1950s

Form over function? Sure, with the help of stretch pants and cool hip angulation.

Those of us of a certain age remember the “comma position”: that very stylish, very modern, very Austrian stance many of us aspired to in the late 1950s through the ’60s. Its confluence with metal skis and stretch pants oozed cool modernity, helping elevate skiing culturally from an outdoor sport for vigorous sportsmen and women to an aspirational leisure activity for the upper middle class—akin to tennis and golf.

The comma position was old wine in a new bottle. It was hip angulation and its concomitant outwardfacing posture of the upper body—what came to be known as reverse shoulder and what we now call counter—but in a feet-together stance—and with stretch pants. Angulation, both at the hip and the knees, and counter had been essential elements of alpine skiing for a long time. They had played a more limited role in earlier decades, however, because the harder-to-turn skis of the era often required upper-body rotation from the skier to initiate a turn. That movement put the skier in a posture antithetical to hip angulation. Even so, in the later phases of many turns—especially on packed snow and in slalom turns—good skiers would angulate and counter.

As skis became more flexible, boots stiffer, bindings more solid and the slopes more packed, technique changed. A skier no longer had to throw the whole body into the turn, and the comma position emerged as a thing: an essential element of what the skiing world regarded as the new Austrian approach to skiing, epitomized by wedeln.

In fact, Stefan Kruckenhauser, Rudi Matt and the rest of the Austrian school responsible for codifying this style of skiing did not consider it uniquely Austrian. In their landmark book, The New Official Austrian Ski System, they asserted it was built on their study of the best skiers of all nations, especially racers, who skied similarly.

It’s hard to argue that the comma’s ultra-narrow, leg-and-feet together stance served a positive functional purpose. While hip angulation and counter were components of all the best competitive skiers’ technique, the tight stance never was. Its appeal was likely due to the way it aesthetically complemented stretch pants and to the fact that you had to be a pretty good skier in order to wiggle your way down the hill with such a functional handicap. The tight stance became to skiing what tail fins had become to American cars.

Stein Eriksen, certainly one of the best skiers of the twentieth century, employed significant angulation and counter during his dominating competitive career. But in the 1960s he carried the comma position to extremes. Sunlight seldom shone between his knees, and his commas came to look more like elbow macaroni. The public was wowed. Many aspired to ski that way. Few could. It looked sexy but was an example of form preceding function.

The narrow stance lost currency by the mid-1970s when most of the world moved on to the more feetapart, utilitarian look of “The New French Way,” which persists today. But skiers continued to angulate at the hips and counter with the upper body. They still do and always will, because those elements of ski technique—the functionally important components of the comma position—are essential to making turns on skis. Stretch pants or not, there’s no getting around that.

By the early 1960s, Head was the leading ski brand in the United States and the UK. At one point in the decade, an estimated 50 percent of all skis sold in the U.S. were Head skis. A marketplace leader has the luxury of being able to be subtle in its advertising. (Watch an ad for Apple or Google lately?) That was the approach with this illustrated ad for Head skis in the October 1958 issue of SKI. A blue-bird powder day. First tracks with two friends. And just the tips of a pair of Head Standard skis about to drop in. What more is needed? Nothing, really. Message delivered.

Coming Up In Future Issues

X Marks the Spot
A made-for-TV event in 1997 that included shovel racing forever bent the arc of racing and the Winter Olympics. That first Winter X Games is celebrating its 20th year in Aspen in January, virus or not.

Really Earn Your Turns
Don’t let summer stop you. Sand ski at the Great Dunes National Park.

Three Years that Changed Skiing
Driven by dramatic advances in gear, skiing may have been transformed more from 1929-1932 than in any other three-year span in the history of the sport.

We Need More Cowbell!
A brief history of the clanging bells that cheer on alpine racers.

PLUS:

Going Deep: An historic exploration of some of the world’s biggest storm cycles and record snowfalls.

Classic Lodges & Historic Resorts.

Join our Facebook page: facebook.com/skiinghistory

When snow is unavailable, skiers will glide on anything: grass, pine needles, sawdust, sand dunes, volcanic ash, carpet, plastic mat, soap flakes, powdered mica and soda crystals.

In 1958, German industrialist Dr Rudolf Alberti (1907-1974) patented the concept of skiing on gravel. Alberti owned a mine in the Harz Mountains (still going today) that produced barium sulphate – a bright white dye -- and calcium fluoride. The ore contained barite, or heavy spar, a very dense mineral used today in x-ray shielding, rubber mudflaps and oil-drilling mud. American industry alone uses about 3.3 million tons of the stuff annually.

Alberti noticed that barite nodules have a very low friction co-efficient and is dust free. He built a 1,300 feet (400 metre) long ski run and covered it with a mix of river gravel and barite, about six inches (15cm) deep.

Contemporary reports record the surface proved pretty good for skiing, but that skis disintegrated due to the heat generated. Alberti ordered up a stock of skis with steel bases, and with a concrete mixer coated the gravel with used engine oil. This reportedly “dramatically increased ski speed but producing some hair-raising results and near disastrous falls.” Alberti received patents in Germany and the United States.

The slope does not appear ever to have operated as a commercial venture. But to this day Altberti’s home town St. Andreasberg has a small ski area operated by Alberti-Lifts. –Patrick Thorne

"Ski Bum: The Warren Miller Story," is now showing on Amazon Prime.

The 90-minute film, produced by Patrick Creadon and Christine O'Malley, is based largely on archival footage provided by Warren Miller Entertainment. It follows Miller's dramatic life story from the beginning, starting with a childhood spent escaping from a dysfunctional family by surfing and skiing. The story is told through interviews with Warren himself, shot a year before his death, and interviews with his children and close friends. More interviews and plenty of action footage feature skiers Scot Schmidt, Jonny Moseley, Colby James, the Egan brothers, Kristen Ulmer, Greg Stump and many more. 

