Telluride, Colorado is one of my favorite places to ski. It’s now also home of one of my favorite blogs, Dave’s Blog (no, not Dave’s Blog), written by Dave Riley, the CEO of Telluride Ski and Golf Resort.
It’s not a press release feed that’s simply mislabeled as a blog. It’s written by a real person who communicates with his readers. My mom introduced it to me prior to our New Year’s trip, and it looks like Dave’s been publishing it since July 2007, shortly after becoming CEO. For a corporate blog, it feels very personal, and I look forward to each entry.
I like the content and style of the posts, because they’re obviously written by Dave himself, and he even takes the pictures. Of course there are nice shots of the mountains and the trails (which I drool over in between trips), but he goes beyond the “postcard” shots and includes cool construction photos and pictures of the Howitzers, yes, Howitzers leased from the U.S. Army, used for avalanche control. Most resorts would probably be too scared to post so much “behind the scenes” material, so I think it’s extra cool that the CEO is doing it at Telluride. The blog is timely too, with captions like “this is what the trail looked like today when I skied it,” rather than “this is something from our marketing department that a professional photographer took last season.”
Dave’s participation doesn’t end after he clicks “publish.” The blog has comments turned on, and Dave replies to many of them. And even with a good number of comments, it’s obvious that there’s some healthy moderation going on, as indicated by the spam/stupidity-free messages. My kind of blog.
And, on top of participating in the comments, Dave publicizes his email address at the bottom of many posts, encouraging people to contact him with questions. At a certain level this becomes unfeasible, but as long as he can keep up with the volume, I think it’s pretty cool that he shares his address.
Just don’t tell too many of your friends about it. I like that Telluride is still able to avoid the crowds. 🙂