Three generations of the Pitcher family help to manage the Wolf Creek Ski Area in southern Colorado, where the days are long and the nearest hotel is 18 miles away.
To really get the Pitchers and the strange and striking success of their Wolf Creek Ski Area in the high lonesome of Colorado's San Juan Range, you need to spend some time with a man born 170 years ago and 6,000 miles from Wolf Creek.
This, at any rate, is the belief of the 91-year-old family patriarch, Kingsbury ("Pitch") Pitcher. Before he says a word about Wolf Creek, Pitch wants to speak of his ancestry—"I can do it in about one minute."
He takes 10 minutes, but nobody's counting. The man, who skied regularly through his mid-80s, is a wonder of nonagenarian focus and vigor. And it's as if he reads from a book, a good one, about the life and deeds of his maternal grandfather, Otto Mears.
Mears, a Russian-born orphan, landed in San Francisco all on his own and penniless at age 11. Pitch waxes biblical: "He worked ever since then...and the years passed." Mears went to Colorado and remade the southwestern part of the state by building toll roads, which he upgraded to railroads networking wilderness settlements and mining towns. A stained-glass portrait of Mears, still widely known as the Pathfinder of the San Juans, adorns the rotunda of Colorado's state capitol.
Mears became a regional omnimagnate, but by the time Pitch was born, much of the great man's empire was lost or on the skids. "I had kind of a strange upbringing," says Pitch, who spent his summers in rough-tough Silverton, Colorado, a mining town in which his family still had business interests, and his school years at the family home in Pasadena, California. Pitch discovered skiing, for which he had a gift, on Mount Baldy in Los Angeles County. He ski-raced for Stanford University, where he earned a business degree, and then taught skiing at Sun Valley in Idaho, reportedly the first non-European to do so. In the U.S., skiing was then a tiny, marginal exotic; it was mainstreamed and Americanized only after World War II.
Pitch briefly operated a ski club's rope tow near Santa Fe, New Mexico—"Being brash and foolish, I said, 'Oh, I know how to splice ropes. I can run it.' " He fibbed about splicing but figured it out and found his professional path. "I learned a lot of the ins and outs of the ski business right then," says Pitch. "I had to do everything myself."
Radical self-reliance—running/fixing/building everything you possibly can—remains a Pitcher First Principle.
Why all the backstory? Well, Pitch thinks we should know it. And, though the Mears fortune vanished, there is a legacy. Pitch become one of skiing's pathfinders.
Pitch, who had learned to fly before World War II, trained fliers in the Army Air Corps. After the war, he taught skiing in Aspen, Colorado, where he also ranched and had a small ski shop. All members of his family—his wife, Jane, and six kids born over a spread of 17 years—helped out as soon as they could. Pitch and Jane's daughter Noël recalls, fondly, doing chores at age 6 and lessons learned from her father: "He taught all of us frugality and just how much you can do without a whole lot."
Moneymen harnessed Pitch's blended expertise—skiing and business—by hiring him to scout mountains that were right for building profitable ski areas. He pointed a developer toward the peaks near Aspen that became the giant area Snowmass. He also explored and backed a surprising winner, given how far south it was: Sierra Blanca (now Ski Apache), in the White Mountains near Ruidoso, New Mexico. A developer had decided to build there, and Pitch scouted to satisfy himself that he ought to accept a job offer to design and oversee construction of the new area. Pitch said yes, and Sierra Blanca opened in 1961.
Davey Pitcher, his father's successor as head of the family business and at 48 the youngest of his siblings, says all that followed depended on Pitch's eye for mountains with commercial potential: "He understood slope and aspect—it's a hard thing for someone who's not a real mountain person to understand." A successful ski mountain must have three things. One, terrain right for trails to accommodate skiers of all levels, plus off-trail steeps and bowls for new-style adventure snow sports. Two, north-facing slopes to catch and hold more snow. Three, good road access. And a mountain can meet those basic requirements but still not work. It takes both imagination and a special knowledge of skiing to perceive how a wild mountain might be cleared and graded to create a successful area. Davey likens the process to an artist seeing a sculpture in raw marble. And he says that the Colorado Rockies, which can look like skiable infinity, are pretty much built out: "If you went out and had a trunkload of money and wanted to build a new ski area, you'd be hard-pressed to find a place to put it."
In 1962, Pitch got his own operation on the same spot, more or less, where he debuted in the ski business circa 1941. He purchased, for an amount so small he can't remember it, Ski Santa Fe, a moribund business with a nonworking lift adapted from mine machinery brought down from Colorado. "I bought Santa Fe on a note, unsecured except by the property, which was junk," says Pitch. Junk as a ski area, but it had good topography and faced north, with access via a newly improved state road. Basically, the owners of the Santa Fe area had given up on it, and Pitch's effort could do as much as the cash and lines of credit he didn't have. "He did all the work, or an awful lot of it," says Davey. "He would run the bulldozer, he'd run the lift, he'd figure out how to haul the equipment up, to build the lift. He didn't rely on financing and hiring specialists." He did, however, rely on his wife and children, the oldest of whom were out of high school when he bought Ski Santa Fe. "There was no money, so if you have six kids, there's your labor force," says Noël, who began work at the Santa Fe area as a teen and later ran support businesses at the base of the lifts—rental, restaurants, children's program, and so on—at Wolf Creek, where she ended a 30-year career in her family's business.