Amazon Prime members can see the film for free; nonmembers can rent it here. 

Toni Sailer raced to seven World Championship medals in an improbable 24 months—helping him become skiing’s first leading man.

Above: The Blitz from Kitz: Combining three gold medals with his matinee-idol appearance, 21-year-old Toni Sailer was the breakout star at the 1956 Cortina Winter Olympic Games.

The ski world conventionally remembers Austria’s Toni Sailer as the first racer to capture three gold medals in a single Olympics, winning all the alpine competitions (slalom, giant slalom and downhill) at the 1956 Winter Games in Cortina, Italy. After Jean-Claude Killy hat-tricked again in 1968, no man has three-peated. But to appreciate Sailer’s dominance, you have to know what he did two years after the Olympics. In the 1958 Alpine World Ski Championships at Bad Gastein, Austria, he was in a class by himself. He won the giant slalom—in which victory is often decided by hundredths of a second—by four seconds, and he won the downhill as well. And he was second in the slalom, narrowly missing gold. The result was that he easily won the overall FIS World Championship combined gold medal.

At the time, Olympic medalists also received World Championship medals (the practice ended in 1980). So Sailer’s three 1958 gold medals, on top of his Olympic four (including the 1956 victory in the “paper” combined event), gave him seven World Championship gold medals in two years—a feat no other racer has achieved. To top it off, during the same 24 months he won the world’s toughest downhill, the Hahnenkamm. Twice.

How could a racer be so dominant? Going fast is one way to win. Its complement is to travel the shortest distance. Sailer was ahead of his time in perfecting the technique of taking a straight line between gates, using an uphill step to enter turns normally. American Tom Corcoran says watching Sailer’s line in 1958 was a lesson that he never forgot—and one that helped him become America’s top giant slalom skier.

Sailer also had a mental edge. His desire to win was so deeply embedded, he explained, that the goal of coming in first didn’t cross his mind. Rather, he likened his skiing to throwing a stone. “The stone flies by itself, and it lands by itself,” said Sailer. “I get the prize because the stone flew well. Why did it fly well? Because I threw it the right way.”

The 1958 World Championships were Sailer’s final races. Strict Olympic guidelines on amateur status forced him to retire. “I have to make money,” said the 23-year-old, by then Europe’s most famous athlete. And he did. Built like a football player and Hollywood handsome, he became a successful movie and TV actor, and a heartthrob to millions of women.

Sailer long served as chairman of the International Ski Federation’s Alpine Committee, making rules for the sport he once ruled as a competitor. One of his life’s proudest achievements was establishing the children’s ski school in his hometown of Kitzbühel. 

Post-script: Sailer died in 2009, in Innsbruck, Austria. He was 73. With his remarkable competitive success, along with his post-racing career in film and entertainment, skiing’s first leading man was nothing short of a national hero. Heinz Fischer, president of Austria, paid tribute to Sailer as “a top athlete who already became a legend during his lifetime.”

Excerpted from the February 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: Deathly encounters that you won’t find in bestsellers about dying. 

The Lighter Side of Ski Movies

Hall of Famer Sverre Engen influenced many aspects of the sport. Perhaps none as enduring as lightening the load for ski movie production. 

By Mike Korologos

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, when ski movie-making was in its infancy, major outdoor filmmakers used “Hollywood methods” of production. Ski-movie shoots were built on the foundation of cumbersome 35-mm cameras affixed atop bulky tripods, with these setups hand-carried from ski lifts to scenic locations by camera crews that did not ski. Often these daylong efforts resulted in 10 to 15 seconds of usable footage.

Pioneering filmmaker Sverre Engen helped turned that laborious process on its head, forever changing how action sports films were made, according to his son, Scott Engen. “Dad may not have been the first to make ski movies, but he sure helped revolutionize the way they were produced,” Scott says.

Sverre honed his film-making skills in the early 1930s and early 1940s while hiking, hunting and working for the Utah Fish and Game Department as he produced and shot informational and educational movies as part of his job.

He also produced, while assigned to the 10th Mountain Division at Camp Hale, Colorado, morale-boosting broadcasts for the Free Norwegian expatriate members in the U.S. and Canada. “In those jobs, Dad came to fully appreciate the virtues of moving fast and traveling light when it came to carrying equipment in the mountains in the winter,” Scott says.

Unlike most ski-movie filmmakers at the time, Sverre was an accomplished skier, which greatly helped him with his movie projects. Traveling light and being nimble with his on-snow production methods provided cost- and time-saving efficiencies, which allowed him to travel into the wilderness to film spectacular scenic footage. Those scenic shots became the signature look of the dozen or so 90-minute ski movies he would later produce.

Born in Norway in 1911, Sverre learned to ski at 2 and moved to the United States at 18, soon settling in Utah. He was among the last of a colorful generation of Norwegian immigrants who were deeply involved in many aspects of the sport. Sverre gained fame as a jumping champion, resort operator, ski instructor, pioneer in the study of avalanche control and maker of ski movies. He served as Alta’s ski school director and as the cofounder and first manager of the new Rustler Lodge at Alta. The U.S. Forest Service named him as Alta’s first snow ranger in 1947 and he coached the University of Utah Ski Team to its first national collegiate championship that same year. He also found time to help build ski jumps at Ecker Hill, Becker Hill and Landes Hill, all in Utah.

