Feature article

Like an irresistible drug, racking up new descents keeps ski mountaineers looking for the highest high. Welcome to the brave new world of 8,000 meters and up. —Part 2
By Jay Cowan

Standing on the top of an 8,000-meter peak in the Himalaya or Karakoram is one of the great achievements in climbing. You are on hallowed ground that few on earth will ever touch. You’ve spent days or more in the “death zone” above 26,000 feet where your body is deteriorating just by being there. The sheer physical exertion of chiseling your way upward—foot by punishing foot, over rock and ice and cliffs in temperatures only fit for yetis and lichens—is fully extreme. And on top, having just expended this massive amount of energy and willpower, you still need to have something left in the tank … because now you have to get down.

It may seem like a skiing descent would at least be easier and quicker than on foot, but that’s not always the case. Quicker, yes, but dangerously so. And those who ski above 8,000 meters, who are all athletic beasts, say they are the hardest turns they’ve made in their lives, even on decent snow, which it rarely is. Just keeping your concentration and staying aware and in the moment is difficult when you’re fighting an oxygen-deprived brain and hemoglobin shortages in your blood. And it’s especially sketchy on a 50-degree pitch slathered with wind-rippled ice where one slip can be fatal and each turn requires super-human effort...

From the moment people figured out they could go downhill on skis and survive, they’ve been trying to be the first to ski from ever-higher mountains. Here are some of the biggest moments in first turns and first descents. By Jay Cowan

When 30-year old Polish ski mountaineer Andrzej Bargiel skied from the summit of K2 in July 2018, it was one of the last and greatest first full descents of the world’s highest peaks. At 28,251 feet in the Karakoram range of northern Pakistan, K2 is the second highest mountain on earth, and arguably the most challenging. To date, fewer than an estimated 450 people have summited it, compared to ten times that many on Mount Everest. And only a handful have been crazy enough to try skiing K2. When it finally happened it was instantly legendary, one of the true highlights of skiing’s longtime obsession with going higher.

Ski mountaineering at this level has evolved into a very specialized pursuit, demanding the best alpine gear and skills, along with extreme physical fitness, in order to survive at the very limits of human endurance: oxygen-thin air, polar temperatures and brutal winds, on slopes that are mostly insane. This isn’t some groomed black diamond at your local hill. Conditions vary from concrete sastrugi whitecaps to steep sheets of sheer ice, on gnarly couloirs and exposed faces, in the shadows of seracs, and across snowfields stitched with crevasses. 
Bargiel, who soloed the climb and descent without oxygen, made one 150-foot rappel with his skis on at the top of the Bottleneck, where other skiers have died. “I’m very happy that I managed to ski down … safely … To be honest it was my second attempt, so I’m glad that I won’t be coming here again,” he declared at the base afterwards. This kind of ski mountaineering is clearly not about simple transportation or pleasure. It’s about constantly pushing the boundaries of yourself and the sport. But that wasn’t the reason high-altitude skiing began.

Once skiers started going downhill and liking it, they sought longer runs on higher mountains. As Lou Dawson notes in his seminal book Wild Snow (American Alpine Book Series, 1997), the early history of first descents in America often went unrecorded. That was also more or less true in the rest of the world. In Europe, those who first introduced skiing to their communities made many of the first descents and inspired others. But they didn’t start keeping close track of them until the skiing was combined with serious climbing and became part of a culture that noted, and celebrated, such things...

Getting dragged across the snow by horses, planes, reindeer and dogs is a unique sport that’s at least 1,000 years old.

By Jay Cowan

Skijoring, one of skiing’s oldest activities, has become one of the latest feel-good winter sports. If you’re doing the popular dog-powered variation—whether pulled around a cross-country track by your own fleet of Corgis, or using huskies supplied by an outfitter—you’re enjoying a recreation that dates back at least 1,000 years. 

