1970s

How one local saved the Borscht Belt’s last ski area.

For nearly 70 years, every southern tourist, every comic, every singer, every song-and-dance man in the Catskills has driven past a ski lift counterweight inscribed with “16 Tons,” just outside of Monticello, New York.

Though no longer in use, the weight remains along Route 17, the main artery linking New York City, 85 miles south, to the so-called Borscht Belt resort area (see Skiing History, “The Sour Cream Sierras,” May-June 2020). The otherwise mundane concrete block paid homage to the 1946 Merle Travis coal-mining song Sixteen Tons, popularized by Tennessee Ernie Ford in 1955.

The counterweight has been free advertising for a 440-vertical-foot municipal ski area called Holiday Mountain, situated between the Neversink River at its base and a divided four-lane highway up top. Although the lettering has since faded, this beloved ski hill, the last dedicated ski area in the southern Catskills according to the Facebook group Catskill Skiing History, is undergoing a multi-year renovation driven by a local entrepreneur who is also a lifelong skier and ski patroller.

Holiday Goes Private

The hill’s riverside terrain opened for skiing in November 1949, with three electric tows, rolling slopes, expert trails and a “Swiss Ski School” to bring authentic Alpine techniques to New York skiers. The original iteration of Holiday, developed by local businessmen Don Hammond, a department store owner, and Manny Bogner, a lumber dealer, also offered a warming hut and ski shop—but it was abandoned after a few years due to a lack of snow, according to Remembering the Sullivan County Catskills, by local historian John Conway.

In December 1957, when the town of Thompson parks commission purchased the property from local resident Maude A. Crawford for $5,000, the ski area reopened with two rope tows and a 900-foot platter-pull lift with an uphill capacity of 900 skiers per hour, according to the Conway book.

Holiday wasn’t as challenging as, say, Stowe’s Nosedive terrain, but in 1957 the New York Times gushed that the ski area 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.” Trails and slopes sported holiday-related names, including Easter Parade, Birthday Schuss and Christmas Bowl. Forty years later, as losses mounted and local taxpayers grew tired of deficits ranging upward of $250,000 per year, town leaders decided to bail out of the ski business.

The ski area was purchased from the town in 2000 by Craig Passante, son of the late owner of the nearby Villa Roma Resort (which still offers skiing and snow tubing to guests). The younger Passante, a Hofstra University graduate with a degree in marketing and an honorary doctorate in hospitality, tried to pump new life into the aging facility by adding a family-activities park, motocross course and special events.

The adjacent Neversink River, known for world-class fly fishing, was a blessing for snowmaking but flooded the 1950s-era base lodge in April 2005. In summer 2011, Hurricane Irene and Tropical Storm Lee caused more damage, according to the Sullivan County Democrat (June 13, 2023). What’s more, low snowfall totals during those years did little to help Passante turn the struggling ski hill around.

Determined to prevent the land from being sold for a housing development, Monticello native Michael Taylor, a longtime ski patroller at nearby Plattekill Mountain and great-grandson of original landowner Maude Crawford, purchased the teetering ski area in May 2023.

No Holiday

“This ski area was about to drop dead,” wrote Stuart Winchester of The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast in November 2024. “Then Mike Taylor bought it. … He has resources. He has energy. He has manpower. And he’s going to transform this dysfunctional junkpile of a ski area into something modern, something nice, something that will last. And everyone knows it wouldn’t be happening without him.”

Tayor, 58, is a successful businessman, the CEO of his family’s propane and heating-oil business in the New York Tri-State area. Still, preventing the ski area from becoming another entry in the directory of lost ski areas was no holiday.

Overcoming the reluctance of banks to loan to a modest ski area, Taylor spent $10 million in renovations, encountering enough bumps along the way to fill a World Cup mogul run. However, he remains dedicated and optimistic about Holiday’s future. “We’re 85 miles from 12 million people,” Taylor told the Sullivan County Democrat shortly after purchasing the area. “We can’t fail.”

