Reviving a history of skiing above the open-pit Climax Mine

FREMONT PASS — David Carner kills the engine on his Ski-Doo at around 12,000 feet, atop the Continental Divide, and points toward the terraced open-pit Climax mine below Bartlett Mountain. 

“There used to be a town down there with 5,000 people,” he says. “They used to ski where we are standing. Kind of a special place.”

Down the other side of the divide is Carner’s Cabin, the first step in the Frisco resident’s  passion project to blend the historic legacy of skiing on Chalk Mountain, the ongoing mining below the peak and the surging recreational tourism in Lake County. 

He calls his “Climax Revival” a rebirth of the Climax ski area that was among the first in Colorado. 

“I want to bring back this area as a way to honor both its industrial and recreational contributions,” he says, giving a tour of his off-grid, two-story cabin where the walls are lined with historic photos and mining relics. “Sort of reimagined for the 21st century, you know. Human-powered skiing — but accessible by snowmobiles or snowcats — that preserves the pristine backcountry in a place away from the industrialized model and all the parking hassles and crowds. That’s what I mean by reviving this place.”

Carner’s Cabin is among a growing number of private backcountry huts in Colorado catering to increasing numbers of skiers exploring Colorado’s snowy mountains. Taking a page from the 10th Mountain Division Hut Association system, new hut-hosting entrepreneurs, like 58-year-old Carner, are merging elements of historical uses like mining and logging with adventurous skiers, exemplifying an economic transition underway across Colorado’s high country.  

It’s already happening up Mosquito Gulch outside Alma, where a nonprofit has spent several years working to restore antique mining structures at Park County’s North London Mill and managing places like the North London Mill Office for backcountry travelers. The 25-year-old  Silverton Mountain ski area was born from a collection of mining claims

The transition from mining to skiing 

Many years ago, disillusioned with skiing at resorts and Vail Pass, Carner started poking around the Leadville courthouse. He pored over U.S. Geological Survey maps, searching for snowy mining claims and cross-referencing them with assessor records. He was searching for a private powder stash. 

“I’d ask Mabel to print out records on her dot-matrix printer and then I’d start writing letters,” he says on the 2-mile skin up to his cabin above Chalk Creek. 

He found one parcel he really liked. About 70 acres, owned by a Florida attorney who picked up the land in a tax sale. 

He got the land in 2005 and then began an arduous process to not only clean up the property — where a previous owner had built a cabin without Lake County permits — but also set up a yurt he could occasionally rent out to backcountry skiers. 

First he had to settle lawsuits involving the county and the previous owner. Then he worked with the county for a couple years to get the property rezoned from mining to a designation that would allow recreational use of a cabin. (The yurt plan didn’t really fly with county planners who worried about snow on a canvas roof.)

“There were a lot of forces working against me back then,” Carner says. 

There were a lot of forces working against Leadville and Lake County back then too. The Climax mine was not operating and the Environmental Protection Agency was conducting a Superfund clean up of dozens of mines around Leadville. The economy in Lake County was quiet and hope was anchored in a revival of mining.  

“The planning commission had a lot of volunteers with a lot of ex-miners who were not in favor of recreational uses that would limit mining,”Carner says. “They were convinced that mining was going to come back.”

Carner was able to make the case that a recreational cabin would fit better into the county’s overarching plan to create more scenic and visually sensitive areas, as opposed to the mining designation. He got the land rezoned by the Lake County Planning Commission and then the county commissioners approved the plan in two very close votes in 2008. 

“One vote would have sunk me,” he said.

He built the foundation for the cabin in 2009 and then three summers later he completed the building, which has weathered beams from a Boulder dairy farm, siding from Wyoming highway snow fences and metal from a recycling yard in Montrose.

He wanted to rent it to friends when he heard about an online site that would help him organize some bookings. That first year in 2012 he had three rentals on the then-nascent airbnb.com. 

“Then it started taking off,” he says. 

By 2020, he was filling his calendar, with about half of his 110 bookings a year from repeat visitors. He runs burro trips in the summer — he and his burro Elroy race all summer in Colorado. He recently built a big deck so he can host weddings. But most of his guests come skiing. The gentle slopes around the cabin get buried in more than 300 inches of snow a winter.

“I call it backcountry-light up here,” he says.

“A rope tow to heaven”  

Above his cabin a rope tow started hauling skiers up Chalk Mountain in 1934. Everyone called it “a rope tow to heaven.” It was the first ski area in Summit County and among the first in the state. 

The company town bustled for decades beneath the 13,348-foot Bartlett Mountain. Skiers strapped their lace-up hiking boots onto hickory skis, seeding what would become — nearly a century later — the most trafficked ski region in the country. When World War II erupted, soldiers across the Continental Divide trained at Camp Hale. By the late 1940s, there was a 300-skier-an-hour T-bar and night skiing at Chalk Mountain as the ski area’s pioneers — like Edna and Max Dercum — launched Arapahoe Basin ski area.

During the war, scientist and skier Walter Orr Roberts built the Western Hemisphere’s first coronagraph, a specialized telescope that Roberts used to link solar flares with disruptions in radio transmissions. The U.S. Navy used Roberts’ research to maintain and schedule consistent communications during WWII. The foundation of the Climax Observatory is just above Carner’s Cabin, where photos of the observatory hang on the  walls and local history books line shelves. 

“The observatory dome is a funky looking building, made with moly steel from the mine. It still exists, it’s been moved to the lower side of Chalk on Climax property,” says Carner, who wants to negotiate a way to move the remains of the scientific facility to the shores of Dillon Reservoir in Frisco and create “a living museum” for Summit County school kids. “I’ve been trying for years to get ahold of it. I would love to recreate the observatory and highlight the mine’s contribution to science and the war effort.”

The mine expanded in the early 1960s and the mine company moved the Town of Climax to a new subdivision in Leadville. The Chalk Mountain ski area closed in 1962, the same year that Vail ski area opened, ushering in a new era of large-scale ski resort development that continues today. 

The mine bustled with thousands of employees in the 1970s but a molybdenum glut in the 1980s forced the closure of the Climax mine, which resumed moly mining in 2012 following a massive investment by owner Freeport-McMoRan. Today, the open-pit Climax mine operates 24 hours a day with nearly 400 workers and a capacity to produce as much as 30 million pounds of molybdenum a year. The mine produced 5 million pounds of the precious metal in 2023.  (Molybdenum, or moly, is used for  strengthening steel, electronic components and in chemical manufacturing.)

A lot changed in Lake County between the 1980s and 2012, with mines getting cleaned up and the economy shifting away from extraction and toward tourism. Carner’s Cabin exemplifies that transition, reclaiming an old mining site and converting it into a skier destination.

He’s got plans underway for a well and septic system and recently built a guide’s cabin from a shipping container. He often helps — for a fee — skiers haul their supplies up to the cabin.

Justin Ibarra, a partner and guide with Summit County-based Colorado Adventure Guides, regularly hosts avalanche education courses at the hut. 

It can be difficult for groups to book the increasingly busy 10th Mountain Huts and Carner’s Cabin is easily accessible. 

“For folks who maybe don’t have a lot of hut experience, they get to get a feel for what it’s like to visit a backcountry hut while also getting avalanche education and backcountry touring knowledge,” Ibarra said during an advanced course at the cabin. “We love this place. It’s great to get students really immersed in the field without getting into riskier avalanche terrain. They can still study and analyze complex avalanche terrain from the comfort of the hut, which is super cool.”