A Dying Town and A Dreamer Come
Together
August, 2000--This is the story of a town struggling to survive.
A tiny community, just 12 by 7 blocks, where kids can still ride
their bikes around town and play without fear, where the librarian
knows all of them (as well as all the gossip), where the grass
grows green, the air is clean and the snow falls white and deep.
It is a town that once thrived on mining, but where the last
operating mine closed in 1991. Like many other Colorado mountain
communities, it still clings to its charming and historical Western/Victorian
image, an image that brings summer tourist dollars, but does
nothing for the town in the cold, snowy winter. This is Silverton,
Colorado.
It is also the story of a dreamer. A 29
year old ski bum sort of dreamer, who on a trip to New Zealand
discovered a kind of skiing that had long disappeared from the
North American ski scene. Club run, with cozy base areas and
satellite lodges or warming huts, these southern hemisphere ski
areas started him dreaming about bringing the old ways back to
North America. Skiing wild ungroomed snow was a passion for him
while majoring in environmental studies in college, so perhaps
it is not surprising that all of these influences and interests
would come together one day in the tiny, dying, former mining
town of Silverton, high in Colorado's San Juan Range. The dreamer's
name is Aaron Brill.
Some of Brill's dreamland
 |
Aaron Brill's dream has a name, the Silverton
Outdoor Learning and Recreation Center (SOLRC). A retro style
ski area that is to have one lift, a double chair recycled from
a destination resort, that will climb 2,000 vertical feet to
the top of a ridge above Silverton. The elevation at the top
of this lift will be about 12,250 feet, with what is said to
be easy hiking up to 13,300. Skiers riding this lift will look
down and see no groomed runs or even designated trails, just
miles of wild snow much like the picture above.
Make no mistake, this is "expert only"
terrain. The routes down range from 35 to 60 degrees. There are
cliff bands and chutes as well as broad bowls. After a helicopter
recon of the area last year, Brill said this, "we got a
birds eye view and it looks great, from the top of the lift there
all kinds of options down to the road. The shots through the
trees are a continuous 45 degrees all the way down." There
will be routes back down to the lift as well as drops heading
into a canyon where at the bottom, skiers will be able to catch
a shuttle van back. With an average annual snowfall of 400 to
600 inches, this place has the potential to become a kind of
mecca for lovers of the steep, deep and wild--mostly all accessed
from the lift.
The town of Silverton could use the juice
that a successful winter business, however modest, would provide.
This is a mountain community that loses 5 students a year from
a K-12 school of only 75 pupils. In the words of one local, "if
we lose the school, this town is toast". When that last
major mining operation closed in 1991, putting nearly 800 people
out of work, it threw Silverton into a tailspin from which it
has yet to recover.
Perhaps this quote from a letter that Silverton's
mayor Ernest Kuhlman wrote, pleading with county and federal
officials to approve Brill's project as quickly as possible,
states the situation most clearly: "the winter population
is less than 15% of the summer population, the winter economy
is less than 10% of the summer economy and the community has
experienced the highest rate of winter unemployment in the entire
state of Colorado since 1992....the Town Board unanimously supports
this project and encourages its approval in as short of time
frame as practicable. To do less is to impose unwarranted harm
and injury on a people that are struggling to survive current
winter living conditions."
Yet there is opposition to Brill's plan
within the community and, surprisingly (with one notable exception)
it is from skiers. Backcountry skiers. A small but vocal group
of locals who call these mountains home are worried about losing
some of their favorite stashs. At one point these folks set up
yet another public town meeting on the project (there have been
a half dozen), this one to rally opposition to SOLRC. They printed
and distributed flyers calling the meeting "Brill On The
Grill". Supporters countered with a flyer of their own referring
to the opposition as "Yuppies On The Half Shell". When
the meeting was held, more than 100 people showed up and by all
accounts the community expressed overwhelming support for Brill's
plan. Some other local backcountry skiers even came to say that
there are plenty of places to ski in the area, adding that they
welcomed the economic benefit to the town. Not long after, the
county approved plans for the Silverton Outdoor Learning and
Recreation Center. Aaron Brill then began the arduous task of
gaining Bureau of Land Management approval for SOLRC to access
land under BLM control lying outside of the ski area.
"Profits are not the
dominating factor here, sustainable living is."