Engen was inspired to make his own movies while appearing in several of Fox Movietone’s Ski Aces vignettes. These short films, shown on movie screens across the country as lead-ins to the day’s feature film, starred Sverre and his brothers Alf and Corey skiing down gorgeous powdery mountainsides or in zany ski scenes.

Sverre’s penchant for traveling light found him embracing the latest equipment that came on the civilian market at the end of World War II. This included the classic Bell and Howell 70-D series 16 mm camera. Sverre would have seen this camera used by John Jay when filming for the 10th Mountain Division. Driven by a hand-wound, clockwork spring motor, it didn’t require batteries, which annoyingly would fail in the wet or cold of the mountains or merely peter out during a shoot.

The camera’s downside, explains Scott, was the time and total darkness required to change rolls of film in the mountains. It had to be done only by feel and often by cold and numb fingers. He said his dad stashed a heavy, black canvas lightproof film-changing bag with arm sleeves in his rucksack. In a pinch, he would use his ski parka, folding over the neck and waist hems to improvise a film-changing bag, using the sleeves for access.

“Never wanting to miss a great action scene, Dad sometimes carried three fully loaded D-70 cameras,” Scott said. “Later he used a compact Bell and Howell 16 mm camera that used 50-foot long film magazines that could be instantly installed in the camera. The magazines were about the size of a small paperback book and designed for the gun cameras used in WWII fighter planes.” Sverre now had his “ideal film-making package,” Scott said. “He could ski anywhere with several small, lightweight, spring-driven cameras, each featuring instant magazine loading.”

He also was a natural promoter, helping to build brand awareness decades before that was a concept. The three Engen brothers barnstormed the country in the 1930s and 1940s, staging ski-jumping shows before tens of thousands of spectators. He touted that fame in his promotional posters and media interviews. And Sverre also had an influential friend: Lowell Thomas, the famous radio commentator, who skied with him several times a year at Alta.

In his book, Skiing a Way of Life, Saga of the Engen Brothers, Sverre describes golden advice from Thomas. “He suggested I talk more about the action. He said, ‘you know, Sverre, a good commentary is almost as important as the film itself . . . speak louder so people can hear and understand you.’ I worried about my Norwegian accent, but he assured me that it was okay and might add a little flavor.” Often when Sverre appeared on stage for his screenings, especially in New York or Los Angeles, Thomas either would introduce him personally or via recorded messages.

In addition to being a main character in Ski Aces (1944) and Margie of the Wasatch, Sverre’s feature length movies included Champs at Play, Dancing Skis (1956), The Snow Ranger, Skiing, Their Way of Life (1957), Skiing America, Ski Fever (1958), Ski Time USA (1959), Skiing Unlimited and Ski Spectacular (1962). He also produced numerous Fox Movietone episodes and short ski promotional vignettes.

Alta purchased most of Sverre’s original reels in the 1990s, says Alta general manager Michael Maughan. The film rolls have been digitized and stored for posterity.

Mike Korologos’ ski articles have appeared in newspapers and periodicals worldwide for more than 60 years. He was skiing editor for The Salt Lake Tribune for 25 years and a correspondent for SKIING Magazine for 30 years. He served as press chief for the organizing committees for the 2002 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games in Salt Lake City, his hometown.

photo courtesy Scott Engen

Arnold Lunn and Sandra Heath

With the passing of John Fry earlier this year, Sandra Heath was motivated to reach out to Skiing History to convey how John always appreciated, and supported, the telling of a good tale. Heath, who modeled for Bogner in the 1950s and 1960s, writes: “John Fry encouraged me to tell this story. In the winter of 1961, when I was being filmed in the Alps, the Fox-Movietone crew and I had the good fortune of visiting the Bellevue Hotel in Mürren, Switzerland. I was introduced to Sir Arnold Lunn, who asked me to join him watching the dangerous climbing activity on the Eiger. He was enchanting: a poet, philosopher and inspirational genius to the ski world. Some 30 years later, in England, I had a drink at the home of Elisabeth Hussey, with her sister Philippa. Elisabeth was Sir Arnold’s secretary and confidante. She sprang from her chair to retrieve something and said ‘This photo is such a mystery. Do you happen to know who this gal is?’ I was flabbergasted—it was me!”

ISHA VP Jeff Blumenfeld Wins Prestigious Exploration Award

Jeff Blumenfeld, ISHA vice president and a self-described “groupie for adventures and explorers,” was recently named the winner of the prestigious 2020 international Leif Erikson Exploration History Award.

Blumenfeld, the editor and publisher of the Boulder, Colorado-based Expedition News website, was recognized for his ongoing work to promote and preserve exploration history. Blumenfeld says that “receiving the award and recognition from the exploration community is quite rewarding. I am privileged to tell their stories.” But what keeps him on task is a bigger mission.

“Exploration is critically important,” he says. “It’s through exploration and field research that we’ll answer many of the questions, many of the mysteries of this planet and hopefully make the world a better place for our children.”

In addition to his work on his website, Blumenfeld is active in helping new explorers gain international exposure, peer recognition and, critically, funding for their research and expeditions.

“If I can foster their efforts, I’m totally rewarded by that,” he says.

The Leif Erikson Exploration awards, which include the History Award and the Young Explorer Award, were established by the Exploration Museum in 2015, and are presented for achievements in exploration and for media coverage and documentation of exploration history.

The museum, located in Húsavík, Iceland, 30 miles from the Arctic Circle, is dedicated to the history of human exploration, from early adventurers through space exploration. Blumenfeld received the award in August in a Zoom ceremony, as part of the annual Húsavík Explorers Festival.

Blumenfeld is an active member of the Explorers Club, and is president of the North American Snowsports Journalists Association. He has written several books to promote travel and exploration, including Get Sponsored: A Funding Guide for Explorers, Adventurers and Would-Be World Travelers and Travel With Purpose: A Field Guide to Voluntourism. 

