Winter Park: Denver's Mountain Backyard

Winter Park sits in the Fraser Valley of Grand County, Colorado, sixty-seven miles from Denver by road over Berthoud Pass, or a straight shot of sixty-two miles through the Moffat Tunnel by rail. At an elevation of roughly nine thousand feet, the valley captures some of the deepest, driest powder in the Rocky Mountains, and for more than sixty years the City of Denver effectively claimed this place as its own mountain backyard. The story of how that happened begins with a railroad tunnel and a parks director who thought in grand terms.

Before any of that, the Fraser Valley was the territory of the Ute people, who ranged across these high mountains for centuries, hunting and camping through country they knew intimately. The first permanent European American homesteader arrived in the eighteen seventies. By the turn of the century, ranchers and a handful of lodges made up the valley's small year-round population.

The settlement that would become Winter Park was known first simply as West Portal, the name for the western mouth of the Moffat Tunnel, which opened in nineteen twenty-eight and made the valley dramatically more accessible from Denver. George Cranmer, Denver's director of parks and improvements, recognized the opportunity immediately. A man who thought in visions and acted on them, Cranmer pushed the city to purchase land at the edge of the valley during the Great Depression and build a winter sports park accessible to ordinary families by train from Union Station.

The ski resort opened on January tenth, nineteen forty, a public facility owned and operated by the City and County of Denver. For sixty-two years, Winter Park was one of a kind among American ski resorts: a mountain bought with public money, run as a public amenity, with ticket prices kept low enough that working families from Denver could actually afford it. That arrangement ended in two thousand two when Denver entered a long-term management partnership with a private operator.

Intrawest Corporation of Canada ran the mountain until Alterra Mountain Company acquired it in two thousand eighteen. Through all the ownership changes, the valley kept the character that the public-parks vision gave it: more lived-in, less polished, a mountain that still feels like somewhere rather than nowhere.