From slow start, ski swap picks up speed

Article Last Updated; Monday, October 27, 2008 7:20AM

If you go

The Hesperus Ski Patrol Ski Swap will be held from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday at the La Plata County Fairgrounds. Admission is 50 cents. Hint: If you go early, there will be a long line.

As Don Fritch recalls, the first one was held in a basement at the La Plata County Courthouse.

About a dozen people showed up, watched a Warren Miller ski film, then left that evening with their own stuff.

This was the inauspicious beginning to what's become an annual buying frenzy and social extravaganza that signals the beginning of the season to come.

The Hesperus Ski Patrol Ski Swap is Saturday at the La Plata County Fairgrounds. The official tally shows this is the 45th annual such swap, although Fritch, for one, could not confirm that. In any case, it's really old, a fact that becomes more than clear when you call people to recollect details from the early years.

The details are sketchy.

Fritch recalls driving from Pagosa Springs, where he and his wife - the late Kathy Fritch - and family were living at the time, on a weeknight. If this is truly the 45th, then the year was 1964. In any case, the evening proved uneventful.

"If I remember right everybody just picked up their own things and went home," Fritch says. "I don't think anything ever changed hands. I don't think it netted anything."

At the time, Fritch worked for the Forest Service's Piedra District, and on weekends worked as a volunteer ski patroller at Hesperus Ski Area and at Monarch Ski Area, a 2-hour-plus drive from Pagosa.

The Fritches moved to Durango the next year. The swap soon moved out of the courthouse basement and into vacant buildings along Main Avenue. Organizers would walk down Main, find such a building, then contact the owners to see if they could rent it out for a few days.

"It grew really fast," Fritch says.

The original purpose was for families to pass down their used equipment to families with younger kids. As any ski parent knows, youngsters outgrow their equipment quickly.

"The whole family looked forward to it," recalls Ed Kutzleb, whose family, including three skiing children, moved to Durango in 1968 and participated annually in the swap.

As it grew it made more money for volunteer ski patrol efforts. In 1964, Hesperus and the Third Avenue Ski Hill (now called Chapman Hill) were the only local places that offered mechanical means of reaching the top of a hill. Purgatory Ski Area opened for the 1965-66 season, creating a need for more patrollers.

Back then, Fritch says, the local group was called the Durango Ski Patrol, and its volunteers patrolled all three local spots. Sometime around 1980, Purgatory established a professional patrol group, and the Durango Ski Patrol renamed itself the Hesperus Ski Patrol.

Meanwhile, the National Ski Patrol, founded in 1938, also grew and changed. (This dates him a little bit, but Don Fritch joined the patrol in 1949 in New York state.) National requirements became more rigid and the rescue equipment better and, of course, more expensive.

So, the Hesperus patrol needed to keep up, and money raised from the swap is vital.

That money pays for rescue toboggans, other emergency supplies and equipment, and training supplies and equipment. Also, the Hesperus Ski Patrol, which now includes about 35 members, hosts a three-day avalanche-awareness class every year and keeps it affordable.

As the swap grew, something was lost and something gained.

Now there's a retail aspect, with local and regional ski shops bringing in used rental equipment and slow-selling clothing. "The nature of it has changed immensely since it started," Kutzleb says.

Dolph Kuss, a former Fort Lewis College and Olympic team ski coach, says the swap has retained some of its small-town feel.

"It is still a community deal in the way they operate and manage it," says Kuss, who moved to Durango in the 1950s. "I see familiar faces in there every year."

It's bigger and not everyone in the football-field-long entry line can call each other by their first name, but it's still a social event that creates a seasonal buzz. Be careful you don't spend more time gabbing than shopping.

And more than that, the swap annually heralds this exciting news:
Ski season is near.

johnp@durangoherald.com.

John Peel writes a weekly
human-interest column.