SKI ART

Ewald Thiel (1855-before 1939)

For such a prolific social painter and illustrator, it’s surprising so little is known about German artist Ewald Thiel; we don’t even know when his death occurred. We do know he was born in Kamanten, in East Prussia (now Klimowka in Kaliningrad, Russia) on August 12, 1855. He studied at the Prussian Art Academy in Berlin and in 1878 at the Royal Academy of Art in Munich. He settled in the Halensee region of Berlin.

Thiel became an illustrator of many Berlin scenes, and his work appeared in popular weeklies. He illustrated books and created wood engravings; he drew scenes of lakes and drainage works, the lighting of bridges, exposition openings, and dancers, lawyers, workers, and politicians. Perhaps his most famous sketch (turned into a color portrait) was the drawing of Otto von Bismarck addressing the Reichstag on February 6, 1888 when he proclaimed: “Wir Deutsche fürchten Gott, aber sonst nichts auf der Welt!” (We Germans fear God, but nothing else in the world!).

He drew skiing scenes, too, including a hunter on skis, a skiing postman, and skiers on the Feldberg. He based the scene pictured here on a sketch by Ernst Hosang of the crowd enjoying the Spreewald, Berlin’s nature preserve. In 1866, a railway from the capital reached Lübbenau, a village at the center of the 200-square-mile area of heathland and pine woods crisscrossed by canals.

An enterprising teacher, Paul Fahlisch, had begun promoting tourism here in 1882. The Spreewald soon became the bourgeois’ place to enjoy summer and winter. Many of the skiers in the scene are locals; the women are wearing the traditional headgear of the Sorb community, Slavic immigrants who settled here in the 6th century. Thiel’s careful depiction of the skier with scarf tying down his cap and protecting his ears, one with a pipe, another carrying a sack, and a third putting on a ski, all attest to a well-grounded knowledge of the skiing world of 1899. The picture was published in Das Buch für Alle, a magazine that appealed to the middle class. — E. John B. Allen

Why's it called that?

Sneg, Schnee, Neige: Why do we have different words for snow?

Five or six thousand years ago, near the beginning of the bronze age, a tribe in what is now Ukraine domesticated horses and learned to ride. They quickly spread their culture, and language, in all directions.

No direct record of their language survives, but scholars call it Proto-Indo-European or PIE. By comparing words in Sanskrit, ancient Greek and Latin and modern languages, linguists have come up with a list of about 200 root words from PIE—white was albus, the root of our word Alps.

The PIE word for snow was sneygh. Cultures close to the PIE homeland kept that word: Slavic languages use some variant of sneg, and the tribes north of Central Asia’s Altai mountains, where bronze-age skiing survives to this day, say snig.

In Northern Europe, the word evolved to schnee (German), sneeuw (Dutch), snow (Friesian and English), snø, snö and snjorr (Norwegian, Swedish and Icelandic). In the Mediterranean, proto-Latin (Italic) turned sneygh into snix. Then the s dropped, becoming nix (Classical Latin), neige (French) and nieve or neve (Italian and Spanish). —Seth Masia

SNAPSHOTS IN TIME

1936 RACING ON KENYA’S GLACIERS
British ex-pats held a ski meet on the Lewis glacier on 17,057-foot Mount Kenya, in central Kenya about 90 miles northeast of Nairobi. The sole female contestant—the dashing Nancye Kennaway—won the women’s division and Bill Delap, who started organized skiing on the glacier starting in 1933, won the men’s downhill. The true ski pioneers of the region, however, were German geographer Hans Meyer and Austrian mountaineer Ludwig Purtscheller, who in 1889 became the first people to reach the 16,893-foot summit of Kibo — the highest of Kilimanjaro’s three cones, 200 miles to the south. —E. John B. Allen (Historical Dictionary of Skiing)

1944 CLOSED ON SUNDAYS
For the first several years after its opening in 1944, Timp Haven in Utah’s Provo Canyon was the only ski area in the country that closed on Sundays, due to the religious beliefs of its owner. Paul “Speed” Stewart, a sheep rancher, ran the resort with his brother Ray for more than 20 years. “We just don’t believe in working on Sunday,” Speed’s wife Hilda told the Deseret News in 1965. By that time, his busy resort offered skiing, skating and tubing — but Speed never did learn to ski. “Don’t have the time,” he said. Actor Robert Redford and other investors bought the resort in 1968 and renamed it Sundance. —Mike Korologos

1967 SHOVEL-RIDING GNOMES
While skiing down for our last run, we stopped in the lee of a big cedar tree to look at the view of endless Laurentian hills and frozen lakes stretching out below us. Suddenly, as we all stood there leaning on our ski poles, six little men who looked like tassel-capped gnomes came laughing by us—hell-bent and sliding straight down the mountain—sitting on big, wide snow shovels. Clutching the handle up between their legs, they were having the ride of their lives, speeding with merry abandon over the bumps, down the chutes and through the trees. Their shouts and laughter echoed up the slopes as they went at crazy speeds down the fall line. “Who are those crazy little men?” said Johnny. “Zee trail packers, Monsieur,” said Pierre. We shoved off and chased the “gnomes” to the base of the mountain, swinging through slalom glades, losing them, finding them and laughing all the way. We were in love with the day, the mountain, and the French-Canadian people.  —Frankie and Johnny O’Rear,
“Chateau Bon Vivant: The Hilariously True Misadventures of Two Vastly Unequipped Innkeepers Who Run a Ski Lodge in Winter in Old Quebec”

