1930s

At the FIS meeting in Oslo in 1930, the Norwegians finally voted to include Alpine skiing into the FIS championship program, and they would soon reap dividends. A number of youngsters living in the Holmenkollen area quickly took advantage of the steep slopes on the west side of the mountain. This biography focuses on one of them, the exceptionally talented Alpine skiing champion Andreas Wyller.

As Liv Wiborg documents, the emergence of Alpine skiing in the Holmenkollen/Tryvann area above Oslo was enabled by the extension of the “T-Bane” (municipal commuter rail system) to Frognerseteren in 1916. The improved access resulted in more residential development. Wyller’s family moved to the “heights” at Voksenlia. With his siblings he could ski from the front door. By the late 1920s the neighborhood included many youngsters who would make their mark in Alpine racing, including Wyller’s next-door neighbors Stella and Johanne Dybwad, his good friends Thorleif Schjelderup and Tomm Murstad and, down the road at Besserud, the Eriksen family (Marius was three years younger than Andreas).

In 1933 Tryvannskleiva, one of the relatively steep slopes on Holmenkollen’s west side, opened as a slalom hill. Wyller then focused on slalom and downhill. National championships and selection to the Norwegian FIS teams followed. The Dybwad sisters and the very precocious Laila Schou Nilsen also qualified. But war clouds were gathering. On the night of April 8-9, 1940, Wyller and a group of racers returned from the national championships, arriving in Oslo to a station in chaos. German troops had invaded Norway by air and sea. The royal family and the cabinet were desperately trying to escape northward by train.

Wiborg captures the confusion, uncertainty and isolated moments of heroism following the invasion. The young men gravitated to Nordmarka, the extensive forested part of Oslo that they knew so well. There, a number of huts provided temporary shelter as they discussed how to respond to German occupation. Gradually, networks arose to enable resistance, routes were established to assist those fleeing to the relative safety of Sweden or England, and connections were made to the British Special Operations Executive (formed to conduct espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance). After roughly a year Wyller made the dangerous escape to England via a fishing boat to the Shetland Islands, and from there went to London to join the RAF. He was quickly sent to Canada for flight training, at the base outside Toronto known as “Little Norway,” arriving there on June 11, 1941.

Norwegians stationed there wanted to ski. The camp commander, Ole Reistad, who was a noted athlete (Holmenkollen ski jumping competitions in 1916, modern pentathlon at the 1920 Summer Olympic Games, and gold medalist at the 1928 Winter Olympics in the military ski patrol), encouraged participation in civilian ski events. The flight school received invitations from a number of colleges and from both the Canadian and American ski associations. Reistad took a group of skiers, including Marius Eriksen, to the Winter Carnival at Dartmouth in February 1941. Wiborg explains how flying cadet Ola Gert Myklebust Aanjsen, of Trondheim, became the 1942 U.S. National Jumping Champion.

After finishing his training in multi-engine aircraft, Wyller was named pilot on a 10,000-mile tour around the U.S. to raise funds for Little Norway. He returned to London on February 11, 1943, and was assigned to RAF Coastal Command 333 (Norwegian) Squadron out of Leuchars, Scotland. With navigator Bård Karl Benjaminsen, he flew fast Mosquito fighter-bombers, attacking German shipping off the Norwegian coast. On February 23, 1944, they tangled with a twin-engine Ju 88; both planes crashed into the sea. In 1994, on the 50th anniversary of his death, a plaque honoring Wyller was installed at the base of Wyllerløypa, the longest, steepest run at the Oslo Winter Park.

This is a valuable book. Wiborg has appended a helpful list of sources by chapter. An index and better editing would have been appreciated.  

Andreas Wyller: alpinist, motstandsmann og krigsflyver by Liv H. Wiborg, John Grieg Forlag (2020), hardcover, 340 pages. In Norwegian.

 

A masterpiece of American alpine architecture was nearly lost. Then a skier came to its rescue. 

Timberline Lodge surely rates as one of the most gorgeous examples of mountain architecture ever built. Against the backdrop of the 11,239-foot summit of Oregon’s Mt. Hood, the structure appears to be part of nature itself.

Construction of the lodge originated with a 1930s Works Progress Administration (WPA) government program that provided jobs to unemployed Americans during the Great Depression. In 1935, Oregon ski enthusiasts persuaded an eager WPA to allocate up to a quarter-million dollars to build a lodge at the 6,000-foot-high base of the slope. A crew of 350 workers completed the four-story lodge in just 15 months, entirely by hand, inside and out.

And what a lodge it would be. On a massive stone understory, built to withstand the weight of 20-foot-deep snow on Mt. Hood, architect Gilbert Stanley Underwood constructed a central frame of hand-hewn ponderosa pine beams that soared 100 feet into the sky. A monstrous stone chimney capped America’s largest fireplace. Inside, artisans carved stunning stonework and wood bas-reliefs, wove rugs, forged wrought iron and created beautiful stained glass. Their artwork reflected native wildlife and pioneer folklore.

By the time Timberline opened in 1938, with 70 rooms and a vast, imposing public space, it rivaled Yosemite’s Ahwahnee and surpassed the new Lodge at Sun Valley as America’s greatest alpine hostelry. After World War II, however, the lodge fell on hard times. The ski operation faltered. Rooms were being rented to prostitutes, and finally it was forced to close. Neglect and deterioration followed. But in 1955, tender love and care came in the form of Dick Kohnstamm, a native New Yorker and outdoorsman who’d recently moved to Portland.

Kohnstamm refurbished the lodge and the lifts, using family money and government funding. So successful was the restoration that Kohnstamm was elected to the US National Ski Hall of Fame, and the Park Service placed Timberline Lodge on its National Register of Historic Places. And so it remains, America’s most majestic slopeside lodge. 

Excerpted from the December 2008 issue of SKI Magazine. John Fry (1930-2020) was editorial director of SKI and Snow Country magazines, and longtime president, then chairman, of ISHA. He authored the award-winning book The Story of Modern Skiing. His final book, published posthumously, is Abandon Foolish Scheme: Deadly encounters that you won’t find in bestsellers about dying.

Photo: Ray Atkeson’s darkly emotive 1945 pre-sunrise image of Mt. Hood’s Timberline Lodge ranks among the most beautiful snow scenes ever captured on film. Courtesy of SKI Magazine

Toni Seelos and Dick Durrance helped build the bridge to the modern carved turn by letting skis "do their magic."

Photo above: Dick Durrance at Oak Hill, Hanover, New Hampshire in 1939. Lane Memorial Library.

In 1933, 18-year-old Dick Durrance returned to the U.S. from his boarding school days in Bavaria with a secret weapon he’d acquired while on the continent: a technique he’d seen Toni Seelos use to dominate his competition in the Alps. Up until that time, the stem Christiania was the ne plus ultra of ski turns. Hannes Schneider, imperator of the most influential ski school at the time, felt that the stem christie was all just about anyone needed to navigate in a controlled manner around the slopes.

