SKIING
HERITAGE

SKIINSKIINsk

ISHA honors eight

2009 awards presented at
Mammoth Skiing Heritage Week

Lifetime Achievement in History: E. John B. Allen

John Allen is an extraordinary, singular figure in the writing and preservation of American ski history, currently the only academic ski historian in the U.S. During his 30-year tenure from 1968 on as professor of history at Plymouth State College in Plymouth, New Hampshire, he has been a major force among those interested in creating a proper historical record for the sport in America.

John Allen also knows quite a bit about skiing in a practical sense: in his younger days he was a ski bum for two seasons at Stowe and two at Aspen as a sort of sabbatical from a serious search for a career. But his career, along the way took him from the ski slopes to ski history. In 1968, John Allen became professor of history at Plymouth State College in New Hampshire, a state once a hotbed of American pioneer skiing and resort building. John’s graduate work had been on the history of diplomacy and he wrote his first book on that subject. It took some time before the turn of events decreed, luckily, that his scholarly work would revolve around ski history.

Initially, John Allen became hooked on ski history in 1976 after having traveled to Innsbruck and seen an exhibition of old skiing prints that set him to buying some old ski books and postcards. After his return to the U.S. he accepted an invitation to join an informal exploratory meeting of a group from the Franconia, New Hampshire Chamber of Commerce aiming to found a “New England Ski Museum.” He spent a day cramming on general museum parameters in the Plymouth State College library with the result that at the meeting he was the only somewhat informed person there—the rest said hardly a word. The steering committee soon appointed him director of the museum’s oral history project.

John Allen thought that taking ski history as his field might be fun and he ought to look into the possibilities. The first signs were good. He went looking for ski history books in Boston. There were none. He was able to find research enough close to home to complete his first work in ski history, a paper published in 1981 entitled The Development of New Hampshire Skiing: 1870-1940. It was published in the spring issue of Historical New Hampshire. John Allen was off and running as a ski historian.

In 1982, the museum finally got a home in a donated state building at Cannon Mountain. Now a museum had to be organized within. John Allen was named to the board of directors’ Executive Committee and elected Vice President and Historian. He says, “None of us knew what we were doing. We joined the New England Museum Association to learn how to run a museum.” To celebrate, John Allen finished his second paper in 1983, Demythologizing a Mail Hero: Snowshoe Thompson, 1827-1940, the second of more than forty papers he published thereafter.

He turned out his first book, Teaching and Technique: A History of Professional Ski Instruction in 1987. In 1993, he published a major work that stands by itself for broad scholarly research in American ski history: From Skisport to Skiing: One Hundred Years of an American Sport, 1840-1940. Thereafter, John Allen wrote his 1997 New England Skiing 1870-1940. In 2002, he wrote the pictorial histories New England on Skis and New Hampshire on Skis and in 2006 the pictorial history Skiing in Massachusetts (with Cal Conniff).

After retirement, John Allen published in 2007 his seventh ski history, this one another milestone academic book: The Culture and Sport of Skiing from Antiquity to World War II, covering a good deal of the entire world of skiing, the first American author of ski history to do such an extensive work in the field of ski history.

And John Allen took the time to write authentic, scholarly articles (minus the footnotes) for the International Ski History Association’s quarterly, Skiing Heritage. He also serves on the Skiing Heritage editorial board, a matter of real importance, since those who are really knowledgeable in ski history remain scarce. Articles in Skiing Heritage begin with “The French Connection to the First Winter Olympics, “in the Second Issue 2000 and “The First Four Olympics, 1924-1936,” in the Fourth Issue 2001.

John Allen’s last sphere of action: the weight of his prestige has made possible the first two international ski history congresses in America. As the only academic ski historian in the U.S. recognized abroad, John Allen as Academic Chair made it possible to hold America’s first International Ski History Congress, sponsored by the Engen Museum and ISHA in Park City in 2002: more than a dozen eminent ski historians came from abroad to read papers. And this year John Allen has ensured the success of the International Ski History Congress at Mammoth Mountain, responsible for attracting more than twenty academic ski historians from abroad to attend.

Thanks in no small part to John Allen, America has joined the rest of the world in considering ski history meriting academic study as a cultural indicator and social barometer, as well as a fascinating sport in and of itself.

