Rio Costilla Ski Area
Costilla, New Mexico1983-2000
Shop Rio Costilla Ski Area tees, long sleeve tees, hoodies and crewnecks. A livestock cooperative built it on 4,000 acres of its ranch in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, and in 1985 SKI Magazine noted that people skied there in overalls and work jackets. By the late 1980s it had been renamed Ski Rio. Browse the styles below, and the full Rio Costilla Ski Area history is further down. We are an American small business bringing back the signs and logos of places and teams that are long gone but remembered fondly.
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Rio Costilla Ski Area History
Rio Costilla Ski Area near Costilla, New Mexico, sat in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains about eight miles east of the village on State Road 196, just below the Colorado line. It opened in the 1982-83 season, built by the Rio Costilla Cooperative Livestock Association on 4,000 acres of its 82,600-acre ranch. The first season brought a Poma triple chair, a Poma surface lift, a ski school tow and 14 trails, with a base at 9,500 feet. Taos was about 46 miles to the south and Alamosa, Colorado, about 55 miles to the north, and the area counted on day skiers from both.
The cooperative ran it for two seasons before the money ran short and the operation passed to other hands. A second triple chair came for 1984-85, and a used Riblet double chair from Stowe, Vermont, went up at the summit to open Cinnamon Bear Bowl, which brought the vertical drop to about 2,150 feet. In 1985 SKI Magazine noted that people skied there in overalls and work jackets, a plain contrast to Taos. Behind the scenes came a bankruptcy filing, a string of owners and a lender that federal regulators took over in 1988. By the late 1980s the area had been renamed Ski Rio, and it was courting snowboarders with a halfpipe.
Ski Rio sat idle for at least one season in the early 1990s and changed hands again in the middle of the decade, when it was run together with Cuchara in southern Colorado. Its late 1990s trail map showed three chairlifts named Alpha, Bravo and Charlie, three surface lifts, 83 runs and 910 skiable acres, from the 9,500-foot base to a summit of 11,650 feet. Hotels, condominiums and a heated outdoor pool were built near the base.
Poor snow shut the area in January 2000, and it never ran lifts again. Season passes were sold for 2001-02, but that fall the phones and website went dead, and buyers got their money back only after a lawsuit. A company with Czech owners bought the property in 2008, called it Endless Blue, removed the two triple chairs in 2009 and sold them to other ski areas, and offered snowcat skiing on the old runs in 2010. The base lodge was torn down, and the Charlie double chair and some of the lodging buildings were left standing on the empty mountain.