Feature article

Patrician attitudes initially dominated 20th-century sports.

In the late 1800s, professional sports attracted high-stakes gambling. The potential for bribery and extortion led to a general sense that paid athletes were corruptible and competitions untrustworthy. While betting on amateur events was common, a deep divide emerged between “pure” amateurs, who were said to compete for the love of the sport, and professionals, who competed for money in the form of cash prizes or other remuneration. The distinction often boiled down to so-called gentleman-athletes, who had private fortunes, versus working-class athletes, who had to earn money to live and train. Sport governing bodies consisted almost exclusively of gentlemen, who often preferred not to compete with working people.

Photo, top of page: Ski jumping became a spectator sport, drawing huge crowds. Ski clubs sold tickets, and athletes wanted appearance money. Thus was born, in 1929, a professional ski jumping circuit. Photo courtesy Washington State Dept of Transportation.

 

 

When Baron Pierre de Coubertin revived the ancient institution of Olympic competition in the 1894 Paris Congress, two governing subcommittees were created: the Olympic committee and the Amateurism committee. The word amateur was defined very loosely; nonetheless, de Coubertin gave it a strong ideological tie to the Olympics that proved very difficult to strip away.

Any participant who accepted financial benefit for any performance was considered professional, and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) acted quickly to disqualify athletes found to have done so. Olympic sport thus claimed to be untainted by the culture of cheating and scandal that was presumed endemic to professionalism. Avery Brundage, the IOC president from 1952–1972 and a staunch supporter of amateurism, said in 1955: “We can only rely on the support of those who believe in the principles of fair play and sportsmanship embodied in the amateur code in our efforts to prevent the games from being used by individuals, organizations or nations for ulterior motives.” This amounted to pure hypocrisy: Brundage himself, when he was president of the U.S. Olympic Committee, was complicit in the Nazi use of Olympic sport for political purposes.

Participation in the first modern Olympics in Athens, in 1896, was limited to gentlemen and military officers (who were granted automatic “gentleman” status). Professionals and the working class were excluded. The tradition continued when the Winter Games began in 1924. It became a flash point because skiing originated as a working-class sport, pursued by hunters, farmers, herders and common warriors from prehistoric times.

Especially in North America, the strictures on working-class participation in sport couldn’t stand. But the rules still favored those wealthy enough not to have to make a living from sport. Amateur athletes could not teach or coach sports for money, receive remuneration for participating in sport nor use their victories and reputations to promote any product.

Conflicts over Amateurism in Skiing

Harold “Cork” Anson, in Jumping Through Time: A History of Ski Jumping in the United States and Southwest Canada, described how skiing developed in North America as Scandinavian immigrants brought ski jumping to Minnesota, Michigan and Wisconsin. It became the “thrill sport of winter,” he wrote. Jumps were built on hills with enough vertical to provide good landings. By the end of the 1890s, Michigan had more than 30 ski clubs centered around jumping.

A trend developed during this period that was inconsistent with the Norwegian principle of idraet, the philosophy that an individual develops strength and manliness through exercise. In theory, a person jumps because of the love of the sport, not for reward. But for ski clubs, jumping was a spectator sport. To draw paying crowds, some clubs worked to attract top athletes who could provide the longest, most thrilling jumps. Clubs gave cash prizes to winning jumpers (based on both distance and style points) and for the longest jumps (regardless of style). The size of jumping hills was increased to set new distance records, “compromising the grace and beauty of well controlled flight,” and clubs offered top jumpers local employment as a recruiting tool.

In 1905, the National Ski Association (NSA) was formed in Ishpeming, Michigan, to promote skiing, standardize competition rules and ski jump design, and to establish standards of amateurism. In 1906, on the principle that money corrupted idraet, NSA decided there should be no cash prizes in competitions. It took 10 years for those prizes to disappear, however. Some ski clubs paid the expenses of outstanding jumpers to participate in their tournaments. Professionals found they could demand, and receive, appearance money. Separate distance records were kept for amateur and professional ski jumpers.

In 1927, at the annual meeting of the NSA in Red Wing, Minnesota, 30 “leading riders of America gave the group an ultimatum,” according to the Seattle Times (February 4, 1927). Either they be allowed to receive cash awards or they would establish their own association. The paper reported that “Crockery, silver-ware, medals, cash and professionalism were more animated subjects of discussion ... than the outcome of the various championship events.”

 

 

Thus, in 1929, a number of Norwegian ski jumpers broke away from NSA and formed the Western American Winter Sports Association. WAWSA organized a professional ski jumping tour to compete around the United States in tournaments and exhibitions. Its members used tournament prize money to pay for travel. The group included Alf Engen, his brother Sverre, Sigurd Ulland, Lars Haugen, Einar Friedbo and others. Some of the country’s best jumpers did not join the tour, including Roy Mikkelsen and George Kotlarek, to preserve their amateur status so they could compete at the Olympics.

In 1932, the Cle Elum Ski Club in Washington asked Engen about appearing in its tournament. Engen replied that if “satisfactory terms” could be made, he would attend the event. “I am a professional and have arranged to jump in several tournaments this winter which offer some very attractive monetary rewards but, should you, however, make an offer which will make it worth my while to come to your city, I shall be very glad to jump upon your hill.” It appears the right offer was not made, as Engen was not one of the contestants in 1932.

Engen set a new world professional distance record in 1931 by jumping 247 feet at Ecker Hill near Salt Lake City. Over the next several years he repeatedly raised his own record. Engen won five National Professional Ski Jumping Championships from 1931 through 1935 and set three world professional jumping records.

Open Tournaments Permitted Ski Instructors to Compete

As Alpine skiing grew in popularity in the 1930s, and ski schools hired paid instructors, new issues relating to amateurism arose. In Europe, the International Ski Federation (FIS) ruled that ski instructors were amateurs and eligible to compete in FIS races. This did not fly with the International Olympic Committee. Olympic Alpine events were scheduled for the first time at the 1936 Winter Games in Garmisch, but the Nazi-run German team had a problem: their men had been shut out of the medals at the FIS World Championships in 1935. The IOC responded to pressure from Germany and excluded from the Garmisch Alpine events all the Swiss and Austrian men, on the grounds that they had worked as ski instructors. This opened a path for German skiers to win medals at the Olympics, while the Swiss and Austrians dominated the FIS Alpine Championships, held concurrently in Innsbruck with no Germans present.

In the United States, NSA considered paid instructors to be “FIS amateurs” who could not compete in amateur tournaments. When Sun Valley opened in December 1936, Averell Harriman set out to make his new resort an international destination and the country’s center of ski racing. He sponsored ski tournaments that attracted the best skiers in the world, and publicist Steve Hannagan made sure newspapers provided extensive coverage of the events. In his autobiography, Dick Durrance said Harriman “was determined that Sun Valley would match anything Europe had to offer.”

Harriman hired some of the best ski racers from Europe to teach in the Sun Valley Ski School, although as ski instructors, they were not eligible to compete in amateur ski races in this country. Harriman decided to host “open” ski tournaments, welcoming both amateurs and professionals, so his ski instructors could show off their skills.

In spring 1937, Sun Valley hosted its first International Open tournament, which would become known later as the Harriman Cup tournament. “The ski instructors are generally considered superior to the average American amateur” and were not permitted to race against true amateurs, according to coverage in the Seattle Times. The Sun Valley International Open was “the No. 1 tournament of the year, because it numbered all the skiing greats in its entry list.” Two championships would be awarded, for open and amateur, and ski instructors were eligible only for the open title, while amateurs were eligible for both. Separate prizes were awarded to the winner of each category. Forty-four of the best European and American skiers entered: eight ski instructors who were eligible for the open championships and 36 amateurs in “the greatest field of foreign and resident skiers ever assembled in North America.”

Seattle’s Peter Garrett, one of the Northwest’s best racers, later lamented that amateur skiers had to compete with better-trained professionals, “who ski seven days out of the week and make skiing their living.” He called for a new system in which pure amateurs and pros would race in their own divisions.

 

 

Skiers Faced Discipline Over Amateur Issue

 

 

Engen immigrated to the U.S. from Norway in 1929 and became a U.S. citizen in 1935. Hoping to represent the U.S. in the 1936 Winter Olympics, he applied to be reinstated as an amateur. NSA ruled that an athlete could regain amateur status by proving he (or she) had not taken a sport-related payment for a full year. Engen did so, then out-jumped the competition at the Olympic trials and was named to the Olympic Team. However, Brundage, then president of the U.S. Olympic Committee, threw Engen off the team because his picture had appeared on Wheaties boxes (the “breakfast of champions”), along with those of basketball star Bob Kessler, hockey player Mike Karakas and speed skater Kit Klein. This made him a professional athlete, according to Brundage.

In late 1941, NSA revoked amateur status for Dick Durrance, Gretchen Fraser and Engen (again). Durrance was head of the Alta Ski School; in addition, both he and Engen endorsed Groswold skis. The NSA said that endorsing skis was allowed but that “use of a title and a record” made Engen a professional. The ski association said that Engen might be reinstated for open competition if changes were made to the advertisement, but it depended on whether the title and his record were used with his permission.

 

 

Fraser had been paid to double for Sonja Henie in skiing sequences in the 1940 movie Thin Ice and in Sun Valley Serenade in 1941. NSA ruled that she “will be a professional, eligible only as a F.I.S. amateur.” To address this issue, Northwest delegates to the NSA meeting were instructed to propose that all U.S. tournaments be open events under FIS rules.

In December 1941, NSA cleared Durrance of violating its rules. A skier could continue to be an amateur even if certified as a ski teacher, so long as he did not teach for money. Open-class competitors could endorse ski equipment “so long as titles were not thereby exploited.” In February 1942, Fraser and Engen each had their amateur status reinstated. The ski association determined that Engen endorsed Groswold skis but had not authorized the use of his record in any advertisement.

 

 

In 1936, both the winter and summer 1940 Olympics were awarded to Tokyo, Japan (to the surprise of many), making it the first non-Western city to win an Olympic bid. After the second Sino-Japanese War broke out in July 1937, doubts were raised about whether Japan should host the Olympics. Japan formally forfeited the Games on July 16, 1938, and the IOC awarded the Summer Games to Helsinki, Finland, which had been runner-up in the original selection process. St. Moritz, Switzerland, was named as the new host of the 1940 Winter Games.

St. Moritz’s willingness to host the Winter Olympics was threatened when a dispute arose over the eligibility of paid ski instructors to participate in the Games. While FIS insisted that instructors were amateurs, the IOC ruled that they were professionals and ineligible. As a result of this conflict, the IOC eliminated skiing as a regular event from the 1940 Olympics, making it an exhibition sport.

Switzerland refused to host the Games at St. Moritz unless skiing were changed back to a regular event. The IOC refused to do so, and the Winter Games were transferred to Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, the host of the 1936 Olympics. Of course, both the 1940 and 1944 Games were eventually cancelled due to World War II.