Lifetime Achievement in Film and Photography: Paul Ryan

Paul was at the leading edge of photographers recording the sport graphically in the 1960s, providing a row of unconventional, memorable pictures of skiers on steep and hairy slopes. Ski editor John Fry hired Ryan as his first staff photographer because he saw that Paul had a superb flair for recreating the emotion of speed on skis within a photo.
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As Paul put it, “The overriding aspect of the work that I did, is that it was done during enormous ferment in the cultural world, and I myself was going through a major cultural rediscovery. I was discarding my education and training as an engineer, looking for an identity as a photographer, moving from a conservative east coast city to San Francisco in the very middle of it all and I was influenced by new ways of expression. This is what I was bringing to the ski world.”

Paul gave notice there was something new happening in ski photography with his four-page The Steepness of Stowe photo essay in Ski’s December 1, 1966 issue, showing his ability to capture the feeling of accelerating down a forty-five degree slope. He moved the camera with the skier as he shot, and moved the camera against the skier. In the final shot, the perspective put the viewer in a dive to the parking lot. It was, says Paul, “about a concept, not just an event. How to visually depict the feeling of heading over the crest of The National on Mt. Mansfield.” This is the point when the heart stops for a beat.

“… just shooting the reality of a steep slope wouldn’t do it,” says Paul. “Thirty or forty degrees is very steep for the average skier. But shot straight on, forty degrees looks very tame. What conveys the sheer drop is not to be able to see over the crest. As you started down the National there is a point where all you could see was Spruce Peak across the valley. The trail you’re headed down disappears over a precipice, like a cliff. It’s only a moment but in a still photograph, it conveys plunging into the unseen.”

Ryan’s Downhill, King of Competitions, a photo essay for the November 1967 issue of Ski is unsurpassed as an impression of racers at the height of their speed, conveying the feeling with camera motion, a blurred snow fence coming at the racer. In another the snow streaks back from skis like a smoking missile. On Ryan’s September 1967 cover of Ski, the shot of Corky Fowler catches the skis raising a huge burst of snow up to the knees like the steam at lift-off of a space shuttle. Much of this was common later but Paul was the first.

After three seasons of shooting photos for Ski, Paul turned to making ski films. He produced three finely crafted avant garde films. The first, Ski Racer, was an impressionistic take of the style and speed of a trio of modern racers in which intercutting makes the most of a day’s free skiing, intermingled with race clips. The film reflects the times. The ferment of late Sixties echoes in the interlacing music from The Grateful Dead, Steve Miller, Mike Bloomfield, and Indian Ragas with the ski action.

Paul made Ski Racer in 1969. There is certainly no traditional narrative, no particular single event. Ryan was using the cinematic process to convey the split between serious, cold competition and the joyous rolling over the slopes of free skiing. His second film, Mike’s Race, was also a film on racing—from an eight-year old’s viewpoint.

Karli, the third film, is a spontaneous memoir from Karl Schranz, 1962 FIS World Champion, and one of the most original films produced during an inventive decade in ski filmmaking, Paul says, “I wanted to dig a little deeper into one character. Karl Schranz, of course, was already well known, even legendary.

“He had just won the World Cup. Celebrities have some part in themselves that they feel the public doesn’t really know and they want people to know. I had become involved in cinema verité, a very direct form of documentary. ‘The truth at 24 frames per second,” as Jean Luc Goddard called it.’ ” Paul did get Schranz to open up.. In Karli, he wonders if he would not have been happier if he had skipped the racing altogether, and lived a life where he could be himself, natural and human, not as he says, being in a situation where “I always have to smile, always have to be friendly.” Paul says, “I felt, successful as he was, part of him would have loved to be just another skier cruising the mountain.”

After three seasons, Paul left skiing behind for the world of theatrical film leaving a body of work on skiing never quite duplicated.

Lifetime of Achievement in Film: Dick Barrymore

Dick Barrymore is one of a handful of great ski lecture filmmakers in American history, ranking with the two giants of the lecture film, John Jay and Warren Miller. This posthumous Lifetime Achievement Award by ISHA is in recognition of the great importance of Barrymore’s films in reflecting and popularizing American ski history, an accomplishment underlined by his election into the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame in 2000.

His first lecture film of note was the Secret Race, filmed at the 1966 Portillo World Championships. His filming led ABC to win an Emmy for coverage. He smuggled footage out of the 1968 Olympics of Moose Barrows’ spectacular fall in the downhill and enabled Robert Redford to sell Paramount on doing Downhill Racer. Barrymore spent three decades traveling from continent to continent wherever excitement was happening on snow. He would try anything. In 1969 he made The Last of the Ski Bums, a long-shot venture in attempting a theater-release ski documentary. It was shown in six major cities. It crashed. Barrymore bounced back.

