Downhill dreams
How a 1962 effort to 'Aspenize' Silverton never came to be (thankfully)

On Jan. 11, the Kendall Mountain Ski Area in Silverton celebrated its 60th birthday. On that day in 1964, 125 skiers tried out the new rope tow, installed by local miners on the lower slopes of Kendall. Locals had big hopes for expanding the ski hill and making it a destination resort.

Kendall could be called Silverton’s Skiing Plan B. Before that, there was the Sultan Mountain Ski Area – or at least the dream of such a thing. It would never come to be, obviously, but it’s fun to contemplate the what ifs of this now mostly forgotten proposal. 

I got to thinking about this would-be development last week, when the San Juan County Historical Society posted a conceptual sketch of the ski area’s proposed second phase on its Facebook page. And when I started looking into the history (again), I was reminded of how different developing a ski area was 60 years ago, and also of how many little ski hills existed prior to this but have been lost to history.

 In the late 1950s, the U.S. Forest Service actually went looking for proposals to develop ski areas on public lands in Colorado. Logging had subsided considerably, skiing was the up-and-coming thing, and the land agency apparently wanted to keep up with the times. One of the sites it presented was outside of Silverton, but initially there were no takers. 

But then, in late1960 or early 1961, the Denver-Golden Corp. stepped up. The mining firm was looking to branch out, and a ski area in a mining town that was eager to diversify its economy seemed to fit the bill. 

Permitting a ski area on public land was a hell of a lot easier back then. Within months, Denver-Golden had received the Forest Service’s go-ahead and had posted the required bonds for what it initially envisioned as an 800-acre ski area with more than 15,000 feet of expert and advanced trails and 10,000 feet of intermediate and beginner slopes.

The company bought Red Mountain Lodges and had options to buy a number of other Silverton properties. It hired Dick Durrance, a renowned ski racer who had made Aspen a going concern, to help with planning. And it expected to begin construction in 1962. 

Silverton’s denizens generally welcomed the development. The mining industry was on its way back after a decade-long hiatus, led by Standard Metals’ reopening of the fabled Sunnyside Mine. But most locals recognized the town needed something more than just mining and summer tourism. 

Silverton certainly had the terrain, the snow and the skiing history – mail-carriers of old traveled by long, wooden skis – to follow in the footprints of Aspen, also a former mining town. The publishers and editors of the Silverton Standard & the Miner, first Ross Beaber and then Allen Nossaman, liked the idea. And when Ian Thompson (my father) came in to cover for Nossaman (while Allen went off to the National Guard), he, too, advocated for winter recreation and for establishing Silverton as a high-altitude Olympic cross-country ski team training ground.

But 1962 came and went, and Denver-Golden had done little more than build a road on its proposed slopes. Ditto in 1963, when it became clear that the Sultan Mountain Ski Area was probably dead, spurring locals to take matters into their own hands and cut runs and build a tow on Kendall. And finally, in June of 1964, Denver-Golden announced it was dropping the proposal after failing to scrape up enough cash. 

For a year or so, it looked like Kendall Mountain could become the region’s premiere ski resort. It had plenty of room to expand, the base area was in town with all of the infrastructure, and the snow was far better than at the handful of makeshift ski hills nearby. 

Silverton’s dreams of being Aspenized were dashed in 1965, however, when Durango-Denver oilman Ray Duncan established Purgatory Ski Area on Forest Service land 23 miles south of Silverton. The new resort was bigger, steeper and easier to access than Kendall Mountain, and even though it was closer to Silverton than to Durango, the larger, lowland community reaped most of the benefits.

Kendall kept operating until 1983, when it seemingly shut down for good. Then, in the 1990s, a determined group of locals started working to reopen it. A chairlift was installed, and eventually, a new lodge was built (after the rickety old one burnt down). Now, Kendall draws folks from all over looking for a more down-home and affordable skiing experience. It’s not quite what Silverton craved in the 1960s, but looking back, I’m sure many are thanking their lucky stars that Denver-Golden couldn’t scrape up the funds to build its resort and, surely, radically alter the trajectory of little Silverton. ?

The Land Desk is a newsletter from Jonathan P. Thompson, author of “River of Lost Souls,” “Behind the Slickrock Curtain” and “Sagebrush Empire.” To subscribe, go to: www.landdesk.org