It was a beautiful, cloudless day in February and the skiing at Wolf Creek Ski Area in southwest Colorado was great. The snow was the soft, squealing one as I ran across glades and ran over sparsely populated groomers. Everything was great. But somehow the memory of that day is another moment.
After my last run, thankfully drained, I headed to the Prospector Grill at the base of the mountain for a recovery coffee. When I started fishing for money, the clerk behind the counter waved me over. He was starting to put things away and it was only a few dollars, but it felt… good.
When asked what draws them to Wolf Creek, where the average annual snowfall is 430 inches, the most in Colorado, many people have a quick answer: “The snow.”
And that’s exactly what Sherry Miller reported. Ms. Miller, 70, drives in the area when the resorts near her northern New Mexico home lack snow and has experienced the benefits of Wolf Creek’s microclimate. “We’ve been in a few storms where you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face,” he said appreciatively.
But if you dig deeper into what makes Wolf Creek feel truly special, the answer for me — and many other visitors — is that good vibe.
“It’s very relaxed,” said Olesya Chornoguz, a 39-year-old skier from the Philadelphia area who regularly travels to various Rockies resorts and has become a fan of Wolf Creek. “Very cool, no people. The people are nice and they’re clearly there to have fun.”
The area’s 1,600 skiable acres top Alberta Peak’s 11,904 feet and tend to build confidence. The clearings are often next to the groomers, so an exit is always in sight if a problem arises. There’s expert terrain, sure — hugging a cliff face, the Knife Ridge Stairway leads to chutes and bowls and will raise the heart rate of any thrill-seeker. But it’s not scary for people who are good, but maybe not good enough to be sponsored by Red Bull.
“You can find very sharp lines, but they’re not relentless,” Ms Miller said. “So you can try your hand at something steeper than your normal comfort zone, knowing it will have shallower rest areas in between.”
That overall smoothness is increasingly rare in a ski industry dominated by big companies, often long lines and loaded trails, and prices that have climbed as high as $15 a day for a medium locker.
My locker at Wolf Creek was 75 cents.
This is a place with reverse sticker shock: The daily price for lift tickets this season is $89 for adults and $44 for children, rising to $100 and $55 more at reasonable prices during holiday seasons. (The usual starting price in much larger Vail for a one-day lift ticket is $269.) On “local appreciation days,” the price drops to $66 and $33.
Fear not, visitors, because according to the Wolf Creek website, “Everyone is local! Discounts apply to everyone!”
When a friend and I pulled into the parking lot on our first morning there in February, she mentioned that she had left her IKON card in another jacket. I said it wouldn’t need it anyway because Wolf Creek isn’t getting IKON — or Epic or any of the other passes that have upended the snowsports industry in recent years.
Part of how Wolf Creek keeps costs in check is the lack of expansive (and expensive to build and maintain) amenities. Improvements are incremental. This season, an 11th lift, the Tumbler, will target beginner and intermediate skiers with a lower speed and proximity to the learning center.
“Because of my love of skiing, my wife’s love of skiing and our general philosophy, we like to see people being able to enjoy public land and skiing without a lot of bells and whistles and without a lot of rules. just have a good day,” said ski resort CEO and director Davey Pitcher. “That’s why we don’t have a ground park: We don’t really like that heavy concentration and all the hype that comes with these events and these things. We think it’s nicer to be able to find your own way.”
Finding your way to the ski resort, on the other hand, is not easy. Wolf Creek is not near a major population center or an interstate. The nearest major airports are Albuquerque, four hours away, and Denver, which takes at least five hours. And once there, you can’t even stay on the mountain: There’s no slopeside lodging or ski tent. “They all ski and then go home and support our local community,” Mr Pitcher said. “Restaurants and hotels are important to the economy and seeing that money spread.”
