Holiday Spirit, Telluride-Style: The Ski Tree Is a Holiday Tradition With Heart
By Emily Shoff
Anyone who’s lived through a Telluride winter knows that we are a town that lives and breathes skiing. When they are not physically strapped to our feet, they’re strapped to our minds. We dream about our next pair of skis, and when we’re desperate for a conversation topic, share this dream with others. So, it’s no surprise that one of the town’s most beloved winter traditions is a Christmas tree made out of skis.
Erected each winter in Elks Park, the ski tree stands at almost 17 feet tall. Local Ted Wilson came up with the idea while visiting Kennebunkport, Maine, where they set up a lobster trap Christmas tree during the winter.
"In one of our countless meetings about the Holiday Prelude and more Christmas lights in town, we were talking about these lobster trap trees and I just threw it out there that Telluride needed something similar that recognized our culture, like a Christmas tree made out of skis," Wilson says.
The idea stuck, and in 2013, the idea came to fruition. The town hired local metal artist Anton Viditz-Ward to create the tree, which is made entirely out of donated skis.
"The coolest aspect is that they all belonged to locals," says Wilson. "Some locals donated skis that belonged to family members who had passed away, as a unique way to honor them. A lot of those skis have a lot of memories in them."
In hindsight, the building of the tree would have been a lot faster had they asked for the gifted skis to be free of bindings. The crew spent hours stripping off the old bindings in order to get the skis ready for building the tree. “If we were able to do it all over again, we'd ask people to remove the bindings first," says Wilson.
When the tree was first displayed on its inaugural Noel Night back in 2013, it was smaller, standing at only half its current height. Looking at it, the team realized it could be a lot taller, and that they still had a lot of leftover skis. For the next Noel Night in 2014, the crew built it to its current height. These days, it typically takes about two hours to assemble the tree which uses roughly 60 strands of lights.
"That tree is always a reminder to me how this town can really come together and do cool things when it wants to," Wilson says. "It was a simple little idea — a Christmas tree made out of skis — but it took the whole village to build it.”
The annual lighting of the ski tree happens every Noel Night, which takes place in December and kicks off the start of the winter season. In a town where skis are more than just gear, the ski tree has become both holiday décor and a monument to Telluride’s mountain lifestyle.
"Hopefully,” says Wilson, “it just brings some holiday spirit to people who stop and take it in — and I'm sure it does — it's still the coolest Christmas tree I've ever seen."