The term “skijoring” comes from the Norwegian snørekjøring and means “ski driving.” Rock art in Scandinavia shows humans skiing as early as the 5^th century AD. Later, there are depictions of skiers being pulled by elk (likely while being captured) and reindeer, possibly domesticated. The first written record of what we define as skijoring comes from the Altai Mountains of central Asia, via a Persian historian, Raschid ed-Din. He wrote in the 1200s AD, citing earlier use of skijoring from historical records of the Tang Dynasty (618 to 907 AD). ...

Skiing was a handy punching bag when television searched for laughs. 
By Jeff Blumenfeld

It was one of the most famous broken legs in modern American history. 

When comedian Lucille Ball suffered a leg fracture during a skiing accident in Aspen in December 1971, the mishap gave new meaning to the Hollywood term “break a leg.” Rather than cancel the fifth season of Here’s Lucy, the accident was written into the script, with the funny redhead performing in a wheelchair and full-leg cast. The first episode, “Lucy’s Big Break,” aired September 11, 1972 on CBS-TV.

It was the beginning of the end for Ball’s brilliant form of slapstick comedy. Sure, there were small gags that Ball could safely perform without further injuring her leg, but according to Geoffrey Mark Fidelman, author of The Lucy Book (Renaissance Books, 1999), this was the point where the Lucy character was “finally allowed to age.” In an effort to turn lemons into lemonade, publicists for the show pitched the media on printing x-rays of her fractured leg, adding insult to injury. 

While we can all name our favorite ski scenes in Hollywood theatrical films—yes, we’re looking at you, James Bond—it was television that entertained us most in the pre-Internet era. From time to time this “vast wasteland,” as a former FCC chairman called it, would focus its gimlet eye on skiing, often giving the sport a black eye...

Photo above: The Rivers Triplets of Long Island are U12 racers who train at Windham Mountain, New York. Left to right: Helaina D. Rivers, Henri D.L. Rivers IV, and Henniyah D. Rivers.

By Jay Cowan

In a 12-month period that has seen perhaps the greatest re-examination of race and race relations in America in the past half-century, the annual meeting of the National Brotherhood of Skiers (NBS) in Squaw Valley in March 2018 had particular resonance. While members did what all ski clubs do—ski, party, race, don costumes and have fun—they also quietly went about their 45-year-long effort to diversify what has been described as one of the whitest large-scale recreational sports in the country.  

For years, skiing in America was like golf and tennis and primarily the province of Caucasians. You didn’t see many more African Americans on the slopes than you did at a rodeo. 

But just as with golf, tennis, and even rodeo, skiing has been getting more diversified. And much of that is certainly due to the NBS. It’s one of the largest ski councils in America, comprising 55 predominantly black ski clubs with 3,000 members, and they’ve introduced tens of thousands of African Americans to the sport since 1973.

Though there were already a number of black ski clubs in the U.S. in the early 1970s, African Americans were a small percentage of the skiers on the slopes. Art Clay was the trip director for the Sno-Gophers Ski Club of Chicago, and Ben Finley was president of the Four Seasons West Ski Club of Los Angeles, when Clay first heard about Finley. “I contacted Ben in 1971, I think, and we talked about holding a gathering of black ski clubs, and spent a year and half trying to reach as many black skiers as possible. They were pretty rare back then.” 

“When Art and I put this together,” says Finley, “it was just to meet and socialize, and discuss issues common to the 13 clubs that attended.” Three hundred and fifty people turned out for the first of what would become annual meetings—alternating Black Summits with the Annual Meeting/Challenge Cup, a.k.a. Mini-Summits—held at Aspen Mountain in 1973. What resulted was a plan to form a national organization, “With the intent of spreading the sport to the African American community,” says Finley. 

Buzz at that first meeting about a black ski racer from Chicago named Teo Hyde, who had a chance to make the U.S. Ski

 Team, influenced the organization’s first mission statement. The National Brotherhood of Skiers was officially formed over Thanksgiving weekend 1973 in Salt Lake City, Utah, and its primary purpose, endorsed by acclamation, was to place an African American on the U.S. Ski Team.

