BRECKENRIDGE • Gene Dayton is making the rounds in the snowcat, cruising along the cross-country ski trail network he oversees, when he spots a visitor down.

“We’re gonna have to stop and help her,” Dayton says.

He goes into instructor mode. He goes through the tips and tricks he’s been preaching around Summit County for five decades.

Soon, with a hand from the 80-year-old helper, the skier is back on her feet. She thanks him. And he’s thankful, too — for her business here at Breckenridge Nordic Center and for the chance to keep doing what he loves most.

What Dayton loves most is instilling a love for Nordic skiing in one and all.

Skiing is “freedom,” he says. “Skis are the things that give my heart wings.”

All should feel that, he believes — able-bodied people and others needing special accommodations. This month he once again hosted skiers with disabilities as part of the long-going Hartford Ski Spectacular.

Back in the 1960s, when he arrived at Breckenridge to find dirt streets and junk cars and stray dogs running around, Dayton had an eye for cross-country skiing when downhill was the rising rave. Lift-served skiing started on Peak 8 in 1961, the year Dayton drove through scouting land for a recreation center.

Dayton had an eye for building trails on flatter terrain when it seemed everyone else was looking up. He had an eye for adaptive skiing when it was far from the mainstream.

“He was taking risks that people didn’t really understand,” says his wife, Therese.

It all worked out.

Dayton has been called the founding father of modern Nordic skiing in Summit County, what might be called the state’s skiing capital with its four world-class resorts.

Dayton has been credited for stewarding the activity from what was historically a practical mode of travel to what it is now: a sport for fun and fitness on manicured snow. Breckenridge Nordic Center represents a daily regimen for season pass-holding locals and an itinerary stop for tourists.

Nordic centers around the West were relatively obscure when Dayton began his in 1969. Trail grooming technology was still coming along.

Josh Dayton, the son managing the center today, has heard his dad’s stories from the early days. “He used to groom the trails by dragging a tire behind him,” he says.

As Josh grew up in the ‘80s, “we’d be dragging this bed spring mattress behind a snowmobile,” he says.

Now they’ve got the snowcats for maintenance — and yes, the elder Dayton is still seen driving.

He’s still helping a skier here and there. Still occasionally out in the middle of the night checking on snowmaking.

“I was up at 4 this morning because we’re trying to open more trails,” he says this afternoon, like every afternoon in which he swims laps at the town aquatic center.

Dayton might also be found playing the accordion or blowing the alpenhorn in his Nordic center’s lodge. He’s known to draw a crowd by the fire, known to stop by for weddings and events here in this log building with a bar, kitchen and retail and rental spaces.

Dayton has come a long way from the igloo base he knew in the beginning. Today’s lodge, called Oh, Be Joyful, opened in 2013.

“It’s the dream come true,” Therese says.

The dream might have started with a picture. Dayton remembers the one his dad kept at their home in DeKalb, Ill. — one showing the Colorado homestead where Dad was born.

“Once I saw that picture of Colorado, that’s where I wanted to be,” Dayton says.

Flash forward to that cross-country, land-scouting drive in 1961. Dayton was out of Florida State University, where he swam competitively. He studied recreation administration, thinking he’d follow in the footsteps of his dad, a school athletics director, and his physical education-teaching mom.

In Florida, Dayton happened to have a professor from Denver. The man was well aware of the ski industry growing back in his home state. He inspired Dayton’s master’s thesis, titled: “An economic study of user preference and demand for alpine skiing in Summit County, Colorado.”

Demand would indeed grow, Dayton figured. And so too, he thought, would the demand for cross-country trails.

He knew Nordic skiing to be more approachable than gravity-fed skiing — better suited for the market he sought.

At a young age Dayton had developed a heart for kids with disabilities.

“I was born in the polio epidemic. I didn’t get it, but there were a lot of kids in our county that did,” he says. “And there was nothing for them. If you had a disabled kid, they were hidden away.”

Dayton’s dad sought to change that.

“He started a program in water therapy at the local pool he managed in the summertime,” Dayton says. “He had school busses full of kids coming in the morning.”

Young Dayton had another inspiration in the family: his older brother, who returned from Dartmouth College to demonstrate the joy of Nordic skiing.

Dayton aimed to spread the joy around Summit County. From a cabin with no running water in Silverthorne, he eventually moved up valley to partner with some of the Europeans expanding the area’s skiing horizons.

One of these was the Norwegian Olav Pedersen. He was looking to import a program called Ski for Light — the program for visually impaired skiers that gave Pederson’s legacy as a pioneer.

Dayton helped establish the mission in Breckenridge. At one time in the 1980s, his Nordic center was noted as one of four sites nationwide where blind Olympic hopefuls trained.

By then Dayton had established Breckenridge Outdoor Education Center, which continues a year-round mission “to expand the potential of people with disabilities and special needs through meaningful, educational and inspiring outdoor experiences.” That started in 1976, with Dayton and a few volunteers operating out of an old mining cabin.

It started thanks to key relationships with a prominent doctor in town and the town attorney. Therese Dayton says those relationships spoke to another attribute of her husband: his ability to connect and inspire.

“Gene makes a friend at every gas station, on every airplane,” she says.

“He’s always been the most giving man I know,” Josh says of his dad. “Sometimes we’ve had to rein him in.”

Josh remembers him buying a new car once. “I was probably more excited about it, I was a teenager all ready to go for a drive. And then he took it to auction at a charity.”

Dayton has given back to the community that he continues to thank for helping him in his darkest time.

His first wife, the woman he met ballroom dancing back at Florida State, died in 1984. Their third child, Josh, was not a year old at the time.

“The town was amazing to us,” Dayton says. “There was one woman, a neighbor, who did a fundraiser and organized meals. We had a woman come in and pretty much did a small daycare in the house and took care of Josh. I didn’t cook a meal for a year.”

There was, he says, “light at the end of the tunnel.” He met Therese, a passionate skier who came to Breckenridge to work Ski for Light.

They’ve been together 37 years, side-by-side for several developments. They long ran the Frisco Nordic Center, now managed by the town. They had a hand, too, in establishing Gold Run Nordic Center housed at Breckenridge Golf Course.

Those were sites within a vision Dayton would talk about: “Nordic nirvana,” he called it, where Summit County’s towns were connected by groomed paths. He’s seen the vision take shape, along with his dream base — this dream lodge, Oh, Be Joyful, to host weddings, events and functions like the Hartford Ski Spectacular.

“We like to share it with people,” Therese says. “We like for people to come.”

They might come for Dayton’s music. Maybe he shouldn’t be playing outside so much at his age — he’s got a shoulder surgery coming up — but he figures he can always play his accordian.

Here he is by the fireplace, snow falling gently outside, guests gathering around the man and his instrument.

Dayton loves music like he loves skiing. “It’s the universal language,” he says. “It brings joy to people.”