{"id":13906,"date":"2026-01-19T13:18:11","date_gmt":"2026-01-19T20:18:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/cuchara-mountain-park-loads-skiers-onto-its-chairlift-for-the-first-time-in-25-years\/"},"modified":"2026-03-25T19:32:23","modified_gmt":"2026-03-25T19:32:23","slug":"cuchara-mountain-park-loads-skiers-onto-its-chairlift-for-the-first-time-in-25-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/cuchara-mountain-park-loads-skiers-onto-its-chairlift-for-the-first-time-in-25-years\/","title":{"rendered":"Cuchara Mountain Park loads skiers onto its chairlift for the first time in 25 years"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Lift
Lift four stands still at Parker-Fitzgerald Cuchara Mountain Park on March 19, 2023, near Cuchara, Colorado. Almost 25 years after idling its chairlifts, a volunteer-led nonprofit has revived Cuchara Mountain Park south of La Veta. (Brittany Peterson\/The Associated Press)<\/span>Brittany Peterson<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n

HUERFANO COUNTY \u2014 Cuchara Mountain Park is open for lift-served skiing.<\/p>\n

Almost 25 years after closing its chairlifts, a volunteer-led nonprofit has revived Cuchara Mountain Park south of La Veta, opening the first new chairlift-served ski area since Echo Mountain opened in 2005.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s been a labor of love through all these years and there\u2019s been a dedicated crew that just stuck with it and persevered,\u201d said Roger Therber, a Tennessee resident who has a nearby cabin and came with his wife to ski the grand opening of the 50-acre Cuchara Mountain Park on Saturday.<\/p>\n

More than 100 skiers flocked to Cuchara to ride Chair 4. Volunteers with the Panadero Ski Corp. nonprofit have spent several years upgrading and rebuilding the chairlift at the ski area, which is owned by Huerfano County. The ski rental shop was built by volunteers, and a chain store in Colorado Springs sold Panadero Ski Corp. an entire store\u2019s worth of rental inventory at a discount after leaving the ski rental business.<\/p>\n

Cuchara ski area first opened in 1981, and a parade of Texas owners struggled to keep it open. For 19 years, the ski area sporadically opened and closed as seven different owners worked to add lifts and condos. The last time Chair 4 carried skiers was 2000, and the Forest Service in 2002 canceled the ski area\u2019s permit to access about 345 public acres. The hope is that if Cuchara Mountain Park can thrive on 50 county-owned acres and one lift, the nonprofit operator may persuade the Forest Service to consider a new permit for more terrain.<\/p>\n

Since 2017, the nonprofit Cuchara Foundation has raised funds to support the ski area. The group raised $150,000 for Huerfano County to purchase the mountain park from a local couple who acquired the base area acreage at a property tax sale.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe didn\u2019t even know it was the old ski area,\u201d said JoVonne Fitzgerald, whose husband, Jerry, bought the roughly 50 acres in 2015 as part of his \u201chobby\u201d of buying tax liens.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve been coming up for years. We definitely were not missing this,\u201d said Casey Hays of Burlington, who came to Cuchara with his wife and son to ski. \u201cTwenty five years and finally going again. It\u2019s so cool. Best thing they could have done for this place.\u201d<\/p>\n

The plan is to offer low-cost lift-served skiing \u2014 tickets are $45 and season passes run $250 \u2014 for local residents. Panadero Ski Corp. plans to hire about five full-time workers to run the ski area Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays for the rest of the season. Most of the snow so far has come from snow guns, with volunteers collecting snowmaking equipment from dormant ski areas across the country.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A nonprofit, community-led effort has revived lift-served skiing at the ski area that last spun chairlifts in 2000 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13907,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[28,29],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-13906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-headlines","tag-newsletter"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13906","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13906"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13906\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19223,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13906\/revisions\/19223"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13906"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=13906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}