Jason Blevins
Outdoors/Business Reporter
Sneak Peek of the Week
A high-point for chairlift falls in Colorado suggests it’s time for increased use of restraining bars
Tonette Romero poses for a portrait with a framed photo of her son, Donovan Romero, with his daughters Myla, 11, and Delilah, 8. Donovan fell from a Keystone chairlift in December, spent two months in the hospital, then another three months in a coma being cared for by his parents and nurses in his home before he died. (Alyte Katilius, Special to The Colorado Sun)“We need a cultural shift.”
— Mike Reitzell, head of the National Ski Areas Association
149
Number of chairlift falls reported to the Colorado Passenger Tramway Safety Board since 2014, including a record 18 falls in the 2024-25 ski season
Chris Oxford and his friend Donovan Romero were having a good day. The pals since grade school were snowboarding Keystone on an uncrowded weekday in December. It was maybe their fifth or sixth run when they zoomed through the maze and loaded up the Ruby Express.
About 30 seconds into the ride, Oxford said he “felt a jolt” and looked over. His friend was hanging from the armrest on the opposite side of the six-person chair.
“It was like a rattle and when I looked over he was holding on, off the chair. He didn’t scream or even make a noise. It all happened so fast,” Oxford said.
Romero fell about 47 feet. He was airlifted to a hospital in Denver. The 32-year-old father of two was badly broken and remained in a vegetative state. He died in May.
An investigation by Keystone ski patrollers and the Colorado Passenger Tramway Safety Board concluded that Romero was leaning over and adjusting his snowboard boots or bindings when he fell off the chair. Oxford did not see his friend leaning over. He did not tell any investigators or patrollers that he saw Romero doing anything. He didn’t see how his friend became unseated. But he helplessly saw his friend of more than 25 years fall and lay motionless in the snow as he rode to the top of the chair.
“It’s been really hard. I haven’t been able to get back up snowboarding. I didn’t have the mental or emotional strength, you know,” Oxford said in an interview with The Sun.
Romero was one of 18 chairlift falls reported to the Colorado Passenger Tramway Safety Board in the 2024-25 ski season, a high point for the state’s resort industry. Eight of those falls involved children.
Since the 2014-15 season, the tramway board has logged 149 reports of falls from chairlifts and at least 55 of those reports — more than a third of all reported falls — involved children or minors.
The Colorado ski resort industry does not track chairlift falls or injuries. It is unclear how many of those 149 falls in the past dozen years resulted in injuries. We do know that Romero’s death was the fourth fatality involving a Colorado chairlift since 2016, marking Colorado’s deadliest decade for chairlifts.
The tramway board’s reports on falls are brief. Most are explained with the note “skier error.” Several falls involved skiers improperly loading. Many involve falls as the restraining bar is being raised. There are several reports of parents holding onto their children before they slipped.
> Click over to The Sun next week to read this story
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In Their Words
Public lands in the crosshairs
The headwaters of the Eagle River at Camp Hale near Leadville on Aug. 16, 2022. The section of river was included in President Joe Biden’s 2022 designation of the 53,804-acre Camp Hale – Continental Divide National Monument. (Hugh Carey, The Colorado Sun)“We must change the reliance on the federal government to fund or deliver these services.”
— Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz
3.3 million acres
Swath of Forest Service and BLM land required to be sold for housing in a U.S. Senate provision added this week to the federal budget bill
The Trump administration’s reorganization of the federal government focused on public lands this week as land managers defended sweeping budget cuts and supported the sale of up to 3.3 million acres of Forest Service and BLM land in 11 Western states including Colorado.
The U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on Wednesday published a provision for the Senate’s budget reconciliation bill requiring the Forest Service to sell between 965,000 and 1.45 million of its 193 million acres and the Bureau of Land Management to sell between 1.23 million and 1.84 million of its 245 million acres to encourage development of housing. The House last month stripped a plan to sell public lands in Nevada from its version of the budget bill.
