Feature article

Alpine ski jumpers—sticking Geländesprungs, cliff hucks and gap-jumps—have been sending it for more than a hundred years.

Jesper Tjader explains what he wants to try on a practice run for the 2014 Nine Knights terrain park competition in Livigno, Italy, and no one thinks it’s possible. But he casually skis onto the in-run anyway. He’s planning a transfer from one big ramp to another one about 50 meters (164 feet) away on a completely different course. Coming up short means a face-full of vertical ice and almost certain serious injury. Overshooting isn’t a consideration since nobody believes he’ll clear the massive gap to begin with. But 20-year old Tjader, without consciously knowing it, is riding a wave of Big Air heroics that will define the first two decades of alpine ski jumping in the 2000s. The Swede sticks the landing three times that day on a jump no one else is even thinking about, and the last time he throws a double back flip.

Photo above: Athletic achievements in action sports often arrive unplanned. Swedish freeskier Jesper Tjader decided to try an unprecedented 50-meter “death gap” transfer between ramps during practice at a 2014 competition. He nailed it three times. And on his final attempt, he threw in a double back flip. Suzuki Nine Knights photo.

When Skiing Big Air debuts at the 2022 Winter Olympics in China, it will be on the back of these kinds of attention-grabbing feats over the past twenty years. Candide Thovex making the first successful jump on 120-foot Chad’s Gap, near Alta, in 1999. Jamie Pierre dropping a 255-foot cliff huck in 2006 in the Grand Targhee, Wyoming, backcountry, only to have Fred Syversen up the ante to a bonkers, and accidental, 351 feet two years later filming in Norway. Rolf Wilson laid down a 374-foot-long alpine jump in 2011 during a competition off the 90-meter jump at Howelsen Hill, and David Wise popped 46 feet above a park jump in 2016 in Italy, upping the record by more than 10 feet. All of this was accomplished on regular alpine ski gear—and it all began with something called the Geländesprung.

Hannes Schneider likely introduced, or at least popularized, the Geländesprung (literally “terrain jump” in German) in the early 1900s in the Austrian Arlberg. Writing in Skiing magazine in 1964, G.S. Bush mentioned Schneider demonstrating a maneuver where he “used two ski poles instead of one, and, an accomplished jumper, he leaped even when there was no ramp. Rushing across a sharp break in a slope, he’d push himself up and forward on the poles, catapulting himself high over the hill’s edge, and then, by twisting his body and skis, he’d change the direction his skis were facing in mid-flight. He called this spectacular trick, ‘Geländesprung.’”

By the 1950s that description was obsolete and gelandes had come to more broadly encompass all alpine-style jumping that includes ski poles and bindings with locked-down heels—two major things that differentiated it from classic heads-and-tips-first Nordic jumping. It began to make regularly noted appearances in the U.S. in the 1930s where it was mentioned as an activity at areas from Glen Ellen, Vermont, to Badger Pass in Yosemite.

Oddly, it also turned up on an American stamp issued in 1932, commemorating that year’s third Winter Olympics, being held in Lake Placid. As noted collector James Riddell remarked in an article, “The Scandinavian disciplines Langlauf and Springlauf only at Lake Placid! This stamp, strangely enough, depicted a Geländesprung, which hardly suited either event.” Ski journalist Mort Lund observed that the stamp displayed “a form of skiing for which there was no Olympic, world or local competitions…” It may have been the 1940s before the first known gelande events started occurring at places like Alta, Utah.

Seeing is Believing

What would primarily propel alpine jumping is photography, which has proven both a blessing and a curse, with detractors claiming that photo fame and peer pressure drive kids to do dangerously crazy things they wouldn’t otherwise. But as the world rolled into the 1960s, magazine photos and movies became major drivers for alpine ski jumping. Not because people were doing it for the cameras, but because the cameras craved it. Big air was dramatic and it sold. Take Jim McConkey, for instance.

A famous early image showed him jumping 100 feet over a ski plane on a glacier in Canada in 1962. He next dropped a 90-foot cliff in the Bugaboos, which was then nearly unthinkable. Ninety feet is still bragging material. And it opened up the mountains to stuff so ridiculous that jumpers had to create wings. Tragically, one who did was McConkey’s son Shane, who died in a skiing and BASE-jumping accident in the Dolomites in 2009.

Jim McConkey’s early 1960s plane-jumping image was followed by a 1963 Hans Truöl photo of legendary Austrian racer Egon Zimmermann, who would go on to win the Olympic downhill gold medal, jumping the Flexenpass highway above Lech and clearing a new 356 Porsche in the process. Zimmermann personally gave visitors a postcard of the photo at his Hotel Kristberg in Lech right up until his death at 80 this past August. He once told me that he’d done the jump mainly as a promo for Porsche, which he thought was ironic since he suffered a bad wreck in his own Porsche several years later. The pic is still iconic today and along with McConkey’s plane jump helped create the modern concept of gap-jumping as an Evel Knievel form of showmanship.

The value of film to big league ski jumping was cemented when skiing action scenes, being shot by Willy Bogner in some of the Alps’ most glamorous locales, began appearing in James Bond movies. The high-octane Bond footage gave a big boost to skiing in general and extreme jumping in particular, the latter as a result of three deeply memorable stunt sequences.

The first was in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service in 1969, where George Lazenby’s stunt skiers were German racer Ludwig Leitner and Swiss downhill ace Bernhard Russi. Near the end of a long chase sequence at Murren, Switzerland, Bond jumps over a highway very reminiscent of Zimmermann’s Porsche-clearing gelande. Only Bond did it over a huge snowplow with a snowblower that devours the pursuing bad guy when he doesn’t go big enough. Unfortunately, “Russi was injured when he crashed on the road,” Willy Bogner once told me. But it definitely raised the stakes on gap-jumping and built on the Zimmermann/McConkey foundation.

Next came Rick Sylvester’s mind-boggling jump off Mount Asgard on Baffin Island in 1977’s The Spy Who Loved Me that ended 3,000 vertical feet later with a parachute landing. It was a game-changer that furthered the blending of skiing with BASE-jumping and fired up ski jumpers by exponentially extending the limits of what was possible. The movie scene took three tries for the camera crew to get the shots, but it awed a global audience and inspired people like Shane McConkey. (Sylvester got the coveted call for the Spy stunt because he had skied off El Capitan in California in 1972, which was filmed by a young Mike Marvin, who went on to Hot Dog—the Movie fame. Sylvester’s El Cap feat is considered the first filmed BASE jump on skis.)

In 1981’s For Your Eyes Only, extensive ski scenes in Cortina, Italy, are capped by former 6-time World Champion freestyle skier John Eaves standing in for Roger Moore and jumping off Cortina’s famed 90-meter Nordic hill—on a pair of 205 Olin Mark VI slalom skis. Almost everyone used at least 215s on gelande jumps a lot smaller than a 90-meter, with 220s more likely under foot. Plus Eaves did it tandem, side-by-side with a regular, properly equipped Nordic jumper.

“I had my own jump,” Eaves told me. “It was set at 0 degrees. The Nordic take off was -11 degrees. They need that to get into the air foil. Mine felt like a good kick when I hit it, allowing me to gain altitude over the Nordic jumper immediately. Then I would slowly lose altitude as he went ahead… I did 200 feet once.” It wasn’t out of his wheelhouse, Eaves explained. “I got second place at the Whistler gelande in 1974 on a pair of Dave Murray’s lead weighted downhill skis.”

Big Air, Big Competitions

Competitive alpine ski jumping wasn’t hugely successful over the years, but it was the testing grounds for a lot of what followed. While earlier gelande competitions definitely occurred, Alf Engen staged the first-ever National Gelande Championships at Alta in 1964, and just for good measure won it.

