Feature article

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.

Bota bags could be having a moment. These holdovers from skiing’s golden age laugh at today’s need for social distancing. 

What will skiing, riding and cross-county look like in 2020-2021? Will gondolas be fully loaded? Will six-seat chairs be limited to a maximum of only two to three people from the same family? No one knows for certain, and policies vary between resorts. But one thing is sure: In a time of social distancing, skiers will be reluctant to pass around that pocket flask of
Jägermeister to ward off the chill.

The time is right to bring back the bota bag.

Martini trees were a legendary and beloved feature of Taos Ski Valley dating back to the mid-1950s. What could be more memorable than coming across a hidden glass porrón buried in a tree well containing a perfectly-chilled gin martini?

Better yet, what if you could carry a martini around all day? And instead of breakable glass, carry it in a bota bag—a wineskin sling pouch traditionally made of leather, which presumably imparted some retsina-like flavor to the wine. Modern versions with plastic liners could carry martinis, wine or some other bracing refreshment that could be consumed while skiing or riding. What’s more, you could share some liquid courage with your friends and loved ones from a safe social distance of six feet—or farther—depending upon your aim.

The forerunner of the bota bag was the waterskin dating back some 5,000 years. Normally made of sheep or goat skin, it retained water naturally, perfect for desert crossings until the invention of the canteen. The first images of these bladders are from ancient Assyrians, who used them as floats in approximately 3000 B.C.

Botas have an especially long history in Spain. Traditional models were made from leather and lined with goat bladders, often suspended by a red braided shoulder strap. Tree sap was used to prevent liquids from seeping through. Its modern iteration has a handy cap that contains a nozzle with its own stopper to dispense the liquid, usually wine, sometimes peppermint schnapps, or any preferred adult beverage. (Botas have been known to be filled with Mateus, then after the bottle is emptied, it can be turned into a fine candle holder suitable for a college dorm room.)

Technique was—and remains—critically important when employing a bota, especially to the Basques, who called it a zahato. No less a drinking authority than Ernest Hemingway explains in the 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises: “He was a young fellow and he held the wine bottle at full arms’ length and raised it high up, squeezing the leather bag with his hand so the stream of wine hissed into his mouth. He held the bag out there, the wine making a flat, hard trajectory into his mouth, and he kept on swallowing smoothly and regularly.” Enough said.

Today, thanks to the internet, there are bota tutorials. Greg Morrill’s blog Retro-skiing.com explains, “First hold the spout with one hand and support the bag with the other hand. Now tip your head back with your mouth open, lift the bota toward your mouth, and squeeze the bag to squirt the wine into your mouth.” Morrill continues, “The mark of an expert bota-user was that once he or she started drinking, the bota would be moved to arms-length while still drinking! Just remember you’ll have to increase the pressure as you move the bota.”

There was a time during the bota’s heyday in the mid- to late-20th century when it was common to see skiers enthusiastically swigging from these soft canteens on a lift, or while a group of friends partied mid-mountain, skis stuck in the snow to form backrests. Often when snow surrounded the nozzle, you could swill icy cold wine slush into your mouth.

Few ski products bring back such a flood of warm memories, or in one case, a rush of adrenaline. My cousin Alan Blumenfeld, 74, from Voorhees, New Jersey, remembers serving on ski patrol at the Big Vanilla at Davos ski area north of New York, and watching from a distance as a hapless skier took an egg-beater fall off a small mogul.

He almost made it until a ski tip caught an edge. “When I skied down to the point of his decimation, the entire area surrounding him was a vibrant red! My heart started racing. I marked off the area quickly and immediately started to check him for what might have been extreme bleeding,” Blumenfeld recalls. “Much to my relief I found that he was fine; the bota bag that was hanging off his neck had exploded during the fall. He was soaked in Chianti. It could have been a scene from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” In the end, all was well. “The skier had a few bruises,” Blumenfeld says. “But the bota was terminal, and never recovered.”