Proof that this could be an effective way of raising interest in skiing in black communities came from similar examples in golf, tennis and rodeo, where famous black champions brought increases of African Americans into those sports. Even though skiing has yet to field its own Tiger Woods, Arthur Ashe or Bill Pickett, the NBS has continued to introduce large numbers of black skiers and boarders to the mountains. All of this is in spite of what many consider to be a substantial geographic barrier. As former racer Andre Horton says, “Black Americans simply don’t live in winter sports areas (beyond hockey).” 

“We’ve been very successful, and it’s all been done with volunteers,” says Finley. “The vast expansion of the sport into the African American community using ski clubs as the tool has helped us to build skiing as a community and a family.” It was a defining effort that soon became part of the NBS motto: To identify, develop and support athletes of color who will WIN international and Olympic winter sports competitions representing the United States and to increase participation in winter sports.

Meanwhile, African Americans have been piling up ski racing credentials. It started with a New York skier named Randy Philpotts. “I was a member of a black ski club in the city when I was a kid, and also skiing at Mount Snow with my dad and black ski instructors who took me under their wing,” says Philpotts. “So when NBS formed I wasn’t in awe of seeing black people on the slopes because I was always around them when I skied. But it was nice to see them. NBS has been an inspiration in bringing out more black ski clubs.”

Philpotts was the literal poster-child the NBS was looking for, in the late 1960s becoming the subject of a national ad campaign by Rossignol. “I was told it was the first ski poster ever with a black person.” In 1975, he won the first NBS Black Summit Challenge in Sun Valley at age 14. In 1991, he appeared in a second Rossignol ad, for the company’s blade-skates and skis.

Bonnie St. John-Dean in 1984, and Ralph Green in 2006, 2010 and 2014, excelled in the Paralympics. In 1997, Jahi Rohrer placed fourth in slalom at the National Junior Championships. Errol Kerr, the Brooklyn-born son of a Jamaican father and American mother, grew up in Truckee, C

A, started as an alpine ski racer, switched to skiercross in 2008, and represented Jamaica at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, where he placed ninth. Halfpipe skier Zyre Austin won a silver medal at the FIS World Junior Championships in Italy in 2013, was an alternate for the 2014 Sochi Olympics, and turned pro in 2015.

A brother and sister duo from Alaska, Andre and Suki Horton, became the most accomplished African American athletes yet in U.S. ski racing. They were the first black male and female members of the U.S. Alpine Ski Team and raced on the NorAm and Europa Cup Tours. Suki had three top-15s in FIS races in Alyeska, Alaska in 2004, including the U.S. National Championships. Andre was the first African American to win a FIS race in Europe (in Sella Nevea, Italy in 2001). Over three days in 2004, at home in Alyeska, he took fourth in a FIS downhill, then sixth in the U.S. national downhill and fourth in the national Super G—beating Bode Miller in the national championship races.

“The NBS was paramount in our careers,” says Andre. “With both our parents being schoolteachers, supporting two professional skiers with Olympic dreams is very difficult. The NBS equipped Suki and I with financial scholarships to race worldwide.” Both retired in 2004 and Andre, who is now a photographer in Alaska, served for four years on the board of the U.S. Ski Team/USSA. 

Today the NBS continues to develop ski racers and introduce African Americans to the sport by partnering with existing youth, church and community organizations such as the YMCA. As current NBS President Peggie Allen explains, “In order to keep moving forward, we have to help our clubs build their membership. We continue to build our outreach program, introducing blacks of all ages to winter sports. With our known retention rate, these outings will help bring new faces in.”  

That retention rate (the number of skiers who stick with it after their first try) is said to be as high as 75 percent, versus an average rate amongst the general population, according to NSAA, of 17 percent. Schone Malliet, the NBS’s Olympic Scholarship Fund Administrator, believes that high retention comes from the “depth and strength of community within the NBS.”

In 2015, Malliet helped raise $12 million to buy Hidden Valley Ski Area near Vernon, New Jersey, upgrade it and make it a non-profit skiing and snowboarding learning venue for kids from the New York City area. The National Winter Activity Center (winter4kids.org) hosted more than 1,100 kids in 2017. He credits the NBS with inspiring him. “All of this is part of what the NBS, at its core, really does.” 