1978 STICK TO THE TRAILS
Don’t go blithely whipping off the trails at Vail, Colorado, this season. Under a new get-tough policy, the U.S. Forest Service is planning to prosecute people who ignore ski-area boundary and trail-closing markers. The penalties: six months in jail and a $500 fine. —SKI (October 1978)

PARKING THE MIND AT KEYSTONE
First the instructor asked us to think of a word that described our skiing. I chose “wobbly.” Mark, a Los Angeles advertising man, chose “strain.” Judy said “tense.” We each acted out our bad quality, exaggerating and clowning. We skied down a gentle intermediate run, clenching our teeth and holding our arms out like scarecrows. “Look at them,” said a voice on a chairlift. “Oh, they’re just doing Inner Skiing,” said its seatmate. —Abby Rand on the Inner Skier Week at Keystone, based on the best-
selling book Inner Skier (SKI, November 1978)

1989 UNITED NATIONS IN THE ALPINE LIFTLINES
Our State Department should analyze national deportment in liftlines across the Alps as an aid to understanding the character of Europeans. The Germans are the most aggressive. The French step all over everyone’s skis. An Englishman slammed into the line and knocked over my daughter. The Swedes make a wedge of six skiers and slowly surge through the line. The polite Japanese make block reservations on the cable cars. As for the Americans, they’re so afraid of making the wrong impression that they get squeezed to the back—the wimps of the European liftlines. —Peter Miller (Snow Country, August 1989)

After a career covering skiing, photographer Paul Ryan has seen it all.

Above: Ryan looks for contrasts when shooting. The dark shadows help visually pop the red-suited racer, next to the red gate, in this image from the 1968 Grenoble Olympic Games. Also, “I liked the sense of launching into the unseen downside of the jump.” Right: Jean-Claude Killy flashes his inimitable style on course in Stowe, Vermont in 1966. The following year, Killy earned the first World Cup overall title, winning 12 of 17 races. Next up: winning the triple crown of alpine skiing, with a sweep of all three Olympic golds at that time (downhill, giant slalom and slalom) at the 1968 Grenoble Winter Games. On skis or off, Killy was as photogenic as they come, says Ryan, who worked extensively with the champ over the years.

"I always was kind of a frustrated ski racer,” admits Paul Ryan, who dabbled in competitive racing in the 1960s. Raised in Newton, Massachusetts, Ryan played hockey for Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York, and after graduation headed north to Stowe, Vermont, to work and follow his racing dreams. In Stowe, racer Marvin Moriarty, of the Moriarty ski hat family, gave Ryan his first camera.

As young ski racers of that generation were likely to do, “a bunch of us decided to abandon career expectations and head out West, eventually landing in Aspen,” he recalls. Ryan and buddies made the racing rounds, competing at various Western resorts, including Mammoth Mountain, where “Dave McCoy let us sleep in the unfinished lodge.”

In the early 1960s, a career beckoned, so Ryan went to graduate film school in San Francisco, but continued to race. He found himself at Sugar Bowl Resort in California for the final race of the season, where he received the career advice of a lifetime. “You are not getting anywhere racing,” Ed Siegel, Sugar Bowl’s general manager told him. “But you’re a pretty good photographer. Come work for us.”

He did. “It was my first job getting paid to take pictures,” Ryan says with a laugh. Skiing remained a passion, but he found the time to pursue his craft in San Francisco, and made a name for himself chronicling the 1960s counterculture there. But he had found a home in skiing, and John Fry hired him as the staff photographer at SKI magazine for several years. He traveled the world shooting for SKI and other periodicals.

Ryan’s personal lens was always wider than just the sport of skiing. He studied under the greats of the time, including Minor White and Ansel Adams. His photography has been honored in international shows, with recent exhibits including “The Sea Ranch, Architecture, Environment, and Idealism” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Ryan has always moved fluidly between still photography and cinematography. His cinema credits include Robert Redford’s A River Runs Through It and The Horse Whisperer. His documentary work includes Gimme Shelter, Salvador Dali, and recently a film on George Soros.

Ryan has always found his way back to the mountains. This photo essay illuminates an era in skiing’s history and also the progress of photography, which has changed as much as the sport that Ryan covers. 

“Photography has evolved enormously since the years when I was very involved in photographing the ski world,” Ryan, now 83, says from his home in Santa Monica, California. “Cameras and iPhones have become very mobile and everyone can take photos of anything.”

With the new mobile technology, “images are abundant and personal moments are revealed every day,” he notes. Ever the artist, Ryan sees these advancements not as a threat to his craft, but as new tools to use. “Photoshop makes possible the transformation of photographs into our own impressionistic images, and expressions of our thoughts superimposed onto the events in front of the lens,” he says. “It’s a visually exciting time.”

These images here are from a different time, “when on the side of the mountain, I had to pre-visualize the end result, often not seeing the processed film until days later,” Ryan says.

Though the technology has changed, what constitutes a powerful image has not. Ryan says there are two main components to a successful photo: What he calls “the graphics” or the visual structure of the image, and “the human element,” or the emotions that are shown in the photograph.

Great photography combines both to reveal “Cartier-Bresson’s ‘decisive moment’ in time,” Ryan says. The art is in recognizing that instant. “A compelling photograph is not what happened a second before or a second after. It’s a single moment,” Ryan says. “A photographer’s goal is to capture that decisive moment.” 

This is Part 1 of a 2 part photo essay series from Paul Ryan, with the second installment in the November/December issue. View this photo essay as a mini-master class in photography, as Ryan explains his approach to his craft and the intriguing backstories to each image.

Built by architect Ralph Erskine, the Borgafjäll Hotel in Swedish Lapland is an enduring outpost of ski culture and solitude.

