06 Dec Telluride: #1 Ski Resort in North America – Again!
Recently the Telluride Ski Resort found itself on Chris Steiner’s list in Forbes of the “Top 10 Ski Resorts in North America”
“There is a group of top tier ski resort towns in North America—and this pack has an alpha. That alpha is Telluride. First-time visitors marvel at the seemingly vertical canyon walls rising on three sides next to town and wonder, ‘Why didn’t I come here earlier?,” Steiner gushed.
Now, hot on the heels of Steiner’s bear hug, comes this announcement: Telluride has once again been selected as the #1 Ski Resort in North America by the readers of Conde Nast Traveler:
“While Telluride is blessed with incredible natural attributes, what truly differentiates the experience is the passion and hard work our community invests in the guest experience. It is this focus on our guests combined with our natural beauty, spectacular terrain and unspoiled character that creates the magic that draws our guests to Telluride again and again,” explains Telski CEO/Partner Bill Jensen.
And this year, because Telluride has received this accolade six out of the past seven years, Conde Nast Traveler published a major feature on the destination. Read Alex Bhattacharji on “Why Telluride Keeps Being Named The Best U.S. Ski Town” below.
Photo, courtesy Telski, Aurelie Slegers
As a half-dozen skiers, planks slung over their shoulders, hiked past us up the ridge toward Telluride’s famed 13,320-foot Palmyra peak, my new friend Seth thrust his ski pole forward for emphasis and shouted, “Confidence!”
It was less an exhortation than an exclamation of discovery. Seth, a fortysomething attorney from Chicago I’d met on the gondola in town, had found the black-diamond run bearing that name was somehow still unskied, despite the fact it was approaching midday. Falling away between granite walls and pines that poked out of deep billowy drifts, its untouched powder reflected the strong bluebird day sun. Before us, the expansive vista of Colorado’s San Juans’ spiny ridges and sharp peaks were blanketed in 19 inches of fresh snowfall. Just up the mountain lay some of the most extreme in-bounds terrain in America; on our other flank, Galloping Goose, a beginner run that wends more than four and a half miles to the base of the mountain.
I followed Seth as we carved first tracks down the run, kicking up a spray of snow softened slightly by the morning sun, and made our way over to the Gold Hill Express lift, where there was no line—as had been the case at the gondola from town and every lift we’d taken up to 12,000 feet. It was a late-season Saturday, no less. Pretty much everyone in town was on the mountain and yet it felt intimate, like a living room concert, in one of nature’s most spectacular stadiums.
“This is just the way it is,” said Seth, who’d been coming to Telluride since the early ’90s, with a shrug. “The way it’s always been.”
A short while later on the sun deck of Bon Vivant restaurant and wine bar, I told Seth: “You know, I think I’m finally beginning to get it.” We sat drinking in the stunning views of the Wilson Range’s trio of 14,000-foot peaks and the improbable back-of-beyond feel with a Bordeaux in hand. I had come to skiing late and Telluride even later, though the destination held my fascination before I could hold my own on its steeps. The accolades hinted at the compelling contrast I was experiencing now: The Best Big Mountain and Little Ski Town in America
Since the mining village got its first lift in 1972, Captain Jack Carey, perhaps the most famous ski bum in history, and captains of industry (from oil barons to Enron execs, former Hewlett Packard CEO Meg Whitman to mogul-loving movie mogul Kathleen Kennedy) have chosen to call it home. Telluride has every luxury amenity—five-star accommodations, spas, and gourmet dining—though other ski destinations have those things in greater numbers. And here’s the thing I had come to realize about Telluride: What it don’t have, you don’t want. Free of crowds, ostentation, tracts of cookie-cutter condos and franchise mall fare like Nordstrom and Forever 21, Telluride is independent and feels that way. If you find designer threads here, it won’t be at the Vuitton or Prada store like in Aspen, but in the Free Box, the open-air giveaway station where the town’s residents walk away with housewares and, occasionally, high-end clothing. And what you find in Telluride is far rarer and more coveted: A place that has only ever aspired to be what it is, that offers a ski experience that’s as pure, sublime, and free of artifice as any in America. While discerning travelers pan for kernels of authenticity, Telluride sits on the motherlode.
The first prospect who struck gold in the Valley staked his claim in 1875. Three years later the town of Telluride was established. Its main drag, Colorado Avenue, is lined by low, late 19th- and early 20th-century buildings that hark back to the town’s mining roots. The low-key restaurants and bars that occupy them today have a Western-inflected bohemian vibe that grew out of the hippie wave that swept into town in the seventies. In the morning, skiers in a hurry to get on the mountain stop at the Coffee Cowboy, housed in a permanently parked camper, for eye-opening espresso drinks in to-go cups. In the evening, they pour into The Last Dollar Saloon, the dive bar institution (since 1978) affectionately known as The Buck, gradually peeling off layers as they settle in with each successive round of après-après-ski drinks. All day long, from breakfast through dinner, the Butcher and Baker attracts a hip, casual crowd with its locally sourced, low-key fare, from hand-made croissants to house-cured salumi plates.
On the other end of the culinary spectrum are the traditional cuts at
New Sheridan Hotel ’s Chop House, which, like its classic bar next door, dates to 1895. Foodies have plenty of options, from the inventive New American cuisine at 221 South Oak (run by chef Eliza Galvin of Top Chef season 10 fame), to the seafood-forward Asian tapas at Siam’s Talay Grille in Mountain Village. But the most unforgettable meal you’ll have is, perhaps fittingly, back on the slopes. At Alpino Vino, the highest restaurant in America at 12,000 feet, you arrive at the chalet via Sno-Cat, are welcomed with an aperitif and views of the sun setting over the Wilson Range, then settle in for a sumptuous five-course tasting menu of northern Italian dishes with generously poured wine pairings.
Sure, there’s a Starbucks in slopeside Mountain Village (technically its own town, connected to Telluride by a free gondola), but it’s tucked away well off the beach at the base of the lifts. Besides, you’re more likely to see folks sipping locally roasted coffee from Tracks Cafe outside nearby Wagner Custom Skis and watching as the bespoke planks are painstakingly crafted over a period of three weeks. “It’s a skier’s town and mountain,” said Pete Wagner, who began making his skis, which start at $1,750, in a trailer park outside town in 2006. “If you want the most of this or that, you should go elsewhere. If you want the best, well, I’ll see you on the lifts.”Telluride has more than 2,000 skiable acres, which doesn’t tell you much about the mountain other than it’s smaller than Vail and Park City. (Another way to measure that: Its hotel capacity of 6,500, more than half which is in Mountain Village, is just a third that of Vail and half that of Park City.) Its vertical drop of more than 4,425 feet—1,400 feet more than Vail and more than 700 feet greater than Park City—is somewhat more telling. Although its trails are divided roughly evenly among ability levels, Telluride’s steeps—52 black diamond, double black diamond, and EX (extreme) runs—are capable of challenging the most adventurous skier. What’s more, its out-of-bounds terrain stacks up against any in North America. “It’s as challenging as Jackson Hole and easier to access,” said Matt Steen, a heli-ski guide with Telluride Helitrax, which operates in 250 square miles worth of alpine wilderness, mostly above the tree line. “I don’t want to blow smoke up clients’ you-know-what, but they really don’t know how good they have it on a perfect day.”
Telluride is increasingly rare amid so many ersatz, theme-park-like resort villages (no offense Whistler Blackcomb), a genuine Old West town. Butch Cassidy, a sometime resident of the town, robbed the San Miguel Valley Bank here in 1889, a decade before he joined forces with the Sundance Kid and formed the Wild Bunch gang and got himself killed…
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