Lost ski areaColoradoFront RangeRocky Mountains
Porcupine Gulch
A one-tow club ski spot on Loveland Pass, near today's Arapahoe Basin, that ran from 1938 into the 1940s.
Overview
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Imagery: USGS The National Map · Terrain: Mapzen, USGS and others
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Porcupine Gulch was a bare-bones ski spot on Loveland Pass, close to where Arapahoe Basin is now. It opened in 1938 with a portable tow, a 4.5-horsepower engine mounted on a toboggan, that pulled skiers up a snow bowl with about 100 feet of vertical.1,2
Read the whole historyTimeline
2 events · swipe
Photos
Memories
Skied Porcupine Gulch, or worked there?
Tell us what you remember, or what this page has wrong. Memories show here, credited to you, after we read them; facts are checked against a source before they change a figure.
Lost near Porcupine Gulch
The closest other lost ski areas, as the crow flies.
- Years not yet collected · 10.1 mi away · ColoradoA one-lift ski hill on Guanella Pass, just north of the later Geneva Basin ski area, run for two or three winters in the 1950s.
- 1963–1984 · 10.6 mi away · ColoradoA ski area by Guanella Pass in Colorado's Pike National Forest that opened as Indianhead in the early 1960s and closed in 1984.
- 1937–2001 · 10.7 mi away · ColoradoA ski area on both sides of the Continental Divide at Berthoud Pass, Colorado, that ran lifts from 1937 to 2001, though not every winter.
History
Written by aurora.ski from the 2 pages below, each sentence numbered to its sources.
Porcupine Gulch was a bare-bones ski spot on Loveland Pass, close to where Arapahoe Basin is now. It opened in 1938 with a portable tow, a 4.5-horsepower engine mounted on a toboggan, that pulled skiers up a snow bowl with about 100 feet of vertical. The Denver-based Ski Club Zipfelberger ran it, and locals called it the Little Sweden Freezer Company for the weather on the pass. Colorado Ski History puts its one run on the west side of the pass; Summit Daily puts the bowl on the east side.1,2
Both sources date its end to the 1940s; Summit Daily says it fell out of use as Loveland, Arapahoe Basin and Keystone grew up nearby. The tow engine is now at the Colorado Ski Museum in Vail.1,2
Sources for this history (2)
- 1Colorado Ski History · Porcupine Gulch Ski Area
- 2Summit Daily · Gone but not forgotten: Lost ski areas of the High Country (Ryan Spencer, December 31, 2023)
Photos
No photographs of Porcupine Gulch we may republish yet
Its old photos and trail maps live on the sites that collected them, and Google finds the rest.
Memories
What skiers remember of Porcupine Gulch, in their own words.
Facts
Location
39.6652° N · 105.8808° W · Colorado · Front Range
OpenSkiMap lists it as abandoned.
Years operated
from 1938 · the year it closed is not yet collected
Closed for good; the year it closed is not yet collected. It stays here as part of the record of U.S. ski areas.
Its numbers
all 2all 2, in one list
Terrain contours: USGS 3D Elevation Program, public domain