Noticias

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.