Review by Ed Quillen
Colorado History – April 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine
A History of Skiing in Colorado
by Abbott Fay
Published in 2000 by Western Reflections
ISBN 1-890437-34-4
Considering the attention that Colorado’s mines and railroads get from authors, it’s rather surprising how little attention is given to the history of our current major mountain industry — skiing.
Abbott Fay, a retired Western State College history professor who now lives in Grand Junction, filled in some of that missing lore in 1984 with Ski Tracks in the Rockies: A Century of Colorado Skiing. Now he has revised, updated, and expanded that into a new book.
Skiing wasn’t invented in America. It’s a Nordic sport which came with Scandinavian immigrants in the 19th century, when home-made skis were called “Norwegian snowshoes,” and put to work for transportation in the Sierra Nevada range after the California Gold Rush of 1849.
The first recorded use in Colorado was during the Mormon War of 1857 when a military relief party was trying to reach the New Mexico settlements from southwestern Wyoming. They had lost their way in knee-deep powder, and unless they found Cochetopa Pass, starvation loomed.
One Jim Baker, a mountain man with the party, carved a pair of skis and used them to climb a nearby ridge. There he spotted a landmark, found his bearings, and the soldiers got across the mountains in time.
After the 1859 gold rush to Colorado, skiing became a rather routine form of mountain transportation, most notably with the Rev. John L. Dyer and his trips with the mail over Mosquito Pass.
As more Scandinavian immigrants arrived, they brought their native sports with them, and skiing moved from an occasional necessity to a hobby and a competitive sport. Miners at the Star Mine near Irwin, north of Gunnison, formed a racing club in 1883, and in 1886, one Alice Denison, who lived on a ranch near Steamboat Springs, tried the sport and announced that “It takes the guzzum out of me.”
Skiing for the fun of it grew its deepest roots in Steamboat Springs, where Carl Howelson began teaching children to ski in 1914. And for a few years, as mining declined and the mountains depopulated, that’s where skiing stayed.
But after World War I, Denver society took up the sport, forming several clubs. They were people of some means, so they could buy or lease land in the mountains for their hobby. Meanwhile, the federal government was looking for ways to spend money during the New Deal, and thus Monarch was built as a WPA project to provide winter recreation to Salidans.
World War II changed everything. The U.S. Army formed the 10th Mountain Division — the soldiers on skis — and built Camp Hale, with a lift on Cooper Hill, to train them. They might have made nearby Leadville into a ski town, but as Fay explains,
“Leadville had a reputation as one of the wildest of ‘Wild West’ towns, and the army placed it off limits for their innocent soldiers. Local leaders were outraged by the ban and went to work to close down the red light district (officially, at least) and set up services for venereal disease control. Their purification rites went so far as to pass sanitation laws for the entire city …
“That brief ban may have cost Leadville the position that Aspen would eventually fill in post-war skiing, as soldiers frustrated at their isolation took the train to Aspen… Leadville was moving again… [and] an active mining camp lacks the charm and quietude some romantically believe should pervade ski resorts. Then there was the decisive factor. Mrs. Walter Paepcke had fallen in love with Aspen, not Leadville.”
That much of the story, as well as through the 1960s, Fay tells, and tells it in his light and entertaining way. But the narrative almost seems to stop with the big expansion in Colorado skiing that came after the Eisenhower Tunnel opened on Interstate 70 in 1973.
Skiing became big business as Wall Street companies swallowed up family-run resorts, and this is a big part of the story that deserves more than a couple of paragraphs. Fay mentions some of the environmental controversies associated with expansions, but more exposition would be welcome.
Not all ski stories are success stories — we have ghost ski areas like Geneva Basin and Conquistador — and a history should tell us why some resorts died even as others were expanding.
Still, History of Skiing in Colorado is the best single book about Colorado’s winter-recreation history, even if it does have some gaps. It’s easy to read, carries a thorough bibliography, and offers several useful appendices, among them a list of all known ski areas.
The big history has yet to be written, but this is a fine small book and a good start.
— Ed Quillen
