Haystack and Hartland Mountain Ski Areas In Litchfield County and West Peak in Meriden never realized their potential as ski resorts for various reasons. Published by the Windsor Patch By Philip R. Devlin January 19, 2012 As a decade, the 1930s is readily associated with...
Boulder’s backyard playground hits its stride, and plans for growth By Seth Masia During the winter of 2010-11, Eldora Mountain Resort held a series of meetings to explain its growth plans to local residents. The resort wants to extend the trail system a few hundred feet...
December 30 will mark the 100th anniversary of a watershed event inColorado’s history: The founding of the first Winter Carnival to feature real Norwegian-style skiing.GrandCounty will celebrate the anniversary with a six-week series of events beginning, on Dec. 30 in Hot...
With the coming of the Depression, Jim Huebner had to leave his failing farm and move to Fresno. An enthusiastic self-taught tennis player, in 1931 he set up a small shop to string rackets and sell balls, near the public courts in Roeding Park. Badger Pass got started as a ski...
While Thousands Cheered: Skiing Heritage Week Scores Record Turnout Skiing Heritage Week, held at Sun Valley in honor of the resort’s 75th anniversary, drew a record turnout. Well, it had some help from half-a-dozen overlapping events. Running concurrently were the U.S....
Fernie Alpine Resort celebrates its 50th anniversary this winter, with special events culminating in a Fernie Heritage Week in late March. But first there's the matter of a new lift. The Polar Peak fixed triple goes to a new summit at 7,050 feet elevation, serving a steep...
A 19th century Rennaissance Man—and yes, eccentric—this Austrian’s extraordinary achievements were largely responsible for the sport we know today. By E. John B. Allen, PhD If modern skiing owes its development to one extraordinary...
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,...
Once in awhile even a trivial challenge can change your life. By Seth Masia 1983 was the 80th anniversary of the “tourist” route from Chamonix to Zermatt, a high traverse of about 100km across the glaciers, cols and couloirs through the Waliser Alps. To celebrate, the...
The factory made its first skis in 1907—and has been an industry leader ever since. Now the future is murky. By Seth Masia Rossignol, the oldest surviving brand name in skiing, can also claim to be the oldest surviving factory in skiing—for now. Ski production began...
From pine pitch to perfluorocarbons, ski waxing has come a long way since the days of Scandinavian ski-sport and Sierra longboard racing. By Seth Masia During the Vancouver Olympics in February, skiers contended alternately with slush and bumpy ice—basically, refrozen...
By Seth Masia Skiers have been following rails into the snowy mountains for 140 years now. 1868 was the year the Mt. Washington cog railway first hauled passengers to the summit. The cog railway didn’t run during the snowy months, because New Hampshire’s vicious weather...
The first "safety" bindings, by Portland skier Hjalmar Hvam, weren't all that safe. But 50 years ago, Cubco, Miller, Look and Marker began to change skiing's broken leg image. By Seth Masia By the mid-Thirties, half of the great inventions of alpine skiing were already in...
By Seth Masia When the first “shaped” skis arrived at ski shops in 1993, they were a revelation. Deep sidecuts to help skis carve short, clean turns had been sneaking up on us for a century – so slowly that only a very few savvy ski designers, largely outside the...
Compiled by Morten Lund and Seth Masia Prehistory: Rock paintings and skis preserved in bogs show that hunters and trappers used skis at least 5000 years ago. [caption id="" align="alignleft" width="487" caption="Classic Norwegian painting of 2-year old prince Häkon...
Compiled by Morten Lund Updated by John Allen and Seth Masia Also see History of Skiing Timeline at the FIS website Also see A Short History of Alpine Skiing Also see A Short History of Skis Also see Lou Dawson's detailed Timeline of Ski Mountaineering 1850—Sondre...
Crans-Montana, Kitzbühel dispute first downhill race In early April 2011, a commemorative race was held on the ski slopes of Crans-Montana, Switzerland, to mark the 100th anniversary of the first Roberts of Kandahar downhill. Some 260 participants, organized into 60 teams,...