Seelos, a racer, understood that Schneider’s favorite turn was inherently a braking maneuver, and figured out how to weave his way through race courses without getting his skis so sideways, especially the stemmed ski. What Seelos came up with, and what Durrance copied, is what we might consider the Cro-Magnon species of the modern parallel turn. And Durrance was the only skier in North America who used it.

In the fall of 1933, when Durrance began winning slalom races by 20 seconds and more for Newport High School in New Hampshire, the ski press badgered him for his secret. He called it the “Tempo Turn,” and the name stuck.

The tempo turn quickly became the talk of competitive skiers. In the 1934 edition of the U.S. Eastern Amateur Ski Association’s Annual, Otto Schniebs and John W. MCrillis wrote an article, “The High Speed Turn,” in which they dissected Durrance’s technique. In the text they referred to them as “high-speed turns,” but included a print of some movie frames of him skiing on pine needles and captioned as ‘a tempo.’” (Another article in the annual titled “Pine Needle Skiing,” by Henry E. Mahoney, describes the Newport Ski Club’s slalom and jumping training on the surface.)

What’s in a Name

As Durrance described it, the tempo turn was specifically the turn as Seelos executed it: in a tall stance with the feet close together. Durrance also said that particular style didn’t suit him well, and that he went on to develop a technique with a lower, feet-apart posture in which he was more stable.

Other prominent people in U.S. skiing didn’t bother to make the distinction. All turns made at speed with the skis parallel were tempo turns. Schniebs and McCrillis, in their book Modern Ski Technique, have a section titled “High-speed (Tempo) Turn” and in the 1936 book Skiing by Charles Proctor and Rockwell Stephens, there is a section titled “High-Speed Christiania (Tempo Turn).”

Up to this point, tempo turns were mostly considered a tool for racers and daredevils. The name “high-speed” said it all. Schniebs and McCrillis even warned that “The turn cannot be done without considerable speed.”

Then, in 1938, Benno Rybizka’s The Hannes Schneider Ski Technique presented us with “Parallel Christiania (Tempo Turn).” Finally, we had a name that was not only unintimidating, it was more descriptive.

Aspirational Turns

All avid skiers now had a technique to which they could aspire. And, not unimportantly, one that was clearly identifiable: It was pretty easy to see if you or your friends could make it down the hill without stemming.

The tempo turn wasn’t completely subsumed by the parallel turn, though. Fred Iselin and A. C. Spectorsky, in their 1947 book Invitation to Skiing, a well-illustrated and comprehensive instructional work based primarily on the Arlberg system, said “every tempo turn is a parallel turn, but not every parallel christie is a tempo turn.”

Their treatment of the tempo turn puts it, in its intent and execution, squarely in the category that Durrance did. It’s for going fast, and getting the ski to do the turning, not the skier. There wasn’t a big windup followed by upper-body rotation in the direction of the turn. Rather, you lean forward and toward the center of the turn, and let the skis do their magic. In this regard we might expand our view of the historical significance of the tempo turn to include being the progenitor of the carved turn: the aspirational turn of the 21st Century.

Dick Durrance himself would probably agree. In The Man on the Medal, John Jerome’s great biography, Durrance said, “With nothing but a weight shift, you could cut a carved turn, letting the camber of the ski do the turning for you. I called it the tempo turn
for some reason, and thought, ‘Boy, this is really the ticket.’” 

SKI LIFE

SKI Magazine, October 1973

 

Before Aspen, Ashcroft and Mount Hayden promised a cable car, ‘immense schusses,’ a village for 2,000. Then World War II intervened.

Photo above: A map drawn by Roch of his vision for a ski resort in the greater Aspen area. Courtesy Aspen Historical Society.

It is difficult now to realize that Aspen’s skiing development did not start in town but out on Castle Creek, where the Highland Bavarian Lodge housing two European guides was to offer ski touring for wealthy clients.

 

 

What a curious tale. During the summer of 1936, one-time Aspen resident Tom Flynn was peddling mining claims and happened on Billy Fiske at a party in Pasadena, California. Fiske came from a wealthy Chicago banking family. He was a sometime dilettante Hollywood film maker, flyer, member of the gold-winning Olympic bobsled team in 1928, and captain of the sled that was victorious four years later at the Lake Placid Games.

Fiske was as well-known on the Cresta run in Switzerland as he was in England’s society circles. Flynn showed him photographs of the mining claims but it was the area as a possible ski region that attracted Fiske, just as those photos had impressed Ted Ryan, New York banker, heir to the Anaconda Copper fortune and brother of Mont Tremblant developer Joe Ryan.

 

 

Fiske, Ryan, and Flynn bought land on Castle Creek, started construction of the Highland Bavarian Lodge, hired Swiss skier, mountaineer and already avalanche expert, André Roch, along with Gunther Langes, a south Tyrolian who had organized the world’s first giant slalom, on Italy’s Marmolata in 1935. The two made the trans-Atlantic crossing and arrived in Aspen in December 1936.

We know much of this from the article Roch wrote for the Swiss ski journal Der Schneehase. From this article and from Ted Ryan’s papers, deposited with the Aspen Historical Society, “what might have been” can be pieced together. For admirers of “what if” history, it makes for a fascinating study.

Roch and Langes believed they were being hired to scout out land in Colorado where a major ski resort might be financed, much the way Count Felix Schaffgotsch had done a year earlier for Union Pacific Railroad’s chairman Averell Harriman, which led to Sun Valley, America’s first purpose-built winter ski resort.

 

 

However, when the two arrived in Aspen they discovered “with some unease” that they were not to explore the Rocky Mountains, since Fiske and Ryan had already chosen the location. Their remit was “simply to verify its excellence, to check on terrain and climate,” all to ensure that the location was suitable for “the launching of a big winter sports resort.” However charming the lodge might be, Roch was immediately critical of the setting of the Highland Bavarian Lodge at the juncture of Castle Creek and Conundrum, about five miles from Aspen.

In a steep-sided, avalanche-prone valley, with wind-battered snowfields far above the tree line, this was not the St. Moritz of America. Worst of all, wealthy guests from Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Chicago had already been booked into the Lodge and expected to revel in pristine snowfields, guided by experienced Europeans…and it was a snow poor December.

 

 

The Lodge was not even finished, so Roch and Langes bedded down in Aspen’s Jerome Hotel and took clients up towards what is now Little Annie. Fiske and Ryan saw the town of Aspen, with its road connections to Glenwood Springs and over Independence Pass, and its railroad, as the hub of skiing. Before Roch left in June 1937, he had marked out a trail for the newly-formed ski club to cut. This became known as the Roch Run.

But 12 miles out of Aspen, farther on up the Castle Creek valley, lay Ashcroft, population one, remnant of a mining outpost. Now, said Roch, there was a real possibility as it sat in a natural bowl surrounded by 12,000-foot peaks. With plenty of options for ski runs on east and north-facing slopes, it would be “a resort without competition.”

Roch climbed from Ashcroft towards Hayden Peak on January 15, 1937. He turned back before reaching the top but had seen enough of the Conundrum valley and had admired the surrounding peaks: Pyramid, Snowmass, Castle, Cathedral and most spectacularly, the Maroon Bells.

