Feature article

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).

Major storms and massive snow years are the stuff of every skier's dreams. And access-road nightmares.

Photo above: Clearing Chinook Pass, elevation 5,430 feet (1,635m), in Mt. Rainier National Park, Washington, in 2011. Photo courtesy Mt. Rainier National Park.

It was President’s Day weekend of 2021 before Alta shook off a snow slump with an active weather pattern that dumped most of the weekend, eased slightly, then entered another cycle. Highway officials closed the road to Snowbird and Alta at midnight for avalanche control work. At Alta, the town marshal ordered an “interlodge,” confining all residents and guests indoors until avalanche work had been completed. That inconvenience is a powder skier’s dream, because it guarantees first tracks when the siege ends.

Ten more inches (25cm) fell between midnight and 8:00 a.m., then a natural slide around 10 a.m. took out Highway 210 and the Bypass Road between Alta and the Bird, and everyone stayed locked down for another day and night. On Wednesday more avalanches buried 210 under 14 feet (4.2 meters) of snow and debris, and swept a snowplow and snowcat off the Seven Sisters area of the highway. Luckily, no one was hurt.

Sixty hours after it began, Alta’s longest interlodge ever (they’ve been doing it since at least 1975) ended early Thursday morning. The road was still closed, but lifts opened at 11:00 a.m. The 65 inches of fresh snow since the lockdown started was untouched, and no one from the outside world could get there for hours. It’s what locals call a Country Club day, for one of powder skiing’s most exclusive clubs. But it had come with a price, making it the perfect symbol of all the good and bad that happens when ski resorts get buried.

Most ski areas have kept fairly consistent snowfall records since lift planning began. Snowstake readings are notoriously unreliable, but some records are certified by national weather services. For instance, in the United States, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says that the largest single-storm dump in the United States (and possibly in the world) occurred in 1959, in the Cascades of northern California. Mt. Shasta Ski Bowl recorded 189 inches (4.8m) over a seven-day period. Mount Shasta City, 4,000 feet (1,200m) lower, reported 33 inches (84cm) during the first day of the storm. Locals considered this normal.

It wasn’t normal for the ski area, because it was its first year of operation. The Ski Bowl had just opened a double chairlift on the southern flank of 14,179-foot Mount Shasta, with a base lodge at 7,850 feet. The storm rolled in on February 13 and over the week delivered nearly 16 feet—27 inches (70cm) per day.

The skiing must have been insane, the kind of godsend that could mint a new ski area’s reputation. But heavy snow brought problems, too: In January 1978, an avalanche wiped out the original lift, closing the Ski Bowl for good. Mt. Shasta Ski Park, opened in 1985, was sited 2,300 feet (700m) lower.

1993 and the Storm of the Century

Big storms and big snow years often concentrate on one region, but occasionally a winter comes along that crushes the whole country. It happened in the spring of 1993, when the “Storm of the Century” capped what was already a record season.

That year, Oregon’s Mount Bachelor would tally its second snowiest year on record with over 600 inches (15m), compared to its healthy annual average of 462 (11.7m). The Sierras picked up nine feet (2.7m) between Christmas and New Year’s Day, effectively barricading a huge chunk of Heavenly Valley’s holiday business. At Mammoth, it snowed three feet on the last night of September. The area opened on October 8 and closed for skiing in mid-August—an amazing season for a non-glacier-based resort. The downside included numerous gas line ruptures, explosions and fires because people couldn’t keep their propane tanks and lines clear of the snow weight.

At Squaw Valley locals savored every minute. The resort stayed open all year for the first time ever, keeping the Bailey’s Beach lift running through the summer until opening day in the fall. “Everyone had a great old time skiing all the new runs in the trees when the passes and the upper mountain were closed,” said then-local Seth Masia. “National Chute, on Palisades where Warren Miller films a lot, normally has an 8- to 10-foot drop (3m) at the entrance. Even on a good winter. That year you just skied in.”

In Park City, Utah, the booming real estate market took a hit in January of ’93 because the weather was so consistently stormy no one wanted to go out and look at property. Crews had to dig out the Jupiter Bowl lift in several places before closing on April 15 with more snow than there’d been all season. And there was plenty: over 42½ feet, 7 feet more than the previous record.

One day in March Little Cottonwood Canyon had five avalanches, and Alta ended the season with a heroic 650.4 inches total compared to a remarkable average of 497 inches over its 82-year history.

In the Rockies, Jackson, Wyoming’s daunting Corbet’s Couloir got more traffic than ever before, due to what locals described as “the lessened fear factor” from the much shorter entry drop. And Big Sky, Montana, opened its steep Challenger Lift earlier than ever before, on Thanksgiving.

Colorado also got blitzed in early November when Aspen had more than double its average snowfall for the month and opened weeks earlier than it ever had. Winter Park got a quick 6½ feet (2m) that month and was able to open its new Parsenn Bowl on November 18 (with face shots up high) instead of in mid-January as anticipated. For the rest of ’93, Keystone got seven feet (2.1m) in February and promptly extended their closing date “indefinitely.” Statewide snow totals didn’t end up setting records, but most resorts reported an abundance of big powder days.

It wasn’t all glad tidings. In Durango, Colorado—a town well-accustomed to winter—the hardware stores ran out of snow shovels on January 14. More were flown in from Denver, but on the night of January 19, the roof of the empty Fort Lewis State College auditorium collapsed under the weight of snow that couldn’t be removed in time.

“Bad news for the college, good news for skiers,” Mike Smedley, media relations director at nearby Purgatory, told SKI Magazine after the blizzard. “As soon as that story hit the wire, our business shot up. People figured we must be buried and we were. There were days when we had 22 inches of new snow and less than a thousand skiers on the mountain.”

In Taos, New Mexico, General
Manager Mickey Blake told SKI he couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen the snowbanks as high along their roads, and his plow crews had run out of places to put it.

New England Buried

The ’92-’93 season started with a bang in New England when one of the most brutish nor’easters in history assaulted the Atlantic seaboard, handing Killington, Vermont, its earliest opening (Oct. 1) in 31 years. The weather turned mild in December, then rebounded in February when Vermont got anywhere from 6 to 11½ feet (2m to 3.5m) of snow and 98 percent of the state’s ski terrain was open for the first time in years.

Beginning March 11 and 12, an arctic high-pressure system formed over the Midwest at the same time an extra-tropical low-pressure front built over the Gulf of Mexico. The Storm of the Century was the cyclonic result of their collision over an enormous sweep of the country, from the Deep South to New England. It dumped up to 3½ feet (2.3m) on March 12 and 13. Okemo reported record base depths, and Killington went into April with the most skiing in its 35-year history.

“Sugarbush was incredible,” SKI contributor Dana Gatlin reported. “Doug Lewis [U.S. ski racer] told me he was born there and had never seen it like that.” The resort kept the steep and rugged Castle Rock area opened for two months on natural snow, which hadn’t happened since the ’70s. “And traffic in town slowed to a crawl because no one could see over the snowbanks at intersections.”

Writer David Goodman reported much the same thing from Stowe. “I’ve never seen conditions like it. The ‘Storm of the Century’ was a skier’s blizzard because it was on a Saturday evening. Stowe got two feet and only one lift was running on Sunday. There was hardly anyone on the mountain because no one wanted to venture out. We hiked to runs like Lookout Trail, that hadn’t been opened in a decade.”