 

 

After the war, the Winter Olympics resumed at St. Moritz in 1948, where Fraser competed as an amateur and won gold and silver, the first American to win an Olympic medal in Alpine skiing. Engen served as co-coach of the U.S. team with Walter Prager. Prager, a two-time World Alpine champion, Lauberhorn and Hahnenkamm victor and Swiss Nordic champion, was one of the Swiss ski instructors who had been barred from the 1936 Olympics. So he departed that year for America, to the benefit of Dartmouth College and the 10th Mountain Division.

As IOC chairman, Avery Brundage would campaign to exclude so-called professionals from “amateur” sports until his death in 1975. In his most notorious confrontation, he threw Karl Schranz out of the 1972 Olympics for signing endorsement contracts. In 1984, World Cup champions Ingemar Stenmark and Hanni Wenzel were banned from the Sarajevo Olympics for taking sponsorship money directly, rather than through their national teams. The IOC finally dropped the amateurs-only rule in 1986, permitting all athletes to deal openly with sponsors. 

John Lundin has won four ISHA Skade Awards for books on the history of Pacific Northwest skiing and Sun Valley. He wrote about Sun Valley’s Ruud Mountain in the March-April 2022 issue of Skiing History.

 

 

 

 

There was more to Willy Schaeffler than stern disciplinarian.

By PETER MILLER

During the 1970-71 World Cup season, the men of the U.S. Alpine squad clashed with their coach, Willy Schaeffler. After Billy Kidd’s departure in February 1970, Spider Sabich was the team’s most successful skier. When he quit in January 1971 to join World Pro Skiing, the proximate cause was money—U.S. Ski Team racers earned none. But Sabich also butted heads with Schaeffler. In his book The 30,000-Mile Ski Race (1972), Peter Miller told both sides of the story.

At fifty-four, their head coach, Willy Schaeffler, was a good generation gap older. His hair is grey, thin and combed straight back close to his skull. Part of his face seems to be paralyzed, so that his smile stops in the middle. Willy is a neat dresser and walks erect, almost stiffly. His blue eyes are appraising and sometimes appear quite cold. He spent the first half of his life in Germany, where he was born.

He had told the team earlier, when they were training in Aspen, Colorado, that he was the team hatchet man and that if someone had to be kicked off the team, he would do it, and he would be the scapegoat for all the difficulties. He had also told them that he was going to discipline their minds and bodies, and that although skiing is an individual sport, everyone must work together. He wanted to develop winners.

Willy has been a winner all his life. In his twenty-two years as the coach at the University of Denver his ski teams won 100 out of 123 dual meets, and 14 National Collegiate titles. For a while, his archrival was Bob Beattie, who, before he became one of Willy’s predecessors as National Ski Team coach, trained the ski team at the University of Colorado. Willy beat the pants off Bob. Most of the team did not appreciate Willy’s authoritarian attitude toward ski racing. . . .

The two months during which the young racers had lived and trained under their new coach had convinced them he was an autocratic disciplinarian. They called Willy a heavy-handed Kraut. What few of them realized was that Willy, like them, had started his life as an avid skier who disliked authority, discipline, regimentation, and the draft. During World War II, Willy’s rebellion against the political-military establishment in Germany nearly cost him his life half a dozen times.

Willy was raised in Bavaria, not far from Garmisch, where he learned to ski. His father was a Social Democrat, and since Hitler was not very well disposed to political opponents in the mid-thirties, the father was placed on the blacklist. Willy was drafted in 1937, and in a letter to an uncle in Chicago he described some of his training. The letter was censored. Then the government extended his Army duty, two weeks before he was to be discharged. Just as any American youth would do, Willy bitched, loud and clear. The Army brought forth the letter and accused Willy of being a spy. They criticized him for lack of patriotism. As Willy was not in the Party, and his family was blacklisted, they busted him from warrant officer to private and sent him to the Dutch border to what was called a baby concentration camp. For the next year and a half, he dug ditches from 5:00 a.m. until 4:00 in the afternoon. He was twenty-one, the same age as most of the racers he now coaches.

Willy was released in 1938 and started to live a happy period as a test driver for the Ford Motor Company. On weekends and holidays, he was a Garmisch ski instructor. When the war broke out, his presence on the blacklist saved him from being drafted. But the Army reconsidered in 1941 and inducted him into the ranks as part of a penal battalion. The battalion was sent to Poland to build bridges. When the offensive into Russia began, Willy’s penal battalion was offered a chance to rehabilitate itself. The men were given weapons and were used as special patrols and on spearhead missions. Willy was somewhere behind Moscow, as part of a pincer movement, when the temperature dropped to -54 degrees and the Russians began to pull the Germans apart. Willy put on the clothes of dead Russians. He was captured and lined up before a firing squad. He went through a very quick and intense period of concentration, where his life flashed in an instant. They fired and Willy, sure he was dead, fell to the ground. The Russians, drunk on vodka, fell down too, laughing madly over their practical joke. Willy managed to escape and rejoin the Germans. His life on the Russian front was probably saved by his fifth wound, shrapnel in the right lung and upper heart chamber. He was evacuated in a plane, which was shot down behind enemy lines. Willy, one of two survivors, hid in a small compartment for two days before he was rescued. He was transferred from one hospital to another until he arrived in Munich, weighing 130 pounds. It was 1944.

The military establishment decided that Willy, after he gained twenty pounds, was so well trained in winter warfare that he could rehabilitate himself again by returning to the Russian front. Willy silently refused. At about the same time, American Flying Fortresses blasted Munich. The headquarters building was evacuated before the raid, but Willy and a friend lingered and filled a knapsack with code numbers, passes, stamps, requisition orders. The building was demolished by bombs five minutes after Willy rifled the offices. A day later, Willy and his friend were dug out of a nearby bomb shelter. No one would ever know that the papers were stolen. Willy split for Austria.

He could, with the papers, go anywhere, requisition guns and munitions, food and uniforms. He entered the underground, harassing the German Army with sabotage. His biggest coup was in 1944, when Hitler ordered a last stand at St. Anton. Tanks, cannons and supplies were brought in by train from Germany through the Arlberg Tunnel, and the guns were being dug into the lower slopes of St. Anton—where today there are ski slopes. Willy blew up the tunnel with a box of dynamite and for the rest of the winter, from his hideout on the Valluga mountain, watched German troops struggle over the Arlberg Pass.

After the war Willy fished out a few top Nazis who were hiding in Austria and managed to land his old job at Garmisch, ski instructing American troops. One of his students was General George C. Patton. They became friends and Patton helped Willy, who had been living for two years on forged identifications, to receive official papers and the goodwill of the U.S. military.

World War II is history; the emotions of that period are lost on the younger generation. Yet perhaps it is the residue of that period of hardship that has forged this particular generation gap, the difference between the easygoing young American ski racers and the older, German-born, adopted American. Willy developed, in his younger days in Bavaria, as an independent thinker who believed in self-determination and who loved to ski. His beliefs, and they were as strong as are the anti-Vietnam war protests of the youth today, turned him into a rebel against authority, the establishment, draft, right-wingers. He developed his own philosophy, survived against the odds, and became a person who dislikes criticism and who is uncompromising in his beliefs. When he was twenty-one, the average age of the American ski racer, he was, because of his independent, outspoken attitude, digging ditches in a concentration camp. In fact, Willy, a German who sabotaged the war effort of his own country, has all the qualities that the young Americans think are so cool. The difference is that Willy was nearly killed a number of times because he adhered to what he thought was correct. Discipline and physical stamina and the will to win, or survive—that which he hopes to instill in his young American skiers—kept him alive. Money, prestige, security were luxuries he never knew in his youth. 

Willy Schaeffler was elected to the U.S. Ski Hall of Fame in 1974. After repeated cardiac surgeries, his heart gave out in 1988. He was 72 years old.

Peter Miller joined Life Magazine as a writer/photographer in 1959 and went on to write and shoot for dozens of national magazines, including Sports Illustrated and, from 1965 to 1988, SKI. He has written ten books. In 1994 he received ISHA’s Lifetime Achievement Award in Journalism.

 

 

 

Belatedly elected to the Hall of Fame, the charismatic skier drove the professionalization of Alpine ski racing.

From the moment he entered the world on January 10, 1945, a ball of energy and gangly limbs, Vladimir Peter Sabich Jr. would be known as Spider. His father, Vlad, a World War II B-25 bomber pilot and California Highway Patrol officer, and his mother, Frances, the local postmistress, were hard-working and pragmatic. They raised their kids in Kyburz, California, nestled along the South Fork of the American River, where the Sierra Nevada foothills rise into the mountains enclosing Lake Tahoe.

Photo top of page: Spider Sabich in peak form at the Aspen World Cup slalom, 1968. Courtesy John Russell.

Nature served up hunting and fishing in the summer and skiing in the winter. Spider, his older sister Mary and younger brother Steve (known to all as “Pinky”) learned to ski fast as part of Edelweiss Ski Area’s Red Hornets. Dede Brinkman, Spider’s Hornet teammate and lifelong friend, remembers the boy with big ears and a crooked front tooth as determined, focused and kind. By their teens, she says, “he had an aura. There was something magical about him.”

As the team packed into station wagons and racked up trophies throughout California, word of the “Highway 50 Boys” traveled beyond the Sierra. Spider and Pinky caught the attention of Bob Beattie, who offered them skiing scholarships at the University of Colorado. In 1963 Spider arrived in Boulder to study aeronautical engineering and ski. At the time, before the U.S. Ski Team was formed, Beattie’s CU Buffs were the de facto U.S. Men’s Ski Team. Spider and Pinky joined future Olympians Billy Kidd, Moose Barrows, Jimmie Heuga and Jere Elliot.

Beattie brought a hard-nosed, football-coach mentality to the ski team, implementing tough dryland training regimens. Bars were off limits. Instead, the team’s house, complete with swimming pool, became the party, where bands played, beer flowed and teammates bonded for life. Part drill sergeant, part cheerleader, part father, Beattie developed protective relationships with his athletes, no more than with Spider.

World Cup Victory at Heavenly

Over the course of his early career, Spider suffered seven broken legs. But by the spring of 1967, at age 22, he was whole and strong. He made his World Cup debut in the final slalom of the inaugural World Cup season at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and finished sixth. The following year, he tackled the circuit full time. Teammates remember him for his street sense and maturity, as well as a penchant for fun and mischief.  

In medal position after the first run of the 1968 Olympic slalom, Spider ended up fifth. The result matched Kidd’s GS finish as the best American skiing performance at the Games, and—though eclipsed by Jean-Claude Killy’s three gold medals—it heralded a bright future for American skiing.

During the 1968 season, Robert Redford was in Kitzbühel, Austria, researching his role for the 1969 film Downhill Racer. Though the original script based the lead on Olympic medalist Kidd, Redford gravitated to an unheralded, unpretentious and supremely charismatic teammate. “Spider Sabich was largely the inspiration for Dave Chappellet, probably more than any other one athlete,” says Redford. “What I remember most about Spider, and what I wanted to depict, was the way he attacked the race course, which to me reflected a feeling of going for broke.”

