LEADVILLE — The future of Colorado Mountain College’s nearly 55-year-old ski area operations program is stacked neatly in a piney copse. And that pile of lift towers and platter chairs — Steamboat’s old Rough Rider surface chair — could be one solution to the ski resort industry’s growing workforce struggles.
With a new used chairlift, a revitalized ski hill and an overhauled ski area operations program developed with ski resort partners, CMC’s Leadville campus hopes its student-run Dutch Henry ski area will expedite training for an industry laboring to retain lift mechanics, equipment operators and other technical workers. The school’s little ski hill could also grow into a community amenity and help groom a new generation of skiers in a town that has long supported the resorts in nearby Eagle and Summit counties.
“We’re trying to serve the industry by educating people who are already in the job as well as training up new people,” said Ben Cairns, the dean of CMC’s Leadville and Salida campuses. “We can be both the education and recruiting arm of the industry. With higher ed, you cannot really divorce yourself from the needs of the industry you are working in.”
Colorado Mountain College just launched a fundraising campaign that hopes to expand partnerships with Alterra Mountain Co., Vail Resorts and Powdr to include employing CMC student interns as well as cash for the new lift installation. Alterra Mountain Co. in 2023 partnered with CMC on an expedited lift mechanic training program.
“We are proud of our continued partnership with Colorado Mountain College and the swift evolution of this program. This ongoing collaborative effort offers opportunity to people with an interest in building a long-term technical career in the ski industry,” Hannah Barrego, the head of integration at Alterra Mountain Co., said in an email. “The program directly addresses the need to fill our operational workforce pipeline through accessible and accelerated hands-on training that is needed at all ski resorts.”
The lift installation — estimated at $500,000 to meet modern-day chairlift standards — is part of an overhaul of the school’s ski area operations program that has trained lift mechanics, avalanche scientists and resort managers for decades. In the modernized ski area operations program, a student arrives in August and will have an intensive campus experience for two semesters and maybe the following summer. At the Leadville campus, they will run the ski area, working on the chairlift, managing grooming, ski instruction and ski patrol while hosting events and learning the business of ski areas.
After that training they will spend a season at a ski area, deploying the skills they have learned. That full year internship will carry them into graduation. That will enable the school to move kids beyond the resorts closest to Leadville, offering internships at California, Utah and Washington resorts.
“We want to formalize the internships to truly make it a meaningful experience and a truly legitimate pathway into the industry,” Cairns said.
There’s another aspect to the overhaul of the CMC ski ops program that includes improved continuing education for licensed resort workers who can earn certificates that can equate to increased pay. For example, the lift mechanics cohort this summer earned continuing education credits.
“We find that most people in that space are not necessarily interested in college credits as much as credentials and certificates that get them pay raises, better jobs and advancements,” Cairns said.
Growing ski area operations programs at other colleges
Cairns is visiting the East Coast this fall with hopes to persuade other colleges to seed a similar program in partnership with New England ski areas. Colorado Mountain College is readily sharing its curriculum and program details with other higher education institutions, Cairns said.
“The industry needs this,” he said. “I’m curious to see in the next couple years how many other programs develop this apprenticeship model where the work-based learning is more central and more featured and the higher ed pieces are playing a supporting role.”
The Colorado Mountain College ski area operations program offers associate degrees that blend actual trades with college learning. Other schools are following suit. Northwest College in Powell, Wyoming, this fall will launch its first ski area operations, two-semester certification program in partnership with nearby Antelope Butte Mountain Recreation Area. Oregon State University offers an online program for lift technicians.
Fort Lewis College in Durango also offers a ski area operations certificate and an 18-credit avalanche science program. Colorado Mountain College this summer helped Salt Lake City Community College launch a 10-week lift mechanic certification program in collaboration with Ski Utah and the state’s ski resorts.
The National Ski Areas Association is hoping that launch of its Lift Maintenance Apprenticeship Program next year will establish a national standard for training and certification. The association is applying for formal recognition of ski lift maintenance with its own occupational code under the American National Standards Institute. (Right now lift workers are classified under a category with elevator repair workers.)
The apprenticeship program will help workers and ski areas build a stronger operational workforce, said Earl Saline, the head of education for the Lakewood-based NSAA.
“Lift maintenance is essential to safe, consistent ski operations,” Saline said in an email. “By expanding education programs and launching our apprenticeship, we’re building clear career pathways that strengthen the profession and prepare our industry for the future.”
A spokesman for Vail Resorts said the CMC Dutch Henry plan will help the company secure technical workers who are hard to find and retain in resort communities. The company hopes its work with Colorado Mountain College and the NSAA will expose skilled technical careers to more potential workers and strengthen lift operations at all resorts.
“We are excited about the expansion of high-quality continuing education that supports our profession. Our shared goal is to build a sustainable, capable pipeline of talents,” said Joe Klosterman, the president of the Rocky Mountain Lift Association and director of lift maintenance at Vail Resorts who has worked with the CMC ski area operations faculty for years. “Programs like this also raise awareness that highly skilled technical careers exist at ski areas.”
