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2001 I.S.H.A. AWARDS

DICK DORWORTH
Lifetime Achievement Award in Ski Journalism

Born and raised in Reno and Lake Tahoe, Dick Dorworth has had successful careers on both the editorial side and the reality side of skiing. His racing career began in 1950 and lasted 15 years. Skiing for the University of Nevada, Dick won the last of the four-way intercollegiate skimeister titles in 1962. He was on the USSA Training Team in 1962-63. Training with the U.S. team in Portillo, he set the world speed record of 106.8 mph on a timed course in 1963. He was a coach on the U.S. Ski Team in 1970-71.
Dick took his ski teacher’s certificate in the U.S. and France as well; he was a Far West examiner, headed Aspen Ski School in 1988-89, and the Soldier Mountain Ski School in 1993-94. His writing career began in 1966 with an account in Ski of breaking the world speed record and continued with regular articles in Ski and Skiing in the 1970s and onward. His stories include first-person accounts of ski mountaineering in China’s Pamirs (Ski November 1981), a trek the length of the Wind River and a week-long solo trek in the Sierra (Ski March 1982).
He has written articles on ski disasters including the crash of the Squaw gondola accident for Ski’s September 1978 issue and the avalanche that buried Alpine Meadows base area (Ski October 1982). He has done sketches of Buddy Werner and Spider Sabich. For Skiing Heritage in 1999, a bio of the late Steve McKinney.
He has also written about the sport for Snow Country, Ski Racing and the Mountain Gazette. He has written a book-length manuscript about speed skiing called The Straight Course. Three sections from it were published as a chapter in The Ski Book, a 1982 anthology of all-time best ski writing, selected by Morten Lund.
Dick is currently living in Sun Valley and is a columnist for the Idaho Mountain Express when not skiing and guiding in the mountains. His most recent piece was this year’s Ski Instruction in America for the Mountain Gazette. His home is in Ketchum, Idaho, and in the winter he skis nearly every day on Mt. Baldy or in the backcountry. His writing career has always been hampered a bit by all the time that he spends on skis.
Dick Hauserman started his book on Vail before Pete Seibert started his. Dick started his book 18 years ago, with a view to getting the details of the founding process down on paper before they became lost in the mists of memory. But Dick did not get serious about wrapping it up until about three years ago when he began writing in earnest, setting up over sixty interviews to get the early days down on the record.
Dick has come a long way since his days as a flat-lander from Cleveland, not interested in skiing. In 1946 while serving as an officer in the Navy, he met his future wife, Blanche, on a blind date in New York. Blanche had been an instructor at Tremblant, and promised to teach Dick to ski. After they married, Dick continued as director of sales and marketing for Cleveland’s Hauserman Company, the family-owned, world’s largest manufacturer of movable interior office walls. But, in March 1948, after the two had been married a year, a change began. The couple took a trip to Aspen. There Blanche taught Dick to ski. On the third day, as Dick recalls it, he made it down the old narrow twisty Roch Run in fear and trembling. He was a skier. Even more, he was a survivor.
In 1950, the two of them made their first trip to Sun Valley. From then on, they returned to Sun Valley for at least two weeks a season and during their tenth Sun Valley vacation, Dick was elected President of the Sun Valley Ski Club.
Enter Vail. In the 1950s, Dick’s firm was doing work in Denver for Gerry Hart, John Murchison’s realty director. In 1959, Gerry became one of the first directors of Vail Associates and suggested getting Dick as an investor. Eventually, Pete Seibert came to Cleveland to pitch Dick, who was not all that impressed. But he did invest $5,000 anyway. The next thing he knew, he was on the Vail board attending the first director’s meeting on January 8, 1960 at the Denver Country Club. Dick had a degree in architecture, and was made the chairman of the Vail village architectural committee. When no one wanted to build the first commercial building “out there in the middle of a pasture,” Dick volunteered. He opened the resort’s first ski shop, getting a three-year moratorium on other shops as protection against the slim clientele of the first few years. In October 1962, Dick and Blanche moved from Cleveland to become the first permanent full-time residents of Vail.
Dick remained on the board until October, 1968. Later he was hired by Ling-Tempco-Vought to consult for two years on the development of Steamboat for LTV. In 1970, Dick founded Rec Sports, which built and operated sports shops within Colorado. Some forty years later, Dick’s Rec Sports still operates twelve successful ski shops in the state, and Dick still has a home in Vail valley.