Spider ended his first full season on the World Cup with a win at Heavenly Valley, 30 miles from Kyburz. A crowd of 5,000 people lined the slope to cheer the hometown hero, who secured the win on a come-from-behind second run. Killy, who finished seventh in that race, won his second overall World Cup title and then retired.

Over the next two seasons on the World Cup, Spider won three more podiums and 11 top-10 results for a career total of 16 finishes in the top 10. Meanwhile, Beattie had moved on to launch the World Pro Skiing Tour (WPS), with Kidd as its star. After winning the FIS World Combined Championship in 1970, Kidd immediately turned pro and won the 1970 WPS championship as well. Spider, who was still competing on the World Cup, grew increasingly restless and unsettled at the hand-to-mouth existence it offered American skiers, while their European counterparts profited richly from sponsors. He finished out the 1970 season and went to Europe with the team the following winter, but his heart wasn’t in it.

Peter Miller, who chronicled the 1970–71 World Cup season in his book The 30,000 Mile Ski Race, summed up the particular challenge for U.S. skiers: “The American racer is a lonely figure on the international circuit. He is an amateur competing against professionals.” Miller also captured the personality conflicts within the team, under the disciplined coaching of Willy Schaeffler. None of it meshed with Spider’s motivations or personality, and he was ripe for change.

To Tyler Palmer, a 20-year-old slalom phenom on the World Cup during the 1970-71 season, Spider was both mentor and friend. In early January, the night before the slalom race in Berchtesgaden, Spider told Palmer he’d be leaving to join Beattie’s WPS. “My stomach hit the floor,” remembers Palmer. “You’re going to be fine,” Spider assured Palmer. “You’ve got everything I’ve got. Don’t hold back.” The next day Palmer, starting 61st, finished fourth. Two weeks later he scored his first World Cup victory.

Spider flew home immediately after Berchtesgaden. “It was such a relief to stop racing as an amateur,” Spider told Sports Illustrated in 1971. “I was fed up with the hypocrisy. Fed up with racing against guys who were making $50,000 a year, guys who had other people to wax their skis, sharpen their edges and who could go home when they got tired. I was nervous trying to compete with what I thought were insufficient weapons. Now I have no worries.”

Going Pro

Spider won his first pro race on February 4, 1971, at Hunter Mountain, New York, pocketing a check for $1,250. “The next thing we know, we’re getting reports Spider is winning every race.” recalls Hank Kashiwa, a U.S. Ski Team racer who joined the WPS in 1972. Spider went on to win seven races, beating Kidd in the final to win the overall tour title and $21,188. In the 1972 season Spider defended his title with nine more wins and broke his own record for prize money, making more than $50,000 ($360,000 today). That same year, the male U.S. Ski Team athletes were reimbursed $200 each for their commitment, the women $80.

WPS brought the relatively unknown sport of ski racing to the American people in an easily understood format and in easily accessible venues—from high-profile Colorado’s Aspen and Vail to tiny Buck Hill, Minnesota, and Beech Mountain, North Carolina. In Beattie’s head-to-head, gladiatorial format, the rules were simple: cross the finish line first and you win. The tour brought the drama, excitement and fun of ski racing up close to viewers and offered them ready access to the athletes and their personalities.

The tour also allowed sponsors and athletes alike to connect with the audience while enabling athletes to maintain their independence and claim cold hard cash. Under amateur rules, U.S. Ski Team members could not directly work with sponsors, but on the pro circuit, skiers could serve as billboards, eager to sell their sponsors’ brands while creating their own. Explains John Demetre, whose sweater designs, especially one based on Spider’s Kyburz High School football jersey, exploded in popularity, “This was showing America Demetre every weekend.”

Regular TV coverage on ABC and NBC, as well as Beattie’s made-for-TV celebrity pro-ams, ensured attention, sponsors and prize money for WPS. In its first season, prize money totaled $92,500. Over the next four years, the amount had grown to more than $500,000. Spider’s laid-back attitude, approachable personality and contagious joie de vivre made him a marketer’s dream, and he earned more than $150,000 annually from sponsors. Said Gordi Eaton, then racing director at K2, “Having Spider ... you knew he was going to handle the public side of the thing well because he loved people and could sell anything to anyone.”

In tirelessly promoting the tour, Spider took his sponsors along for the ride, none more so than K2. At home, he charmed the brand’s factory workers, retailers and customers, and diligently worked trade shows and press conferences to win the hearts and attention of fans. In Europe, where the American ski companies had previously garnered little credibility, he represented the free-spirited ambition and legitimacy of American skiing, and skis.

Klaus Obermeyer once described Spider as “a man drinking life out of a full cup.” Spider could seamlessly switch from being laser focused on course to being friendly elsewhere, headlining everything from autograph sessions to wet T-shirt contests and sponsor parties. He’d pound a glass of water before bedtime, then be first up in the morning to train. The ambassador of hard work and fun was eminently approachable, especially around kids, for whom he’d get down on his knee to have eye contact while signing autographs.

Explained the late Gaylord Guenin, the WPS PR director, “It was simply Sabich being Sabich. . . . He brought an honest vitality to the sport that can be compared to the vitality Joe Namath brought to football.”

Meanwhile, the restrictions on amateur skiers tightened further, climaxing with the disqualification of Austria’s top skier, Karl Schranz, from the 1972 Sapporo Olympics for “professionalism.” This impelled more top Olympians, enticed by Spider’s success and lifestyle, to travel directly from the Games to join the WPS. Among them were Kashiwa and Palmer. As more World Cup racers joined the ranks and learned the format, Spider rolled on to defend his title and lead ski racing’s revolution.

A Plane, a Porsche and a Pad

Spider embodied everything that Beattie had imagined WPS could provide: American ski racers making a living on their own terms, on their own turf, and using it as a springboard to their professional lives. With his earnings and competing near home, Spider was able to enjoy a lifestyle similar to that of European ski stars. He engineered a home in Aspen’s Starwood neighborhood, near his friend John Denver. The house was neither huge nor showy, but a unique creation featuring California timber, curved stone walls and a waterbed in the living room. He earned his pilot’s license and bought a twin-engine Piper Aztec that he often flew to competitions.

“He had the plane, the nice house, the Porsche. We wanted to be like him,” says fellow pro Dan Mooney, while noting that no competitors begrudged Spider his success. They fully understood the work it took and his talent for walking the line between fierce competitor and life of the party. Spider generously mentored incoming athletes, teaching them that making it as a pro meant managing training, travel, equipment, sponsors and one’s own competitive instincts. It meant working hard in the gym and on the hill, in the ski room and the board room, at trade shows, in ski shops and, most importantly, with sponsors.

Whereas amateurs were punished for promoting sponsors, pros were fined for not going to sponsor parties. Terry Palmer recalls Spider teaching him how to drink at tour parties by having one shot, then discreetly throwing subsequent drinks over his shoulder. His message, Palmer recalls, was always clear: “If you’re going to be good, if you’re going to make money at this, if we’re going to have a good tour, you’re going to have to work hard.”

Sponsors and athletes organized themselves into factory teams, bringing together the financial and logistical support of a national team while preserving the monetary incentive for individual success. So compelling was the tour that Killy came out of retirement for the 1972–73 season and joinedWPS, bringing it international attention.

Kashiwa was with Spider when they learned Killy was joining the tour and felt his demeanor change. “I think he wanted to prove that we [on the WPS] were the best skiers in the world,” says Kashiwa. Initially unprepared for the physical challenge of the format, Killy earned $225 total in his first race but retrenched over the Christmas break and roared back, winning five races to Spider’s three. Spider and Killy’s epic battle for the 1973 season title—recounted in the film Spider and the Frenchman and in Killy’s book Comeback—ended when Spider crashed off a bump, badly injuring his neck and shoulder.

Despite losing the title to Killy, and amid the infusion of new stars, Spider graced the cover of GQ magazine in November 1974. Clutching his red, white and blue K2 skis, in his signature Demetre sweater, he remained the face of the American pro tour and the picture of success. As tour director Nappy Neaman once put it, “Every kid wanted to be Spider. Every girl wanted to date Spider.”

As a brand ambassador for Snowmass (the resort’s only front man since Stein Eriksen), Spider deftly navigated all aspects of Aspen’s scene, comfortably mingling with cowboys, ski bums, celebrities and the ultra-rich. In 1972, at a pro-am event in California, he met French singer Claudine Longet. Recently and amicably divorced from Andy Williams, who had facilitated her Hollywood career, Longet and her three children later moved in with Spider. For a time, the couple seemed genuinely in love, but friends recall that her quick temper and possessiveness turned the intensity of the relationship into a liability. This shift coincided with Spider’s competitive decline. “If you’re out of shape by the eighth run, you’re not going to be able to do the things that you’re telling yourself mentally you can do,” he said. “And that breeds inconsistency. And in this game, inconsistency is elimination.”

Last Runs

In 1974, Spider managed two wins and limped through the season to finish fifth in the tour standings. By then his litany of injuries included knee, back and neck problems—on top of the seven early-career broken legs. Publicly he made no excuses, remaining upbeat and optimistic about the future. After missing the entire 1975 season due to injury, Spider knew his ski racing career was coming to its natural end. He and Beattie (as friend and advisor) together plotted the next step, which would likely involve K2 and Snowmass, and possibly ski area development, real estate and TV commentary. With Spider’s talent, education and connections, his next chapter promised to be as exciting as the last, and less stressful.

By March 1976, having qualified for the weekend round of 32 only twice that season, Spider decided to quit two things that were no longer healthy for him: ski racing and Claudine. He told Tyler Palmer as much in their hotel room in Collingwood, Ontario, before the penultimate race of the season. Palmer, upset at the prospect of once again losing his teammate and mentor, also mistrusted Longet. “I told him ‘Just be careful with her,’” Palmer recalls. “That was the last I saw of him.”

Longet and her kids were to move out by April 1. On March 21, Sabich spent his afternoon training at Buttermilk, while Longet, according to toxicology reports that were ultimately disallowed as evidence, spent hers indulging in Aspen’s notorious après ski. After a short visit with Beattie, Spider headed home to change. He planned to meet Beattie later that evening and to fly to the annual ski trade show in Vegas the next day. Instead, Longet shot him to death in his own bathroom, with the gun his dad had bought as a souvenir from the ’68 Olympics. Spider was 31 years old.

While the shooting itself still holds mysteries, the aftermath of the killing, the trial and the events that led to Longet’s sentence—a $250 fine and 30 days at the Pitkin County Jail to be served at a time of her choosing—are well chronicled (see “Spider Sabich: A Tale Larger Than Life,” by Charlie Meyers, in Skiing Heritage, September 2006).

