Noticias

• An Update from the Telluride Ski Patrol Picket Line
• A Look Back: Goats Graze the Valley Floor

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An Update from the Telluride Ski Patrol Picket Line

On a cold, blustery December Saturday, the Telluride Ski Resort was closed as ski patrollers picketed at the bottom of Lift 8 in Oak Street Plaza in Telluride on the first day of the Telluride Ski Patrol Union strike.

“We have about 60 of our patrollers here picketing, picketing the ski area,” said Katherin Devlin, vice president of the Telluride Ski Patrol Union and a ski patroller who has worked at Telluride for the past six years.

The Ski Patrol Union and Telluride Ski Resort, known as Telski, began contract negotiations in early June. Their contract expired in August. After a series of failed negotiations, the union announced last week it would go on strike. Following that announcement, the Telluride Ski Resort said it would close.

“There’s a lot of people in this community that are going to be affected by this. It feels like bullying,” Devlin said. “There’s a lot of people that could still be getting paid today. To just shut it down, it feels like bullying. It feels like someone is taking the soccer ball and saying, ‘If I can’t play, no one can play.’”

Wearing red jackets with a white cross on the back, ski patrollers and members of the community walked in circles around the plaza carrying signs reading “100% solidarity” and “Honk if you support ski patrol.”

Tom Sokolowski, who goes by Soko, has been on the Telluride Ski Patrol for 53 years.

“I grew up in Detroit and almost everyone in my family were in unions,” Sokolowski said. “It’s foreign to me, but I think it was our only choice.”

He said seeing the mountain close breaks his heart.

“I mean, everybody has bills to pay. Everyone has rent to pay, mortgages, kids in school,” Sokolowski said. “I can’t believe it came to this. It came to shutting the ski area down. It seems to be really spiteful to me. It saddens me.”

Andy Martin started working for Telski in 2013 as a lift operator and joined ski patrol in 2017.

“This is a dream job for all of us,” Martin said. “We’re fighting for it because we believe in it, it’s something we really love to do. There is a lot of responsibility as a ski patroller. We have to save lives out there, we really do. We have to make the terrain safe. It’s something that we really do love to do.”

Martin said ski patrollers are asking for a wage that allows them to continue living in the community.

“What we’re asking — it’s not enough for us to buy houses in this community,” he said. “It’s just enough for us to keep doing what we love to do.”

At the center of the contract negotiations is a push for higher wages to improve ski patrol retention. For Lindsey MacIntire, that issue resonates.

“You start these jobs as young ski bums, just putting your heart into it and finding a place that makes your life sparkle and makes your heart beat faster, and makes you proud of the ski resort you live in and the sport that you love,” MacIntire said. “And it’s not the kind of job that you want to let go of as you leave your 20s and your ski bum life. It takes more than that.”

MacIntire said the strike is about more than ski patrol and represents a fight for the culture of the community.

“You know, we have the opportunity to stand up as a group and tell the world what’s right and what’s wrong, in our eyes and in our hearts,” she said. “Our hope is that the other groups in our community that have been kind of stomped out and pushed under the rug can see that and join us. We’re not just screaming for ourselves; we’re yelling for all the people that make this town run.”

In a statement, Telski said the resort is working on a plan to safely reopen Lifts 1 and 4 as quickly as possible. The company said a certain number of medical providers are required to operate the mountain and that it has formed a recruitment team to hire qualified and experienced personnel to temporarily fill gaps and allow the mountain to reopen.

As for the ski patrollers, Devlin said the union plans to remain on the picket line.

“We’ll be picketing until we have a fair contract,” she said.

KOTO News will continue covering the Telski closure and its impact on the community. Those affected who wish to share their stories can contact KOTO News by emailing [email protected] or calling 970-728-3206.

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A Look Back: Goats Graze the Valley Floor

As 2025 draws to a close, KOTO News is revisiting some of its biggest stories from the past year. Today’s rebroadcast looks back to July, when a band of bleating beasts landed on the Valley Floor.

More featured stories from the year, along with KOTO’s full daily newscasts, are available at koto.org under the News tab.

It’s a warm July day. Jonathan Bartley and Adrian Lacasse are on Telluride’s Valley Floor — with over 80 bleating companions.

“That’s Duce 2.0, and then you have Cookie over there, who looks like cookie dough ice cream. He’s one of our lead, favorite goats. Mumu over there munching on the thistle,” Bartley said.

Bartley and Lacasse are the owners and managers of Durangoats, a Durango-based fire and weed mitigation company. Their method? Goats.

“We take a regenerative approach to the land management. It’s all about regenerating the land. From the beginning of every site visit we always say, this is not about getting rid of the weeds, or destroying the weeds, or anything like that. Even in the mentality of that, you’re entering into the destructive, extractive methods that have gotten us here,” Bartley said.

“The goal is more to create an environment that the weeds can’t thrive in.”

Bartley started Durangoats after four seasons of wildland firefighting, looking for a regenerative way to fight fires. He started with six baby goats: Fanta, Cola, Barg, Spirit, Dewey and Pepe — named after the soda bottles Bartley bottle-fed them from.

“They’ve been there from the beginning. They’re everything. It’s cool to have this relationship with your stock where you provide for them and they provide for you,” he said.