Regional Records

The Pacific Northwest routinely ranks as one of the continent’s snowiest areas. One reason is because the region is visited by “extra-tropical cyclones,” with high winds and big snow that knock out power and bring highways, airports and trains to a standstill. During one three-day La Niña–inspired pounding in January 2012, parts of Oregon got 50 inches (1.3m) of snow.

Mount Baker averages 662 inches (16.8m), arguably the most in the Lower 48. In 1998-99 they got a positively freakish, world-record 1,140 total inches (29m) and were open for the entire year.

Whistler, British Columbia, gets a 448-inch (11.4m) annual average. Like Mount Baker, in 1998-99 the resort got walloped, scoring 644 inches (16.4m).

Powder magazine editor Leslie Anthony commuted there that winter from his home in Toronto. “Records are nice and all, but what’s it like to ski during a winter of endless snowfall? Pretty freakin’ great. Glorious even,” he recalls. “Like the hyenas gorging on a dead elephant that skiers resemble when it comes to powder, day after day after day of a foot or more of snow meant skiing bell to bell day after day after day—until you simply couldn’t do it anymore. And with the highway frequently closed, locals had a lot of it to themselves. After 22 years living here now, I have yet to see people take days off to rest their legs the way they did that winter.”

Whether you count it as part of the Pacific Northwest or as a region all its own, Alaska is home to one of America’s snowiest ski areas: Alyeska. The resort averages 669 inches (17m) at the summit, where it received a record 978 inches (24.8m) in 2011-12. Alaskan backcountry and heliski destination Thompson Pass reported an American record–setting 78 inches (2m) in 24 hours in 1963.

California has been racking up absurd amounts of snowfall since accounts have been kept, like the suffocating 32½ feet (9.9m) in a month in 1911 at Tamarack, near what’s now the Bear Valley ski area. In 1982 Donner Summit reported 87½ inches (2.2m) in a single two-day storm. Squaw Valley’s season record stands at 728 inches (18.5m) in 2016-17. Mammoth posted 668.5 (17m) inches for 2010-11.

Utah’s Wasatch Range is legendary for big storms moving in from the West Coast with crazy amounts of moisture and passing across a desert and then the Great Salt Lake before slamming into the mountains and releasing everything. Alta averages 551 inches (14m) but in 1994-95 posted 745.4 inches (19m).

In 1921, Silver Lake, Colorado, near St. Mary’s Glacier, got 75.8 inches (1.9m) in 24 hours out of a system that delivered another foot (30cm) over the next few hours.

New England’s snowfall king remains Jay Peak, claiming an average 355 inches (9m), and topping 513 inches (13m) in 2000-01. Stowe has been tracking snowfall on lift-served slopes since 1933, and claims an average 314 inches (8m). The record came in 2000-01 at 432 inches (11m). Locals say mountain operations are rarely stymied by storms, ’93 notwithstanding. However, as Town Manager Charles Safford notes, they have only one road in and, “We occasionally have a car that can’t make it up Harlow Hill, blocking traffic.” It doesn’t happen often or for long, but when it does it can mean that those already on the mountain have it all to themselves for a few hours.

Which sums up the divine dilemma of snow dumps: When the weather’s really bad for normal people, the skiing is delightful. If you can get to it. 

Jay Cowan’s last piece for Skiing History was the story of the X-Games (January-February 2021).

Archaeology and DNA evidence support the theory that skiing arose east of the Baltic, at the end of the last Ice Age.

Translated by Seth Masia

Photo above: The author proposes that skiing began between the Baltic and the Urals, in the gray oval containing all the archaeological sites that have yielded “fossil” skis. Skiing tribes then migrated north and west into Scandinavia, and eastward, up the Ob and Yenisei river valleys to the Altai region and beyond. Millennia later, the migration reversed, as Asian tribes moved west across the steppes and along the Arctic coast.

Where and when was skiing invented? In 1888, Fridtjof Nansen theorized that it was invented in prehistoric times in southern Siberia, in the region between Lake Baikal and the Altai Mountains. From there, he wrote, it spread with migrating tribes to the rest of Siberia and Europe. But archaeological sites in European Russia and recent DNA evidence suggest strongly that skiing began in the Baltic region, at the close of the last Ice Age.

While writing his book On Skis Across Greenland, Nansen asked his friend Andreas M. Hansen, a curator of the University Library in Christiania (today Oslo), to research the origin of the words for “ski” used by the peoples of northern Eurasia. This was probably the first linguistic study specific to skis. Nansen found Hansen’s report very curious. One surprise was to find the Finnish word suksi in much of Siberia.

In the middle of the 19th century, the Finnish linguist Matias Aleksanteri Castrén advanced the concept of a large Ural-Altaic language family, including the Finnish languages and languages spoken by the Tungus and Manchus, plus the Turks and Mongols. He located its birthplace in the Altai region. This concept could explain why the Samoyeds, who came from southern Siberia, spoke languages related to Finnish. The Ural-Altaic theory is now abandoned, but that was the dominant view in the 1880s and may have influenced the Hansen/Nansen linguistic theory.

Hansen reported that variations of the root word suk appear in the languages of the Baltic Finns and the Evenki peoples of Eastern Siberia and China, all the way to the Pacific. In Chapter Three of On Skis Across Greenland, Nansen wrote that both groups—along with the Samoyed tribes—originally were close neighbors in the Baikal-Altai region and migrated from there to the east, north and west. They traveled on skis and sleds. Nansen supposed that Scandinavian people learned to ski from Finns and Saami migrating from the east.

The Swedish historian and linguist Karl Wiklund (1868-1934) emphatically questioned the validity of Hansen’s study. The Norwegian linguistics professor Arnold Dalen, in 1996, did not reject Nansen’s hypothesis outright but found it most likely unverifiable. These reservations have not deterred wide repetition [of the Hansen/Nansen theory], and down the years the concept of a “Siberian cradle” is today set in stone.

(Translator’s note: In 1888, Hansen was a respected and influential geologist, but only an amateur philologist. His doctoral dissertation in geology focused on ancient shorelines and demonstrated that sea level rise and fall since the last Ice Age was a useful marker for determining the age of archaeological sites. He accurately placed the end of the last glaciation at between 11,000 and 9,000 years ago; and his ideas about the role of crustal “drift” were prescient. Nansen adopted Hansen’s geological ideas in his own studies of Greenland and Arctic geology. Hansen would go on to notoriety as an advocate of a racial theory of the Norwegian population that anticipated “Master Race” ideology.)

Origin of the Saami and Finns

According to Finnish anthropologist Markku Niskanen, Nansen’s contemporaries believed, on weak evidence, that Finnish-speaking Europeans, and especially Saami, were of Asian origin. Genetic studies have shown this to be wrong. Studies by geneticists Kristiina Tambets and Antonio Torroni show that the Saami come from the merger of two populations originating in Western and Eastern Europe. Specifically, the Saami are cousins of the Basques, merged with genes from the Proto-Finns of Eastern Europe. All Finns belong to European genotypes.

As Ice Age glaciers began to retreat during the warm Bølling–Allerød interstadial, about 15,000 to 13,000 years ago, tribes migrated north. One population left the ice-free Franco-Cantabrian region in the southwest [today’s Aquitaine and Basque country]. Another moved northwest from what is now Ukraine. The two groups met on the southern shore of the Gulf of Finland and around 10,000 years ago created the Kunda culture.