A Long Legacy

Under Chuck Ferries’ supervision, K2 had introduced its first race ski in 1969. Spider’s success helped bring the brand to prominence, and by 1975 it had achieved a 30 percent market share in North America. Iconic, fiercely independent stars like Phil and Steve Mahre, Glen Plake and Bode Miller continued to build the uniquely American brand. Beattie’s WPS thrived, and the popularity of the format inspired a women’s pro tour, started by Jill Wing Heck in 1978. In 1993, Bernhard Knauss became the first pro skier to break the $1 million mark in tour winnings. “Even in the 90s, this name Spider Sabich meant something,” says Knauss. “I realized from the beginning that if I work hard enough and do well it can change my life.”

Skier Erik Schlopy revived his own amateur career with the technique and independence he learned through the pro format. When it came to naming his own son, Schlopy was inspired by one person: “Spider Sabich was the coolest racer of all time,” he says. Young Spider Schlopy now races for the Park City ski team. Today, a revived pro tour features both amateur and pro skiers facing off with no eligibility restrictions, and its star, Rob Cone, is a laid-back former U.S. Ski Teamer and collegiate skier who races on his own terms. Meanwhile, at the Spider Sabich Race Arena in Snowmass, people of all ages come to experience the rush of head-to-head racing.

Spider lives on in a more tangible way, too. “In the early summer of 1967,” Dede Brinkman recounts, “he and I spent the night together, and we conceived a child.” At the time, both were otherwise engaged, Dede to her future husband and Spider with his skiing career. The two decided to keep this secret. Dede remained close with Spider, as their lives took both of them from Tahoe to Boulder and, eventually, to Aspen. After her divorce, she lived in Starwood, where their daughter, Missy, had a close connection to Spider.

When Brinkman told her daughter, then age 20, the truth, “there was a lot more about my life that made sense,” says Missy. She now runs a successful coffee business in Salt Lake City, and her own daughter, Grace, recently graduated from UC Berkeley. They share a love of skiing and an appreciation for Spider’s ideals, which Missy describes as “doing what’s right, not what is easy. And making a difference.” While Spider never met his own grandchild, his parents did. Missy recalls Frances Sabich’s words: “It’s just the nicest thing to know there’s a legacy.’” 

Regular contributor Edith Thys Morgan spent nine years on the U.S. Ski Team, competing in three World Championships and two Olympics. She last wrote about “What to Expect When You’re Inspecting” in the January-February 2022 issue.

Spider Lives: On Film and in the Hall of Fame

Spider Sabich’s life is commemorated in the new film Spider Lives, which will hold its premiere at 5:30 pm on March 25 during Skiing History Week in Sun Valley. Produced by Christin Cooper, Mike Hundert, Mark Taché, Edith Thys Morgan and Hayden Scott, the 90-minute film earned a 2021 ISHA Film Award. On March 26, Sabich will be inducted into the U.S. Ski & Snowboard Hall of Fame, during its banquet in Sun Valley.

A teenager came to America, embodying the greatest ski jumping tradition of all.

North American skiing owes a lot to Kongsberg, Norway. This silver-mining town, 55 miles southwest of Oslo, dominated ski jumping in the first half of the 20th century. Between 1928 and 1948, of the 12 Olympic medals awarded in ski jumping, Norwegians won 10 (all gold and silver), and six went to Kongsberg boys. Often, three members of a four-man ski jumping team representing Norway were from Kongsberg.

(Photo top: Ragnar Ulland's leap at Mr. Norquay, Alberta, around 1955, appears to clear Mt. Rundle and the town of Banff. Courtesy Ragnar Ulland).

The guys with the red sweaters and white K’s on their chest included Birger, Sigmund and Asbjorn Ruud; Roy and Strand Mikkelsen; Hjalmar Hvam; Petter Hugsted; Arnhold Kongsberg; Nordal Kahldal; Tom Mobraaten; Henry Sodvedt; and Olav, Sigurd and Reidar Ulland.

The Ruuds Led the Way

The Ruud brothers dominated international ski jumping for Norway in the 1930s. Birger won back-to-back gold medals in ski jumping in the 1932 and 1936 Winter Olympics, plus the first Olympic Alpine downhill (not itself a medal event in 1936) and silver in jumping in 1948. He also earned two World Championship golds. In fact, the three Ruud brothers won the World Championships five times among them.

Sigmund won a silver medal in the 1928 St. Moritz Winter Games and Asbjorn won gold at both the 1938 FIS Nordic World Ski Championships and the 1946 Holmenkollen competition. In 1937–38, Birger and Sigmund toured the United States, setting new world records on America’s big hills.

Meanwhile, the Mikkelsen brothers contributed greatly to the development of ski jumping in North America. Strand won the 1929 U.S. National Championships, and younger brother Roy was a member of the 1932 and 1936 U.S. Olympic jumping teams.

Hjalmar Hvam grew up skiing in Kongsberg and came to Portland, Oregon, in 1927. Five years later, he won the first U.S. Nordic combined championship at Lake Tahoe, California, by taking first in Class B jumping and in the 18-kilometer cross-country race. He won several Northwest Alpine and Nordic events in the 1930s and 1940s and also is widely credited with inventing the first commercially successful Alpine release binding.

Petter Hugsted won the junior Holmenkollen championship in 1940 and went on to win a gold medal for Norway in the 1948 Winter Olympic Games.

The trio of Nordal Kaldahl, Henry Sodvedt, and Tom Mobraaten immigrated to British Columbia during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Known as the “three musketeers of ski jumping,” they dominated Northwest jumping events and helped organize, teach and judge skiing competitions throughout Canada.

In 1932, Kaldahl won more than five Class A jumping tournaments in the Northwest. The following year, Mobraaten won most of the same championship events, then joined the Canadian Olympic team in 1936 and 1948. Sodvedt, a champion in the combined Nordic events, was also active in the Canadian Amateur Ski Association, serving as a vice-president, and became a renowned international ski jumping judge.

Seven Ulland Brothers Competed

There were seven Ulland brothers. Sigurd came to the United States in 1928 and set hill jumping records at Lake Placid, New York, and Mount Shasta, California. In 1938, he won the U.S. Ski Jumping Championships in Brattleboro, Vermont.

In 1930, Sigurd’s younger brother Olav took third in the Holmenkollen junior championships. He then coached in France and won the 1935 French four-way championship. In the same year, Olav made jumping history at Ponte di Legno, Italy, where he soared 103.5 meters (339 feet) to become the first ski jumper ever to break the 100-meter barrier. He then coached the Italian jumping team at the 1936 Olympics. The Seattle Ski Club later hired him to coach their young ski jumpers.

Olav settled permanently in Seattle. He won several Class A jumping events in the Pacific Northwest, including the PNSA championships in 1939. Like many jumpers of his time, Olav was also an accomplished Alpine skier and took fifth in the Mount Rainier Silver Skis race of 1938. After years of teaching, he became coach of the 1956 U.S. Olympic ski jumping team, a role he continued through the 1958 World Championships in Lahti, Finland. In 1960, he was named chief of competition for jumping events at the Squaw Valley Olympic Games. Olav is also widely known for his role in the Osborn and Ulland sporting goods stores, a dominant Seattle area ski business from 1941 through 1995.

Olav brought his younger brother Reidar to Seattle in 1947. Reidar immediately found himself a top finisher in jumping tournaments. Four years later he brought his son, Ragnar, then 14, to Seattle.

Ragnar Ulland Continues the Legacy

Ragnar began jumping at age five in Kongsberg. By age eight, he was said to have been jumping from 110 to 120 feet in competitions.

During his first winter in Seattle, Ragnar consistently placed in the top five in Class B regional tournaments. At the 1952 National Junior Ski Jumping Tournament at Lake Tahoe, he took third and also received a prize for the most stylish leap of the day, a 127-foot effort.

Ragnar was said to achieve his amazing distances because he “held his float.” He had learned the technique of carrying skis higher on the float, keeping the air pressure under the blades all the way, leaning forward and then timing his landing to get the last yard, foot and inch. Indeed, the Kongsberg jumpers, starting with Ragnar’s uncle Sigurd, had refined a new style of leaning forward, bending at the hips and keeping the ski tips high on the descent.

During the 1952–53 season, Ragnar notched five first-place finishes, and the next year, at age 16, he began jumping in Class A events, consistently taking second in tournaments, with one first-place title when he beat Uncle Olav. The National Junior Ski Jumping Championships, held in Duluth, Minnesota, in February 1954, were no exception. He placed second, with longer jumps than the local youth, Jerry Lewis, who won the event based on style points.

In the 1954–55 season, Ragnar attended a two-week training camp at Howelsen Hill in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, under coach Gordy Wren. With three jumps at more than 230 feet, he took seventh in Class A events there. A month later, he won the National Junior Ski Jumping Championships at Leavenworth, Washington, and tied the hill record with a standing leap of 284 feet. With that win, he was invited, with 40 other jumpers, to the tryouts for the U.S. Olympic ski jumping team in Iron Mountain, Michigan. He took fourth place and earned a spot on the team.

Olympic Hopes Dashed

Going into the Cortina Olympics, Ragnar was 18, a senior at Seattle’s Roosevelt High School and, at that time, the youngest member of a U.S. ski jumping team to compete in the Olympics.

Before heading for Europe, the team trained at Lake Placid. The intensity there was high, as no American since 1924 had placed better than fifth in Olympic ski jumping. Uncle Olav, as coach of the team, knew European judges were tough on the landing and worked with the jumpers on their style.

In Cortina, the six U.S. jumpers pushed hard in practice, and mishaps occurred. Ragnar took a terrible spill and badly hurt his lower back. He was one of six U.S. winter athletes hurt in one day in Cortina. Disappointed and recovering, Ragnar went home to Seattle. He competed in the local Kongsberger Ski Club annual event, placing second.

With the 1956–57 season, tryouts loomed to select the next U.S. team to participate in the FIS World Championships, scheduled for Lahti, Finland, in 1958. Ragnar, now 19, still was recovering from his injuries, and, while he had several top-10 finishes, he finished 17th in the 1957 National Ski Jumping Championships in Berlin, New Hampshire.

In January 1958, he went to Ishpeming for the final tryouts for the 1958 U.S. Team. On the famed Suicide Hill, he repeated his 17th place finish from Nationals the year before. That effort, along with his previous record, was enough to qualify him as an alternate for the Lahti squad.

Later in 1958, he rallied and took third in the PNSA Class A championships at Leavenworth, with a long jump of 283 feet, one foot shy of his previous hill record. Judge Peter Hostmark told the local newspaper that, “The kid’s form was beautiful, better than I’ve seen him display before. I’ve never seen such uniformly good jumping in a Northwest meet.” Ragnar was said to have mastered the new “torpedo” style, with arms held back to augment torso lift.

Near Mt. Hood, Oregon, in March 1958, Ragnar soared 224 feet to set a Multorpor Hill jumping record, winning the Class A Western Open Jumping meet.