Taylor and his team, often improvising on the fly, had to contend with snowmaking pumps and guns that clogged with river grass; a pump-house fire that caused $500,000 in damage; extensive soil erosion caused by the motorcross operation; a scarcity of chairlift parts; the cancellation of local after-school ski programs and the costly landscaping of the adjacent Bridgeville Cemetery, which dates back to the late 1700s. To add to the financial challenges of running a diminutive ski area, a fire damaged the attic of its new snowtubing lodge one week before opening this season, delaying the launch of this popular kids’ activity.

From Molehill to Mountain

Today, it’s hard to imagine a small ski area—with just 40 skiable acres, a stingy 55-inch average annual snowfall and a 1,600-foot summit—doing so much with so little. This season the mountain opened with nine trails, anchored by a refurbished quad and triple chair. Other amenities include an 11-lane lighted snow-tubing park and a ropetow and conveyor lift overlooking the cemetery. An upgraded snowmaking system, including 200 new guns and towers and eight miles of snowmaking pipe, strive to compensate for the area’s typically modest snowfall. A true community ski area, Holiday is closed on Mondays. One benefit of its tiny footprint, Holiday is able to offer night skiing across all of its terrain—a staple amenity for a family area.

There’s also Mambo Night, a new trail that honors the Cuban-themed dance parties once held at now-defunct Catskill resorts, and Hackledam, named after a former tanning and lumbering community that existed nearby in the late 1800s. The double black, winch-groomed trail is said to be one of the steepest in the Catskills. “We’ve really rebuilt this ski area from the ground up,” says Taylor.

Fond Memories

News about Holiday’s resurrection was greeted by the region’s skiers like a powder forecast. Jeff McBride, 66, now of Las Vegas, Nevada, and a grandson of Don Hammond, lived within sight of the mountain and started skiing there at age four. “I loved skiing Holiday nearly every day of the season,” he says, “practicing Daffies, back scratchers and side-tucks almost daily for annual freestyle skiing contests.

McBride, who became a professional magician and has several entries in the Guinness Book of World Records, especially remembers drinking hot Dr Pepper with lemon in the base lodge. (Apparently “hot Doc” was a thing back then, according to the web channel Tasting History with Max Miller.)

Catskill skiing historian and native Barry Levinson, 65, who now resides in Gypsum, Colorado, recalls that as a kid, “I kinda hated this little rinky-dink 440-foot hill with a highway on top and a gravel pit on the bottom that did not look like the pictures I saw in SKI, Skiing and Powder magazines.” However, “now, with age and perhaps wisdom and a sense of nostalgia I look back on it and feel lucky to have had that hill in my backyard. Holiday Mountain [was] neither a holiday nor a mountain, but it was ours.”

Future Plans

The conversion of Route 17 to Interstate I-86 has been a long-term state project, with major upgrades planned to bring the section passing Holiday Mountain up to Interstate standards, according to the New York State Department of Transportation. Still several years away, this will reduce commuter congestion during weekday peak hours and mitigate weekend vacation traffic, hopefully leading to more ticket sales for Holiday.

Today Taylor is singularly focused on his mission, as determined as ever to answer the question of “How do we get kids off their phones and out recreating again?” As he told Storm Skiing, “You can’t make me happier than to see busloads of kids improving their skills and enjoying something they’re going to do for the rest of their lives.”

Jeff Blumenfeld grew up skiing at Holiday Mountain. A resident of Boulder, Colorado, Blumenfeld is vice president of ISHA and past president of the North American Snowsports Journalists Association. He chairs the Rocky Mountain chapter of the Explorers Club and has covered the adventure field in ExpeditionNews.com for 32 years.

Ayja Bounous has crafted a well-written and comprehensive biography of an iconic American skier and teacher, and a tender tribute to her grandfather.

Junior Bounous was born in 1925 in Provo, Utah, in the Wasatch Mountains, and taught himself to ski at age eight on self-fashioned skis. He became a renowned powder skier and was a favorite model for photographers like Fred Lindholm, appearing frequently in ski periodicals and Warren Miller films.

Bounous’s astounding ability to convey the secrets of navigating powder to other skiers brought students from afar to wherever he was teaching, and they returned year after year.

After explaining how he got the name “Junior,” Ayja Bounous recounts her grandfather’s life-changing encounter with Alf Engen at Alta, their instant rapport and how he fully absorbed Engen’s teaching philosophy. Bounous would later infuse Engen’s methods into the Professional Ski Instructors of America’s American Teaching System.