The Meaning of Migration

This is the starting point for Nansen’s error. He was correct to think that the word suksi had traveled between Siberia and Europe, but he was wrong about the direction it took. Archaeological and genetic evidence, consolidated in work by Russian expert Yakov A. Sher, now strongly suggests that the direction of migrations, from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age, was mainly from west to east, before reversing. Andrey Filchenko, of Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan, mentions the presence in the Sayan region of ethnic groups of Finno-Ugrian origin, who came from northwestern Siberia and the Urals. They are known to historians as the Samoyed of the Sayan. The presence in southern Siberia of other Europoid populations prior to our era is otherwise firmly established.

The definite reversal of the direction of migration took place at the start of the Iron Age, when Asian nomadic hordes began to ravage the great Eurasian steppe that runs from Mongolia to the Carpathian Basin. The arrival of their avant-garde in Europe is dated by French archaeologist Michel Kazanski to the victory of the Huns over the Goths in the year 375. By this time, skiing had already existed in Europe for about 8,000 years.

(Translator’s note: Genomic research published in 2018 by Thisius Laminidis et. al. suggests that a Siberian migration entered the Saami/Finnish gene pool “at least 3,500 years ago.” By that time the Saami had been skiing for five millenia.)

The Cradle of Skiing Is European

The arguments in favor of this thesis are archaeological, geographic and cultural.

The oldest skis we know of come from west of the Urals: from the Vis peatbog near Lake Sindor, 800 miles northeast of Moscow, and even farther west, from the Nizhneje Veretje site, 200 miles north of Moscow (the skis found here have been little studied but are of comparable age—about 9,250 years old). Archaeological finds, including sled runners, show that these two prehistoric settlements belonged to a larger group. According to Russian archaeologist Grigory Burov, who led the Vis digs, the culture “was probably linked to Baltic cultures (Suomusjärvi, Kunda) and to sites located between the Baltic and northeast Europe (Veretje).”

In addition, it’s very likely that skiing was practiced in southern Finland around 10,000 years ago. I asked Finnish archaeologist Hannu Takala and Grigory Burov for advice on this. Their response is quite clear: Takala wrote, “It is certain that the first settlers who came to Finland at least had wooden sleds since we have the Heinola sled [10,000 years old]. They probably knew about skis, although we have not yet discovered any, but finds from Russia show this possibility.”

And Burov responded: “We can assume that skis were known and used by the people of Ristola, Finland. The Heinola sled runners are similar to those at the Vis site. This similarity can prove that relations existed between Finland and northern European Russia, and that in Finland they used Vis and Veretje skis.”

The geography of the eastern Baltic offered good conditions for the invention of skiing. According to Polish archaeologist Zofia Sulgostowska, in the Preboreal (11,500 to 10,000 years ago), the Kunda and neighboring cultures lived on low plains dotted with ponds, lakes and gentle streams, offering in winter immense flat surfaces. The southeast Baltic was home to pine and birch forests. These conditions were very favorable to the systematic use of canoes in summer and sleds in winter.

From there skiing would have spread to similar terrain in neighboring Finland, Karelia and part of Lapland. Most of Finland is covered with lakes. Similarly, on the other side of the Urals, the land of the Khantys contains vast marshes, with many lakes and rivers.

Cultural conditions were also conducive to innovation. Archeology shows that the Mesolithics were particularly mobile, adventurous and inventive. The peculiar landscape of the eastern Baltic could only push them to develop new means of travel. The manufacturing sequence of the canoe, to the sled, to harnessing dogs, to skiing was easily within reach.

We can hypothesize on the date of the invention of skiing by first relying on the manufacturing process. We have seen that the skis and sled runner of Vis were carved from tree trunks, in the same way as dug-out canoes. Skis manufactured using this process were necessarily heavier and more fragile than skis made by bending planks. They certainly knew how to bend wood sticks with heat. We can suppose that they still used the carved-log process because the transition from sledge runner to ski was very new at this time.

The Start of Skiing in Siberia

East of the Urals, the oldest evidence we have are sled runners, which we know were in use by 7,000 years ago. Ski expeditions up the ice-covered waterways to Lake Baikal are plausible at that point. The Russian archaeologist G.M. Vasilevich concludes that the Tungus probably lived south of Lake Baikal in the Mesolithic, and it’s reasonable to conclude that Finno-Ugrians from the northwest brought skiing here first, along with their word suksi. As we’ve seen, the word suksi has been preserved in the Tungus-Manchu languages, specifically among the Evenki, who transmitted it to eastern Siberia.

The oldest Siberian stone engravings of skiers are believed to be around 7,000 years old, but stone engravings cannot be carbon dated so their ages are notoriously difficult to estimate.

The four-hole ski-binding system tells us a little more. Skis with foot-plate and mortise, invented by the Saami in the Bronze Age, are carbon-dated to 3,400 years ago with the Høting (Sweden) ski. That design has never been found in Siberia, except in the Arctic trading post Mangazaya [founded 1600 AD].

After thousands of years of skiing in Siberia, one might expect to find more actual skis, or parts of skis. Apart from the unusual case of the Mangazaya skis, there are none. Not having been preserved in peat bogs as in Scandinavia, they have rotted or ended up as firewood. 

This article is condensed from the final chapters of the ISHA Award-winning book Les Peuples du Ski: 10,000 ans d’histoire, by Maurice Woehrlé; Books on Demand, 2020. Engineer and skier Maurice Woehrlé ran Rossignol’s race-ski development for four decades, beginning with the Strato.

When there isn’t enough snow outside, skiers have headed inside for nearly a century.

With trainloads of a mixture of sawdust, soda crystals and mica used to mimic snow, the first indoor ski center in Europe opened in 1927 in Berlin and helped launch the early era of indoor skiing (photo top of page).

Though Ski Dubai is frequently considered the cradle of indoor skiing, by the time of its opening in 2005 the concept was some eight decades old. Legions of people were already skiing indoors in dozens of countries—in some cases on bigger slopes already open in Europe and Japan. These facilities just hadn’t captured the public imagination quite as much as did the engineering miracles of indoor snow in the Dubai desert.

Fast forward to 2021, and we’ve recently passed the 150 mark for indoor-snow centers worldwide. True, there was a blip when the global economic crash of 2008 stopped some of the most ambitious projects of the time—including a 1.2 mile indoor slope proposed for the Middle East. But the past decade has seen more centers built than during the “boom” years of the 1990s. In fact, in the last few years centers have opened in Africa (Ski Egypt), South America (Snowland) and, finally, North America (Big Snow in New Jersey). Big Snow’s opening means that you can now ski indoors on a snowy surface every day of the year on every continent except Antarctica (where, let’s face it, you can ski outdoors every day of the year anyway).

For some that sounds like skiing nirvana: snowy slopes on tap whenever you need them, 365 days a year. For others, it’s a dystopian vision of the future of our sport: not skiing under blue bird skies surrounded by majestic peaks, but rather sliding down modest fall lines under a man-made dome. Or projected forward: Does the ultimate result of climate change and a warming world mean very little natural snowfall and therefore very few functional ski slopes?

It’s just a touch ironic that the massive refrigerators required to produce snow indoors and keep it cold use up a lot of energy, potentially contributing to climate change. But fortunately, that irony is not lost on the companies that build indoor centers. They incorporate energy efficiency to minimize running costs and in some cases cover their vast ski-center roofs with solar panels to generate the power needed to run the facilities. So is the future a utopian world of self-powered eternal indoor-snow centers? Perhaps worldwide statistics already reveal the future. In 2000, there were around 40 glacier ski areas in the European Alps where you could ski in summer and about 50 indoor snow centers. Two decades later, the count of glacier ski areas has dropped by more than half while the number of indoor-snow centers has tripled.