PETER SEIBERT
Ullr Award for Vail, Triumph of a Dream

In 1960, Peter Seibert had become the sparkplug and leader of the entrepreneurs who were founding the resort of Vail. Pete by then had already had more adventure and travel than most have in their lifetime. The adventures began with service in the 10th Mountain Division and peaked when Pete took part in the assault on Mt. Terminale, March 3, 1945, and received severe wounds from mortar fire, one fragment destroying his right kneecap.
Doctors told him he might not walk and would certainly never ski. It was August 1946, 17 months later, before he had recovered sufficiently to reunite with his family in Sharon, Massachusetts. He headed for Aspen that September, and began his own physical therapy regime, working with the crews clearing slash from the liftlines and trails of the ski area being cut on the mountain under the direction of Friedl Pfeifer. That winter, he worked on the Aspen patrol, learning to ski all over again with a knee bandage-brace he had designed. One of his patrol duties was ski-packing the trails from the top, sometimes twice a day, or 6,400 feet of vertical. Pete’s right leg grew stronger. By fitting a wooden block behind his knee, he was able to race. The climactic moment of his recovery came when Pete won Aspen’s second Roch Cup in 1947. He was on the 1950 U.S. ski team—a sprained ankle ended his chances at Aspen.
He decided to go into resort management. In the spring of 1950 he flew off to Switzerland, learned French and attended L’École de Hotelière de Lausanne—for three years. He returned here to run Loveland Basin, directly west of Denver.
On March 19, 1957, he went skiing with his friend Earl Eaton, who was working on the Loveland patrol, exploring some promising terrain Eaton had walked several times in the summer, but never in the winter. Pete and Earl climbed for seven hours from the valley where I-90 now runs to the top of what is now Vail. After that, Pete moved fast.
By May 1960, Vail Associates had been formed and obtained a Forest Service permit. It had bought hundreds of acres of valley bottom. Vail opened on December 15, 1962, and after a few years became a runaway success. Vail grew and grew. In 1976, the resort was sold to Harry Bass. Soon after, Pete and Vail parted company but Pete’s work lived on. When Beaver Creek opened in 1980, it made Vail/Beaver Creek by far the country’s largest ski resort.
This story was too good to be kept under wraps so Pete and William Oscar Johnson labored mightily during the past year to put Pete’s and Vail’s biography between two covers. As with many of Pete’s adventures, this one ended in success.

DICK HAUSERMAN
Ullr Award for The Inventors of Vail

Dick Hauserman started his book on Vail before Pete Seibert started his. Dick started his book 18 years ago, with a view to getting the details of the founding process down on paper before they became lost in the mists of memory. But Dick did not get serious about wrapping it up until about three years ago when he began writing in earnest, setting up over sixty interviews to get the early days down on the record.
Dick has come a long way since his days as a flat-lander from Cleveland, not interested in skiing. In 1946 while serving as an officer in the Navy, he met his future wife, Blanche, on a blind date in New York. Blanche had been an instructor at Tremblant, and promised to teach Dick to ski. After they married, Dick continued as director of sales and marketing for Cleveland’s Hauserman Company, the family-owned, world’s largest manufacturer of movable interior office walls. But, in March 1948, after the two had been married a year, a change began. The couple took a trip to Aspen. There Blanche taught Dick to ski. On the third day, as Dick recalls it, he made it down the old narrow twisty Roch Run in fear and trembling. He was a skier. Even more, he was a survivor.
In 1950, the two of them made their first trip to Sun Valley. From then on, they returned to Sun Valley for at least two weeks a season and during their tenth Sun Valley vacation, Dick was elected President of the Sun Valley Ski Club.
Enter Vail. In the 1950s, Dick’s firm was doing work in Denver for Gerry Hart, John Murchison’s realty director. In 1959, Gerry became one of the first directors of Vail Associates and suggested getting Dick as an investor. Eventually, Pete Seibert came to Cleveland to pitch Dick, who was not all that impressed. But he did invest $5,000 anyway. The next thing he knew, he was on the Vail board attending the first director’s meeting on January 8, 1960 at the Denver Country Club. Dick had a degree in architecture, and was made the chairman of the Vail village architectural committee. When no one wanted to build the first commercial building “out there in the middle of a pasture,” Dick volunteered. He opened the resort’s first ski shop, getting a three-year moratorium on other shops as protection against the slim clientele of the first few years. In October 1962, Dick and Blanche moved from Cleveland to become the first permanent full-time residents of Vail.
Dick remained on the board until October, 1968. Later he was hired by Ling-Tempco-Vought to consult for two years on the development of Steamboat for LTV. In 1970, Dick founded Rec Sports, which built and operated sports shops within Colorado. Some forty years later, Dick’s Rec Sports still operates twelve successful ski shops in the state, and Dick still has a home in Vail valley.