That event lasted for ten years (plus occasional resurrections for anniversaries) before insurance companies and lawyers got involved. But by then there were gelande comps, and their direct descendants in the form of “ski splashes,” going on everywhere: Mad River, Sugarbush, Purgatory’s famous Goliath Gelande, Snowbowl Montana, Steamboat Spring’s Winter Carnival off the 70 and 90-meter jumps. Other hosts included Jackson, Whistler, Alyeska, Aspen’s Winterskol, a swimming pool alongside the Silvertree Hotel in Snowmass, and so on, with a tour that included 13 stops at its peak. But Alta’s remained the granddaddy and the big one everybody aimed for.

Interestingly, Porsche stayed allied with alpine ski jumping over the years, supplying a car as first prize for one of the early gelande events in Vail, won by Mark Jones in 1974 at the then world-record distance of 213.5 feet. The prize got everyone’s attention as much as the length, and helped to jump-start (ahem) the gelande tour.

By this time freestyle skiing aerial events had been going on for a few years in the US and around the world. They were formally recognized by the FIS in 1979 and first showcased at the Olympics in 1994. Combining outrageously vertical air (20 feet above the kicker, up to 60 feet above the landing) with full-on gymnastics (three full back flips with five full twists for example), they’ve made for great TV. They also led directly to the jibbing movement and park and pipe riding that rewards tricks as much as amplitude or distance.

For the last 40 years, the sky has literally been the limit for gelandes, gap-jumps and cliff hucks, to the point where some of it has gone almost beyond the pale and stalled a bit as a result. Meanwhile, park and pipe events have combined most of the other forms of alpine jumping and added some new wrinkles, along with wide exposure and money that both attracts and nurtures a lot of the jumping talent.

Freestyle courses, super-pipes and big air kickers provide highly visible venues for people to go huge while emphasizing tricks and still being able to ski away. That’s because the jumps are vaguely within reason, and are regular events instead of one-off stunts to set a record.

Video Revolution

There’s no avoiding the inherent danger of big air. After Paul Ruff’s fatal 160-foot jump in 1993 near Kirkwood, California, in an attempt to set a world record, some industry insiders said it would slow the seemingly endless rush to push skiing’s limits. Not so.

There are still people, of course, getting big air, and there’s still a market for it, primarily in the ski-porn films that are more popular than ever with platforms like Netflix and YouTube. The video cameras were there when Candide Thovex made the first successful flight over Chad’s Gap in Cottonwood Canyon, Utah, in 1999, throwing in a mute grab, and when he came back the next year and did it with a D-Spin. Yes, the same Chad’s Gap where Tanner Hall, after sessioning it well all day in 2005, came up short trying a switch cork 900 and broke both ankles. On video. He returned for redemption in 2017.

The cameras were running in 2006 when Jamie Pierre stuck a 255-foot cliff drop in the Grand Targhee backcountry of the Tetons. He literally stuck it, going in almost headfirst like a dart and having to be dug out. He’d worked his way up since 2003 from 165 feet to 255 during a series of big leaps in Utah, Switzerland and Oregon.

“I just really wanted to hold the record, even if only for a day,” he said afterward. With a young family, he noted he could now happily “retire” to slightly less hazardous skiing. Sadly, he died at 38 in 2009 in an avalanche in the Alta backcountry.

The heart-stopping heights of serious cliff hucks had progressed to the point in the 1990s where no one was even trying to ski away from them. They would simply plant their landings in deep snow, using the tails of their skis when possible to absorb some impact, and just hope to survive. That was Fred Syversen’s plan in 2008 when he made a filmed practice run, during a movie shoot, to a cliff in Norway chosen to break Pierre’s 255-foot record. But he turned too early in his fast-moving descent, and realized it too late.

“Braking or trying to stop was no longer an option, it simply went too fast,” he posted on social media. “So that left one choice: go for it and do it right!” He turned slightly to avoid rocks to his left, got out over snow and tilted so he didn’t land on his ABS pack that could have damaged his spine. He cratered like an unexploded howitzer shell. His only slight injury came when someone hit him with a shovel digging him out—351-feet later.

There’s also nine seconds of wobbly bystander footage (pure gelande still doesn’t get much love) of Rolf Wilson setting the alpine-jumping world record of 374 feet at Howelson Hill in Steamboat in 2011. You probably didn’t see it even if you lived in Steamboat. “It’s such an odd sport,” allows Wilson, who’s from Missoula, Montana. “One of the sports that doesn’t get a lot of recognition, because the guys that do it really just wanna jump, and see how far they go, and have fun. And we’re a bunch of hooligans to be honest with you.”

Jesper Tjader’s giant transfer in 2014, and David Wise’s 2016 blast, rocked the park and pipe world. And since then Big Air has seemed poised for the next big step. As some alpine jumping records near their survivable outer limits, no one has been lining up to try to beat Syversen’s 351 (12 years ago) or Wilson’s 374 (nine years ago). So what’s on the horizon?

More X Games-style productions; more ski movies; more genius films like Candide Thovex’s with amazing stunts that aren’t always potentially lethal; wing-suited jumpers regularly landing on slopes from big drops without ever popping chutes; and someone letting the true gelande crowd build the jump they yearn for with a lightning fast in-run, adjustable kicker, and endless run out.

Meanwhile, if you want to go really long the best bet is still Nordic ski flying on the 120-meter hills, where the current world record by Stefan Kraft of Austria at 831 feet is just shy of three football fields, no tricks involved. 

Jay Cowan has written about skiing for five decades and received Colorado Ski Country USA’s Lowell Thomas Award for print journalism, multiple magazine feature writing awards from NASJA, and has been included in The Best American Travel Writing of the Year. His books include Hunter S. Thompson and his latest, Scandal Aspen.

Photo: The gas crisis of the early 1970s introduced skiers to gas rationing, prices tripling at the pump and gas-station lines longer than those at the ski lifts. Skiers "still came," noted a ski-resort executive. Photo: Dreamstime

A Short History of Catastrophes

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

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

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

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

In Idaho, Sun Valley—the country’s first true destination ski resort—was transformed into a Navy recuperating hospital, and earlier it contributed the feel-good movie Sun Valley Serenade to the effort. Filmed at the resort and starring Sonja Henie, the Norwegian Olympic ice-skating champion, the movie’s release in 1941, just prior to Peal Harbor, fit the mood of the times and provided an entertaining escape. (The ski scenes were orchestrated by Sun Valley ski-school director Otto Lang; he and Gretchen Fraser, the first U.S. skier to win an Olympic Gold Medal, [Slalom, 1948, St. Moritz] filled in for Henie and her co-star, John Payne.) The experience led Lang to shoot a training film for the 10th, whose members would create the post-war modern North American ski industry by founding dozens of resorts and driving advances in every corner of the sport.

The war wreaked havoc on European ski resorts, and led to the cancellation of the 1940 and 1944 Olympics, set for Sapporo, Japan, and Cortina d’Ampezzo in the Dolomites. FIS held an Axis-only World Championships in 1941, at Cortina, where Germany and Italy won all 18 alpine and nordic medals. The results were invalidated after the war.

The Nazis called on their citizenry to donate skis for use on the Eastern Front; an astounding 1.5 million pairs were collected, according to research by Lorenz Pfeiffer (Collected Papers of the International Ski History Congress, 2002). This was testimony both to the iron grip of National Socialism and the popularity of the sport, especially considering there must have been another few hundred thousand pairs hidden away in attics. Most of the skis sent to Werhrmacht troops were cut up for firewood. When the Olympics resumed in 1948 at St. Moritz in Switzerland, Germany was not invited. Across the globe, the modern ski era, after a five-year pause, resumed its steady ascent.

EARLY 1970s: NO GAS, NO PROBLEM

The gas crisis and recession of 1973-74 came as the nation was fully embracing this growing sport and lifestyle. With gas prices tripling and availability both random and scarce, New Jersey skiers would strap five-gallon cans of fuel to the roofs of their station wagons and pile in for the long drive north to Killington. It wasn’t even a good snow year that season, with cycles of rain and sub-zero temps. “They still came,” recalls Chris Diamond, who was starting his resort career at Killington then and whose duties included overseeing the resort’s gas station. “Skiers are resilient.”