That same year he saw Bob Burns come down a mogul run on Sun Valley’s Lower Holiday. The sight changed his life as a ski filmmaker. Burns’ style was not like any Barrymore had seen before. “He attacked a field of moguls like Errol Flynn attacking a band of pirates,” Barrymore wrote in his memoir. When Burns skied bumps, he took a seated position, arms high over his head holding 60-inch-long ski poles and sent his skis straight out over the moguls in front of him and used his strong body to catch up with the skis. He was unique. No one skied like Burns. Bob Burns was, in 1969, the first hot dogger. “One look,” wrote Barrymore, “and I knew that I had to capture Burns on film.”

During the next three winters Barrymore’s films all but single-handedly boosted hot dog skiing from a funky deviation from normal skiing to a full, widely practiced sport. The Performers, shot in 1970 at the first-ever western hot dog contest (in Aspen), released in 1971. The Performers and the next season’s Winter Heat both came out at the height of the “counterculture.” They were very successful. Barrymore was making the most of it, buying a Porsche, a plane, a pad on Dana Point with swimming pool, a catamaran sailboat, a diving boat and more surfboards than he could use.

Barrymore did most of his own shooting, almost always with a handheld camera, almost always doing the editing himself from start to finish. The business end, though, he left to his wife Betsy, a national demo team member, after the two had moved in together in 1972 at Sun Valley.

Jim Stelling, one of Barrymore’s Sun Valley top performers, says, “ Sure, Dick liked to make money, but for him it was mainly the skiing life, the experiences and the stories. He would hold court at dinner, always the entertainer…. For him it was the art of the tale.”

By the late 1970s, Barrymore was so famous around the world he could arrange to ski with the Shah of Iran (who loved to ski) and film the Shah’s wife, Empress Fara Dibba, skiing with onetime U.S. Ski Team members Suzy Chaffee and Billy Kidd in the hills near Teheran. Only Barrymore could have promoted something like that.

Finally, in 1990, he hung up his camera. But Barrymore’s powers of storytelling were not confined the camera. In retirement, he wrote a highly amusing memoir of his life as an entertainer. “It wasn’t that I was tired of skiing or telling stories. It had just become too tough to break even financially.” He entitled his memoir Breaking Even. “I never got rich making ski films…. I was usually in debt and hanging by my fingernails from a small financial ledge while my friends and creditors looked up and yelled, ‘Hang on, Dick, you make great ski movies.’ ”

“As far as the ‘Why did you write this book?’ question, it’s simple: I like to tell stories. This book is about my life as a storyteller.” Breaking Even, one critic wrote, “is a hilarious volume of ski history, a look at what can happen if you make your own rules. If Barrymore hadn’t lived it, even Hollywood couldn’t have dreamt it up.”

Ullr Award: Roland Huntford for Two Boards and a Passion

Huntford is the well-known author of three fine biographies of famous arctic explorers, Scott and Amundsen released in 1979, Shackleton released in 1985 and Nansen, The Explorer as Hero, released in 1997. The first and last books have skiing at the center of the story.

The book on Fridtjof Nansen is considered a definitive biography of the man whose 1888 Across Greenland on Skis roused immense interest in skiing the world over. The books Scott and Amundsen and Shackleton demonstrated the crucial advantage of skilled skiing in wild snow over other means of arctic transport that enabled Amundsen to reach the South Pole first.

Two Planks and a Passion is centered on the development of skiing in Europe. It treats at a greater length than any previous book in English the crucial Norwegian invention of controlling skis without the long steering and braking stick of ancient times. Huntford has a good deal of fresh research on the migration of skiing for sport from Norway to the Continent.

Huntford has researched so widely he has expertly done chapters on Swiss, Austro-Hungarian, French and British development of the sport. Huntford’s book leads the way in many instances to a deeper appreciation of critical junctures in the development of the modern sport.

Two Planks and a Passion treats at greater length than any previous book in English the crucial input of Norwegians in creating the first group of citizens so skilled in the sport as to maneuver freely on all kinds of slopes. This point in the historic development of ski technique came in the late 1800s. It was in effect the historic bridge from ancient to modern skiing. As Huntford says himself in his introduction, “Norwegian sources were central to my task.”