We learn how, with Engen’s urging, Bounous earned his Forest Service certification to teach skiing at age 23 and then became a full-time ski instructor at Alta, teaching there from 1948 to 1958. In 1958, he was lured 600 miles westward to Sugar Bowl, California, becoming one of the first American-born ski school directors in the country.

The author describes how her grandfather later returned to Utah, in 1966, to become part owner and ski school director of the Timp Haven ski area (on Mount Timpanogos). In 1968, Robert Redford acquired the resort and renamed it Sundance (after his character in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid). Redford prevailed upon Bounous to stay on as ski school director, and the actor thereby became a Bounous-trained powder adept.

In 1970, Bounous was approached to design the trail system for the nascent Snowbird ski resort, which opened in 1971. He then served as ski school director there until 1991, when he was named director of skiing. At Snowbird, Bounous also inaugurated both a children’s and a disabled learn-to-ski program.

Bounous’s partner through all these adventures, from 1952 onwards, was his wife, Maxine (née Overlade), who became a master powder skier in her own right and for her off-piste speed became know as “Fast Max.” A BYU graduate, she became indispensable as an editor when SKI and Skiing magazines published Bounous’s ski tips and PSIA’s instructional ski books included his contributions. Together, they raised two boys (one, Steve, raced for the U.S. Ski Team).

This biography recounts the couple’s full life of world travel and recreation in the off-season, too. They visited more than a dozen countries, from a memorable journey to Bounous’s ancestral hometown in northern Italy to the South Pacific, and from Nepal to New Zealand.

Somehow, the couple also managed to fit in month-long trips with friends and family on Lake Powell, on a houseboat or camping with a ski boat. Bounous loved exploring the many canyons and hidden rock arches that line the immense reservoir. Both would waterski and wake surf well into their 80s. And they botanized with passion, seeking out the myriad wildflower species of the Wasatch Mountains and discovering how the schedule and abundance of their flowering depended upon the snowpack of the previous winter. Junior Bounous is still skiing at the age of 98.

Junior Bounous and the Joys of Skiing, by Ayja Bounous. Printed by Paragon Press, Inc. (2022), softcover, 283 pages. $38

Reprinted from the November 1971 issue of Skiing magazine.

The Crisis in Ski Teaching—A Revolution Is Needed: Ski Instruction Is All Wrong

If All the World’s Ski Instructors Suddenly Disappeared, Would Anyone Really Miss Them? Would Anyone Care?

Up until a year ago, any of the above lines might have been an apt title to this article. Oh, sure, there were good individual instructors here and there, in this country and abroad. But organized instruction the world over was hung up on the Final Form Syndrome: Your hands had to be here, your pole planted there, you had to do this with the downhill shoulder, do that with the hip and observe a half-dozen other bits of body position dogma.

But now, new-think has hit the slopes. The youngbloods have triumphed. We’ve got short skis. And still shorter skis. And all kinds of Graduated Length Methods. And we’ve got avalement and jet christies and sit-back techniques and anticipation and square stance. And new designs in equipment. And instructors trying out this new equipment, actually trying to ski these new ways. And they don’t have to go over to the backside of the mountain where the fuddy-duddy ski school director won’t see them. They’ve been demonstrating these new techniques to one another at their official symposia and clinics, both here and in Europe. At last, there’s hope.

Unfortunately, the adoption of the signs of progress does not necessarily mean victory for the substance of progress. A case in point: GLM, the much-vaunted system (justifiably, in our view) of learning to ski with short skis and progressing to longer ones. This season, in the USA alone, more than 100 schools will be teaching some version of GLM. There’s Clif Taylor’s method of some 10 years standing: Lock the feet together, then swivel the feet or the legs or the knees or the hips or the whole body, depending on the kind of turn you want. A legs-glued-together, pivot-under-foot turn, turn, turn technique. And you’ve got the Karl Pfeiffer, ex-Killington Ski School GLM, now Headway system. Wide stance, independent leg action, some reliance on snowplow-stem progression. Both these systems start you out on three-footers, let you putter around fruitfully for a day or so, then move you up to four-footers. You move to longer skis only as you develop strength to handle more lumber.