In the pages of SKI, editor-in-chief John Fry saw upside in the re-emergence of carpooling and ski buses with a shared ski-tribe vibe, which had been disappearing as cars replaced trains and sprawling condo complexes replaced cozy ski lodges. “One of the most immediate effects of the gas crisis is that it could bring skiers closer together again,” Fry wrote. The gas crisis and the resulting shared space of skiers didn’t last. The 2020-21 season promises unprecedented social distancing, but Fry’s overall point, that skiers and the industry need to evolve and innovate in times of catastrophe, still holds true.

IT’S THE WEATHER, STUPID

The oil crisis, inflation, recession, and the Iranian Revolution of the early 1980s illustrate the over-arching importance of weather—and the industry’s response. Even with unemployment rising to near 11 percent, the 1981-82 winter was busy, setting a six-year high. It was the previous season, 1980-81, when it truly failed to snow in the West, that skiers cut their visits by more than 20 percent. It was the worst result, by far, in the 40 seasons that skier visits have been recorded by the NSAA. That weather disaster led resorts to dramatically increase their water rights and expand snowmaking capabilities, setting the foundation for today’s resort business model.

Machine gun-toting military stalked the twin Austrian villages of Saalbach-Hinterglemm during the 1991 World Alpine Championships, held in the wake of the short and indecisive first Gulf War. Eleven suspected terrorists, believed to be planning an attack in the Zel am See region, had been detained. The U.S. Ski Team first ordered its racers to return stateside from the European circuit, then flew them back for the championships. Some skiers stayed home to monitor the Gulf War on TV while a recession tightened pocketbooks. Season visitation reached a low-water mark, the poorest showing in the past three decades. But the biggest culprit in a season-to-forget was scarce snowfall on both coasts.

In 2001 and 2002, the dot-com crash and 9/11 ended what was at the time the longest period of U.S. economic expansion. Skiers and resorts feared the worst that fall of 2001, as dust settled over the collapsed Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. The owner of a New Jersey ski shop located just 20 minutes away said that 250 of his customers were lost in the attack; these were not just clients but friends, ski buddies, neighbors. He expressed what has become the mantra through all catastrophes: “I’ve been really impressed by the spirit of skiers. They are going to go skiing, no matter what.” Security was tight at the Salt Lake Olympics in February, but the fear of flying eventually lapsed, and visitations dipped only slightly.

THE GREAT RECESSION AND BEYOND

The subprime-mortgage crash and subsequent Great Recession of 2007-09 arguably had the most significant impact of any financial event, and yet the U.S. as a whole enjoyed strong, even record, years for skier visits. The traditional Wall Street high-roller vacation in Vail, with private instructors, $3,000-a-night-condos, and catered dinners, screeched to a halt. Amid job losses, bankruptcies and home foreclosures, family ski trips to the West slowed, as did international visitation. Vail Resorts, which owned just five ski resorts back then, was down 13 percent in lodging and 9 percent in lift revenues for the 2008-09 season; the latter would have been much worse if not for the newly launched Epic Pass.

The recession ultimately proved fatal for real-estate-centric Intrawest, at the time the largest ski-resort operator in North America. The condos Intrawest owned in its villages became virtually worthless on the corporate balance sheet, and the company would eventually cease to exist. (Its last remnants were snatched up in the phoenix-like creation of Alterra Mountain Company in 2018.) One lasting outcome: Most ski resorts, both large and small, exited the real-estate development market, opting instead to find development partners to take the risk. Overall, capital expansion projects were put on hold for a few seasons. Meanwhile, many smaller, low-cost, drive-to resorts flourished across the country.

Season pass sales at Mt. Snow in Vermont increased by 10 percent for the 2008-09 season, and they remained stable through the country. Visitation dropped 5.5 percent overall, but it was still the fifth best season on record at the time, a respectable outcome. The reason? Abundant snowfall.

THE UNKNOWN SEASON AHEAD

The Great Recession provides some economic clues in forecasting the season ahead, but the unprecedented travel concerns and mandated social distancing driven by Covid-19 will play major roles. The high cost of skiing has long been lamented. Skiers boast a median household income of $134,000, well more than double the national average of $55,000. These are people who frequently can work from home and likely have kept their jobs during the pandemic, or have the resources to continue pursuing their passion. But they won’t be rushing to jump on planes. The Rocky Mountain ski region is by far the most accessed by air travel, with 65 percent of resort customers flying in. Particularly impacted may be remote resorts that have few direct flights or require connecting flights. Summer resort destinations are reporting that returning guests now favor more convenient social-distancing at Airbnb-type accommodations over traditional hotel lodging, so that already established ski trend will continue. The buzz of crowded après-ski haunts, restaurants, bars, concerts, festivals and retail shops will be scaled back.

Looking ahead, on-mountain occupancy restrictions to ensure social distancing, and lotteries to determine access, are a real possibility. This may be particularly true in Democratic-leaning “blue” ski states with tighter restrictions (one might expect, for instance, that New Hampshire and Wyoming state guidelines will be looser than those in Vermont and Colorado), but strict restrictions could be across-the-board during peak periods. The long lift lines experienced at popular mega-pass resorts during powder days last season could literally stretch halfway up the mountain with the application of six-foot social distancing. The handful of resorts that tested re-openings last spring severely limited customers, but it is hoped that with all resorts open, that can be largely avoided during all but the most popular holiday periods.

The Epic and Ikon season passes, enjoying unprecedented popularity pre-Covid as they raced toward a combined sales of 2 million, announced relatively generous credit and cancellation clauses for pass purchasers to protect against the unknowns of the coming 2020-21 season. Other ski areas, large and small, across North America did the same.

Disaster spurs innovation, so expect to see more self-directed transactions, including online purchases at home or other off-site locations and with ticket kiosks at your favorite resorts or ski towns. Austrian-based ticketing and gate management company AXESS even has a system that denies entry to skiers who aren’t wearing a mask. RFID and online ticketing is one of the business segments that has seen demand rise during the pandemic, along with backcountry gear—and the suddenly useful, mask-like, neck gaiters.

Skiing enters the 2020-21 winter with exponentially more uncertainty and potential downside than any season since World War II. Predictions range from near normalcy (driven by a miracle vaccine or other medical breakthroughs) to dark repercussions from a worsening second wave in the fall (following the seemingly never-ending first wave).

In the best of times, skiing thrives as one of the most social of sports, bringing together people from different backgrounds in a healthy, serene mountain environment. When required, it can adapt to social distancing, with crowds spread over hundreds and even thousands of acres. And there’s always this: Skiing is one of the few pursuits in which wearing a mask and gloves is de rigueur. 

Andy Bigford is the former editor-in-chief and publisher of SKI. He’s collaborated with Chris Diamond on two books, Ski Inc., and Ski Inc. 2020. A third Ski Inc.book is planned for release in October 2022.

Skiing put Aspen on the map. But bad behavior keeps the town in the news.

In one of the best known and most scandalous ski towns in the world, it’s inevitable that some of the headlines spill over onto the slopes. But scandals were a regular feature of Aspen’s existence from its start in the 1880s as one of the richest and wildest silver mining camps in the West. The most notorious early stories often concerned money, sex, drug abuse and murder, which is still the case today.

Wyatt Earp, for instance, helped make an arrest in Aspen in 1884. That same year, Earp’s buddy Doc Holliday used a pistol in a poker-game shooting elsewhere in the valley, when both men, inconveniently, were wanted in other states for murder. As in every other mining town, Aspen’s population supported thriving cathouses and opium dens.

An early skiing-specific scandal involved uber alpinist Fritz Stammberger who lived in Aspen during the 1960s and 70s when he was a founder of Climbing magazine and became one of the leading ski mountaineers of the time. He once chained himself to a tree in town in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent the property owner from cutting it down to build what is now the Miner’s Building hardware store. In the mountains he attracted attention for using no supplemental oxygen and could often be seen skinning to the top of Aspen Mountain with his mouth duct-taped in order to acclimate for the 8,000-meter mountains of Asia.