There was something slightly illicit about the appeal of bota bags. Brian Fairbank, 74, chairman of Fairbank Group based at Jiminy Peak Mountain Resort in western Massachusetts, recalls, “the only time I used one was when I was under drinking age and an older buddy got some red wine to put in it. I can remember hiding it under my parka and skiing off trail to take a swig.”

A full 16 years old at the time, “I remember thinking how cool it was to drink without getting caught—until I got sick. My stomach and head were killing me,” Fairbank remembers. “That was it for me and bota bags.”

Cindy Suh, 50, of Bricktown, New Jersey, learned later in life that her father had an ulterior motive when breaking out the bota bag. “I always thought it was so cool that my dad would let me drink from it when we were on the ski lift. Years later he told me that prior to that I would just cry all the way up the mountain, saying it was too cold to keep skiing. The wine kept me from crying and shivering.”

The martini trees can still be found at Taos, although in this litigious age, they’re tightly monitored, hung from trees in handcarved wooden lockboxes. Meanwhile, bota bags continue to be sold — in both traditional old-school versions and modern styles that use neoprene to encase one-liter sports bottles made of HDPE-recyclable, BPA-free plastic to handle liquids hot or cold. Have times changed.

Could botas, however, once again be ready for prime time? Perhaps in an era of pandemic-induced social distancing, swigging from a shared bottle of Jager will give way to tossing around a bota bag like some colorful Hemingway character … and then simply taking aim. 

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 (travelwithpurposebook.com.)

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When cartoons take a run at skiing, mayhem ensues.

Goofy does not live up to his name in what might be the most realistic instructional cartoon on skiing (above). Part of Goofy’s “How To” oeuvre, The Art of Skiing shows viewers how to dress, load a chairlift and kick-turn, and even features an authentic yodeler on the soundtrack.

What is quickly learned from total immersion into the golden age of animation, roughly the 1930s through the 1970s, is that when Hollywood animators put characters on skis, they suspend the laws of physics. From the earliest cartoon depictions to a recent animated relaunch on HBO, skiing is primed for slapstick humor, visual punchlines and lots and lots of long freefalls.

Popeye crashes off ski jumps. Wile E. Coyote falls off cliffs with an ice machine on his back. The Pink Panther is engulfed in a giant snowball, while Homer Simpson hangs from a chair upside down and is blasted by a frigid fan gun and fiery snowcat exhaust, to name just a few.

Each stunt is more gravity-defying than the next one, often relying on a host of products, usually from the Acme Corporation, makers of sticks of dynamite, intricate booby traps, and anvils and bank safes that inevitably are dropped on unsuspecting heads.

And when viewed through 21st century goggles, some animation was so politically incorrect as to be downright cringeworthy, from Betty Boop resisting an unwanted suitor, to Tom from Tom & Jerry panting over a ski bunny, to poking fun at poor Mr. Magoo for his near-sightedness.

The sight gags are endless. There are drunken St. Bernards, skiers on the wooden runners of a rocking horse, a dachshund too long for a single pair of skis riding atop two pairs of them, and characters sailing off ski jumps with parachutes.

You’ll often see one of the most popular of all ski sight gags: downhill tracks on both sides of a tree, as if the cartoon character went through unharmed. (A tip of the hat to Charles Addams’ famous 1940 cartoon “The Skier” in the New Yorker that set the gold standard.) But in cartoonland, no one is seriously injured. Like a classic clown bop bag, they bounce back up for even more indignities in the next scene.

Lucille Ball broke her leg skiing while starring in a TV sitcom, and her real-world accident (and her subsequent leg cast) was famously written into that season. “But in cartoons, characters get hurt, you laugh, and you move on to the next gag,” A.B. Osborne, Professor of Animation at Georgia’s Augusta University, explains. 

What is it about skiing that appeals to cartoon animators? “It’s a visual sport and people get it immediately,” Osborn says. “When someone is going down a hill on skis, you don’t have to explain it. I never went skiing in my life, but I know what it is.”