At its peak, the NBS had more than 7,500 members from nearly 80 clubs. And when they come together to celebrate every year, they meet all over the U.S. and the world. They’ve congregated at far-flung venues ranging from Lake Placid, New York to Heavenly Valley, California, Big Sky, Montana, Sun Valley, Idaho (five times), Banff and Whistler in Canada, and Innsbruck, Austria. Colorado is an NBS favorite, including six events in Aspen/Snowmass and also in Steamboat Springs, and four in Vail, where in 1993 they held what is said to be the largest ski club event ever, with over 6,000 in attendance. Along with skiing, snowboarding, racing, lessons and tours, the meetings also host board meetings and focus groups, guest speakers, fundraisers, GospelFest with a sermon and choir, comedy shows, and live music. Special guests Sinbad and Mario Van Peebles were in Vail in ’93, and Raheem Devaughn performed at Snowmass in 2009.  

Like many ski clubs, the NBS took a hit in membership numbers during the last recession. The cushy deals that clubs have traditionally been able to strike at resorts are now available online and through multi-resort ticketing. Plus ski clubs are graying and not replacing members who retire. The average age of NBSers hovers around 50, while 65 percent of winter sports participants, per SIA, are 44 and under. 

There are also issues within the NBS. Some feel not enough is being spent on supporting promising competitors, others think there’s already too much emphasis on racing. Everyone likes the concept of the outreach programs, but they differ on the specifics. “I would really like to see more directed at being able to help families pay for their kids to get out,” says Art Clay. “For the families here in Chicago, it’s just too expensive.”

The NBS, as always, remains optimistic. “The fact that we have been in existence for 45 years serving the African American community is a major accomplishment,” says Peggie Allen. “The Squaw Valley 2018 Mini-Summit was fabulous, with over 550 participants. And that we still come together every year for our Summit—in support of our youth,  and introducing our under-represented community to winter sports and our spirit of family and fun—is our legacy.” 

Longtime Aspen resident Jay Cowan is the author of several books, including The Best of the Alps. He has won multiple awards, including the Harold S. Hirsch Award (North American Association of Snowsports Journalists) and the Lowell Thomas Award (Society of American Travel Writers), among others.

CLICK HERE TO READ RICK KAHL’S ANALYSIS OF HOW BLACK PARTICIPATION IN SKIING HAS CHANGED, STATISTICALLY, OVER THE YEARS.

When it comes to trail monikers, no lions and tigers, but plenty of bears—not to mention resort founders, historic events and death threats.

By Jeff Blumenfeld

I remember December 1973 like it was yesterday.

While on Christmas break from Syracuse University, a buddy and I decided to fly cross-country, stay at Utah’s Snowbird Cliff Lodge, and ski something bigger than what we were used to in Central New York. 

It didn’t work out that way.

Instead of skiing, we spent three days shuttling between our hotel room and the basement as ski patrollers used explosives to trigger controlled avalanches. It sounded like we were under attack. Little Cottonwood Canyon was closed and wealthier guests were renting choppers to descend to Salt Lake City.

One avalanche gained more power than the patrol expected. It damaged Alta Lodge, filled four rooms with snow and severely injured a lodge employee. It also partially buried a housing trailer where two co-workers were caught in flagrante delicto. Today that slide zone is colloquially referred to as Valerie’s Climax among those who were there. 

All these onomastics got me wondering: Where do trails derive their idiosyncratic names? An informal Skiing History poll of resorts indicates that trail names generally honor founders, long-serving employees and historic events; a unique mountain feature or fauna; or warn that you just might die on the descent. 

Honoring History
Several trails at Vermont’s Bromley Mountain commemorate the late Fred Pabst Jr., of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer fame, who opened the ski area in the late 1930s as part of his growing Ski Tows, Inc. empire. After you ski Pabst Panic, Pabst Peril and Blue Ribbon, you can knock back a PBR on tap at the Wild Boar Tavern or Sun Deck Bar.