Based out of Aspen, Stammberger became a flamboyant figure locally, but also in climbing’s elite global community. He survived a controversial disaster that claimed the lives of the rest of his 1964 expedition on 27,725-foot Cho Oyu, on the China-Nepal border, where he successfully solo summited and skied down from 24,000 feet to try to get help.

The most scandalous insinuations about him came when he disappeared on a solo skiing and climbing expedition to Tirich Mir in Pakistan in 1975. He spent the night with John McMurtry’s family in Denver on his way to begin that fateful trip, and McMurtry says, “I remember asking him where he was going. He would only say it was top-secret.” Rumors circulated that he may have been spying in the tense region where Russia, China, Afghanistan and Pakistan all shared borders. Multiple efforts to find some trace of him failed. In 1994 Stammberger’s widow, former Price is Right model Janice Pennington, wrote a book called Husband, Lover, Spy, where she said he had been recruited by the CIA and either killed in jihad fighting or imprisoned by the Soviets.

During World Cup and IPSRA ski races in Aspen in the 1970s, several visiting racers and officials got in trouble. Brothers Terry and Tyler Palmer once drove a loaner Jeep up the Little Nell ski run and halfway up Spar Gulch in the middle of the night before getting it stuck. At least they had permission to use the vehicle. Austrian ski stars Hermann Maier and Andreas Schiffer got arrested for stealing a bicycle from a house where they spent the night partying. Their excuse: They needed it to get back to their hotel so they wouldn’t miss their flight out that morning. If they had been a little more ambitious they could have matched World Cup journalist (and Skiing History contributor) Patrick Lang, who was once arrested in Aspen for stealing a car. It was all a misunderstanding. Sort of.

Those hijinks paled alongside the 1976 shooting death of American ski-racing superstar Spider Sabich by his lover, the singer/actress Claudine Longet. Longtime Denver journalist and ski writer Charlie Meyers wrote an excellent story about it for Skiing Heritage (now Skiing History) in 2006.

I had access to some of Spider’s close friends, including Bob Beattie, and have been able to report details that Charlie and others couldn’t. Among them are allegations that Claudine actually stole the pistol she shot Spider with from the house of Spider’s brother Steve, two weeks before the shooting. This potential evidence might have turned the manslaughter conviction into something much different.

The .22 caliber Luger replica was said to have belonged to Spider’s dad, Vlad Sabich Sr., and passed to Steve when the father died.

But Pinkie, as Steve’s friends called him, had been convicted of a felony marijuana charge in 1971, and wasn’t allowed to own any guns. Testimony ultimately declared that the gun passed to Spider’s possession after Pinkie’s conviction. There was also supposedly a substantial payment to Pinkie from entertainer Andy Williams, Longet’s former husband, presumably to keep him from revealing any theft of his gun.

Pinkie never clarified the issue, and died of cancer in 2004. Longet got off with a one-month jail sentence and then married her local attorney (who was married when he went to work for her). To this day, the tragic farce is a black mark on Aspen’s legal system.

That legal system dropped the ball again a year later, when, in June 1977, convicted serial killer Ted Bundy escaped from Aspen’s Pitkin County Courthouse. Bundy was an avid skier and stalked some of his victims at resorts in Utah and Colorado. He was on trial in Aspen for the 1975 Snowmass murder of a visiting nurse from Michigan, Caryn Campbell, whom he had lured into helping him by faking a ski injury.

Recaptured, in December he broke out of the Glenwood Springs jail and committed several more murders in Florida. Bundy was caught in February 1978 and finally executed in 1989.

Donald Trump was making bad relationship news long before he became President of the United States. Several different versions of his 1990 Christmas holidays imbroglio in Aspen made the next day’s front pages in tabloids from Hong Kong to the New York Post. What was known for sure was that both Ivana Trump and Marla Maples were in town with him, and only Ivana was married to him. The rest of the details varied considerably.

Most witnesses (undoubtedly more than there actually were) claim Ivana went off on Marla at Bonnie’s restaurant on Aspen Mountain, called her “Moolah” Maple in her wicked Czech accent and demanded, “You bitch, leave my husband alone!”

Afterward Ivana, who is a former ski instructor, reportedly skied backwards down the slope in front of the Donald, hurling invectives and the occasional snowball at him. It eventually turned into his costliest ski trip ever, reportedly in the neighborhood of $50 million all told for the subsequent divorce. It was rumored that Trump liked to brag, “It was the biggest divorce ever!”

The death of Michael Kennedy while skiing on Aspen Mountain during the Christmas holidays of 1991 was considered scandalous by some, inasmuch as the family was playing football on skis, something they had previously been asked by ski patrol not to do. So the Kennedys had waited for their game until the sweep of the mountain, when there were fewer other people on the slopes.

But it wasn’t other people who were in danger when Michael, having just caught a pass while skiing, pulled it down and then hit a tree head-on. And at that time no one wore helmets. The Aspen Mountain ski patrol cut the tree down the next day to avoid the potential for morbid shrines.

The terrible accident immediately created gossip, including speculation that alcohol or drugs were involved, but toxicology reports said no. And people talked about other Kennedy family excesses (destroying rental houses, illegally trying to buy prescription drugs, heavy partying, etc.) in a town they’d been visiting since the 1960s. However, many who live in Aspen where death in the mountains isn’t a rarity, saw it not as a scandal but simply and sadly what can happen, especially in a large, adventurous and willful family.

A 1993 fiasco made some non-celebrities temporarily famous when five skiers from Denver became lost and stranded on a backcountry hut trip during a brutal February blizzard that had been widely forecast. They were discovered alive after four days of intensive and dangerous searching and quickly went from being semi-heroic survivors to fools in way over their heads. They had gone into the mountains in spite of warnings and put dozens of other lives at risk looking for them. Sports Illustrated magazine gave it four pages. The so-called leader of the group was Ken Torp, and for years afterward any dumbass move in the backcountry was called “Torping.”

Aspen has had no shortage of controversies over the years. Locals have quarreled over aggressive ticket pricing, unionization of the ski patrol, underground ski school instructors and terrain expansion, among other issues.

History suggests that it won’t be long before another major scandal puts Aspen in the news again.
Stay tuned.

This piece contains excerpts from the book Scandal Aspen. Jay Cowan has written about skiing for five decades from his home near Aspen (and now in Montana) and has received multiple writing awards, as well as inclusion in The Best American Travel Writing. His many books include Hunter S. Thompson and Scandal Aspen, his latest.

Sun Valley Skier Shares Rare Find

By David Butterfield

In 1979, 18-year-old, Marc Corney, did his best to become a Sun Valley ski bum. He left his So Cal home of Glendora with high hopes of joblessness, raucous nightlife, and endless days of skiing Baldy. He had some early success but eventually succumbed to responsibility and regular employment. He even went back to school, became an architect, and now has a family. Though a failed ski bum, Marc still skis over 60 days a year and contributes as a Guest Services supervisor. Over the years he has developed an appreciation for Sun Valley history and traditions of mountain camaraderie.

It was a special night of on-line ski history study when he came across a bookseller in Vermont with something rare and unique to offer. The Sun Valley Ski Book is a 1939 pictorial ski instruction tome by Friedl Pfeifer that is not uncommon among collectors and aficionados, but this copy had buried treasure. Along with ski school director Pfeifer’s step by step instruction and mountain lifestyle photos, there are hand-written captions from photo subjects and a four-page signature spread. Also tucked in are a few vintage newspaper clippings and a song lyric by poet, Christopher La Farge, a friend of Ernest Hemingway.

