Tony Daranyi has worked as a ski patroller in Telluride, Colorado, for 27 years. He’s a certified EMT with advanced training in forecasting avalanches and using explosives to mitigate them. He works in extreme weather and puts his safety on the line each day.
For that, he said, he’s paid about $32 an hour, on par with most other seasoned ski patrollers; newer patrollers make $21 an hour. Those wages, Daranyi says, aren’t enough to live on in one of the most expensive housing markets in America, prompting him and his fellow ski patrollers at the Telluride Ski Resort to go on strike Dec. 27 — a move that shut down the resort during the busy holiday season.
Ski patrollers in mountain towns across the West are increasingly leading the push for higher wages in communities hit hard by rising cost of living. A year ago, ski patrollers in Park City, Utah, went on strike, which caused the resort to close most of its terrain for nearly two weeks, drawing backlash from visitors. Ski patrollers at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort in Wyoming voted to unionize last fall, joining a wave of other patrollers who have done so in recent years, including those at Keystone Resort, Eldora Mountain and Arapahoe Basin Ski Area in Colorado. The United Mountain Workers union says it now has about 1,000 members.
“Wages haven’t kept up. We’re so far below what it takes somebody in this community to afford either rent or trying to buy even an affordable house,” said Daranyi, a past union president who helped start the Telluride union a decade ago. “This is about more than just the Telluride ski patrol. This is a reflection of what’s going on in all mountain communities, and it’s also a reflection of what’s going on nationwide with income inequality and wealth.”
Surviving on a ski resort salary has long been a struggle, especially in destination towns with some of the world’s most sought-after real estate. But the surge in housing costs in resort communities following the pandemic has pushed workers to a breaking point, ski patrollers said.
“We are like an ambulance on the ski hill that doesn’t charge anything for our services, and some of us are getting paid barely more than an entry-level position,” said Amanda Kelly, a patroller at Keystone Resort. “We risk our lives and our bodies, and we require a lot of skill to do what we do, and we’re struggling with even just feeding ourselves day to day.”
Home prices in rural vacation communities increased 47% in the three years following the start of the pandemic, compared to a 36% increase in rural areas overall, according to a recent analysis by Harvard University researchers. Vacation communities in the West, such as Telluride and Park City, saw the biggest increase, with home prices up an average of 51%.
The researchers attributed the spike to an influx of remote workers and buyers of second homes, who flocked to rural communities looking for more space, lower housing costs and easy access to outdoor activities. Rural areas saw a population gain of 540,400 from 2021 to 2023, compared to a loss of 77,900 in the three years prior to the pandemic, the Harvard researchers found.
“What we’re seeing in our mountain communities across Colorado is like what we’re seeing across the country on steroids,” said David Seligman, executive director of Towards Justice, a workers’ advocacy group, who is running for Colorado attorney general as a Democrat.
Unlike some resort workers, ski patrollers have a level of training that makes them essential to operations and difficult to replace in a strike. They are responsible for ensuring the safety of the guests on the mountain, including administering first aid, rescuing guests stranded on chairlifts or cliffs and preventing unintended avalanches with explosives.
The ski patrollers have argued that their expertise merits the higher pay. The job can also be physically taxing and even deadly. Cole Murphy, a ski patroller at Mammoth Mountain, was killed on the job and a second ski patroller was injured in an avalanche there last month.