Europe 1920s

The idea of skiing indoors was first conceived in Europe in the mid-1920s. A Brit, Laurence Ayscough, patented something that kind of resembled snow—a mixture of sawdust, soda crystals and mica. This was then spread on top of straw on a sloping surface indoors.

The mixture’s first recorded use was within the Berlin Automobil Halle in Germany where a ski slope 720 feet long (220m) and 66 feet wide (20m) was opened in 1927. Trainloads of Ayscough’s snow mixture were required and government scientists had to approve its safety. The event was a success, and six months later a more permanent facility, the Schneepalast (Snow Palace), complete with an indoor ski jump, was unveiled at the disused Northwest Railway Station in Vienna, Austria.

Norwegian ski jumper Dagfinn Carlsen built the 41,000-square-foot facility, and there was plenty of publicity—though news reports focused on an assassination attempt on Vienna’s mayor after the event. Enthusiasm waned though, as people noted the chemical mixture wasn’t actually very slippery and quickly turned an unappealing yellow. The Snow Palace closed within seven months (see Skiing History, March-April 2019). However, a smaller facility, complete with a mini-ski jump, operated in Paris throughout the 1930s. Its snow had a different chemical mix to Ayscough’s concoction and was spread thinly on a coconut-matting covered slope.

US 1930s, Japan 1950s

The first known attempt to bring something like real snow indoors was not for a public ski facility but for a big show: The Great Indoor Winter Sports Carnival staged at New York’s Madison Square Garden in December 1936.

Complete with ski jumpers, dog sledders, ski stars from Europe and North America and even clowns on ice, the Carnival’s logistics were startling. An 85-foot high (26m) ski-jump tower had to be built by a team of 100 workers in a matter of days. Madison Square Garden’s thermostat was turned down to 26 degrees, then enough ice was pulverized to cover the 30,000-square-foot area with a snow-like surface. The show ran for four days and nights and attracted 80,000 spectators. Boston and London hosted their own Winter Carnivals in 1937 and 1938, with similar attendance success.

A related concept for indoor snow creation, but this time intended for more long-term use, appeared in Japan two decades later. Businessmen in the small city of Sayama, about an hour outside of Tokyo, hit on a way of extending the season. This time ice was trucked in from the mountains, again crushed to a “snow-like” material and spread on a 1,065-foot (320m) indoor slope. The Sayama indoor ski center opened in 1959 and is the oldest snow slope under a roof still operating. The snow surface is now made by snowmaking machines rather than hauled in by truck.

Australia, Europe and Japan, 1980s

The modern era of indoor skiing began in the mid-1980s when young Australian ski fanatic Alfio Bucceri created what he christened Permasnow.

In 1984, at the age of 28, Bucceri went skiing for the first time in Australia, was hooked and wanted to create the same experience in his home city, tropical Brisbane, 930 miles from the nearest snow. “I loved eating jelly as a child, and the Permasnow idea came from the thought of making small particles of jelly then freezing them. I studied ice rink technology and found that jelly crystals would freeze on frozen pipes at plus temperatures. Finally, I found the right safe chemical to use [a water-absorbent polymer] from an Australian manufacturer, engaged Queensland University to help and Permasnow was invented,” Bucceri recalls. “Funnily enough, the Japanese call it ‘Jelly Snow.’” Early trials were successful, but it was the Permasnow slope created for the Swiss Pavilion at the 1988 World Expo in Brisbane that attracted global publicity.

The first indoor-snow centers using Permasnow, at Mt. Thebarton in Adelaide and Casablanca in Belgium, opened that same year. Japanese rights were sold to the Matsushita Company, which created more than 20 centers in the 1990s under the Snova name, with some still operating today. Bucceri sold Permasnow in 1991 but remains in the all-weather snow business and developed a non-chemical, all-water snowmaking system that is used worldwide.

1990s, Real Indoor Snow

The success of the early indoor-snow centers led several pioneers to work on what, back then, was the holy grail of the concept: pure snow indoors, without chemical additives.

To create true snow indoors is much more difficult than outdoor snowmaking. Dealing with high humidity, constant refrigeration and maintaining the snow when hundreds of people are skiing the same patch over and over are just a few of the many challenges involved.

Several claim to have been the first to achieve it, one of them being Cor Mollin, a former alpine ski racer who started in the indoor skiing trade when he ran the Casablanca ski center in Belgium. He wanted to create Europe’s first indoor-snow slope and had made a four-day trip to the Brisbane World Expo to see Permasnow in action. He decided to license the product.

Back in Belgium, Casablanca was not a success. “The system didn’t work at all. As we had no refrigerated building, the jelly-snow wasn’t slippery and we almost went bankrupt,” Mollin recalls. “I then did research myself, and after a year of trial and error I built my first real snow machine. From that moment on we were successful in the snow business.” He went on to set up his own indoor snow slope, Snow Valley in Peer, Belgium, which remains in operation today and is one of the largest indoor ski halls in Europe.

The 1990s saw Japan and European nations dominate center construction, with ever-larger real-snow facilities in countries like Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK, all of which traditionally feed the destination ski resorts of the Alps.

Japan developed smaller Snova facilities, with the notable exception of the vast SSAWS (Spring Summer Autumn Winter Snow) indoor center near Tokyo, by far the largest yet seen, with a slope 1,640-feet long (500m) and 328-feet wide (100m). Unfortunately, it opened in 1993 as Japan’s bubble economy burst and it never turned a profit. It eventually closed in 2002, with the site later turned into Japan’s first Ikea store.

By 2000, around 50 centers had been built, and the next decade saw a similar number added. The longest slopes yet opened are in Amnéville, France and Bottrop, Germany. Both claim the world record at about 2,100 feet (640m) long.

China has been the dominant force in snow-dome construction over the past decade as the country builds towards the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics and strives to meet President Xi Jinping’s publicized goal to persuade 300 million people to give snow sports a go.

However, most of the country’s 1.4 billion population don’t live in cold or mountainous areas, so indoor snow is the answer. More than 30 centers have been built, including several of the world’s largest slopes. Some even have indoor trail maps.

Should We Embrace Indoor Skiing?

Indoor snow centers are here to stay. When properly managed and located near a population hub, they’ve proved to be viable. Yet many skiers can’t imagine skiing on a short, moderate slope inside a
giant freezer.

Perhaps they’re missing the point. Indoor-snow centers don’t attempt to replace the mountain experience. Instead, their goal is to entice people around the world to conveniently try a sport they don’t know if they’ll like. No harm in that. 

Big Snow. Big Money

New Jersey’s Big Snow epitomizes one key factor in almost all indoor-snow-center developments: They cost an awful lot to build, usually into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Far more centers have been conceived than ever opened. That said, of the 150+ that have now been built over the last 35 years, more than 100 are currently still operational. In that same time period, there have been few high-profile failures like Japan’s SSAWS center.

Big Snow is part of a huge mall complex in New Jersey created by the Mills Corporation, at the time an international leader in mall construction. Mills set to work on its multi-billion-dollar New Jersey project, then named Xanadu, at the turn of the century. Mills was also completing major malls on other continents at the time, including in Madrid, home to another Xanadu indoor-snow center which still operates today.

Big Snow was mostly completed around 2008, just before the global economic crash. Construction stopped, and it remained empty for 11 years before the complex finally began to open at the end of 2019.

