Audio By Carbonatix
Colorado’s entry in the “Lost Ski Areas” series from History Press turned out to be a bigger project than Caryn and Peter Boddie imagined: They found 140 abandoned ski hills in all and ended up writing two books. They’ll introduce the first, Lost Ski Areas of Colorado’s Front Range and Northern Mountains, tonight at the Tattered Cover Colfax.
The oldest one they found was Bungalow Hill in Hot Sulphur Springs, where Carl Howelsen and Angell Schmidt performed a ski-jump demo in 1911 and helped host the first annual Hot Sulphur Springs Winter Carnival in February 1912. Those events, combined with heavy storms in Denver the following winter, helped spark a statewide interest in skiing.
“We loved discovering that it was the tradesmen — all these Norwegians who came here to work as loggers and brick layers and ranchers — that brought the Nordic ski culture and built all the early ski hills,” says Caryn Boddie, who found photos of her own grandmother (taken at Inspiration Point in Denver and marked “Big Snow, 1913″) while she was researching the project. “These were people who worked really hard, and they wanted to play, too. It’s the same spirit you see in Colorado today, only my sense is that they worked much, much harder.”
The Boddies will discuss volume one at 7 p.m. at the Tattered Cover, 2526 East Colfax Avenue. For more information, visit tatteredcover.com or call 303-322-7727.
Tue., Dec. 9, 7 p.m., 2014
