An obscure Austrian accountant invented the steel edge in order to save lives. Racers found it more valuable for winning gold medals. By John Fry Rudolf Lettner, an office worker who liked to ski, invented a piece of equipment which, more than anything, revolutionized the...
Photo: Gary Cooper (center) with Clark Gable (right) on Dollar Mountain, with their instructor, Sun Valley's Sigi Engl. Sun Valley photo. Imagine a small-size ski area with a 200-room hotel and a crowd of week-long guests hanging around – say, Robert Redford, Bruce Willis,...
They spent almost an hour in line, yet more and more skiers came, bonding as they waited . . . and waited. Beginning after World War II and for the next 40 years, weekend skiers waited in lift lines so long that the person next to you had time to describe where he was...
Giant slalom was invented in Italy in 1935 -- the result of an accident of weather, according to a recent article in the magazine Sciare. It happened when a downhill race, scheduled to take place on January 19, 1935, in Mottarone, above Lake Maggiore in Piedmont, had to be...
At first a gimmicky convenience, the boot buckle took ten years to earn its place among the sport’s enduring inventions. By John Fry Fifty-seven years ago a former stunt pilot and Swiss inventor named Hans Martin sold the world’s leading ski boot company, Henke, his...
If you’ve read the book or seen the film The Other Side of the Mountain, you know about California teenaged ski racer, Jill Kinmont, who suffered a catastrophic injury in a high-speed giant slalom at Alta, Utah, which left her in a wheelchair for the rest of her life. Jill...
The Story of Modern Skiing, by John Fry University Press of New England 2006 • 408 pp. 90 illus. 6 x 9" Sports & Recreation / History $27.95 Cloth, 1-58465-489-9 The book is available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble and the publisher's website (www.upne.com), and in...
In 1935 Seattle native Al Nydin had the idea for a magazine about skiing. Until that time most ski periodicals and annuals were association-published. In publishing America's first independent, commercial magazine, Nydin used the title SKI. The first issue appeared in January...
Boyne Mountain, the Midwest’s largest ski resort, has a further distinction: it is virtually a museum of lifts. The collection started in 1948, according to lift historian Kirby Gilbert, when Boyne’s shrewd, machinery-savvy owner Everett Kircher bought the original 1936...
Skied for 55 or more years, Ruthie’s Run on Aspen Mountain has been the venue for classic, hotly contested World Cup and Roch Cup races. On the mild upper section, the whims of wind and waxing have often decided the downhill winners over the years. If you’re an intermediate,...
The Mason Beekley Collection of skiing art and photography is looking for a new home. “When one door closes, another opens,” said Nat Messina, an attorney and director for the Beekley Family Foundation. The Foundation learned in mid-September, 2009, that the $5 million...
By John Fry The overall World Cup championship was to have been determined by a single giant slalom race, to be held on Saturday, March 19th in the 4,921-foot high Swiss ski resort of Lenzerheide. On the eve of the race, Germany’s Maria Riesch led America’s Lindsey Vonn by...