Just up the road at Pico Peak, the late Karl Acker, who served in the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division for three years during World War II, was a downhill and slalom champion, and as ski school director would later purchase the ski area with his wife, June Acker. He’s remembered by an expert summit trail called Upper KA, which turns into an intermediate run lower on the mountain. 

Utah’s Deer Valley has Stein’s Way, named after its late director of skiing, Stein Eriksen. The resort’s late founder, Edgar Stern, is honored with Edgar’s Alley. And if you ski or ride Colorado’s Copper Mountain, you get a sense of the reverence placed upon Charles D. Lewis, former executive vice president and treasurer of the then-fledgling Vail Ski Corporation. In 1969, as founding CEO of Copper, he developed the ski area “from the ground up,” according to the Colorado Ski & Snowboard Museum Hall of Fame. The CDL trail is off the Excelerator chair in Spaulding Bowl.

Back at Utah’s Snowbird, Junior’s Powder Paradise pays homage to Junior Bounous, the resort’s first ski school director and a pioneer in the ski industry who was inducted into the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame. Alice Avenue is named for founder Dick Bass’s wife, whom he called “sweet Alice from Dallas.” Bassackwards is named for Bass himself.

The list goes on and on. Want a ski trail named after you? Clearly, it helps to start a ski area. 

And with so many U.S. ski areas founded by veterans of World War II, it’s not surprising to learn of trails commemorating that conflict. Riva Ridge on Colorado’s Vail Mountain, for example, is named after the site of the 10th Mountain Division’s first victory, a surprise 1945 night climb and dawn attack on the steep Apennine plateau north of Florence in north-central Italy.

At Taos Ski Valley in New Mexico, the Stauffenberg trail is named for German army officer Claus von Stauffenberg, who unsuccessfully tried to assassinate Adolph Hitler on July 20, 1944. The story of that effort to change the course of history was depicted in the 2008 film Valkyrie, with Tom Cruise in the lead, and the 1951 film The Desert Fox. Other trails, some of Taos’ most challenging, commemorate the roles of three additional anti-Nazis—would-be assassins Hans Oster, Fabian von Schlaberndorff and Henning von Treskow. A bit lower down, Walkyries Bowl and Walkyries Gulch are named for the assassination plot itself, Operation Valkyrie. 

Owner Ernie Blake (formerly Bloch, a Jewish Swiss Air Force vet) served in the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during the war. Think of him when descending Ernie’s Run off Lift 5 from the base. When liftlines were long at Taos, he was known to distribute cookies to waiting skiers. 

The rich mining history of many western resorts is also reflected in trail names. At Snowbird, Big Emma is named for the beloved local madam of Alta’s mining days—back when brothels were euphemistically known as “sporting clubs.” Meanwhile, West 2nd South, an easy run, was named for the location of the red light district. 

The Silver Queen run at Colorado’s Aspen honors the largest silver nugget ever mined (1,840 pounds). A massive statue made from the nugget traveled to the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 but mysteriously disappeared and never made it back to Aspen. The trail also pays homage to the imaginary profile of Aspen Mountain, first coined the “Silver Queen” in the 1880s, lying on her back, head in town, with her face looking to the sky from Shadow Mountain. In 1950, the trail was the site of the first GS race ever contested in a FIS World Championship. Ruthie’s Run was named for the wife of Aspen pioneer David R.C. Brown and also a piste for many hotly contested World Cup races and the 1950 FIS championships—the first held in North America.

Bears are Big

Bears are big at Vermont’s Stratton. The Algonquin name of the resort itself is Manicknung, which means “home of the bear,” and references to our ursine friends adorn the logo, trail signs, website and all sorts of swag. Stratton is also the location of a bear travel corridor, part of a six-year radio telemetry study that provides data important for land use planning across the state and led to conservation easements on more than 1,000 acres of prime habitat around the mountain, according to senior manager Myra Foster. 

