On the picket line with the Telluride Ski Patrol union
Guest Post from Zak Podmore
Red jackets emblazoned with white crosses gather into concentric circles on a cobblestone plaza below a loop of cable that elevates black chairs through a canyon of pines.
The ski lift isn’t moving. Each jacket contains a member of the Telluride Professional Ski Patrollers Association organized with Communication Workers of America Local 7781, United Mountain Workers, who are striking against Telluride Ski and Golf after months of stalled bargaining sessions. It’s day eight of the unfair labor practice strike. Eight days since the resort’s billionaire owner decided to shut down the iconic Colorado mountain in the middle of Christmas week. Eight days of empty ski slopes and refunded lift tickets. There is no end to the labor dispute in sight.
The patrollers huddle together to outline the day’s agenda. Captains share plans for pickets and updates from the negotiating committee. The 78-person bargaining unit, whose members have between one and 53 years of experience on the Telluride Ski Patrol, is well versed in discussions and debriefs. In the past, while working under contract, they’ve huddled pre-dawn to go over the plan for launching explosives from a howitzer to trigger an avalanche. On other occasions, after a high-angle rescue in forested, cliff-cut terrain, they’ve huddled to discuss what went right and what could be improved. They’ve huddled to celebrate promotions, weddings, and births; to mourn the loss of colleagues to ski accidents; to raise a glass to a patroller whose quick-thinking led coworkers and guests out of a perilous situation.
The patrollers have broken from these gatherings at the end of the day to move onto second jobs as bartenders and servers at local restaurants. They’ve changed out of ski gear and driven an hour and half back to their homes on the other side of mountain passes. Some returned to employee housing where black mold plumed across the walls of ill-ventilated bathrooms, where they’ve seen hinges rust clean through and doors clatter onto linoleum floors. They’ve crashed on friends’ couches or crawled into beds in rooms that cost nearly two thousand dollars a month to rent. They slipped behind the wheels of camper vans and trucks outfitted with custom-sewn curtains and drove them below the darkened outlines of multi-million-dollar mansions, past the private drives leading to ranches owned by Tom Cruise or Oprah Winfrey or Neil Young and Daryl Hannah. They’ve driven beyond the jurisdiction of municipal no-camping ordinances to pulloffs where they’ve heated their dinner on campstoves. They’ve awoken at 3:30 am to head back to work.
Before the strike began on Dec. 27, the union was asking for a contract that would have set a base wage for second-year patrollers at $27 per hour, up from $21.28. Workers with five to ten years of experience would have received a minimum of $30 per hour, and the three people who have been on patrol for 50-plus years (since a time when Telluride was a funky old mining town with 35-cent beers) would have made around $50 hourly, or roughly the starting wage of local EMTs and firefighters.
Telluride Ski and Golf, also known as Telski, offered a contract where the majority of the patrol would have earned under $30 an hour with a $24 starting wage. The total difference between the two proposals was less than $50,000 per year for a resort owned by a billionaire that charges up to $328 for a single-day lift ticket.
The morning huddle breaks. The patrollers pick up signs and the day begins.
When greed hoists the white flag
In 1903, one hundred years before the ski resort sold to California-based real estate and nursing home mogul Chuck Horning for $21 million, the gold and silver mines surrounding Telluride ground to a halt. Hundreds of workers walked away from their ten- or twelve-hour shifts, demanding an eight-hour day with a base wage of $3.
They were organized by the Western Federation of Miners, the militant socialist union that would evolve into the racially integrated and radical Industrial Workers of the World in 1905. The WFM had led a largely successful strike in Telluride two years earlier under the leadership of a young Kentuckian miner and future IWW general secretary Vincent St. John, and they were hopeful that another victory was imminent.
A couple of months into the earlier strike in 1901, union men marched to a mine that had been reopened by company-hired guards and strikebreakers. A standoff ensued, threats were shouted, and a scab’s bullet tore through the neck of a Finnish union miner, killing him instantly. For several hours the situation erupted into an all-out shooting war, with hundreds of rounds being fired from both sides until two more men lay dead and over ten were wounded. The union miners gained the upper hand and marched 88 strikebreakers over a 13,000-foot pass to Ouray, warning them not to return. St. John, known locally as “the Saint,” helped deescalate the situation by that evening.
