These days, Mount Vernon Canyon is Denver’s busy gateway to the high-flown and high-priced ski resorts of the high Rockies. Not so many days ago, though, serious schussers trekked that gorgeous gorge to plant their planks on the slippery slopes of – Mount Vernon Canyon.
Long before Vail, before Breckenridge and Beaver Creek, in a simpler age before snow-making machines and quad lifts and time-share condos and the $6 doughnut, there was Genesee Mountain, the 8,284-foot cradle of Colorado’s ski industry.
The year was 1919, and most Front Range ski enthusiasts scratched their alpine itch at Inspiration Point, a modest mound of prairie located at Sheridan Boulevard and West 49th Avenue offering about 60 feet of vertical dissatisfaction and tantalizing views of plunge-ier prospects to the west. At the time, the term “skiing” was widely understood to mean “ski jumping.” Downhill equipment hadn’t yet progressed much beyond plank-and-lash technology, and while a few earnest types were fooling around with the arcane mysteries of “telemark”, Nordic technique was still hip deep in the age of “French fries” versus “slice of pizza.” Early skiers needed unambiguous point-and-shoot runs offering nowhere else to go but straight down. Ambitious elements of the freshly-minted Denver Winter Sports Club began constructing a loftier kind of inspiration on the north face of Genesee Mountain.
The Genesee Ski Jump opened for business in 1920 to immediate success. Ski clubs from Steamboat Springs, to Hot Sulphur Springs, to Homewood Park in Deer Creek Canyon sent their best to compete against the local set, and they all gathered together in a cozy warming house after a hard day’s jumping to crow about their aerial exploits and enjoy “dainty Norwegian pastry gems.” The Genesee Jump went big-time the following year, hosting the first of seven National Ski Jumping Tournaments to be held atop Mount Vernon Canyon. From 1921 to 1927, the prestigious events drew top-tier talent from across the region and annually attracted up to 10,000 spectators from across the Front Range.
Before bemoaning too deeply the parking lot that forms in Clear Creek Canyon each winter weekend, modern skiers should consider the personal price of a lift-ticket in the 1920s. The very idea of Interstate 70 was purest science fiction back then, and U.S. 40 wasn’t even a glint in a civil engineer’s eye. To reach Genesee Mountain, most skiers drove the harrowing Lookout Mountain Road and endured a back-breaking bump-fest along miles of abandoned wagon road. That probably sounded downright posh to the typical spectator, who would take the trolley from Denver to Golden, ride the funicular to the top of Lookout Mountain, and trudge the remaining distance on foot.
Genesee Mountain boasted four separate ski jumps during its brief-but-brilliant hey-day, the largest measuring some 2,000 feet in length and plummeting 700 vertical feet. Given the region’s mild meteorological profile, fleets of trucks and teams of strong backs were frequently enlisted to haul snow from far afield and shovel it by hand onto the sun-washed mountainside, creating shiny ivory ribbons of winter cascading through grassy meadow. It was the canyon’s cursedly clement climate, along with improved access to snowier slopes in Steamboat Springs and Estes Park, that ultimately doomed the Genesee Jump. All but derelict by the late 1930s, the site caught a brief second wind in the mid-1950s when the University of Denver chose it for a handful of collegiate meets. But academia, too, quickly moved on, and today the once-prominent landmark is largely obscured by encroaching pine forest and upscale condominiums.
And that would have spelled the end to skiing in Mount Vernon Canyon, except that it didn’t.
In 1946, a Dartmouth graduate, 10th Mountain Division veteran and Denver winter sports promoter named Laurance ‘Larry’ Jump helped launch Arapahoe Basin Ski Area among the gasping peaks just south of Loveland Pass. Fast-forward to 1972 when Jump, perceiving an under-served market of potential skiers who might pick up the habit if they didn’t have to face the rigors of Loveland Pass in winter, launched Arapahoe East Ski Area on the south wall of Mount Vernon Canyon just a couple of miles down-stream from the area’s original Jump.
The effort started strong, serving about 600 feet of vertical drop serviced via one double chair lift, a Poma lift and a rope tow. The half-dozen anchor runs bottomed out at 6,800 feet where Arapahoe East’s modest, but modern, ski lodge offered hot food, equipment rentals and ski lessons. Modeling the venture on successful suburban ski areas of the Midwest, and hoping to capture the interest of “casual” day-skiers, Jump introduced Colorado to “shift” pricing, single-ride lift tokens, night skiing, and the new and novel notion of “ski-bobbing.”
Of course, no more snow fell on Arapahoe East’s 7,400-foot “Top One” than fell on the Genesee Mountain Jump, and not even the modern magic of manufactured snow could rescue the low-flung folly from temperate oblivion. But that’s not to say that Laurance ‘Larry’ Jump gave up without a fight. Taking heat from his partners at Arapahoe Basin, he promoted the concept of “grass skiing”, which never took off, and in 1976 he applied for an alpine slide permit, which was never granted. In a desperate bid at re-branding, in 1982 the area was re-named “Ski Golden” and closed for good two years later when the Colorado Tramway Board cited the operation for numerous violations including a thoroughly demoralized staff found drinking on the job.
While Genesee Park remains a popular antidote to the daily frets and fidgets of civilization, there’s virtually nothing left of the celebrated Jump that helped put Colorado on the nation’s ski map. The rusting lift towers of Arapahoe East would stand still and silent until 1996, when they were pulled down to make room for nothing at all. Although the area’s access road is still plainly visible, it takes a sharp eye to trace the course of the “Top Two” trails that still fall through the trees from the ridgeline above.
If skiers on their way to Pitkin County glitz, Eagle County glamour and the elegant resorts of Summit and Grand rarely spare a thought for Jefferson County’s precipitous landscapes, it’s because those too-familiar hillsides offer precious little to remind them of the not-so-long-ago days when both gateway and destination were in Mount Vernon Canyon.