 

 

That spring Roch, Langes and Fiske climbed Hayden. Soon after, renowned Eastern skiers like Otto Schniebs came out to be amazed by the spectacular West. And from Denver came ski manufacturer Thor Groswold and skiing man-about-town Frank Ashley. Other areas were explored, too.

The conclusion was inescapable: Fiske and Ryan had untouched resort territory. The road into Ashcroft would need rebuilding and in some places re-routing to avoid avalanches. Hotels were planned to hold 2,000 skiers. That figure was gauged to make a cable car up Mount Hayden economically feasible. The accompanying map indicates the lifts with the mid station marked leading to a second lift to reach a hotel at the top, some 3,000 feet above the valley floor.

 

 

Beginners were not forgotten, with the more gentle ski fields near the road, and two jumps were planned. Roch added comments, underscoring the importance of slopes on the north and eastern sides; south- and west-facing slopes had too much sun, too little snow and the western side was subject to winds. The first of two connecting chairs was proposed from Ashcroft to Monument. The second chair was to reach the summit of Electric Peak, providing a 2,000-foot-plus vertical.

This was vital because it would give access to Hayden’s ridge and thus to Cathedral Lake and on down to Pine, Sandy and Sawyer creeks. From there, transportation would be needed to get back to Ashcroft. Altitude was the drawback. Topping out at 13,600 feet, bad weather would shut the lift complex down. Even so “this splendid ski-area would not be developed into its proper capacity without it.” Descents from the top could be compared to the Parsenn. With “immense Schusses,” Roch skied down to Ashcroft in twenty minutes. He was ecstatic. And the valley below was long and broad, large enough “to combine hotels, bungalows and parking places.” A Swiss village was envisioned.

In Denver, the Colorado legislature voted a $650,000 bond for the lifts. Ashcroft was going to be the “Williamsburg of the Old West,” enthused architect Ellery Husted. Ted Ryan was all enthusiasm, too. As he recalled for the documentary Legends of American Skiing: “We had an area bigger than Zermatt.” “We were all set to go, and then ‘bang’ World War II came and Billy Fiske was shot down during the Battle of Britain.” Fiske, flying a Hurricane for 601 Squadron, was badly wounded when his plane was hit. He managed to fly his machine home, but died in hospital two days later. His death and the war ended what might have been the Mount Hayden development.

Maybe it is not all bad; backcountry skiers certainly like the way it has all turned out. The Ashcroft Touring Center became the first self-sustaining cross-country center in the U.S. in 1971, and its Pine Creek Cookhouse provides a uniquely memorable dining experience. And, as patrons will attest, the views are “unreal.” 

 

Cooperstown hit two fouls, then a 380-foot home run.

Photo above: Kate and Chris Mulhern at the base of Mt. Otsego in 1958. The main slope is visible behind the sign, with the rope tow to the right. Courtesy Barbara Harrison Mulhern

Cooperstown is, of course, forever the home of baseball, hosting the National Baseball Hall of fame since 1939. But it’s also the center of a pioneering New York ski region. Here, community leaders and volunteers created skiing opportunities at four locations for over 40 years.

Cooperstown, at the foot of Lake Otsego, lies in hilly terrain with annual snowfalls approaching 90 inches per year. In the early to middle 1930s, skiers toured these hills, including the Fenimore Slope next to today’s Farmers Museum. The land, now just north of the downtown district, was once owned by James Fenimore Cooper, author of The Last of the Mohicans.

New York State’s first rope tow operated for the 1935-1936 season in North Creek in the Adirondacks. In the fall of 1937, the Cooperstown Chamber of Commerce began making plans for a ski lift. A suitable location was found on the former Robert Sterling Clark estate in Bowerstown, located about a mile south of Cooperstown Central. By 1937 it was county land. A 1,200-foot gasoline-powered rope tow was installed, and the Reynolds brothers hired to operate it.

The tow officially opened on January 15, 1938 to enthusiastic skiers and spectators who had never seen anything like it. Skiers came from as far away as Binghamton, and more than 75 cars lined adjacent roads. However, improvements were needed: snow fencing, better grading for the tow, and lights for night skiing. These were installed over the next few months, but a lack of snow limited operation. Higher elevations nearby promised more consistent snowfall, and thoughts turned to relocating the tow.

Tow Moved to Drake Farm

In the summer of 1938, the Sports Committee of the Chamber of Commerce began the hunt for a new location. Dr. Francis Harrison, Sherman Hoyt, and others explored hills to the north, in Pierstown. Harrison’s daughter Barbara Mulhern, now in her 90s, remembers “riding along with my father and his cronies” on dirt roads as they scouted the region.

They found what they thought might be the perfect slope, on Drake Farm, 500 to 700 feet higher than Bowerstown. The tow was moved, lengthened and installed during the fall of 1938. The higher elevation was expected to provide deeper, more consistent snow depths.

To promote the bigger hill, the committee transformed into the Cooperstown Winter Sports Association. Lester Hanson, a founding CWSA shareholder and neighboring farmer, ran the tow. He would run tows here and at other locations for nearly forty years.

Despite the Association’s best hopes, the location was fraught with problems. While skiers came from all around to check out the new ski area, strong winds scoured portions of the slope clear. A third location would need to be considered for the following year.

The Opening of Mt. Otsego

The Association did not need to look far. To the south of Drake Farm, a broad slope offered 380 feet of sheltered vertical on the Lamb Farm. The tow was moved again, to its final location, for the 1939-1940 season. The Lamb farmhouse would serve refreshments to skiers.

The name Mt. Otsego was chosen, for the lake, called “Glimmerglass” in Cooper’s novel The Deerslayer. In November, crews cleared brush and cut new trails. Hanson fired up the tow in December of 1939.

To promote the ski area, the Cooperstown Ski Club was formed the same year. Vice president was Nick Sterling, principal at Cooperstown Central School. The club aimed to make skiing affordable for everyone. Membership was set at just one dollar for adults, and 25 cents for children. Principal Sterling arranged for school kids to get free ski lessons, taught by volunteers. Over several decades, thousands of students entered the sport.

Cooperstown Hires Inga Grauers

Shortly after organizing, the Cooperstown Ski Club hired Miss Inga Grauers, 30, the only certified female ski instructor in Sweden. A pupil of Hannes Schneider in St. Anton, Grauers was expert in the Arlberg technique. She left Sweden at the outbreak of World War II, to find new opportunities in the United States. For two seasons from 1939-1941, she taught at the Fenimore Slope on weekdays and the Mt. Otsego slope on weekends.

At the end of the 1940-1941 season, Grauers left to teach skiing at Stowe, Vermont. She married E. Gardner Prime, and after the war the couple purchased the Alpine Lodge in Lake Placid, where they started their own rope tow ski area. Later, Inga became a ski legend at Vail, and was featured in the 2002 backcountry documentary “Spirit of Skiing.”

