Pioneers: Sepp Benedikter Put Southern California on Skis
Starting with his work for Averell Harriman to launch Sun Valley, Benedikter made it his life goal to grow the sport of skiing.
Sepp Benedikter dedicated his life to skiing, achieving many firsts over the span of a 62-year career that involved ski instruction, ski-area development and ownership, and inventive ways to make skiing popular in Southern California.
Born in Bad Gastein, in the Austrian Alps, in 1911, Benedikter began skiing at age two and a half and entered his first race the following year. His teaching career began when he was 16. Two years later, he earned his Austrian ski teachers certificate.
From 1929 through 1936 he owned and operated ski schools in Zell am See, Schmittenhöhe, Saalbach-Hinterglemm and Bad Gastein. In 1932, he graduated from the Hotelfachschule Salzburg with a degree in hotel management and operated an agency offering European travel to tourists.
In 1936 Averell Harriman, chairman of Union Pacific Railroad, enlisted Austrian Count Felix Schaffgotsch to gather a group of European ski instructors to teach at Sun Valley, Idaho, hoping to create one of the top ski schools in the world. Schaffgotsch contracted to bring Benedikter and five other Austrian instructors to help launch America’s first purpose-built destination ski resort.
Benedikter arrived that fall, while construction was ongoing at the lodge and on the resort’s three chairlifts. At Sun Valley, he marked one of his many firsts in U.S. skiing. It’s been reported that Benedikter took the first ride on the country’s first chairlift and, soon after, taught the resort’s first ski lesson, on opening day, December 21, 1936. Those lessons took place at nearby Galena Summit since there was not yet any snow at the resort.
Paramount Studios soon arrived in Sun Valley to film
I Met Him in Paris, starring Claudette Colbert, Robert Young and Melvyn Douglas. Paramount tapped Ethel Severson Van Degrift, from Southern California, and Benedikter to ski in the film. He would later double for Milton Berle in Sun Valley Serenade and was recruited to ski in a training film for U.S. ski troops produced by Twentieth Century Fox.
Benedikter fell in love with the U.S. while in Sun Valley and in spring 1937 went back to Austria to prepare for a permanent move to America. When he returned in the fall, he landed in Minneapolis, Minnesota, having been recruited by Dayton’s department store to assist with its ski shop and provide lessons on an indoor ski slide, which Benedikter then designed and built. Dayton’s had gone all in for skiing, opening a 9,000-square-foot ski shop on its second floor. Along with his ski-teaching duties, Benedikter trained shop employees and advised on the store’s gear purchases.
Word spread about Dayton’s Austrian ski expert, and he was soon teaching night skiing at Moon Valley, 18 miles from downtown Minneapolis. The ski area was described as a place where “Minneapolis businessmen get their exercise by after-dinner skiing on the floodlighted slopes.”
Up to this time, Midwestern ski culture had centered on cross-country skiing and jumping. But Benedikter’s enthusiasm and expertise nearly single-handedly helped make Alpine skiing popular in the Twin Cities area.
In spring 1938, Benedikter joined with the Union Pacific Railroad to sponsor a ski train from Minneapolis to Sun Valley, with packages that included five days of skiing and lodging at the Challenger Inn.
Then, when Moon Valley organized its ski club in November 1938, Benedikter presented movies of Sun Valley to the 300 skiers in attendance. He also started weekly Monday night lessons for ski club members, as Moon Valley’s first and only instructor at the time.
In December 1938, Minneapolis’ Wirth Park, outfitted with lights, began offering evening instruction and clinics in ski jumping, downhill and slalom skiing. Benedikter and Wyman Smith, coach of the Glenwood and Columbia-Arlberg clubs, directed the slalom and downhill instruction, the first time Alpine race coaching was offered in the Minneapolis area.
Also in December 1938, Benedikter began writing a weekly ski-instructional column, “The Art of Skiing,” for the Minneapolis Journal. Around the same time, the “Ski Hill Jottings” column in the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that in his two seasons at Dayton’s, Benedikter “demonstrated the Arlberg technique of controlled skiing on the indoor slide … to thousands of people who would otherwise have had no way of learning what this much-talked-of ‘downhill skiing’ meant.”
At the end of 1938, Benedikter was lured away to California by Cortlandt “Corty” Hill, to be the private instructor for the newly formed Wooden Wings Ski Club. The club had a full roster of Hollywood stars, including Gary Cooper, Errol Flynn, Henry Fonda, Claudette Colbert, David Niven, Tyrone Power and David O. Selznick. (Hill was inducted into the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame in 1970.)
Benedikter arrived in California in January 1939. He instructed members of the club at Little Round Valley in the Eastern Sierra. That summer, he completed work on a pine-needle ski slope near Los Angeles, on a hillside near what is now Universal Studios. He installed two rope tows and a ski-rental shop and covered the slope with about 6,000 sacks of pine needles.
The Wooden Wings Ski Club was short lived. The 1941–42 ski season found Benedikter in McCall, Idaho, where he was tapped to replace Kaare Engen, Alf Engen’s brother, as a ski instructor. Benedikter immediately began to plan ski tournaments throughout the season and scheduled practice slalom meets on Sundays. In the early 1940s, he taught recreational skiing for the U.S. Air Force at Gowen Field in Boise.
Benedikter soon became involved in the development of Bogus Basin, located a few miles north of Boise. The ski area opened on December 20, 1942, but he had already been on hand the previous winter, supervising the construction of a rope tow.
