Did you know Red River once had two ski areas? Just west of town, a small beginner hill called Powder Puff Mountain taught generations of first-timers to turn, stop, and fall in love with winter in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. It was never the biggest mountain in New Mexico, and that was exactly the point. Powder Puff was friendly, close, and built for learning.
Click to see more photos of Powder Puff Mountain — Judy Miller on the slopes and the famous We Make Snow brochure
Lester and Jan Lewis started it in 1962 as the E-Z Ski Area. They rented unusual E-Z skis — a wide ski in the middle, two skis on the sides, a seat, and a handle you steered by leaning — and inner tubes called whirly-birds, whose riders were hauled uphill in small cars that, as the Red River Historical Society tells it, looked like cattle in freight cars on train tracks. In 1964 Lester built a chairlift and gave the hill its lasting name, Powder Puff Mountain. True to Red River's do-it-yourself spirit, he built that lift from salvaged oil derricks and oil wells, trailers once used to haul bombs during World War II, and towers that had originally been natural gas pipelines. A POMA platter lift served another slope.
Powder Puff's owners also fought New Mexico's fickle snow with ingenuity. In the disastrously dry winter at the end of the 1960s, Lester recalled a race with Red River Ski Area to shovel snow from all over town and haul it by pickup to the slopes. When David Stultz at the Ponderosa had a pile of snow out front, he put up a sign that read, Property of Lester Lewis. That scrappiness paid off in a bigger way: Powder Puff had compressed-air and water snowmaking early on, making it one of the first western ski areas to take that step. One year it opened on October 29, tying Loveland in Colorado for first in the nation, and its brochure proudly showed a snow gun under the caption, We make snow!
In 1970 John and Judy Miller, with Gary and Fran Starbuck, bought Powder Puff from Lester Lewis. The hill offered about 700 feet of vertical, three rope tows, and just a few runs. Its Expert run was so short, the Historical Society notes, you could go straight down without making a turn before the slope flattened out. Lift tickets cost 6 dollars for adults and 4 dollars and 50 cents for children, lessons were 5 dollars, and beginners learned on 100-centimeter skis using Cliff Taylor's Graduated Length Method, which started students short and moved them longer as they improved.
In 1979 Powder Puff was sold to Red River Ski Area, which renamed it The Woodlands Ski Basin. If you learned to ski there in the early 1980s, The Woodlands is the name you remember. The ski area operated it for about three more seasons before closing it for good and moving beginner lessons up to the main mountain. Its rope tows and chairlifts are gone, its snowmaking compressor was sold for scrap, its buildings were dismantled, and houses now dot its old slopes. But its legacy is still easy to find. Countless skiers took their first turns there, and John Miller carried its teaching spirit into the backcountry and, later, to Enchanted Forest Cross Country Ski Area on Bobcat Pass. Next time you drive west of town, picture that little hill busy again — a homemade chairlift turning, short skis carving careful wedges, and a snow gun living up to its promise: We make snow!