Other developers hope that now that there finally is a facility in North America, many more will follow. The giant Triple Five Group that runs the mall where Big Snow is located has plans for a duplicate complex in Florida and the proposed green-energy powered Fairfax Peak in North Virginia.— PT

Lack of snow deters not the true believer.

Photo above: German sand-skiing speed record holder (nearly 60 mph) Henrik May shows his form on the sands of Namibia.

Snow is unquestionably top of the heap for sliding. Not to get all Poindexter on you, but skis slide easily thanks to a very thin layer of meltwater between the skis and the snow.

So what happens if it doesn’t snow? Or what if it’s one of those three warmer seasons that shall remain nameless? That’s where history has proven skiers will ski on just about anything, especially sand.

For decades, the mecca for sand skiing in the U.S. has been the Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve near Alamosa, Colorado, North America’s tallest dunes. Opened in 1932 as a national monument, it became a national park in 2004.

Each fall, ski bums return to Great Sand Dunes to ski or board 34-degree, 742-foot-high dunes in a tradition that, for many, begins the new ski season. One enthusiast tells OutThereColorado.com, “Sand is not as slippery as snow, so it’s like skiing in slow motion. You have to make shallow turns, but it’s definitely real skiing. That’s why we come back every year—because we’re jonesin’ to ski.”

The Great Dunes skier was accurate, if not precise, about the relative slickness of sand vs. snow. To get technical (stay with me here): dry sand has a dynamic coefficient of friction of about .55 compared to snow at about .03—depending on the snow and the ski wax. So sand is about 18 times more resistant to gliding than snow. But if you dampen the sand a bit (just a bit) the coefficient can go down to a range of .3 to .45, depending on the size of the sand grains and how wet the conditions are. Ancient pyramid-builders poured water on desert sand to more easily drag massive sleds. And that’s why savvy sand skiers hit the Great Dunes slopes after a rain.

At the Great Dunes, sandboards can be rented outside the park and are more popular than skis. It seems that while sand doesn’t appear to damage the base of alpine skis, it may dull edges and jam bindings. Sandboard bases, much harder than snowboard bases, are usually treated with paraffin-based wax to reduce friction, and it works like a charm on rain-soaked sand.

Sand skiing in the Colorado desert is not without risk. Great Dunes sand can reach 150 degrees F., lightning can occur at any time during the warmer months, and in high winds, those Covid masks come in handy. Eye protection, long sleeves and pants are helpful to avoid getting sandblasted.

Still, sand is better than other sliding surfaces known to lure skiers.

Members of the Facebook group Elite Skiing report sliding on volcanic ash, pine needles, scree (loose stones), shale, coal slag, carpet, soap flakes, powdered mica, and even gravel and barite mixed with used motor oil. During the heyday of the New York State Borscht Belt in the Catskills, Grossinger’s resort hotel experimented with ground-up collar buttons (see Skiing History, May/June 2020).

For millions of snow-starved Europeans, there’s one word: plastics. So-called dry slopes are part of a cottage industry tracked by Dry Slope News, established in 2018. “People have been skiing on slopes without snow for over a century, but the earliest artificial surfaces manufactured especially for skiing date from the 1950s,” says editor Patrick Thorne.

“Since the first few dry slopes appeared, close to 2,000 have been built in more than 50 countries worldwide. At the height of dry skiing’s popularity in the early 1980s, there were reports of over 300 in Great Britain alone.”

Sand Skiing Gets its Start in Africa

Some 44 countries offer sandboarding today according to Sandboard.com.

Modern sand skiing dates back to 1927 when French athlete, mountaineer, aviator, and journalist Marie Marvingt (1875-1963) combined her careers as a surgical nurse and military aviator, to create aluminum skis for an experimental medevac airplane to land on Saharan sand in Morocco and Algeria (see Skiing History, March-April 2020).

By then a decorated hero of World War I and credited as the world’s first female combat pilot, Marvingt hired a metal shop in her home town of Nancy to forge personal skis from solid aircraft-grade aluminum alloy. She determined metal sand skis were better than wood and certainly better than walking up dunes in sandals, reportedly testing them on sand for 50 miles. One year later, she started a ski school for Berbers, along the snowless Moroccan coast.

Marvingt’s legacy continues in the northern African country. Today, people who engage in guided ski touring on the snows of Mount Toubkal or take advantage of the lift service at Oukaimeden in the rugged High Atlas Mountains in southwestern Morocco, also head a few hours southeast to the edge of the Sahara Desert to sand ski or sandboard for bragging rights.

Four thousand miles farther south, in Namibia, the German-born Henrik May, 45, has been pioneering the sport of sand skiing for two decades, according to Powder magazine (July 2013). There, the Namib Desert is home to some of the largest dunes in the world, thousands of miles from the nearest snow.

May’s company, Ski Namibia (ski-namibia.com), is one of the very few dune ski-specific operations in the world and has been featured by NBC’s Today Show and the CBS reality show, The Amazing Race. He started his touring company in 2003 and since then has logged thousands of ski descents. He set a Guinness world speed record in 2010, reaching 92.12 km/h (57.24 mph) on sand. He introduced Wustenskisport, or dune skiing, to the internet with guided runs usually between 200 to 400 vertical feet after climbs of around 20 minutes.

Back in the U.S.A.

Sand skiing in the United States dates back at least to 1937 on the Cape Cod, Massachusetts, side of Nantucket Sound. According to the New York Times (Sept. 12, 1937), “Some of the dunes near Centerville are unusually long, permitting runs of 100 and 150 feet, on which a skier can attain speeds of about forty miles an hour. . . Wooden skis slide easily on the sand and gain speed, particularly when the sand is covered by short grass or pine needles.”

At any rate, those Centerville dunes are long gone, according to Patti Machado, town of Barnstable Director of Recreation in Hyannis, Massachusetts. “We do not have any dunes. I think that the beach topography may have been different back then,” she emails Skiing History.

One famed sand skiing competition was Sandblast in Prince George, British Columbia, held every August from 1971 to 2003. It attracted thousands of spectators to a dual slalom race among so-called “sandblasters” who didn’t want summer to get in the way of their favorite sport. Just north of the city by the Nechako River is a steep hill called the Cutbanks where 10 to 15-sec. races were once held on a 500-foot slope of sand and gravel. It was popular over the decades and people traveled long distances to participate, including filmmaker Warren Miller, according to FreeThoughtBlogs.com.

Amazingly, no one was ever seriously injured. But according to the TV show BC Was Awesome, hosted by Bob Kronbauer, in 2003 some yahoos descended in a three-wheeled couch. The resulting crash scared off the insurance companies, leading to a permanent ban.

Sand and Deliver

Sand skiing was also popular as a cross-country competition on Pacific Ocean beaches during that era. In 1980, Bjorn Arvnes of Norway, winner of the 1977 American Birkebeiner, won the sand XC skiing title at the Epoke Beach Classic at Redondo Beach, California. Event producers were Larry Harrison, a rep for NorTur, the U.S. importer of Epoke Skis, and Peter Graves, NorTur marketing director.

The sand skiing stunt appeared on NBC’s Real People, page one of the Los Angeles Times, and even in the National Enquirer, which wrote breathlessly that “sand skiing was sweeping the country.” Tom Kelly, who handled event promotion with Graves, tells Skiing History, “It was a hugely successful media event for the time, garnering national coverage for Epoke.”

Other favorite North American sand skiing locations are Jockey’s Ridge State Park in North Carolina, White Sands National Park in New Mexico, Idaho’s Bruneau Sand Dunes and St. Anthony Sand Dunes, California’s San Bernardino Mountains, and Sandbanks Provincial Park in Ontario.