Hours viewing vintage cartoons online reveals a world where skiing was considered glamorous and a colorful theme for all manner of cold-weather comedy and conflict. Popularized in 1930 during the start of Hollywood’s golden era of animation, these short-form cartoons ran before main features, then were eventually broadcast on TV. Many were inspired by vaudeville acts such as The Three Stooges and Laurel and Hardy, according to Robert Ito writing in the New York Times (May 29, 2020).

Pandemic Antidote

Watching ski cartoons from a couch is the perfect antidote to a cranky Covid-19 lockdown. According to CartoonResearch.com, the earliest references in titles to ski themes are from the Mutt and Jeff shorts. Among the 292 animated cartoons produced from 1916-1926 that depict skiing are On Ice (1918), Mutt and Jeff in Switzerland (1919), The Frozen North (1919), The Far North (1921), and Any Ice Today (1922). American cartoonist Paul Terry’s series of animated short subjects based upon Aesop’s Fables included ski scenes in On the Ice (1924), An Alpine Flapper (1926), and Cracked Ice (1927).

Those shorts are unavailable, so I wasn’t able to confirm their ski content. The earliest cartoon depiction I could confirm is Krazy Kat’s Snow Time (1932). When Krazy tries to jump in his skates over a row of barrels, he misjudges the distance and crashes into the last barrel, breaking it into slats, two of which stick to his feet as skis. He slides uncontrollably down the pond, jumping over small snow mounds. A snowman unzips his “snow” suit, revealing a skeleton inside, and tosses the snow back at Krazy, who grows into a giant snowball.

Betty Boop & Pudgy in Thrills and Chills (1938) is one of the least circulated or known of all the Betty Boop episodes. According to CartoonResearch.com, Betty tries to get on a train to the mountains, but her way is blocked by a freckle-faced male doofus who demands, “Hey pretty girl. Give me a kiss and I’ll let you in.” He then stalks her for more than six minutes. He eventually saves Betty and her dog Pudgy from peril. The dastardly interloper finally gets his kiss—from the dog. Politically correct it’s not.

Goofy’s The Art of Skiing (1941) is one of the most definitive ski cartoons in animation history. This was the first in Goofy’s acclaimed “How To” catalogue of shorts in which the character tackled a recognized sport. Walt Disney Productions animators even retained a professional yodeler to provide an authentic soundtrack.

In the cartoon, Goofy explains how to dress for the day’s activities—including devising his own challenge of putting on trousers when his feet are already in skis. Finally reaching the summit by way of a chair lift, he demonstrates a kick-turn, and how to get up when fallen. He lands backwards and skis in reverse, which, of course, eventually leads to him going off a ski jump—except Goofy forgets to lace his ski boots, which separate his skis from his feet shortly after takeoff. He manages to get hold of both of them, using the skis as glider wings to maneuver between mountain peaks, then finally crash-lands through the window of his own room at the ski lodge. Goofy falls instantly sound asleep, to close out the perfect day on the slopes.

One of the cleverest of all sight gags, which channels Rube Goldberg, appears in Fast and Furry-ous (1949) a Warner Bros. Looney Tunes Road Runner cartoon that shows a resourceful Wile E. Coyote strapping a full-size refrigerator to his back, then feeding ice cubes into a meat grinder to create a strip of skiable crushed ice. It works great—until he skis off a cliff.

Back in the 1950s, any infirmity was seemingly fair game. In Magoo Goes Skiing (1954) the opening sets up a gag to follow, as the severely near-sighted Magoo calls out to a mountain peak with his best attempt at a yodel—but is disappointed to hear no echo. The fact that he’s serenading a picture on the ski lodge wall rather than a real mountain is the explanation. Magoo really intends to go skiing—but of course he picks up a St. Bernard along the way (another ski resort stereotype) whom he thinks is his nephew Waldo.

Skiing, and its alluring enthusiasts, has always offered plenty of opportunities for romantic entanglements. Incongruously, Popeye appears far from the sea in Ski-Jump Chump (1960), jealous that his sweetheart Olive Oyl is falling for Frenchman Gorgeous Pierre, the greatest ski jumper in the world. The sailorman, of course, eventually wins his sweetie back with the help of some spinach-fueled courage.

