No Longer A “Lost” Ski Area: Cuchara Mountain Park Makes A Comeback

This winter, Cuchara Mountain Park plans to cut the ribbon on a fully refurbished Riblet double chairlift, restoring lift-served skiing to Baker Mountain in southern Colorado’s Huerfano County. With this lift opening, Cuchara Mountain Park will complete an informal change in status, from one of Colorado’s “lost” ski areas to an affordable, easy-to-access option for families, beginner and intermediate skiers and riders, terrain park enthusiasts and “uphillers” willing to earn their turns. 

Photos courtesy of Panadero Ski Corp./Cuchara Mountain Park

According to Ken Clayton, a Panadero Ski Corporation board member, Cuchara Mountain Park’s revitalization has been a community-based effort — a multi-faceted undertaking between the Cuchara Foundation, Huerfano County and Panadero Ski Corporation. While most of Baker Mountain is under U.S. Forest Service jurisdiction, the lower 50 acres of the ski area are on private land. Wary of future non-skiing development, the Cuchara Foundation purchased the bottom of the shuttered ski area in 2017, the result of a successful community fundraising campaign. The land was then donated to Huerfano County. Panadero Ski Corporation was formed in 2019, with a goal of reopening the mountain’s lower chairlift, known as Chair Four. This past summer, Panadero inked a 40-year operating agreement with Huerfano County. With this, Cuchara Mountain Park became Colorado’s first nonprofit community ski area. 

A Community Effort to Bring Skiing Back

The history of Cuchara Mountain Park is long and convoluted, with numerous names and owners. The first organized skiing along the front range of the soaring Sangre de Cristo mountains was tiny Cuchara Ski Valley, according to Caryn and Peter Boddie, who have chronicled the “lost ski areas” of Colorado in several books. Cuchara Ski Valley had a surface lift with five runs and was open from 1950 to 1970. 

After an 11-year hiatus, Panadero Ski Area opened in 1981 and operated two chairlifts and a rope tow. In a meaningful nod to Baker Mountain and the region’s earliest settlers, Panadero means “baker” in Spanish. When it closed in 2000, the ski area, then known as Cuchara Valley, operated four chairlifts and two surface lifts, serving 230 skiable acres. The mountain had 1,562 vertical feet of terrain, topping out at an elevation of 10,810 feet. The closing was both a recreational and economic blow to the region.

Aside from acquiring the private land necessary to reopen Cuchara Mountain Park, the biggest challenge has been reestablishing chairlift operations after a more than 20-year hiatus. Reopening Chair Four has been a top priority. An initial inspection by the Colorado Passenger Tramway Safety Board showed how big the project was. “We were advised to replace just about everything that could be replaced, outside of the chairs, the towers and the buildings at the top and the bottom,” explains Clayton. Needing additional funding, Panadero wrote a grant for $250,000 to the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade which was awarded in late 2024. 

With this funding, work on Chair Four has been accelerated and is scheduled to be complete in November 2025, with an anticipated tramway board inspection and certification in December. 

In the meantime, Cuchara Mountain Park is entering its fourth year of operation. Featuring “one of the better terrain parks on the Front Range,” according to Clayton who adds that “a couple of pro snowboarders say the same thing,” the park is being expanded for the coming winter. The ski area has snowmaking — and dedicated water rights — ensuring a strong opening and sufficient coverage.

Even without a lift, skiers and riders have flocked to the mountain for the past few winters thanks to “our maintenance guy, who is our lifeblood,” shares Clayton. Unwilling to sit idly by and watch the snow fall, “he went and fabricated what we call our ski bus,” a snowcat pulling a trailer that hauls 22 people at a time up the hill, taking them to the top of the available runs. 

Mike Moore is a businessman and community member who became involved with Panadero Ski Area in the early 1980s. A self-described “ski bum” from childhood, Moore recalls hearing about a ski area set to open in Huerfano County, southwest of Pueblo and northwest of Trinidad. Although his source was reliable — it was his younger brother and he knew the developers — Moore was initially dubious. 

“I questioned the fact that along that part of Interstate 25, it's all flat. There are no mountains there. But I didn't realize that 20 miles inland, there was a hill that you could put a ski area on,” he laughs. And while he didn’t uproot and move to the small town of Cuchara until 1993, he became, as he puts it, a “helper and advisor” from the ski area’s earliest days. 

Today, Moore serves on the Cuchara Foundation board and continues to pour his energy and enthusiasm into ensuring Cuchara Mountain Park remains viable. In part this is due to his love of winter sports. He’s also an innkeeper, the proprietor of the Dodgeton Creek Inn, a nearby bed and breakfast. 

A Revival for the Region

The reopening of Cuchara Mountain Park has resulted in a significant uptick in weekend lodging and dining activity, according to Moore. This winter, he anticipates seeing even more visitors once the chairlift opens. The reopening of the ski area “means that instead of being a 90-day summer resort, Cuchara will be a year-round resort again,” he explains, adding that the restored Grandote Peaks Golf Course in La Veta is a big summer draw. 

The word is getting out. Once the secret domain of backcountry skiers, who discovered Cuchara during the decades it was closed, Cuchara Mountain Park is now pulling in skiers and riders from along the Front Range, as well as neighboring states. 

“For the first two years, we were drawing a lot of guests from Pueblo and sometimes Colorado Springs and Trinidad,” says Clayton, adding that they also began seeing many people driving down from Denver to ski on weekends, when Interstate 70 is especially busy.

Then in 2024, Cuchara Mountain Park got “a ton of great press, and we started drawing families from North Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma,” he shares. “It’s a second homeowner community, and all of these people who used to ski there realized they could ski again and started coming up in the winter.” 

With $40 lift tickets, $200 season passes and free uphill access, Cuchara Mountain Park hopes that the combination of affordability, easy access, an upgraded lift and an excellent guest experience provide a measure of stability and longevity that previous versions of the ski area couldn’t quite unlock.

“It’s a nice alternative for people,” says Clayton. “We like to say that our single-day ticket is cheaper than a cheeseburger, coke and fries at a major resort up I-70. You can ski in the park all day if you want to for free, just by walking up. But at 40 bucks, we’re trying to get everyone on the mountain in some way or another.”

Originally published in the winter 2025-26 issue of Spoke+Blossom.