The Ski Journal • Volume 18, Issue 1 • CUCHARA FOR THE PEOPLE

Sunrise over West Spanish Peak and the Cuchara River Valley from the slopes of the former ski area. Photo: Amarante Anderson

Colorado is known for its big, flashy ski resorts, but Cuchara Mountain is not one of those. On a Friday last winter, local school kids in rental gear piled into the rebuilding ski area’s “Ski Bus”—a vintage snowcat hauling a 22-passenger trailer—to ascend the lower flanks of the mountain. There are currently no operating chairlifts at Cuchara, but plans are in the works to reopen Lift 4, a double chair installed in 1981 that’s still standing and accesses the lower 300 vertical feet of the mountain.

“We’re inches away from being able to reopen that lift,” says Mike Moore, a Cuchara resident and former general manager of the ski area who worked under the last two owners from 1994 until 2000. “We’re not trying to become the next Breckenridge. We just want a place for local kids to be able to learn to ski. We’re making it for and by the people.”

Moore sits on the board of the Cuchara Foundation, a community nonprofit started by a group of area residents who have been fighting to reopen Cuchara Mountain to skiers for two decades now. Last winter, when it was clear the lift wouldn’t get the necessary permitting in time, they bought a car hauler to drag behind a snowcat, installed free school bus seats from Craigslist, and called it snowcat skiing. They sold out four weekends in a row.

The Ski Bus operated most weekends from early January through the end of March. Tickets were $40 for the full day, $20 for half a day, or $150 for the whole season. Skiers sat shoulder to shoulder in their open-air sleigh, a throwback to the days long before fancy gondolas and high-speed six-packs became the norm. Now operated by a local nonprofit organization, Cuchara’s future depends on a Forest Service permit that’s been years in the making. Two additional existing lifts on the upper mountain are on Forest Service land and will remain inoperable for now.

Cuchara is currently a ghost of its former self, a once bustling family ski area in southern Colorado—50 miles west of the city of Trinidad, on the eastern slopes of the Sangre de Cristos—that’s now struggling to reopen amidst economic turmoil and the impacts of a warming climate.

“You’re supposed to build ski areas where there are population centers,” says Moore, a self-proclaimed ski bum in his 70s who moved to Cuchara in the 1990s from Vail and owns a bed and breakfast down the road called the Dodgeton Creek Inn. “The former owners of this place thought Cuchara could compete with Vail and Aspen. Clearly, that wasn’t the case.”

Originally called Panadero (Spanish for “baker”), the ski area on Baker Mountain opened in 1981 with a rope tow and two double chairs. The base sits at 9,200 feet in elevation and the lifts top out at 10,810 feet. Lift tickets back then cost $16 and families from southern Colorado’s flatlands, as well as neighboring Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas, arrived in jeans to learn to ski. At its height, Cuchara brought in 22,000 skiers a season. The resort went through nine different ownerships—mostly oil baron investors from Texas with zero ski-industry experience—and closed sporadically over the next two decades, due to lack of permitting, financial woes and poor snow quality, before finally shuttering for good in 2000.

“Northern Colorado gets good snow three out of four years,” says Moore. “Southern Colorado gets good snow one out of every four years. You need a good snowmaking system here.” (Which fortunately, Cuchara has. They recently installed 1,200 feet of new snowmaking pipe in 40-year-old snowmaking equipment.)

When the resort closed for the last time in 2000, the owners packed up seemingly overnight, leaving everything frozen in place. Plates of food were scattered throughout the restaurant and abandoned buildings were left stocked with ski rental gear and office supplies.

In 2017, the Cuchara Foundation raised $150,000 to buy the tax liens at the bottom of the mountain, then they donated that land to Huerfano County—one of the poorest counties in Colorado—as a public park, offering a disc golf course and hiking in the summer and snowshoeing in the winter. A wide scale cleanup took place amidst the old buildings and ski runs, which had been left in disarray for years. In 2019, a second nonprofit, called the Panadero Ski Corporation, was formed to attempt to reopen the ski area, and talks are in progress for the county to return the land to the Cuchara Foundation.

“Our community has donated so much time and money. We’ve been trying to fix and replace everything to get that lift certified by the Colorado Passenger Tramway Safety Board,” says Ken Clayton, treasurer of the Panadero Ski Corporation. “The permits for those lifts expired 20 years ago, but the goal is to have that lift open this winter.”

For now, you can ski the entire mountain, but you’ll need to earn your turns. The ski area has a free uphill policy and an agreement with the U.S. Forest Service to allow uphill skiers to access the upper part of the mountain—another 1,500 vertical feet and 230 acres of terrain—as well as the surrounding backcountry, which tops out upon 13,000-foot peaks.

A local carpenter named Amarante Anderson has been exploring the backcountry terrain from Cuchara’s base area since 2015. “My first year there was nobody there. The buildings were rundown,” says Anderson, who’s 30 and lives in nearby Walsenburg. “I started splitboarding at the old resort because I thought it would be a nice way to get into the backcountry.”

Anderson says he likes the place for its solitude. “You show up to Teton Pass or the Wasatch and there are 100 cars and you’re fighting for a parking spot,” he says. “Whereas if you go past the resort at Cuchara, you don’t see another person.”

Yet the old ski area is slowly coming back to life. In the old rental building, you can buy a lift ticket and sit by the fireplace while ’90s ski movies stream on the TV. There’s no gear rental on site, but you can head to a shop in nearby Pueblo called the Edge Ski, Paddle, and Pack. The building that once housed the ski patrol headquarters and a warming hut is just a concrete foundation now, but a recent grant from Great Outdoors Colorado, as well as private donations, are helping fund facility restoration.

In 2018, Chris Smith and Donna Van Treese, a couple who moved from Oklahoma, bought two buildings in the base area, 50 yards from the lift, and began cleaning them up. These days, they operate the popular Cuchara Mountain Mercantile, a deli and market slinging morning cinnamon rolls and pizza midday, as well an event space and dorm-style accommodations out of those spaces.

So, will more skiers show up to support this place? The locals hope so. As resorts elsewhere in Colorado struggle with overcrowding, more adventurous skiers are heading south, when the snow delivers, for a different experience. “People who are tired of the megaresort life elsewhere have discovered these nonprofit ski areas in small communities,” says Clayton. “We’re an alternative for people who want to avoid Interstate 70. Here, families can come down and a day of cat skiing is cheaper than a burger and fries at those bigger resorts. The place is like a time capsule.”

The Ski Journal - Volume 18, Issue 1

CUCHARA FOR THE PEOPLE

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