LEADVILLE • The little house from the 1870s is cluttered, piles everywhere of mail, magazines, newspapers, cat stuff, outdoor stuff and tattered notebooks keeping an impressive record. The piles of broken skis in every other corner speak to that record. It’s a wonder how Tom Szwedko, 75, navigates the piles of everything else en route to his twin-sized bed in another corner. The piles are up to the TV, which is of course tuned to the Weather Channel. Good news: more snow.
Friends kind of worry about the mess and kind of do not. Nola Chavez shrugs. “What can we say? That’s how he lives.”
Skier responsibility code adds 2 new rules and breaking either is criminal in Colorado
That’s Tomski, as people have known the local legend in North America’s highest incorporated town. Leadville, he decided long ago, was the place for him and his skiing obsession. Conveniently from his home above 10,000 feet, Szwedko looks in every direction at some of Colorado’s highest mountains.
Those notebooks maintain route descriptions and snow reports from skiing every month of the year for 43 years. And not just once a month, but closer to daily. Another friend, Silas Wild, has known Szwedko to claim close to 330 days a year of skiing.
Tom Szwedko, 75, sits on the front porch of his 1870s home in Leadville.
Wild lives near Seattle; Szwedko has visited him on occasion to catch year-round snow high on Mount Rainier. Szwedko has also been known to travel to South America’s winter during North America’s summer.
“He even figures out ways to fly into San Diego, for example, and go skiing that day so he doesn’t miss a day,” says Wild, who at one time was trying for a similar streak. He stopped, “because the thing was controlling my life.”
As it does Tomski’s, the friend says.
“There are people who think they are fanatic skiers,” Wild says, “but they haven’t met Tom Szwedko.”
It’s been a streak only possible for knowledge as meticulous as those notes penned by this retired engineer, analytical as ever — knowledge of high, hidden pockets above Leadville that keep snow, even if it’s just a little, for him to plop his skis year-round.
Snow has been harder to come by, Szwedko says. “Every year it’s getting harder and harder.”
And every year, he pushes on. As to why, he offers little besides “it’s fun.”
Friends do much of the talking for him. If it weren’t for them, there would not have been a celebration in May of 2021 for his 500th straight month of skiing.
Tom Szwedko sticks his pole into the snow as he cross-country skis on a trail near his home in Leadville early this month.
“It isn’t that he doesn’t talk about it,” says Sharon Siler, a friend of 20-plus years. “But, I mean, I’m a salesperson, that was my career, so I tend to blab too much. But Tom doesn’t sell. He doesn’t talk. He just does it.”
He was different from any other person she had ever met when she encountered him cross-country skiing one day. Different as most people find him. He might be out in what he calls his “desert hat” with the flaps, dirt-stained shells top and bottom, sun-protective film behind his glasses and mismatching gloves.
He might be out with his cats, if Cinder Bigfoot and BBW (Big, Black and White) are up for it. If there’s anything Szwedko loves more than skiing, it’s his cats.
“He’s ... quirky,” Chavez says, after thinking some about why he never married or started a family.
Ski bikes, snow bikes — whatever you call them, they're getting around Colorado
How could he have? asks Wild. Maybe in another life, Tomski would have a clean house. Maybe he would eat more than just fast food as Wild has always known him to eat. (That explains, maybe, why he looked to Wild like Santa Claus at one point; the beard is still there, but now some worry Szwedko looks too skinny.)
“The guy is so dedicated to skiing that he pays very little attention to the details that most people pay to normal life,” Wild says. “So he’s not a homemaker. His eating is as simple and convenient as possible. I mean, it’s all about skiing.”
Szwedko reflects on his past 43 years of skiing and his love for his cats, among other parts of his life, on the front porch of his home in Leadville on Feb. 2.
It’s all about skiing as he approaches his 76th birthday in March. Which, to people close to him, is kind of worrisome and kind of not.
“We know that’s what keeps him going,” Chavez says. “It gives him purpose and enjoyment. And with all this cancer stuff going on, it’s probably a distraction.”
Pancreatic cancer has been his burden in recent years. Despite the ills and pains from radiation, Szwedko has skied on, even if it’s just up his snowy street.
Once, up in Utah’s La Sal Mountains, he skied on despite breaking an ankle. In the months after, “I skied on one foot to keep the streak,” he says.
The streak started in 1979. Living then in Harrisburg, Pa., Szwedko visited Shenandoah National Park to find Skyline Drive closed due to snow.
“A whole bunch of pissed-off tourists,” he recalls. “But I was happy.”
He happily skied ahead. That’s when he got the idea to do this every month.
His love for the sport started as a kid on wood planks growing up around Pittsburgh. Out of high school in 1966, the Air Force sent him to Europe. That’s where his love soared to new heights. He joined soldiers for off-duty adventure in Germany’s Alps and Italy’s Dolomites.
Those outings and his service in computer programming prepared him for life and work back home. His career eventually took him to Lockheed Martin in Denver. It was close to an ideal basecamp; he found mountainous Leadville to be much better by retirement.
Tom Szwedko scopes out the snow conditions in his neighborhood on Thursday, Feb. 2, 2023. Although he has garnered a reputation for skiing and hiking the tallest peaks in the state, these days he’s not opposed to plopping on his skis right out his front door. (Parker Seibold, The Gazette)
By then, he had garnered a reputation for more than just skiing. He was an accomplished alpinist, having checked off Colorado’s 14,000- and 13,000-foot mountains and bigger summits around the world: volcanoes in Chile, jagged ranges in Iceland.
He was a caver. He was an ice skater. He’s still an ice skater to an extent.
”I’m a figure skater,” he says. “I could do seven or eight different jumps at one time.”
Outfitters envision 'deluxe' ski tour in Colorado's high alpine
At one time, he wasn’t so forgetful, Siler says. He was always so kind, so friendly, and he still is, but it seems time and cancer have taken a toll there as well. Siler has not known him to be so irritable, as he was on a trip they took to Switzerland last year. The snow was bad.
“He wasn’t able to do what he hoped to do,” Siler says.
He was relegated to nostalgia.
”He was pointing out all these places he backcountry skied back in the day,” Siler says. “He’s still very knowledgeable about those different areas. He was suggesting all these places, saying where else we could go. But they had uniformly low, low snow.”
Tomski is fine back in his mountains. Fine with the trails just out his door. More than fine with his cats, who do not tag along this afternoon.
RIGHT: Tom Szwedko slides his cross-country skis through the snow. He says winter snow is less consistent than it used to be and as the years have gone on, he’s finding it harder and harder to find snow to ski in the late summer months.
”By the way, see that mining hill there?” Szwedko says, pointing to a mound down by the trailhead. “I own that.”
He bought that and called it Mount Kitty. “Because the cats used to love climbing it all the time,” he says.
One of them was a stray he took in. Now the cat’s ashes rest in a box back home. Now the other two don’t come out as much.
Szwedko would hate to lose them. ”I usually put them on a leash now,” he says.
