Three Telluride sisters keeping family history alive

When Angie, Pam and Crissy Aldasoro were growing up in the family's single-wide trailer on a mesa outside Telluride, they likened it to being in Antarctica. Peering into the dark in the mid-1960s, they could never see lights. There were no neighbors near the 5,000-acre Aldasoro Brothers Ranch where herds of sheep made the mountain valleys look snow-covered in July. Their outside links were a radio station from faraway Oklahoma City and one TV station that would fade when an antenna was turned in the down-on-its- luck town of Telluride. Fast forward. The Aldasoro girls — now Pam Bennett, Angie Petersen and Cristine Mitchell, or "the sisters," as they are known around Telluride — are the executives in a slew of commercial property-management corporations. Part of their ranch is now the largest star-studded subdivision in this high- dollar region. Another piece is the highest commercial airport in the country. But the sisters are most proud of being the keepers of an agricultural legacy. The 735-acre heart of the ranch that their Basque grandfather bought as prime sheep pasture is still theirs, treasured for its colorful history. The sisters named the roads in homage to Basque ancestors. Joaquin Road refers to Jose Joaquin Aldasoro, who came to the United States from the Pyrenees Mountains of Spain in 1913 to work for a Utah rancher. The family's immigration story nearly ended there. Joaquin was dropped off outside Green River, Utah, and told to walk to his sheep camp 18 miles away. He walked until exhaustion prompted him to bed down in the dark. In the morning, he discovered that if he had kept walking another 200 feet, he would have fallen over a cliff. Joaquin did not just survive. He thrived. He married Cristina Aguirre, another Basque immigrant, and, with his brother Prudencio and cousin Serapio, started buying up homesteads on Deep Creek Mesa, near Telluride, in 1926. By the mid-1950s, they had acquired 12 homesteads and pastured 5,000 head of sheep there...more