Eldora will open a new 12,000-square-foot lodge on Wednesday in its lower mountain area to provide a new gathering space for visitors and a home for two programs.
The new Caribou Lodge will house the Eldora children’s ski school and Ignite Adaptive Sports. It’s an energy-efficient building in accordance with green building codes that will include a café, modern restrooms, a retail shop, a second-floor deck and spaces for lessons and gear rentals.
“This really is a lodge in our lower mountain and I think what it’s adding is a new place for people to gather and to share this winter experience and share this common love of being outside and sliding on snow,” said Hunter Wright, director of sustainability and project development at Eldora.
Design and planning for the Caribou Lodge began in 2019 and construction started in 2023. Wright said the lodge is a major upgrade to the base area of the mountain that will improve accessibility and expand space for programming. The lodge will be a space for those taking a break from the cold, and it will give parents a place to sit and watch their kids during lessons.
“It will improve the overall learning experience and make it easier for families to access everything they need in one place,” Wright said.
In addition to housing the Eldora children’s ski school, the new lodge will be the first-ever permanent home for Ignite Adaptive Sports, a non-profit partner of Eldora since 1975 and the second oldest adaptive winter sports program in Colorado.
Ignite helps people with disabilities ski, and about 250 volunteers teach lessons to all the athletes. Last season, Ignite provided more than 1,300 lessons to roughly 360 athletes.
Ignite Executive Director Carol Nickell said the new home Eldora created for Ignite is “beyond words.” Before, the organization worked out of temporary trailers.
“People with disabilities can sometimes be invisible in the world because people get uncomfortable around it, but that’s not true at Eldora, and this shows it tremendously,” Nickell said.
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Colorado Springs resident David Pettigrew started skiing with Ignite two seasons ago. He’s a military veteran with an amputated right leg. He uses a single sit ski, a sled-like device with a bucket the person can sit in with one ski attached in the middle below it.
“I personally have found it incredibly freeing to go crazy fast down a mountain, even though it’s not something I ever thought I could have done,” Pettigrew said. “I hope that this facility allows them to store more equipment and handle a larger volume of participants than they were limited by in their previous accommodations.”
Besides being ADA-compliant, the new lodge will have an elevator to take people to a bridge so Ignite volunteers can push a sit ski across the bridge to a lift. Before, volunteers had to push sit skis hundreds of yards up the hill with the skier in it, to ensure they could get to the slopes.
“We really wanted to be able to support Ignite and help them expand their offerings and increase the number of individuals with disabilities they support so we can increase diversity on the mountain and ensure the mountain is accessible to everyone,” Wright said.