Marc snapped up the souvenir and with his wife, Jill, put the probable story together. The book most likely belonged to Pfeifer and his wife and must have been passed around at parties or on their coffee table around the time of their wedding in the spring of 1940. The captions are directed to the Pfeifers and the signatures are those of the inner circle of accomplished skiers in Sun Valley’s magical formative years. Every time Marc and Jill open the book, they know they are holding traces of Sun Valley ski heroes in their hands and are pleased to share a look with Skiing History readers. 

In 1956, two Americans crisscrossed Scandinavia to film the world’s fastest Nordic racers and make the first-ever cross-country ski technique film.

One thing leads to another. In this case, a 1956 summer school course in Oslo landed a couple of Americans smack in the middle of the three biggest cross-country ski races in Scandinavia. It was the chance of a lifetime to make an instructional film showing how Scandinavian racers skied so much faster than anyone else in the world—especially those living back home, in the good old USA.

Photo top of page: Norwegian racer Håkon Brusveen, shown here in 1952, won two medals (gold and silver) at the 1960 Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley, California.  Wikimedia Commons.

The story started the previous summer, as I bounced along on a student sightseeing tour of historical Norwegian landmarks. I saw Viking settlements, ancient stave churches and the famous longboats that took fierce raiders to distant lands. I also happened to meet Fritz Harshbarger, a first-class cinematographer. As we rumbled along, Fritz perched himself next to the bus door, motion-picture camera at the ready, the first off at each stop. Everywhere we went, and everything we did, was recorded for posterity on 16mm film.  His mission: to provide Oslo University with great advertising footage to promote the summer school program and attract dozens of eager tuition-paying students. 

Harshbarger was no ordinary camera-toting tourist. He took amateur filmmaking seriously, and had won a number of awards for his work. Once a collegiate basketball star, he had just completed his PhD in “rocket science” (jet propulsion) and was in Norway for 15 months on a Fulbright fellowship. Tall, lanky, with weathered face and broad smile, he could have passed as a Texas cowboy. And with a laugh you could hear a mile away, he sounded the part as well. 

It was easy to strike up conversations with Fritz. I had been a cross-country racer at Middlebury College in Vermont, and when he learned of my interest in racing technique, the handwriting began forming on the wall. He was taking a year off and had two 16 mm cameras. I was a skier and coach who wanted to study cross-country racing technique. Having just completed two years of U.S. military service, I also had time. We became a team, and the more we talked, the more exciting the possibilities looked. Using two cameras, we wanted to film the biggest ski races, take pictures of all the best racers, and then put together an instructional film showing how to ski like the champions — arguably the first-ever cross-country technique film. 

That was the plan. How it unfolded follows.  

Fritz was sure that future audiences would tire of watching a parade of knicker-clad skiers. We needed a little comic interlude to liven things up. That’s how the “Cowboy on Skis” subplot was born. The script was pretty simple: Fritz, the Texas Cowboy, decked out in a flying scarf, broad brimmed hat, and wearing number O, enters the world-famous Holmenkollen race. But early on, it becomes obvious that the bouncing gait of the tall Texan will be no match for the powerful strides of the Scandinavians.

Luckily, the plot turns when the cowboy meets “The Beautiful Girl.” We found “Tova,” who had all the necessary attributes, plus a few more. What followed was love at first sight, culminating in a passionate trailside kiss that catapulted the fired-up cowboy to victory. As any sports psychologist will tell you, motivation is the key to success. 

In the film, the cowboy was shown zooming up hills in a tuck position. How did we do that? First, we modified the back end of a pair of skis so they would slide backwards. After many practice runs, along with some pretty good falls, we got the footage. Later we edited the film by flipping it to produce reversed direction and splicing that section into the final edition. It worked! The cowboy coasted up hills on custom skis with curved tips that resembled a ram’s horn.

Alas, the cowboy subplot failed to amuse the elderly members of the Holmenkollen organizing committee. Perhaps the opening shot of the cowboy, standing in the starting gate of the Holmenkollen on a pair of ridiculous-looking skis, was too much for them to swallow. Norwegian pride, you know. But the committee did like the ski technique part of the film and once completed, the NSF (Norges Skiforbund) was the first to purchase a copy. 

We had started planning our filming schedule in September 1956. We decided to focus on the marquee race in each of the three Scandinavian countries. Letters were written, phone calls were made, interviews took place and national coaches were consulted. The three national ski associations provided us with the necessary permissions. At every turn we were greeted with a friendly handshake. Many were quite enthusiastic, even flattered, that we wanted to film their racers. And, of course, national team coaches wanted to see the motion picture.     

In late fall I took a trip to Vålådalen, a sports resort and training center in northern Sweden made famous by the legendary coach, Gosta Olander. Vålådalen is a resort like no other. Ordinary vacationers and world-class athletes mix freely, eating at the same tables and enjoying the same evening entertainment. There are facilities for all the major sports, enough to satisfy the most ardent fan. I chose to hang out with the Swedish cross-country team on one of their interval training days. Yes, they were very impressive, and yes, I learned a lot that day. 

Later, the skiers showed up at the training room for their monthly bicycle ergometer test. They rode an adapted stationary bicycle that kept pedaling effort constant while heart rate was taken every minute.  Calculations would show the amount of oxygen each skier can take in and send to his working muscles.  In recent decades, science has become the basis for endurance training. The process was developed by the famous Swedish sports physiologist, Per-Olof Åstrand. 

Endurance will always be the key that unlocks the door to cross-country skiing success. I was reminded of this truism one evening in Finland when the famous Finnish racer, Arnie Hiiva, and I were hanging out with a bunch of his friends. These guys had little formal schooling. They were loggers, or woodsmen, raised on farms, and accustomed to hard work. Many generations of this hardy outdoor lifestyle had evolved a genetic pool from which gold-medal winners were born. The takeaway for other countries? When it comes to physical endurance, the rest of us have a lot of catching up to do. Sixten Jernberg’s advice for Americans was simply put: “...endurance training, endurance training, and more endurance training.” A pretty clear message.  Sixten’s own life gives us a perfect example. His formula was: Get up early, run or ski to work, chop and saw wood all day, run home and then train for two or three hours. Repeat six times a week for many years. 

Jernberg was typical of the cross-country skiers we had the pleasure of associating with during our time in Scandinavia. These were honest, simple people, no frills. They asked for no favors but, on the other hand, were willing to give you the shirt off their backs. And I remember them as being patient—in fact, amazingly patient—with some of our crazy requests. A couple of them persuaded a neighbor to hitch up his horses and pull a sled, so Fritz could take long, uninterrupted pictures of them skiing in the field. When I asked Veikko Hakulinen to use diagonal stride the whole way, he said that was not the way he usually skied, but he did it anyway, just because I asked.  

With four world titles and nine Olympic medals, Jernberg was one of the most decorated cross-country skiers of all time. He and his wife lived in a modest house, with one exception: the kitchen. Thanks to her husband’s race winnings, she had every appliance and kitchen convenience known to the civilized world. 

Another time, when we were visiting Håkon Brusveen at his home in Lillehammer, I asked if we could film him sawing a log with a bucksaw. “Why does this crazy American want me to do that?” But there was a method in our madness:  The slow-motion pictures of his sawing motion clearly showed the body initiating each stroke, with the arms following in a coordinated sequence. Good body mechanics produces a powerful and energy-saving sawing technique. I can’t imagine today’s Olympic champions taking time to do those things. We live in a much different age. 

Saunas are big in Finland and are treated with respect bordering on reverence. The family sauna is given credit for everyone’s good health and recovery from fatigue. That last part is where Nordic skiers come in. One afternoon, members of the national team suggested that I join them. It’s funny how a trip to the sauna could turn into a ski-racing lesson: Hakulinen and his teammates could have been models for an anatomical wall chart. Hakulinen probably had zero percent body fat, and that was lesson number one: Lose the extra fat.