At age 21, going into the 1958–59 season, he was still in the running for the U.S. Ski Team and looking ahead to the 1960 Olympics. He had several first and second place finishes at tournaments in the Northwest but finished 14th at the National Championships in Leavenworth. While he missed the 1960 U.S. Team, Ragnar attended the Games as a trial jumper to test hill conditions prior to the official competitions.

Skiing Remains a Way of Life

Ragnar continued to jump through the 1960s, often securing a top-10 finish, but by then he was married and had a young family. He joined Osborn and Ulland on both the wholesale and retail sides of their business. In 1964, he was named manager of the company’s north Seattle store and ran that successful business for many years.

Today, Ragnar is retired in Mt. Vernon, Washington, where he looks back fondly on his ski jumping days. He makes annual trips to Kongsberg to visit relatives and friends, go cross-country skiing and reminisce about being lucky enough to recall the great era of Kongsberg jumpers. And his Multorpor ski hill record of 224 feet still stands. 

Longtime contributor Kirby Gilbert is vice president of the Washington State Ski & Snowboard Museum and Historian of the Ancient Skiers Association.

 

Before Hans Gmoser and Mike Wiegele made it a success, heliskiing had unsung pioneers.

The helicopter has been called the God Machine for its ability to hover and land on almost any kind of terrain. One has even summited Mount Everest: On May 14, 2005, test pilot Didier Delsalle braved high winds to perch a Eurocopter AS350 B3 on the summit for 3 minutes, 50 seconds, repeating the landing the next day. No one has done it since.

Photo above: Hans Gmoser (right) with five guests and a pilot, with a Bell 47B1, at Valemount in 1969. Courtesy CMH.

In decent weather, helicopters can land anywhere on earth. That wasn’t always the case. An early Bell 47G2 with a 260-horsepower piston engine could barely hover and land at 10,000 feet (3,048 m) in still air. That was just high enough to reach the ridgelines, if not all the summits, in British Columbia’s Bugaboos.  

Hans Gmoser, widely credited as the inventor of heliskiing, came to Canada from Austria in 1951, at age 19, and quickly became known as a top climber. He opened his own guide service in 1957, and in 1963 helped found the Canadian Mountain Guides Association. Gmoser himself said that the idea of heliskiing was first brought to him by Art Patterson, a Calgary geologist and a skier. Patterson had used helicopters in the mountains for summer fieldwork, and he knew that a lot of these machines were sitting idle during the winter months. He thought that hauling skiers could be an interesting new business. He also realized that to make the idea work, he would need professional guides who understood routefinding, snow and avalanches. Gmoser and Patterson teamed up, with Patterson handling the business side and Gmoser the guiding.

Their first heliski adventure began in late February 1963. Twenty clients, organized by Brooks and Ann Dodge, paid $20 each (approximately $160 in today’s dollars) for a day on Old Goat Glacier, 10 miles south of Canmore, Alberta. The result was disappointing. The two-seat Bell 47G2 helicopters could fly only one passenger at a time and climbed at less than 850 feet per minute; it took hours to get everyone to the 8,200-foot (2,500 m) summit. Then the snow conditions turned out to be less than ideal. They tried another heliski day in May, but encountered high winds that limited the possible landing zones. Patterson decided that heliskiing was a risky business and dropped out. But Gmoser saw the potential in helicopters.

He eventually renamed his guide service Canadian Mountain Holidays and, with the advent of fast-climbing, heavy-hauling, jet-powered helicopters, was able to create a successful heliski and helihike operation.

That’s the accepted version of heliskiing’s genesis. But earlier pioneers preceded Gmoser and Patterson.

1948

Writing in Vertical magazine (March 2012), Canadian aviation writer Bob Petite reported, “The first recorded occurrence of a helicopter being used to airlift skiers into mountains was back in 1948, by Skyways Services, which was one of three Canadian commercial operations at the time.” This wasn’t heliskiing proper—it was an air taxi service from Vancouver to the summit of Grouse Mountain ski resort (1,231 m, 4,039 ft). The fare-paying passengers then skied the lift network.

1950

In 1950, pioneering avalanche expert Monty Atwater used a helicopter while surveying Mineral King Valley, the proposed Disney ski resort in California. Elevations ranged from the valley floor at 7,400 feet (2,300 m) to surrounding peaks of more than 11,000 feet (3,400 m). In his book
Avalanche Hunters, Atwater wrote:

“In Northern California I once did a job surveying a complex of ski areas of the future. My companion and I used a chopper first of all to jump over the snowbound (i.e., closed for the winter) highways. Then we used it as a ski lift with an infinite number of lines. It flew us to the top, picked us up at the bottom, flew us to a different top. In three days of about three hours of flying time apiece we did more work than we could have in a month on foot and with Sno-Cats, and we did it better. It was an aerial platform for making maps and photographs. If one of us got hurt, our angel of mercy was slurruping overhead. I have ridden helicopters from Chile to British Columbia, and I have great affection for them.”

Clearly, Atwater was heliskiing. His wife, Joan, did realize how much fun it could be. Atwater wrote: “As soon as she knew that there was a chopper on the program, Joan began propagandizing for a ride in it. ‘Not a chance,’ I told her. ‘Do you have any idea how much it costs per hour to fly this doodlebug? Besides, it’s a government job and the government doesn’t approve of using its equipment for joy riding.’”

Much later, in 1965, Disney also hired Swiss avalanche researcher (and Aspen skiing pioneer) André Roch to study Mineral King. Roch, too, used a helicopter to access the higher bowls, and he brought along other skiers on these trips. If Disney had known, he might have become the first heliski vacation developer. Regardless, Mineral King Ski area was never developed due to opposition by environmental groups.

1957–58

Bengt “Binx” Sandahl moved to Alta, Utah, in 1953 and worked as a bartender in the Alta Lodge. There, he became interested in snow and avalanche work, and, according to his daughter, he talked frequently with Atwater, who was by then director of the avalanche research center. The following year he left to take a job in Alaska, where he eventually worked as a ski instructor at Alyeska. Skiing magazine (February 2007) reported that in 1958, Sandahl guided skiers using a helicopter. Video exists of an Alouette II—the first turboshaft helicopter, introduced in 1956—carrying four skiers and a pilot at Alyeska, around that time. Sandahl apparently hauled skiers to Max’s Mountain on the south rim of Alyeska’s bowl, charging $10 per ride for up to 100 skiers per day. Sandahl later became Alyeska’s snow safety director. Returning to Alta, he was hired as the U.S. Forest Service snow ranger in 1964. He then used helicopters to drop explosives into avalanche chutes.

The January 1959 issue of SKI magazine ran an article entitled “By Helicopter to Virgin Snowfields,” about replacing ski-equipped planes with helicopters for glacier skiing in Alaska and the Alps. “By helicopter it is possible to ski unbroken powder all day long without ever seeing ski tracks except the ones you make yourself.” The reference to heliskiing in Alaska is to Sandahl’s operation. The article reported that at Gstaad and at Val d’Isère, skiers could ride for $22 to $52 per flight—about $176 to $416 today. Heliskiing has never been cheap.

1960s

In 1963 Bob Hosking was flying skiers from the Rustler Lodge at Alta. It’s not clear if he held a special use permit that allowed this. It’s said that for $5 or $10 one could buy a lift to Mount Superior, above Alta.

The big breakthrough, as Sandahl had found, came with jet engines. In 1961 Bell introduced the turboshaft-powered 204/205 series helicopters, capable of flying 10 to 14 passengers and climbing 1,750 feet per minute. That was more than 20 times the performance of a Bell 47.

Before long, the 205 was outfitted with a 1,500-horsepower engine. So equipped, by the late 1960s, Gmoser really had CMH up and running. Sun Valley owner Bill Janss skied with Gmoser in the Purcell range and in 1966 launched Sun Valley Heliski. Mike Wiegele started his operation in Valemount, British Columbia, in 1970 and moved down the road to Blue River in 1974. In 1973 Wasatch Powderbird Guides started operations in Utah (Hosking was a partner). By November 1982, Powder magazine listed 15 heliskiing operations in the Lower 48 states alone.

Learning curve

The early leaders in heliskiing learned by trial and error. Protocols were needed for both helicopter and avalanche safety. Once the boom started, Gmoser and Wiegele, in particular, faced a shortage of qualified guides, the reason for the foundation of the Canadian Ski Guides Association (CSGA) in 1990. CSGA now has about 130 members, and heliskiing contributes more than $160 million annually to the economy of British Columbia. 

Fat skis: A second boom

By the late 1980s, the rising cost of aviation fuel was cutting into profits for heliski operators. The crunch was exacerbated by a limited pool of capable powder skiers—there simply weren’t a lot of skiers who could handle bottomless powder on the 68 millimeter–waisted straight skis of the era. Then in 1988, one of the competitors in Mike Wiegele’s Powder 8 contest contacted Rupert Huber at the Atomic ski factory and asked for a fatter powder ski. Huber responded in 1990 with the Powder Plus fat ski (112 mm waist width). Wiegele adopted and promoted the concept. Fat skis took off, and heliskiing resumed growing.

 

First Heavy Lifter

Use of helicopters in mountainous terrain depends critically on engine power. The first machine to lift significant loads at higher elevations was the German Focke-Achgelis Fa-223 Drache (Dragon), a twin-rotor design that first flew in 1940, powered by a 1,000-horsepower radial engine. Climb rate was 1,700 feet per minute. Theoretical service ceiling was 23,000 feet (7,100 m) at light weight, and 8,000 feet (2,440 m) with a full payload of 1,000 kg (2,200 lb). This was better than twice the performance of the much smaller Bell 47.

A Fa-233 is known to have crashed on Mont Blanc in 1944 during an attempted mountain rescue. Mountain flight testing resumed in Mittenwald in the Bavarian Alps in September 1944, with an emphasis on hauling heavy cargo to mountain troops—howitzers, for instance. The highest landing was at 2,300 meters (7,549 ft) while testing performance as an air ambulance. By then the factory had been repeatedly destroyed by Allied bombers and the project was abandoned. Of 11 built,only three survivedthe war. Neither of the Austrian-born pioneers of Canadian heliskiing, Hans Gmoser and Mike Wiegele, were aware of the German experiments.

Halsted Morris is president of the American Avalanche Association. His patrol handle is “Hacksaw.” See his website at heliskihistory.com.

 

In 1964, the Kokanee Glacier gave birth to Canada’s national ski team.

Canadians fared poorly at the 1964 Olympics in Innsbruck. Only Nancy Greene had a top-10 finish (seventh in downhill). In May 1964, former Canadian downhill champion Dave Jacobs, who had retired with a broken leg in 1961, wrote a letter to Bill Tindale, then president of the Canadian Amateur Ski Association (CASA), concluding: “We have some tough problems to solve which require some slightly revolutionary solutions.”

Jacobs had experienced firsthand Canada’s dysfunctional ski racing program and witnessed the hugely successful programs of European nations. France, Austria and Switzerland had full-time coaching staffs, dedicated national teams with scheduled training camps and established programs for younger skiers to advance to the national level.

