Long before Red River had a chairlift, a young couple down the Rio Pueblo valley near Vadito was already hauling skiers uphill with a rope. In 1952, Lloyd and Olive Bolander opened Sipapu, and with it, New Mexico got its first lift-served ski area — a small, family-built hill that has stayed family in spirit ever since.
Lloyd Bolander knew those mountains from childhood. Born in Dulce and raised in Penasco, he began skiing at age three on a wooded hillside near Taos, shooting between the pine trees on skis bought from Montgomery Ward. He went on to compete on the University of New Mexico ski team and graduated in business in 1950. Olive, born and raised in west Texas, met Lloyd while working a summer job in the mountains, and they married in 1949. Both learned their skiing at the old Agua Piedra Ski Club, later known as Tres Ritos, up the valley from where Sipapu now stands.
In 1950, the newlyweds bought 13 acres of riverfront property in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, hoping to build a sustainable life doing something they loved in the valley they called home. They ran a general store and a summer lodge at the site, and two years later they opened for skiing. Their lift was a portable rope tow, about 100 feet long, brought up the valley from Tres Ritos. There were three minimal trails and about 350 vertical feet of skiing, and a lift ticket cost 50 cents. They named the place Sipapu, a Tewa word for the land of paradise.
Growth came the slow, handmade way. The next year, 30 pairs of rental skis started a rental department. Over the years the family added and replaced lifts, cut new trails, and hand-built the slopeside lodging themselves, with daughter Sue and son Bruce working alongside their parents. When one new lift arrived with its operating instructions written in German, help came from a neighbor: Ernie Blake drove over from Taos Ski Valley to translate the handbook. The hill the Bolanders started eventually grew to more than 1,000 vertical feet of trails.
Teaching mattered to Lloyd as much as lifts did. He was passionate about putting newcomers, especially children, on skis, and he founded the Sipapu School Program, which offers deep discounts so local schools can bring whole classes to learn. That emphasis on schoolchildren and beginners helped make Sipapu the place where generations of northern New Mexico families first learned to turn.
Lloyd and Olive retired from daily duties in 1984, but Lloyd kept showing up to help teach in the ski school run by his daughter Sue. In 2004, the couple was inducted into the New Mexico Ski Hall of Fame, and the Professional Ski Instructors Association later recognized Lloyd for 55 years of service. He died at his home in Vadito on January 20, 2014, at age 86, remembered by Sipapu managing partner James Coleman as one of the last true pioneers of New Mexico. For Red River skiers making the drive south, Sipapu remains what the Bolanders built it to be: unpretentious, welcoming, and proud of being first.
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