Lesson number two is not so obvious: You needed to notice that the flat muscle on the forward side of Hakulinen’s hips was exceptionally well developed. This is an important muscle for hip flexion, as in swinging the leg forward. The Hawk’s stride had a very fast leg recovery, a rapid swing-through that carried him forward onto the next glide. Repeated thousands of times, over many years, his hip flexion muscle had become strong and well defined, a hidden key to his success.  

Dr. Birger Tvedt taught at the Oslo Orthopedic Institute and had a lifelong interest in the science of human movement. As Norway’s team doctor and physical therapist, he had a perfect opportunity to study the skiing technique of world-class athletes. He produced “training films” to help loggers and farmers benefit from his kinesiological understanding. Whether swinging an axe, cutting hay with a scythe, or sawing logs, good body mechanics affected how much work was done, effort used, and at what energy cost. It is fascinating to see how a small technique improvement makes a real impact on the day’s work.   

The same in skiing. Good technique results in going fast and saving energy. Motion picture analysis, together with a coach’s trained eye, can help anyone who wants to ski better. Feeling the improvement is exciting and so the skier’s love of cross-country skiing increases. As we learned 60 years ago as amateur filmmakers in Scandinavia, the reward is in the doing. 

The technique instruction film described in this article was released over 60 years ago. It was 35 minutes long, in black and white, with English soundtrack. Copies were sold to a number of ski associations in Europe and Asia. In the United States, several college ski teams purchased it, as did the Vermont Ski Museum in Stowe. No other copies remain.  

Rick Eliot is a former collegiate racer and coach who lives in Massachusetts. Thanks to ISHA editorial review-board member John Caldwell for his help in reviewing and editing this article.

Marie Marvingt achieved fame as an aviator, but she was also a pioneering skier and inventor of an early aluminum ski. 

She’s famous in France, but nearly unheard of in North America. Marie Marvingt (1875–1963) was an athletic phenomenon who forged a path for women into mountaineering, martial arts, skiing, cycling, aviation and military service. Combining her careers as a surgical nurse and military aviator, she invented the concept and technology of the air ambulance, and promoted air-evac services around the world.

(Photo top of page: Marie Marvingt at Chamonix in January 1913. The pants were a practical but daring fashion statement.)

With few exceptions, women of her era who succeeded in alpinism and aviation had the support of their wealthy families or husbands. In fact, Marie never married and had to work for her adventures. Marie’s father, Felix Marvingt, was postmaster of Aurillac, a decidedly middle-class occupation. After 1879 when, at age 52, Felix fled his stifling career as a bureaucrat, the family lived on his pension. A champion swimmer in his youth, Felix was 48 years old at Marie’s birth, and encouraged her to excel in sports—first swimming, then cycling, canoeing, mountaineering and gymnastics. From the age of five, she followed Felix on his swims in the Moselle and on trekking holidays in the Alps. At 15, she trained with the Alphonse Rancy Circus, learning to do acrobatics on horseback. With a preternatural sense of balance, she quickly became a leading equestrienne. Equitation put her in touch with cavalry officers, who dominated the sport. For the rest of her life Marie maintained a close relationship with officers of the French Army.

Marie’s mother, Elisabeth, died in 1889. At age 14, Marie lost any maternal influence Elisabeth may have exerted. Though she dressed fashionably and flirted easily, Marie increasingly devoted herself to sports. While attending the equivalent of high school in Metz in Lorraine, then a part of Germany, she learned archery, riflery, fencing, boxing, tennis, golf, track and field. (And, of course, German.) While studying medicine at the University of Nancy, she earned a reputation as a fierce competitor in all sports, winning against women in swimming and track, and against men in target-shooting. More passionate about sports than about medicine, she settled for a nursing license and supplemented that income as a sports and adventure writer. She sold articles, under the pseudonym Myriel, to dozens of newspapers. Returning to the Alps, she was the first woman to summit many of the high peaks around Chamonix.

Many women rode bicycles, but few entered races. Marie won the Nancy-Bordeaux race (600 miles) in 1904, Nancy-Milan (350 miles) in 1905 and Nancy-Toulouse (560 miles) in 1906.

That year, at age 31, she took up skiing in a serious way. Skiing in France and Italy was largely a military endeavor, as armies focused on frontier defense in the rising tensions with Germany and Austria. Marie set up the first civilian ski school in France, and at the second military ski meet, at Chamonix in 1908, she ran in the first organized cross-country race for women, a three-kilometer sprint. While the army races were covered widely in the French press, reporters paid not much attention to the women’s race. Coached by the Swedish expert Harald Durban-Hansen, Marie and her peers used two poles at a time when the French Army team was still paddling away with a single pole (see “End of the Single Pole,” Skiing History, March-April 2019). She apparently won the race, though no official records survive. Perhaps there were none to begin with. Durban-Hansen also taught her ski-jumping.

In 1909 Marie repeated the win, at the Gérardmer meet. This time, all the women racers showed up in culottes rather than skirts, greatly improving their performance and setting ski fashion forever. The threepeat came at Ballon d’Alsace in 1910. Meanwhile, she won events in skating, luge and bobsleigh.

During the summer of 1908, Marie made bicycling history. At age 33, she tried to enter the Tour de France and was refused—the race would be for men only. That year the race covered 2,800 miles over 14 stages. An average of 200 miles a day on dirt roads with single-speed bikes was punishing even for the strongest cyclists, so organizers allowed a day of rest after each stage. Marie simply cycled each stage on the rest days. She finished handily, while 76 of the 114 male starters dropped out.

In the summers during her ski-racing career, Marie took up aviation. She first piloted a balloon in 1907, and during an October 1909 storm piloted the first east-to-west crossing of the North Sea from Europe to England, nearly drowning herself and her passenger. That year she soloed in an Antoinette, a fiendishly tricky monoplane designed before the standard stick-and-rudder control system was devised.

Like skiing, French aviation was heavily promoted by the French Army. Among Marie’s student-pilot friends was the cavalry and artillery officer Paul-Maurice Écheman. Écheman was also an accomplished skier and skater. The two became constant companions on the flying fields and in the mountains. While Marie set some of the first aviation records for women, Écheman was promoted to captain and put in charge of one of the first French Army airfields. In 1910, Marie had the idea of combining her surgical and piloting skills to create an air ambulance service. With Écheman’s encouragement, she presented the idea to the Army. It was too early, and the War Department wasn’t interested. Écheman died in a solo crash in 1911.

Now 35, Marie continued to set aviation records, which were featured in newspapers around the world. The fame enabled her to earn money flying in exhibitions. In winters, she continued to compete in winter sports. Increasingly she devoted time to developing the medical air-evacuation concept. She organized conferences to promote the idea and raised enough money to order a specially designed Deperdussin monoplane to carry a pilot plus two stretcher patients or a patient and doctor. The company went bankrupt before the plane was delivered; its designer, Louis Béchereau, went on to create the SPAD fighter series of World War I.

When war broke out, Marie went straight to work as a surgical nurse. The Army wouldn’t let her fly military missions, but she became a part-time civilian flight instructor training new Army pilots. After all, she was one of the world’s most experienced aviators, with a sterling reputation. She had completed more than 900 flights without ever seriously damaging an airplane, while more than 15 percent of pilots licensed in 1910 were killed before the war—and that doesn’t include the student pilots who died before being licensed (77 percent of French pilots died during the war). In March, 1915, one of her surgical patients was an injured pilot, and she learned there was no replacement for him in his bombing squadron. She talked her way into the cockpit and flew two bombing missions over a German airfield. She was thus the world’s first female combat pilot. The army turned a blind eye. Officially, she was a nurse. Unofficially, she flew missions as a “scout”—that is, solo reconnaissance in a fighter plane. Then, with the collusion of an infantry lieutenant (and some help from her friend Marshall Foch), she put on a private’s uniform and served in the trenches. After six weeks she was wounded lightly and sent to infirmary. That was the end of her infantry career, but Foch assigned her to the Italian alpine troops fighting Austria in the Dolomites, officially as a combat nurse. It was the perfect job. As a skier and alpinist, for six months she engineered the evacuation of wounded soldiers from the mountain peaks and passes, and skied in food and medical supplies. After that, she spent most of 1916 at the Italian front, ostensibly as a war correspondent. There are big gaps in what is known about her travels, and friends assumed she was working for military intelligence. What with flying, fighting, nursing and spying, at the end of the war Marie earned both the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honor.

