The sun is out and the mood is high in Leadville, Colorado, for the city’s annual skijoring competition.
America’s highest-elevation city—at a whopping 10,154 feet—has played host to skijoring for 75 years. Riders on horseback tow skiers behind them on a rope, who must complete a snowy obstacle course down the historic main street, as thousands of people look on.
“The noise echoing off of our historic 1800s mining town buildings, wall-to-wall people merely feet away from a 1,200-pound animal with a rider on top and a skier behind, blasting down the avenue at 30, 40 miles an hour,” said Duffy Counsel, describing the atmosphere.
Counsel is a 20-year Leadville resident and veteran skijorer. Following knee-replacement surgery two years ago, he now works behind the scenes, to organize the event each year, but he’s just as fired up about the sport as ever.
“You can feel it when it goes past. Like, literally feel it,” he said during a break in the action on day 2 of this year’s festivities.
Leadville has transformed itself over the years. The city grew up during the gold and silver rushes of the 1860s and 70s. Now, it’s a hub of outdoor recreation: people come from all over the world to race in its famous ultramarathons and trail runs, raft on the Arkansas River, hike two nearby fourteeners, and enjoy affordable powder at Ski Cooper.
Skijoring, Counsel said, represents both this resilience, and the intersection of the old and the new west.
“I'm a lifelong skier. I've never owned a horse,” he said. “I've learned almost everything I know about the cowboy code and how those real true grit cowboys and cowgirls roll from the folks I've met and partnered with over the last nearly twenty years of doing this.”
But Leadville, located in Lake County, isn’t immune to the impacts of a changing climate. That includes a longer wildfire season and less predictable, more severe storms. Leadville’s popularity also puts a strain on its services during big events like skijoring.
“We had about 10,000 people in town, which is a lot for our small community,” said Claire Hathaway, Lake County’s director of emergency management. “We have limited restaurants, limited hotels, limited cell phone service, so one of our cell phone providers did struggle this weekend to keep up with the crowds.”
Hathaway spearheaded Lake County’s most recent hazard mitigation plan, which outlines all the possibilities for a disaster, and what work the county can do to lessen their impacts before they happen.
Lake County’s updated plan factors in those climate impacts. It was 45 degrees out during this year’s ski joring—much warmer than average for early March—and Hathaway said they’re planning for more heat.
“We may not get the same 100 degree temperatures as Pueblo does,” Hathaway acknowledged. “But if we start to see an increased temperature just in the summer, that's absolutely going to change Lake County, and that's going to impact both our natural resources and our people as well.”
Hazard mitigation planning isn’t just ticking a box (FEMA requires a county hazard mitigation plan for certain grants and funding opportunities), the process has actually worked for communities like Lake County.
Last summer, the Interlaken Fire burned over 700 acres in South Lake County, but firefighters fully contained it with no damage to homes or infrastructure.
“We were able to point to mitigation work that had been done years prior to Interlaken that gave firefighters a fuel break to work from,” Hathaway said.
This new plan identifies more areas for new hazard mitigation projects, like culverts that reinforce local roads, emergency power generation and charging during winter storms, and, of course, education for the town’s ever-growing tourist population.
“When you see the gray clouds on Mount Massive at 2 p.m., that is not the time to go for a hike,” Hathaway said. “So really, getting out that public education to people that maybe aren't as familiar with rural Colorado and the weather challenges we face.”
It’s a problem faced by rural, tourism-focused economies throughout Colorado and the west. In 2020, the Grizzly Creek Fire burned over 30,000 acres in Glenwood Canyon, near Glenwood Springs. A year later, a 500-year storm dumped anywhere from half an inch to an inch of rain on the burn scar left by the fire, causing mudslides and debris flows that closed I-70 through the canyon for two weeks.
In 2022, out of an abundance of caution, the Colorado Department of Transportation closed the interstate, bike path, rest areas, and trailheads in the canyon each time it seemed as though there would be a severe rain event, to prevent tourists and locals alike from getting caught in another mudslide.
The trouble is, Lake County is small and remote. Hathaway said the work and planning that went into this most recent plan was only possible because of a grant from FEMA.
“We were awarded in a kind of a special round; we got a 90-10 match on that, and that was huge for Lake County,” Hathaway said.
But federal funds for rural communities like Lake County are at risk.
According to the Colorado Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, the state is currently unable to access funds through FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Grant Program for eleven county plans in progress.
Another ten counties received hazard mitigation planning money through FEMA’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities, or BRIC, which is also frozen. A judge has ruled that these funds must be released, but for now, counties can’t get their money.
In addition, FEMA has terminated the BRIC program altogether, calling it “wasteful and ineffective.” The agency has not yet responded to a request for comment.
Leadville skijoring hasn’t missed a year since its inception in 1949. Even though spectators were gone during COVID, the race went on, and people watched a broadcast online. It’s something Duffy Counsel is proud of.
“This town doesn't quit. There is no say die in this town. If we are gonna do it, we are going to do it,” he said.
Counsel said that can-do spirit is what makes Leadville so resilient. Even in the face of a changing climate and outside pressures, he’s confident Leadville Ski Joring will still be here 25 years from now.
“And Leadville's history and adaptability combined there, this will always be the granddaddy of them all,” he said.
But there’s no denying the challenges that rural areas like Leadville will face without federal support, especially with the risk of greater natural hazards. Claire Hathaway acknowledges that despite the town’s resilience in the face of many, many challenges, there’s a lot of uncertainty.
“A lot is up in the air for us right now,” she said.
Copyright 2025 Rocky Mountain Community Radio. This story was shared via Rocky Mountain Community Radio, a network of public media stations in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico, including Aspen Public Radio.
