OUT THERE: Closed New Mexico ski resort getting new life, six skiers a day

AMALIA, N.M. - You know the feeling, when you’ve skipped work on a powder day in the middle of the week to ski, the snow is deep and untouched and the mountain is so empty you think, “I have this place to myself?”

That’s every day at this remote northern New Mexico resort once known as Ski Rio, 14 miles’ drive south of Colorado in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

The chairlifts are gone or permanently shut off. Most of the hotels, restaurants and lodges have been torn down or allowed to succumb to the elements. A “closed” sign along a winding two-lane highway is the only indication from the road that this place ever existed.

But the resort is seeing new life this winter, after a decade of its wide-open runs going untracked. Last month, new owners began offering snowcat skiing on the terrain, the only snowcat skiing in New Mexico. They renamed the place Endless Blue Resorts, and are selling half-day ’cat trips for $150 — or $75 during the week — and $250 for full-day trips.

It’s the beginning of what they say could be a full-scale revival of the resort, an effort to re-introduce the skiing world to a small mountain that always lived in the shadow of its bigger neighbor Taos, 48 miles to the south.

Earlier this month, I made the three-hour drive from Colorado Springs. There, along with a couple of reporters from Santa Fe and the mountain’s four employees, I learned what it is like to truly “have the mountain to yourself.”

Comedy of errors

Even by the standards of small ski areas, Ski Rio has a hard-luck history, dragging down everyone who touched it.

Opened by a livestock cooperative in 1982, it was sold in 1984 to a developer. The developer couldn’t make loan payments and it went into foreclosure. A savings and loan bought it out of bankruptcy in 1986, and two years later the bank went under. Picked up by a federal bailout agency, it sat idle in 1990-91 and was sold to one company in 1992 but never opened for skiing. A Texas investor bought it in 1993 and had a few successful years before the venture ended in foreclosure.

You get the picture. The resort was a longer drive from population centers than Taos, Angel Fire or Wolf Creek. It lacked the steep terrain of Taos to attract expert skiers, but as an intermediate resort, it also lacked the off-slope accommodations and activities for families. Locals called it “Ski Free-o,” because they always seemed to be giving away lift tickets.

A group of Texas investors finally shut the lifts for good in the middle of the 1999-2000 ski season, a poor snow year that saw dismal attendance, and the property was tied up in foreclosure and bankruptcy litigation from 2003 to 2008.

In 2008 CIMEX Invest Inc. of the Czech Republic bought the resort. Last summer, it sold four of the five chair lifts, and began moving toward some sort of revival of skiing.

Just what that means remains to be seen.

A world of powder awaits

The old warming hut at 11,650 feet, the highest point on the mountain, offers views you won’t find at most Colorado resorts. Dusty mesas rise to the west, while the San Luis Valley stretches across the horizon, an endless, arid ocean in stark contrast to the jagged heights of Blanca Peak and the Sangres that glisten in the distance.

“When you see those barren peaks, those are Colorado ski areas,” said Pavel Lukes of Taos, who brokered the sale of the resort and, as spokesman for the new resort, came along on the recent tour.

The snow isn’t always good here — it gets an average of 260 inches a year, less than many Colorado resorts — but it’s good this year.

There is no official snow report. Asked what the base is, the employees discussed how much powder they had to swim through last time they fell. The consensus: deep.

An El Niño weather pattern has kept many of Colorado’s ski resorts dry this winter, sending the storms to the south. Many central Colorado resorts, as of early February, had bases in the 30- to 40-inch range, flimsy for a usually snowy region.

Endless Blue has benefitted, but so have southern Colorado resorts like Wolf Creek and other New Mexico resorts, enjoying abundant snowfall while Summit County starves. So why come here?

“You’re going to find out,” promised mountain manager Tom Atkins, a former Manitou Springs real estate agent who has managed the mountain intermittently since 1990.

The snowcat blazed a path through the powder and waited at the bottom as we plunged into the untracked snow on either side. On runs nobody had skied this season, I could feel every snowstorm of winter. I sank through the top 18 inches and glided down on the more condensed snow beneath. Every move was like turning in feathers.

Journalistic indifference was out the window. I was grinning and the mountain employees knew it.

Lunch was grilled brats in the mid-mountain restaurant that opened in December 1999 and operated for just days before the resort closed. Then it was back up in the snowcat, which can carry up to four people.

Six people skiing at any time would be a crowded day on the mountain.

Future uncertain

Endless Blue employees acknowledge that the operation is not yet a sustainable business model. As of our trip, they had had just three paying customers, skiers from Taos looking for fresh tracks. It costs Endless Blue $300 just to run the snowcat for the day.

“Six people a day is not going to ski up the mountain. This is not going to make the owners a lot of money,” said Atkins.

This late in the season, they just hope to get their name out there. And they point out that, unlike other area resorts, they are not on national forest land, so they are free to operate as late into spring as they want.

“This is not a money-maker. This is an introduction to things in the future. There’s a lot of potential here,” said Lukes.

Who the resort will cater to remains to be seen. Ski Rio was known as an intermediate mountain, with 30 percent green trails and 50 percent blue, meaning there is not much steep terrain for experts, who are the typical snowcat skiers. What steeps there are are short, with long run-outs on mellow terrain in the ’cat tracks to get to the bottom.

The aprés-ski scene is what you would expect of a closed-down resort, and the only lodging is six private homes available for rent.

Still, the new owners are confident the promise of powder on open runs will attract families and less-hardcore skiers who would not normally consider snowcat skiing.

“A private ski resort for you and five friends. The lines are short when there are only six people,” said Atkins.

The future plans are as wide open as the runs, ranging from continuing limited snowcat skiing to new lifts and restaurants. But for now, it’s just about reintroducing Colorado and New Mexico skiers to this forgotten gem.

Said Atkins, “It’s a beautiful mountain. It’s going to waste. It really is.”