After the war, Marie campaigned tirelessly for her medical air-evacuation program, and this, oddly enough, led to the invention of an aluminum ski.

Travelling with French and Italian forces in the Sahara, as both a medical officer and war correspondent, in 1923 she designed aluminum skis for an experimental medevac airplane to land on sand. That led her to think about skis for herself. Back in France in 1927, she found a metal shop in Nancy that could forge skis from solid aircraft-grade aluminum alloy. She had two pairs made, one pair for sand in the desert. She tested the other pair on snow in Chamonix. The sand skis were certainly better than walking up dunes in sandals, but the snow skis failed, compared to ash and hickory. Undamped, they were nearly uncontrollable on firm snow, and as they didn’t absorb wax, could glide in soft snow only in a very narrow temperature range. Nonetheless, her skis represented a start, and French aluminum foundries near the Alps began looking for a way to combine wood-ski performance with aluminum durability—a problem eventually solved in 1947, in the United States.

Marie had many more adventures, including leading early motorized expeditions across the Sahara, first in a modified Fiat truck and later in Citroën six-wheelers. By the early ‘30s her flying ambulance concept was on a roll, and she held many international conferences to promote the concept. She established the Captain Écheman Award for the best-equipped medical aircraft, and launched the first training course for medevac nurses. During World War II she returned to the Red Cross, and was honored after the war for unspecified actions on behalf of the French Resistance.

Into her 80s, Marie was widely honored by the aviation community and French government, but she descended into genteel poverty and died in a hospice, penniless, in 1963, at age 88. 

Seth Masia is the president of ISHA. Sources for this article include Une histoire du ski by Franck Cochoy; Marie Marvingt: Fiancée of Danger, by Marcel Cordier and Rosalie Maggio; “Bride of Danger,” in The Strand Magazine, September 1913; The Culture and Sport of Skiing, by E. John B. Allen; and Before Amelia: Women Pilots in the Early Days of Aviation, by Eileen F. Lebow.

Long before the internet, influential newspaper columnists gave us up-to-date dispatches on where to ski, where to stay, and where the snow was best.

By Jeff Blumenfeld

Long before the internet took over our lives like a giant electronic Godzilla, when skiers wanted to know where to go, where to stay, what to bind to their feet, and what to wear in all kinds of weather, they turned to ski magazines. But it was newspapers that carried the most up-to-date information. Legendary scribes like ski columnist Frank Elkins (1910–1973), one of the country’s most influential mid-century ski writers, worked for 28 years at the The New York Times and 18 years at the Long Island Press, and was elected posthumously to the U.S. Ski Hall of Fame in 1974.

But Elkins wasn’t the only journalist whose columns influenced generations of skiers. From Europe to Canada and across the United States, during the 1950s to 1980s heyday of print journalism, a skiing press corps churned out copy. Usually every Thursday or Friday, these outsized personalities—old-school journalists, every one of them—would profile ski area executives, write about their visits the previous week, offer tips about money-saving lift and lodging packages, and stories about beginners, seniors, children, gear, racers and ski patrollers. Snow conditions were rated: poor, fair, good, very good or excellent, although a Friday night freeze could turn it all to boilerplate.

Their names are now legendary and include, in addition to Elkins, 1928 Canadian Olympic women’s track-and-field star Myrtle Cook (1902–1985) of the Montreal Star, one of Canada’s greatest advocates of women’s sport; Sir David English (1931–1998), editor of Britain’s Daily Mail and noted ski writer; Robert William Lochner (1930–2015), sportswriter/editor for the San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times and Oregonian newspapers; John Samuel (1928–2014), sports editor of the UK Guardian; Carson White (1914–2001) of the Sacramento Bee and San Francisco Examiner, among other outlets; and Archer Winsten (1905–1997), a leading American film critic and ski writer for the New York Post.

Reading their columns, one imagines them pounding on classic Remingtons or Olivettis, then later TRS-80 desktop microcomputers (affectionately nicknamed “Trash-80s”), sipping bourbon as unfiltered Camels burned down to their fingertips.

Today fewer newspapers cover skiing, due to competition from online sources and loss of advertising dollars. Snow condition reports and race coverage has been drastically reduced. Newspapers have less space to cover hard news, let alone to write about winter enthusiasts who slide down mountains. This is despite the fact that for most newspapers, skiers are an ideal demographic that tends to be upscale, affluent, active, suburban, and thus, attractive to advertisers. So it’s not surprising that ski writers who still file a column every week during ski season reminisce fondly about four ski journalists in particular.

Kings of the Press Rooms

No one could dominate a press room like French journalist Jean-Jacques “Serge” Lang (1920–1999). An imposing 6-foot, 7-inch mountain of French Alsatian stock, Lang was a sports journalist for Blick, La Suisse, 24 Heures, and L’Équipe, and founded the Association of International Ski Journalists in 1971.

“Here was this giant man with his hands on a small typewriter. He was so huge and his hands were so big, you wonder how he could type,” remembers John Fry, author of The Story of Modern Skiing (University Press of New England, 2010). “Much of Lang’s avoirdupois appeared to be concentrated in a beach-ball abdomen, teetering on surprisingly sturdy legs. His skull was square and massive, framing a florid peasant’s face that could have come from a Bruegel painting. His eyes tightened into slits when he was angry, and his smile was gap-toothed and friendly,” Fry said.

Lang also co-founded the World Cup, the racing circuit that made stars out of Jean-Claude Killy, Ingemar Stenmark and Franz Klammer. He modeled the concept on the soccer competition of the same name. With U.S. Ski Team coach and broadcaster Bob Beattie and French coach Honoré Bonnet, Lang hashed out the details in January 1966 near Hinterseer Farm, halfway up Kitzbühel’s Hahnenkamm downhill course.

Another larger-than-life character was Michael Strauss (1912–2008), The New York Times sports journalist for 54 years and its ski writer for 25 winters. He had a seemingly inexhaustible reserve of personal anecdotes about everyone from Babe Ruth to Pete Rose, Sonny Liston to Joe Namath, Calvin Coolidge to Richard Nixon. Strauss covered everything from archery to yachting, but he especially loved skiing. As the Times ski specialist from 1954 through 1979, it’s said he wrote more ski stories than any other writer for a major American newspaper, about 1,600 of them.

“Straussy” was a Panama hat-wearing sportswriter who would enter a press room shouting, “Somebody give me a lead for my story,” remembers Phil Johnson, a ski columnist for the Schenectady, New York Daily Gazette.

Sports reporting was in his blood. Stories in the Times covered every facet of skiing, including alpine and nordic competitions all over America, NCAA tournaments, and recreational ski happenings, according to Carol Hoffman, president of the Lake Placid Ski Club. He was elected into the organization in 2001. Strauss covered the Winter Olympics at Calgary, Squaw Valley, Grenoble, Innsbruck and Lake Placid.

Olympic silver medalist and world champion Billy Kidd, now 76, met Strauss when he was a teenager. “He used to come to Stowe to cover the International Races, created by American International Group (AIG) founder C.V. Starr, and write about the skiing Kennedy clan and the Aga Khan, a competitive downhill skier who skied for Iran in the 1964 Olympic Games…If he mentioned you, that meant you were playing in the big leagues.”

After retiring from the Times in 1982, Strauss became the Florida Palm Beach Daily News sports editor for 25 years. Asked through the years why he never was a fine skier himself, Strauss had a ready answer: “I never found time to do much skiing. By the time I finished my interviews, wrote my stories and went into town to send them by Western Union to make my paper’s deadlines, the lifts had stopped running.”

