ELDORA * It was like a family reunion one recent afternoon at this Boulder County ski area, everyone hugging and celebrating and looking at each other wide-eyed.
"They haven't seen each other since last year, and it's like they haven't seen each other in many years," observed Kevin Wilson.
He was on the receiving end of those hugs, one of the hundreds gathered on what was a momentous day for Ignite Adaptive Sports. The organization's volunteers and friends greeted Wilson with joyous remarks:
"This is so cool!"
"This is gorgeous!"
"This is amazing, holy cow!"
This was the ribbon-cutting of Caribou Lodge, Eldora Mountain's new hub that will serve as the new center for the nonprofit getting people with disabilities out on the snow.
Ignite Adaptive Sports is recognizing this upcoming season as its 50th. The anniversary comes with state-of-the-art digs that would have been hard to imagine in the 1970s, when what was then called the Eldora Handicapped Recreation Program started out of a van.
"It's like we're in a house now," said Wilson, Ignite's operations manager, "where we had been living in a shack."
Not a shack, but precarious trailers slowly sinking over wetlands. "They were trailers, but we just called it headquarters," Wilson said with a smile. "To keep things neutral. Positive instead of negative."
Positive thinking helped get Ignite to this new center equipped with restrooms (porta-potties previously) and an elevator to a bridge running straight to the chairlift (wheelchair-bound, sit-ski students were previously hauled uphill by two or three volunteer instructors).
Positive thinking, yes, and those ever-determined volunteers.
"It's been a long time coming," Eldora General Manager Brent Tregaskis said to the crowd at Caribou Lodge's ribbon-cutting. "For some of you Ignite folks, it's probably been close to 20 years."
One of those folks, David Levin, could not be there to see it. Cancer took his life in 2017, but not before he pushed Eldora-owning Powdr Corp. to get serious about a building that would be leased to Ignite.
Levin put up $250,000 of his own money -- the start of Ignite's $1.9 million in fundraising toward construction. (Powdr spent millions more, but figures were not disclosed.)
The ribbon-cutting was a day to remember Levin, who is pictured around Ignite's new front desk, kitchen and spacious equipment and fitting rooms. Levin is pictured guiding a boy in a sit ski, the wind against both smiling faces.
The faces of nearly 250 Ignite volunteers are pictured. One of them is Paula Galloway, who started volunteering in 2003 and continues to do so every Friday. From a parking lot in Loveland, she carpools to Eldora with others who share the passion.
"It seems like everyone has been touched by a friend or family member, someone they care about that has a disability," Galloway said of fellow volunteers. "There's a passion for winter sports, but then there's just caring about someone you love who thought they couldn't do something anymore."
Skiing for purpose
Galloway's late husband, Stan, lived with multiple sclerosis. He found Ignite in 2003, and from then on he skied.
"It was just so freeing for him," Galloway said. "He had lost so many things. He could no longer hike, he couldn't bike, couldn't play basketball. But now he could ski again."
The stories go on -- stories from nearly 1,300 lessons Ignite has reported providing in recent seasons.
Reads a letter of thanks from one father: "For some of our families, there will never come a day when they can hear their child speak or walk, but that child remembers the time they skied down the mountain."
There are more stories of first-time skiers or people hoping to return to the sport. They are amputees or blind or paralyzed or living with disease.
Among them is David Pettigrew, a Colorado Springs-based veteran.
Twenty-one years ago in Iraq, he lost his leg in combat. The years gave way to depression and life-threatening weight gain before an attention to fitness and adaptive sports.
Thanks to Ignite, skiing is a newer sport for Pettigrew -- and it's one of his favorites.
He relies on crutches, "which is to say I mostly keep a walking pace day to day," he said. "There's a part of my brain that really, really likes that adrenaline. And I just love being up in the mountains. Especially like a sunny day after a big snow, it's quiet and gorgeous and wonderful."
It's the kind of bliss that Alison Rehfus found last season when she started lessons with Ignite.
Before a neurological illness brought her to a wheelchair, she was a college athlete and U.S. Forest Service employee. "I was in the woods every day," Rehfus said. "So being outside is huge for me."
So is being able to challenge herself and improve skills on the sit ski -- that athlete mentality -- and being able to do so not far from her home in Fort Collins. With Eldora's proximity, "I could go out every weekend, or every other weekend," she said.
Growing a family
The proximity to Front Range populations might help explain a seemingly unlikely claim at the relatively small ski area: Among adaptive snowsports programs across the likes of Vail, Steamboat, Telluride and Crested Butte, Ignite is said to be Colorado's second-oldest.