Not long ago, my friend Axel Persson and I embarked on a ski journey that took us north to Lapland—and back in time. Our destination was Borgafjäll, a remote mountain village in Swedish Lapland that’s home to Sami reindeer herders, a small lift-served ski area, extensive backcountry terrain, and a unique hotel and spa with an interesting history.

Above: Erskine built the hotel roof to be a ski slope, with a railing on three sides to prevent skiers from falling off. It opened in 1955.

Swedish Lapland, in the northernmost portion of the country, covers roughly 110,000 square kilometers and is home to only 94,000 people. That calculates to a population density below one person per square kilometer. It’s a place where skiers can still find a bit of elbow room while connecting with the sport’s heritage, which is rooted in solitude.

Our trip began in the city of Gothenburg on April 27, a lovely spring day in western Sweden. The forest near my home was a blanket of white, and the wood anemones were in full bloom. The girls that parade under those stately trees, walking daily along Gothenburg’s main avenue, had exchanged their winter wardrobes of black clothes and long overcoats for short dresses in spring pastels. When we arrived at our remote destination, the Lapland wilderness was also covered by white … but it was snow.

After taking the train to Stockholm, a local propeller plane flew us to Wilhelmina, a small settlement of 4,000 people in the province of Västerbotten. About 1,000 air kilometers north of our original Gothenburg starting point, the small aircraft touched down in a little clearing in the woods that they call an airport. From there, we borrowed a friend’s car and drove 112 kilometers northwest. Ninety minutes and a couple of reindeer herds later, we arrived at the Borgafjäll Hotel.

Here in southern Lapland, the pace of life is slow, small is good, and skiing never has been and never will be an “industry.” They say the Sami people have 100 different words to describe snow. I suspect they need no word for crowd, as the phenomenon does not exist.

A remote but enduring outpost of ski civilization, Borgafjäll has a unique history. Its tale begins in 1939, when architect Ralph Erskine was visiting Sweden from his native England. When World War II broke out during his stay, the pacifist Quaker decided to remain in neutral Sweden rather than return to the United Kingdom. Hence, Erskine’s early work was done primarily in his newly adopted homeland.

One of Erskine’s first significant achievements was the Hotel Borgafjäll, a fascinating piece of architecture that today still stands out as an iconic remnant of 1950s culture. Like the great Frank Lloyd Wright, Erskine sought to create harmony between his buildings and the surrounding environment. Not only did he build the hotel primarily from local materials, but he also built the roof to be a ski slope, with a railing on three sides to prevent skiers from falling off. Inside, sections of the hotel are connected by walkways that resemble ship’s gangways, while idiosyncratic fireplaces warm the lobby and dining room. The rooms are quirky, too: Many are laid out on three levels. The double room, for example, accommodates up to four people, with two single beds on the top level, sofa bed and TV on the central level, and bathroom below. A detached ski lodge has bunks and showers for budget-minded skiers.

Drawn by the hotel’s quirky reputation, skiers started to find their way to this remote Lapland outpost in the late 1950s. The pace picked up starting in 1962, when Erskine’s friend Arne Isaksson invested in a Weasel — a tracked military vehicle designed during World War II to move quickly over snowy terrain. For skiing purposes, it was the predecessor of the snow cat, and Arne used his Weasel to drag skiers up the slopes around the hotel.

Now 82, Arne is still around, and he reminisced with me about those pioneer days.

Skiing was growing in popularity in the early 1960s, and within a few years, he owned five Weasels, each driven by one of his brothers. Each Weasel could carry six passengers and haul an additional 25, each holding on for dear life to one of three ropes tied to the back.

Meanwhile, his wife was also active in this budding ski enterprise, serving waffles, sandwiches, sausages, coffee and soft drinks at a small hut on the slopes. The first surface lift was installed in 1967. Because it only took beginners about 165 vertical feet up the nearest slope, it didn’t provide much competition for Arne’s Weasels, which transported skiers about 1,300 vertical feet up the local mountains. When the first long T-bar was built in 1973, Arne retired his fleet.

Perhaps the most interesting bit of trivia regarding Arne’s early days is the manner in which he purchased the Weasels. He bought them from the U.S. Army, which had no use for them after the war.

“A lumber company bought such old military equipment per square kilometer,” Arne told me.

“Sorry, Arne. I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said. “How can one buy a Weasel by the square kilometer?”

“Well,” the old timer drawled, “the lumber company negotiated a price for whatever old army vehicles were situated on one square kilometer of land. Everything remaining on that chunk of earth was theirs for that price. Later, the lumber company sold some of the equipment to me and others.”

While Ralph Erskine and Arne Isaksson have certainly left their legacy on the little ski area, an important person in today’s Borgafjäll is Magnus Nilsson. Magnus now owns the lifts and slopes, and at the time of my visit, he also ran a cat-skiing operation—a descendent of Arne’s Weasel business. Over the years, in addition to transporting skiers and boarders up the mountains with his snow cat, Magnus has also taken people off-piste with a chopper and guided them on touring skis.

When we arrived, the cat skiing had finished for the winter because the reindeer had begun to return to the mountains, but Magnus took some time to show Axel and me around. The ski area has two lifts. The longer and higher Borgalift, which serves a vertical drop of 950 vertical feet, is by far the more interesting. It has five pistes of differing gradients, all facing the picturesque Borga Lake and cliff-lined north face of Borgahällan (3,378 feet) on the opposite shore. The shorter Avasjö Lift and beginner lift on the east-facing side cater to families, but does access some nice off-piste tree skiing. After a trip to the sauna and four-star dinner of reindeer carpaccio and butter-fried whitefish, I slept like a baby.
 