Meet the Flintstones

Things get sticky for the modern Stone Age family when Fred Flintstone and his pal Barney Rubble appear in The Flintstone’s Here’s Snow in Your Eyes (1962). The first primetime animated show on television was a sly take-off of The Honeymooners.

Fred and Barney are off to Stone Mountain Ski Resort for a Loyal Order of Water Buffalo Lodge convention. Because none of the members’ wives have been invited to go along, Wilma and Betty stoically remain at home—but their stoicism quickly evaporates when they learn that the resort is also the site of the Miss Winter Carnival beauty contest.

More recent favorites include the Pink Panther Pink Streaker (1975) wherein the famed big cat works at a ski area and unintentionally bedevils the Little Man character who is trying to learn to ski from a book appropriately titled, How to Ski. In Tom & Jerry The Ski Bunny (1975), set in the Swiss Alps, Tom competes against his mouse buddy Jerry for the affections of a female kitten dressed as a ski bunny.

No less of a show than The Simpsons, the longest running American sitcom of all time, headed to the mountains. In Little Big Mom (1999) the family visits Mount Embolism, where Homer must decide which double diamond trail to descend. “The Widowmaker? That one is for the ladies,” he says. The Spinebuster trail he calls “boring,” before deciding to take the Colostomizer run. The hapless character soon cries, “Oh my legs, this is the worst pain ever.”

Cartoons on the Rebound

Cartoons are coming back. One reason is Covid-19, which translates to a nationwide captive audience of homebound kids, along with adults who are primed for some feel-good nostalgic screen time. In fact, Looney Tunes Cartoons, a revamp of the classic Warner Bros. series that had its glory years in the 1940s and 1950s, premiered on HBO Max in May 2020.

Darryn King, in the May 17, 2020 Wall Street Journal, wrote “Animation has seen a 22 percent surge in viewership during lockdown, more than any other category, according to Reelgood, a website that analyzes streaming viewer behavior patterns. This is likely because of the huge demand for content for children stuck at home, but it is also possible that the art form, liberated from real-world constraints, is suitably escapist entertainment right now.”

These catastrophic cartoons convey just what skiing has been trying to overcome for decades, to be known as a relatively safe, healthy, family endeavor rather than as risky business. But where is the entertainment in that?

Then again, as ski resorts develop their Covid-era protocols for next season and require advance reservations, among other restrictions, if you find yourself skiing less, maybe what you need are more ski cartoons in your life. 

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When it opened in 1930, the Seigniory Club was the largest ski resort in Canada...and possibly in North America. 

Photo above: Aerial photo of the Fairmont Le Château Montebello resort, on the north bank of the St. Lawrence River in western Quebec, highlighting the Log Château (main lodge) near the waterfront. Though it’s no longer a premier ski destination, winter guests at the luxury resort can still enjoy an extensive network of cross-country trails, snowshoeing, skating, tubing and sleigh rides.

The historic Le Château Montebello, 50 miles east of Ottawa in the Outaouais region of western Quebec, claims to be the largest log structure in the world. That may or may not be true. But while the architecture is impressive, the almost-forgotten ski history of the
hotel is legendary.

Extensive research by the late Pierre Dumas, a retired engineer who won an ISHA Award for his work in identifying and cataloging every ski area and jump in the history of Quebec (Skiing History, July-August 2017), has revealed that when it opened in 1930 the Seigniory Club, as the complex was then called, was the largest ski and winter sports resort in Canada...and possibly in North America.

First, a bit of background. In 1929, a Swiss-American businessman, Harold M. Saddlemire, met the auction price and bought the rural property—a seigneurial estate originally granted in 1674—near the village of Montebello on the Ottawa River. Saddlemire, a bold man with a vision, had already created Lucerne-in-Maine, an early resort conceived as a rustic holiday destination for wealthy Americans.

