The earliest recorded use of skis in Colorado dates to 1857, when mountain guide Jim Bridger fashioned a crude pair to rescue an army unit snowbound in the San Juan Mountains. On the frontier, these “snowshoes” were survival gear rather than sporting goods, used by miners, freighters, trappers, mailmen, and others who spent winters in the mountains, while Father John Dyer became perhaps the nineteenth century’s most prolific Colorado skier as he crossed a parish that included Breckenridge, Leadville, and Fairplay. Though ski clubs formed as early as the nineteenth century, skiing remained difficult and limited until winter festivals in the 1910s, the 1932 Winter Olympics at Lake Placid, and improved mountain highways helped broaden interest and support the opening of resorts such as Berthoud Pass, Loveland, Monarch, and Winter Park. With the development of Aspen Mountain in the late 1940s, Colorado skiing entered a golden age as resorts expanded with luxury amenities and the mountains became international travel destinations, even as growth brought traffic jams, pollution, high housing costs, and opposition that led Coloradans to reject the 1976 Winter Olympics on environmental grounds. Technological changes also transformed the sport, beginning with Colorado’s first ski lift, a rope tow installed at Berthoud Pass Ski Area in 1937, followed by T-bars, chairlifts, gondolas, slope groomers invented in 1957, and snowmaking machines popularized in the 1980s, while newer equipment and snowboarding offered fresh excitement and some skiers returned to backcountry skiing, snowshoeing, and telemark skiing. During the twentieth century, nearly two hundred commercial resorts operated in Colorado, some lasting only a few winters and others for decades, and the resorts that survived into the twenty-first century became some of the world’s finest by drawing on the state’s high peaks, sunny winters, and dry powder snow.