Canadians, by contrast, trained at their own hills, then gathered for a selection camp before major international events. CASA would then hire a European coach to join the team when it arrived at the events. This arrangement seemed to work for brilliant skiers like Lucile Wheeler and Anne Heggtveit, but it wasn’t a plan for consistent success. When Jacobs and his Canadian teammates arrived in Germany en route to the 1958 World Championships in Bad Gastein, Austria, they had never even met their coach—German Mookie Causing—and Causing certainly knew nothing about the Canadians.

It was time, Jacobs said in his letter, for Canada to develop a national team program, in which skiers could attend university on scholarship and train year-round with a full-time coaching staff. Unbeknownst to him, a small group of forward-thinking individuals were already working on just such a program. In Montreal, Don Sturgess, chairman of CASA’s Alpine competition committee, and B.C.-based John Platt, vice-chairman, had already agreed that drastic changes were needed. Meanwhile, in Nelson, British Columbia, Notre Dame University (NDU) President Father Aquinas Thomas and athletic director Ernie Gare had just implemented Canada’s first university athletic scholarship program, for its hockey team.

The four men saw plenty of common ground that could benefit both CASA and NDU.

Sturgess replied to Jacobs’ letter, saying CASA was likely to set up a national program in Nelson that year and, by the way, would Jacobs be interested in the head coach job? Jacobs eventually accepted the offer, with half his $6,000 annual salary paid by the association and half by Notre Dame, where he was employed to teach freshman math. Peter Webster took a leave from his banking job to serve as pro bono team manager, although he did receive $1,800 annually from the university to also serve as dorm supervisor.

So in the summer of 1964 Jacobs and Webster welcomed 15 men and 10 women to their new homes—the dorm at NDU—where the intense East-versus-West rivalry eased and one truly national team evolved.

Jacobs introduced high-intensity dryland training in preparation for hikes to nearby Kokanee Glacier for summer training, an experience few team members would forget. “You had to carry all your stuff in this backpack, and it was at least a three-hour hike that was quite rugged,” recalls Andrée Crepeau. “When we got to the top, some of the girls were in these tiny cloth sneakers and there was a foot and a half of snow and it was dark, completely dark.”

“We had those Keds, little canvas shoes,” adds Nancy Greene. “We used to go and get them at Kresge’s for a dollar forty-nine. The second year we got running shoes.”

“The boys had gone ahead, so we at least had a path in the snow to follow,” continues Crepeau. “It was kind of scary, but really exciting, and when we finally got to the cabin, wow! We were all on the floor of the top floor, no mattresses, nothing, people farting, snoring. It was such an adventure. I was a shy, well-bred little girl. I had turned 17 a couple of months before so it was quite a discovery. I loved it.”

“Each morning at 6:00 a.m. we hiked, skis on our backs, up to the glacier,” says Barbie Walker. There, a cable drag-lift awaited them, with a gasoline engine powerful enough to haul only one skier at a time. Each skier carried a tow harness that clipped to the cable. “That came in very handy to use as a tourniquet when coach Bob Gilmour, wearing shorts, sliced his calf deeply,” Walker recalls. “That accident was at 10:00 a.m., and we built a tent shelter out of ski poles and jackets to shield him from the hot sun. Currie [Chapman] ran down to the parking lot where the buses say, but, alas, the porcupines had eaten the rubber tires. He had to run further, to Kaslo, only to discover the helicopter was in Cranbrook for repairs. Four hours after the accident, Bob was riding beneath a helicopter on his way to the hospital in Nelson.”

After a day of hiking and skiing, the reward was a swim in the frigid glacier lake, followed by a sauna, sort of. Keith Shepherd, Currie Chapman, Peter Duncan and Rod Hebron had found an old pot-belly stove that they incorporated into the makeshift sauna. “Three walls of plastic on a frame against a flat rock, with a flap for a door, made warming up after the swim enjoyable,” says Walker.

With all of the hiking and just the one-person lift, Crepeau said the skiers only got in about four runs a day. “I sort of said, what am I doing this for? Am I really going to learn something with four runs?” Indeed, the skiers did learn, and it showed in their results.

“We went to the first races in 1965 in Aspen,” Jacobs says. “Billy Kidd and Jimmy Heuga had just won their ’64 Olympic medals. And Peter Duncan, Nancy Greene, Bob Swan ... they pretty much cleaned those guys. Sports Illustrated wrote this big article, ‘Canadians Raid Aspen.’ And it took off from there.”

Jacobs left the team after the 1966 season to work for Bob Lange. In 1967, Greene won six individual races and the first-ever women’s overall World Cup title. A year later she defended that title and won Olympic gold and silver as well. At the time, critics said she would have won even without the program.

“For me it was the perfect situation,” Greene says from Sun Peaks Ski Resort, where she is director of skiing and operates Nancy Greene’s Cahilty Lodge along with husband, Al Raine, former head coach and program director of the national team. “I trained a lot with the guys, so I always had somebody around who was skiing better than I was, who was training harder, who I would have a hard time catching up to.”

Based on her success, the International Ski Federation awarded a 1968 World Cup race to her home hill, Red Mountain, in Rossland, British Columbia. It was the first World Cup held in Canada.

Greene retired after the 1968 season, at age 24. Al Raine took over as head coach. The program moved out of Nelson in 1969 when Raine and CASA decided the skiers needed more time on snow and less in classrooms.

But the groundwork had been laid, and the Nelson camp launched an intergenerational success story. First, Betsy Clifford became the 1970 FIS World Slalom Champion, and Kathy Kreiner the 1976 GS Olympic champion. Then Currie Chapman coached the Canadian women when Gerry Sorensen and Laurie Graham took gold and bronze in downhill at the 1982 World Championships, and Scott Henderson coached the men’s team that gave birth to the Crazy Canucks, including Steve Podborski’s World Cup downhill title in 1982 and, eventually, Ken Read’s on-snow success, followed by his longtime stewardship of Alpine Canada. 

Freelancer John Korobanik is former managing editor of the St. Albert Gazette, in St. Albert, Alberta.

The Original Team

Head coach Dave Jacobs
Manager Peter Webster

MEN
Gerry Rinaldi
Currie Chapman
Peter Duncan
Rod Hebron
Scott Henderson
Wayne Henderson
Bert Irwin
Jacques Roux
Dan Irwin
John Ritchie
Keith Shepherd
Gary Battistella
Bob Swan
Michel Lehmann
Bob Laverdure

WOMEN
Nancy Greene
Andrée Crepeau
Karen Dokka
Judi Leinweber
Emily Ringheim
Stephanie Townsend
Barbie Walker
Heather Quipp
Garrie Matheson
Jill Fish

Photo top of page:  Volkswagen contributed buses painted in national team colors and members all had a Canadian uniform. “We had never had everyone in the same uniform before,” says Jacobs. “Everyone had a sense of purpose. This was Canada’s national ski team. It gave everyone tremendous incentive.”

 

 

Skiing predates establishment of the first national park, in 1872.

The unique spectacles of Yellowstone National Park are as engraved on the collective American consciousness as Mount Rushmore, the Grand Canyon and West Coast redwoods. Incredibly, the park’s sights in winter are even more rare and evocative.

Photo above: Skiers from the Haynes Mid-Winter Expedition break trail, circa 1887-1901, in the Obsidian Cliff area, with
several hardy souls pulling fully loaded supply sleds.

Geyser plumes and steam rise through the brittle-cold air like smoke from hundreds of scattered campfires. Ice-rimed bison look impossibly stoic and noble. Eagles and ravens glide just above rivers warmed by hot springs and floated by trumpeter swans. Elk and moose plow through chest-high drifts, mountain goats the color of the snow roost on sunburned cliffs, and scattered bear paw prints start appearing in the early spring. The rumble of myriad waterfalls are muted when they freeze into stunning ice stalactites, domes and walls. And the visibility stretches across half a dozen mountain ranges and three states.

It’s a big slice of the classic Wild West, literally frozen in time about six months out of every year. In Paul Schullery’s excellent book Yellowstone’s Ski Pioneers, he says that people were probably skiing in the area before it became the world’s first national park in March 1872. The earliest written reference is from a journal by A. Barr Henderson, a miner who started prospecting in the Yellowstone Valley in 1866.

Around Christmas of 1871 Henderson left his camp near present-day Emigrant, Montana, and “went to Bozeman on a pair of 15-foot snow shoes.” At that time his route should have taken him near or through the northern reaches of what would become the park a few months later.

Another likely early skier was Henry Maguire, author of The Coming Empire: A Complete and Reliable Treatise on the Black Hills, Yellowstone and Big Horn Regions (1878). He made numerous winter trips into the park starting in 1873, and while his book makes no mention of skis or skiing, Schullery feels that Maguire would have had to ski, at least sometimes, in order to see what he wrote about.

On an attempt to get to Yellowstone Falls and the geyser basins in December 1873, Maguire was turned back by deep snows and avalanche conditions. Upon reaching Mammoth Hot Springs, he wrote, “I felt amply repaid, however, for making the trip that far. It seemed as though the torrid and frigid zones had met at the spot, and flung together the phenomena peculiar to each. Bright-green ferns, and other water-plants, grew in rank profusion, along the rims of the myriads of perpetually boiling springs, in

the hot breath of which descending snowflakes were converted into water before they reached the earth; while hard by were colossal icicles and trees thickly encased in frost, the surrounding landscape being deeply buried in snow.”

Poachers invade

Unfortunately, most of Yellowstone’s early skiing didn’t center on exploration and sightseeing, but on wholesale wildlife poaching and efforts to prevent it. The harsh winters forced bison, elk and deer into valleys where they could become trapped in deep snow. Hunters on skis had been overwhelming them for years, and that didn’t end when the area became a national park.

“The 1870's was a time of incredible waste and destruction among western wildlife populations, and Yellowstone Park was no exception,” writes Schullery.

General W.E. Strong, who explored Yellowstone on an expedition in 1872, wrote, “In 1870, when Lieutenant Doane first entered the Yellowstone Basin, it was without a doubt unsurpassed on this continent for big game… During the past five years the large game has been slaughtered here by professional hunters by thousands, and for their hides alone.” The meat was left to rot.

Ten years late in coming, an 1883 change in the park regulations prohibited “absolutely” the killing of most wildlife. Yellowstone ski patrols became a big part of the anti-poaching efforts, since the bulk of the damage was done in winter.

Between the poachers, army ski patrols, various expeditions, the mail delivery system, a growing string of small lodges and ranger stations that were inhabited year-round and increasing numbers of skiing tourists at Mammoth Hot Springs, early Yellowstone was one of the most active ski sites in the country.

Schwatka-Haynes expedition

When a much-ballyhooed 1886–87 winter expedition was launched by the Arctic explorer Lt. Frederick Schwatka and newly-appointed official Yellowstone photographer F. Jay Haynes to catalog the “mysteries” of that season, locals scoffed that it was no new thing to ski around the park in the winter.