The following day, we traveled by snowmobile with Magnus to the base of Klöverfjäll (4,273 feet), where we strapped skins to our skis and replaced the machines with manpower. As we skied, Magnus explained the long-running conflict between skiers and snowmobilers in Lapland. Nothing is more disturbing to a skier in search of solitude than a noisy machine cutting deep ruts through virgin snow. Meanwhile, snowmobilers want to race around the valleys without worrying about some errant skier who might end up as collateral damage. Magnus hoped his resort could be a melting pot where the two would coexist.

For the next few hours, we glided up through a moonscape of undulating white. The higher we skied, the farther the eye could see, and the panorama that unfolded as we approached the top was breathtaking.

Just under the summit, we paused for a short picnic. Near the peak, the wind had blasted the rocks with a coat of rime. It was early May, but the day was cold. Magnus had told us that the best time of day for corn snow would be between two and three o’clock in the afternoon, and he was right.

After our first few turns, the spring snow turned to the perfect texture. Little kernels riffled off our ski edges like a May hailstorm. Skiing corn is so effortless that one hardly requires a pause, and before we knew it, we were back at the snowmobiles, gazing up at our tracks that glistened in the sunshine. Later, sitting by the pool, I reflected on the common ground that skiers and snowmobilers share. Sure, snowmobiles are noisy and leave a trail of exhaust in the air that I can’t avoid breathing as I glide silently uphill to my destination. Both sports, however, share a love of speed, a sense of freedom, and a desire for communion with nature.

And then I remembered Ralph Erskine and the reindeer. They are the rightful rulers of this territory. They, too, want to roam freely in the mountains. Magnus had recently compromised his financial interests and shut down his snow cat operation for the season in deference to the return of the herds to higher ground. It was all about respect. 

American-born writer Jimmy Petterson has produced 15 ski films and written and photographed Skiing Around the World, Volumes 1 and 2. See www.skiingaroundtheworldbook.com.

When it snows, skiers ski, even amid calamity. That could change with Covid-19. By Andy Bigford

Skiers and the industry have confronted and overcome a variety of disasters—wars, gas shortages, recessions, and terrorism—none of which affected the sport more than the biggest annual influencer of all: the weather. This disaster is different. The novel coronavirus already has trimmed one-sixth of the prematurely closed 2019-20 season, an estimated 8 million skier days and $2 billion in revenue, according to the National Ski Areas Association (NSAA). Travel concerns, social distancing constraints, and the cratering economy could take a much bigger bite out of the upcoming 2020-21 season. Or not.

Just prior to the modern skiing age, World War II was the obvious exception to the weather rule. Many of the 60 or so “ski areas” operating in the U.S. closed during the conflict, as did countless community rope-tow hills, with resort improvements coming to a standstill. 

Stowe stayed open. With gas rationing in force, skiers commuted by train and bus, but the lifts spun just six hours a day. The sport supported the war effort in other ways. Stowe skier C. Minot “Minnie” Dole, who founded the National Ski Patrol in 1938, persuaded the U.S. State Department to create the 10th Mountain Division ski troops. At the 10th’s headquarters at Camp Hale in Leadville, Colorado, Ski Cooper was created and then opened to the public after the war...

Thousands learned to ski at the Borscht Belt hotels of New York's Catskill Mountains.

Starting in the early 1950s, hundreds of thousands of Americans learned to ski not on the slopes of major resorts like Sun Valley, Stowe or Aspen, but at more prosaic ski areas and resort hotels with names like Big Vanilla at Davos, the Concord, Gibber’s, the Granit, Grossingers, Homowack Lodge, Kutsher’s, Laurels, the Nevele, the Pines and the Raleigh. These were among the Borscht Belt hotels in the Catskills, about 90 miles northwest of New York City.

The Borscht Belt—named for a sweet-and-sour beet soup associated with immigrants from eastern Europe—identifies the show-biz culture that arose from Yiddish theater and spawned comedians such as Lenny Bruce, Red Buttons, Sid Caesar, Billy Crystal, Buddy Hackett, Danny Kaye, Carl Reiner and Jerry Stiller. They honed their stand-up acts in the region also affectionately nicknamed the Sour Cream Sierras (sweet red borscht was often served with a dollop of sour cream), or even the Jewish Alps.

The resorts became fictional locations for movies like Dirty Dancing and A Walk on the Moon, and TV shows like The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, although some were actually shot at look-alike resorts in Virginia, North Carolina or the Adirondacks.

“From the early ’50s up to the early ’70s, the area’s hotels were a haven for upwardly mobile Jewish families who came year-round to eat prodigious amounts of food and chortle at comedians like Jerry Lewis who defined their era,” says Steve Cohen, who wrote lively articles about the Catskills for SKI in 2000 and 2006.

Legendary New York Times snowsports journalist Michael Strauss wrote in SKI in January 1960 (subsequently reprinted in “Borscht, Bagels and Bindings,” Skiing Heritage, December 2000) that “The Catskills were the Alps of mid-coast, middle-class Americans on ski vacations in the mid-20th century.”

He credits Swiss-born instructor Tino Koch for taking “dime-sized beginner’s areas and turning out hundreds of polished beginners yearning for the more trying slopes of upper New York State and New England.”

For me, it was my boyhood home. Living just a few miles from tiny Holiday Mountain was a dream come true for me, although not so much for drivers who had to contend with machine-made snow drifting onto the adjacent Route 17. Holiday offered only a 400-foot vertical, but I remember the glee of endlessly yo-yoing its narrow white-gauze-bandage runs, riding a Poma and two slow double chairs on weekends and Wednesday evenings after school. I was part of a local vacation attraction that dated back almost 100 years.