In Montebello, he thought bigger, approaching three major bank presidents, the premier of Quebec and the president of Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR). All endorsed his plans to acquire an additional 100 square miles and build Lucerne-in-Quebec, a year-round resort on a grand scale. For the construction, and the convenience of future guests, CPR built a special 3,700-foot spur line to its doorstep. In the book Building The Chateau Montebello, by Allan and Doris Muir, it’s reported that by 1930 the project had passed out of Saddlemire’s hands and plans had shifted to create the private, prestigious Seigniory Club. (The resort was owned by the CPR and leased to the Seigniory Club until 1970, when it was converted into a public resort by Canadian Pacific Hotels and renamed the Château Montebello.)

The owners engaged Montreal architect Harold Lawson and dreamed of building the largest log structure ever. They decided to open to the public on Dominion Day—July 1, 1930—just a few months away. Canadian Pacific built a spur line to reach the site, thousands of cedar logs were ordered from western Canada, and the project broke ground in late February.

The Crash of 1929 and the ensuing Depression had hit Canada hard, but the Château Montebello visionaries created a Canadian version of the American New Deal for the 3,500 workers they hired. Many were Scandinavian and Russian log craftsmen who worked with hand tools. Victor Nymark, a Finnish immigrant and master log builder, oversaw teams that worked around the clock in shifts to finish the project in less than four months, using 10,000 Western red cedars from British Columbia (40 miles laid end-to-end).

The grand 211-room resort hotel featured a snowflake-shaped floor plan and was, at the time, the largest log cabin in the world. It had the world’s tallest ski jump, a world-class bobsled run, cross-country and alpine slopes, a curling rink, a skating rink, a billiards room, a ballroom, a heated indoor swimming pool, fine dining, and a massive four-story, six-sided fireplace.

Three days after the grand opening on July 1, the Governor General of Canada attended a glittering costume ball at the club. For its first 40 years, the Seigniory Club remained an exclusive private retreat, attracting such luminaries as Prince Rainier and Princess Grace of Monaco, U.S. President Harry Truman, and entertainers Bing Crosby, Perry Como, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Today, it’s a luxury resort owned by the Fairmont chain, where wintertime guests can still enjoy an extensive cross-country trail network, snowshoeing, tubing, sleigh rides, dogsledding and ice skating.

In January 2015, I received an email from my friend, the late Pierre Dumas. He had attached a picture showing Patricia Paré at the finish line of the 1939 Women’s Dominion Ski Championships at the Seigniory Club in Montebello. He asked if this was my mother. Yes, I laughed. Looking at the photo, I could see that what she’d always told us kids was true: A downhill and giant slalom champion in the 1930s and the first professional female ski instructor in Canada, she always claimed she didn’t know how to ski as a young and daring racer. Her graceful style in later years made this seem unlikely. But while she won the race, one glance at the young woman in the picture proved her point: My mom just pointed her skis straight down the hill, and often said she either crashed or won.

Over the following years, I followed with fascination as Dumas unearthed and identified an extensive record of downhill skiing, jumping and bobsledding at Montebello. Working with other amateur historians, he found clues in old aerial photographs and other pictures, pored through mountains of old documents, and even located mortared rock mounds in the forest—the remaining foundations of the ski jumps and other installations.

In the pictures that accompany this article, you can see the scale of the venture, with its bobsled course designed by world-class German engineer Stanislaus Zentzytzki, and a ski jump designed by Norwegian engineer and renowned Canadian cross-country ski pioneer Herman “Jackrabbit” Smith-Johannsen. The builders spared no expense and hired top-ranking professionals to undertake each project.

Throughout the 1930s, the Seigniory Club was an important center for the development and promotion of skiing, ski jumping, bobsledding and other winter sports. It hosted important races and served as a training location for overseas teams competing at the 1932 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid. Its jumping and bobsledding facilities were comparable to Lake Placid, and it had excellent ski slopes and trails. The one thing it didn’t have—and never installed—was a rope tow or lift, thus fixing it forever to an era in which races began with competitors trekking uphill.

Rhoda Wurtele, who with her late twin sister Rhona was a Canadian ski champion in the 1940s and 1950s, remembers running up the hills at the Seigniory on seven-foot-long skis to race down, as documented in Penguin Club scrapbooks. With its gentle hills, open fields and reliable snow, Montebello was particularly good for that kind of skiing, called “ski running.” This was a familiar term in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly in Canada, during an era in which skiing involved a lot of walking or running up the slopes in order to ski down.

