Photos courtesy Peaks Resort
The Peaks Resort and Spa in Telluride, Colo., is one of the nation’s few resorts that is ski-in/ski-out in the winter and tee-in/tee-out in the summer.
With its own ski run at the resort’s lower level and a golf course out its back door, the Peaks is a meeting destination that promises plenty of pleasure with business — and scenery, lots of scenery.
“Without a doubt, view, view, view is the No. 1 thing that makes our meetings different than anyone else’s,” said Alan Palmer, national sales manager for the Grand Heritage Hotel Group, which owns the Peaks.
Telluride sits in the rugged San Juan Mountain range in southwestern Colorado. The Peaks is built into the western face of a ridge, so the valley falls away from the side of the resort, offering expansive views of the adjacent Telluride Golf Course and three of Colorado’s 14,000-foot peaks: El Diente Peak, Wilson Peak and Mount Wilson (the only two 14ers in the state named after the same person, topographer A.D. Wilson). Guests can often see as far as the La Sal Mountains in Utah, “making for incomparable sunsets,” Palmer said.
Built in 1992, the 168-room resort has 9,000 square feet of meeting space and 10,000 square feet of outdoor event space.
Three years ago, new owners began a $13 million, multiphase renovation that turned some main-level meeting space into the Palmyra Restaurant and made its former restaurant, on the lower level, a lounge.
Guest rooms and baths were gutted, rebuilt and refinished with new furniture, new fixtures, new lighting and new mountain-lodge-style decor.
Almost any type of meeting or event fits the resort, but the Peaks handles meetings of 150 or fewer people well and excels at meetings of 30 to 120 people, Palmer said.
The Peaks can and will host larger groups, working with the Telluride Conference Center (see sidebar, pg. 32) down the street. An example is the Colorado Association of Libraries’ Risk and Reward Conference, which brought about 400 attendees to Telluride in September 2012.
The conference used “everything we had,” Palmer said, including the Peaks’ outdoor space for a Frisbee toss and an obstacle course, and meeting rooms for presentations and breakout sessions. Meals and other events were held at the Telluride Conference Center.
“It was so cool,” Palmer said. “It was very nontraditional, but it was perfect for our multiple spaces.”
