When Oklahoma oil man Stokes Bolton rolled into Red River in the 1950s, the town counted barely a dozen year-round residents. He had never skied a run in his life. What he had was an entrepreneur's eye: the steep, snowy slopes rising above town looked like a business waiting to happen. In 1959 he opened the Red River Ski and Summer Area with a rope tow, a poma platter lift, and a chairlift cobbled together from salvaged oil derricks — and a ski town was born.
The idea was not entirely new. In the early 1940s, L.S. Lewis hauled old oil-well equipment up from Texas and built a rope tow near what is now the ski area's beginner hill. Local lore says the tow opened — and closed — on December 7, 1941, the day of the Pearl Harbor attack, staying shuttered for the war. Afterward, locals skied on their own terms. Old-timer Hank Mutz recalled that nobody paid and everybody just had a good time.
Bolton turned a pastime into an industry. A year before the area opened, in 1958, he installed a chairlift built from old oil derricks as a scenic summer ride, then opened the ski area the following season with two runs. He wisely surrounded himself with people who knew skiing — Toni Woerndle, Buzz Bainbridge, and Gary Starbuck joined his mountain crew — and he even helped Lester Lewis start a smaller rival hill, Powder Puff Mountain.
The locals gave Bolton his due. Speaking at the Red River Community House in 1985, Tillie Simion said the man who brought ski recreation to the Red River Valley had never been properly honored for his determination. Those early years were scrappy: ski school director Sigi Klein remembered one snowless Christmas in the early 1960s when everyone played flag football on Main Street, and ski patroller Johnnie Mutz told kids they had to ski down the beginner hill to earn a coonskin cap.
But the gamble paid off. The 1959 oil-derrick chairlift gave way to the 1974 Riblet double, and the area grew into the resort that loads right in town today — step off Main Street and onto a chairlift, up to the 10,353-foot summit. Every ride still traces back to Bolton's contraption of oilfield steel.
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