Colorado Mountain College aims to give everyone access to the outdoors through youth skiing program
LEADVILLE — Vanessa Saldivar was introduced to skiing when she was 5 years old in a small town at the foot of Oregon’s Mount Hood. Her father, Pablo, took her to a local beginner’s slope even though he didn’t know how to ski, let alone how to teach someone.
She didn’t have a lift ticket, but he rented skis for her. She wore jeans, with socks for mittens.
“He walked me up the bunny hill, set me down and let me go,” said Saldivar, who immigrated from Mexico with her parents when she was an infant. “We just did that, and I learned to ski. I was so lucky, even though my mom and dad had a very typical immigrant story of working in restaurants. My dad gave me this gift. It set me on a path of winter sports that is still a huge passion of mine.
“So many of our youth do not get that opportunity to fall in love with the sport.”
Saldivar and a lot of other committed folks in Leadville — North America’s highest unincorporated city at 10,152 feet — are trying to bring that kind of opportunity to children of modest means in Lake County. She is executive director of Get Outdoors Leadville, a county program entirely funded by grants from Great Outdoors Colorado and other sources. GOL, as locals call it, provides summer and winter programs for local youth. It also maintains a “gear library” at the Leadville campus of Colorado Mountain College for those who cannot afford to buy their own equipment.
“We give exposure and an access point to the sport that has been so exclusive in the past,” Saldivar said. “We’re trying to make sure our youth have an opportunity to learn to ski, to be outside and feel like they belong here.”
Many in the community are working toward that goal. Cloud City Mountain Sports is a non-profit that provides access to alpine and nordic ski teams at a fraction of what it costs in other ski towns. It owns a ski slope adjacent to the CMC campus, which the college supports by providing snowmaking and grooming operations performed by students in its Ski Area Operations program.
Ben Cairns, dean of CMC’s Leadville campus, is also the volunteer president of Cloud City Mountain Sports, and he coaches the Lake County High School ski team. Before taking the CMC job last year, he was principal of the high school.
“CMC is so interested right now in the ski industry, in questions of affordability in mountain towns, increasingly having students and staff who are having trouble living in mountain towns,” Cairns said. “So this affordable approach to skiing is really interesting. The relationship between CMC and the ski club is so interconnected.”
About 27% of the children in Lake County are poor, with about 67% receiving free or reduced-cost school lunches, according to John McMurtry, executive director of the Lake County Community Fund. The Lake County school district is about 70% Hispanic, many the children of immigrants. More than 70% of the county’s workforce have jobs outside of the county, with many commuting over mountain passes to Summit County or Vail to work in the service industry.
Colorado Mountain College has 11 locations across the state with three residential campuses, once of which is in Leadville. Last year, CMC was designated a Hispanic Serving Institution by the federal government — a distinction awarded to colleges that have more than 25% Hispanic enrollment — which makes CMC eligible for additional grant funding. Many of CMC’s Hispanic students have parents who do not speak English.
“Lots of our families are washing dishes, doing the really challenging work,” Cairns said of Leadville’s demographic makeup. “We’d love for more students to venture into other parts of the ski industry that are more secure, higher paying. And it’s all here at CMC.”
At the Leadville campus, students can earn a two-year associate degree in Ski Area Operations. Using the college’s two snowcats, they learn how to groom slopes, build terrain parks and conduct snowmaking operations. They learn lift maintenance and repair. They can receive basic training in ski patrolling, get EMT training and learn how to put on events like ski races and rail jams.
“We’re surrounded here by world-renowned resorts,” McMurtry said. “The ski industry is a billion-dollar industry. With CMC and this tremendous human resource we have here in Lake County, working in the ski industry could be a wonderful career.”
Brian Rosser, one of two full-time faculty members assigned to the program, couldn’t agree more. He has spent three decades working in the industry.
“There is no business like snow business,” Rosser said. “It is an industry that is full of people who are passionate about snow sports.”
Erick Corral Parra commutes 40 miles from Edwards to attend Ski Area Operations classes in Leadville. On Tuesday morning,he had four hours of classroom instruction as part of a course called Terrain Park and Halfpipe Operations, followed by an afternoon outdoor lab where a dozen students built a terrain park by running 10,000-pound snowcats, raking and shoveling snow, building rails and other features.
“I love this environment; I love working in the ski industry; I love working outside,” said Parra, 20, a snowboarder. “It’s pretty cool that my campus has a backyard (terrain) park that anyone can try out. I really enjoy building whatever we’re going to do for the day.”
But without widening access to skiing and snowboarding, Lake County youth may not be inclined to pursue ski industry careers. In his role as leader of the CMC Leadville campus and head of Cloud City Mountain Sports, Cairns yearns to provide opportunities for more minority youth.
“Right now, our ski team does not look like the demographic of Leadville,” Cairns said. “Our ski team is still largely kids who grew up skiing, who have parents who work in the ski industry. What we have learned is that it’s really hard (for a kid) to add ski racing as a school sport in middle school or high school. We have to expand our reach into a learn-to-ski program so a student who gets to sixth or seventh grade feels comfortable jumping into a race course.”
Ski Cooper, where the Cloud City skiers do much of their training, is 10 miles from town. Now the ski club is raising funds to install a surface lift on the small ski slope that Cloud City owns next to the CMC campus. Currently, skiers have to hike for their turns there, but a surface lift would make it ideal for beginners.
“Cooper has been a great partner, but it’s really hard to get a kid out to Cooper, get all their gear and put them in a lesson,” Cairns said. “We’re 100% convinced that if we do learn-to-ski here as an after-school program, that is the key, rather than trying to get kids out to Cooper on Saturday.”
That’s one reason the partnership between the college, the ski club, and Get Outdoors Leadville is so valuable.
“If you can get young people to connect to the ski industry, to feel comfortable on skis, to feel comfortable on snow, and if we could then help those students realize this is an awesome industry and career and matriculate into our ski operations program, that would be a dream,” Cairns said.
“That really is our goal, both as Cloud City Mountain Sports and as CMC: to help our community connect to the winter sports industry. And then, to realize there are really viable career paths that are really rewarding, and really fun, in the outdoors.”
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