Mountain Women: A Sisterhood Has Played a Leading Role in Shaping This Mountain Community
By Martinique Davis
Mountain towns have long been considered the territory of men. Perhaps it’s the austerity of the landscape or the inherent roughness of mountain life. Irrespective of the cause, the perception that high-altitude living equates to low female-to-male ratios is not unfounded: Colorado is one of only 10 states where men outnumber women, and Telluride has one of the highest percentages of men compared to other similar towns — 55 percent at the last census.
While women have likely always been outnumbered by men in Telluride, their contribution to civic and economic life has been substantial. From the hard-living mining days to the birth of a new economy based on outdoor recreation, and onward to today, Telluride’s women have chipped at the armor of historical male iconography by playing leading roles in shaping this mountain community into what it is today.
Turn-of-the-century boom to 1960s bust
“They had a woman doctor,” recalls Telluride local Ed Ress in Davine Pera’s Conversations at 9,000 Feet, a collection of oral histories of Telluride. “People just couldn’t quite get it through their heads that women could doctor.”
Ress was referring to Telluride’s first female doctor, Anna S. Brown, who moved to Telluride in 1894 and practiced medicine in the area for 27 years. In that time, she helped steer the town through the flu pandemic of 1918 as San Miguel County’s health officer. Brown was an anomaly because employment options for American women were limited at that time, and the trend was especially acute in Telluride where the chief industry was mining and men outnumbered women three to one.
Consequently, some working women made their living as sex workers. The Telluride Historical Museum’s director of education and outreach, Theresa Koenigsknecht, explains that representation of these women is often lacking in the historical record. “They were part of that invisible class of nameless, faceless women, yet they were a huge part of the economy here,” she notes. The indigenous Ute women who came well before the white settlers were likewise not documented as reliably as their male counterparts.
‘Women run this town’
Octogenarian and longtime local Pam Pettee moved to Telluride in 1982, a time marked by the growing pains inherent in the evolution of a new industry. As the community grappled with the issues brought about by the development of the ski area, Pettee became immersed in questions about community character and direction when she was elected to Telluride Town Council in 1984.
There were three other women on town council at the time, and other eminent local women in the workforce like Telluride’s town clerk, Elvira Wunderlich; her sister, Irene Visintin, who managed the office at the Idarado Mine; Gay Cappis, the San Miguel County clerk; and others.
“Yes, we were outnumbered,” Pettee remembers, “but a lot of the women that were here were outspoken and active. We felt it was a good place for women to be living … and sometimes we would chuckle, talking about all the ways women run this town.”
Annie Savath was another woman running things in Telluride in the 70s and 80s. A transplant from Chamonix, France, Savath moved to town and helped opened the Chez Pierre restaurant in 1972 and began working as a ski instructor at the Telluride Ski Resort. In 1978, she was named director of the Telluride Ski School, a position she held for 23 years.
Those decades saw an increase in female participation in the ski industry and Savath is credited as being an influencer in that shift. When she started with the ski school in 1972, there was little demand for female ski instructors as there were few female skiers. To get more women involved, Savath started Telluride Women’s Week in 1981, the first women-only ski program in Colorado.
“We were trying to make the sport more appealing to women so more families would come skiing,” she says. With the success of Telluride Women’s Week, women-specific programs were duplicated in other resorts across the country. With that came more female instructors and Savath worked to ensure those women had equal access to higher-level students and wages.
Fast forward to 2023 when an all-female cohort of the Telluride Ski Patrol found themselves rostered together to run patrol’s High Camp station. A first for Telluride’s women patrollers and emblematic of the sisterhood of strong mountain women that thrives in Telluride today, with females represented in all levels and sectors and, in many ways, still running this town.