Then there’s the Vail approach—standard teaching on five-footers. And the Aspen-Breckenridge-Sun Valley approach—standard on four-and-a-half footers. Or Paul Valar’s four- and five-footers. And so on.

Which makes one wonder. Hans Thorner (Magic Mountain, Vt.) was quoted as saying he was going to GLM because “you’ve got to give customers what they want. You can’t buck a trend.” But what is the trend? Simply to use shorter skis? That’s a good thing in itself, of course. Anything shorter than the skis a racer or instructor uses is an improvement. For years, there have been men around like Professor Frank Salymosi who have done studies to show how much stronger the twisting muscles of even a girl ski teacher’s legs are than those of a football player or weightlifter. Why anyone should expect the sedentary layman just taking up the sport to have the muscle power to twist those long appendages is a mystery; but at least those days are over.

But GLM should be more than simply chopping a few feet off the long boards. Put on three-footers an intermediate skier who can’t shake his stem, and with the proper remedial exercises, he’ll learn how to turn them both at the same time. But if instead of the proper remedial exercises, he gets more of the down-up-down, drop your shoulder, hold your hands here, put your pole there final form nonsense, the short skis won’t help a bit. Similarly, the beginning GLM student may find himself in just another New American Official National Modern System Technique.

The crux of what’s been wrong with ski teaching is that by and large there have been too few teachers (T-E-A-C-H-E-R-S, that is) involved with the sport. Instruction has been dominated by ex-racers, ex-coaches, ski businessmen—good skiers all. Often conscientious would-be teachers. But all too few have made any study of how people learn. It may not be necessary for them to have read Pavlov and Watson and be familiar with terms like conditioned reflex and gestalt (though it wouldn’t hurt!) to be effective teachers. But a syllabus, a recommended learning progression that doesn’t take into consideration such things as the conditions most conducive for a transfer of training, the moment of readiness, the need to learn at one’s own pace—individual differences, in a phrase—or the effect of motivation on the rate of learning, such a syllabus is doomed to failure. The emphasis in ski instruction has been on technique. And on maneuvers. Instruction is still hung up on some of the paper logic laid down by Hannes Schneider, the famous Father of Ski Teaching, who developed the original ski technique—The Arlberg Technique—some 50-60 years ago. That logic held that first you learned the snowplow, then the snowplow turn, then the stem turn, then the stem christie and finally (but only after 30 years of development had taken place did he begin to concede you could learn) the parallel christie. Neat. Ordered. Logical.

And all cockeyed. A progression of maneuvers would make sense only if one could demonstrate a transfer of skills from one maneuver to another. As generations of skiers have learned, the snowplow is so totally different from the parallel christie, it is a devil of a job to unlearn it. Yet, teaching skiing has become synonymous to many teachers with forcing people into the maneuver mold. Instead, I submit, learning to ski is in large measure a matter of developing specific muscles for basic skills. Yet, where do you even find these basic skills defined? Skills like edge control. Or weight control—being able to move your weight forward or backward or from side to side, as needed. Skills like ski and foot manipulation, which come from just plain walking around with your skis on. The skills needed for balance.

If these skills are not even defined by the instructors, it’s small wonder there has been scant research to see which ones are involved in skiing, how much they need to be developed, how they can be developed. Admittedly, many a fine ski instructor has an intuitive grasp of what’s involved. He may go through the maneuver-teaching sequence, but in the process he manages to get the skills across to his charges. But it’s almost accidental, for the emphasis on final forms focuses the teacher’s attention—and therefore the student’s attention—on the wrong things. After all, if a person can control his edges, can balance himself fore and aft and side to side, then the maneuvers of skiing become simple.

Now that ski schools are finally abandoning so many of the old absolutes (weight doesn’t have to be on the downhill ski, weight doesn’t have to be on the fronts of the skis, shoulders don’t have to be facing down the valley, etc.) there is hope. Take a look at the instructors at your area. Are they still skiing automaton style, locked into a rigid Wedeln? Or have they turned loose, making those wild, smooth, sinewy turns that characterize today’s hot shots? If they’ve come out of hiding, by all means, go take a lesson. Then odds are in your favor that you’ll learn more this year—at any level—than you would have last season. Enough so, perhaps, that you may want to become a ski instructor yourself.