The new provision directs land managers to publish lists of tracts for sale every 60 days with priority for parcels that are nominated by states or local governments, are adjacent to developed areas, have access to existing infrastructure and are suitable for residential development.
“This is not about our most sacred and beautiful places,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told the committee Wednesday. “This is often about barren land next to highways with existing billboards that have no recreational value.”
Burgum is leading a $900 million reduction in funding for the National Park Service that could close as many as 350 of the Park Service’s 433 sites. Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz is overseeing one of the most drastic overhauls of the land management agency in its 150-year history, with a presidential call for increased logging and mineral extraction from public lands coinciding with a steep reduction in staff and funding.
The Trump administration’s 2026 budget published this month calls for a $392 million cut from the Forest Service management budget, $303 million from grant programs supporting non-federal forests and a $391 million cut to forest operations. The cuts — outlining the “highest priorities in forest management” of timber sales, hazardous fuels removal, mineral extraction, grazing and wildlife habitat management — move the Forest Service toward a goal “of restoring federalism by empowering states to assume a great role in managing forest lands within their borders.
National Forest land, Schultz told the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee on Wednesday “are a bountiful resource for minerals” and the agency has a fiduciary responsibility to the American public to better steward tax dollars wisely.
He said the budget cuts for the Forest Service are intended to “better balance the appropriate roles of federal and state government.” Cancelling $303 million for community partnerships to manage non-federal lands is part of that balance, he said.
“It is not our intent to degrade the services of state and local governments but we must change the reliance on the federal government to fund or deliver these services,” said Schultz, whose career at state land agencies in Idaho and Montana makes him the first Forest Service chief to not rise up through the ranks of the federal agency. “In alignment with restoring federalism, we encourage increased state authority to fund management of state and privately owned forests, community preparedness and public risk mitigation activities.”
Overall, the 2026 budget cuts $1.39 billion from the Forest Service budget, including cutting $300 million from the Forest and Rangeland Research Program and $303 million from state, local, Tribal and nonprofit conservation partnership programs.
“The president has pledged to manage national forests for their intended purpose of producing timber,” reads the budget proposal. An April memo from the Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins issued an emergency declaration calling for increased logging on 112.6 million Forest Service acres — about 59% of all Forest Service lands — to reduce wildfire risk and “support the durability and resiliency of forests.”
Also this week the Justice Department published a legal opinion that allows presidents to revoke prior presidential declarations of national monuments, overturning a 1938 opinion saying presidents using the Antiquities Act can only create, not abolish, national monuments. The determination opens the door for President Donald Trump to reduce the size —– or even cancel designations —– of national monuments created by previous presidents. (Seventeen presidents have used the 1906 Antiquities Act to create 160 national monuments.)
> Click over to The Sun on Friday to read this story
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The Playground
Five drownings so far in 2025, far fewer than this time last year
Colorado Parks and Wildlife and local communities have built more more than 40 life-jacket loaner stations across the state, like this one at the Eagle River Park. (Jason Blevins, The Colorado Sun)“Pretty please, with sugar on top, wear your darn life jacket.”
— CPW Director Jeff Davis
5
Drowning deaths in Colorado lakes and rivers so far in 2025, compared to 19 at this time last year
At least five people have drowned in Colorado’s outdoors in 2025, including three deaths in the last month at Pueblo Reservoir.
Last year at this time, at least 19 people had drowned in Colorado lakes, rivers and streams.
The below-average snowpack has eased runoff this spring. Last year by the middle of June a healthy snowpack had swollen the state’s rivers and streams and there were 10 fatalities in moving water. So far this year there has only been one fatality in a river: a man whose packraft overturned on the Arkansas River on June 6 between Buena Vista and Johnson Village.
Last year was a particularly grim season on Colorado’s lake and rivers, with at least 39 people drowning between March 28 and Sept. 7.
Pueblo Reservoir has seen three drowning deaths since May 14, when a father drowned trying to help children struggling in rough waters. On May 31 a 28-year-old man drowned after his boat overturned in high winds on the reservoir. On June 7 a man died while swimming in Rock Creek Cove at Pueblo Reservoir.
