TO: Telluride Professional Ski Patrol Association (TPSPA) 

FROM: The Citizens, Business Owners, and Residents of Telluride and Mountain Village 

DATE: January 6, 2026

SUBJECT: Saving Our Community to Fight for Our Future

Dear Neighbors, Friends, and Guardians of the Mountain,

We are writing to you today as your fellow locals—the shopkeepers who greet you in the morning, the bartenders who pour your post-shift beers, the families whose safety you ensure every time we venture onto a chairlift. We stand with you in spirit, and we recognize the immense courage it took to say "enough" and walk off the job on December 27.

We unequivocally acknowledge two truths:

1. You are core to the soul of this mountain. Your expertise in avalanche mitigation, high-angle rescue, and emergency medicine is not a commodity; it is a specialized, irreplaceable skill set that keeps us all alive, and is integral to the economic engine of the community.
2. You deserve a living wage. The cost of living in San Miguel County is crushing. When housing prices force you to live hours away from the slopes you protect, and when wages fail to meet the basic standards of survival as defined by every objective metric, the system is broken. Your demand for dignity is just.

However, we must also face a third, darker truth together: This strike is not hurting Chuck Horning.

As the lifts sit silent, the pain is felt monumentally by the people who live and work here. The strike is harming people who aren’t at the bargaining table: local workers and small businesses—restaurants, hotels, retailers, guides, shuttles, childcare providers, and seasonal employees.  Meanwhile, the owner of Telluride Ski Resort is insulated by his personal wealth and distance from the community. He has the resources to wait this out indefinitely, watching from his ranches in California and Hawaii while our livelihoods evaporate.

Most damningly, Mr. Horning has made his indifference explicit. In his November 6, 2025 interview with The Daily Planet, he openly claimed that he sees no connection between ownership and community commitment.

Please read the published interview and let Mr. Horning’s own words sink in. He has publicly admitted that he feels no moral obligation to this community. He does not care if our businesses fail. He does not care if the town loses its vibrancy. He views this resort as a private asset, and he is willing to sacrifice the prosperity of the entire region to break your union.

We are asking you, TPSPA, to execute a strategic pivot: Accept a less than ideal offer, end the strike, and return to work immediately.

We ask this not because we don’t believe in your cause or your value to the community.  We know your grievances are financially and morally sound.  We ask because the alternative is the destruction of the community that supports you. By continuing the strike, you inadvertently give Mr. Horning exactly what he wants: a divided town and the pretext to replace you with less-qualified staff. If he succeeds in reopening the mountain with replacement workers, the union will be broken, and the culture of safety you built over decades will be lost.

Real change in Telluride will not come from a picket line that Mr. Horning continues to ignore. It will come from a unified community effort. We need the economic engine of the mountain running so that we have the resources to address our concerns through political and legal channels. We need to be a stable and cohesive community to meaningfully engage Mr. Horning on issues regarding his water rights, his development plans, his housing mitigation failures, and fair labor practices. We cannot successfully advocate for our community if we are struggling for our own economic survival.

We, the citizens of Telluride and Mountain Village, implore you to return to the mountain. Let us turn the lifts and secure our town’s survival. Once the immediate crisis is averted, we pledge to stand with you in a sustained, unified campaign to hold ownership accountable—not as victims of an absentee owner who feels no obligation to the community, but as a powerful, united collective that refuses to be ignored.

With deep respect and solidarity,

The Community of Telluride