According to Henry Curtis, quoted in the book Building Bogus Basin, “Benedikter had rounded up a group of junior and senior high school youngsters and took us to Bogus Basin on weekends to build a simple rope tow from the bottom of the basin to the knoll a short distance uphill.” He also opened the area’s ski school, becoming Bogus Basin’s first instructor. He remained there throughout the war, when it was one of the few ski areas to remain open because Bogus Basin Ski Club members volunteered to operate the area.
After the war, Benedikter again landed in Southern California, which would become his home. In 1946, he established a ski school at Big Pines Park, in the San Gabriel Mountains and became ski school director in January 1947.
When the California Ski Instructors Association—later the Far West Ski Instructors Association—incorporated in 1947, Benedikter was one of 11 directors. He also served as an examiner for nine years, served on the board of directors and was president of the organization for two years.
Postwar skiing continued to grow, and virtually every Southern California area had installed rope tows or a chairlift or had plans to do so. Ski lessons were in demand and in December 1948, Benedikter organized a ski school that offered instruction at four of Southern California’s major ski areas: Big Pines, Table Mountain, Mt. Waterman and Snow Valley. He hired 10 instructors for the school.
Southern California skiing was coming of age. Los Angeles Times ski writer Ethel Severson Van Degrift wrote in her “Ski Slants” column, “All this is a far cry from the early days of skiing here, when ski tows did not exist, skiing was mostly climbing and instruction was catch-as-catch-can.”
Benedikter soon had a new focus—owning his own ski area. The December 13, 1949, Los Angeles Mirror announced the opening of Holiday Hill, constructed and developed by Benedikter. Situated between Big Pines and Wrightwood, northeast of Los Angeles, it opened with a lower 800-foot rope tow for beginners and another 600-foot rope tow above for intermediate and advanced skiers. The area included a warming house, with equipment rentals and lessons available.
The second phase of Holiday Hill’s development was a 5,800-foot chairlift to the summit. Construction began in October 1950 but was interrupted in December.
Financial conflict arose between Benedikter and business partner John Steinmann. A compromise was soon agreed upon, with Van Degrift reporting in December that “an amicable settlement of legal differences in the partnership will be reached soon, and work may proceed by the beginning of the week. Once work is resumed it will be only a matter of 10 days or so, barring interference from snowfall, until the work will be completed.”
Work was soon restarted and the chairlift, with a capacity of 600 skiers per hour, began whisking skiers to the top of the area in December 1950. Holiday Hill, now Mountain High East, is still operating today and is one of Southern California’s most popular ski areas.
Steinmann took over ownership of Holiday Hill in 1951, and even though Benedikter was no longer involved in the area, the 1950s was nonetheless a busy decade for him. In summer 1951, he designed and oversaw the construction of a ski jump at the Los Angeles County Fair. It was touted as the world’s highest artificial ski jump.
With temperatures frequently over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, close to eight million pounds of crushed ice had to be spread over the jump and out run during the duration of the fair. Benedikter enlisted the U.S. Olympic ski jump team to give exhibition ski jumps, along with Clarita Heath Bright and other women skiers to demonstrate Alpine technique and pique media coverage.
He also hosted a weekly television show called Ski Tips, where he taught skiing and promoted the virtues of Southern California skiing. Then, in December 1954, Benedikter produced and starred in his own show, Ski Meisters, giving the latest tips on where to go skiing.
The 1960s brought new opportunities for Benedikter. He had a second chance at becoming a ski area owner and operator. Rebel Ridge ski area in Big Bear Lake was on the block in a bankruptcy auction. Benedikter and his business partner, Robert E. Thomas, purchased the ski area on December 19, 1965. Rebel Ridge opened five days later, on Christmas Eve.
The area operated with a double chairlift, a Poma lift and three rope tows and was furnished with a ski and rental shop, restaurant and cocktail lounge. After the 1965–66 season, Benedikter made grandiose plans for the future: doubling the length of ski runs, installing a lift or tow to the top, enlarging the restaurant and cocktail lounge, adding day care, expanding the snowmaking system, arranging for charter transportation via bus or airplane, and building a 70-room lodge.
Unfortunately, none of his plans were ever realized. Rebel Ridge was a small area with little room for expansion. It was adequate for beginner and intermediate skiers, but there was no terrain for more advanced skiers. And business was likely to be overshadowed by nearby Snow Summit and Moonridge Ski Area.
He did try to carve out a niche by creating—as much as possible—an Austrian atmosphere at the resort, pledging “all the charm in the tradition of the Austrian Alps and old-world trained instructors.” His run as a ski resort owner ended in 1969 when he sold the area. After Rebel Ridge closed, Benedikter continued his involvement in skiing by working as a ski-area consultant, offering help in all aspects to get a resort up and running.
From 1951 to 1958, Benedikter had been the chief engineer of the West Coast division of the Standard Conveyor Company, which led him to acquire California licenses for general and elevator contracting in 1959. This allowed him to later form his own company, All-Purpose Engineering and Elevator Co., located in Tarzana, California; it specialized in manufacturing cable cars and designing and installing residential hillside elevators and tramways.
Benedikter was a member of the 1977 class of the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame. He passed in November 1981, at age 70, of pneumonia. 
Award-winning ski historian and author Ingrid P. Wicken is the founder and director of the California Ski Library, the largest private ski library and archive in the world. She wrote about the Los Angeles–based Van Degrift's Ski Hut in the July-August 2025 issue.