Snow Trains

Many of the early New York ski areas were far from major population centers. The Cooperstown Ski Club arranged for several snow trains to visit Mt. Otsego in 1940 and 1941. Trains came from Albany, and even from New York City, bringing up to 400 skiers at a time. Skiers were picked up at the Delaware & Hudson Station in Cooperstown and brought to Mt. Otsego in any available vehicle.

Formation of the Ski Patrol

It became clear after the opening of Mt. Otsego that a ski patrol was needed. In late 1939, Carlotta Harrison, the wife of Dr. Harrison, met with Minot Dole in New York City to begin organizing a patrol, just a year after Dole started the National Ski Patrol. Dr. Harrison was the first patrol leader. A future patrol leader, Charlie Michaels, now in his 80s, learned to ski as a kid at Otsego, in exchange for hauling gas cans to run the rope tow.

Fenimore Slope Gets a Tow

The Fenimore Slope did have the benefit of being close to town. In the late 1940s, Lester Hanson put in a rope tow and lights for night skiing. The tow opened weekday afternoons and evenings, and occasionally on weekends. The slope was abandoned in 1950.

Otsego Reaches its Peak

Like many ski areas, Mt. Otsego closed during World War II. It reopened in the fall of 1945. Additional beginner tows were added, and by 1950 skiers enjoyed new trails and slopes, including Natty Bumppo. A new lodge went up in 1956, transforming Mt. Otsego into a center for community activities through the 1960s.

The largest capital project at Mt. Otsego was a Hall T-bar on new slopes south of the rope tow. Another T-bar was later proposed to replace the main rope tow, but skiers protested—the T-bar would take at least twice as long to ride, resulting in fewer runs. In 1963, Lester Hanson, who over the years had been buying up shares from his partners, finally owned the ski area.

Later Years of Mt. Otsego

The 1970s were not kind to many smaller ski areas throughout New York, and Mt. Otsego was no exception. Back-to-back mild winters in 1973 and 1974, gas shortages, rising insurance rates, a lack of snowmaking, and aging facilities took their toll. The area closed during the 1976-1977 season.

Lester Hanson sold Mt. Otsego in 1978, and a series of new owners tried to resuscitate the area. In most years, only the T-bar operated, and only when natural snow allowed. At the conclusion of the 1982 ski season, Mt. Otsego closed for good.

Today

The former Mt. Otsego Ski Area is on private property, clearly visible from Wedderspoon Hollow Road. The T-bar was removed and sold for scrap, though its drive building remains. The rope tows are long gone. The landowners have kept most of the trails clear.

Mt. Otsego may be gone, but like other small areas that closed in the ’60s and ’70s, its legacy lives on with the thousands of skiers who learned the sport there as kids and passed the passion on to their own families. 

 

Photo: Walter Mosauer earned a medical degree, taught zoology and found planted seeds of a vibrant ski industry in Southern California.

Vacationers and adventurers have always flocked to Southern California’s famous sunshine and scenic shoreline. Walter Mosauer dreamed bigger. He saw the snowy high peaks of the region and asked: Why not skiers?

California skiing in the early 1930s was in its infancy, as was ski technique. Skiers descended steep slopes with long traverses, kick turns, and many falls. A downhill turn was unheard of. Mosauer, with his enthusiasm and exuberance for skiing, tackled both challenges, introducing a generation of skiers to ski mountaineering and, using the Arlberg technique, how to maneuver skis on any type of terrain.

Born in Vienna, Austria, in 1905, Mosauer was a man of divergent interests. He earned a medical degree at the University of Vienna, but his life-long fascination with reptiles led him to a Ph.D. in zoology at the University of Michigan. He became an instructor of zoology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1931 and was able to engage in his two passions—snakes and skiing.

Not long after arriving in Los Angeles, he began teaching at UCLA, where he soon developed and coached the ski team. One of his best athletes was Wolfgang Lert, an early member of ISHA.

On a trip to Washington in 1932 to speak at a scientific meeting, Mosauer and Pomona College student Sandy Lyon stopped and skied Garfield Peak at the rim of Crater Lake, Oregon. Two days later they skied to the summit of Mt. Hood. They then joined ski mountaineer Otto Strizek, with ski racers Hans-Otto Giese and Hans Grage, to make the first ski ascent and descent of 12,280-foot Mt. Adams.

In 1934, Walter and a dozen or so of his most enthusiastic skiers formed the Ski Mountaineers of California. The club was created to promote ski mountaineering throughout the state. They set out to provide instruction for beginners, build ski huts near popular snow fields and sponsor and publicize races. The Ski Mountaineers soon became a section of the Sierra Club, and the group is still active today.

Two of Mosauer’s favorite ski destinations were 10,046-foot Mount San Antonio, aka Mt. Baldy, located only 10 miles from Pomona College, and San Gorgonio Mountain, with an elevation of 11,503 feet, Southern California’s highest peak. Mosauer and his made numerous trips to both locales.

As ski coach, Mosauer understood how the allure of racing helped grow the sport. He established the San Antonio Downhill in March 1935, and started the race at the summit. The Ski Mountaineers completed construction of an alpine-style ski hut at the base of the downhill course in 1936. The ski hut is still in use today.

After frequently skiing the slopes below the summit, Walter and seven companions from the Lake Arrowhead Ski Club and the Sierra Club scaled San Gorgonio on skis in 1934. They camped at 6,000 feet on Saturday night and started their ascent before dawn on Sunday morning. They reached the summit at 10:00 a.m.

Mosauer, along with his students and members of the Ski Mountaineers, made a number of notable ski ascents in the eastern Sierra. In 1933, Glen Dawson, Louis Turner, Dick Jones and Mosauer skied to Kearsarge Pass on the Sierra Crest, elevation 11,709 feet. The next year, Mosauer’s group skied Bishop Pass with mountaineer Norman Clyde.

In 1935, incomplete ascents, due to weather, were made of Mount Emma and Dunderberg Peak. And after one failed attempt of Mammoth Mountain, the group was able to make a successful ascent of the peak. Mosauer and Ski Mountaineer Bob Brinton finally made a successful ski ascent of 12,379-foot Dunderberg Peak in 1936.

When Mosauer arrived in Los Angeles, there were no formal or organized ski schools in the region. He soon began teaching eager locals wanting to learn the sport and recognized the need for a pocket-sized instructional manual to complement what he was teaching. This led him to write On Skis Over The Mountains, the first instructional book published in California.

The first edition was published in 1934, the second in 1937. The small book was illustrated with line drawings taken from movies of Mosauer teaching on the slopes of Mt. Baldy. The second edition included two new chapters—one on ski touring and ski mountaineering, the other on the Tempo Style and Tempo Turn.

Mosauer acknowledged Hannes Schroll in the preface for turning him on to the tempo-turn style.

Mosauer’s summers were spent on his second love: zoology. He went on reptile hunting excursions to California, Arizona, and Mexican deserts. Sadly, on a month-long expedition to Mexico, he became ill and passed away on August 10, 1937, at the age of 32. His death has been attributed to acute leukemia, but the actual cause of death is still a mystery.

