TELLURIDE — As light flakes fell, the ski patrollers in this town voted. It wasn’t what they wanted, but it was time.
After an unprecedented resort closure and 13-day ski patrol strike that drained holiday business in a community that relies on skiing vacationers, the 75-member Telluride Professional Ski Patrol union on Thursday voted to accept an offer from the resort owner and return to the slopes.
It’s been an ugly two weeks in Telluride and Mountain Village. Visitor and second homeowner traffic collapsed over the holidays as patrollers went on strike Dec. 27 and resort owner Chuck Horning responded by closing the ski area. The patrollers walked off the job after spending months fruitlessly pushing for a wage increase in a new three-year contract with Horning, a Southern California real estate investor who bought the ski area in 2004.
“We are delighted that the two parties came to an agreement today. It has been a lot of work but we are confident that this last offer represented a fair compromise,” said Telluride Ski and Golf spokesman Steve Swenson in a statement.
The ski resort will begin opening on Saturday, with Lift 4 and more lifts and terrain to follow.
On Wednesday, more than 100 Telluride merchants and workers marched up and down the town’s main street, chanting “End it now!” and waving signs urging the resort and patrollers to reach a deal.
An online petition launched by “citizens, business owners and residents” Wednesday morning and signed by nearly 500 people asked the patrol union “to execute a strategic pivot” and “accept a less than ideal offer” to end the strike.
“We know your grievances are financially and morally sound. We ask because the alternative is the destruction of the community that supports you,” reads the petition that acknowledged the worth of the patrol and the need for a living wage while also noting “a third, darker truth,” that “this strike is not hurting Chuck Horning.”
Local schoolchildren at Telluride marched in support of striking ski patrollers on Jan. 7. (Ben Eng, Special to The Colorado Sun)“We are fucking terrified. We can’t sleep. It’s affecting our families,” Chris Fish, the co-owner of the Telluride Brewing Co. told elected officials late Wednesday at an emotional joint meeting with the Telluride and Mountain Village town councils. “I respect that the patrol deserves a livable wage. We all do. It’s a bloodbath. I think as someone who owns a business in town, it’s gnarly and everyone needs to wake the f*** up and make a deal.”
“Most remote resorts failed”
Horning has a fraught relationship with the community. His ownership of the largest economic engine in the region has been erratic. He has fired a long list of resort veterans he hired to run the ski area. He’s stopped spending on marketing and no longer supports airline traffic into the Montrose and Telluride airports. Local businesses struggle to engage the 81-year-old owner who rarely visits the mountain communities. The locally created ChuckChuck.ski website outlines a litany of business decisions that have challenged the resort and local economies.
“In order to most effectively pull levers on the ski company we need to be working together and we need to have the economic engine in our community running and stand united and then we will be able to effectively influence the ski company,” Telluride resident Dana Conneally said as he passed out paper copies of his petition during the merchant march.
Horning, in an email to The Sun, said under his watch his resort “has gone from pretty much unknown, to having a well established reputation for the experience on the mountain including amazing food at extreme altitude.”
“It’s been fun to do all this, other than for the ‘news.’” Horning said of the steady stream of articles lambasting him. “Perhaps that’s the culture of selling ads and circulation today, but it’s distracting. We have a great staff and provide a great experience, something extraordinarily challenging for a remote resort. Lech, St Anton and Zermatt are wonderful examples of a cohesive community understanding and provide a very unique experience, capable of attracting loyal customers year after year. Most remote resorts failed. These resorts had alignment in their communities with government and built an amazing guest experience, with community and government support.”
Telluride Ski and Golf lacks the community support those European resorts have, Horning said.
“We lack any community sense of what we are in terms of the regulatory side being able to accomplish critical aspects required, like worker housing,” he said. “This is largely due, in my view, to an outdated, failed system of governing.”
A tipping point for Telluride
There was a sense of urgency Wednesday as word trickled out about a revised offer from Telluride Ski and Golf made late Tuesday. The next three weeks are the biggest booking window of the year for Telluride vacationers. If the resort remained largely closed — on Monday this week it opened two magic carpet surface lifts serving a couple of beginner runs used for teaching first timers — those bookings would not happen and the season would likely be lost.
Occupancy around the ski area was down 42% in December and down 59% in the first week of January. Businesses this week started laying off workers as crowds evaporated. The lack of snowfall – Colorado’s median snowpack is at 63% of normal – has slowed skier traffic across the state. Tourism boosters in Telluride said comparable resorts were down only 6% over the not-quite-snowy holidays.
Tommy Thacher, who co-owns Telluride Brewing Co. with Fish, expanded last month with a new restaurant location in Lawson Hill outside town. Business is down 40% this season, and Thacher expects that to reach 60% by the end of this week.
“If things don’t change, we will close the brewpub,” he said as a bus driver pulled over at the end of the main street merchant march in Telluride and hinged open the shuttle doors to offer Thacher’s bulldog, Bogart, a treat. “We are on the verge of economic collapse if this does not get fixed.”
More than 100 merchants on Jan. 7 marched on Telluride’s main street chanting “End it now!” urging the ski patrol and Telluride Ski and Golf to end a 12-day strike that has slowed traffic in the community. Sally Puff Courtney, a local real estate broker seen here, urged the merchants and workers to reach out to patrollers and company leaders. “Make those hard calls so we don’t go down the tubes,” she said. (Jason Blevins, The Colorado Sun)The patrollers wanted a wage structure that would help them better retain younger workers who often leave after a few years for higher paying jobs in firehouses or ambulances. The median tenure for patrollers at Telluride ski area is around 11 years.