A founder of PSIA, freestyle skiing pioneer and influential magazine editor, Doug Pfeiffer recently died at 96 after a distinguished career. See obituary. 

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In 1969, this WWII Vet Invented First Avalanche Transceiver

Photo top of page: John Lawton with the prototype transceiver, which used a loop antenna sewn into a parka.

A framed letter hangs on the wall of World War II U.S. Army veteran, electrical engineer and pilot John Lawton, Ph.D., in his apartment at an assisted living facility in Louisville, Colorado. It sits near a flag that flew over the U.S. Capitol, models of a B-17 and Messerschmitt aircraft, and other mementos of an extraordinary life well lived.

            Lawton, who survived Kristallnacht in Vienna, recently celebrated his 100th birthday, and has been hailed as “living history,” after a visit by U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse (D-Colo.).

            The life-long skier is most proud, besides having seven children, of inventing the first personal avalanche transceiver, named Skadi after the Norse goddess of the wilderness. The analog handheld electronic device is credited with saving numerous lives, including that of at least two clients of Canadian Mountain Holidays (CMH) in the early 1970s.

            CMH’s Rick Gray wrote Lawton in February 1972 to report a rescue the month before. Three guests had already descended a slope facing due east, one averaging 35 degrees, that had been loaded with shifting snow.

            The guide skied it first. Three of his guests had already come down, one at a time.

            When the next two went out on the slope it broke and carried them a distance of about 1500 feet, 600 vertical feet down.

            Gray says the guide immediately got his group together. They all turned their Skadis to receive. They spotted one victim downslope whose head and shoulders were out, suffering from four broken ribs and a lung puncture.

            The rest of the party continued downslope to pick up the signal from the second victim. That person was completely buried, was then uncovered, and treated for lacerations around the mouth and damaged front teeth.

            In his report to Lawton, Gray continues, “If we hadn’t had the Skadis, it would have been at least 20 to 30 minutes before we could have organized a proper probing and may have been at least another 10 minutes before the victim would have been located … I am almost positive that during that time lapse this man would have completely suffocated.”

            Lawton would later write to Lou Dawson of Wildsnow.com that it was, “The first save by means of Skadi and as far as I know, by any avalanche rescue beacon.”

            With his World War II service still very much on his mind, and after years spent in active combat, Lawton tells Skiing History, “I think it’s nice to have invented a device that saves lives instead of taking them.”

            Before Transceivers

           Prior to transceivers, avalanche safety consisted of lines of rescuers with wooden probes and avalanche cords.

            Use of probes could often prove gruesome. Teeth were cut into the ends of the probes so that by turning the probe rescuers could determine what was underneath, whether it was wood bark, bits of clothing or blood. 

            “It was tough to tell the difference between a human being and a branch that bended,” he tells Skiing History. “We needed something that made a beep-beep-beep sound when a body was found.”

            As for avalanche cords, according to Tyler Cohen and Lucy Higgins writing in Backcountry magazine (February 23, 2015), “In the First World War, Austro-Hungarian Alpine companies began using avalanche cords while crossing often-dangerous mountain passes.

            “Soldiers would tie the 20-25-meter cords around their waists, and, if an avalanche broke, the light rope unfurled and rose to the surface. The cords were numerically marked every meter, and arrows pointed toward the buried skier.”

            They were similar to the powder cords skiers use today in case they lose their equipment in deep snow.

            Early Skeptics

            The introduction of the Skadi was hailed by The New York Times (February 16, 1969), as a new electronic device that may ultimately replace avalanche dogs. The invention was credited to Lawton, then working for the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory in Buffalo, New York, and said it was demonstrated at the Forest Service’s avalanche school in Alta.

            “However the day seems distant when ordinary skiers and climbers will carry such equipment,” sniffs the Times’ Walter Sullivan.

            In other words, don’t hold your breath.

            Sullivan continues, “Meanwhile the keen-nosed avalanche dogs will continue to save lives.”

            As proof, he recalls a visit to the Great St. Bernard Pass where Prior Bernard Rausis, in charge of the famous hospice between Switzerland and Italy, praised his dogs as rescuers, many of which were trained at a rescue school in Verbier.