By the 1930s, ski trains were bringing as many as 10,000 people to the Laurentians every weekend to destinations like Émile Cochand’s Chalet Cochand. Statistics for 1938 show that 10,000 Americans came to the area for the Christmas holidays alone. Montebello’s builders determined to make it the most important ski center in the region. With over a hundred square miles of land at their disposal and solid financial backing, they could easily pull it off. All through the 1930s, the Seigniory Club was a favored location for ski runners. Clubs challenged each other every winter, including the Montreal Ski Club, the McGill Red Birds, the Penguins, clubs from Ottawa and Toronto, and even a club that regularly came up from New York.

The club that took the overall prize did so by having the highest total points across all disciplines. For the women those were downhill, slalom and giant slalom, while the men included jumping. The year of my own mother’s victory, 1939, she won the downhill for the Penguins. It was part of a four-year run that saw the Penguins defend the title as overall winners at the Seigniory Club, until McGill beat them in 1941. In 1942 the Penguins came back with a new team and the Wurtele twins tied for first place in the downhill during a day of races held during a fierce blizzard. They took the title back for the Penguins.

When Cochand arrived from Switzerland in 1911, his first surprise was the diminutive size of the Laurentian hills. Races in the Alps could involve climbing mountain glaciers to take a downhill run covering 5,000 feet of elevation. Cochand quickly embraced the ski runner style and helped to develop it. But when the American Joe Ryan and other investors began to build lifts at resorts like Mont Tremblant in 1939, skiers opted for Alpine-style schusses and larger, steeper hills.

Montebello could not compete. It no longer hosted competitive winter sports, leaving the jump and bobsleigh track to fall into disuse. Through the decades, the resort has continued to maintain its cross-country ski trails, along with sleigh rides, skating and curling.

From a gathering spot for the people of the Petite Nation, to the land-grant estate belonging to Canada’s first bishop, to the building of the largest log structure in the world, Chateau Montebello has many stories to tell. Its one-time dominance as Canada’s largest ski resort is just one of them. Thanks to the diligent work of a team of heritage experts, we can begin to tell it. 

Joseph Graham is an historian and the son of Canadian ski pioneer Patricia Paré. The late Pierre Dumas won a 2017 ISHA Award for his work to document Quebec’s ski areas and jumps; for his obituary, see page 30. This article was funded by a grant from the Chawkers Foundation through a partnership with ISHA, the Canadian Ski Hall of Fame and Museum, and the Canadian Ski History Writers Project (https://skiinghistory.org/resources/canadian-ski-history-writers-project).

seigniory floor plan: Building the Chateau Montebello (allan and doris muir)

Inspiration for Sun Valley?

There is no evidence that the Seigniory Club provided the inspiration for W. Averell Harriman when he built his dream resort of Sun Valley in the mountains of Idaho in 1936. But the similarities between these two ground-breaking winter destination resorts does raise the question.

Sun Valley would also be built during the Depression, at the end of a Union Pacific railroad line, and in a hurry (seven months rather than four). Its 220-room resort hotel (versus 211) also featured a snowflake floor plan (though modified) and was built using rough lumber forms to leave wood-grain impressions in the concrete, which was acid-stained brown. It too had a heated pool, a skating rink, a ballroom, fine dining, and billiards were planned. Like Seigniory, Sun Valley drew the biggest names, including Hollywood stars, and was also featured in films.

The big difference? Alpine events were added to the Olympics in 1936, so Sun Valley’s emphasis, unlike Seigniory, was on downhill skiing. It had serious alpine slopes nearby and built the world’s first chairlift.

Sun Valley became the largest modern ski resort in North America, while Seigniory faded out of the alpine picture, though certainly not from world view. In 1981, the Canadian resort hosted the seventh G7 summit, and in 1983, it hosted NATO’s Nuclear Planning Group. —Bob Soden

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

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

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

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

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.