And then there were two. Telluride Ski & Golf earlier this month nixed its discounted season pass for seniors and its free season pass for skiers 80 and older, following a 25-year trend in the resort industry that has consistently sliced discounts for skiing seniors. That leaves Purgatory and Sunlight as the last two ski areas in Colorado that offer free season passes to octogenarians. (Lake County-owned Ski Cooper has a $10 season pass for skiers 75 and up, Monarch offers a $29 pass for skiers 69 and up and Powderhorn offers $29 passes for skiers age 75 and up.) “I mean come on, how many 80-plus skiers use these passes? I’m guessing 15,” said Corina Gordon, who this week launched a GoFundMe campaign to raise money to buy passes for Telluride’s octogenarian skiers. Gordon grew up in Telluride, where her folks ran a Native American art gallery. Several years ago she opened The Gordon Collection store on Main Street.“Many of these people are my second parents and they have shaped this community and they look forward to this benefit when they are 80,” said Gordon, who hopes to raise $25,000 so she can buy maybe a dozen elderly skiers season passes “or at least some day tickets.” A season pass at Telluride for 2024-25 costs $2,100.“I feel like we should be celebrating people in their 80s and 90s who still want to get up on the hill,” Gordon said. “As a culture, we should be cheering that and not restricting their ability to ski.”For most of the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, resorts offered all sorts of discounts and free passes for older skiers. But as the baby boomers who seeded the modern resort industry aged into senior status, their free ski days started to pinch bottom lines. In the mid-1990s, legendary resort boss John Rutter announced the end of free ski passes for seniors at Keystone and Breckenridge ski areas, back when they were owned by Ralston Corp. After weathering a deluge of heated calls and missives in the local paper, Rutter restored free passes for seniors. The owner of Telluride Ski & Golf on Wednesday spoke with hosts at the KOTO radio station and amended the company’s new policy. Chad Horning told the radio station that any 80+ skiers enduring financial hardships could call him and he’d hook them up with a free ski pass.Horning, noting aging infrastructure costs at Telluride, said that while the resort’s owners “have a hard time subsidizing lift access to this mountain for people who can afford it,” the new pass prices were meant to include a note for people 80 or older who are struggling financially: “We do not want you paying for that pass.”Gordon suspended her fundraising effort after Horning announced the adjustment to pass prices.The “end of an era” for free senior skiing started in 2000 Aspen Skiing Co. followed Rutter’s lead, bracing for the old-timer backlash. As Aspen Snowmass resort leaders pored over visitation trends in the late-1990s, they saw that nearly 15% of the visits at their four Roaring Fork Valley ski hills were from skiers over 70, all of whom were skiing for free on Aspen Skiing’s fleet of elder-friendly passes.“God bless ’em, they were good customers and so faithful, but it was just too big of a number for us to ignore,” said John Norton, the former head of operations at Aspen Skiing Co. who shepherded the decision to end free access for 70+ skiers in 2000. “The crowd just erupted on us. I was taking dozens of calls a day. I wanted to listen to everyone who was calling and they were all similar: ‘I’ve waited all my life to get a free ticket out of you guys.’”The tactic at Aspen Skiing Co. was to replace the free pass with a $99 season pass for the 70-plus crowd, back when the full season pass for the company cost around $1,500. Vail Resorts was next. Months after Aspen Skiing Co. broke the senior-skier dam, the Vail-based ski area operator announced it was ending free skiing for seniors at Beaver Creek, Breckenridge, Keystone and Vail ski areas as well as its partner Arapahoe Basin. Like Aspen, Vail Resorts priced its 70-and-older passes at $99. “We priced it there so it would be embarrassing to complain about,” Norton said. “One guy called me a sneaky little bastard. He said you’re gonna raise that price next season and it’s the end of an era. I laughed because that was exactly our plan.”It was definitely the end of an era. Today, seniors get no discounts on Vail Resorts’ $1,025 Epic Pass. Neither do senior skiers buying the rival Ikon Pass, which is $1,359 for 2024-25. Aspen Skiing Co. offers skiers 70 and older its unlimited Premier Pass for $809, seniors 65-69 pay $2,429 and skiers 18 to 65 pay a whopping $3,324.Norton remembers calls from grateful resort operators sprinkled in with the salty seniors in 2000. “It created a storm but I did get a lot of thank you notes from ski areas,” he said. “When I got into the industry in the ’80s, skiers in their 70s were a rarity. Now, with advances in health care and nutrition and surgeries and everything, people are skiing deep into their 80s. That’s great and so good for our older skiers. But it’s not practical that they ski for free.”First published by The Colorado Sun.