In his short life, he left a literary legacy, publishing 39 herpetological papers and 20 articles on skiing, in addition to his pioneering instruction book On Skis Over The Mountains.

Mosauer arrived in Southern California when skiing needed an enthusiastic trailblazer to reveal the undiscovered slopes so close to the burgeoning beach communities.

His frequent ski companion, Murray Kirkwood, wrote “this dynamic young Austrian rapidly surrounded himself with a band of followers from his own university, and its neighbor, Pomona College, who not only shared his love of snow-capped peaks, but his eagerness to spread the knowledge of how to negotiate them on skis.”

Mosauer’s pioneering work set the stage for today’s vibrant California ski scene, with dozens of resorts that regularly tally more than 7 million annual skiers visits between them. Through his efforts, Mosauer has rightly been named the “Father of Skiing in Southern California” and left his legacy through the Sierra Club Ski Mountaineers and the Sierra Club Ski Huts that are still in use today. 

Ingrid Wicken, founder of the California Ski Library (skilibrary.com), has recently completed her fifth book on California ski history. Lost Ski Areas of Tahoe and Donner (History Press) is scheduled to be published in November.

 

 

Photo above: Walter Amstutz led the transition from free-heel to locked-heel skiing. In 1928, he pioneered a spring to control heel-lift, soon known as the “Amstutz spring.” Reduced heel-lift helped spark the parallel turn revolution. Photo courtesy Ivan Wagner, Swiss Academic Ski Club

From 1929 to 1932, steel edges and locked-down heels transformed downhill and slalom racing into the high-speed alpine sports we love today.

It’s often said that alpine skiing was born in 1892, when Matthias Zdarsky experimented with skis adapted for steeper terrain, or perhaps with Christof Iselin’s 1893 ascent, with Jacques Jenny, of the Schilt in Switzerland.

But Zdarsky, Iselin and their heirs—including Hannes Schneider—were free-heel skiers and today we would lump them in with the nordic crowd. The sport we recognize as alpine skiing began with a pair of inventions that transformed downhill and slalom racing over the course of three winters, from 1929 to 1932.

Racers in Austria and Switzerland were primed for alpine competition, but lacked the tools for downhill speed. Kitzbühel held its first Hahnenkamm downhill in April 1906, won by Sebastian Monitzer at an average speed of 14 mph. Arnold Lunn launched the Kandahar Cup at Crans-Montana in 1911. After the Great War, Lunn headquartered at Mürren and in January 1924 founded the Kandahar Ski Club. This prompted Walter Amstutz and a few friends to launch the Swiss Academic Ski Club (SAS) the following month. Lunn intended the Kandahar to promote racing amongst his British guests—a rowdy assortment of public school Old Boys. Another contingent of sporting toffs infested the neighboring town of Wengen. Rivalry between the groups led the Wengen chaps, in 1925, to create their own ski-racing club. Because a railway ran partway up the Lauberhorn, the Wengen skiers disdained climbing. They called themselves the Downhill Only Ski Club (DHO).

 

 

Downhill and slalom racing were still fringe sports, pursued by a few dozen people at half a dozen meets each year. Lunn often said it was just good fun, and no one took it seriously. The equipment—hickory or ash skis without edges, and bindings with leather straps—worked well only in soft snow. Downhills were gateless route-finding exercises. Winning time on a typical two-mile downhill might be 15 or 20 minutes, for an average speed around 15 mph. Low speeds meant that falls, while common, rarely produced serious injury. Racers expected to fall, get back up, and finish. Slaloms were usually set to produce a one-minute winning time, but every gate required an exaggerated stem turn. A smooth stem christie was the mark of an expert skier.

On hard snow, edgeless hickory skis slipped and skidded uncontrollably. Skiers dreaded any traverse across an icy or crusted steilhang. In 1931 Christian Rubi, director of the Wengen ski school and a founder of the Lauberhorn race, recalled the terror of wooden edges:

“Touring skiers are on a Whitsun tour in the high mountains. They take their skis to the summit, and prepare to descend. Then comes the traverse on the hard firn, above the bergschrund. One of them slips, his edges don’t grip, he falls, slides, tries to stop in vain, slips headfirst and disappears into the coal-black night of the yawning crevasse – After half an hour, rescue is at hand. Someone dives into the cold depths on a double rope. There the victim dangles head-down from his ski bindings, face bloody. . .”

 

 

In December 1917, the mountaineer and ski jumper Rudolf Lettner had just such a scare during a solo tour on the Tennenbirge south of Salzburg. Lettner was able to self-arrest, stopping a potentially fatal slide by using the steel tip of his bamboo pole. Back at his accounting job, Lettner began doodling designs for steel edges. It took nearly a decade to figure out how to armor the skis without making them too stiff, but he filed a patent in 1926 for what we now call the segmented edge: short strips of carbon steel screwed to the edge of the ski-sole in a mortised channel.

Using steel edges, Lettner’s daughter Kathe finished second in downhill at the very first Austrian championships in 1928 (she reached the podium four more times in the next six years). Another early adopter was the 18-year-old ski instructor Toni Seelos of Seefeld, who used Lettner edges when he won a 1929 slalom at Seegrube—by five seconds.

Skiers outside of Austria heard about metal edges, but were skeptical. In 1927, Tom Fox of the DHO acquired a set of Lettners, but other Brits scoffed. Segmented edges looked fragile. Besides, 120 screws might weaken the ski. Arnold Lunn, after grumbling that some Englishman had tried unsatisfactory steel edges in the early ’20s, ran articles in the British Ski Yearbook suggesting that they made skis heavy, dragged in the snow, and inhibited turning. Beginners, he wrote, should by no means use metal edges. Over the next decade, experiments were made with continuous edges of brass and aluminum (continuous edges of steel proved far too stiff).

However, Lettner’s neighbors took notice. A handful of racers from the Innsbruck ski club saw an opportunity and on January 10-12, 1930, at Davos, they beat the pants off everyone at the second World Inter-University Winter Games. On Lettner edges, the Innsbruck boys took four of the top five places in slalom (and eight of the top 15 spots), plus the top four places in downhill. Notable were the Lantschner brothers, Gustav (Guzzi), Otto and Helmuth, who took first, second and fourth in downhill; Otto won the slalom with Helmuth fifth. On January 15, three days after the Davos triumph, Guzzi and Otto each went 65.5mph at the first Flying Kilometer, organized by Walter Amstutz at St. Moritz. They did it on jumping skis without steel edges, though they obviously hit the wax.

The Lantschners were hot but they had not previously been world-beaters. Only a year earlier, Guzzi came fourth in the 1929 Arlberg-Kandahar downhill and Otto tenth in the slalom.

It was obvious after the January 1930 races that steel edges were now essential for winning. Top “runners” scrambled for Lettner edges. The wealthy Brits of the Kandahar and DHO clubs were happy to pay a carpenter about $100 (in today’s money) to mortise their skis and sink about 120 screws.

