Cheryl Jensen, Colorado Snowsports Hall of Fame Inductee and Woman Who Rocks the Rockies

Founder of the Vail Veterans Program and recipient of the Outstanding Public Service Medal from the Secretary of Defense, Cheryl Jensen shows us what it means to live and give with your whole heart

By Lisa Blake

In 1988, Cheryl Jensen volunteered as a counselor at a California summer camp for kids with terminal cancer. Life was never the same after that.

“I remember coming back and thinking ‘wow, what just happened?’” she says. “I think I got more out of this than some of the campers. That feeling that we get inside when we give back is pretty remarkable. That was the first time I had ever felt that.”

Jensen, 62, was born in California and grew up in the Bay Area, Tahoe and Golden, Colorado. After spending 20 years in Tahoe, she and her now husband moved to Breckenridge where he launched a career with Breckenridge Ski Resort and she started volunteering with the Breckenridge Outdoor Education Center. Eventually, the couple relocated to Vail and Jensen began teaching Nordic skiing while her husband continued his career with Vail Resorts.

One day, he came home with a conundrum — The resort had been storing old employee uniforms on property for years and they were stacking up with no sustainable way to dispose of them. Jensen formulated a way to distribute the warm, insulated coats to Africa, Nepal and beyond. Soon, she found herself driving a U-Haul around, gathering retired uniforms from resorts across Colorado and founding the nonprofit Sharing Warmth Around the Globe in 2000. That give-back buzz was coursing through her veins once again and it felt good.

On a trip to Washington, D.C. peddling coats to the Department of Defense to ship them to faraway places, Jensen went to dinner with a friend who’d had an emotional day. She’d been working with wounded warriors at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

“I immediately thought, ‘well we need to get them skiing,’” Jensen says.

The seed was planted, but she had no idea how she was going to do it. Until she went to a cocktail party in Vail and met Retired Army Colonel David Rozelle, a vet who had lost his leg below the knee. Jensen told him about her idea to bring wounded soldiers to Vail for an adaptive ski and snowboard program. Colonel Rozelle agreed to gather wounded soldiers and, in March of 2004, the Vail Veterans Program became the first organization to take severely injured service members out of a hospital setting and bring them skiing.

“It’s amazing to know it’s been almost 20 years and we’ve had about 3,500 folks come through the program, including their families,” Jensen says. “We’re never afraid to think outside the box if it means we can have a positive effect on someone. They’ve seen others killed. Their friends have died. Their bodies are different. We put them in nature and hope that they take some of that home with them. Watching that transformation take place is incredible.”

It’s that make-it-happen-no-matter-what attitude that earned Jensen a spot in the Colorado Snowsports Museums’ Hall of Fame, an award she accepted on a Sunday in August 2023. The Vail Veterans Program now works directly with hospitals and their therapists to recruit service members for recreational therapy and has expanded its offerings to include caregiver programs and family support programs that benefit caretakers of wounded service members and summer programming that features rafting, golf and climbing opportunities.

For Jensen, the inspiration lies in the resilience of the human spirit

“We’re not a vacation club,” Jensen says. “We see people come here as one person and leave as another. There’s a newfound confidence in themselves, realizing there are so many things that they can do. They embrace life to the fullest, even after everything they’ve been through.”Learn more about the Vail Veterans Program at

www.vailveteransprogram.org