“As well talk of ‘exploring’ Central Park, New York, as the National Park. The National Park is a well known country, everything worth seeing is mapped out,” declared seasoned Yellowstone skier Thomas Elwood (“Uncle Billy”) Hofer in a series of stories for Forest and Stream magazine titled “Winter in Wonderland, through the Yellowstone Park on snowshoes.”

No one minimized the risks of a deep dive into winter in country where nighttime temperatures could plunge to -50 Fahrenheit, and the days weren’t always much warmer. Blizzards could strike any time, it was easy to become disoriented and lost, and you had to carry enough food and warm weather gear to survive if that happened. The list of hazards was long, and some seriously hardcore Revenant-style hardships were regularly endured when any untimely mishaps could quickly become life threatening.

Consider the well-documented story of the biggest poacher bust in the park’s history. Edgar Howell was one of the region’s most notorious and rugged wildlife killers and in 1893 still operated with impunity. But army scout Felix Burgess managed to arrest him on March 12, in the Pelican Valley, for killing some of the last bison in the park. Catching Howell in the act was daring and difficult. But getting him back over the course of two days to Fort Yellowstone at Mammoth Hot Springs was Jack London material. Transporting a dangerous criminal through harsh conditions cost Burgess parts of one foot to frostbite.

As Schullery notes, it would be hard to say when skiing in the park became less about this kind of daunting work and more about recreation. “Indeed it probably always was,” he writes. “Skiing was certainly a popular local activity by the time Fort Yellowstone was built in 1891.” Accounts in 1894 mentioned children skiing at the fort regularly, with skis of all sizes stacked outside many houses, “just as in the park today,” observes Schullery.

In April 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt, who had been instrumental in the park’s creation, went skiing out of Mammoth with nature writer John Burroughs.

Alpine skiing, 1941

By 1941, according to Stan Cohen’s comprehensive book Downhill in Montana, a Yellowstone Winter Sports Association was founded “for the purpose of purchasing a ski lift for the use of Yellowstone Park residents and for the promotion of other winter sports activities.” That winter a rope tow was installed on the north side of Mount Washburn. The next season a thousand-foot tow, rising 250 feet, operated east of Mammoth Hot Springs near Undine Falls.

For 50 years the tow furnished regular recreation for park employees and Gardiner and Mammoth residents. Lessons became part of the curriculum at local schools. Then, in 1994, several public controversies over safety issues and possible ski area expansion erupted, and the National Park Service pulled the plug on the ski area. In the meantime, lift-served skiing had sprung up all around the park, in Cody, Jackson Hole, Grand Targhee and Big Sky.

Today cross-country skiing within Yellowstone and Grand Teton is flourishing to the point where conflicts have arisen with snowmobilers and snowcoaches—not to mention concerns about the effect of traffic on the delicate winter ecosystem.

Yellowstone under snow poses a harsh enough challenge to flora and fauna without adding increasingly high levels of human interaction to the mix. The average frost-free period is barely more than a month. Annual plants, and even perennials, have a tough time some years, and that directly affects wildlife populations that are already under stress.

Winter can be deadly for many of the park’s species, especially bison, which get scalded by geysers and hot springs and mired in thermal bogs, and sometimes fall through the ice on rivers. One winter, 39 bison broke through on the Yellowstone River and drowned.

Over-winter survival rates among the newborn of most large fauna are often less than 50 percent. Moose calves spend their first two years with their mothers, who protect them from predators and guide them to foraging areas. Deer, elk, moose and bison sometimes team up to take turns breaking trail.

The geothermal areas offer oases of green and blooming plants in midwinter, so temperate that they maintain insect populations. Mosquitoes in January may be annoying, but they’re a small price to pay for making it through another bitter winter.

With all of its brutal challenges for flora, fauna and humans, Yellowstone in winter remains a place of exceptional beauty and wonder that can verge on the spiritual. As all 139 square miles of Yellowstone Lake freeze over, the transformation of water to ice produces “music,” sometimes described as sounding like a great pipe organ or the ringing of telegraph wires. “Sometimes the music plays throughout the night—melodious, vast and harmonious. It stops within a few days when snow begins to accumulate on the ice,” writes Steve Fuller in Snow Country: Autumn, Winter & Spring in Yellowstone. Add to that a full-moon night with a chorus of wolves and coyotes joining in, and the experience can be fully transcendent. 

Frequent contributor Jay Cowan wrote about North American snowfall records in the July–August issue of Skiing History.

Yellowstone: Few Set Tracks, But Lots of Space to Wander

Though tracks are only set on a few trails, nearly all unplowed roads and trails in Yellowstone are open to cross-country skiing and snowshoeing. You may find yourself sharing the road with snowmobilers, and there’s always a possibility of wildlife encounters. Some visitors prefer to take a snowcoach from the town of West Yellowstone into Old Faithful or the Upper Geyser Basin and ski on marked trails from there. You can also drive through Grand Teton National Park from the Jackson side, then ski to Yellowstone from there. Mammoth Hot Springs is one of the park’s biggest winter centers. The road is plowed and open all winter to Cooke City, at the park’s far northeastern corner. —J.C.

Jess Bell’s lipstick racers dazzled the ski world.

Photo above: Jess Bell (center in hat) often entertained New York fashion editors, providing an opportunity to field test his skin-protective cosmetics. The late team captain Karin S. Allen is third from right in the yellow outfit.

Revlon or Estee Lauder or Helena Rubinstein can have their high-fashion models. Their runways. Their heavily purple–shadowed eyelids and rouged cheekbones. Cleveland businessman Jess A. Bell, Sr., had a different idea when, in 1959, he succeeded his father at Bonne Bell, the family cosmetics business.

As major stores and ski area shops slowly warmed to his line of ski lipsticks, sunscreens and high-altitude creams (an alternative to pasty-white zinc oxide), Bell tossed in the women, called “girls” back then. They would come to be known as the Bonne Bell Ski Team.

Reported Anita Verschoth in the November 22, 1971, issue of Sports Illustrated, “Bell’s beauties all look as if they had just dropped in from the wholesome house next door. … The emphasis is on a sort of dewy-cheeked outdoor look, complete with creamy tan and snowy teeth.”

Bonne Bell Cosmetics was founded in 1927 by Bell’s father, Jesse Grover Bell, who had been selling cosmetics door to door in Kansas. After moving to Ohio during the Depression, he made his products on a hot plate in his basement and continued door-to-door sales. The company was named after one of the elder Bell’s daughters.

Beginning in the 1950s the company actively pursued the outdoor market, developing sun blocks, heavy-duty moisturizers and lip protectors for skiers, hikers and joggers. While more elegant cosmeticians fought over big-city sales, Bell’s tagline resonated with resort-bound skiers: “Out there you need us, baby.”

In 1973, as its celebrity sales reps were storming ski country, Bonne Bell introduced a lip pomade called Lip Smacker, aimed originally at skiers, then later at pre-teens. According to Women’s Wear Daily, “Lip Smackers achieved cultural icon status as the first flavored lip item on the market.” Lip Smackers started with strawberry, green apple and orange-chocolate flavors. By 1975, the brand made news with a Dr. Pepper flavor.

Jess Bell, a graduate of Valley Forge Military Academy and Baldwin Wallace College, served as a paratrooper in both World War II and the Korean War. He defied the common image of a cosmetics industry giant. A fitness buff, he scaled Kilimanjaro, ran marathons, swam to keep in shape and served on the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports.

His Lakewood, Ohio, offices were smoke-free long before that became common, and he pioneered the idea of an office fitness center. He offered incentives to employees who exercised regularly, lost weight or quit smoking. 

Avalanche of Applicants

Georgia Lesnevich Haneke, a photographer and horsewoman from Heber, Utah, was on the Bonne Bell Ski Team from 1971 to 1974. She recalls that the selection process was fierce, with “thousands of applicants.” She asked her stepfather, a classmate of Jess Bell, to provide an introduction.

She flew to Bonne Bell headquarters, and 48 hours later Bell offered her a salary of around $12,000 per year, all expenses paid, and free ski equipment. She credits her acceptance to “good looks and skiing ability.” But it was no walk in the park. Her responsibilities included selling cosmetics, visiting retailers, straightening stock, filling out sales reports, going to ski resorts and pre-running NASTAR courses.

“It was 90 percent hard work, and 10 percent glamour,” she says. “Sure, it was a sales job, but I felt like a mini movie star. You’d walk into a retailer or hotel or ski resort and when the Bonne Bell Ski Team girl arrived, they treated you like royalty. Everyone knew who you were and what you represented.”

The late Karin S. Allen, team captain, told Sports Illustrated in 1971 that being on the team was better than being Miss America.

Allen moved to Woodstock, Georgia, following 40 years with the company in roles that also included international sales training. She passed away in August 2021, shortly after sharing her Bonne Bell experiences with us.

“Jess was brilliant,” she said. “The Bonne Bell Ski Team was made up of surfers as well as skiers, and was a great marketing tool for attracting new customers. The other cosmetics salespeople showed up in mink coats and high heels. Instead, our girls were athletes. There were about 10 of us at any one time, working across the U.S., and we were all skiers.

“Jess used to say, ‘You’re healthy and wholesome, toasty and brown, and you’re killing your skin,’ in reference to girls who went into the mountains or out in extreme weather with no sunscreen protection,” Allen said.

“When I look back on my career, I consider it to be the most amazing job you could ever have. Jess Bell was generous, loyal and supportive. We could not have had more fun in our working lives. There wasn’t a morning when my feet hit the floor and I wasn’t excited to do the job.”

“Sign Me Up”

Nancy Stofer Brehm, a retired schoolteacher in Saugatuck, Michigan, remembers what it was like being around the Bonne Bell Ski Team for five years, pitching the brand on campus. “As a young college student working at Bonne Bell part-time, I felt the members of the team were the epitome of cool,” she says. “I loved skiing as a sport and was envious they were getting to ski around the country. I thought to myself, ‘If this is a job, then sign me up.’”

Team member Bettie Simms Hastings, a retired Indiana horse farm owner now living on a ranch near Telluride, remembers, “It was a great job before skiing became so commercial and corporate. It was all fun. How many people are hired to go to different ski areas and be paid to have fun skiing with people?”

She especially liked her Captain America–like outfits and skiing in films by Willy Bogner, Jr. Another highlight was meeting Robert Redford while traveling through the airport in Denver. “He would look you right in the eye while he talked,” she recalls.

Mission accomplished, the ski team was disbanded in the mid-1970s. According to Karin Allen, the promotion saturated its target market. “We expanded to nearly every ski area in North America,” she said. “Our efforts eventually evolved to focus on international sales and the higher volume U.S. cosmetics retail business, which paid the bills.”

Jess Bell died of heart ailments in 2005, at age 80.

