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Members of the Ski Blazers club of Colorado Springs ham it up on the slopes. Courtesy of Ski Blazers
BY R. SCOTT RAPPOLD
THE GAZETTE
After 77 years of skiing, Dorothy Tolliver has figured out the best way to plan a ski trip: let someone else do all the work.
“I enjoy that everything is always organized so nicely,” said the 80-year-old. “I just put my a-- on the bus and I don’t have to worry about anything else.”
That’s why she belongs to the Blazer Ski Club, a local club for adults that organizes bus trips with lodging, food and discount lift tickets.
Carl Kotkowski belongs to the Sno Jets, another local club for adults that organizes ski trips with lodging, food and discount lift tickets.
“It’s the camaraderie, being able to ski with other people that are not only maybe better skiers than you, but lesser-skilled than you. It’s being able to go out and enjoy the sport,” he said.
For more than 50 years, these clubs have coexisted. The Blazer Ski Club was more sedate, for older skiers. The Sno Jets was wilder, a party scene for singles. They didn’t feud like the Jets and Sharks, but neither did they do much together.
Those days are over.
Skiing is as popular as it has ever been, but both clubs have had trouble filling their trips in a recession. So this winter they’re doing the unthinkable: opening up trips to members from the other club.
And they’re hoping Colorado Springs skiers take interest and realize there are better ways to ski than driving two or more hours each way, paying exorbitant prices and skiing alone.
The two clubs have remarkably similar beginnings.
In the early 1950s, Colorado Springs was flush with Air Force pilots who were feeding their need-for-speed fix with the burgeoning sport of skiing. Some pilots at Peterson Air Force Base formed the Sno Jets.
A few years later, pilots at the old Ent Air Force Base here formed the Blazer Ski Club.
Before a plowed and paved highway system made getting to the slopes easy, the clubs offered shared transportation. Before the Internet made it simple to book accommodations, they arranged lodging.
Other local ski clubs formed over the years, but these two remained the biggest, with hundreds of members each.
For the Blazers, each trip starts before dawn in a parking lot. Members throw their gear down and sink into a seat on the group bus. Cocktails are served to those so inclined. And for a few hours someone else deals with the icy roads, traffic and parking.
Members of the Sno Jets club of Colorado Springs take a shotski after a run down the slopes. Courtesy of Sno Jets
Then they ski.
“In the club, you don’t have to ski alone. There’s somebody at every level,” said Dorrie Wilk. “If you want to cruise, you can cruise. If you want to jump off cliffs and ski in the powder, there’s someone to do that with you.”
While most Blazers are retired, don’t let their age fool you; some members are pretty good skiers. Just ask Sarah Nasatka, who at 22 is the youngest member and also one of the few snowboarders in the group. They wear her out.
And later, after the skiing and after the wine-and-cheese reception at the hotel, it’s time to hit the town — and they wear her out again.
“Some of these people are party animals,” Nasatka said.
The Blazers have eight trips planned this winter, all but two of them multi-day trips to resorts that are more than a couple hours’ drive from Colorado Springs. With five decades of institutional memory of where the best snow usually is, they’re going to Wolf Creek in the early season, Telluride and Crested Butte in mid-season, Taos and Monarch (a day trip) in March and wrapping up with a beach party at Arapahoe Basin in April.
The club gets special group rates — try paying for gas and getting three nights in the base village at Telluride for $390 a person on your own — and after skiing hard, they don’t have to pile into a car, exhausted, and drive all the way home.
“I’ve done too many of the ski trips where you ski all weekend and you’re dead driving back,” said member Wayne Turner.
Dues are $35 a year. Non-members can sign up for trips for an extra fee.
The Sno Jets offer quite similar experiences, except most of this year’s trips will be carpools.
“We offer so much diversity in skiing ability. Someone can come who doesn’t ski much and hang out with someone who doesn’t ski much or you can do chutes or the double blacks,” said member Janice Doyle.
Except for trips to Monarch and Snowmass, the Sno Jets tend to ski the Vail Resorts mountains, since most members have season passes. Annual dues are $42, and like the Blazers, they recently opened trips to non-members for an extra fee.
In fact, the clubs are so similar, the only differences seem to be age — the Blazers seem to be an average of 10 to 20 years older than the Jets — and the “shot ski,” the ski with shot glasses attached that the Sno Jets use to imbibe. The Jets are no longer mainly singles and the Blazers are no longer mainly families, but you have to be 21 years old to join either club.
Still, neither club has attracted many younger members. The clubs differ in that way from their early years.
Al Chioffe first joined the Sno Jets when he was stationed here in the Army.
“When I was here in the ‘60s, everyone was in their twenties. When I was here in the ‘70s, everyone was in their thirties,” he said.
Now neither club can claim to be young. Maybe the economy has people taking fewer overnight ski trips, or maybe the younger generation of skiers are not “joiners,” but membership has dwindled for both clubs.
The Blazers number 108, the Sno Jets 145. They have waived the non-member fee for each other’s trips to boost participation and have even discussed the unthinkable: merging.
“We’ve talked about it. Who knows? It is on the table,” said Sno Jet Paula Sollenberger.
Still, for old-time skiers like Tolliver, who learned the sport in the Alps as a child and has weathered many changes (“Oh I hated the snowboarders ... They scared the bejesus out of me. But they are getting better.”), it will always be about the skiing.
Even if she doesn’t ski as hard as she used to.
“Now I’m a cruiser. I can’t afford to break any bones.”
SNO JETS SKI & SOCIAL CLUB
Annual dues: $42
Meetings: October through mid-April at 6:30 p.m. Thursdays, downstairs at the Dublin House, 1850 Dominion Way
Open to: Ages 21 and older
Trips this season: Snowmass, Jan. 13-17; Beaver Creek, Feb. 10-12; Monarch, Feb. 25; Breckenridge, March 2-4; Arapahoe Basin beach party, March 24; Vail, April 14-16
Info: snojets.org
BLAZER SKI CLUB
Annual dues: $35
Meetings: October through April at 6 p.m. Wednesdays. Most are at the Fox and Hound, 3101 New Center Point. Check the website for details.
Open to: Ages 21 and older
Trips this season: Wolf Creek, Dec. 9-11; Crested Butte, Jan. 27-29; train trip to Sunlight, Feb. 4-7; Telluride, Feb. 17-20; Taos, March 2-4; Ski Cooper, March 16-18; Monarch, March 30; Arapahoe Basin beach party, April 7
Info: blazerskiclub.org
Other ski club
Pikes Peak Over the Hill Gang: For skiers 50 and older; members also snowshoe and cross-country ski and participate in other sports year-round; www.ppothg.com.
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Contact R. Scott Rappold: 476-1605
Twitter @scottrappold
Facebook Gazette Scott Rappold
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