Rumors flew through the newspapers that the union had seized control of the mines. When WFM secretary Big Bill Haywood walked into Denver’s First National Bank soon afterwards, the bank’s vice president asked him if the reports were true and what that meant for the mine’s investors. “Tell me where the owners got the money to invest in the mines,” Haywood responded. “Who has a better right to be in peaceful possession of the mines than the miners?”
The company called for the national guard to be deployed, but the Colorado governor refused. Seven hundred people marched in a mile-long line behind the slain miner’s casket that was laid to rest in the graveyard at the edge of Telluride. Mine managers conceded most of the union’s demands within days, and the mines reopened under a union-approved contract.
By 1903, the union said the company had broken its promises and Telluride workers went on strike again. Haywood took to the pages of the union journal to call their eight-hour demand a “fight for humanity, whose results will be felt by generations that are yet unborn.” Despite the millions of dollars in the treasuries of the corporations, Haywood continued, “we must…force greed to hoist the white flag.”
This time, however, the new, anti-union governor of Colorado did send the national guard, which allowed company thugs to unleash a terror campaign on Telluride. Martial law was declared. Stores and houses were burned. Union members and sympathizers were pushed into open-air barbed wire cages before being deported by train to neighboring counties or as far away as Kansas.
Telski’s decline
In the mid-twentieth century, Telluride’s Victorian homes largely sat vacant. Skiing brought new life to the area in the 70s as a laid-back hippie escape and, later, as a world-class resort developed enough for its realtors to attract A-list Hollywood talent. By the time Chuck Horning purchased the resort in 2003, Telluride had long since ceased to be a union town.
Horning has a history of fraud and sexual misconduct allegations, according to a recent expose in the Denver Post as well as an anonymously run website ChuckChuck.ski. But for a while, ski patrollers and other Telluride residents told me, the ski resort was run competently under CEO Bill Jensen.
Telluride’s ski patrol unionized in 2014 and their first contracts, negotiated under Jensen’s tenure from 2015 to 2020, were agreed to without issue, usually a year before the contract expired. One union member described the process as “dreamy.” Another said that those contracts were the “gold standard” in the ski industry.
Graham Hoffman, union president and 11-year patroller, told me, “If Bill couldn’t give us something, he’d explain why.”
Jensen left the company in 2020, and the resort is currently operating with most of its top leadership positions vacant. Horning has repeatedly sparred with the Town of Mountain Village, and his relationship with the surrounding communities has reportedly soured.
Union negotiations were rocky in 2023, and the patrol made considerable concessions to avoid a strike. Hoffman said that the final offer from Telski in December would have put them below the industry standard and well below a living wage for the region. The patrol has struggled with retention of trained workers, and the union hopes a better wage package would help address that issue.
Horning’s and Telski management’s refusal to meet the union’s demands, which had been considerably scaled back throughout the bargaining sessions, was met with disapproval from members of the Mountain Village Town Council in a mid-December meeting. Union members said the gap between the union’s and company’s offer was around $45,000 per year, which led Mayor Pro Tem Scott Pearson to question a resort representative at the meeting: “If the numbers are anywhere close to that,” he said, “you have to agree that it would be the height of folly to let this devolve into a strike over less than the salary of one full-time person.”
Another town council member called the situation “stupid.”
The company made no improved offer before shutting down the ski area several weeks later.
United Mountain Workers
In 2024, Park City’s ski patrol union walked out of the Vail-owned Utah resort shortly after Christmas. Vail, a publicly traded company that owns 42 resorts around the world, brought in workers from its other ski areas to keep part of the mountain open, but long lift lines clogged the slopes. Visitors turned comment sections into a cascade of: “Vail, pay your workers!” The company’s stock plummeted, losing 30% of its value in the four months following the ski patrol’s walkout, and it has not recovered since. Its CEO was replaced. There are still several pending class-action lawsuits against Vail brought by skiers impacted by the strike. All told, the company suffered a financial loss that was orders of magnitude bigger than the modest pay bump the patrol was requesting (and which Vail conceded nearly two weeks into the strike).