Norway also was the first to define the meaning of skiing as a national competition with a series of large meets culminating in Norway’s famous annual Holmenkollen meet. However, before 1900 only Norwegians were invited. It took Sweden to break the monopoly and define skiing as a sport of international competition with its famous Nordic Games just after the turn of the 1900s, a generation before the first Winter Olympics arrived in Chamonix as a final result.

However, it was the Norwegians who remained for a generation on either side of 1900 the world’s premier skiers in cross country, jumping and in downhill running, even though Norwegians ran downhill only for fun, refusing to see this relative easy matter of downhill skiing as fit for serious competition. Huntford so reminds readers with this bit from Jakob Vaage’s Norske Skier Erober Verden (Norwegian Skiers Conquer the World): Vaage quotes the words of a German ski pioneer describing Norwegian skiers descending a slope in Germany’s Bavarian mountains during the 1890s, “They displayed fantastic elegance, and they finished a downhill run with a Telemark turn, not just a jerk, but in an elegant curve…How amazed we were when we saw how they negotiated steep forested slopes with astonishing speed, using a short [Christiania] turn while we ran down slowly with stem turns.”

The Germans had their revenge. Working ever so hard and ever so diligently—coached by hired Austrians—the Germans managed to turn their stem into a sliding parallel turn, finally achieving a better short parallel turn than the Norwegians had managed to do.

This was evidenced in the 1936 Winter Olympics, held at Garmisch in the same Bavaria where the Norwegians had earlier, as Huntford notes, been observed to out-ski their German friends. At Garmisch, German men came first and second in the slalom and so won the alpine combined gold and silver—the combined being the only alpine medal given. Norway’s Birger Ruud, who had won the downhill, did not do well enough in the slalom to win an alpine medal for the Norwegians, although in compensation, he won the special jump. This is the sort of absorbing tale that rises out of a diligent reading of Huntford’s masterful ski history, at once a delightful book and a storehouse of historical insight.

Skade Award: Robin Morning for Tracks of Passion

Robin Morning got into her first race at Snow Valley, the then flagship ski area of Southern California. The year was 1958 and she was ten, a Santa Monica pre-teen who showed a certain flash for beating others her own size—a talent she never outgrew, as it turned out. Her father, a World War II marine, satisfied his need for action by taking to the slopes weekends with wife, son, and two daughters.

The family switched to Tommy Tyndall’s fast-growing Snow Summit. Family skiing became more of a parent-managed rat pack of kid racers going to meets. At that point, Robin’s mother, tired of seeing her kids beaten by other little juniors from towns lying in snow country. She organized the Junior Skiers of Southern California, with other parents to get their racers on the snow as often as possible. The combined car fleet carried some forty kids to the ski races every weekend. Robin’s mother turned out to have provided the key. Robin and her brother made it onto the 1961 Far West Junior Ski Team: Robin at thirteen, three years into racing, was beating girls of fifteen and sixteen.

In the meantime, Mammoth Mountain had gone into operation with one chair and many ropes six years earlier. And was underway to greatness. Dave had time to conduct a full-on coaching program to fill the berths on his Mammoth Ski Team with talented kids. When Dave was the named to coach of the Far West kids for the 1961 Nationals, he invited Robin to come to Mammoth to train.

“My family, and my brother and I just started coming to Mammoth,” says Robin. “Dave took us under his wing. It was amazing to be coached by Dave. Fantastic. Everything was so upbeat.. It got to be a big family. We had the run of the mountain. We did not pay for a thing. The best women in the world were skiing with us—Linda Meyers, Joan Hannah, Jean Saubert.”

Robin was on her way. In 1968, she was about to hit the big time. Almost. She broke her leg on a speed run the day before the opening ceremonies at the 1968 Olympics in Grenoble. Her racing career was over. But her tie to Dave McCoy remained. She skied at Mammoth whenever she could. Ten years ago, Robin started researching what she had decided would be her book on McCoy, Mammoth and Eastern Sierra skiing.

She began to pile up facts and pictures on trips to Mammoth during open time slots around her work as a science teacher in San Diego. “I was determined to start the book with the Paiute Indians, so I did a lot of background.” Then she moved to Mammoth to work on the museum exhibits full time. Two years ago, she was ready to put it together in the format she decided would best represent her feeling for the mountains, for Mammoth and for Dave. She had decided to do it as a picture book.