 

 

In Wengen, Christian Rubi and Ernst Gertsch were convinced. Seeking to prove that local Swiss skiers could beat the Brits, they were busy organizing the first-ever running of the Lauberhorn, set for February 2-3. But Gertsch found time to take over the workbench at his father’s ski shop and install the new edges.

So equipped, they were able to beat the Lantschners. Rubi won the downhill, with three Brits following: Col. L.F.W. Jackson, then Bill Bracken, founder of the Mürren ski school, with Tom Fox third. Guzzi Lantschner settled for fifth, with Gertsch seventh.

The next day, Gertsch tied for the slalom win with Bracken. The next three places belonged to Innsbruck skiers, including Guzzi Lantschner in fourth, followed by Fox and Rubi. Bracken, who had grown up skiing in St. Anton, thus became the first Lauberhorn combined champion.

Over the space of three weeks, all the top alpine racers in Europe had converted to steel edges.

 

 

In the Illustrated Sportsman and Dramatic News (London), Arnold Lunn wrote “The Austrian team at the Winter University Games last year had all provided themselves with steel-edged skis, and they scored a run-away victory in the slalom. Again, steel edges had a great triumph in the race for the Lauberhorn Cup which was held at Wengen in the middle of February. The snow in the Devil’s Gap was the nearest thing to genuine ice that I have seen on the lower hills in winter since I was nearly killed twenty-five years ago on a cow-mountain above Adelboden. The contrast between the ease and security of the racers with steel edges and the slithering helplessness of the other competitors was most impressive.” Lunn predicted universal adoption of metal edges and recommended armor for the lower legs to prevent lacerations.

Scotsman David A.G. Pearson of the DHO reported to Ski Notes and Queries (London), “At my particular sports shop in Wengen the first supply [of edges] was sold out almost immediately, and I had to wait some days before a new stock came in. I believe that our friends at Mürren were as keen as we were.” Pearson warned that “A certain amount of skill is needed for their use. . . . If, in doing a Christiania one gets for a fraction of time on to the outside edge of the lower ski, one can hardly avoid going over like a shot rabbit . . .” This may be the first reference in print to catching an edge.

In late February, after years of lobbying, Lunn finally persuaded the FIS to sanction alpine races (some accounts say that Walter Amstutz did most of the talking on Lunn’s behalf).

 

 

Meanwhile, a parallel revolution was brewing. The switch from free-heel to locked-heel skiing began when Walter Amstutz took a close look at his bindings. Amstutz, like nearly every ski racer of his era, used a steel toe iron (Eriksen and Attenhofer Alpina were the popular brands) with leather straps over the toe and around the heel. Rotational control, not to mention what we would today call leverage control, was imprecise at best. In 1928, Amstutz introduced a steel coil spring to control heel-lift. The spring attached at one end to a leather strap above the ankle, and at the other end via a detachable clip to the top of the ski, about six inches behind the boot heel.

Arnold Lunn considered this a brilliant innovation. Beginning in 1929 nearly all top racers adopted the spring or some variant—less expensive competing versions used rubber straps. Decades later, Dick Durrance told Skiing Magazine’s Doug Pfeiffer, “The Amstutz springs were great. They held your boot to the ski. . . . we did add some strips of innertube for better tension.” By tension, Durrance meant heel hold-down.

Better control of the boot heel optimized the advantage of steel edges. Toni Seelos figured out how to cinch down his leather binding-straps to hold his heel solidly to the ski-top. He practiced jumping his ski tails around close-set slalom gates, using plenty of vorlage (forward lean) to get the tails off the snow so he could swing them sideways, in parallel, and land going in the new direction. The technique eliminated the draggy stem. Gradually he refined the movement, moving the tails sideways as a unit, without a visible hop.

 

 

Amstutz’ friend Guido Reuge, a mechanical engineering graduate of ETH Zurich, went one better. With his brother Henri, in 1928 he cobbled up a new binding, the first to use a steel cable to replace leather straps. The cable tightened around the boot heel with a Bildstein lever across the back of the boot (the lever was later moved out ahead of the toe iron, where a skier could reach it easily for binding entry and exit). But the real innovation was a set of clips

 

 

screwed to the sidewalls ahead of the boot heel. With the cable routed under the clips, the boot heel was clamped to the top of the ski for downhill skiing—English speakers called this effect “pull-down.” With the cable routed above the clips, you had a free-heel binding for climbing, touring and telemark. Reuge called this the Kandahar binding. He received a patent and began selling it in 1932. The two new technologies—steel edges and locked-heels—worked perfectly in concert, enabling all forms of stemless turning.

Meanwhile, Seelos perfected his skidless parallel turn. The concept was new and unique: No practitioner of Arlberg had ever thought of it. As late as 1933, Charley Proctor wrote in The Art of Skiing that the ultimate downhill turn was the “pure Christiana,” which skidded both skis.

That year Seelos brought his new turn to the FIS World Championships and won the two-run slalom by nine seconds over stem-turning Guzzi Lantschner. (For the full story of the Seelos turn, see “Anton Seelos” by John Fry, in the January-February 2013 issue of Skiing Heritage.) Seelos instantly transformed from ski instructor to international coach, and over the next two decades taught parallel turns to Olympic and world champions from Christl Cranz and Franz Pfnur to Toni Matt, Emile Allais and Andrea Mead Lawrence.

Decades later Durrance told John Jerome: “Seelos . . . developed this knack for getting through slalom gates like an eel. In the first FIS that he ran I think he won the slalom by something like thirteen seconds. He was head and shoulders above anybody else. He was my idol when I left Germany [in 1933]. . . With nothing but your weight shift you cut a carved turn, letting the camber of the ski do the turning for you.”

 

 

“I thought I’d just start skiing slalom like Seelos and I’d beat anybody,” Durrance said. If “anybody” meant any North American, he was right. But he couldn’t beat another Seelos fan, the professional Hannes Schroll, winner of the 1934 Marmolada downhill and new ski school director at Yosemite.

Like the steel edge, the Kandahar binding became an instant must-have for alpine racing, and then for all alpine skiers. The binding was manufactured under license, or simply copied, by numerous companies around the world. Under a variety of brand names (for instance, Salomon Lift) it remained the standard alpine heel binding design into the 1960s, long after the Eriksen-style toe iron was replaced by lateral-release toes. Some of the top racers, including Durrance, used both the Kandahar and the Amstutz spring for extra pull-down.

With new technology, race times tumbled. In 1929 at Dartmouth’s Moosilauke downhill, Charley Proctor set the fast time of 11 minutes, 59 seconds on the 2.6-mile course (average speed 13mph). He had hickory edges and free-heel bindings. By 1933, with steel edges and Kandahar bindings, he had it down to 7:22 for an average 20.25mph.

In 1930 the Lauberhorn start moved up to the summit, and assumed its modern length of 4.4km (2.7 miles). Christian Rubi won that race in 4:30.00, for an average speed with steel edges of 36 mph. In 1932, with heels locked, Fritz Steuri knocked 20 seconds off that time for an average speed of 38.9 mph.

