This once-abandoned Southern Colorado ski hill is now offering $40 lift tickets
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CUCHARA, Colo. — Cuchara Mountain Park’s $40 lift ticket is among the cheapest in Colorado, but Ken Clayton thinks it is still too high.
“Forty dollars is still unattainable for some people, and we don’t want anyone to be excluded from coming up here and learning how to ski or snowboard by the cost of the ticket,” said Clayton, a Panadero Ski Corporation board member.
The Panadero Ski Corporation is the nonprofit operating the Cuchara Mountain Park, a near-50-acre ski area located in the small southern Colorado community of Cuchara, located in Huerfano County.
Clayton understands how inaccessible winter sports can be, particularly in Huerfano County, which has one of the highest poverty rates in Colorado.
Lift tickets are only one expense on a ski trip budget (an adult day ticket at Vail, for example, can be more than $300), and when matched with pricey food and drink options, transportation costs, equipment rentals and lodging, a weekend ski trip can run into the low thousands.
The Denver Gazette’s estimate for an out-of-state family’s 2024 trip to Breckenridge reached more than $11,000.
The Panadero Ski Corporation recently received a $250,000 Colorado State Outdoor Recreation Grant, which it will use to support operational expenses and infrastructure improvements for the park.
The nonprofit also earned $100,000 through an Outdoor Equity Grant from the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Outdoor Equity Grant Program, which will go towards hosting a youth-oriented winter ski camp and a summer bike camp.
“My kids, they had classmates who had never driven the 12 miles from La Veta to Cuchara. They never know that this mountain was up here,” said Ken Clayton.
“So many potential skiers and snowboarders are priced out of the market, and if we can offer an affordable solution or a free solution for some of the youth around here, we can get them up here to ski and snowboard.”
Texas developers first opened Panadero Ski Park — now Cuchara Mountain Park — in 1981, the first of many Texas-based owners that would buy and close the ski area for the next two decades.
Located on Baker Mountain, the two-lift and one-rope tow ski park expanded to 230 acres at its largest. At its zenith, Cuchara included four operating chairlifts, two surface lifts and more than 1,500 feet of vertical terrain.
However, Cuchara struggled to turn a profit, and ski park ownership changed hands several times between a series of inexperienced investors with backgrounds ranging from savings and loan businessmen to car dealers.
The park opened and closed repeatedly until shuttering completely in 2000. It remained abandoned for nearly twenty years after.
About 10 years after closing in 2000, previous owners began parceling off and selling the land, breaking up the ski park’s vast acreage into separated plots.
One of these plots, a 47-acre segment of the ski area that included a lift — Lift 4 — at the base of the mountain along with a ski rental building and some storage facilities, went up for sale in 2016 and caught the eye of Cuchara locals and previous Cuchara Mountain Park regulars.
“When we found out we could buy [the land] for $150,000… we said, ‘We have to do this,’” said Mike Moore, a self-proclaimed “ski bum” who has lived in Cuchara for more than 20 years.
He currently owns and operates The Dodgeton Creek Inn, a local bed and breakfast. Moore spent his earlier years hopping between storied ski towns such as Aspen, Crested Butte and Vail, working odd jobs to support his love for skiing.
After 16 years in Vail, Moore said he was priced out of the area. He moved south to the much smaller community of Cuchara, where his two brothers were working on the Cuchara Mountain Park.
“I tell my guests that I’m a refugee from Denver, Vail, Aspen and Crested Butte,” said Moore. “Nobody could afford to live in Vail… so this was a completely different concept.”
Prices for ski passes such as the Epic Pass, which offers access to six ski resorts in Colorado, including Vail, and many more across the country, have increased steadily for the past decade, dropping only during the COVID-19 pandemic.
However, about 59% of ski areas in the United States are considered small, according to the National Ski Areas Association (NSAA), which measures size based on an area’s vertical transportation feet per hour (VTF/h), or how many feet a person moves in an hour (in other words, higher peaks allows for a skier to travel more feet per hour, and therefore qualifies the area as a larger ski area).
Colorado has seven ski areas that offer tickets for less than $50, most of which are labeled “ski hills” instead of “ski resorts,” as they often host fewer and smaller runs, many of which only require a rope tow as opposed to a chair lift.
Moore worked for the last two owners of the Cuchara Mountain Park before it closed in 2000. He said that Cuchara residents and residents in the slightly larger neighboring town of La Veta lamented the loss of the skiing and also the loss of ski tourism that helped bolster local businesses during winter months.
