allred told them to find one name that covered them all. Their solution was Kant-Mak-M, an anagram using each child’s first initial. Another is Jaws, the challenging black run off Lift 8, which Allred named for resort co-owner (and his childhood best friend) Jim Wells, whose full name is James Alva Wells.
1980s
Bobbi T. Smith
Eric Limon Courtesy Telluride Ski Resort
FRIENDS THAT SKI TOGETHER
The Skeezers is a group of longtime locals in their 60s, 70s and 80s who ski together weekly. Largely comprised of some of the original ski bums who moved to Telluride in the 1970s, plus a few others who were raised here, the Skeezers (as their kids affectionately call them) have been skiing and socializing together since 1992, when, local legend has it, old-school ski patrollers Tom Taylor, Johnnie Stevens, Alan Ranta and Bill Cantlin began these Friday afternoon on-mountain meet-ups.
A slew of infrastructure
BY MARTINIQUE DAVIS
At the Telluride Ski Resort, they’ll let you take the Plunge … but they won’t take American Express. When Visa aired a commercial with this tagline during the 1994 Lillehammer Winter Olympics, it was the first time Telluride had been advertised on an international stage. It was also the first time many had heard of the Telluride Ski Resort.
Telluride’s burgeoning reputation came as no surprise to those who’d been working for years to develop it, however. And, thanks to a slew of infrastructure projects realized during this busy decade, the 90s represented an era of unprecedented growth and change that finally put a spotlight on Telluride’s potential as a world-class ski resort.
Telluride Ski Resort owners Ron Allred and Jim Wells understood that a successful ski area needed robust infrastructure. (“We built a lot in the 90s because we had to,” Allred says.) Among a multitude of projects, the resort partnered in the development of the Doral Hotel (now the Peaks Resort and Spa) and the Telluride Golf Course, both of which opened in 1992.
Mountain Village, which had been considered a “company town” since San Miguel County approved it as a planned use development in the 1980s, saw steady growth in the early 90s. More residents meant more need for services and thus in 1995 community members rallied to incorporate it as a town.
Dave Flatt, a member of Mountain Village’s first town council, says incorporating the town benefitted the resort as much as its residents. “It attracted people to invest in the town, which was becoming more than just a ski area,” he says.
Says Allred of the development of Mountain Village: “If you go up to Mountain Village today, there are roads everywhere and they all have utilities and water and whatnot. We did all of that and we built 16 or 17 bridges, too.”
In addition, Allred and Wells felt passionately that the ski area needed a way of connecting the towns of Mountain Village and Telluride and proposed a gondola system to be financed with a Real Estate Transfer Assessment of 3 percent on all sales of real estate in Mountain Village. Still the only public transportation system of its kind in North America, the Gondola would be free and obviate the need for the 7-plus-mile drive from one town to the other. Wells, who was the ski company’s president at the time, recalls spending years “pounding the pavement” in search of a bank that would finance this never-before-seen public transit system. “How do you find a lender that would believe such an approach would work, especially since Mountain Village and sales of real estate therein were relatively new and unproven?” he remembers. Even after the resort secured funding, the project was held up by litigation with the Environmental Protection Agency and by local opposition. The Gondola eventually opened in 1996. Since then, it has averaged 3 million passenger rides annually, providing a total of more than 56
THE 90S million rides in its 25-plus years in operation.
REPRESENTED Throughout this time, the resort was also
AN ERA OF laying the groundwork to expand into Prospect Bowl. Jeff Proteau was the resort’s vice UNPRECEDENTED president of environmental affairs at the time
GROWTH. and, as he explains, the project was controversial. Years of site analysis, public meetings and negotiations with the EPA, though, ultimately paid off and by 1999 the Prospect Bowl expansion had been approved by the U.S. Forest Service. That same year, Allred and Wells sold a majority interest to Hideo “Joe” Morita, a Japanese businessman and son of the founder of Sony. As Proteau recalls, the expansion approval, coupled with an infusion of significant capital from Morita, represented an encouraging bookend to the decade. “It helped us take that next step, from an ordinary ski area to a world-class ski resort,” he says.
1990s
HALL OF FAMERS
No story about Telluride and the Telluride Ski Resort is complete without shining a light on Senior Mahoney and his enthusiasm, knowledge and towering influence on the local ski culture and the resort. An iconic figure, Mahoney, who sadly passed away in 2021, was deservedly inducted into the Colorado Ski Hall of Fame in 1997. Others connected with the Telluride Ski Resort who share this honor include Johnnie Stevens (2004), Ron Allred (2007), and former resort CEO Bill Jensen (2018).