None of the drowning deaths in Colorado reservoirs this season involved a person wearing a personal floatation device, or a PFD. A majority of last year’s drownings were people who were not wearing a PFD.
Colorado Parks and Wildlife several years ago began offering free PFDs at its reservoirs and wildlife areas. There are now more than 40 life jacket loaner stations across the state.
State law requires boaters to carry PFDs for every person aboard and children 12 and under must wear the PFDs on boats. At least three of the drowning deaths this year involved boaters who had PFDs in their craft but were not wearing them.
At the Colorado Parks and Wildlife commissioner meeting this week in Glenwood Springs, agency director Jeff Davis urged visitors to always always consider safety when playing outside.
“Sometimes you can get overwhelmed by the weather. Sometimes you can think it’s not cool or you don’t look good wearing a life jacket. What we want as public servants is that everyone can go out and safely access the outdoors. So please check the weather and be careful … and pretty please, with sugar on top, wear your darn life jacket,” Davis said. “This is not the time of year to not be doing that.”
After unprecedented success out of the gate, Peak Ski Company crashes
The Peak Ski Co. headquarters in Bozeman, Montana has been closed for weeks as the company collapses. (Stella Campanale, Special to The Colorado Sun)“It was too good to be true.”
— pro skier Michelle Parker, who has not been paid for more than a year after signing with Peak Ski Co. in 2022.
$1.24 million
Amount raised in an early 2024 crowdfunding campaign by Peak Ski Co.
After one of the most successful ski launches ever, Peak Ski Co. has collapsed amid acrimony and claims of mismanagement by the high-profile founders of the Montana-based ski maker.
“It’s such a sad story. It did not need to go down this way,” says Aspen big-mountain skiing legend Chris Davenport, who joined Peak Ski Co. in 2022 as a senior director of skiing and product innovation.
The paychecks stopped coming in shortly after Davenport signed on. Same for freeskiing icon Michelle Parker, who also joined Peak in 2022 as a big-name athlete and head of product design.
“It was too good to be true,” Parker says of a contract offer from Peak in 2022 that drew her away from her longtime ski sponsor Black Crows. “They paid maybe a quarter of the three year deal.”
Davenport and Parker are lawyered up. They have spent months trying to reach the founders of Peak Ski Co., resort industry veteran Andy Wirth and ski racing superstar Bode Miller.
The skiers have drafted a breach-of-contract lawsuit, but their attorney worries there’s no money left to pursue.
“It’s kind of hard to imagine how they could treat us this way,” Parker said. “It’s kind of heartless. I don’t feel they were good at business. They certainly have not been upfront, fair or communicative.”
The glitzy Peak Ski Co. showroom in Bozeman, Montana is closed. The company’s high-profile roster of executives have left the company and its employees are laid off. Its athletes – including Davenport, Parker and JT Holmes – are no longer onboard. The company’s website went dark on Friday.
Wirth, a ski resort executive with tenures at Steamboat and Palisades Tahoe ski areas, and Miller, who retired from ski racing in 2017 after 33 World Cup victories and six Olympic medals, have been unavailable to comment for the last week but say they will talk soon.
Peak Ski Co. launched in 2021 with a unique ski design that includes a small “keyhole” cutout in front of the toe binding that purported to make the ski more flexible and turnable without sacrificing stability.
The company also offered a rare direct-to-consumer e-commerce website and planned a new automated production process. Wirth and Miller pitched Peak as a promise to revolutionize how skis are made and sold.
Peak Skis harvested accolades from ski media, heralding a fresh design and approach for the industry. The Snowsports Industries America trade group’s annual consumer report in 2023 ranked Peak Skis among the top five most memorable brands after only one season on snow. It was an unprecedented ascent for a brand-new ski company.
Now it appears that Peak Ski Co.’s descent is equally dramatic.
> Click over to The Sun next week to read this story.
— j
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