Winter Park Resort began as Denver's city-owned ski hill

Winter Park is a big modern resort, but it started as something unusual: a ski hill owned by a city on the other side of the mountains.

The ski area opened around 1940, and for decades it was owned by the City and County of Denver. Denver saw value in a winter playground its residents could reach by train and, later, by car over Berthoud Pass. The slopes began small and grew from there.

Two things are worth knowing if you are moving nearby. First, even though a private company runs the resort today, much of the ski terrain sits on Arapaho National Forest land. Like most Colorado ski areas, the resort operates that terrain under a special-use permit from the U.S. Forest Service. Some base-area and valley land is under other ownership, so the picture is mixed close to town — but the forest setting is why so much of the surrounding land is public.

Second, this Denver connection helps explain why the Fraser Valley has long felt like a Front Range getaway, with a rail link and a steady stream of weekend visitors.

If you want the documented version of the resort’s founding, look to History Colorado and the City and County of Denver’s official records. For how ski areas use national forest land, the U.S. Forest Service page for the Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests is the place to start.