The first section of the book does start with the Paiutes in the Eastern Sierra, an elder of the tribe who says, “We were not very cold or afraid of the snow.” This leads into old time skiing at Mammoth City, when there were a hundred skiers out on their long boards on a good day. The book takes the reader through scenes of the pre-ski resort Eastern Sierra—the ramshackle main street of Mojave, a gas station at Big Pine, antique cars parked for a picnic—all very nostalgic rural 1920s. And then a gradually to modern skiing beginning with Dave McCoy as a boy who learned to ski from high school friends. There is a shot of him in a full Arlberg crouch, with a grin.

In 1935, he graduated and headed for the Eastern Sierra where he wanted to be. McCoy was a young man with independence, nerve, and determination, traits that drew Dave to the very new ski area business. McCoy understudied by building a totally transportable rope tow set in the back of a pickup, powered by the pickup’s jacked-up wheel. He and his friends drove wherever the snow was best, carrying their tow with them.

Dave’s sparkling vitality—it shines forth in the photos of the young entrepreneur—kept him going onward and upward and inspired those who worked with him to turn the Mammoth terrain into, eventually, a totally McCoy-designed mountain. Mammoth itself, as seen in successive pictures in the book, rises visibly to the level of the top half-dozen leading destination resorts in the country.

Skade Award: Mary Kerr for A Mountain Love Affair: The Story of Mad River

During the mid-1980s, Mary Kerr, a graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, found herself restless in the suburban New Jersey housewife role. Even though husband Joe Kerr was working in New York City for the prestigious consulting firm of Booz Allen, Mary and Joe decided to move to rural surroundings near their favorite ski resort in Vermont’s Mad River Valley.

Once settled down, Mary got a job editing The Valley Reporter. Joe found rewarding work in human resources, including a four- year stint as special assistant to the governor of the state, Dean Davis. In time, Mad River decided to celebrate its 60th Anniversary in 2008 by issuing a history of the ski area and turned to Mary. She already had an archive on Mad River, and managed to pull together old and new interviews, illustrations of memorabilia and a trove of photographs into A Mountain Love Affair, describing how and why Mad River was, and is, an extraordinary ski area.

Mad River’s founders laid out a conservative plan of development and stuck to it—that is unusual right there. The main terrain on Stark Mountain is somewhat of a live flashback to 1948—no grooming, no machine-made snow. While there is a more recently constructed intermediate ski area to one side that is regularly groomed, on any given day, the main trails on Mt. Stark have moguls, ruts, and with luck some newly fallen snow. Mad River last year built a brand new lift up Stark Mountain—a meticulous reincarnation of its 1948 single chair, per the expressed wish of the skiers in the Mad River Cooperative: the Faithful, owning the mountain as a co-op, voted to keep things as is.

The ski area of Mad River sans the resort overhang of restaurants, bars and condo villages was founded in the midst of the great escalation of “family values” that followed World War II. Nearly family in America had a member serving among the ten million in the armed forces—and many could not wait to hunker down into family life and produce the Baby Boom. And there was a new thing, family togetherness. Family skiers came pouring into the sport during the postwar economic high. The postwar ski boom took off at a strong rate, as much as 30 percent per year.

A regular web of rope tows was slung across the rolling hills of American snow country. And for upgrades to the not-so-elegant ropes, steel plants with wartime capacity were eager to make steel parts for T-bars and chairs. Thousands of ex-GI’s who had learned to prefer the outdoors over office work were happy to make skiing the touchstone of postwar life. Mad River profited from all that, along with many other resorts. But “Mad” stayed close, as Mary Kerr details, to the ideal of family skiing.

Mary Kerr’s book captures the temperament of Mad River’s founder, Roland Palmedo, a New York investment banker and Navy pilot, spent much of World War II on the carrier Yorktown. Roland already had a head start in investing in skiing, having financed and operated the East’s premier chairlift on land leased from the state of Vermont on Mt. Mansfield in Stowe. While at sea, Roland had decided to build a ski area that was all his, rather than sharing Mt. Mansfield with other enterprises seeking to crowd in.