In the end, sand has an enduring advantage over snow: It doesn’t melt. 

ISHA VP Jeff Blumenfeld’s most recent contribution to Skiing History was “The Day They Threw Cow Chips in Las Vegas” (January-February 2021).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arguably nothing has had a bigger impact on skiing and snowboarding during the past 25 years than the Winter X Games.

Standing at the start of the 2012 Winter X Games SuperPipe in Aspen for his final run of the event, snowboarder Shaun White was the dominant and defending champion in the event and already a certified legend. Just to drive that point home, he made a run that soared 15 to 20 feet above the shiny pipe walls, casually spinning and whirling like some enraptured snow dervish. When it was over, he’d thrown the first-ever frontside double cork 1260 (three full spins with a double horizontal twist) in a pipe and scored the first and only perfect 100 in the event in X Games history.

“I’ve waited for that one hundred for a long time!” said the jubilant 25-year old. He also picked up another gold to add to an overall medal stash of 18 as of this writing. It’s all part of a stellar career that surely has him headed into the US Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame.

In January of 2020, Mark McMorris tied White’s medal record with a silver at Snowboard Big Air in Aspen, then topped it at the Norway X Games with a gold. Whether this major achievement will help propel him into the Hall of Fame remains to be seen. But that it could, illustrates the status the Winter X Games have attained.

They got there in part by pioneering many firsts in winter sports (first switch triple rodeo, first snowmobile front flip, and so on). Winter X Games 2021 had its own dubious first: It took place in a quarantine bubble in Aspen without the 111,500 live fans who watched in 2020.

Coverage ran live on ESPN and ABC throughout the four-day event, and will rerun almost incessantly across ESPN’s many platforms for the rest of the year. That’s because the games generate some of the network’s biggest ratings outside of professional and college football, basketball and baseball. And Winter X gives skiing and snowboarding their biggest global audience other than the Olympics, reaching up to 215 countries and territories and 400 million households.

This transformative and deeply lucrative franchise arose from brainstorming at ESPN in 1993 aimed at creating a world-championship-level gathering of action—or alternative or extreme (take your pick)—sports. The concept was unveiled at a press conference at the New York Planet Hollywood in 1994. In 1995, 27 events in 9 different categories were held at the first X Games during the last week of July in Rhode Island.

With an enthusiastic response from everyone—the athletes, the hosts, 198,000 spectators and, critically, the high-profile sponsors—ESPN realized they were on to something. Plans began evolving and expanding, an ongoing process today. The network scheduled events annually instead of every two years as originally conceived, and cloned the product.

That resulted in the first Winter X Games, at Snow Summit in Big Bear Lake, California, in 1997. The following two years the Games were held in Crested Butte, Colorado, and then moved for two years to Mount Snow, Vermont. Since 2002, the event has been held in Aspen.

The 1997 inaugural lineup consisted of five divergent categories of competitions held over four days: Snowboarding (BoarderCross, Big Air and Slopestyle), Ice Climbing, Snow Mountain Bike Racing, Super Modified Shovel Racing, and a crossover multi-sport event.

For the first time ever, ESPN’s sister channel ABC broadcast an X Games event, and coverage reached nearly 200 countries. Shaun Palmer won both the BoarderCross and the Snow Mountain Bike race for what would be the first two of his six total Winter X medals, all of them gold. Sweden’s Jennie Waara won gold, silver and bronze in three separate snowboard events, still a Winter X record.

Striking in retrospect is that skiing itself wasn’t even included. The glaringly insane—and not widely followed—shovel race was axed after one year. Mountain bike racing downhill on snow didn’t survive much longer. But the snowboard events flourished. And new skiing comps along the same lines were introduced in 1998 with Freeskiing and Skiboarding (a terrain-park oddity on tiny skis jettisoned in 2001) at the new venue of Crested Butte.

This second Winter X also added snowmobiles. Skiing and snowboarding today form the bulk of the Winter X Games and drive their broadcast popularity. But snowmobiles (and for awhile motocross bikes) have played a prominent role, too, and routinely attract some of the biggest live crowds in Aspen, who come for the noise, danger and NASCAR-style action.

Skiing and snowboarding also had dangerous, head-to-head events. BoarderCross (or Boarder X), featuring multiple riders on a wild course, was in the games from the start for both men and women. SkierCross was soon added, and both are now in the Olympic Games. Part of the thrill is the imminent possibility of disaster. Sure enough, carnage ensued. And after 20 years the events were dropped from Winter X in 2013. Boarder Cross was reintroduced back in 2014, but both are now gone.

The first five years saw the introduction of women’s Freeskiing, and Shaun Palmer was the first to win gold three years in a row, doing it in BoarderCross (’97-’99). The SuperPipe replaced the original Halfpipe competition in 2000 when organizers raised the walls from 11.5 feet to 15 (the walls grew to 22 feet in 2009). Todd Richards, Barrett Christy, Ross Powers and Tara Dakides were tough to beat in the early years when frontside and backside 720s (two full spins) won gold in Snowboard Halfpipe and Slopestyle.

In 2002 Aspen Skiing Company officials finally reversed a longtime ban on snowboards on Aspen Mountain and needed a way to publicize their change of attitude. X Games honchos were attracted by Aspen’s fame, and by the opportunity to present all the winter events at one venue: Buttermilk ski area.

Killeen Brettman, head of communications for ASC at the time, said, “When we sensed there was a chance to get the X Games, we decided this would be a bigger bang than anything else we were considering. The fact that a resort of Aspen’s stature was interested in hosting their event was appealing to ESPN in that they felt being accepted here gave their event tremendous credibility.”

Not everyone in Aspen was thrilled, of course. Some feared X Games crowds were just rowdy hip-hoppers with bad attitudes and no money. Even after the games succeeded, familiar questions around town were, “What do people see in all of this? And why do they like it better than the World Cup races?” Even early on, Winter X outdrew Aspen’s World Cup races, live and on TV. Sponsors, naturally, noticed.

When three full rings of the Winter X circus went off simultaneously, either you got it or you didn’t. With skiers arcing high above the walls of the SuperPipe, padded gladiators battling down a full-contact BoarderCross course, snowmobiles flying through the sky in the tear-ass SnoCross races, music pounding and Jumbotrons flashing images of it all to every corner of the premises, it was action-packed snow theater for our short-attention-span times. Not incidentally it also featured great athletes doing crazy and amazing athletic things.

As an index of the event’s importance, the entire U.S. Olympic freestyle snowboarding team showed up in Aspen to compete in the 2002 SuperPipe, just a few weeks before the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.

Aspen’s own three-time Winter X gold medalist Gretchen Bleiler boiled it down when she said, “For me the Olympics will always be huge, but the X Games are becoming the modern Olympics because the kids are really into them.”

On the business side, ESPN ramped up world domination plans by launching the X Games Global Championship in May 2003. A team event with both winter and summer sports, it was held simultaneously in Austin, Texas and Whistler Blackcomb, British Columbia. More than 69,000 spectators attended live, Team USA won, and women’s ski SuperPipe was introduced with rising star Sarah Burke taking gold. There hasn’t been a second edition. ESPN found other ways to become an international brand.

By 2010, live annual attendance blew past 80,000. The games were carried across all ABC and ESPN media platforms, including clips on iPod, nightly X Center highlights, and daily mobile content.

