One of the enduring charms of Red River, from its ski areas to its myriad of shops, is that few businesses are corporate-owned. This town is mom and pop owned and operated. Many of these small businesses may see new owners come and go with the seasons, but some, like All Seasons and Sitzmark Sports, have endured long enough for the next generation to take over.
Both businesses arose with Red River’s winter renaissance. Before Oklahoman Stokes Bolton opened Red River Ski Area in 1959, the town was a summer destination. Most locals eked out a living however they could — some finding whatever work they could through the cold months, some leaving town to find work elsewhere, leaving their businesses boarded up until spring. Bolton changed everything when he built the first chairlift in town using salvaged oil derricks. In his search for a ski school director, he found Toni Woerndle operating the Alpine Lodge with his wife Ilse in Aspen, Colo. Toni left Ilse to run the lodge and went down to Red River that winter.
It started with the Alpine
Toni must have seen opportunity in this little upstart ski town. Bolton had also built the SEB Motel opposite the ski area, and when he announced he wanted to sell, Toni jumped. Says Ilse, “He called me in February and said, ‘Momma, I bought the SEB Motel.’ I wasn’t overjoyed at all. We had put so much into our place in Aspen.”
The Woerndles moved to Aspen from Garmisch, Germany, in 1951 and their sons, George and Rudi were born in that community’s 10-bed hospital, Ilse says. Both learned to ski around the motel grounds by the time they could walk.
Still, she packed up and moved to Red River with George, 7, and Rudi, 5. She admits to being a little worried when she set eyes on the motel she says was “all rather new but pretty cheerless. There was not one tree, not one fleck of grass, not one bush. It was nothing.”
Toni set about transforming the place, adding pitched roofs (“Everything was flat and leaking,” Ilse says), Bavarian-style trim, trees, bushes, flowers, grass — all the mountain landscaping that still distinguish The Alpine as a beautiful riverside setting to this day.
Toni continued working as ski school director that first winter of 1960 –61 but Ilse says at the time, Red River Ski Area was the only place to rent skis, “so we decided, ‘why don’t we open a ski shop?’ The decision left him without a job at the ski area but Toni plowed ahead, opening the rental shop in winter 1961–62 and commuting weekends to Monarch Mountain in Colorado to oversee the ski school there.
Red River, meanwhile, got more boosts to its economy: The road from Questa to Red River was paved in 1963 and the “new pass” from the Moreno Valley to Red River was cut and paved in 1965.
“We did quite well with the shop,” Ilse says. “Many times I had to bring my own skis and boots to the shop because we didn’t have enough to rent.”
George and Rudi dove into the ski-town life, racing on the town’s first ski team and helping mom and dad. “If we weren’t racing we had to help at the shop,” George says, adding, “It was more fun to be out skiing than fitting skis and hot waxing. Every night you had to hot wax them. We had a pot, kind of like a crock pot, then you had a paint brush and you painted it on.”
The system was far from scientific and, occasionally, dangerous. “We had one fire on the workbench,” Ilse says, speculating a wax-soaked rag had spontaneously combusted. The fire might have gotten out of hand if a customer had not turned his skis in early — the shop was closed during the day. “If I hadn’t gone out there the place would have gone up (in flames).”
Toni and Ilse also added the Alpine Restaurant and Bar and, says Ilse, if the restaurant was slow and the rental shop busy, “We’d put one of the waitresses to work.”
George and Rudi attended boarding school at Holy Cross Abbey in Canon City, Colo., and says George, “I got ’em to start a ski team,” which allowed both boys to race all through high school. They continued racing in college for the then-fledgling University of New Mexico Ski Team.
Today, Rudi works as an environmental lawyer in Midland, Texas, where he lives with his wife and family. George returned to Red River in 1975, after finishing college, and followed in his father’s footsteps, working as ski instructor at Red River Ski Area (and bartending at the Alpine nights).
In 1976, with their ski rental business growing too big for the little shop at The Alpine, the Woerndles purchased a building across the street that for years had housed a grocery store and opened Sitzmark Sports in 1977.
Toni died in 1981 and in 1991 Ilse sold The Alpine Lodge property to enjoy retirement, (“I kicked myself out”) leaving George in charge of The Sitzmark, which includes eight condo units and a rental cabin on High Street. Just as his father had, George relies a great deal on the help of his wife Carol who first came to Red River in 1980 and eventually ended up bartending at The Alpine herself. After a long courtship, the two married in 1997 and, with George and a crew of 10 (many of whom have been there well over a decade), Carol works most every day at The Sitzmark and — if the help fails to show — she cleans condos.
Both are still avid skiers heading over to Red River Ski Area “at least once a week,” according to George, and taking pre- or post-season treks to other resorts.
