SILVERTON — Aaron and Jenny Brill relish the steepest, most daunting slopes they can put beneath their snowboards. Rocks and cliffs included? Even better.

But ask them if they would do it all over again — hand-hew a one-of-a-kind, expert-only ski area up a lonely road outside a near ghost town — and they get flustered.

“Some days I say no way. Other days I wonder,” says Jenny, swinging her snowboard off the ambling double chair that climbs to the top of their Silverton Mountain ski area.

“Knowing what I know now, would I do it again?” says Aaron. “If I knew everything that has gone down in the last 15 years, I’m not sure I’d do it again. I definitely would have done it differently.”

Aaron pulled into Silverton in 1999 with a fantastical dream. Then 28 years old, he’d

been all over the West, seeking overlooked steeps that could become a single-lift ski club, like he’d ridden in New Zealand.

He wanted a raw experience that emphasized powder over pampering — not the village-building ethos that was taking over U.S. skiing.

Aaron found his place up a lonely county road along a polluted creek that ran orange. He camped in the back of a beat-down UPS van that hadn’t seen packages for a decade and slowly assembled about 220 acres of mining claims that climbed 2,000 vertical feet straight up from Cement Creek.

He told everyone the cost of those acres was less than a condo in Telluride. He found a second-hand double-chairlift in a California recycle bin and shipped it to Silverton. He dug the bases for the lift towers by hand, hauling bags of cement up the hill, one at a time.

When he needed to blast rock to make the holes, he studied and took a test that allowed him to use explosives on rock, just as he did for snowpack.

Turns out all that hiking hauling, blasting and exploring was the easy part. It took five years of intensive review by the Bureau of Land Management to approve his plan to access 1,300 public acres surrounding his ski area, creating the only BLM ski area in the lower 48 and the first new ski area in Colorado since 1983.

He hired the best lawyers and deflected several lawsuits from angry neighbors, including an Aspen man who had spent the previous decade planning a $20 million ski resort with a gondola that stretched several miles from Silverton to a restaurant he wanted to build at the top of the jagged ridge where Aaron planted his lift.

Everywhere the Brills turned, they were told they were going to fail.

The federal review seemed designed to wear them down. Local experts warned of deaths if they put skiers on the avalanche-prone peaks surrounding their chairlift.

“I was very skeptical at the time, and what can I say? The proof is in the pudding. Aaron pulled it off, and he’s gone a long time without any serious problems. I must tip my hat to them,” said Chris George, who handled avalanche mitigation for three speed-skiing world championships in the 1980s in the same basin now occupied by Silverton Mountain. Once, when George began firing explosives into the snowpack in Velocity Basin to prep for the 1982 Camel International speed-skiing championships, a single shot triggered 17 avalanches that filled the valley.

The costs of the environmental review left the Brills without a paycheck for nearly a decade. They lived in a dilapidated mining shack with holes in the floor.

Only recently, with the birth of their son, Colt Gladstone, have they upgraded their home and started paying themselves. But they still drive the same tired cars and scrimp on their personal spending while investing deeply in their dream.

But that dream has changed. By the time Aaron and Jenny secured their several-million-dollar BLM permit for Silverton Mountain in 2005, the idea of $25 lift tickets and an environmental center offering education and lift-accessed backcountry skiing had morphed. They had to offer guided skiing, and they needed to spend big money on intensive avalanche control.

“It evolved as businesses evolve, and you adjust to the market and the climate,” Jenny says. “We did what we had to do.”

A 5-pound ammonium nitrate/fuel oil explosive shot cost about $2.25 in 2000. Today, with increased regulation of explosives following Sept. 11, the price for that bomb is more than $20. And the Brills heave more explosives into their slide-prone snowpack than any other resort in Colorado. Insurance costs have quadrupled since they started.

Still, the two never deviated from their commitment to avoid real estate development to fund their ski area, keeping the same tent as a base lodge and only recently upgrading from iced-over pit toilets to portable potties. There’s no running water at the base, but they have retired that UPS truck from skier shuttle duty.

Still, one could argue they replaced real estate with a Eurocopter AS350 B3e helicopter, which has become a huge revenue generator for Silverton Mountain — both in Colorado and Alaska.

“What’s funny and quite ironic is that going through the environmental review is how I got the helicopter. I never wanted it and never asked for it. But in the end, I thought it would be nice to come out of this with something, and we needed the heli for avy control. And it was good for safety,” Aaron says. “I didn’t really think it would go anywhere.”

To offset the cost of leasing a helicopter, the Brills charged guests $99 for a bump to remote peaks that would take a couple hours of hiking to reach.

Demand was high.

Aaron approached Telluride’s Helitrax about buying unused helicopter-skiing permits near his ski area and by 2009, he had BLM permission to run trips on 15,000 acres around his ski area. Today, the Silverton heli runs virtually year-round, ferrying skiers in Colorado in February and March and in Alaska in the spring, fall and early winter.

George, who said his St. Paul Lodge & Hut up Red Mountain Pass near Silverton has benefitted thanks to the Brills, understands the evolution in Silverton Mountain’s business strategy.

“If you are getting into an industry that is a one-of-a-kind, there are going to be changes,” George said.

The success at Silverton Mountain, which this winter for the first time sold out nearly every four-day weekend from January through March, has trickled into town. Before the Brills arrived, most every business boarded up for winter, relying on tourists who flood into town on the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad all summer long.

Retail sales in San Juan County — which counts Silverton as its only town — climbed to $21 million in 2012 from $14 million in 1999.

The unemployment rate dropped to 5.3 percent in 2014 from 11.5 percent in 1999, according to the Region 9 Economic Development District of Southwest Colorado, which helped the Brills with financial support in the early days. Many of those new jobs are in the service industry, with Silverton Mountain’s 40 to 50 jobs making it the county’s leading employer.

“The mountain is why we are here,” said Paul Zimmerman, who opened the Pickle Barrel restaurant for its first-ever winter when the Brills secured their first permits to host skiers. “It has definitely bolstered our winter economy and brought a lot of notoriety.”

Silverton Mountain also lured Lisa and Klem Branner to Silverton, where they set up their Venture Snowboards factory in 2006. Today, Venture is a partner with Silverton Mountain, providing custom-built boards for the Brills and their guides.

“Who better to put our boards through their paces than their guides, who are navigating through burly terrain day in and day out? The feedback and design input we’ve received from the Brills and their team has been invaluable,” said Klem Branner.

This season, the Brills surprised the resort industry when they hired Tim Petrick, the chief executive of K2 Sports and the former chief of Rossignol. They had been consulting with Petrick to find an executive who could help ease pressure on the overworked couple when he volunteered himself for the chief operating officer job, moving with his wife to Silverton from Seattle.

It’s easy to assume the Brills were shining the place up for a sale.

Aaron and Jenny don’t deny it. Their labor of love has always been for sale. Just about everything is for sale, Aaron says. But no one has ever approached them with an offer.

“If somebody walks in with a shoebox full of 100s, you’d have to count them up, right,” Aaron says. “But selling is not my goal. Still, I’m surprised no one has ever called me and even asked me about it.”

Jenny says their motivation hasn’t changed since their first day in Silverton. They want to ride soft snow. Whether it’s off their chairlift or in Alaska, where they own 12 million acres of helicopter skiing permits.

“We both still love skiing, and skiing is still the passion that drives us,” Jenny says. “And really there’s no better place for skiing than Silverton Mountain.”

Jason Blevins: 303-954-1374, jblevins@denverpost.com or @jasonblevins