            The whiskey barrel around those original St. Bernards’ necks is a myth, no doubt perpetuated by the 1820 painting entitled Alpine Mastiffs Reanimating a Distressed Traveller by the renowned 19th-century British painter of animals Edwin Landseer, which showed the dogs equipped with an nip or two of liquid therapy.

            In the Times interview, Prior Rausis scoffed at the idea that true St. Bernard rescue dogs carried brandy kegs on their collars. “How could a dog with a keg under its chin drop his nose to sniff out snow-buried travelers?”

            Furthermore, according to Prior Rausis, fumes leaking from the keg would smother the dog’s sense of smell.           

            After escaping the Nazis, once hiding out in the back of his father’s broom and brush parts store in Vienna, Lawton then fled to England with his family, eventually emigrating to the U.S. Initially denied entry into the service because he wasn’t a U.S. citizen, he quickly gained citizenship and was drafted to serve in a reconnaissance team in the 91st Infantry Division, spending most of the war in Northern Africa and in Italy.

            Upon the end of the war, he received a doctoral degree in electrical engineering from Cornell University despite never graduating high school.

            Pulsing Electricity Through Copper  

            It was while working at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory that he saw the benefit of creating a device that could locate buried skiers or climbers.

            Prior to Lawton’s work, researchers had managed to develop electromagnetic methods to locate avalanche victims, although their products lacked enough range and accuracy to deliver the timely location required to save lives, according to John Dakin of the Colorado Ski & Snowboard Museum and Hall of Fame in the Vail Daily (March 5, 2016).

            Lawton’s Skadi evolved from a culmination of ideas and experimentation involving a number of people, most notably, renowned avalanche expert glaciologist, mountaineer, and skier Edward LaChapelle (1926-2007).

            “LaChapelle’s work in Alta, Utah, in the late 1960’s, involved the development of avalanche safety ideas and techniques, including methods for finding buried victims,” Dakin writes.

            Lawton, who happened to be skiing at Alta, saw LaChapelle, a snow ranger for the Forest Service, conducting his experiments and figured there might be a better way.

            After sending early prototypes back to LaChapelle for testing, the avalanche safety expert enthusiastically reported, “They worked,” according to a letter LaChapelle wrote to Lou Dawson of Wildsnow.com (posted on Aug. 9, 2013). 

            Simply stated, Lawton’s Skadi device radiates a magnetic field by pulsing electricity through copper. Every member of a skiing party keeps their device on transmit. Then if a skier goes missing, the rescue party switches their Skadis to receive. The receiving part of the unit could pick up this signal and convert it into a sound heard through an earphone that became louder as users got closer to a victim.

            The original Skadi antenna was about a foot in diameter and sewn into the back of a parka. The large coil antenna provided more range, although it also proved awkward to use, while obviously limiting the user to the chosen parka.

            Lawton’s Cornell team selected a frequency of 2.275 kHz, which is audible to the human ear, eliminating much of the expense and complexity of a radio transceiver that had to convert a non-audible signal to a tone that could be heard. That spot on the dial

was virtually free of interference and worked well when blocked by objects such as rocks and trees.

            The Hot Dog

            In the early 1970s, Lawton downsized the unit by eliminating the parka antenna and replacing it with a smaller ferrite loopstick antenna integrated into a handheld plastic box nicknamed the “Hot Dog,” owning to its red color, solid yellow lettering, and curved corners.  It featured a long-lasting battery and an approximately 90-foot range. It retailed for $125 ($980 in 2023 dollars) and was originally made in his home basement under his new company name, Lawtronics.

            In 1996, the highly directional 457 kHz frequency offered greater range and was approved as an international standard by ASTM, according to the Colorado Ski & Snowboard Museum and Hall of Fame’s John Dakin. 

            While Skadis could be found at all major U.S. and Canadian ski areas, and CMH alone purchased 400, Lawton tells Skiing History, “The sale of Skadis never amounted to a big business.”

            Nonetheless, Skadis had a significant impact on avalanche safety that lasts to this day. 

            Current digital avalanche beacons on the market, such as the popular Backcountry Access (BCA) Tracker DTS, incorporate microprocessors to simplify searching while containing a number of additional features, but all of them work on similar principles to the original Skadi.