They’ve seen a lot of changes over the years, too, since the days when they had 30 skis, lace leather boots and bamboo poles. The ski shop that included a relative few-dollars worth of tools and hot wax in a crock pot today sports almost $150,000 in precision equipment that can stone grind a perfect surface, bevel edges and apply just the right amount of wax to ski … or snowboards, which, George says, amount to about 25 percent of their fleet which includes about 1,200 skis.
One thing hasn’t changed, though. “We still have fun doing it,” says George.
Through boom times and more
Like the Woerndles, Pat and Mary Lamb saw opportunity in a tiny town that, in 1963, probably only had 150 year-’round residents. They left Big Springs, Texas, that year and — with their sons Rick, 9, Daniel, 7, and Larry, 2 — bought and moved into Three Canyon Camp, a motel situated near Mallette Creek where Eisenhut Condominiums sit today. They changed the name to Lonesome Pine and, like so many others in town, boarded up at the end of summer and went to work at Red River Ski Area. The following winter, their cabins now winterized, Mary ran the motel while Pat continued to work at the ski area.
About three years later, the Lambs sold the Lonesome Pine to a group of doctors from Lubbock. Since the group intended to build condominiums at the site, the Lambs sold the cabins and relocated their two-story house next to the Dalton cabin, combining the two into a shop and residence.
Pat says, “That’s when we started the shop. We were living in it and remodeling at the same time,”
“That’s the story of our life, living with construction,” Mary says with a laugh looking around at her husband’s current renovation project expanding the rental shop.
The first year, Mary pursued her passion for painting and opened a fine art gallery.
Around that same time, Pat says, they also got into the ski rental business with 50 pairs of Head skis. “In the old days, before a procedure was set up to fit people, we’d put them in their boots, then in the skis and have them lean forward and try to get the bindings to release and they’d accidentally step on your hands.”
Mid-week could be slow back then, so the Lambs devised a system: Pat would go skiing and Mary says, “If I needed anything, I’d hang a white cloth out.”
“If I got to The Face and saw the white flag, I knew I needed to come home, take care of business,” Pat adds.
Wiggle worms in the water
By the time the Lambs arrived in 1963, Bolton had created a small water system for about 15 Red River businesses. “We had wiggle worms in the water,” Mary recalls.
Recognizing the need for infrastructure, Pat joined the effort to incorporate the town, a move he calls, “pretty controversial” and in 1971 served on the first town council with Mayor David Stultz and fellow councilors John Miller, Ted Calhoun and Lester Lewis. Pat has since served two more terms, the most recent with fellow two-term councilor George Woerndle who finishes his term next November. “This last time I was the oldest one on there,” Pat says.
For many years, Pat also volunteered with the Red River Fire Department (also with George Woerndle who still volunteers as a company officer, and Carol, who helps with logistics). Mary recalls watching a fire across the street at what was then the Valley Lodge and wondering why Pat was walking funny. Seems his sons had ‘borrowed” his suspenders for a school project. “There he was, trying to keep his pants up and fight a fire!”
In 1968, following on the heels of Red River locals Johnnie Mutz, Roy Brunson and Glen Calhoun, Pat got into the snowmobile tour business, taking guests out on big, single-track Ski Doos, and later opening a full service Arctic Cat Dealership.
In the early 1970s, Pat also became a contractor building a thriving business with buildings too numerous to list around Red River, while Mary kept the shop open winter and summer. The boys, all avid skiers themselves, helped out, each finding his niche in the family business with Rick in the ski rental shop, Larry, tinkering with snowmobiles and Daniel, working with the shop that expanded to include an array of gifts and clothing.
“Since I grew up in the shop I feel I’ve been doing it all my life,” Daniel says. “I started working (wholesale) markets with them when I was a little kid.”
Since then, the shop has seen many transformations: The art gallery is gone, as are the snowmobiles, but All Seasons has grown from two small cabins to an attractive 6,500-square- foot store featuring an array of gifts, fashion-forward clothing, ski gear and accessories, shoes, and a state-of-the-art ski (and snowboard) rental shop with a fleet of over 1,200.
All three boys went on to college and life away from Red River. Rick, like fellow Red Riverite George Woerndle, skied on the University of New Mexico Ski Team. Later he pursued a calling to ministry and today is pastor at Northside Baptist Church in Corsicana, Texas. Larry, an electrical engineer, designs multi-million-dollar interiors for luxury jets.
Daniel began his college education in California, then returned to help run his parents, business until a combination of the collapse of the Texas oil economy and savings and loan banks sent the Red River economy into a bit of a nose dive in the early 1980s. At that time, Daniel left Red River to become a Hotel Operational Analyst for Hotels of Distinction in Boston. Pat and Mary Lamb took a brief hiatus in the early 1990s from Red River.
“But we came back,” Mary says happily.
They reopened All Seasons in 1993 and in May 2006 Daniel, who had worked as an administrator and educator at the University of New Mexico for 17 years, came back as well so his parents could “retire” — though both seem content to keep working!
“Retail and Red River are like the mafia,” Daniel quips. “You can’t
get out.”
