15 Sep Telluride Library: “After Snow – The Case for an Alpine Public,” 9/15!
Telluride’s Wilkinson Public Library, EcoAction Partners, and the Town of Telluride present “After Snow: The Case for an Alpine Public.” In person Harvard Graduate School of Design graduate Cory Page. 5:30 p.m. – 7 p.m.
Focus of the talk: Page plans to present the findings from his graduate-level thesis on the topic of how a ski resort might transition to a sustainable public space “after snow.” Guess which ski resort Page chose for his case study.
Scroll down for an overview of the evening from the hosts.
Go here for more about Telluride Library.
Go here for more on EcoAction Partners.
Go here for more posts about the Town of Telluride.
What happens after snow?
As winters shrink and ski resorts rely more on artificial snow, “After Snow” reimagines the alpine slope as public terrain for ecological repair rather than private extraction. Focusing on Telluride Ski Resort, the project explores design strategies that reclaim forest remnants, repurpose snowmaking systems, and redefine ski runs for a warming world.
Join Cory Page (Harvard GSD’25, Telluride High School’14), Landscape Architect and Urban Planner, for a presentation on the future of skiing. Page’s talk is followed by a panel discussion about “the cost of doing nothing.” “The panel will feature a representative from Telski, along with EcoAction Partners’ Director discussing our current climate and Town of Telluride Sustainability Manager on environmental policies and initiatives.”
“After Snow: The Case for an Alpine Public”
In the not-so-distant future, winter as we know it may cease to exist. In an era of climate transition, alpine skiing demands reexamination: What happens after snow? This thesis envisions the ski resort as a public terrain for contested remediation rather than a privatized, extractive enclave. Focusing on the Telluride Ski Resort in Colorado, the project examines the mountain as a designed landscape—clear-cut, regraded, and reshaped. It also traces the industry’s corporate consolidation and shift from natural to artificial snow.
Skiing has long been romanticized as an escape to a pristine natural world. But resorts like Telluride are highly engineered—shaped through landforming and technical infrastructures to construct the illusion of permanence. Telluride has taken drastic measures to sustain this illusion in a warming world, expanding its snowmaking network and turning water into frozen infrastructure.
Working through three spatial strategies—Foil, Filter, and Frame—After Snow reimagines the alpine slope. Foil reclaims forest remnants by constructing cairns from dead trees to mark and expand public access; Filter retools snowmaking systems to disperse native seeds and reshapes terrain to support ecological succession; and Frame defines new spatial thresholds within existing ski runs.
Across alpine regions – from the Alps to the Rockies – the snowy landscapes that define skiing are unraveling: melting and simultaneously reengineered to simulate what no longer naturally falls. Rather than project skiing’s end, After Snow proposes a designed transition—tying the sport’s long-term survival to the creation of an alpine public.
Cory Page Bio
Cory Page, LinkedIn.
Cory Page is a landscape architect and urban planner (MLA / MUP’25) whose work explores the intersection of climate adaptation, waste, and design. As the 2025 Peter Walker & Partners Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), his current research builds on his thesis project in landscape architecture, After Snow, which reimagines the ski resort as a public terrain for ecological and spatial remediation. Set in his hometown of Telluride, Colorado (Telluride High School Class of 2014), the project proposes a series of design interventions that confront the artificial preservation of winter by transforming extractive ski infrastructure into regenerative alpine commons. Drawing from a personal history shaped by the mined landscapes of the San Juan Mountains, his work investigates how design can intervene in the unstable futures of alpine regions—next turning toward research in the Alps and Andes as case studies in seasonal resilience.
At the GSD, Cory founded the Zero Waste Project, an initiative that cut campus landfill waste by half in its first year through improved collection systems and material diversion. He has collaborated with the NYC Department of Sanitation on zero-waste design policy, designed post-waste infrastructure for the Port of Los Angeles with SWA, and led research into the embodied carbon of paving with Landscape Architecture firm, Reed Hilderbrand. Before graduate school, he worked in the corporate environmental sustainability office at The Walt Disney Company, helping to reduce waste, energy, and water impacts across its global operations—a role that ultimately pushed him to pursue design as a more creative and radical tool for climate action.
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