Sign Up for free: Peak Interest Your weekly local update on arts, entertainment, and life in Colorado Springs! Delivered every Thursday to your inbox.
Sign Up View all of our newsletters. Success! Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. View all of our newsletters. Featured Local Savings
For Ignite's longevity, longtime volunteer John Humbrecht also credits a certain culture.
"More of a family feel than many of the other adaptive organizations I'd been with over the years," he said. "Some run it more like a business, not that that's a bad thing."
But it's different to be paid and different to volunteer, Humbrecht explained. Different to clock out and go home, and to stick around for runs after lessons and for wine and cheese among friends, as has been the scene for Ignite's volunteers.
"You come up because you like it, not because you're getting paid for it," Humbrecht said.
Ignite's origins are traced to two physician assistants students from the University of Colorado-Boulder in 1975. Five years prior, Winter Park saw the start of what would be the National Sports Center for the Disabled.
The early concept at Eldora was widely unfamiliar, recalled Jim Hahn. He started volunteering in the early '80s.
"It was sort of this experiment to see if anything would work," he said.
The stories Humbrecht heard from those early days out of the van: "You didn't know if you'd have a lesson that day. You just came up and hung out in the parking lot, and if somebody came over, you took them on a lesson."
Humbrecht started volunteering around 2000. He would inspire more instructors to get national certifications -- training often paid for out of volunteer pockets.
"When we started, I think our budget was like $500 or $600 a year," Humbrecht said. "How we raised money was, the instructors had to pay dues, and then we'd sell candy bars. It was like being in the Boy Scouts."
Hahn remembered his fellow early board members donating hundreds or thousands of dollars of their own as needs arose, namely insurance. The biggest needs often regarded infrastructure, or lack thereof.
Equipment eventually moved out of the van. "I won't say it was a building. It was more the size of an outhouse," Hahn said.
Students would be outfitted at a picnic bench. "There was that picnic bench, no matter what the weather was," Hahn said. "There was definitely some survival training in that."
Shelter later came in the form of a trailer. Then came a fire in 2006, destroying the base but not the mission. Volunteers managed to keep lessons going. And, again, they managed to put together funds for a new trailer.
Not long after, in 2008, the organization was featured by Al Roker on the "Today" show -- national attention that fueled a new approach to fundraising. Now funds would be sought from major donors, businesses and foundations.
And as volunteers topped 1,000 lessons a season, their sell to Eldora ownership continued:
"We brought a clientele that they probably wouldn't have had," Hahn said. "Even though they donated lift tickets to us, these skiers and snowboarders we brought up brought their families who would come to ski on their own. It was a pull-through business we talked about every year."
Until ownership soured on the idea, worried about logistics and space on the mountain.
"It came down to them saying, No, we don't need you. I think it was around September or October 2013," said Galloway, who sat on the board at the time. "We actually gathered big protests in Boulder, got some publicity, and we were able to negotiate at that point and get back on the mountain."
Ignite needed more professional muscle, volunteers decided. Carol Nickell became executive director in 2015, the first of a few paid staffers today.
One early priority was building a relationship with Powdr, which took over Eldora soon after Nickell arrived. Another priority was boosting finances -- all in the grand plan for a new headquarters.
A new era
"To me, it's like a magical building," Nickell said of Caribou Lodge.
For its physical attributes, she said, and also for what it represents: the volunteer spirit to thank for much of Ignite's $1.9 million contribution.
Compared with shoddy bases over the past 50 years, "It just gives a sense of permanence," Galloway said.
And yet the future is uncertain. Over the summer, Powdr listed Eldora for sale.
"I have confidence that whoever steps in will embrace Ignite as well as Powdr did," Nickell said.
She has confidence in the people the new ownership will see: people skiing against the odds they perceived, thanks to people helping them break those perceptions. People like Kevin Wilson.
Ignite's operations manager knows what it's like to think of a disability as an insurmountable boundary. "I did for 25 or 30 years," Wilson said.
He has been in a wheelchair since 1990, when a car crash left him paralyzed at the age of 16. He struggled with addiction and depression long after, struggled to find the formerly active, happy person he was.
On the mend, he discovered Ignite. And now his job is helping people find the joy of skiing that he found.
"It just feels like I'm living again," he said.
That was the feeling there inside Caribou Lodge. It felt like a family reunion, everyone hugging and celebrating. And there was Wilson in the middle of it all, there in this place he called "a house" -- a home.