“Everybody was disappointed because a lot of people from Oklahoma and Texas came down, and so we lost all those people, plus all the local people that would come up and ski and enjoy the mountain,” said Robin Johnson, the current ski patrol director at Cuchara Mountain Park who had worked as a Cuchara ski patroller before the 2000 closure.
“We lost an awful lot of business,” said Moore. “Without the ski area, this is a three-month town.”
The Panadero Ski Corporation is working to build mountain biking and hiking trails for visitors to use in the off-season, and the 230 acres of land above the Panadero Ski Corporation’s 47 acres belongs to the U.S. Forest Service, which offers recreational trails to tourists as well.
When the 47-acre plot went on the market, Moore teamed up with a collection of residents to form the Cuchara Foundation, which raised the $150,000 needed to purchase the land in 2017.
While the Cuchara Foundation operates the ski area, Huerfano County owns the land. It is a similar model to other public assets in the county, such as Walsenburg's Fox Theater or the Huerfano County Fairgrounds, which are run by a local nonprofit and volunteer board, respectively.
Moore has expressed opposition to the county maintaining ownership over the 47 acres. He told the Colorado Sun in 2022 that "the county is trying to figure out how to run a park and a ski area and they don’t have a clue, not a clue, what they are doing."
When asked for a response to this quote, Moore told Rocky Mountain PBS that he still feels this way.
While making plans about the future of the newly-acquired ski hill, members of the Cuchara Foundation learned about some ski areas operating as nonprofits, namely Winter4Kids in New Jersey, which offers free ski and snowboarding opportunities to kids.
The foundation decided to make the new Cuchara Mountain Park Colorado’s first nonprofit ski hill, the only other comparable being Ski Cooper which is registered as a 501(c)4, or a social welfare organization, meaning they are not eligible to receive tax deductible charitable donations.
As volunteers worked on clearing and repairing the abandoned mountain, the Cuchara Foundation recruited the Panadero Ski Corporation, a nonprofit founded in 2019 specifically for the purpose of fixing the dormant Lift 4, the only lift contained entirely within the purchased acreage.
Today, the Panadero Ski Corporation acts as the mountain’s concessionaire and is responsible for running and maintaining Cuchara Mountain Park.
Lift 4 still does not work, though Clayton and the Panadero Ski Corporation board believe it will be ready to go pending approval from the Colorado Passenger Tramway Safety Board, hopefully some time this season. The funds in the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Grant are not eligible to go towards fixing the lift.
As the operators waited for certification, the mountain still needed a way to transport skiers to the top of the hill. Enter Jeremy Golnik, Cuchara Mountain Park’s dedicated maintenance director.
“He went and purchased a car hauler… got some free bus seats off of Facebook Marketplace and welded them to the trailer, and now what we call the Ski Bus pulls about 22 people from the bottom to the top every ten minutes all day long,” Clayton said.
“It’s a very unique experience on the Ski Bus,” said Annabelle Clayton, Ken Clayton’s teenage daughter currently training as an Outdoor Emergency Care (OEC) candidate on her way to becoming a certified ski patroller.
“This is a very closely-knit community. Everyone here is doing volunteer work and people are just putting their everything into this mountain to make it run,” she said.
Annabelle Clayton works alongside a handful of volunteers including snowcat drivers, ski instructors and ski patrollers, many of whom travel a few hours for their shifts.
“Volunteering on the ski patrol is a really unique thing to be able to do,” said Gabriel Tristain, a volunteer ski patroller who travels more than two hours from Colorado Springs to Cuchara Mountain Park.
“It does feel more personal than something to do to make money.”
“In the old days, it was all a business for profit,” said Johnson, the ski patrol director who commutes from his home in Woodland Park. “But now our goal is to involve Colorado people in the outdoors, having fun… so it’s more local now.”
Note: This article was was updated Tuesday, Jan. 7, 2025 at 3:05 p.m. to correct the name of the grants received by the Panadero Ski Corporation. A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that the Cuchara Mountain Park had received $250,000 through the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Outdoor Equity Grant Program and that $100,000 from that grant would "go towards a youth-oriented winter ski camp and a summer bike camp." The $250,000 was granted as a Colorado State Outdoor Recreation Grant, while the $100,000 was granted as an Outdoor Equity Grant from the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Outdoor Equity Grant Program.
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