Most ski resorts are founded by skiers. Red River's was founded by a man who never clicked into a pair of bindings.
S.E. "Stokes" Bolton came to the Red River Valley in the 1950s with a dream but no skiing of his own. Where others saw a steep mountainside, Bolton saw a ski hill waiting to happen — a place where families could glide down the snow and be eating dinner on Main Street the same evening. The town's historians still call him what he was: the father of the Red River Valley's ski business.
Bolton's ambition had one problem: chairlifts were expensive. So in 1959, he did what a resourceful mountain man does — he built one himself. His home-built double chair rose up the mountainside on towers fashioned from oil derricks, carrying the first skiers of what would become the Red River Ski Area. It was crude, it was clever, and it worked. That lift served until 1974, when a manufactured Riblet double replaced it, and the line it carved up the hill is still skiing territory today.
Bolton knew his limits, and that was his genius. Rather than pretend to be a ski professional, he hired real ones. Toni and Ilse Woerndle, Buzz Bainbridge, and Gary Starbuck joined his mountain crew, bringing the instruction, the mountain savvy, and the professionalism a brand-new ski area needed to survive. The old-timers say their expertise was what insured the new mountain's success.
Bolton's dream wasn't limited to one hill, either. Working with Lester Lewis, he helped start Powder Puff Mountain on the Questa side of town — a friendly little twenty-acre learners' area with two double chairs and two rope tows that became a beloved proving ground for instructors and local kids through the 1970s.
In 1994, when the Red River Historical Society gathered the pioneers for a ski history panel — Lottie Tweed, Ilse Woerndle, Drew Judycki, and the rest — they were tracing the branches of a tree Stokes Bolton had planted. The non-skier with the dream. The oil derricks reaching for the summit. The town he believed in, riding up the mountain.
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