The ski runs above the mountain town of Telluride, Colo., sat eerily empty on Saturday. Chair lifts hung as motionless as icicles. Tourists slumped beside outdoor fire pits, trying not to think about the money they had spent on ski vacations now upended by a labor dispute.
“This is the first time I’ve seen snow in six years,” Alexander Caro, 23, who flew in from Miami with his family, said as he looked hungrily at the base of the ski mountain, now blocked off by “closed” signs.
A few feet away, a golden Labrador retriever played fetch in the snow beside the resort’s shuttered main lift. It was the closest anyone would get to having fun on the mountain this holiday weekend, after the resort decided to shut down its operations in response to a vote by the ski patrollers’ union to reject a contract offer and go on strike for higher pay.
The resort and its owner, Chuck Horning, a real-estate investor based in California, blamed the patrollers for the shutdown. In an open letter, Mr. Horning accused the patrol union of rejecting what he called “industry-leading, livable and sustainable” pay increases that would have raised the starting pay for patrollers to about $24 an hour.
Graham Hoffman, the president of the 78-member Telluride Professional Ski Patrol Association, said the union had already come down from its initial demand of an increase of $8 per hour.
The current average pay for a ski patroller is $29 an hour, according to the union. The ski patrol provides medical assistance to skiers and guidance on the mountain, and helps to reduce the likelihood of avalanches. Patrollers say it is demanding and sometimes dangerous work, its perils highlighted by a recent avalanche at Mammoth Mountain that caught two patrollers.
Mr. Hoffman said the resort deserved the blame for the economic damage that might come from stopping the lifts.
“We didn’t shut the mountain down,” he told several dozen ski patrollers in red jackets on Saturday morning, as they prepared to picket beside the gondola that connects the old mining town of Telluride to the slopes and the neighboring chalet-style town of Mountain Village.
The towns are scrambling to give visitors something to do by lighting fire pits and setting up ice-sculpting events and children’s play areas, or urging them to go hiking or snowmobiling. Local officials say there has not yet been a flood of cancellations. But they worry that few visitors will be willing to spend $10,000 on a winter trip to Telluride if the mountain stays closed.
“They came out to ski,” Mayor Teddy Errico of Telluride said.
The clash between the ski patrol union and its wealthy out-of-town owner has intensified the debate over the chasm between the superrich and everyone else in gilded resort towns like Telluride, where the median home price has soared to nearly $4 million since the pandemic. Many workers have been priced out of Telluride and, unable to find subsidized housing, have little choice but to commute an hour along treacherous mountain roads.
Tom Sokolowski, who at 80 years old is one of Telluride’s oldest and longest-serving ski patrollers, said he got his start on the mountain in the early 1970s, long before the Four Seasons began selling $7 million “private residences” or restaurants served $150 Tomahawk steak dinners. Back then, Telluride was still a dwindling old mining town in the remote San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado.
He said he never paid more than $150 in rent — a far cry from the $1,500 a month that some newcomers now pay to rent a room.
But Mr. Sokolowski said it was never easy to cobble together a living in a tourism-dependent town like Telluride, even before the likes of Oprah Winfrey and Tom Cruise began snapping up real estate. Because the ski season runs from late November through April, most patrollers are considered seasonal workers who do not receive health insurance. Many spend the off-season working construction and maintenance jobs, or as mountain guides or in restaurants.
“The ski bum life is almost done,” Mr. Sokolowski said. “That’s why we’re doing this.”
Tensions between workers and industry have roiled Telluride ever since its early mining days. In the early 1900s, gold and silver miners struck for minimum wages and better working conditions. But when the mining company brought in replacement workers, the strike spiraled into what newspapers called “a bloody riot.”
This time, many who live in overwhelmingly liberal Telluride — population 2,500, where utility boxes are plastered with “Eliminate Billionaires” stickers — say they support the ski patrol. As the patrollers marched down the main street on Saturday, snowy peaks towering above them, bus drivers and chauffeurs for luxury rental services honked in support.
Mr. Horning makes for an easy villain around Telluride. Local officials call him an absentee owner who has erratically cycled through ski-area managers, including, local officials said, firing his own son, and picked fights over funding the free gondola service and a summer-concert series. Local leaders openly call for him to sell the ski area, and an anonymous internet campaign has even cropped up to “chuck Chuck.”
“We have an owner who’s unwilling to invest in his own company, his own resort, his own employees,” Paul Wisor, the town manager of the Mountain Village, said in an interview.
Nancy Clark, a spokeswoman for the ski resort, said the area was working on contingency plans that would allow it to reopen at least some of the mountain. She criticized the personal attacks against Mr. Horning as “over the top.”
“Whether people like Chuck or not, what they may not realize is that their extreme nastiness impacts everyone at the ski resort,” she said in an email. “When people attack Chuck, they are indirectly attacking every single person who works at that resort.”
The strike and shutdown come during a bleak start to the winter for much of the Mountain West. Snow levels in Colorado are tied for the worst on record, and mountainsides around Telluride that would normally be gleaming white are brown and barren.
As a few meager flakes swirled on Saturday afternoon, Greg Shawcroft, 30, who runs a food cart in Mountain Village near the lift, was just hoping the snow would come and lifts would start spinning. He blamed Mr. Horning for the shutdown, but said his business could not afford much more pain.
“I’m torn,” he said. “I want ski patrol to get what they deserve, but at what cost to the community?”
Jack Healy is based in Colorado and covers the west and southwest.
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