Top speeds were getting interesting, and alpine racing became a spectator sport. At the 1936 Olympics in Garmisch, 50,000 people turned out to watch the slalom. The winner was Franz Pfnur. But there was a faster skier on the course. Toni Seelos, ineligible to race because he was a professional instructor and coach, was the forerunner. He beat Pfnur by five
seconds.

Pretty soon skiers didn’t even have to unlock their heels to reach the race start. A few resort hotels had already built rack railways and Switzerland’s first cable-pulled rail car, or funi, opened in 1924 at Crans, the first cable tram in Engleberg in 1927, Kitzbühel’s Hahnenkammbahn in 1928, and Ernst Constam’s T-bar at Davos in 1934. The race was on for uphill transportation, and alpine skiing had conquered Europe. 

Sources for this article include numerous reports in Der Schneehase and in the British, Canadian and American Ski Year Books for the years 1928 through 1939. Thanks to Einar Sunde for scanning many of these articles from his own library. Dick Durrance quotes from The Man on the Medal by John Jerome and from Skiing Magazine. More details from Snow, Sun and Stars, edited by Michael Lutscher. 

Other photo credits for the print edition: Guzzi Lantschner photo from Getty Images; Toni Seelos photo source unknown.

Just a few miles from glitzy St. Moritz, the cultural heart of this Swiss ski region beats quietly in Pontresina. 

The history of the Swiss resort town of Pontresina is inextricably linked to its glamorous neighbor, St. Moritz, which lies five miles away. Pontresina has always played second fiddle to St. Moritz, which was the cradle of winter sports in Switzerland and hosted the Winter Olympics in 1928 and 1948. 

Today, St. Moritz is closer in spirit to Monaco, an outpost of the uber rich. But take a 10-minute drive along the Val Bernina, the high-altitude valley that branches off the Upper Engadin Valley, and you’ll discover the cultural heart of the region in Pontresina. Much smaller than its glamorous sibling, the town lies at 5,822 feet elevation and is laid out on a long ridge on the south-facing shelf of Alp Languard mountain. It is subtly elegant, and redolent of the Belle Epoque with its cobblestone streets and pastel-colored stucco houses. 

Many of these quaint buildings, which date back to the 17th century, are decked out in s’graffito, the stenciled plaster designs that are hallmarks of the region. The word itself is the origin of the term “graffiti” and the designs are of striking geometric patterns, fish, stars and whimsical beasts, along with sundials etched onto the sides of the homes. 

The locals greet each other not with “Gruezi,” the Swiss German greeting, but “Allegra,” which is how one says hello in Romansch, the Latin-based mountain language. Less than 70,000 people still speak Switzerland’s fourth language (after German, French and Italian) and Pontresina is a bastion of Romansch. If you paid attention in 10th grade Latin class, you will be amazed at how much you can decipher.

Pontresina offers astonishing panoramic views of nearby mountains, the Roseg Glacier and the pistes of Corviglia and Corvatsch that rise up behind St. Moritz. Surrounding this genteel, well-heeled town are pine and larch forests. It’s an alpine landscape that was be

loved by Italian-Swiss artist Giovanni Segantini, who spent much of his life painting it.

 The main ski areas of Pontresina are Lagalb and Diavolezza, the latter resembling a giant, undulating meringue and offering glacier skiing as early as October and running as late as May. Closer to Pontresina is the Morterasch Glacier, the largest glacier by area in the Bernina Range of the Bündner Alps. There’s a 10km route along the glacier from Diavolezza, the longest glacier ski in Switzerland. So famed was the glacier that it was painted in the 19th century by Albert Bierstadt and drawn by John Singer Sargent. But what once was an attraction for Victorian visitors is now a poster child for vanishing glaciers. It has retreated nearly two miles since the late 19th century and in the past few years, the Swiss have enlisted snow guns to try and save the glacier from melting further...

When it opened in 1930, the Seigniory Club was the largest ski resort in Canada...and possibly in North America.

By Joseph Graham and Pierre Dumas

The historic Le Château Montebello, 50 miles east of Ottawa in the Outaouais region of western Quebec, claims to be the largest log structure in the world. That may or may not be true.  But while the architecture is impressive, the almost-forgotten ski history of the
hotel is legendary. 

Extensive research by the late Pierre Dumas, a retired engineer who won an ISHA Award for his work in identifying and cataloging every ski area and jump in the history of Quebec (Skiing History, July-August 2017), has revealed that when it opened in 1930 the Seigniory Club, as the complex was then called, was the largest ski and winter sports resort in Canada...and possibly in North America...

When it opened in 1930, the Seigniory Club was the largest ski resort in Canada...and possibly in North America. 

Photo above: Aerial photo of the Fairmont Le Château Montebello resort, on the north bank of the St. Lawrence River in western Quebec, highlighting the Log Château (main lodge) near the waterfront. Though it’s no longer a premier ski destination, winter guests at the luxury resort can still enjoy an extensive network of cross-country trails, snowshoeing, skating, tubing and sleigh rides.

The historic Le Château Montebello, 50 miles east of Ottawa in the Outaouais region of western Quebec, claims to be the largest log structure in the world. That may or may not be true. But while the architecture is impressive, the almost-forgotten ski history of the
hotel is legendary.

Extensive research by the late Pierre Dumas, a retired engineer who won an ISHA Award for his work in identifying and cataloging every ski area and jump in the history of Quebec (Skiing History, July-August 2017), has revealed that when it opened in 1930 the Seigniory Club, as the complex was then called, was the largest ski and winter sports resort in Canada...and possibly in North America.

First, a bit of background. In 1929, a Swiss-American businessman, Harold M. Saddlemire, met the auction price and bought the rural property—a seigneurial estate originally granted in 1674—near the village of Montebello on the Ottawa River. Saddlemire, a bold man with a vision, had already created Lucerne-in-Maine, an early resort conceived as a rustic holiday destination for wealthy Americans.

In Montebello, he thought bigger, approaching three major bank presidents, the premier of Quebec and the president of Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR). All endorsed his plans to acquire an additional 100 square miles and build Lucerne-in-Quebec, a year-round resort on a grand scale. For the construction, and the convenience of future guests, CPR built a special 3,700-foot spur line to its doorstep. In the book Building The Chateau Montebello, by Allan and Doris Muir, it’s reported that by 1930 the project had passed out of Saddlemire’s hands and plans had shifted to create the private, prestigious Seigniory Club. (The resort was owned by the CPR and leased to the Seigniory Club until 1970, when it was converted into a public resort by Canadian Pacific Hotels and renamed the Château Montebello.)

The owners engaged Montreal architect Harold Lawson and dreamed of building the largest log structure ever. They decided to open to the public on Dominion Day—July 1, 1930—just a few months away. Canadian Pacific built a spur line to reach the site, thousands of cedar logs were ordered from western Canada, and the project broke ground in late February.

The Crash of 1929 and the ensuing Depression had hit Canada hard, but the Château Montebello visionaries created a Canadian version of the American New Deal for the 3,500 workers they hired. Many were Scandinavian and Russian log craftsmen who worked with hand tools. Victor Nymark, a Finnish immigrant and master log builder, oversaw teams that worked around the clock in shifts to finish the project in less than four months, using 10,000 Western red cedars from British Columbia (40 miles laid end-to-end).