Better retention of ski patrollers means there are more experienced avalanche technicians and rescuers on patrol, which improves the safety of the patrollers and skiers. Last month a Mammoth Mountain ski patroller died from injuries he sustained in an avalanche while mitigating hazards after a big storm.
“It has become quite apparent that the inconvenience of this strike is far greater than if one of us died doing our job,” patroller Bennett Hrabovsky said Wednesday night at a packed meeting with both the Telluride and Mountain Village town councils.
Unattainable home prices in mountain towns drive affordability crisis
The cost of housing has exploded in recent years across all Colorado mountain towns as wealth disparity grows and new residents arrive. In Telluride, the median priced home sells for between $3 million and $4 million. Home buyers spent more than $1 billion a year in San Miguel County in four of the last five years. The middle class and service workers are being priced out of many resort communities, forcing them to downvalley towns where home prices are still high.
In Telluride, that means many workers commute an hour or more to reach their jobs. Telluride ski patrollers are asking for wages to help them better afford life in the valley and better reflect the intensity of their jobs. The resort company has expressed concern that giving 75 ski patrollers a significant bump in pay could lead to increased wage demands from the other 1,100-plus seasonal workers at the ski area.
The Telluride patrol union was seeking a pay increase up to $40 an hour for veteran patrollers. The patrol was seeking annual cost-of-living increases as well as stipends to help pay for health insurance and gear required for the job. The union has reduced the overall value of its initial request by 50% during more than 200 hours of negotiations.
“I understand that people want this to go away. It’s the company that is refusing to pay that amount and all the vitriol that has been directed at us is honestly astonishing to me,” patroller and union representative Jackie Kearney said at the Wednesday meeting.
Telluride Ski and Golf has kept paying its idled seasonal workers and the paychecks were scheduled to stop on Jan. 11, increasing the urgency for the company to reach an agreement with patrollers if it wanted to keep those workers in town.
Vacationers ride the gondola from the Telluride Ski Resort in Mountain Village to Telluride on Dec. 27, 2025. (William Woody, Special to The Colorado Sun)The philanthropic community around Telluride has rallied in the recent week. The Telluride Foundation Good Neighbor Fund, which was born in the pandemic as a tool for helping financially stressed workers and families remain in the region, grew from $40,000 in reserves to more than $450,000 in the last week. The foundation has increased the grant size from the fund from $1,500 and $2,500 as donors push to increase the fund to $1 million.
“This is quite literally neighbors taking care of neighbors,” Jason Corzine, the head of the Telluride Foundation, said Wednesday. “When we put a call into the philanthropic community they step up. Tonight we have each other’s back.”
Rebuilding trust and the Telluride brand
Telluride Ski and Golf last month published a table of hourly wages for ski patrollers at five other ski areas in Colorado, Montana and Utah. That chart showed patrollers earning from $18.91 an hour at a “remote” Colorado resort to $31 an hour at a “mid-size” resort near Salt Lake City.
But the pay negotiations are complicated, with additional benefits for patrollers with technical training and certification for medical care and avalanche mitigation.
“The wage structure we are working with has to make sense for workers across all of our company,” Telluride Ski and Golf representative Swenson told the two councils in Mountain Village Town Hall on Wednesday night, adding that the latest proposal from the company was “a solid offer.”
Telluride Professional Ski Patrol Association union president Graham Hoffman speaks to members of the ski patrol in the parking lot near the ski patrol’s headquarters early Saturday morning December 27, 2025 in Telluride. (William Woody, Special to The Colorado Sun)Elected leaders in Mountain Village, Telluride and San Miguel County are increasing funding for a massive blitz to reengage visitors and second homeowners whose holiday ski vacations crumbled in the labor scrap.
The rebranding and marketing will dovetail a larger overhaul of community relations and repairing trust within a region that is increasingly riven by the haves and have-nots.
A lot of business owners said they supported ski patrol and shared a no-longer simmering disdain for the absentee owner of the ski area. But they also shared a weariness, not just from the last week but the persistent push to return their mountain town to the old days.
“We all want to go back in time and live in communities that were all about waist-deep powder and this incredible lifestyle and ski town tribes,” said Lauren Woodward, a local real estate broker who has owned the Camel’s Garden Hotel in Telluride’s Gondola Plaza since 2021. “But this community has changed so much. It’s expensive and complicated and nothing is that simple anymore. I’m sort of exhausted with looking back. We need to look forward. The community must reinvent itself.”
Woodward, who was born and raised in Telluride, hopes the labor fight and the owner’s decision to shutdown the resort will be a catalyst that prods all residents, business owners and second homeowners to participate more deeply in local governance.
Snowmaking operations continue at the closed Telluride ski area in Mountain Village on Dec. 27, 2025. (William Woody, Special to The Colorado Sun)Woodward wants more locals involved in a plan for the community’s future.
“We need to become more diverse and we need to know how to deal with low-snow years like this one,” she said.
The issue is bigger than worker wages at one ski area. The roiling labor dispute and regional shutdown reflect a growing inequality in mountain towns, where workers are being edged out or forced into subsidized housing that forever eclipses them from accessing any of the wealth that surrounds them.
A surging wave of unionized resort workers that now number more than 1,100 at 14 ski areas in four Western states will shape the future of the resort industry moving forward. So will the Telluride rebuilding and recovery from the shutdown. Can mountain towns lean away from a sole reliance on ski resorts? They evolved from the collapse of mining into tourist destinations with skyrocketing real estate prices. What will the next evolution of resort winter economies look like? What will mountain towns learn from the debacle that nearly crushed Telluride?
“This is what happens when things are out of balance,” said Carl Houser, the manager of the historic New Sheridan Hotel in Telluride, which this week laid off 30 workers and scaled down food service to a few days a week. “Maybe this is an overdue correction.”
This story will be updated as details of the new contract are released
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