Bonne Bell Cosmetics was sold to Markwins Beauty Brands in 2015. Markwins closed the Bonne Bell headquarters, laying off 91 employees, according to Cleveland’s The Plain Dealer (Jan. 30, 2015). Those nostalgic about the brand’s 90-year run can still find Ten-O-Six astringents, moisturizers, and deep-pore cleansers (now known as Formula 10.0.06) on Amazon and at Walmart. Lip Smacker lip gloss and lip balm is sold on Amazon and in Dollar General stores. Lipsmacker.com invites kids to become “Balm Squad” artists.

Bettie Hastings adds, “The independence we had to do the job, the travel, and meeting people at ski areas, skiing everywhere, and having capital F-U-N. I don’t think sales reps today have the same freedom. Younger friends don’t know about the Bonne Bell Ski Team, but I’m proud to still be called a Bonne Bell girl … especially at my age. It was a wonderful chapter in my life.” 

ISHA board member Jeff Blumenfeld, a resident of Boulder, Colo., is president of the North American Snowsports Journalists Association (NASJA.org). He is author of Travel with Purpose: A Field Guide to Voluntourism (Rowman & Littlefield).

Photo: Robert Doisneau: Maurice Baquet a Chamonix, 1957/Getty Images

Click here to read the full article and listen to the tunes!

Skiers used to yodel and sing about the sport. 

Two boards upon cold, powder snow, yo-ho, what else does a man need to know? goes the refrain of the Tirolean ballad Der Feinste Sport (The Finest Sport).

As a professor of entertainment law at New York University, I’ve taught courses on the relationship of music to history. I’ve also been skiing, all over the world, for some 50 years. It finally occurred to me that while music and skiing have been culturally intertwined for hundreds of years, and ski songs are woven deeply into the fabric of the sport, little has been written about how and why that incredible melding of art and athletics came to be. That, I concluded, is what else a skier needs to know.

The result is a series of online feature articles entitled Sunshine on My Shoulders, crafted specially for members of the International Skiing History Association for their reading and listening pleasure. Links to 200 musical examples illustrate how skiing and music developed side by side from the 19th to the 21st centuries, mirroring momentous times in history.

This project was inspired by conversations with yodeling superstar Klaus Obermeyer at the 2017 Skiing History Week in Aspen. Sunshine traces the long trail of ski song, from Romantic Age composers and Alpine singing groups of the belle epoque, to the musical influence of the Italian mountain soldiers of World War I, and the eventual collapse of the joyous ski heil singing tradition of the German-speaking Alps into a militarized celebration of hate in the 1930s and ’40s.

Of course, it’s not all serious. We cover the hilarious song-parody traditions developed in North America by the Carcajou Ski Club at Dartmouth, the Red Birds of Quebec and, especially, the U.S. 10th Mountain Division. There are stories of Glenn Miller and his “Sun Valley Serenade,” “Ninety Pounds of Rucksack” and “Happy Wanderers”; the great Jo Stafford’s recording of “Moonlight in Vermont”; and the impeccable contributions of John Denver.

The postwar ski boom and folk music explosion, led by singers like Bob Gibson and Ray Conrad, serve as the prelude to music in ski films, from the works of Roger Brown, Dick Barrymore and Greg Stump to mainstream movies such as the Beatles’ Help! and Robert Redford’s Downhill Racer. From Hansi Hinterseer’s Ski Twist franchise to the rebirth of the après-ski sing-along tradition on steroids at the Krazy Kangahruh in St. Anton, it’s all covered. Did we miss something? Add your own musical memories in the comments section.

American lyrical genius Yip Harburg (“Over the Rainbow”) perhaps explained the phenomenon best: “Words make you think a thought. Music makes you feel a feeling. A song makes you feel a thought.” Klaus Obermeyer knows exactly what Harburg was getting at. “Skiing,” he insists after a century on snow, “is just the realization of the ecstasy music strives to inspire.”

 

 

It began with yodeling

Aspen’s beloved centenarian, the world-class yodeler and ski apparel legend Klaus Obermeyer, has a theory why skiing and music will always be inextricably linked. “To express feelings as happy as sliding down a mountain through powder snow and sunshine,” he philosophizes through his million-watt smile, “they must be sung. Words alone can’t convey that much joy.”

“Yodeling,” Obermeyer insists, “was the beginning. Absolutely. When skiing became popular, those yodeling tunes were turned into songs about the happiness you feel when you reach the summit and go flying down. Sometimes you yodel out loud, sometimes inside. But we all sing in our own way. That’s the basis of all ski music. It’s yodeling for the pure joy of playing in the snow.”

Mountain troops in World War I

 

 

World War I came to the Alps in 1914. The Austrian ski-technique pioneer and “father of modern skiing” Hannes Schneider served as a trainer of his nation’s ski troops on the Sud Tirolean front. Many of the men about to face one another in combat had grown up climbing, skiing and singing together in those same mountains. Going into battle against each other would literally pit friend against friend, an eventuality they sought to avoid for as long as possible.

As a result, even after the First World War began in earnest that autumn, the ski heil spirit of camaraderie among mountain troops persisted. That was especially true after Italy declared its neutrality in the struggle between the Western Allies and Russia on one side and Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey on the other. Austrian and Italian ski troops on either end of the Dolomite border continued to chat bilingually, trade food and bottles of wine, and drink and sing together. Maintaining a code of fellowship in wartime, however, was simply not possible after Italy joined the Allies in April 1915, and declared war on Austria. That reality was later starkly depicted in German actor-director Luis Trenker’s 1931 mountain film Berge in Flammen (Mountain on Fire), which featured military singing as part of its grueling and dramatic war reenactments.

 

 

Austrians in America

[In North Conway, Harvey] Gibson even honored [Hannes] Schneider with a measure of musical revenge against his former captors. When a German diplomat visited the Eastern Slope Inn in 1939, the proprietor told his hotel’s bandleader that he was to play at dinner only music written by “non-Aryan” composers. After a night showcasing the works of George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Yip Harburg and the expelled German composer and lyricist Kurt Weil (most famous for “Mack the Knife”), the Nazi statesman and his entourage understood the insult and stomped out of the dining room. According to Hannes’ son Herbert, the Schneider family was elated over Gibson’s gesture.

North American drinking songs

Prior to the 1939 arrival in New Hampshire of Hannes Schneider’s ski school in exile, the catalog of American and Canadian ski tunes was limited nearly exclusively to humorous, and sometimes risqué, parodies of popular songs, lyrically transfigured by the members of local college ski teams and winter outing clubs to promote bonding among their members. Here and there were smatterings of German language mountain lyrics and melodies carried home by those few who had skied in Europe, but even those compositions were frequently, tipsily translated into American-ese for local consumption.

The Carcajou Ski Club—founded by veterans of the national champion Dartmouth College Ski Teams and local skiers of Hanover, New Hampshire—was a prime example. The members no doubt did ski together, but the real point of the club, according to the lyrics of its favorite ski songs, was gathering on cold New England evenings to sing parodies until the beer and wine ran out. Even Dartmouth’s most sacred, fraternal hymn, the “Hanover Winter Song,” falls hard into the “drinks by the fire” category of both Ivy League and hardscrabble Northeastern fellowship.

 

 

Ninety Pounds of Rucksack

By far the most enduring tune written for the 10th Mountain Division is its ubiquitous anthem, “Ninety Pounds of Rucksack” (sung to the tune of “Bell Bottom Trousers”). Oddly, however, it is the one 10th Mountain Division song whose provenance is most difficult to trace. Charles McLane was certain that he and Ralph Bromaghin had a strong hand in creating the parody lyrics. Other sources, including The Skier’s Songbook (a revered collection compiled by David Kemp, published in 1950), list the song as “Never Trust a Skier an Inch Above the Knee,” credited to 10th Mountaineers Billy Neidner, Dick Johnson and Don Hawkins. Regardless of

 

 

its various sources and titles, no history of American ski music is complete without devout reference to it, if for no other reason than its unique, life-long popularity among those who came home from war, founded the North American ski industry, and invented a good deal of the post-war skiing culture that it sparked.

Bob Gibson and the folksong revival

 

 

It was the commencement of a U.S. folk music boom in the late 1950s, coinciding with the explosion in popularity of North American skiing, that created the opportunity for the first real star of American ski music to emerge. His name was Samuel Robert “Bob” Gibson, a Pete Seeger acolyte from Brooklyn who possessed genuine street cred as a leader of the new American folk movement. Gibson’s career included a stint in Aspen, where he fell madly in love with skiing. Leading a double life by commuting between Ajax Mountain and the folk circuit, Gibson managed to become a creditable Colorado downhiller. Meanwhile, he discover and introduce Joan Baez to the world at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival, and become instrumental in getting Judy Collins to sign with him to Jac Holzman’s up-and-coming Elektra Records. He also found time in 1959 to co-write and record the album Ski Songs, containing both original and classic skiing-based compositions mainly performed in the 1930s New England frat-style. The selections were so humorously impressive that (along with his socially conscious “straight” folk performances), they influenced an entire generation of future singer-songwriters. His fans and disciples stretched from The Byrds and Paul Simon (who covered his non-skiing songs) to Collins, Harry Chapin, John Denver and James Taylor. According to Peter Yarrow of Peter Paul & Mary, the New York folk icon who has spent most of his post-folk era life skiing in Telluride, Colorado, “when you listened to us, you were hearing Bob Gibson.”

John Denver’s mountain spirituality

John Denver, who was born in Roswell, New Mexico in 1943, had by the mid-1970s become the living, international symbol of American Rocky Mountain skiing. His top-rated “Rocky Mountain Christmas” TV specials were by then annually drawing audiences of over 60 million viewers to watch him sing and ski, adding yet another dimension of success to both his career and the sport.

By the early 1980s, over thirty of Denver’s songs and albums had already gone gold or platinum around the world. Those hits included skiing and Alpine favorites like “Starwood in Aspen,” the Gibson-esque ecology masterpiece “Eagle and the Hawk,” “Dancing with the Mountain,” “Annie’s Song,” “Song of Wyoming,” “Wild Montana Skies,” “Alaska and Me,” The Gold and Beyond” (which served as the theme of the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympics), and the extraordinary ballad “Sunshine on My Shoulders,” (written with Mike Taylor and folk bassist Dick Kniss), which featured what many consider the perfect expression of spiritual generosity that defines the skiing and mountain lifestyles.

Suddenly, in bars lining the roads to every ski area in North America, skiers were mouthing the lyrics to John Denver songs played by guitarists on tiny stages urging the crowd to sing out louder. It wasn’t quite the same as the [fireside singing of the] old days, but it was a reasonable facsimile. Ski music sing-alongs in the traditional sense hadn’t returned, but the spirit of celebrating a great day on the slopes with a beer, friends and a sentimental song of the mountains was certainly reborn. 

Charlie Sanders is a director of ISHA and the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame and serves on the advisory board of Protect Our Winters. He is author of the award-winning book Boys of Winter: Life and Death in the U.S. Ski Troops During the Second World War, and of “Skiing the Seven Continents” (Skiing History supplement, 2020).