In 2004, the first time ESPN and ABC broadcast the games live, they added massive lighting for nighttime, prime time viewing. It helped juice up television viewership over 30 percent from the previous year. And by 2006 viewership hit a record of more than 747,000 households, raising the 2005 numbers by 45 percent. The audience in every form was expanding exponentially.

The juggernaut helped create big stars such as Bleiler, White, Kelly Clark, Travis Rice, Lindsey Jacobellis, Tanner Hall and Sarah Burke. Winter X raised the bar every year on what could be done, expanding the limits of the sports and providing unprecedented opportunities for riders who had few other options at the time.

The Games also became labs for advancements in park and pipe gear, as well as features like twin tips that made their way to the general public. The entire new hard and soft goods industry that had sprung up for boarding got a huge boost as dedicated park and pipe ski lines such as Armada and 4FRNT joined pioneers like Burton and Jones, and crossovers from the surfing and skateboarding worlds like Oakley and Quiksilver, all flourishing in the bright lights of the X Games.

“Winter X has brought sports like skiing and snowboarding into people’s living rooms that probably would never have seen them before,” said Chris Davenport in 2004, when he became an announcer for them. Davenport got a bronze in Skier X at Crested Butte in 1998. “It’s one of my prize possessions, seeing how big the X Games have become,” he said, adding that they’ve “helped mainstream our sports and the athletes that participate, leading to more money from sponsors. Today we see more kids getting into skiing and snowboarding because they have been exposed to them through Winter X.”

Meanwhile, ESPN’s long shot bet on crazy youth looked brilliant. “In 10 years the X Games have become, pound for pound, one of the most valuable enterprises in television sports‚—and a favorite venue for Sony, Gillette and other marketers eager to reach an elusive audience: 12-19-year olds,” wrote Monte Burke in Forbes in February of 2004. It was no secret ESPN targeted generations X and Y, and succeeded. Burke also noted that in four years TV ratings for the winter games increased 88 percent, and that in 2003, 37 million people watched some slice of them.

He further pointed out that the astronomical cost of buying major league sports rights was predicted by Morgan Stanley to cause “billions of dollars in losses for the four major broadcast networks in the next four years.” On the other hand, the X Games, winter and summer, were expected to bring in up to $70 million for 2003 and net $15 million, “though ESPN executives insist the franchise’s overall profit is only $1 million.”

However much they’re cashing in, it’s in large part because they own the games outright, coughing up zero for TV rights, with no risk of losing them to a rival network in a bidding war. Disney, ESPN’s owner, doesn’t break out ESPN’s financial performance, so it’s hard to know how much that network makes, let alone its X Games brand. But the fact that reruns air constantly suggests healthy ad sales.

One important question Burke raised in Forbes was whether athletes are fairly compensated given the amount of money the games generate. Some athletes said no, and made attempts to unionize and launch competing events. But many of the top competitors seemed to agree with Barrett Christy, who made $100,000 annually in endorsements, when she said, “They’re not paying us enough, but I’m where I am because of ESPN.”

For ESPN’s part, President George Bodenheimer said, “No one is holding a gun to anyone’s head to participate.” Then they began adjusting their awards scale.

“When the X Games first started, the total prize money was $186,000,” said ESPN PR director Katie Moses Swope. She then explained that as the games and athletes were progressing, so were the financial rewards. For 2007, gold medal wins were reportedly worth $20,000, and by 2008 were up to $30,000 out of a total purse of a million dollars.

Meanwhile, athletes understood that winning Winter X metal, and the constant drumbeat of media coverage on ESPN, helped them earn name recognition with kids everywhere. The program guide became a Who’s Who of extreme sports.

ESPN introduced disabled sports at Winter X 2007 with a combined men’s and women’s MonoSkier X event, with Tyler Walker taking home the first gold, and Sarah Will, the top female finisher, coming in fourth overall.

In 2010, Winter X went global with an event in Tignes, France. Games followed around the world, but 10 years later only Norway plays host outside North America. Now ESPN has licensed Winter X Games in China and Asia in 2021 and beyond, and is optimistic about further franchising.

In April of 2020 Luis Sanchez followed up on Monte Burke’s story 16 years earlier by doing “some detective work” for a financial website on Disney’s media properties. Sanchez concluded that “ESPN likely generated at least $11.4 billion of revenue last year.”

Assuming total expenses of around $9 billion, “it implies that ESPN generates over $2 billion of annual operating income … and probably a good deal more.”

Given that profits are hard to come by in the major sports league coverage, it isn’t unreasonable to think that the X Games could be earning hundreds of millions or more of that total. Perhaps reflecting these impressive figures, an X Games gold medal in 2020 came with a $50,000 check.

A new generation of stars is rising to the occasion. Former teen sensation Chloe Kim already has seven medals, including five gold, from seven Snowboard SuperPipes starting in 2015. Reigning Snowboard Big Air queen Jamie Anderson takes lots of risks and gets lots of injuries. Also, lots of medals: 16 so far, more than any other female snowboarder in Winter X, ever. And last year skier Gus Kenworthy (five medals and counting) threw the first ever switch triple rodeo 1440 (three backflips with four full rotations) in Slopestyle, as the barrage of high-flying aerials continues. There’s no end in sight.

It’s a fitting metaphor for the Winter X Games, still flying high, unleashing genius and breaking records—a quarter of a century later. 

Amateur photographers: Paul Ryan feels your pain.

Blue sky, green trees, white snow, happy skier. Every ski photographer risks producing cliché images.

Paul Ryan understands. “In today’s world, we are saturated with photographs in the media and online. Sometimes when I go out to shoot, these images pop up and scream at me ‘Someone’s done that! I’ve seen that!’” he says.

Ryan, 83, offers this wisdom gleaned from six decades behind a lens: “Be open for something odd and new, not necessarily strange, but a different vision of the familiar. Perhaps a juxtaposition of disparate elements in the same frame. Wash from your mind all the classic images that linger from the past. Images by others you’ve seen and loved, even images that you see right away—the obvious.”

To that end, when shooting, he strives for “an empty mind, or at least a clean vision,” a reference to the 1970 book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, which he found inspiring early in his career.

Photo top of page: Ryan started his career as the staff photographer at California’s Sugar Bowl resort. The Silver Belt, the final big race of the season, was held in the late spring. Part of the post-race festivities was a softball game on skis between the racers. “The European racers, unfamiliar with baseball, found the game amusing,” Ryan says. Buddy Werner, a natural athlete and a born competitor, took the softball game—and winning it—seriously. Those are American Olympians Tom Corcoran and Linda Meyers watching the action.

Ryan grew up in Boston and, after taking a BS in engineering, moved to Stowe to pursue what he imagined could be a career in ski racing. An Eastern snow drought in 1960-61 led him to Aspen, and for a few years he spent winters racing and summers in San Francisco, going to film school. He eventually found himself at Sugar Bowl Resort in California for the final race of the season, where general manager Ed Siegel candidly told him that his future wasn’t in ski racing, and hired him as resort photographer.

It was a good fit. John Fry eventually hired Ryan as the staff photographer at SKI magazine for several years. He traveled the world shooting for SKI and other periodicals.

But his professional pursuits expanded beyond skiing. He chronicled the 1960s counterculture in San Francisco. He studied under the greats of the time, including Minor White and Ansel Adams. His photography has been honored in numerous shows, with recent exhibits including “The Sea Ranch, Architecture, Environment, and Idealism” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

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

He has always found his way back to the mountains. Here are some of his favorite images from a different era. “When on the side of the mountain, I had to pre-visualize the end result, not seeing the film until days later,” Ryan says from his home in Santa Monica, California.