---Quote from
the SOLRC Business Plan
The exception noted above comes in the
form of one Jane and Steve Legge. The couple own property and
a cabin off the dirt road leading to Brill's planned base of
operations. They attended the public meetings to voice their
concerns. A major one was that they were worried skiers would
wander onto their property. Brill offered to lay out a roped-off
35 acre buffer zone. The Legge's responded by filing a lawsuit
against San Juan county to try to force officials to rescind
the permit they had already issued. At this time the status of
the suit is unclear, but the county has filed a motion to have
the suit dismissed.
These challenges to Brill's project are
miniscule in comparison to the biggest challenge of all, the
one provided by none other than Mother Nature herself. That 400-600
inches of snow is both a blessing and a curse. Colorado's snowpack
is notoriously unstable and much of the ski area is prime avalanche
terrain. There is no doubt that Brill and company will have to
be totally on it from a snow safety standpoint.
Even though he worries about
possible competition, George supports the project....
|
It is planned for avalanche control experts
to be on the scene each morning and SOLRC has acquired a pair
of bomb launchers that are expected to be deployed at the top
of the mountain, as well as on the back of a snow-cat.
"No question, snow safety is
going to be his (Brill's) biggest challenge. It's a mixture of
the Colorado snowpack, which we all know about here, and some
really, really steep terrain," says Chris George, longtime
guide and owner of a nearby backcountry ski lodge. |
|
|
Those aren't
ski runs........ |
|
Even with avalanche control work being
performed regularly and aggressively, this is still going to
be a place where skiers will have to bring their own avy eyes
to the table. Before purchasing a lift ticket, visitors will
be required to pass a backcountry skills test and show that they
are in possession of a beacon, shovel and probe poles. It is
planned that those who do not have the gear will be able to rent,
and skiers failing the skills test will have the option of going
with a guide. Brill says, "at most ski areas it is expected
that the ski patrol will make all of the decisions for the visitors
regarding the issues of weather, safety, and avalanche hazard.
SOLRC will provide some of the best ski patrollers and a safe
experience for our guests, but will emphasize the process of
observing one's surroundings and making the appropriate decision
on where they should be skiing." In addition each lift rider
will need a "Colorado Hiker Card" that is a kind of
rescue insurance administered by the state ($1). Avalanche awareness
classes will also be offered as part of the "Outdoor Learning"
aspect of SOLRC.
More awesome terrain...
 |
Further plans include a 2,200 square foot
yurt style "lodge" and ten or so "huts" that
Brill says will be low cost and designed to be "one step
above sleeping in your car".
As you can see, Aaron Brill's dream is
a unique one. In an era when ski areas are more about selling
dirt than snow and the skiing experience has been homogenized,
huckified and Disneyized, Brill wants to go the other way. This
is not "some rich guy"...it has been reported that
the shuttle van that sits in his yard in Silverton and is slated
to shuttle SOLRC skiers was once his home. He cut his teeth skiing
wild snow on Baldy's backside while finishing college in SoCal,
and he and Jenny Ader started the first inland chapter of the
Surfrider Foundation, a group devoted to keeping the ocean clean.
Prior to coming to Silverton, the pair were instrumental in a
group formed to preventt Montana's Big Sky resort from dumping
treated sewage water into the Gallatin River. This is not your
run of the mill development team, they too are unique.
For years telemark skiers have been taking
their backcountry techniques to the resorts, now a dreamer wants
to bring a ski area to a tiny corner of the backcountry. Recently,
Brill and Co. purchased Mammoth Mountain's dependable old chair
15 which was replaced with a high-speed detachable quad (what
else?) by that area's mangement. Brill still hopes to get his
recycled lift installed for operation this winter, but he needs
a heavy lifting helicopter to install the lift towers and with
wildfires raging throughout the western U.S. this summer, such
a helicopter is hard to come by.
Meanwhile, the long-term locals of Silverton
who have seen the town struggle to survive in the face of severe
economic hardship, each winter becoming more difficult, wish
nothing more than for Aaron Brill's dream to come true.... and
that it will bring hope to their dying town.
To learn more about the Silverton Outdoor
Learning and Recreation Center: www.silvertonmountain.com
Photographs courtesy Core Mountain
Enterprises.
Cover | Site Map | News
Page | Talk
Forum |