HUERFANO COUNTY — Cuchara Mountain Park is open for lift-served skiing.
Almost 25 years after idling its chairlifts, a volunteer-led nonprofit has revived Cuchara Mountain Park south of La Veta, opening the first new chairlift-served ski area since Echo Mountain opened in 2005.
“It’s been a labor of love through all these years and there’s been a dedicated crew that just stuck with it and persevered,” said Roger Therber, a Tennesseean who has a nearby cabin and came up with his wife to ski the grand opening of the 50-acre Cuchara Mountain Park on Saturday.
More than 100 skiers flocked to Cuchara to ride Chair 4. Volunteers with the Panadero Ski Corp. nonprofit have spent several years upgrading and rebuilding the chairlift at the ski area, which is owned by Huerfano County. The ski rental shop was built by volunteers, and a chain store in Colorado Springs wanted to get out of the ski rental business and they sold Panadero Corp. an entire store’s worth of rental inventory for cheap.
Cuchara ski area first opened in 1981, and a parade of Texas owners struggled to keep the ski area open. For 19 years the ski area would sporadically open and close as seven different owners worked to develop new lifts and condos. The last time Chair 4 carried skiers was 2000 and the Forest Service in 2002 canceled the ski area’s permit to access about 345 public acres. The hope is that if Cuchara Mountain Park can thrive on 50 county-owned acres and one lift, the nonprofit operator may be able to persuade the Forest Service to consider a new permit to access more terrain.
Since 2017, the nonprofit Cuchara Foundation has worked to raise funds to support the ski area. The group raised $150,000 for Huerfano County to purchase the mountain park from a local couple who acquired the base area acreage at a property tax sale.
“We didn’t even know it was the old ski area,” said JoVonne Fitzgerald, whose husband, Jerry, bought the roughly 50 acres in 2015 as part of his “hobby” of buying tax liens.
“It’s been a long time coming,” said Jerry as he and JoVonne attended Saturday’s grand opening.
“We’ve been coming up for years. We definitely were not missing this,” said Casey Hays of Burlington, who came over to Cuchara with his wife and son to ski. “Twenty five years and finally going again. It’s so cool. Best thing they could have done for this place.”
The plan is to offer low-cost lift-served skiing — tickets are $45 and season passes run $250 — for local residents. Panadero Ski Corp. plans to hire about five full-time workers to run the ski area on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays for the rest of the season. Most of the snow so far this season has come from snow guns, with volunteers collecting snowmaking equipment from an assortment of dormant ski areas from across the country.
Gerard Henzler, who has lived in the nearby Forbes Park community for 13 years, has spent years hiking the old lift lines with his dogs. On Saturday, he rode a chairlift at Cuchara for the first time.
“We’ve been waiting a long time for this,” Henzler said as he loaded the chair with his 5-year-old son.