Whenever he’s back in Colorado Springs, Steve Wilmot’s gaze turns south to Cheyenne Mountain, to the pair of wide lanes running down the mountain’s foot — especially visible after snowfall.

“I look all the time,” Wilmot, 72, says from his home now in Fort Collins. “It’s a bit sad. I think that’s the emotion I get out of it.”

Same for Sarah Beatty, who grew up in the Springs through the 1980s, a generation after Wilmot. For newer people to town, she wonders if that sight at the foot of Cheyenne Mountain registers at all.

“I wonder how many people know any more that those were ski runs,” Beatty says.

But “when I see it now, it’s like, yep, there used to be an old ski area up there. Those were good days.”

Those were the days of Ski Broadmoor.

The days when the historic, five-star hotel offered another spoil for guests: the chance to ski downhill. But the little ski area wasn’t just for guests.

Ski Broadmoor became a place for local kids to learn, hone skills and race toe to toe with some of the best and brightest out there. It was an after-school place. A place for pre- and post-work laps. A place for friends and families to gather in a Bavarian-themed dining room. They gathered around a big fire in there in the Winter House, where a big window looked out to the skiers whooshing down the slope that was illuminated at night.

“It was a social club as much as anything,” says Kristen Winkler, another one of those young skiers from the day.

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Wilmot was one of the first. He was 8 in 1959, when Ski Broadmoor opened. It opened, in part, thanks to his dad.

His dad was Leon Wilmot, who was inducted into the Colorado Snowsports Hall of Fame for his role at Ski Broadmoor. He was among 10th Mountain Division veterans tasked with the development — among those legendary, skiing soldiers who out of World War II went on to build resorts in Colorado and beyond.

That included Aspen and Vail. Ski Broadmoor was never meant to be an Aspen or Vail.

The planned opening day in 1959 was delayed due to a lack of snow — foreshadowing the next 32 years of operations plagued by dry, too-warm conditions at the too-low-in-elevation base. Behind the jovial scenes had to be frustration, Wilmot thinks.

“I think for (my dad) it was absolutely miserable to be honest,” he says.

And yet the man stayed involved for almost all of Ski Broadmoor’s 32 years. For inspiration, he could look to his son and every other kid around.

Young Beatty, for one, would go on to a career in the industry. She’s the communications director for Colorado Ski Country USA, the trade group that represents most of the state’s ski areas.

“I can’t imagine anything luckier,” she says of Ski Broadmoor.

“It was a great childhood,” adds Kari Simpson, who rose through the racing ranks thanks to days and nights at the hill. “Your parents could drop you off, and you could spend the entire day and ski, and go inside and get a hot dog or chili.”

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Simpson and her fellow racing siblings grew up conveniently close in the Broadmoor neighborhood; the road continued up toward Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, where it bent around to the ski area. They made their father proud. In the post-war years, Ron Marold raced in Europe before settling back in his native Colorado Springs, where through the ‘60s he ran a business by day and taught at Ski Broadmoor by night under the lights.

Marold, 87, remembers the smiling faces of those kids. “I would walk the street downtown, and they’d say, ‘Hey, there’s our ski instructor!’”

He was one of the early instructors under Iris Draper. The German woman started a program still fondly remembered: Kids would earn multi-colored hats for their skill development. Marold keeps Draper’s obituary from 2021, calling her “the Grande Dame of Colorado Springs skiers for 30 years” and crediting her for teaching “more than 10,000 youngsters the joys of skiing.”

Steve Knowlton is credited with designing Ski Broadmoor. He was another 10th Mountain Division man renowned for his racing and promotion of the sport. He would be the first director of Colorado Ski Country USA.

Before then, in 1960, Knowlton oversaw Ski Broadmoor’s International Slalom Derby. Reads the hotel’s remembrance from the year: “Twenty-four of the world’s best skiers, representing six foreign countries, Canada and the United States, competed at Ski Broadmoor in a two-day invitation slalom event …”

The ski area opened months prior to great fanfare. It was the continuation of a sporting legacy established by The Broadmoor’s founder, explains hotel historian Cynthia Leonard.

Spencer Penrose made sure guests had horseback riding, fishing, ice skating, a zoo and a highway for driving to the top of Pikes Peak. And they’d have skiing.

“It’s kind of a nod to what Spencer Penrose did originally: making sure (guests) always had something to do,” Leonard says.

Upon opening, The Gazette-Telegraph wrote of a double chairlift, “and a magnificent view awaits those who take it to the top of the hill.” There would be “a complete rental service” and “a spacious open sun deck.”

The Broadmoor would claim a snow-making machine unlike any other west of the Mississippi at the time, to be called “the Phenomenal Snowman.” The machine, the newspaper wrote, “will assure Ski Broadmoor of fine skiing conditions regardless of Mother Nature’s whims.”

Not so.

Locals came to know Ski Broadmoor by another name: Ski Ice-more.

“The joke was, If you could ski Broadmoor, you could ski anywhere,” Beatty says.

Similar to pros back East, the ice had a way of molding young talent. But the ice was not the product that came to be sought as Colorado’s big, powder-packed resorts rose.

The demise of Ski Broadmoor was not so unlike the demise of lift-served skiing on Pikes Peak, says Don Sanborn. His family was at the forefront of those historic efforts on the mountain.

“The roads got better, the cars got better, and the snow was way better elsewhere,” Sanborn says. “People would rather go ski where the snow was good.”

Maybe not all people. Simpson was happy staying put at Ski Broadmoor, the place where she learned and raced and returned to coach in 1986.

By then, the hotel had walked away from rising costs. The city took over.

“The city was just really having issues making it work financially,” Simpson says.

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She saw the next operator, Vail Resorts, similarly struggle for a couple more seasons. Vail had the idea of a “feeder” ski area, where people would learn and be drawn to the company’s bigger destinations.

“It didn’t really work like that,” Simpson says. “A lot of people who skied the smaller ski areas couldn’t afford to go to the larger ski areas.”

The ski area closed in 1991, never to reopen.

“For me, it was kind of heartbreaking,” Simpson says, “because there wasn’t that place for my kids to go ski.”

Generations saw other little ski areas come and go — similar victims to climate and economics.

The Colorado Snowsports Museum maintains an exhibit of “lost ski areas” scattered across the mountains, from Pikes Peak, to Rocky Mountain National Park, to Berthoud Pass and a 100-plus more sites.

“In my mind, they were much more accessible, whereas now going to ski resorts can be sometimes intimidating. … It’s all kind of a big thing now,” says Dana Zapfel, the museum’s curator and director of collections. “So I think kind of holding on to what it used to be is important.”

Wilmot holds on to the memories.

They come back to him whenever he looks out to Cheyenne Mountain, out to those old runs shining in the sun after a snowfall. Those are precious memories, increasingly precious.

“Unfortunately, the memories kind of fade,” he says. “Time goes by, that’s just the way it happens.”