Roland commissioned J. Negley Cooke, an investor in Roland’s Mansfield enterprise, to scout about Vermont for suitable private land. After some searching, J. Negley found the 3637-foot vertical Stark Mountain with 2000 vertical in the Mad River Valley, state of Vermont. When Roland came off the Yorktown, he quickly bought the mountain. Equally quickly, he financed a single chair to the top—with a little help from friends who shared his belief that “mountains should be utilized as close to their natural state as possible for recreation not for profit,” as Kerr writes. And that has held.

Mad River has remained a skiers’ mountain above a simple skiers’ village. All around in Vermont during the next fifty years, the “business model” raged on to new heights of saturation while Mad remained aloof. As Mary Kerr notes, “Anyone who got involved with Mad River wasn’t there for the money.” One full-page, four-color photo in Mary Kerr’s book is a still life showing nothing but a new, glorious single chair all by itself, sporting a glistening coat of rime on steel, hanging in lonely splendor, brilliant in the Vermont sunshine against blue peaks in the distance. Somehow it does not need a caption.

Film Award: Lars Larsen for Skiing in the Shadows of Genghis Khan

One of the most interesting films recently available and valuable to ski historians happens to be not as much about the past as about the survival of the past in the present. The film revolves around the real live skiers of China’s Altai mountains contacted and filmed by the Northwest’s expert nordic and backcountry ski instructor Nils Larsen. Into view in Larsen’s film Skiing in the Shadow of Genghis Kahn come skiers in big sheepskin hats and knit caps sailing down the slope on six-inch wide, eight-foot long skis, lined underneath with shaggy horse-skin. Their equipment and technique are so different from any today, quite obviously their development has not been affected by the modern world.

Their technique can tell us about the technical level that could have been attained by prehistoric tribes that, at the end of the Stone Age, spread skiing around the Arctic rim from Norway to the Bering Strait. Until now, study of prehistoric ski technique has been confined to crude drawings incised on rocks around the end of the Neolithic Age, the last phase of the Stone Age. And now we know that primitive skiers do exist in deepest Asia—the closest live demonstration we will likely ever have to Stone Age skiing come to life.

Larsen documents the remoteness in winter of Kanas, a village in the Chinese Altai Mountains where villagers ski with technique and skis very possibly developed over centuries in isolation. To see skiers come flying out of the ancient past skiing so confidently has pushed the appreciation of primitive skiing to a new level. There is a superb sequence in the film of an Altai ski-maker felling a tree with an axe, then boring a line of holes down the center to aid in splitting the log, then laboriously planing down the log halves until they take the shape of skis. The tips are made by heating the front ends in an open oven and bending and holding the fronts up until they dry in the right shape. Add leather thong bindings anchored by four holes drilled through the wood and—presto, skis!

The Altai skiers use their broad long skis for travel and steer by changing direction with the help of a long stiff pole. To turn, skiers lean well back on their long pole to bring the ski tips to the surface of the snow. The resulting reduction of resistance gives the skiers enough leverage to turn the skis with their feet, aided by a little rudder action by the pole.
The film also looks at the life of the Altai mountain people, a life still fairly well preserved even though changes are slowly being wrought by the recent opening of the roads to the outside in summer, bringing a certain amount of summer tourism. In winter, when the snow is no more than three feet, the villagers travel by beautifully handcrafted wooden sleds, drawn by the small wiry, shaggy mountain ponies, tough as nails. Nils Larsen and two American friends, Naheed Henderson, a veteran of backcountry, and David Waag, publisher of Off-Piste magazine, came into Kanas village by horse sled via a two-day trudge from the town of Chunkor, the jumping-off point.

The kids ride bareback. One of the short but startling sequences comes when a four-year-old bounces into view on the bare back of a galloping pony! These mountains still turn out riders skilled as those who made up the great armies of Genghis Kahn, born somewhat east of the Altai. His portrait still hangs on the walls of the log homes in the village. The riders of the Altai were among those spearheading Genghis Kahn’s fearful push westward to Europe in the 1200s.

Skiing in the Altai is now confined to getting through deep snow, but Mongolian ponies, towing sleds, bear the brunt of winter travel. The other historic reason for skiing was the hunt. During the winter, skiers quite handily ran down deer, elk, wolves and small game in deep snow. But hunting is now banned by the government, and the number of practiced skiers is diminishing.

Nils Larsen, after having spent over three months total on three trips to the Chinese Altai, says that “My interest in the culture and the history of the area keeps me coming back. It is changing rapidly and a very old way of life will, for the most part, soon vanish.”

