Loveland Ski Area wins the hearts of many Coloradans with an opening day full of options

There were other, bigger ski resorts opening in Colorado the same day, but Tom Miller and his friends chose to be at Loveland Ski Area’s opening day because, well, they love it there.

Miller and his buddies have chased the first chairs of the season at the state’s various ski resorts for decades, especially those near Summit County, but Loveland has a particularly special place in Miller’s heart.

“This has just been a tradition with my friends and I for 31 years, and really where it started for us was here,” Miller said. “This was our first getting on first chair. We had some at Keystone, but this is really what started that tradition. … This was our first first-chair.”

When the Chet’s Dream lift started running at 9 a.m., Miller and his friends were waiting at the front of the line. There was a bluebird sky, and as morning wore into afternoon, the run from the Cat Walk to Mambo to Home Run trails shifted from shadows to sunlight.

On the lifts and on the slopes, smiles abounded as people young and old carved into groomed trails still soft in places after a small snowstorm earlier in the week. The lift lines, which had several dozen people in them when the lifts opened, moved fast.

“Loveland is a great place early season,” Loveland Marketing Manager Dustin Shaefer said. “We don’t get the crowds like the other mountains. So, it’s kind of a secret here. It tends to be a little bit busier over those other mountains, and our snowmakers are already putting guns on other runs.”

He added that the real secret is that it’s not just the early season when the lines move quickly at Loveland — it’s most of the year. Especially as more terrain opens up, it is easy to find quiet corners of the mountain to make turns without dodging through crowds of people, according to Shaefer.

“That is a year-round thing,” Shaefe said. “We’ve got the free, close-in parking here at Loveland. We’ll run out of parking before we run out of capacity on the mountain. You’ll get up there in the middle of spring break, a holiday, Christmas break, and you get up on the hill and there’s no one around you.”

It is one of the things that several of Loveland’s opening-day skiers said they loved about the mountain. When asked how the conditions are, many others responded with some variation of “beats work.”

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That was the response Boulder resident Kelly Fagans gave. It was his first day of the season and his fourth season as a season passholder at Loveland. Fagans said the lack of lines and the convenient location off Interstate 70 are what keeps him coming back to the ski area.

The same goes for Dean Sanderford, who lives 45 minutes away in Golden and says he’s been a season pass holder at Loveland for the past several years. Sanderford said he keeps coming back because the ski area has “a local kind of family-owned feel to it.”

What got him to come out to opening day? Well, Sanderford said, “I have the day off work.”

After replacing Lift 6 and completing a new ski lodge at Loveland Valley last year, the ski area doesn’t have any big projects lined up for this year. Instead, the area is focusing on its snowcat tours, which will likely start up in January as terrain fills in, Shaefer said.

This will be the second year Loveland will offer an authentic backcountry experience guided by ski patrollers with full-day snowcat tours in Dry Gulch, Shaefer said. The Ridge Cat, a snowcat that takes ticket holders to the top of the Continental Divide for free, will also continue this year, he said.

At the top of Chet’s Dream, Bill and Lisa Gooch were chatting with their friend, ski patroller Tamara Bryan, while preparing to make some of their first turns of the season. Bill and Lisa say they have both skied Loveland for more than 50 years.

Lisa Gooch, who has been skiing at Loveland since college, said she feels blessed by the “family feel” Loveland has created over the years. Bill Gooch said he loves the place for the long seasons, variety of terrain and good people who work there.

“You can ski the groom. You can ski the trees, backcountry, ski the raw. Anything up here that we see,” Bill Gooch said, pointing to Loveland Basin stretching below. “It’s family more than business, even though it is a business.”

Bryan chimed in.

“But it is such a family, look at us,” she said. “All these people who ski together every year.”