There are trails named Bear Bottom, Bear Down, Black Bear, Dancing Bear, Polar Bear, and the Ursa Express lift. Sure to baffle any Millennial, Gentle Ben was named for the bear character created by author Walt Morey and first introduced in a 1965 children’s novel, a 1967 film, and a popular late 1960s U.S. television series of the same name. 

When you ski Vermont’s Mad River Glen, you’ll likely ski on an animal-themed trail such as the Beaver, Bunny, Ferret, Fox, Gazelle, Loon, Lynx and Wren. One trail performing double duty is an intermediate run named Quacky, which actually honors long-time general manager Ken Quackenbush, an iconic figure in MRG’s history and a decorated World War II U.S. Marine who died at age 95 in 2012. In her book A Mountain Love Affair: The History of Mad River Glen, author Mary Kerr calls Quackenbush the “glue and the conduit that have held Mad River Glen together for forty-five years under three owners.”
Abandon All Hope
There’s a signpost above the gates of Hell, writes Italian poet Dante Alighieri in the allegorical epic poem Divine Comedy, published in 1472. It says simply, “Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here.” An apt description of our final category of trail names, namely, those that predict imminent doom ahead. 

If you’re a happily married man, think twice before descending the black diamond Widowmaker trail, located at Mt. Norquay in Banff, Alberta, and accessible off the North American chair. It’s one of the last in-bound runs on the south side of the resort and offers jaw-dropping views of the town of Banff. 

“The trail has a very steep drop-off turn to the left, coming back over 90 degrees. If you missed that turn in a downhill race, you’d go airborne, probably hitting the trees about 10 feet above the ground,” says ISHA board member Wini Jones, who grew up skiing in Alberta and spent 30 years at Roffe Skiwear in Seattle as vice president for design and marketing. 

A former instructor at Zermatt and Innsbruck, Jones also remembers the mid-1980s day in the Selkirks out of Revelstoke, British Columbia, when Selkirk Tangiers Heli Skiing introduced her to a 2,000-foot fall line run called Holy Sh*t. 

“When you got out of the chopper and looked down at 2,000 feet of virgin powder, guess what everyone said?” she laughs. These days, sales manager Emma Mains says the run goes by the moniker Deep Sh*t.

Rather than face annihilation, you can hedge your bets by skiing the intermediate St. George Prayer trail at Vermont’s Jay Peak. Around 1960, after Jay had previously installed a pomalift and then a T-Bar, it was decided that to join the big leagues, Jay would need a chairlift, according to ISHA board member and ski historian Bob Soden, an engineering consultant from Montreal. Father George St. Onge, a priest from nearby Richford, Vermont, led the fundraising committee.

“Father George was no ordinary man of the collar—he drove a sports car with panache, wearing a large grin, a tweed cap and a flowing scarf. He was given one year to raise $100,000 for the lift,” Soden says. “He drove a tough bargain and left no stone unturned, held fundraiser after fundraiser and called in every favor owed—and he met the deadline.”

To honor his tenacity and faith in the project, Jay Peak’s then general manager, Walter Foeger, named the most prominent trail from the top of the Bonaventure chairlift St. George’s Prayer.

The list of death-defying names is endless in a sport that prides itself on safety initiatives. There’s Harakiri at Mayrhofen, Austria, named for the Japanese ritual samurai suicide by disembowelment; the sphincter-tightening Jaws of Death at Vermont’s Mount Snow; Organ Grinder and Exterminator at Sugarbush, Vermont; and Body Bag at Crested Butte in Colorado. 

Golf uses numbers to identify holes; the same with tennis, squash and racquetball courts. Bowling lanes are always numbered. How boring. Skiers and riders are born storytellers. Just visit any après ski bar: When a resort plays the name game, a creative trail moniker makes any day sound twice as epic.   

Jeff Blumenfeld, a resident of Boulder, Colorado, founded Blumenfeld and Associates PR, LLC, in 1980. He is chairman of the Rocky Mountain chapter of The Explorers Club and edits Expedition News, a monthly review of expeditions and adventures (expeditionnews.com).

Penguin Power!