No Better Advocates

There were no better advocates for the sport of skiing than enthusiastic ski writers, many of whom can be credited with the early growth of the sport.

One such super journalist/fan is Arnie Wilson, a veteran British ski writer who started in the 1970s, and for 15 years was the London Financial Times ski correspondent. He then wrote for Ski+board, the Ski Club of Great Britain magazine, which he edited for 13 years, and for a few years had a regular ski column in Australia’s The SkiMag.

In 1994, he and the late Lucy Dicker skied every day for a year in The Financial Times Round The World Ski Expedition—a feat which took them to 240 resorts in 13 countries, and into the pages of the Guinness Book of Records. In all, Wilson has skied 737 resorts worldwide, including ski areas in all 38 U.S. skiing states, and 40 heli-ski operations in 14 countries.

From his home south of London, he tells Skiing History, “When I started writing about skiing there were very few full-time ski writers except the tiny staffs working on dedicated ski magazines. Most of the writers who gradually became regular ski writers were all doing other jobs on national newspapers at the time.

“I suppose you could say we were all cheerleaders for the sport. I’d like to think that our enthusiastic stories about skiing were contagious and hopefully led to more people taking beginner lessons,” Wilson said. 

The power of the printed word should never be underestimated, and certainly not when it came to Charlie Meyers (1937–2009) of the Denver Post. Meyers, who also wrote for magazines, covered six Winter Olympics, opening doors to the nascent sport of American ski racing.

In February 1987, tragedy struck the sport when an avalanche killed four skiers on Peak 7, a then-unpatrolled backcountry stash in Breckenridge. In search of epic powder, skiers disregarded the skull and crossbones on bluntly worded warning signs, and were swept away. More than 250 volunteers and skilled mountaineers were involved in the recovery efforts, working shoulder-to-shoulder with probes and ground radar. Lawsuits ensued. Even the mountain’s own ski patrol thought the company was negligent, according to David Peri, Breckenridge director of marketing at that time.

In the aftermath of the deadly slide, Meyers attended town meetings and witnessed volcanic anger among parents, ski patrollers and resort management. Peri says Meyers worked to defuse the situation with even-balanced Denver Post coverage of both sides of the issue.

“Charlie advocated for backcountry skiing and wondered whether it’s better to give people freedom, or try to create a nanny state that attempts to protect them from themselves,” says Peri, who now lives in Santa Cruz, California. “His words soaked in like a rainstorm. People were still hurt but Charlie had brought all of us together, particularly first responders on the front line.”

Rise of the Internet

Ski columnists are no longer the primary source of snowsports information. During the winter season, nonstop coverage is everywhere: Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, blogs, vlogs and podcasts. The news may be instantaneous, but it lacks the depth evident in the work of those ink-stained wretches who were the greatest advocates for the sport.

Tom Kelly, U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame honoree and former VP-Communications at U.S. Ski and Snowboard, fondly remembers that the sport was lucky to have dedicated sports writers, especially considering its size compared to traditional ball sports. It was more than a job.

“If you participated in skiing and were a journalist, you wanted to write about it. Maybe they did it for their passion, the sense of adventure, the ability to travel or the free lift ticket—or all of the above,” Kelly says.

“We don’t have that same level of coverage now. They helped play a significant role in helping grow the sport. Skiing wouldn’t be what it is today if not for the grassroots efforts of journalists in those days.”

Adds Billy Kidd, “They brought new and creative ways of covering skiing. People followed along as their favorite athletes accumulated points. It built up season-long interest, and more importantly, readership.

“Sure, I can obtain ski race results online, but it doesn’t provide the kind of insights I gained from classically trained ski columnists who took a lot of information and boiled it down to concise analysis.”

Kidd continues, “The columnists who followed ski racing were the best at helping readers understand why an exceptional athlete like Jean-Claude Killy, for instance, had his best events under pressure when it counted the most. Try getting that on Instagram or Twitter.”

ISHA vice president Jeff Blumenfeld, a resident of Boulder, Colorado, is the president of the North American Snowsports Journalists Association (NASJA.org). He is author of Travel With Purpose: A Field Guide to Voluntourism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019). Learn more at travelwithpurposebook.com.

From the January-February 2020 issue of Skiing History.

When MAD Magazine put skiing on its cover, millions bought it. Ski editors were influenced too.

By John Fry

MAD, which ceased publication last year, was a seminal, grungy magazine of American culture during the second half of the 20th century. Its intensely illustrated and caustically written pages skewered the media, education, government agencies, politicians, hippies, psychoanalysts, the sexual revolution and even the lifestyles of its own cynical, adolescent-minded readers.

MAD #173 © E.C. Publications, Inc.

The image most closely associated with the magazine was Alfred E. Neuman, the boy with misaligned eyes and a gap-toothed smile. A skiing Neuman appeared on at least four MAD covers between 1975 and 1980. Publisher William Gaines and MAD’s editors and artists clearly saw frantic humor in putting him and the image of reckless skiing on the magazine’s cover. MAD’s most prolific illustrator was Jack Davis, an enthusiastic skier himself. Davis did the covers on the facing page and on page 25.

Seen through MAD’s eyes, a recreation in which people donned a pair of wooden boards and slid at high speed off a jump—or into a tree—must be as stupidly conceived as the TV shows, movies, health cures, and other sacred cows mocked by MAD. The ski-disaster visual also happened to be funny to the two million-plus newsstand buyers of the magazine.

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MAD was part of a golden age of publishing that happened to coincide with the peak newsstand sales of SKI and Skiing magazines. They picked up on MAD’s satirical spirit. In 1966, when I was SKI magazine’s editor-in-chief, I hired the talented young staff of the Harvard Lampoon to create a special eight-page humor section with fake articles. The most memorable joke was a letter from a bogus reader asking the magazine, “What is the cheapest way to engrave my name on my skis?” The answer was, “Change your name to Kaestle.”

In another spoof, SKI staffer Karen Rae wrote about visiting Mount Oniontop, with its glorious 100 feet of vertical, where nine jet flights a day soared over the local airport. “The sun sparkled and the crunch of my boots upon snow scared a volunteer patrolman,” she wrote. The prolific ski journalist Morten Lund wrote about a bus trip to Mt. Nowhere, a “mystical mountain where all the siren songs of ski resort publicity finally ring true.”
The ski magazines also featured full pages of cartoon art by Bob Cram and Bob Bugg. Laugh-inducing cartoons were eventually banished because too many of them made fun of women, or were seen as anti-feminist, even if the Editor and the cartoonist didn’t understand why. Political correctness hadn’t yet penetrated their minds. 

At MAD, anything and everything was politically incorrect. For many years the magazine’s offices were located on Manhattan’s Madison Avenue, several blocks north of the SKI Magazine office at 380 Madison. While MAD lampooned the work of the ad agencies on the avenue, SKI was selling Mad Men on the wonders of placing advertising in its pages.

In 2018, Burton’s Deep Thinker free-ride snowboard featured Alfred E. Neuman, the iconic MAD mascot. “If you’re wondering who these people are, they’re from an old humor magazine,” explained one website in a December 2017 review.

John Fry is the author of The Story of Modern Skiing, about the revolution in technique, equipment, resorts and media that revolutionized the sport after World War II. Skiing History and Fry are grateful to ISHA director Bob Soden for preserving the MAD covers, and to E.C. Publications, DC Comics and Warner Media for permission to reproduce them.

Cover at top of page: MAD #212 © E.C. Publications, Inc.

Like an irrestible drug, racking up mew descents leeps ski mountaineers looking for the highest high. Part 2.

Photo: Bill Briggs in 1971 skied the 13,770-foot Grand Teton, then an almost unthinkable accomplishment.

See https://www.skiinghistory.org/issue/digital/volume-31-no-6-november-december-2019, page 23.

See https://www.skiinghistory.org/issue/digital/volume-31-no-6-november-december-2019