800 CMC grads in the resort industry
Voters in five Western Slope counties in the mid 1960s approved a property tax to fund a local college and by the early 1970s, CMC campuses were thriving in Glenwood Springs and Leadville. As the resort industry in Colorado boomed, the Leadville school created the first one-year certification program for ski area operations in 1971. A few years later the school launched a two-year degree in ski area operations. Just about every student who graduates with that degree walks into a resort job, and 85% are still in the resort industry five years later.
Cairns estimates there are about 800 CMC graduates working at ski areas across North America. Colorado Mountain College has long helped mountain communities better prepare young residents for jobs in their hometowns. It’s part of the mission of the venerable school, which is now spread across 11 campuses that educate 14,000 students a year.
CMC students already use the school’s Prinroth Husky and PistenBully 400 snowcats to shape terrain park features and groom snow at Dutch Henry. The plan is for students to use heavy machinery to dig the foundations for the four towers, clear some trees to add terrain, install snowmaking systems and make snow. When the season is up and running, they will groom and patrol the ski area as well as host the occasional event.
Maybe Dutch Henry could open to the public one day. Maybe local kids, or groups of school kids could come visit for a day. There is not a plan to open a ski area that would compete with the Lake County-owned nonprofit Ski Cooper up the road from Leadville. But maybe the CMC ski area could host ski race clubs or teams who would pay to rent slalom-gated lanes for practice. Ski clubs often pay $100 an hour, per racer, for training time. That sort of happens now with the local ski team and Team Summit, who visit Dutch Henry to train on moguls but the skiers have to hike or ride a snowmobile to get back to the top. There’s also a county-run tubing operation at Dutch Henry in the winter.
Cairns said the industry is starting to look closer at lift mechanic education after some high profile accidents in the 2024-25 ski season. A gondola cabin with passengers in March fell off the cable at the Kicking Horse ski area in British Columbia. A steel beam on a tower for Winter Park ski area’s gondola broke in December, requiring an evacuation. A chair on a lift at Heavenly in California slid backward and collided with the chair behind it, injuring five skiers. There were a record-number of chairlift falls at Colorado ski areas.
These accidents were not connected to lift mechanical failures, “but it’s certainly an adjacent conversation,” Cairns said. Lift mechanics should be studying accidents — even falls that are not connected to lift mechanical systems — as part of their education, Cairns said.
“This pushes the lift mechanic conversation onto everyone’s radar,” he said.
The school is building a $3 million building for students working on heavy machinery. That leaves the old snowcat barn for lift mechanics and construction students. They’ve been collecting electrical systems, gear boxes, lift grips and other technical components, which students regularly tear down and rebuild.
Getting Leadville outside
The other side of the project, Cairns said, is introducing not just ski industry work, but skiing, to overlooked populations.
“You aren’t going to work in the ski industry if you are not a skier,” he said. “For a lot of Latino kids living in our valleys, it’s really hard to go to a ski resort and learn to ski. But what if you have something like this in your community? You can ride a school bus up to the hill after school and all the sudden, skiing is much more accessible. So we have hopes here that we can help with the long-term recruitment of skiers for the industry.”
That’s how it worked for Leadville resident Brayhan Reveles, who graduated from CMC with an outdoor leadership degree. He now works as deputy director of Lake County’s Get Outdoors Leadville, helping to remove barriers local families face when they want to recreate outside. That includes a gear library that offers members affordable access to high quality gear and soon, hopefully, a local ski hill.
“We are trying to engage families, whole families — kids, parents and grandparents — in activities in an introductory way so they can see that skiing is not just for rich people and everyone can do it,” Reveles said. “And then they can see the big opportunity for employment in this area. We are trying to build up pathways with CMC to be able to capture families and get them outside and hopefully inspire them to pursue high-paying jobs in local industries. That way you can have a career where you don’t have to leave your mountain home and go down to the city for work.”
That local workforce development is key as the Climax Mine taps its remaining reserves of molybdenum with a plan to shut down in the late 2030s. That’s happened before in the late 1980s and proved a devastating economic blow to Leadville. This time, there are a lot of plans in the works to keep Leadville’s economy afloat when the nearly 400-worker mine closes.
“In terms of mental health, if we can get the local people in Lake County to become skiers and identify as skiers, it makes living here way more enjoyable,” Cairns said. “This can be a rough place to live if you don’t have anything fun to go out and do in the winter. It’s a long time to sit inside.”
That starts with making everyone feel welcome outside and helping them “build a sense of place” around their hometown, Reveles said. Too many people in the working communities adjacent to resort towns — like Leadville — are filled with people who maybe don’t fully enjoy the natural resources and amenities that surround them.
“So maybe we can help them build community so that they start to feel welcome and start participating in different activities,” he said. “Then they can have generations of their families staying here and continuing to thrive.”