Skeezers: Still Snow-Crazy After All These Years

One of the women who had come from the Southeast asked Gary: "Do you have any recommendations for breathing?"

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"Do it!" he replied.

The one caveat regarding Winter Park is the elevation. The village itself is at 9,000 feet, a thousand feet higher than Aspen and Vail and roughly 2,000 higher than Park City and Steamboat. (One member of the Elderhostel corps had to quit early in the week because he showed signs of altitude sickness.)

Among the runs we sampled on the front side of the mountain was Cranmer. A main drag was named after George E. Cranmer, a Denver parks official in the 1930s who is regarded as the father of Winter Park. The ski area's history is entwined with the history of railroads and recreation in Colorado.

In the 1920s, builders punched a hole through the mountains to forge a route for a narrow-gauge railway. Known as the Moffat Tunnel, its west portal opened up the Fraser Valley to travelers from Denver.

The farsighted Cranmer envisioned the hills facing the west portal as the ideal place for a winter recreation facility where Denverites could learn the relatively new sport of skiing. He obtained the necessary leases, raised money for construction, and in 1940 Winter Park, with three runs and a rope tow, opened for business.

Today it is the largest municipally owned ski area in the country, although operations are handled by Intrawest, the resort behemoth that has begun an ambitious course of improvements to the base area and lifts. Many skiers arrive on weekends via the Ski Train, which is about to begin its 68th year of operation. Unfortunately, I would have had to spend an extra night in Denver itself to take the train, since it leaves Union Station at 7:15 a.m., but it sounds like a wonderful alternative to driving.

The Elders and I spent that first afternoon exploring Mary Jane, a second mountain linked to the Winter Park trails. Although it is considered one of Colorado's finest pieces of mogul-filled real estate, I stuck to its long, thigh-burning, groomed runs. I had a hard enough workout that before dinner I availed myself of the hotel's hot tub. A half-dozen of my new cohorts did, too. Bob Stratton, an octogenarian, mentioned his recent cataract surgery: "I could finally see the whole mountain," he declared.

The next three days sped by. No one hurried me out the hotel door in the morning, but by sticking to the faster group I logged far more mileage than usual on a four-day ski trip, and I enjoyed every turn. One day, catching up to Mary and Fred, I wondered why I had not seen much of them. "I hate all that standing around," said Fred, who took Mary to learn to ski on their honeymoon 47 years earlier. Instead of meeting the group at 9:30 each morning, he and Mary caught the first chairlift at 9. "There's no one there and there's fresh corduroy!" he explained.

Part of the fun was discovering sections of Winter Park I had never ventured into before, such as Parsenn Bowl, a parcel of mostly ungroomed runs served by a lift that deposited us above 12,000 feet, above the tree line. Swooping downhill at a relatively gentle angle, we could gulp the thin air and then warm up in the increasingly chilly temperatures as we dropped into thick glades of trees that eventually led us back into the paths that fed into the main Mary Jane lifts. (This year, Parsenn Bowl is likely to have many more visitors, thanks to a new six-passenger high-speed lift.)

We spent one evening watching members of the Grand County Historical Association reenact the region's pioneer days. At Cozens Ranch, on the highway between Winter Park and Fraser, a local piano tuner dressed in morning coat, bowler hat and string bow tie impersonated David Moffat, an important early Colorado financier. He described how Moffat's bank had been robbed in 1889 by none other than Butch Cassidy. I also learned something I had never known when I was the New York Times correspondent in the region: that a camp for prisoners captured at Anzio in Italy during World War II existed in Fraser for two years.

Another evening program was devoted to a slide show and demonstration of ice climbing (indoors, thankfully) by Dan, the Elderhostel guide, who, at 51, said he was growing more careful as he aged. Why? "There are old climbers and bold climbers, but no old and bold climbers."

Winter Park lived up to its "icebox" tag as our week progressed. By Thursday, the thermometer at the top of Parsenn Bowl was said to register negative double digits, and it was a tribute to my new friends and our leaders that I skied at all that day -- decked out in a face mask and every piece of outerwear I had packed.

Still, on Friday I was sorry to leave. I appreciated these mates, who had proved to be hearty athletes and fine companions. Some had skied my buns off, and there was not a whiner in the pack. Older skiers are like Winter Park itself -- seasoned but not tired, feeling like they're just coming into their prime.

Grace Lichtenstein last wrote for Travel about Staten Island, N.Y.