Ryan said that White, one of his early mentors, introduced him to the idea that a compelling photograph is more than a static image—it has an afterlife, of sorts.

“White spoke of ‘Equivalents,’ which is a photographic concept that the photograph mirrors something in ourselves—something that remains in mind after the literal image has faded,” Ryan explains.

To reach that end, Ryan says, the strongest images touch upon a commonality, something universal across the human experience. These images draw the viewer into the frame and into a broader narrative. “The most powerful photos evoke something beyond what was literally in front of the lens. This may come from the implication of what happened just before or of what might happen a moment after,” he says. “What remains is not only the image of the time and place, but a visual residue connected to a broader spectrum of our own experience.”

Of course, in order to achieve White’s concept of “Equivalents,” the photographer does have to first nail the shot. These days, with everyone shooting an endless stream of digital photos at the press of a button, that’s an achievement that’s often underappreciated.

Not by Ryan. “To achieve a high level of visual acuity is demanding,” he notes, “particularly while simultaneously navigating deep powder, an icy mogul field, high speeds or the intensity of race day—all with an array of cameras in check.” 

This is the second installment of a two-part photo essay series from Paul Ryan. (See part 1 in the September/October issue.) View this photo essay as a mini-master class in photography, as Ryan explains his approach to his craft and the intriguing backstories to each image. Find more of Ryan’s work at paulryanphotography.com.

Ryan first got to know Billy Kidd during the 1960 season at Stowe. “He was always friendly and curious about photography and actually filmed some of the Megève downhill for me when I was making the Lange film, Ski Racer. This photo was taken at Kidd’s home in Stowe circa 1967. The wall was lined with trophies and his bibs from the 1964 Innsbruck Olympics, where Kidd and Jimmie Heuga became the first American men to win alpine medals. “Ever since 1966, Billy was plagued with recurring ankle injuries,” Ryan recalls. “It was interesting to see a young admirer realizing that even a hero is vulnerable.” Ryan was fascinated throughout his career with catching athletes away from the competition, believing that these moments can tell a story as revealing as the athletic action itself.

One of the many challenges of nailing a great image is “photographing people up close in difficult situations,” Ryan says. Fortunately, Ryan had spent a lot of time with the Canadian team and earned its trust, such as after a nasty downhill tumble by racer Andrée Crepeau, who recalls the crash. “It was on the flats at the bottom of the downhill in Stowe, where I learned that catching an edge is not always reversible. And down I went, face first—real quick.” The resulting image captures both the physical toll of the crash and the indominable spirit of the Canadian’s women’s team. “In photographing emotional situations, it’s always better to be physically close to the people rather than standing farther back with a telephoto lens,” Ryan says.

Great photography is at the intersection of art and science, according to Ryan. Getting the technical aspects right, such as the light, focus and framing, is key. But some of it is just heading into the field and hoping for the best. “Shooting ski action at slower than normal shutter speeds, here 1/8 second, is photographing without the luxury of certainty,” Ryan says. “After a while you get better at anticipating the results, but it’s still guesswork.” Here, at Stowe, the “obscuration of the subject promotes an awareness of the overall graphics in the frame.” Ryan also liked the flame-like gate banner flickering above the racer’s head.

Contrasts help bring a viewer into the frame, seeking out details of the surprising image. “In this case it was the ominous dark tree in the white landscape that attracted me,” Ryan says. “I waited for a bit, assuming a skier would come into the frame. He did and that completed the image.”

In 1970, Ryan made a documentary film on Austrian ski champion Karl Schranz. He filmed for several weeks on the World Cup circuit. “But I was curious to film Karl’s off-season life in his hometown of St. Anton,” Ryan says. He traveled to St. Anton in the summer, after the race season, and talked to locals who knew Schranz since his boyhood. “Karl brought us to meet his mother, who lived in the same small house she had for the last fifty years,” Ryan recalls. “As a widow, she had raised five children.” With photos and medals decorating this modest shrine to her son, Ryan likes the image because it tells as much about Schranz and his upbringing as it does about his mother.

Mammoth was one of the first destinations on Ryan’s unofficial resort itinerary when he headed West as a young racer in the 1960s. “I spent a lot of time there, both skiing and photographing the Mammoth racing program.” The racing operation was a top-notch group, whose roster frequently included members of Mammoth founder Dave McCoy’s family. At the end of a training day, racer Kandi McCoy chats with Dennis Agee, a junior coach at the time, who went on to become the Alpine Director of the U.S. Ski Team. “I liked her shy reaction to a coach’s compliment,” Ryan says.

In 1968, John Fry “had the idea to send me to do a photo story on skiing in the flatlands of the Midwest” for SKI. Ryan ended up at Boyne Mountain, Michigan, with its modest vertical of 500 feet. “For Othmar Schneider, a past Olympic champion and previously at Stowe where I knew him, it must have been confining,” Ryan says. “This image had a feeling of him reaching for something greater—or at least higher.”

John Fry and Mort Lund assigned Ryan to do a photo essay for SKI specifically on the experience of the downhill discipline. “This is the only event where there is a day or more to prepare, inspecting the course and taking a practice run,” Ryan says. “But there is never the sense of totally understanding what it will be like on race day.” At the end of the day prior to the race, there’s one last inspection down the course. Ryan strived to capture the intense preparation and anticipation in this early evening shot of a solitary racer looking down the course. Ryan: “I often find it rewarding to hang around for that extra hour at the end of the day, after the main action has ended. The light is dramatic and interesting things sometimes happen.”

All photographers have favorite assignments. This was one of Ryan’s. “One of my first and most gratifying assignments at SKI was a photo essay on Nancy Greene on the 1967 race circuit. I followed her travels for three weeks, on and off the course,” Ryan says. As well as being a superb racing talent, Ryan learned that Greene was a good friend and dedicated mentor to her teammates. Greene also didn’t let any aspect of her gear go uninspected. “Like many racers of the era, she personally paid exacting attention to the details of her skis,” Ryan says.

For Ryan’s 1969 photo essay, “The Steepness of Stowe” for SKI, he began experimenting with colored gel filters on the lens. “I liked the creative effect and usually made a few photographs this way on most other assignments,” Ryan notes, such as here as part of a story on Roger Staub at Vail (see right). With the analog film of the time, there was no way to know how the gels were working until the film was processed days later.

Digital photography now provides instant feedback (see above). “In contrast, a couple of years ago at the World Cup finals at Aspen I was fascinated with the maze of blue lines left by the multiple course markings. Shooting digitally, I could see the image right away and later, in Photoshop, I was able to exaggerate my impression of the intensity of the blue dye,” Ryan says. “Photography now has evolved to allow for, and even expect, imagery beyond simple representation of reality.”

Beat writers are often accused of writing stories for the audience of other beat writers, bringing nuances into play that can only be picked up on by other pros. The same goes for photographers. Ryan was attracted to the action in this shot for a SKI assignment. The racer is in sharp focus at the 1968 Grenoble Winter Games, with other elements blurred. However, “I liked the patrol sled waiting in the background behind the fencing,” Ryan says. “It quietly portrayed a sense of risk and danger.”

Ryan competed in the Roch Cup slalom in 1962, which became a hinge point in his career. “This was the last of my efforts at ski racing,” Ryan says. “I was decent, but when I was up against world-class racers, I realized I should spend more time at photography.” And for that decision in 1962, skiing’s visual legacy is, indeed, a bit richer.