ELLIE HUGGINS AND DAN WENDIN
Ullr Awards for Distinguished Ski History Book Publishing

Operating a small publishing house from home at the foot of Donner Pass, Dan Wendin and Ellie Huggins made Coldstream Press a mainstay of ski history during the late 1990s. As editor and publisher, Ellie and Dan brought out three outstanding titles: Mountain Dreamers, Visionaries of Sierra Nevada Skiing by Robert Frolich, 1997; Skiing With Style, Sugar Bowl 60 Years by Robert Frolich and S. E. Humphries, 1999; Magic Yosemite Winters, A Century of Winter Sports by Gene Rose, also in 1999.
Ellie got into the sport more heavily in Europe, where she and her then husband became proficient at the sport, in Germany’s Hartz mountains.
In 1990, she met Dan Wendin, a programmer for Apple Computer in Cupertino. Ellie started Coldstream Press in 1992 from home in the Bay area with What Shall We Do Tomorrow at Lake Tahoe?, a book now with some 35,000 copies in print. In 1993, Dan and Ellie married and later moved to Truckee in 1995. Dan decided to join Coldstream in 1997 to see if they could continue the firm’s publishing success. In 1997, they republished Northwest Passages from the Pen of John Muir. Their approach became one of putting a fine designer together with outstanding photographers to create their vision of special people and places of the Sierra.
They are proud that Gene Rose’s book on Yosemite skiing won both an I.S.H.A. Ullr Award last year and the Benjamin Franklin Award for design and editorial excellence given by an association of independent publishers. They research travel guides together. The best part of their research trips is traveling to the most picturesque sites, staying at bed-and-breakfasts, indulging both their love of the Sierra and the region’s food.
Dan and Ellie are currently working with Robin Morning, onetime U.S. ski team member, to produce a history of Mammoth and Dave McCoy. Ellie says they have found that, “when you do beautiful books, it costs a lot of money but it’s been fun.”

BILL WILSON
Skade Award for Challenging The Mountain:
The Life and Times of Wendell Robie

A working newspaperman, Bill Wilson has made his home in the Sierra foothills for forty-two years, heading a bureau for the Sacramento Bee, covering news and writing features about the high country. In 1985 he turned to freelancing.
He was a longtime acquaintance of Wendell Robie, founder of the Auburn Ski Club, the oldest still-functioning ski club in the Far West. That made Robie a natural subject. Wendell was an Auburn lumberman and outdoorsman who founded the Auburn Ski Club in 1928, the first ski club in the Far West since the old miners’ clubs.
There is besides the story of the Auburn club a good deal of Robie’s riding and lumbering in the book. Nevertheless, the book contains a priceless record of early California nordic and alpine skiing. The club’s early competitions were a sparkplug of California skiing. National jumping champ Roy Mikkelsen was an early member. The club held California’s first slalom race in 1931.
Bill began writing his book five years ago, encouraged by the Wendell Robie Historical Foundation, an organization formed in order to fund the work of writing and publishing the book. Robie died in 1984, but there were many of his friends still living in Auburn. As Wilson says, “I interviewed nearly seventy people who knew him. After that, the book wrote itself.”