Larsen notes that the people in Kana still hang portraits of
Genghis Kahn up on the wall. He says, “Genghis Kahn is almost a kind of deity here, because he conquered most of the known world, creating the largest contiguous empire in history, the biggest expression of the Mongolian culture. When you look at where he came from, which is hunting country, and know that when he was young, he was destitute and had to live from hunting, you can see that there is a high probability that he used skis.”

Cyber Award: Jeremy Davis for the NELSAP Project

A lifetime skier who is a rather rare combination of working meteorologist and volunteer ski historian, Jeremy Davis has been hard at it over the last decade in adding a whole new chunk to the ski history record. His day job is prediction of future weather for a selected clientele of ocean-going craft, occasionally famous ships including, say the Queen Mary.

Davis’ off-hours are taken up with retrieving the past, memories and memorabilia of the past, ski areas that no longer exist. Davis locates ski areas that have been “lost,” in New England in particular, mainly through his website nelsap.org, or NELSAP, New England Lost Ski Areas Project. And he has been busy. At last count, the website lists some six hundred abandoned ski areas slowly deteriorating or already practically in the ground.

From a history point of view Davis has discovered an almost entirely unsuspected but amazing number of small ski areas founded from 1945 to 1970—the post-World War II era—that sprang up, and then mostly died. His sources come from veteran skiers fifty and up documenting abandoned ski areas, contributing scanned photos, memorabilia, and emailing reminiscences, all to be posted on his website. The contributors form an informal sort of club with scheduled get-togethers and a yearly hike for those interested in sharing recollections of now-abandoned sites once part of a simpler,
calmer and more personal era of skiing.

The New England Lost Ski Area Project has become a ski history bonanza, proving as nothing else has that the main thrust behind the Northeast’s post-World War II ski boom was the rapid, often amateur, construction of small ski areas run often in part by volunteers. New England set the pace for rapid expansion of the sport in the U.S. , typically by throwing up a rope tow early on, making enough profit to rather quickly upgrade to T-bars and then possibly to single chairlifts and to create a solid base for popular skiing that has persisted even if the ski areas mostly did not. New England set the record for converting to less personal but more complex ski areas that survived by becoming ski “resorts,” infiltrating the slopes and nearby roads with restaurants, bars, condo villages, and luxurious inns, or at least inns with pretensions to luxury, like steady hot water.

Davis has also gone hunting for lost ski areas himself. Davis says, “I have found all kinds of cool artifacts. At Mt. Watatic, I found old, musty brochures in the remains of the ski rental building. At Hamilton Hills in Massachusetts I found a J-bar standing in the woods.” (He saved that one, stored it at his house.) “At Thorn Mountain, New Hampshire, which had been closed for 50 years, Davis “found the chairlift cables under piles of leaves and the paved parking lot, now essentially in the woods.” He also found collapsed outhouses for skiers coming off the upper single. “At another area in western Massachusetts,” says Davis, “I found a rusted snow gun, probably from the late 1950's.”

In his first book, Davis’ discovery of those long gone early ski areas in New Hampshire is well-documented. In The Lost Ski Areas of the White Mountains. Davis uses photos and recollected fact to prove that these ski areas actually existed in the state, even if not for long. He has logged in some 70 ski areas operating at one time or another. The survivors have dwindled to thirteen. Davis will certainly be writing future books to document the rise and fall of skiing areas in the other five New England states to round out his fine and inventive contribution to mid-1900s American ski history in New England.

Glenn Parkinson, former president of the New England Ski Museum, writes in his foreword, “We may have grown up in different states, but we have shared memories of learning to ski and riding a rope tow, poma lift or T-bar, and of skiing under the lights on a school night. Jeremy's work reminds us of our youth. By documenting the past of lost ski areas, Jeremy has also documented the sense of community found at a small, local ski hill. He has documented the pride, the work and the fun that was found across the North Country in the winter. Preserving the history and the heritage of skiing is a noble endeavor. The passing of time brings with it many changes, but they are often more superficial than we may think. Skiing's soul remains unchanged.”

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The International Skiing History Association is a not-for-profit corporation, whose mission is to preserve and advance the knowledge of ski history and to increase public awareness of the sport's heritage.

ISHA, 4582 South Ulster St., Suite 1340, Denver, CO 80237 303-893-0903
Skiing Heritage, 133 South Van Gordon St #300, Lakewood CO 80228 303-987-1111