Courtesy Telluride Ski Resort
Brett Schreckengost
Doug Berry Courtesy Telluride Ski Resort
BY THE NUMBERS
After the terrain expansions of the 2000s, the Telluride Ski Resort could boast over 2,000 acres of skiable terrain and 148 trails with a lift-served vertical drop of 3,790 feet and total vertical of 4,425. The mountain’s longest run is Galloping Goose, which meanders 4.6 miles from the top of Lift 12 to the Meadows. It’s highest? Senior’s, a double-black hike-to named for Senior Mahoney that begins at the resort’s highest point, Palmyra Peak, which tops out at 13,150 feet.
Fresh tracks
BY LINNE HALPERN
At the Telluride Ski Resort, the first decade of the new millennium saw a flurry of terrain expansions and other developments. In 2001, Joe Morita took the reins fully from longtime owners Ron Allred and Jim Wells. In Morita’s hands, and with a fresh injection of capital, some longtime goals were finally able to come to fruition: the completion of the Prospect Bowl project and Allred’s restaurant, the establishment of the Telluride Foundation and the purchase of privately held mining claims, one where Alpino Vino now sits, the other the Tempter House property.
The 733-acre Prospect expansion, for instance, nearly doubled the resort’s skiable terrain when it opened in January 2002, laying the basis for Telluride’s emergence as a premier resort down the line, while the Telluride Foundation’s establishment the previous year launched a philanthropic initiative committed to investing in the enrichment of the Telluride region.
Jim Wear, a Vail lawyer who served as Morita’s attorney and advisor, says of the Prospect Bowl expansion, “I think it helped complete the circulation of the mountain and created a great experience for intermediate skiers, which was something the mountain needed ... and Joe jumped in to complete it.” Wear stresses that publicity-shy Morita was an excellent steward of the resort whose impacts outweigh his relatively brief tenure. “Joe made a lot of contributions to the mountain in a short period of time,” he says.
For his part, Johnnie Stevens, who was then the resort’s chief operating officer, agrees: “The significance of Joe Morita to the Telluride Ski Resort cannot be overstated.”
In 2004, the resort underwent an ownership shift as Morita sold to Chuck and Chad Horning, father-and-son property developers from California. According to Chuck Horning, the to-do list in those early years included updating lifts and moving the resort away from a dependence on selling real estate to finance operations and capital projects. “We followed a principle of working hard, learning from the best models in the industry and accepting that progress would be slow,” he says.
Eventually, the pair and their team turned their attention
to further terrain expansion. “We are considered a remote resort, so the experience has to be worth the effort to travel here,” notes Horning. The results were impressive. Mountain Quail opened in 2005, Black Iron Bowl and Palmyra Peak in 2007, and Revelation Bowl and the Gold Hill Chutes in 2008. “That was really the beginning of taking the ski resort to the next level and being able to compete in a higher category,” shares Jeff Proteau, by then the resort’s vice president of mountain operations THE 733-ACRE PROSPECT and planning. Not only did the new
EXPANSION NEARLY additions increase the amount of terrain, they also diversified the DOUBLED THE RESORT’S resort’s offerings, including incompa-
SKIABLE TERRAIN. rable terrain for advanced skiers. “We started attracting a different type of skier, someone more interested in learning about extreme conditions, avalanche awareness, etc.,” Proteau remarks. “People started to see skiing Telluride as an adventure, more than just a family vacation on groomed runs.” Alongside this growth, the opening decade of the 21st century saw on-mountain amenities and guest services begin to reach new heights as well. In 2008, the resort opened Alpino Vino, which offered authentic Italian fine dining in an extraordinary setting (it is the highest restaurant in North America). The next year, a push for more high-end accommodations resulted in the opening of two luxury properties in Mountain Village, the Capella, which today is the Madeline Hotel and Residences, as well as the Lumière. The upshot? By the end of the decade, the Telluride Ski Resort was primed to claim its rightful place as a worldclass, luxury ski destination.
2000s
KA-POW!
Two of Telluride’s snowiest winters took place in the 2000s. The unforgettable season of 2007-2008 saw a whopping 341 inches of powder fall at the resort. The third-best winter was the very next year, 20082009, when 293 inches fell. (No. 2 was 2016-2017 with 317 inches.) The all-important job of measuring snowfall at the resort relies on sonar devices that sit at the top of Lift 6, near Telluride Ski Patrol headquarters, and at the bottom of Lift 14.
