George Cranmer and the Mountain Denver Built
Near Winter Park, Colorado
George Cranmer served as Denver's manager of parks and improvements in the nineteen thirties and forties, and he was the man who gave Winter Park to the city. In the depths of the Depression, when most governments were contracting their ambitions, Cranmer looked at the Fraser Valley and saw opportunity, meaning not gold or silver but Colorado's natural resources, specifically the deep snow and high terrain that could be transformed into a winter playground. He pushed the City of Denver to purchase land at the western portal of the Moffat Tunnel, negotiated rights from the United States Forest Service, and organized the construction of the ski area's first lift and a warming lodge.
The resort opened for the winter of nineteen thirty-nine to nineteen forty. Its public ownership was intentional and ideological: a mountain for the people of Denver, not a resort for the wealthy. Ticket prices were kept low.
The ski train ran from Union Station through the tunnel and deposited skiers directly at the base of the slope. Cranmer's vision of a publicly owned, transit-accessible mountain playground was ahead of its time and has rarely been matched anywhere in American skiing. In two thousand two, Denver partnered with a private operator to run the day-to-day business of the mountain that Cranmer built.