SKIING BEFORE THE WAR

Beginning in 1936, Liberty Winter Sports operated the Walnut Mountain rope tow in Liberty, on the site of the now-demolished Walnut Mountain House. Skiers brought refreshments in knapsacks and sunned, like lizards, atop a boulder, according to the CD-ROM Liberty, NY: Memories, produced by Between The Lakes Group (Taconic, Connecticut). In the era before snowmaking, Walnut Mountain depended on natural snowfall. With World War II, and the departure of its male skiers to war, Walnut closed.

October 1948 saw the launch of Christmas Hills in Livingston Manor, now a partially gentrified second home community in the northern part of Sullivan County. According to Sullivan County historian John Conway, writing for the New York Almanack, Christmas Hills had a lot going for it, and there were high hopes for its success. Conway quotes Jeffersonville’s Sullivan County Record (October 21, 1948): “During its first season of operation Christmas Hills will be open every weekend, except during the holiday season when a daily schedule will take effect. It will provide two of the latest type electric ski tows, varied slopes, including alternate ski trails through the woods and a professional ski school.”

The Republican Watchman reported the next day, “There will be the added feature of ‘ski-joring’—the use of a horse for level towing on skis—is planned (sic) as an added thrill for the fast growing ski public.

“The Christmas Hills slopes compare favorably with the best on the Eastern Seaboard. More than 1,500 feet long, the main ski run varies in rise from 30 degrees for the ski expert to a mild 10 to 15 degrees for beginners. Snow conditions should be ideal over a long period and the southern exposure of the slopes afford an exceptionally beautiful setting.”

Conway writes, “Just as it had with the Walnut Mountain ski hill a decade before, the lack of snow prevented Christmas Hills from ever becoming as successful as it might have been.”

The Concord Hotel in nearby Kiamesha Lake has claimed to be the first ski area to make its own snow (that honor belongs to Mohawk Mountain, which installed Wayne Pierce’s new snow gun in 1950). But the Concord was certainly the first ski area to blow pink and blue snow. Michael Strauss of the New York Times reported that the dye used to color Concord snow badly stained the pants and sweaters of beginners who fell in it.

By 1958, Conway wrote, the hotel was operating an Austrian-manufactured T-bar capable of transporting 460 skiers per hour. Vertical drop was 139 feet.

“At Grossinger’s, before snowmaking equipment was installed in 1952, it was a common practice to physically move as much snow as possible from the hotel’s extensive property to the ski area in order to accommodate the skiers,” Conway wrote. “It was not a foolproof plan, and only occasionally provided satisfactory results.” They also experimented with a surface of ground-up plastic collar buttons.

In the late 1950s, Holiday Mountain Ski Area in Bridgeville was fully operational and billed itself as the closest ski area of its kind to New York City.

“It will be no layout to captivate the imagination of experts accustomed to tearing down Stowe’s Nosedive or Mount Greylock’s Thunderbolt, but it will more than suffice for the run-of-the-mill sports lover who wants to test his legs as well as enjoy the sport with a minimum risk of injury,” predicted Michael Strauss in the New York Times on December 8, 1957.

According to Conway’s book, Remembering the Sullivan County Catskills (History Press, 2008), “Holiday Mountain continued to improve its operation over the next several years, and managed to survive the opening of the larger and better equipped Davos in Woodbridge in 1959, as well as the advent and expansion of other ski hills, including the nearby Columbia and the Pines, which, in 1965, became the first hotel to feature a chairlift.”

By 1960, Holiday Mountain was facing stiff competition. There were numerous Sullivan County hotels offering skiing, along with ice skating, tobogganing, endless games of Simon Sez, and the attraction of all-you-can-eat meals. Yet today, Holiday is the county’s only stand-alone ski area, helped in part by reinventing itself as a Ski and Fun Park.

Frozen in Time

Barry Levinson, 59, is a 40-year veteran of the ski industry who teaches part-time at Vail. He was born in Monticello, the county seat of Sullivan County, where he lived for 18 years—in fact, next door to me. We sledded and skied on the hill between our homes. Last summer he returned to the southern Catskills to document the lost ski areas of his youth.

His Catskill Skiing History page on Facebook documents the remains of dozens of Borscht Belt ski areas. One photo shows a solitary cableless bullwheel at the remains of Big Vanilla at Davos, where at its prime, a waiter in the base lodge would warm your hot toddys with a glowing poker. There are images of chairlifts rotting into the ground and a vintage snowcat stored in a shed with mechanic tools nearby. A YouTube video of Nevele Resort shows skis strewn in the base lodge. A sign offers $20 group
and $60 private lessons (see https://tinyurl.com/neveleruins).

In a recent call with Skiing History, Levinson likened abandoned Catskill ski hills to Chernobyl. “It’s totally frozen in time,” he said. “A post apocalyptic scene. It’s depressing as hell, but fascinating…I documented these lost ski areas out of a sense of nostalgia. Growing up in the Catskills when I was a kid was a nice place to be,” he says.

“While I thought Holiday Mountain was too small, I realized in the grand scheme of things we were lucky to have it. What else would we have done up there in the winter?”

Southern Catskill hotel skiing failed to prosper into the 21st century, with the exception of a small still-operating hill at the Italian-American Villa Roma Resort in Callicoon. Nonetheless, as Michael Strauss wrote in SKI, “there are tens of thousands of Americans skiing today on bigger, better mountains, thanks partly to the early chutzpah of Catskill hoteliers.”

ISHA vice president Jeff Blumenfeld is president of the North American Snow-sports Journalists Association (NASJA.org) and author of Travel With Purpose: A Field Guide to Voluntourism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019). Learn more at travelwithpurposebook.com.