Nineteen Sixty-One: The Ski Area That Saved the Town
Near Breckenridge, Colorado
By the middle of the twentieth century, Breckenridge was fading. The mines were played out, the last dredge had gone quiet in nineteen forty-two, and the population had dwindled. What rescued the town was the very thing that once made winter here so brutal, the snow.
In the summer of nineteen sixty, a businessman named Bill Rounds and a skier named Trygve Berge scouted the slopes of Peak Eight, on the flank of the Tenmile Range just west of downtown. Backed by Rounds and the local development company, they carved out ski runs, and on December sixteenth of nineteen sixty-one, Breckenridge Ski Resort opened for business. The first winter had just a single chairlift and a beginner's tow rope, and lift tickets cost four dollars for adults.
Around seventeen thousand skier visits came that first season. From that modest start the resort grew across the range, adding Peak Nine, then Peak Ten, then Peaks Seven and Six, until it spanned five peaks. Within a few decades Breckenridge had become one of the most visited ski areas in all of North America, drawing well over a million skiers a year.
The gold had built the town. The snow brought it back to life.
