Pikes Peak Region Trail Finder

By DAVE PHILIPPS, The Gazette

Charles Elliott, 96, skis the blue run Charisma off the Bonanza Chair at Wolf Creek ski area Dec. 15. It was his first day of skiing since his hip surgery in June so Elliott said he was taking it easy.

Christian Murdock, The Gazette

Wolf Creek Pass • Charles Elliott’s doctor never called back to give him permission, but with a forecast of sunny skies and 5 feet of fresh snow, the 96-year-old went skiing anyway last week — on his new hip joint.

Elliott, a pioneer of Colorado skiing, is not one to pass up a day on the slopes. He has skied powder at Wolf Creek Ski Area every winter since 1934, with the exception of two seasons during World War II. He skied powder before Colorado had a single ski area.

“I’ve been skiing powder here since before they had even started using the word ‘powder’,” Elliott said with a chuckle as he buckled his ski boots last week.

Friends in Wolf Creek’s Gray Wolf senior ski group (most of them whippersnappers a mere 75 years old) figured hip-replacement surgery in June  might finally end Elliott’s run of Wolf Creek’s slopes, but he was walking two miles a day just a month later to get in shape for ski season.

The life-long San Luis Valley resident arrived at the ski area last week wearing a knit sweater he bought in Aspen in 1949 and carrying a fairly new pair of Volant skis.

The Gray Wolves greeted him with a flurry of hugs and kisses.

At Wolf Creek’s busy base area, he stepped into his skis, slid through the chairlift line — he now skis for free — and took a seat on a high-speed quad cruising silently over groomed runs to a ridge 800 feet above.

The scene was remarkably different 75 years ago, when Elliott and a friend threw homemade, 8-foot-long wooden skis in the rumble seat of a Model A Ford and puttered to the top of Wolf Creek Pass.

It was the first winter the twisted dirt road had been plowed. There was not a soul in sight.

Elliott and his buddy threw the heavy skis over their shoulders and trudged up through the snow.

“He didn’t know anything about skiing and I knew less, but we were intrigued,” Elliott said. “We walked up the hill, shot straight down, fell, walked back up, fell again. We did that almost every Sunday for two years before we saw another skier.”

Skiing was in its infancy in Colorado. Though a few communities had small ski jumps and races, no rope tows or chairlifts were built in the state until 1936. Ski shops were unheard of.

Elliott made his first skis from wood planks, bending the tips by hand after holding them for hours over a steaming kettle on his mother’s stove. He waxed them with paraffin from his mother’s jam jars.

One Sunday in 1936, another skier showed up at the top of the pass. He was a traveling salesman from Pueblo. The trio ate lunch in the salesman’s car and he showed the boys a how-to book on the new sport of downhill skiing. It was the first Elliott had ever seen. He noticed all the skiers in the book had poles.

“What are those for?” he remembers asking.

“They help you turn,” the salesman said.

“You mean you can turn on skis?!” Elliott replied.

That night he went home and made poles out of a bamboo fishing pole and his grandmother’s embroidery hoops.

“We didn’t have anyone to teach us so it took me a long time to learn,” he said. “I probably have the record for most falls on this mountain.”

He bought his first skis five years later for $5 from the Montgomery Ward catalogue.

Interest in skiing began to blossom in Colorado. Monarch Pass, Pikes Peak, Loveland and Denver started ski clubs. By 1938, Wolf Creek had a club with enough members to raise money to buy a rope tow.

A flour mill in Monte Vista donated some used rope. A beer salesman talked the miners in nearby Creede out of some wheels to hold the rope. A mechanic offered a used 1928 Chevy engine to power the wheels. Elliott and his friends built the tow. The Civilian Conservation Corps erected a warming hut with an enormous stone fireplace, and Wolf Creek ski area was born.

Elliott fired up the rope tow in December 1938; it ran for about 60 seconds before the engine threw a rod. A replacement did not begin carrying skiers until 1939.

Over the decades, Elliott watched dozens of small ski areas open, then close. The state has almost 200 shuttered areas. But Wolf Creek, despite being far from a major city, has endured, and even thrived.

The secret of its success: “It always has lots of snow,” Elliott said.

As much as Elliott worked to develop Wolf Creek, he has also fought to keep development away. He is a vocal opponent of plans by Texas billionaire Billy Joe “Red” McCombs to build 2,100 housing units at the base of the ski area.

“It would just ruin the character of the place completely,” he said.

Elliott said he did not learn to ski well until he was in his 80s. He and his wife, Virginia,had eight children, so he only got out to ski a few times a year for decades. It was not until his wife died in 1991 that he rediscovered his old love.

“It helped me get my mind off things, gave me something to look forward to,” he said.

He skied over 30 days a season well into his 90s. A few years ago he was scolded by ski patrollers at Copper Mountain for skiing too fast.

“He has always been amazingly active,” said his son Vernon, 56. “He still fishes, hunts, goes backpacking by himself in the Weminuche Wilderness. People say, ‘How can you let your father do all this when he could get hurt?’ I say, ‘We can’t stop him.’”

Standing atop the Continental Divide last week, Elliott stood on his untested hip joint and pointed his skis down a wide green run. “Well, here it goes.”

At first he tottered gingerly from edge to edge like a beginner. Then, realizing his new hip was strong and stable, he began carving from side to side in long, elegant turns. Where strength had faded over the years, grace took over. He turned down a bumpy blue run, slipping easily through small moguls. He considered diving into the trees, then said, “Maybe I should wait until the snow is a little softer.”

At the bottom, his hip was feeling so good that he decided to do it again.

And again.

“I just love skiing,” he said. “To be going at speed, but have control . . . it’s exhilarating.”

He hopes to ski 15 days in this season.

“I didn’t think it would be possible for anyone to ski until 100,” he said at the end of his third run. “But now that’s only four years away. I just might make it.”