Mar. 2--A new sun dawned on Telluride on Thursday. 

With 2 feet of fresh snow blanketing the mountain, the two men who carried Telluride for more than 20 years announced Thursday they had shed their heavy loads. 

Ron Allred and Jim Wells no longer own Telluride ski area. A $14 million investment by Joe Morita, the skiing scion of Sony founder Akio Morita, will provide the resort with three new lifts to serve the hard-fought expansion area. The investment also buys out Allred and Wells, who bought the ski area in 1979. 

Allred will remain chief executive and chairman of the Telluride Ski & Golf Co. Wells is stepping down from his position as president of Telski. 

In their 22 years at the helm of Telski, Allred and Wells have guided the resort and town into the lofty and elite realm of four-season resorts. A once-lonely mining town is now a vibrant community, with snowriding vacationers flocking in in the winter and music, movie- and festival-goers gathering in the summer. 

The dream of Wells and Allred was buttressed in 1999, when they found Morita, owner of Arai, a Japanese ski area. It was a time when corporately owned ski areas across the nation were dwarfing individually owned ski hills with unrivaled, unmatchable injections of capital. 

The 1999 deal with Morita -- which reportedly gave him an 80 percent ownership interest -- afforded him a major role in the business of Telski and started Allred and Wells on a track that ended Thursday. It was never a secret that Morita would eventually take over the business. 

"That's been the game plan since day one," said Gary Lisbon, a local ski shop owner. "Everybody is really excited about Morita's ability to take this ski area to the next level. And Jim and Ron should get the credit for getting the ski area to where it is now." 

During their reign, Wells and Allred founded and developed Telluride's Mountain Village, an upscale community of million-dollar homes tucked into the wooded glades flanking the ski hill. They also helped build a local airport, and developed a one-of-a-kind European-style gondola system that ferries riders across the valley for free. 

The pair's crowning achievement is Prospect Basin, a recently approved expansion that will almost double the resort's skiable terrain. 

Morita is well aware of Telluride's unique character and, with the new expansion, the resort's ability to become a premier destination resort, said Chris Ryman, a ski industry veteran who serves on Telski's executive board. 

"He looks for the kind of unique niche in an investment," Ryman said. "He wants irreplaceable assets. And he believes very much that Telluride is one of those." 

-----To see more of The Denver Post, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.denverpost.com 

(c) 2001, The Denver Post. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.