A 13-year-old Silverton skier emerges as backcountry wunderkind

Jason Blevins

Outdoors/Business Reporter

Sneak Peek of the Week

Silverton backcountry skiing boss is 13 years old

SILVERTON — When the pandemic shut down the world in 2020, Griff Pinto was 8 and made a big decision. It was time to go all-in on skiing.

Five years later, the 13-year-old from Silverton is a backcountry skiing phenom, climbing more than 500,000 vertical feet a winter and skiing long lines off remote peaks that challenge skiers many times his age. Under the careful eye of his dad, Cliff, and mom, Kim, Griff has become a social media superstar with helmet-cam videos of his audacious descents.

Cliff, a longtime volunteer with the San Juan County’s intrepid Silverton Medical Rescue Team, said “it’s taken a village” to hone Griff’s skills and avalanche awareness.

“There are not a lot of people who are willing to go into the backcountry with a 7-year-old, or even a 13-year-old,” Cliff says. “It’s pretty unique the number of people in this community who have worked with Griff and mentored him and supported our sort of unorthodox parenting. And they’ve mentored me and my wife, too. That support system has really enabled us to take this, like, different path, you know.”

Griff was 9 when he sat down his mom and dad and said he wanted to be homeschooled in the winter, so he could ski more. His folks came up with a program that blends physical training with schoolwork. They’ve made skiing a formal education in the Pinto home.

Griff gets up at 6 a.m. and does 45 minutes of exercises with weights and balancing. A friend put together an exercise program to develop core strength.

“It definitely helps. I can definitely push a lot harder than I could two years ago. I can go a lot faster without taking breaks,” Griff says. “My best time up Irene’s is an hour and three minutes.”

Irene’s is a 2,200-vertical-foot climb of a popular, well-trafficked avalanche path just outside town. (For comparison, Griff’s one-hour ascent of Irene’s is about twice the pace of most backcountry skinners. So, he spends a good amount of time waiting on peaks as adults stomp up his skintrack.)

In January, Griff and his dad climbed three peaks — Anvil, Battleship and Bear mountains — totaling more than 8,300 vertical feet of climbing and three descents in less than nine hours.

Not every day is like that, of course. Some days the Pintos climb and ski small pillow lines in the trees. Other days they do long-haul traverses along timbered ridge lines and skip descents through avalanche terrain. Other times, when conditions are good and avalanche risk is manageable, they climb and ski off peaks. And some days, they just tromp through the woods, making their own trail in the hills above town.

“We do this one that, there’s like three people in town who actually enjoy it,” Griff says.

“There’s a running joke in town where people tell us, ‘Call me when you aren’t going to go do one of those things,’” Cliff says. “But those things help us. Get enough of that type of work in and we can go stack 8,000 to 10,000 feet on a powder day. That’s what we want to instill in Griff. There’s a lot of work to do to be great.”

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In Their Words

Postal woes boil over in Crested Butte as town waits for post office plans

Many Colorado mountain towns do not have home mail delivery, which puts a lot of pressure on package-packed post offices. In this age of Amazon-carted mania, the overwhelmed and understaffed mountain town post office is flailing.

The postal imbroglio is boiling over in Crested Butte, where yellow-slipped locals for years have bemoaned the lines snaking out the door of their 3,300-square-foot downtown post office. The Postal Service’s lease for that facility expires in less than a year and there are no plans to replace it, sparking speculation that residents may soon be traveling a half-hour to Gunnison to collect their precious parcels.

The town has acreage for the post office and is ready to partner with the Postal Service on a new facility. Maybe the town will build a facility and lease it to the service? Maybe the service will build on the town-owned lot? How about a shared building that includes deed-restricted housing?

“Every plan we offer, we do not hear anything back. They are silent and nonresponsive,” said Dara MacDonald, the town manager of Crested Butte. “So we are stuck. We can’t really plan anything.”

In the past couple months, a flurry of increasingly desperate letters — from Colorado’s U.S. Sens. Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper, U.S. Rep. Jeff Hurd, Gunnison County commissioners and town councils in Crested Butte and Mt. Crested Butte — have pleaded with the Postal Service to make a decision.

“Closing this post office would be catastrophic since this area does not receive any home delivery,” reads the letter from members of the state’s D.C. delegation to the postmaster, who quit the Postal Service last month.

As the federal government enters a lean fasting-phase under the Trump administration, response from the Postal Service has been lacking as deadlines for a new facility pass.

“With the USPS publicly signaling its intent to move out of the existing facilities three years ago, but demonstrating no meaningful progress in a replacement plan, we are seeing growing anxiety about how the USPS will maintain critical services,” reads a January letter from the mayor of Crested Butte to regional Postal Service managers.

The Postal Service responded this week saying the lot offered by the town is too small, but offering no other plans, saying the service “continue(s) to navigate issues such as zoning restrictions, infrastructure limitations, land availability, and long-term sustainability.”

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The Outsider now has a podcast! Veteran reporter Jason Blevins covers the industry from the inside out, plus indulges in the fun side of being outdoors in our beautiful state.

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The Guide

Layoffs begin at Vail Resorts as part of a two-year plan to trim $100 million

Vail Resorts last year unveiled a two-year plan to trim $100 million from its bottom line with what it awkwardly calls “scaled operations, global shared services and expanded workforce management.” The Resource Efficiency Transformation Plan follows a decade in which Vail Resorts grew to 42 resorts from 10 and invested close to $2 billion in its ski areas, including $433 million at its Beaver Creek, Breckenridge, Keystone and Vail ski areas.

