Ski History

In the early 1950s, Ernie Blake had an unusual commute. The Swiss-German skier was managing the Santa Fe Ski Basin and a sister resort in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, and rather than driving between them, he flew his own Cessna 170 — about six hours of driving saved each way. But the flights gave him something better than time: a bird's-eye view of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, and a growing obsession with finding the perfect mountain for a ski area of his own.

When Oklahoma oil man Stokes Bolton rolled into Red River in the 1950s, the town counted barely a dozen year-round residents. He had never skied a run in his life. What he had was an entrepreneur's eye: the steep, snowy slopes rising above town looked like a business waiting to happen. In 1959 he opened the Red River Ski and Summer Area with a rope tow, a poma platter lift, and a chairlift cobbled together from salvaged oil derricks — and a ski town was born.