            Still, probes and shovels, training and practice, and trained avalanche dogs (without brandy kegs), are all recommended to increase the chances of finding victims.    

            “Transceivers are still the best way to find someone who is buried under the snow.  The ease of use has changed dramatically with digital transceivers with multiple burial features and decreased search times,” says Mike Duffy, an Eagle, Colorado-based Certified American Avalanche Association instructor with almost 30 years in avalanche education as founder of avalanche1.com.  

              “Transceiver use is no longer the hard part of rescue, it's the digging that takes the most time.”

            Jeff Blumenfeld, a resident of Boulder, Colorado, is vice president of ISHA and author of Travel With Purpose: A Field Guide to Voluntourism (Rowman & Littlefield). www.travelwithpurposebook.com

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In 2019, long-distance runner and ski mountaineer Kilian Jornet—with the goal of just testing “how his body will perform”—completed 51 laps on Tusten ski area in Molde, Norway, in 24 hours. He climbed 78,274 feet, crushing previous 24-hour records by a ridiculous margin. To be clear, Molde is at sea level. Jornet climbed 1,535 feet, 51 times, on roughly a one-mile piste. That works out to skinning up at about 2.25 mph for 25 minutes and resting a couple of minutes during a 36-mph schuss. Fifty-one times.

Photo above: Kilian Jornet has been rewriting the record books for ski mountaineering and high-altitude running for more than a decade, sometimes merely as a result of his training regimen. Right: An early ski-endurance competition, the 24 Hours of Aspen attracted elite athletes, television audiences and sponsorship dollars in the 1980s-1990s. YouTube photo

That’s nothing for the Catalan Jornet, who grew up in Chamonix. For more than 15 years he’s been methodically assaulting the records for high-altitude marathons and ski mountaineering. In his recent five-year “Summits of My Life” project, he set the fastest known times (or FKT) for the ascent and ski descent of major mountains including Kilimanjaro, Denali, Aconcagua, the Matterhorn and Mont Blanc, at times shaving hours off previous records. Some of his records have since been broken by Ecuadorian mountain guide Karl Egloff.

Climbing and skiing massive verticals has become a passion with today’s endurance athletes, who are repeatedly blowing by many of the world's best times. Which begs the question, when did vertical-feet-skied become a thing?

Before smart watches and phone apps made vertical-feet scorekeeping easy, it was possible to estimate your numbers from the number of runs completed. Heliski operators charged by the vertical foot, and kept accurate count. You could keep track of your bragging rights whether for 24 hours, a week, a season or a lifetime. Heliski operations certified guest accomplishments with pins and special million-foot prizes, like Mike Wiegele’s silver belt buckles and limited-edition powder suits at Canadian Mountain Holidays.

One of the first vertical-foot-based competitions was the late 24 Hours of Aspen. After 13 events in 16 years, declining television ratings scuttled the show in 2003. But it left behind a slew of records. Chris Kent of Canada did 83 laps for 271,161 feet for the men’s mark in 1991. That’s 216 miles of skiing at an average 66 mph. Kate McBride and Anda Rojs set the women’s vertical record of 261,360 feet in 1997.

Once the genie was out of the bottle, lift- and rotor-assisted records started to topple. In 1994, Canadian speed skier and Chamonix resident Mark Jones logged 212,000 vertical feet in just 12 hours at Les Grands Montets. Next, Dr. Mark Bennett racked up 294,380 feet in 14 hours in the Yukon in 1997 for a new “daylight” world record. Fourteen months later, former U.S. Ski Team racer Rusty Squires chartered a specialized high-altitude helicopter and recorded 331,160 vertical feet in 10 hours and 15 minutes at Big Sky, Montana.

In the meantime, the guides at Wiegele’s were determined to set a record based on the normal constraints of commercial heli-skiing, with a full group of skiers and a single machine. In 1998, Swiss extreme skier Dominique Perret, Chris Kent and Austrian guide Robert Reindl, with Edi Podivinsky and Luke Sauder of the Canadian Alpine Team, logged 353,600 vertical feet in 14½ hours.