That plan announced in September includes a reshuffling of employees and planned layoffs of about 14% of its corporate workforce and less than 1% of its operational workforce. The company this week told the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment that it plans to lay off 64 employees as part of the permanent closure of its human resources department at its Broomfield headquarters beginning in June. The company has spent the last few seasons tinkering with an automated, app-based HR system to manage a workforce that swells to nearly 45,000 in the height of winter.

The largest ski resort operator in North America hopes its cost-cutting will expand its resort earnings margin — which is at 29.3% for the 2024-25 winter, defined by dividing earnings by revenue — to levels from before the pandemic.

The Telluride revolt against resort owner Chuck Horning

TELLURIDE — The revolt is peaking.

What was once a quiet grumbling about Chuck Horning, the 21-year owner of the Telluride Ski and Golf Resort, is now a vocal chorus involving elected leaders in Mountain Village and Telluride as well as local business owners.

“I think the chaos he has created is negligent at its best and disruptive at its very worst,” Mountain Village Mayor Marti Prohaska said in a March 20 meeting where the council gave initial approval to a lift tax that would support the region’s public gondola transportation system. “We are an entity that is not going to deal with disruption any longer. We are taking our destiny into our own hands.”

The lift tax proposal — which requires approval by Mountain Village voters in June — lands after Horning failed to negotiate a funding plan for the gondola with the San Miguel Authority for Regional Transportation.

The town of Mountain Village and the transportation authority spent months trying to figure out the ski area’s funding role for the free public gondola and Horning did not respond until after the March 20 meeting began.

“We wanted to work in good faith with the ski resort. We wanted them to be part of the conversation. We spent a lot of energy with outreach and open and honest conversation asking Telski to engage with us in this conversation,” Prohaska said. “It’s difficult to address Telski’s issues when their responses were delivered during the meeting.”

A week earlier the Mountain Village council voted to approve eminent domain condemnation of a parcel owned by the 81-year-old Horning after the resort owner failed to permit a 25-year-old summer concert series on the Sunset Plaza acreage. In launching the condemnation, Mountain Village Town Administrator Paul Wisor unleashed an impassioned critique of Horning, saying out loud what had only been quietly murmured in the town for more than two decades.

“Chuck has failed in every respect to meet his responsibilities in a meaningful way and he’s been doing so for quite some time,” Wisor said at the March 13 council meeting.

Prohaska a week later told the council that local residents have shown “more support than anything we have ever done,” following the condemnation vote.

“Paul got the ball rolling, but it’s our job to keep that ball rolling,” she said.

The Telluride Town Council this week scheduled a one-hour update with Horning, hoping the owner could share the resort’s plans for the coming year, which includes not just funding the gondola between Telluride and Mountain Village but a sweeping development plan around the 1975 Lift 7 in the middle of town.

Horning, who lives in California, did not show up, just as he didn’t attend the Mountain Village council meetings in March. Horning’s son Chad has served as an on-the-ground manager for his dad, but apparently Horning fired Chad last month, leaving the resort without any daily management. Horning has fired several resort industry veterans since he acquired the resort in 2004, including respected leaders like Chris Ryman, Ray Jacobi, Greg Pack, Dave Riley and Bill Jensen.

“We want to work collaboratively with the ski area,” Telluride Town Councilman Dan Enright said. “We need to have trust in our partnerships and I don’t feel like that trust is there. I don’t think I can trust Mr. Horning’s word. If he’s listening to this, you are the hub of our economy, sir, and you need to support our community.”

Telluride ski patroller Katherine Devlin, who serves as vice president of the ski patrol union, urged Horning to fill management positions, telling the council that the resort is “the only ski area in the country without a CEO.”

The lack of leadership, “is starting to rear its head and affect us in meaningful ways,” said Councilwoman Ashley Von Spreecken. “It’s something I would hope Mr. Horning would take seriously and find that there is power in having strong leadership.”

Horning has not spoken publicly in recent months but sent a note to The Sun last month saying he was disappointed by the Mountain Village condemnation vote.

“We need to build vitality in the village that is sustainable in the long term, and this should involve a discussion rather than a battle,” he said. “With a thoughtful forum, we will not only get a better result, but it is the decent way to approach these matters among good people.”

Here’s a different perspective on Horning ignoring community concerns.

Could Horning, whose ownership of the Telluride ski area marked his first-ever investment in the resort industry, be a pioneer in an emerging resort operator strategy? Vail Resorts, for example, has quietly backed away from active support and engagement in communities where the company runs ski areas. The largest ski area operator in North America is singularly focused on selling season passes and is slowly ending traditional support of local marketing campaigns and airline programs that ferry visitors into regional airports.

That is leaving some communities in angst as they navigate the evolution of their tourism-based economies without much support from the largest engine in that economy. But in many ways the divorce from resort operators is enabling a sort of bootstrapped revival of local community identity, not unlike the way mountain communities like Telluride transitioned from a mining town to a ski town in the 1970s. Now these towns are becoming year-round mountain towns, not just ski towns.

Could Horning’s laissez-faire management style be fast-tracking that transition in Telluride?

— j

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