Most of the accommodations are located 18 miles away in the town of South Fork or 24 miles away in Pagosa Springs. The latter has more accommodation and restaurants, along with hot springs that feel very sweet at the end of a day of skiing. At the Springs Resort (day pass: $67 adults / $35 children), you can get a refreshing shock to the system by going from a 100+ degree soak straight into the frozen San Juan River.
While lacking in dining and lodging options (though an old property has just been renovated and joined by the outdoor-focused LOGE chain), the South Fork is a safer bet if the weather forecast is good for skiing, but unpleasant to drive: The road to the ski resort tends to stay open during big storms, while the section from Pagosa can be closed.
The Pitcher family has owned and operated Wolf Creek for nearly five decades. Davey’s father, Kingsbury, a pioneer of mountain design in the United States, helped create Snowmass, made the original lift layout for Big Sky, Montana, and built Sierra Blanca Ski Area (now Ski Apache) and the Santa Fe skiing in New Mexico.
In 1976, Kingsbury turned his attention to Wolf Creek, which was owned by a consortium of Texas investors, including players from the Dallas Cowboys. “They were very good at football, but not very good at running a ski area,” Davey Pitcher said dryly. When the team went bankrupt, Kingsbury pounced.
The Pitchers’ presence is felt everywhere — the Charity Jane Express lift is named after Kingsbury’s wife, for example — and the family is hands-on. Davey’s wife, Rosanne, is vice president of marketing and sales. Their son Keith is an assistant elevator supervisor and daughter Erika works in graphic design for marketing and retail. (Davy’s brother Peter bought Discovery Ski Mountain in Montana in the mid-1980s; it’s the only place Wolf Creek has a lift agreement with.)
But even Wolf Creek isn’t immune to market forces, and figures familiar to the ski industry right now: ambitious developers.
In the mid-1980s, a group led by Texas billionaire Red McCombs (who died in February 2023) purchased land near Wolf Creek Pass, a portion of which essentially includes the base of some of the ski lifts of the area. The idea was to develop 300 acres into the Village at Wolf Creek, which would provide the lodging and amenities currently lacking.
“Our last project had something that totaled 1,700 units, which was a mix of residences, townhouses, condominiums and hotel rooms,” Clint E. Jones, president and principal leader of the project for the past decade or so, said in a telephone interview. . “We’ve got to provide food and drink up there, we’ve got to provide some level of groceries so that if someone’s staying for the week, they’ve got some essentials available.”
But to build, developers first had to connect those acres to U.S. Highway 160, which connects Wolf Creek to Pagosa Springs and the South Fork. Local organizations banded together and sued to block the construction of a new access road, arguing that the Village at Wolf Creek would drastically affect the environment and wildlife and destroy resources such as water.
“It’s essentially the highest-elevation city in North America that they want to build there,” Mark Pearson, executive director of the San Juan Citizens Alliance, a group that opposes the project, said in a video chat. “So that’s causing a lot of confusion, like: What’s the state of emergency medical services there? I think most people who are local appreciate Wolf Creek for what it is now.”
Christine Canaly, director of the San Luis Valley Ecosystem Council, another organization fighting the Village, highlighted the risks to the ecosystem. “It’s probably the most biodiverse, the most concentrated, ecologically sensitive area left in the southern Rockies,” he said in a video chat. “And there they want to build, right in the middle of it!”
In October 2022, a senior federal judge struck down the access road plan, arguing that the environmental impacts had not been adequately mapped. the Forest Service and developers filed an appeal in the spring, and a hearing was held Jan. 16 in Denver. A decision is expected later this year. Mr Jones declined to comment further on the appeal.
As for the ski area, Kingsbury Pitcher was briefly part of the Village project before the family sold its stake in the early 2000s and faced arduous litigation with McCombs. Pitchers are being diplomatic these days: “The project is currently in a lawsuit that we are not a party to,” Rosanne said in an email. “We are optimistic that if it moves forward, the developer will work with us to fill Wolf Creek’s unique niche.”
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