By this point recognition was growing that assisted vertical-foot records were as much about money as skill and endurance. As ski mountaineering boomed (it’ll be a full medal event at the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympics) interest focused on self-powered athletes. In 2009, Austrian Eckhard Dorschlag set a 24-hour world record of 60,350 feet. Ultra-marathoner Mike Foote broke that in 2018 with 68,697 feet. A few months later Norwegian Lars Erik Eriksen took it to 68,697 feet. Then Jornet obliterated that.

Born in 1987, Jornet has captured more Skyrunner World Series and Skimo (ski mountaineering) World Championship medals than we have room to list. He still holds the mark for the Innominata ski traverse on Mont Blanc linking Chamonix and Courmayeur (8 hours 42 minutes), as well as the fastest ascent/descent of Mont Blanc from Chamonix (4:57) and of the Matterhorn from Breuil-Cervinia (2:52).

As for why all the fuss over vertical speed records advancing every season, Nick Heil, writing in Outside, quoted Foote: “How many push-ups can I do in a minute? How long can I hold my breath? How far can I ski in a day? In the end, it’s all arbitrary and contrived, but it gets people to ask, what am I capable of?” 

Snapshots in Time

1958 Be Careful What You Wish For
A penetrating statistical study of the ski industry in Colorado and New Mexico has been published by the University of Colorado. Pointing out that a great many more tourists visit Colorado and New Mexico in June, July and August than in the other months of the year, the authors ask if it is not possible to develop the winter tourist industry so that tourist facilities can be used all year. — “Skiers Under Scrutiny in Colorado and New Mexico” (SKI Magazine, October 1958)

1970 The Continuing Death of the Ski Bum
Once upon a time, the ski bum was the ultimate ski insider. As neither an entrenched member of the ski-area management nor a local profiteer, he enjoyed a free-swinging life with lots of time to ski and unlimited access to the inner circles of the ski establishment. It is, therefore, ironic that as the need for ski workers grows, the reputation of the ski bum diminishes. Ski bums, industry management will tell you, are bad news; the title is now synonymous with “hippie.” Many employers won’t consider hiring ski bums, even for temporary jobs. As a result, there are fewer of the old-time ski-bum types than ever before. — Janet Nelson, “But They’re Employed” (SKI Magazine, January 1970)

1978 Risk v. Reward
I have been skiing o.b. for many years. Skiing out of bounds is extremely dangerous. Inevitably some crazy powder addicts (myself included) will continue to leave the “safe” confines of patrolled areas. After reading Lou Dawson’s account and subtle hints (“... how far can you crawl with a spinal fracture?”), I realized certain steps must be taken to ensure the safety or at least the survival of o.b. skiers. Education is what is needed on this topic. — Steven Harrison, Central Valley, New York, “Whistling in the Dark" (Letters, Powder Magazine, Spring 1978)

1981 Crowds and Crashes
The rapidly increasing skiing population has led to an alarming increase in inconsiderate and out-of-control skiers who are a serious menace. Last season, an out-of-control skier crashed into me. He never so much as asked if I needed help. I’ll have a scar I’ll carry for the rest of my life. For too long ski areas have allowed Bonzai Bombers to endanger others on the slope without adequate punishment. It’s time something was done to protect the rest of us from these slope-side criminals. —Thomas F. Warda, Rochester, N.Y., "Slope menaces" (Letters, Skiing Magazine, October 1981)

2007 Bode Rules
Call them the Bode Rules. This year every athlete on the U.S. Ski Team is required to stay in official team housing. Every racer on the team is also prohibited from having a celebratory drink with the coaches after a big win, because it’s a slippery slope from that to, say, being photographed carousing with Miss March 2002 draped on your arm during the Olympics. U.S. Ski Team chief Bill Marolt implemented the stricter guidelines after the strongest American squad in decades limped away from the 2006 Torino Games with only two medals—neither of them won by the phenomenally gifted Bode Miller. —Nathaniel Vinton, “Ski Fast but Party Slow”(SKI Magazine, February 2007)

2021 A Woman’s Place Is On Patrol
“When there are women on a team like this, it lends an important voice and perspective to the job. I can say that having women on patrol keeps everyone connected. Men muscle their way through the job and women do it with finesse,” said Addy McCord, 64, one of the longest-standing professional patrollers in the industry. — Shauna Farnell, “A Surge of Women in Ski Patrols, Once Nearly All Men” (New York Times, February 11, 2021)