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Colorado's freshest powder
Silverton set to send first skiers into neighboring federal lands
By Jason Blevins
Denver Post Business Writer
http://media.mnginteractive.com/medi...verton0209.jpg
Post / Jason Blevins
A snowboarder burns through the powder in
the Tiger Main section of Aaron and Jenny Brill’s
Silverton Mountain ski area. The Bureau of Land
Management is expected to rule in March on the
couple’s request to allow skiers to enter public land
surrounding the ski area.
SILVERTON - More than 50 inches of unfettered powder buries the San Juan Mountains surrounding this mining-turned-ski hamlet one sunny Saturday.
Radios connecting Aaron and Jenny Brill with the 18 employees at their Silverton Mountain ski area cackle endlessly.
"Attention all guides, a 10- pound will go in Tiger Main in 30 seconds followed by another 10- pound in one minute," Pat Ahern, the mountain's snow safety director, says over the radios.
"Plug your ears. Pass it on," guide John Shockley hollers from the chairlift to his clients in the chairs ahead of him. Two blasts resonate across the valley.
This clarion day is one that Aaron, 32, and Jenny, 31, have labored five years for. They've gone half a decade without a paycheck. They've spent months living in a drafty bus that now ferries their paying guests from chute to lift. They've coddled curious investors, courted any and all supporters, and humped countless bags of cement up the mountain to anchor their hand-me-down chairlift.
The rewards of their work are finally in sight. A long-awaited decision by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management on their permit application to allow skiers to access the public land surrounding their small ski area will come in March.
"This is the new business model. And it works," says Aaron Brill, who delivered lift-access skiing to this downtrodden village of 500 three years ago. "Look at the other ski places. It's all status quo. What's really new in skiing? I think people are hungry for something truly different."
"People tell us every day this is unlike any other place they have skied," Jenny Brill says.
Mired in the tasks that hound the ski hill and the daunting hurdles that could derail their aspirations, the Brills find solace inside the canvas base lodge at the end of a day that included a first-ever helicopter evacuation of an injured snowboarder and a visit from a film crew eager to document development of the first new U.S. ski area in two decades.
"I think I had - no wait, I did have the best day of snowboarding in my life today," says Michael Strumph, who planned four days of Silverton Mountain skiing as a celebration of his recent graduation from the University of Vermont.
"I never get tired of hearing that," Jenny Brill says.
"When the chips are down and the stress is building, hearing that someone just had the best day of riding in their life brings it all into perspective," Aaron Brill says.
It helps, too, that when the couple returns to their century-old home on Silverton's Main Street, the e-mail and voice mail boxes are brimming with messages from skiers hankering to reserve a day on their back-to-basics hill.
The Silverton word is out, bellowed in just about every outdoor- oriented magazine published today, and the mountain is booked close to capacity for the rest of the season.
And it doesn't hurt that more and more investors are circling Silverton, hoping to tap into the skiing phenomenon the Brills created.
"What appeals to us is that this place is so cost-effective, which opens it to a much broader audience," says David Sharpless, chairman of investment firm HKMB Capital Solutions in Toronto, noting that a day of helicopter skiing can cost $1,500. "This is part of a market that is not really well served."
Potential investors such as Sharpless, who recently spent a weekend enjoying the Brills' pamperless skiing, see a future in Silverton Mountain.
That future will soon be cemented with the pending decision by the BLM. The BLM has spent almost three years and $600,000 of the Brills' money studying the Silverton Mountain plan, carefully plodding through an environmental review of what would be the first ski area on BLM land in the continental United States.
The bureau first allowed 20 guided skiers a day in 2002, then 40 in 2003. This year, the Brills are ferrying up to 80 guided skiers a day into the tangle of steep chutes and bowls that spill from the 13,487- foot mountain.
The bureau's draft Environmental Impact Statement recommends allowing a mix of guided and unguided skiers on the mountain. It addresses the concerns of private property owners near the mountain, environmental impacts and safety issues surrounding the notoriously fickle snowpack in the San Juans.
"I'm as anxious as Aaron is to get this done," says Richard Speegle, the project's manager at the BLM office in Durango. "It's been an interesting situation from the start. They've learned a lot, and we've learned a lot. We are close, so close."
The BLM is not the only hurdle in the Brills' pursuit of building the nation's first expert-only ski playground.
Jim Jackson, an Aspen businessman who once promulgated plans to build a giant high-end resort in the same canyon as the Brills' operation and owns islands of land within their proposed ski-area boundary, is promising to defend his property rights, according to letters he has sent to the BLM.
Jackson declined to comment.
While the Brills are understandably anxious for a BLM decision, the town of Silverton, population 450, is equally invested.
When Silverton Mountain was hosting 20 skiers a day, the town's restaurants, hotel, gas station and bars saw a 17 percent increase in sales tax receipts. The next year, with 40 skiers a day, sales tax revenues climbed another 27 percent. That kind of wintertime bustle could resurrect a town that has spent the past decade barely surviving the winter.
"Improving Silverton's winter economy is the key to improving the community's future well-being," Silverton Mayor James Huffman wrote in a letter to Speegle last fall, pleading for approval of the Brills' project.
"For a community that has struggled over the past decade with the declining numbers, the potential to now experience increasing numbers is welcomed by the community."
Aaron and Jenny Brill bite their tongues when the duration and cost of the BLM review is discussed. They say the review is 400 percent over budget and two years beyond its projected completion date. It has cost twice the amount of buying an aged double chairlift from Mammoth ski area in California, trucking it to Silverton and installing the towers with a helicopter.
The environmental review process was demoralizing, they say. But in November, when more than 700 volunteers showed up to march up and down the mountain packing snow to minimize future avalanche danger, their spirits soared.
"They were camping in our parking lot in 20-degree weather. In the snow. To bootpack. It was unbelievable," Jenny Brill says.
Equally comforting is the couple's summer business. They have opened their lift to those rowdy, armored, downhill mountain bikers who are banned at a growing number of Colorado resorts.
"All the riders who come out here say we are filling a void," Brill says. "We thought we were doing it with skiers, and it turns out we are doing it for bikers, too."
Fueling the area's ski business, Aaron Brill says, is the so-called season pass war among the nation's largest resorts along Interstate 70. More than half of Silverton's skiers hail from Colorado's urban corridor.
Crowd-weary Front Range skiers are easy to spot in the morning at the Silverton base tent. They stomp their boots and shuffle nervously, raring to shred the untrammeled powder that lasts only minutes at their home hills along the interstate.
"We have to tell them all the time to just chill," Jenny Brill says.
By the end of the day, those same skiers appear sated: exhausted, yet revived.
"They come here and it's a relaxed pace, and no matter what, the snow is better than where they usually go," Aaron Brill says. "And they don't have to fight for it."
Last year, the Brills hosted 2,800 skiers, up from 700 the season before. Through early January, they've seen close to 2,000 skiers, including the hardy bootpackers.
"This kind of brings you back to what the sport is all about. It's about the soul of skiing," says Denver resident Amy Wiedeman, who is skiing Silverton as part of an extreme-skiing clinic hosted by pro skier Chris Anthony.
"This is back to the roots. Back to the basic stuff, which is refreshing in this world of high-speed six-packs (chairlift) and faux villages owned by giant corporations," Wiedeman says.