The grand 211-room resort hotel featured a snowflake-shaped floor plan and was, at the time, the largest log cabin in the world. It had the world’s tallest ski jump, a world-class bobsled run, cross-country and alpine slopes, a curling rink, a skating rink, a billiards room, a ballroom, a heated indoor swimming pool, fine dining, and a massive four-story, six-sided fireplace.

Three days after the grand opening on July 1, the Governor General of Canada attended a glittering costume ball at the club. For its first 40 years, the Seigniory Club remained an exclusive private retreat, attracting such luminaries as Prince Rainier and Princess Grace of Monaco, U.S. President Harry Truman, and entertainers Bing Crosby, Perry Como, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Today, it’s a luxury resort owned by the Fairmont chain, where wintertime guests can still enjoy an extensive cross-country trail network, snowshoeing, tubing, sleigh rides, dogsledding and ice skating.

In January 2015, I received an email from my friend, the late Pierre Dumas. He had attached a picture showing Patricia Paré at the finish line of the 1939 Women’s Dominion Ski Championships at the Seigniory Club in Montebello. He asked if this was my mother. Yes, I laughed. Looking at the photo, I could see that what she’d always told us kids was true: A downhill and giant slalom champion in the 1930s and the first professional female ski instructor in Canada, she always claimed she didn’t know how to ski as a young and daring racer. Her graceful style in later years made this seem unlikely. But while she won the race, one glance at the young woman in the picture proved her point: My mom just pointed her skis straight down the hill, and often said she either crashed or won.

Over the following years, I followed with fascination as Dumas unearthed and identified an extensive record of downhill skiing, jumping and bobsledding at Montebello. Working with other amateur historians, he found clues in old aerial photographs and other pictures, pored through mountains of old documents, and even located mortared rock mounds in the forest—the remaining foundations of the ski jumps and other installations.

In the pictures that accompany this article, you can see the scale of the venture, with its bobsled course designed by world-class German engineer Stanislaus Zentzytzki, and a ski jump designed by Norwegian engineer and renowned Canadian cross-country ski pioneer Herman “Jackrabbit” Smith-Johannsen. The builders spared no expense and hired top-ranking professionals to undertake each project.

Throughout the 1930s, the Seigniory Club was an important center for the development and promotion of skiing, ski jumping, bobsledding and other winter sports. It hosted important races and served as a training location for overseas teams competing at the 1932 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid. Its jumping and bobsledding facilities were comparable to Lake Placid, and it had excellent ski slopes and trails. The one thing it didn’t have—and never installed—was a rope tow or lift, thus fixing it forever to an era in which races began with competitors trekking uphill.

Rhoda Wurtele, who with her late twin sister Rhona was a Canadian ski champion in the 1940s and 1950s, remembers running up the hills at the Seigniory on seven-foot-long skis to race down, as documented in Penguin Club scrapbooks. With its gentle hills, open fields and reliable snow, Montebello was particularly good for that kind of skiing, called “ski running.” This was a familiar term in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly in Canada, during an era in which skiing involved a lot of walking or running up the slopes in order to ski down.

By the 1930s, ski trains were bringing as many as 10,000 people to the Laurentians every weekend to destinations like Émile Cochand’s Chalet Cochand. Statistics for 1938 show that 10,000 Americans came to the area for the Christmas holidays alone. Montebello’s builders determined to make it the most important ski center in the region. With over a hundred square miles of land at their disposal and solid financial backing, they could easily pull it off. All through the 1930s, the Seigniory Club was a favored location for ski runners. Clubs challenged each other every winter, including the Montreal Ski Club, the McGill Red Birds, the Penguins, clubs from Ottawa and Toronto, and even a club that regularly came up from New York.

The club that took the overall prize did so by having the highest total points across all disciplines. For the women those were downhill, slalom and giant slalom, while the men included jumping. The year of my own mother’s victory, 1939, she won the downhill for the Penguins. It was part of a four-year run that saw the Penguins defend the title as overall winners at the Seigniory Club, until McGill beat them in 1941. In 1942 the Penguins came back with a new team and the Wurtele twins tied for first place in the downhill during a day of races held during a fierce blizzard. They took the title back for the Penguins.

When Cochand arrived from Switzerland in 1911, his first surprise was the diminutive size of the Laurentian hills. Races in the Alps could involve climbing mountain glaciers to take a downhill run covering 5,000 feet of elevation. Cochand quickly embraced the ski runner style and helped to develop it. But when the American Joe Ryan and other investors began to build lifts at resorts like Mont Tremblant in 1939, skiers opted for Alpine-style schusses and larger, steeper hills.

Montebello could not compete. It no longer hosted competitive winter sports, leaving the jump and bobsleigh track to fall into disuse. Through the decades, the resort has continued to maintain its cross-country ski trails, along with sleigh rides, skating and curling.

From a gathering spot for the people of the Petite Nation, to the land-grant estate belonging to Canada’s first bishop, to the building of the largest log structure in the world, Chateau Montebello has many stories to tell. Its one-time dominance as Canada’s largest ski resort is just one of them. Thanks to the diligent work of a team of heritage experts, we can begin to tell it. 

Joseph Graham is an historian and the son of Canadian ski pioneer Patricia Paré. The late Pierre Dumas won a 2017 ISHA Award for his work to document Quebec’s ski areas and jumps; for his obituary, see page 30. This article was funded by a grant from the Chawkers Foundation through a partnership with ISHA, the Canadian Ski Hall of Fame and Museum, and the Canadian Ski History Writers Project (https://skiinghistory.org/resources/canadian-ski-history-writers-project).

seigniory floor plan: Building the Chateau Montebello (allan and doris muir)

Inspiration for Sun Valley?

There is no evidence that the Seigniory Club provided the inspiration for W. Averell Harriman when he built his dream resort of Sun Valley in the mountains of Idaho in 1936. But the similarities between these two ground-breaking winter destination resorts does raise the question.

Sun Valley would also be built during the Depression, at the end of a Union Pacific railroad line, and in a hurry (seven months rather than four). Its 220-room resort hotel (versus 211) also featured a snowflake floor plan (though modified) and was built using rough lumber forms to leave wood-grain impressions in the concrete, which was acid-stained brown. It too had a heated pool, a skating rink, a ballroom, fine dining, and billiards were planned. Like Seigniory, Sun Valley drew the biggest names, including Hollywood stars, and was also featured in films.

The big difference? Alpine events were added to the Olympics in 1936, so Sun Valley’s emphasis, unlike Seigniory, was on downhill skiing. It had serious alpine slopes nearby and built the world’s first chairlift.

Sun Valley became the largest modern ski resort in North America, while Seigniory faded out of the alpine picture, though certainly not from world view. In 1981, the Canadian resort hosted the seventh G7 summit, and in 1983, it hosted NATO’s Nuclear Planning Group. —Bob Soden