Rather than wildfire prevention, the town of Telluride hired Durangoats for weed mitigation. The goats are eating thistle and yellow toadflax on approximately four acres of land.

“We’re down on the Valley Floor, and there are a bunch of thistles that are blooming big purple flowers everywhere,” Lacasse said. “We’re enclosing those blooming thistles within our electric fence and trying to keep as many of these invasive plants in the fence and as many native plants outside the fence as we can. We always have the pen where the goats are in, and they’re just about done with their area right now. So, we have their next pen set up. So, we’re constantly leapfrogging them from one pen to the other.”

On this morning, the goats have been in one pen for about 24 hours and are ready to move to the next. Lacasse and Bartley use a herding dog named Kippy to shuttle the goats to the new pasture.

Once in the pen, the process is quite simple. The goats eat the plants — seeds, leaves and all — preventing them from photosynthesizing.

“We time out our management of the weeds with the biocycle of the plant, so when we eat down these flower heads, it’s in its seeding season so it’s less likely to go into another bloom,” Bartley said.

But the goats aren’t only removing the weeds — they’re fertilizing the ground.

“They ferment whatever they’re eating in their stomach, and spread this micro-rich and nitrogen-rich manure. It’s incredibly good for the soil,” he said.

Durangoats is a business, but for Bartley and Lacasse, it’s more than that. It’s small and meaningful steps toward healing the planet.

“When you compare these things that are the worst of the worst carcinogens, and then you compare it to a goat eating down this plant, then using that plant — that you would have sprayed chemicals on — to fertilize your earth — which is actually the solution to getting rid of those weeds, it’s healing that earth. So, fertilizing it. Then they can be turning it into goat milk. It’s wild that this isn’t more common,” Bartley said.

It’s about making intentional, and historic, efforts to have a more reciprocal relationship with the land.

“It’s pretty wild to see how many vast impacts can happen just by trying to replicate nature and using a natural path,” he said.

While climate change and creating a healthy planet is a multifaceted, complex conversation, the Durangoats are doing their part — munching on thistle.

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State Parks Mark New Year With First Day Hikes

After a New Year’s Eve to remember, Colorado Parks and Wildlife is inviting the community to kick off the new year outdoors.

On Jan. 1, Colorado Parks and Wildlife will host First Day Hikes at state parks across Colorado. According to the agency, the annual event offers an opportunity to start 2026 on the right foot by exercising in nature.

Ridgway State Park will participate with free hikes scheduled throughout the day. Participants must have a valid state park pass, and advance registration is required.

Hikers are encouraged to bring snacks, water, extra clothing and hiking shoes with good traction.

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Monarch Mountain Offers Free Lift Tickets to Telluride Skiers

Monarch Mountain in Salida is offering free three-day lift tickets to Telluride Ski Resort season pass holders or single-day lift tickets to pass holders between Dec. 29 and Jan. 8.

The offer is also available to Telluride Ski and Golf Co., known as Telski, employees and their children.

In a release, Monarch Mountain said the tickets are intended to support skiers and riders affected by the Telluride Ski Resort closure “in the spirit of Colorado’s close-knit ski community.”

Eligible individuals can redeem lift tickets by presenting valid documentation at the Monarch Mountain ticket office.

Conditions, hours of operation and additional information are available at skimonarch.com.

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States Face Deadlock Over Colorado River Water Cuts

At the annual Colorado River Water Users Association conference earlier this month in Las Vegas, attendees grappled with worsening drought conditions and a lack of progress on plans to allocate the river’s water after 2026.

The Upper Basin states of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico have not agreed to cuts in water use, arguing that the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada consume the majority of the river’s water and should shoulder the largest reductions.

Chris Winter, an environmental attorney with the University of Colorado Boulder, attended the conference.

“I don’t think there was a lot of hope or optimism, and folks were feeling frustrated,” Winter said. “And I think folks are also feeling like this crisis, the actual crisis in terms of managing water on the system is becoming more acute. And so there’s all of this energy to get something done and there’s nothing happening.”

Winter said states have until Feb. 14 to submit a plan to the federal government, noting there is still a chance an agreement could be reached before the deadline.

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AI Law Changes Loom at State Capitol

Artificial intelligence is expected to be a major focus when lawmakers return to the state Capitol in January for the legislative session.

Lawmakers plan to make changes to Colorado’s anti-discrimination artificial intelligence law before it takes effect in June. The law has been delayed to give deployers, developers, and privacy and consumer rights groups more time to reach a compromise.

The measure is intended to establish liability if an AI system discriminates against an individual in key areas such as banking, education or employment.

President Donald Trump has criticized Colorado’s law, calling it overly burdensome in an executive order addressing artificial intelligence. Trump said states that do not comply with his order prohibiting state-level controls on AI could lose millions of dollars in federal funding.

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Developer Turns Old Motel into Workforce Housing in Western Colorado

The rising cost of housing across the Mountain West is forcing people to relocate, downsize or leave jobs, even in small towns such as Parachute and Battlement Mesa in Western Colorado.

In response, one developer is working with local leaders to convert an old motel into workforce housing.

For Rocky Mountain Community Radio, Aspen Public Radio and Aspen Journalism, Eleanor Bennett reports.

Story beings at 14:30.