The Park City union’s success led to ski patrol raises at other resorts and enlarged the United Mountain Workers, the local that now represents 1,100 ski patrollers, bike patrollers, ski lift mechanics, and electricians at 17 ski areas, including Telluride.
Telski is a privately owned company that’s not accountable to shareholders like Vail, and Horning, at the age of 81, is rumored to have turned down nine-figure offers to buy the resort. But because Horning does not own other ski areas, finding strikebreakers is even more difficult than it was for Vail. Steve Swenson, a company spokesperson who has dealt with his own set of fraud allegations, acknowledged to local officials that the vast majority of the mountain wouldn’t be able to open without Telluride’s highly trained and specialized patrol.
On January 5, after more than a week of being fully shut down, the resort used replacement workers to open just three out of its 149 runs, all of them beginner slopes.
Back on the line
I spent a day on the picket line with the patrol union earlier this month, chatting with the patrollers, who held signs that invited the public to ask them questions about the strike.
The passers by, locals and tourists alike, were largely supportive. Horns blared from Toyota Tacomas, which were answered by cheers from the patrol. A passing driver shouted, “I wish Chuck would buckle!” The union had raised over $150,000 for its strike fund on GoFundMe. Bumper stickers had started to appear around town that read: EVEN JESUS HATES CHUCK. But the strike has put the local community under enormous strain, since nearly all the businesses rely on ski tourism during the winter months. Hotel bookings plummeted, service workers were laid off, and restaurants reported huge declines in customers. “For every ten honks, we get one bird,” a union member told me.
A well-dressed Australian couple emerged from the town-run gondola, which provides public transportation from Telluride to Mountain Village, and began asking a red jacket about the strike. The couple offered support to the union and said they’d shifted most of their 12-day vacation to Jackson, Wyoming.
One of them, Hugh, calculated the rough amount he’d planned to spend on the vacation: $2400 for two, 10-day ski passes; thousands in airfare, $400 for a shuttle from the airport; $7000 for lodging; and thousands more for fine dining. For one couple’s vacation.
What is to be done?
Telluride, like most ski resorts in the West, is partially built on public US Forest Service lands. Operators are often given 40-year leases that allow resorts to use the land for private profit, and companies pay fees that, in the words of one expert, are “well below” the “market value for the land in which they operate.”
At the dawn of the modern ski industry in the late 1930s, Wilderness Society co-founder and USFS’s director of recreation, Bob Marshall, called for resorts on public land to be publicly owned. While that didn’t happen, the industry was strictly regulated until the late 1970s, when Jimmy Carter rolled back federal controls on lift ticket prices. In 1977, a full-day ticket at Telluride was $9.50, or around $50 in 2026 dollars.
Most USFS ski area permits allow for revocation or suspension if the companies fail to comply with federal, state, or local law, or “for specific and compelling reasons in the public interest.”
It would theoretically be possible for a future federal administration to apply considerable pressure on private resort operators, either to pursue antitrust action against ski conglomerates like Vail and Alterra, or to enforce federal labor laws.
Could the Department of Agriculture threaten to suspend a resort’s USFS permit over unfair labor practices in a labor dispute? Probably, though it’s not likely to come from the Trump administration.
San Miguel County, Telluride Town Council, and Mountain Village Town Council all voiced support for the union in December. What could local governments do to pressure Telski to not sink the regional economy over a labor dispute? The inclusion of “local” in the USFS permits appears to offer one lane of action.
There is at least one instance of a small ski resort transitioning to a skier-owned coop: New Hampshire’s Black Mountain. With the Telluride area held hostage to the whims of one erratic billionaire, nothing should be off the table.
To paraphrase Big Bill Haywood, Who has a better right to be in peaceful possession of the ski slopes than the skiers?
UPDATE: Telluride’s ski patrol union ratified a new contract offer from Telski late on January 8, ending the strike. Details of the agreement have yet to be announced.
Zak Podmore is the author of Life After Dead Pool: Lake Powell's Last Days and the Rebirth of the Colorado River (Torrey House Press, 2024).
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Excellent choice of guest poster.