Rendezvous presents a lift chair to Dwight and Jean Miller, 49 years after they launched Ski Idlewild
Winter Park Ski Area had been open for 20 years when Dwight Miller, a development pioneer in the town of Hideaway Park, posed the question whether inexperienced skiers were getting the most from Winter Park’s terrain, or whether they might prefer a beginner-friendly hill where they could improve their skills.
Buz Koelbel, developer of Rendezvous in Winter Park, presents an original lift chair to Dwight and Jean Miller, who opened Ski Idlewild as a beginner ski area in 1960.
On Aug. 26, 2009, some 49 years after Miller opened Ski Idlewild in what is today the resort community of Rendezvous, Walter ‘Buz’ Koelbel, Jr., of Koelbel and Company presented Miller and his wife Jean with a lift chair recovered from the site. The boutique ski area where a generation of skiers, including Buz Koelbel, learned their sport is now part of Rendezvous’ 688-acre expansion area, east of the town of Winter Park.
By 1960 Miller’s family had already been part of the Fraser Valley for three decades (his father, who retired from school teaching in Kansas, had wrangled development loans for projects along U.S. 40 from Central Bank, during years when banks were still recoiling from resort loans they’d made during the Depression). In 1957 the Millers opened Idlewild Lodge and Guest Ranch on 160 acres that spanned from west of U.S. 40 in present-day Winter Park, across the highway and up the slopes east of town.
Miller eyed the rise of the hill; “I thought it would be a nifty place for a beginner’s area,” he recalls. It was, he thought, better suited to inexperienced skiing than was Winter Park’s own beginner hill — not as well situated for preserving wet, spring snow and served only by a rope tow. As the Guest Ranch took shape with pool, tennis, and some winter sports (skating and Nordic trails), Miller consulted with Larry Jump, Arapahoe Basin developer and a sales rep for Pomagalski chair lifts. In summer of 1960, Miller surveyed a half-mile slope of the hill, cleared the pines, and poured concrete foundations for a double-chair lift. “We got it up and opened by Christmas,” Miller recalls.
As during construction of the Lodge, the years of building Ski Idlewild could be tough on the family. During some of construction, the Millers lived in a nearby 16-by-20-foot cabin, with a loft where the couple’s three kids were housed. “Before we moved out of the cabin,” Jean Miller recalls today, “we had four children, a Saint Bernard, and another dog.” “It’s amazing she didn’t leave me or kill me,” adds Dwight Miller. Miller, who had worked in a nearby sawmill after getting out of school in Kansas, designed the guest lodge to be constructed of solid cedar planks, four inches thick; and built a pine warming hut the bottom of the slope. Dwight and Jean hired a high quality, seasonal staff of ten instructors and chairlift operators who were to return regularly over coming decades. “I had a lot of doubts,” Miller recalls of the first season; however, by February of 1962 he saw the parking lot filling with cars.
Ski Idlewild, Miller says, “was the best beginner area in Colorado.” As he had predicted, novice skiers at Winter Park would burn out on the steeper terrain there and would drive down the hill a few miles to Hideaway Park to refresh and improve. Meanwhile, the area began attracting a clientele of families wanting a kid-friendly slope (including Denver developer Walt Koelbel and wife Gene, who brought their children back for repeat seasons). “We rarely had accidents, and never had anything serious,” Jean Miller recalls, adding that Idlewild introduced the use of Ski-doos for first-aid purposes to Grand County.
The Millers sold Ski Idlewild in 1965. Ski Idlewild operated until spring of 1986; Idlewild Lodge operated intermittently until 1996. Both sites are now part of Rendezvous, the master-planned resort community created by Koelbel’s son, Buz. Rendezvous borders current-day Winter Park, and includes plans for resort neighborhoods that will preserve some of the history of Ski Idlewild in parks and open space.
Tags: Buz Koelbel, Dwight Miller, Hideaway Park, Rendezvous, Ski Idlewild, Winter Park, Winter Park Ski Resort