Jeff Proteau
Courtesy Telluride Ski Resort
LIVING HISTORY
Want to know more? Check out the Telluride Historical Museum’s fascinating annual exhibit, The Long Run: 50 Years of the Telluride Ski Area. Devised by Molly Daniel, director of programs and exhibits at the museum, The Long Run continues until April. It includes a range of media, like a 1970s short film, Telluride is Happening, made by ski filmmaker Warren Miller, as well as engaging artifacts including the Tellurider, a character created as part of a publicity campaign. The exhibit also looks at the vibrant ski culture that existed in Telluride decades before the ski resort opened — a culture that stretches back to the late 1800s when Scandinavian miners used skis to move around, and which continued through the 1950s and 60s when locals skied recreationally pretty much everywhere they could: the backcountry, towed behind cars and on slopes adjoining the town. Daniel notes that exploring The Long Run is an opportunity to dig deeper into Telluride’s ski history. “Visitors to the museum may be surprised by the decades of effort to get an official ski area established and the amount of pushback that Joseph Zoline, who finally made it happen, received,” she says. “Even after the ski area opened, it still wasn’t smooth sailing.” It’s clear that a lot of hard work and expertise has gone into The Long Run. What does she hope visitors to the exhibit take away? “My hope is that the exhibit conveys the deep community involvement, collaboration and connections the ski resort has required for it to thrive and become the well-known, world-class ski area it is today,” Daniel says. “It’s so important to remember that Telluride is more than a resort and is, in fact, still a town and a community.”
The stars align
BY ERIN SPILLANE
By 2010, the Telluride Ski Resort was in good shape. The expansions of the previous decade meant the terrain was well balanced — 23 percent beginner, 36 percent intermediate and 41 percent advanced or extreme. Now, a range of skiers and boarders could spend a week in Telluride and enjoy a steady supply of fresh terrain over five or six days on the mountain. Just as appealing, even the beginners got stunning views, lengthy runs and a fun terrain park, while advanced skiers had access to some of the most compelling hike-to and extreme terrain in the world — genuine memory-makers.
Resort owners Chuck and Chad Horning, as well as their team, knew a deserving Telluride was poised to take its place among North America’s elite ski resorts. Was there a conscious effort to make a final push? “Yes, most definitely — we did this by studying other world-class resorts, most notably in Europe,” Chuck Horning says, citing Lech, the classy Austrian resort known for its impeccable customer service and sophisticated dining and lodging.
For Jeff Proteau, the then-vice president of mountain operations and planning, “the stars were aligning around this time for the Telluride Ski Resort, and we were confident this could place us in the top tier of resorts. The hard work was done by 2010 and this gave us an opportunity. Skiing was going to a new phase. People no longer wanted what we would call ‘resort skiing’, where you ride a lift, you go down the trail and that’s it. Instead, it was turning into more of an adventure skiing-type pursuit by people who wanted an experience.”
He continues, “People come to Colorado to have these life-changing experiences and now Telluride could provide that.”
As part of efforts to round out that experience, the resort set to work on enhancing its on-mountain dining options. After Alpino Vino in 2008, the team opened French eatery Bon Vivant at the top of Lift 5 in 2011 and hired a wine director in 2013. Like with the terrain expansions, a visitor could now spend a week at the Telluride Ski Resort and have a different, and memorable, on-mountain dining experience every day. Horning calls this “a crowning achievement” and notes that Allred’s, with a wine professional at the helm, went on to develop “one of the largest and finest wine collections among ski resorts.” Says Proteau, “We created dining experiences that were just off the charts and were part of raising us into that new level.”
None of this went unnoticed.
In 2012, Telluride was named, for the first time in its histor y, the no. 1 ski resort in North America by Condé Nast Traveler readers — a prestigious award that it would go on to win five more times in the following six years. CN Traveler’s readers weren’t alone in their admiration. Throughout the 2010s, the resort scooped “best of” accolades from Ski Magazine, USA Today, National Geographic, Men’s Health, Forbes, Fodors, Travel + Leisure and more.
Looking ahead
As the Telluride Ski Resort moves into its sixth decade, what’s on the agenda?
“The opportunities moving forward are to continue the progress that the resort has made in terms of superior service delivery to our guests and to continue to attract employees who will work hard and make their lives in this gorgeous place,” Horning says. “The challenges are working with the local governments to ensure that we can keep these employees, most notably through the successful construction of affordable housing.”
In addition to upgrades to Lifts 7 and 10, Proteau, who still works for the ski resort, primarily on special projects, agrees that affordable housing is a priority, and also points to the resort’s ongoing environmental efforts. “These are eco-efficiencies,” he emphasizes. “They save on energy and other resources, which is good for the planet and they also save on costs. It’s a win-win.”
Feeling good as the resort celebrates its 50th anniversary?
Horning demurs and says simply that he is “proud of the team at the Telluride Ski Resort. They have worked tirelessly to develop the ski resort into the world-class experience that it is today.”
Says Proteau, “The mountain is the foundation, it’s always been the foundation. It’s a beautiful place — an extraordinary place — and that brings challenges and opportunities, but, really, I just think we’re lucky to be here.”