One of North America’s first and most successful ski clubs was created in Quebec entirely by, and for, women.

By Cara Armstrong and Lori Knowles

Ski clubs have played an important role in the growth of Quebec’s Laurentians as a major North American ski hub, as well as in the development of world-class Canadian racers. And few clubs have been as successful as the Penguin Ski Club, founded in 1932 by a group of young Montrealers—a group consisting entirely of women. In the decades since then, Penguins have won alpine and nordic medals at the Olympic, World Cup, Master’s and national level; been inducted into national and regional halls of fame; and have been awarded some of Canada’s highest honors.

In the 1933 edition of the Canadian Ski Club Annual, the Penguin’s founder and first president, Betty Sherrard—born in Mexico City, raised in Montreal and educated in England—said the club’s mission was: “to help its members enjoy skiing to the fullest, and to advance the standard of ski proficiency amongst women.” To begin, she recruited fellow female skiers from the Junior League of Montreal and the Canadian Amateur Ski Association. She also worked closely with the all-male Red Birds Ski Club of McGill University, founded in 1928. 

While inspired by the Red Birds, the Penguins opted for broader membership criteria. As noted in the club’s official history, The Penguin Ski Club: 1932–1992, the women elected to found their group outside the university as an “important opportunity for young Montreal women to travel, socialize, and stay together [as well as] offer the first ski instruction and competition specifically for women.” Membership was by invitation, and the first recorded meeting was held on March 29, 1934. Members could make nominations and the executive committee would discuss each one.  One “blackball” meant the nomination was referred to the committee, and two meant the nominee was out. 

Making Headlines

The Penguins began making headlines almost immediately after being formed. Olympic track-and-field gold medalist-turned-journalist, Myrtle Cook, began featuring the club in her sports column, “Women in the Sportlight,” on a regular basis for the Montreal Star. In 1933, the Boston Herald featured a story on this unique all-female group. Both newspapers were fascinated by Duke Dimitri von Leuchtenberg’s work with the club. As a graduate of Hannes Schneider’s Arlberg Ski School and former director of the ski school at Peckett’s-on-Sugar Hill in New Hampshire, von Leuchtenberg had taken on the task of improving the Penguin’s skiing skills and honing their racing technique. 

They practiced at Mont Saint-Sauveur, and held their first meet during the winter of 1934. The early competitions included downhill, cross country, jumping, slalom and a bushwhack race. Laurentian ski pioneer Herman “Jackrabbit” Johannsen organized the festivities and set up the bushwhack course down an unmarked slope. From the club history: “‘I remember the bushwhack races,” said Penguin member Percival Ritchie. “They were soon outlawed,” she said. “We would start from the top of a steep, uncleared hill and race straight to the bottom. I ended up in a barbed wire fence, tore my pants and cut my knee. This made me very proud. I still have the scar.’” 

In 1935, the Penguins joined the Canadian Amateur Ski Association and began competing in women’s races. In that first year, they participated in eight ski races and won every single one of them. Members of the group continued to either win or place in the top five of the Canadian Championships from 1936 to 1939.

Penguin House: A Home is Built by the Molsons

During their early years, the Penguins led a peripatetic existence. In 1933, club members used two rooms above the Banque National in Saint Sauveur as their base. In 1934, they moved to a house on the “station road” that had three small bedrooms, four cots per room and one bathroom. Members claimed they could “lean out one side of a cot to brush their teeth and out the other side to cook bacon for breakfast!” 

Desperate for more space, the club moved the following year to a house in Piedmont, Quebec, but soon determined it was too far away from the ski action. A permanent home was needed. According to the official history, John and Herbert Molson of beer fame stepped in as Penguin patrons in late 1938. The Molsons donated land three-quarters of a mile from Saint Sauveur, as well as the funds for construction of a building for “the fine women who were doing a lot for the Canadian sport (of skiing) and for the enjoyment of the outdoors.” The Penguin Ski House opened officially on January 1, 1939.

Designed by Alexander Tilloch Galt Durnford of the Montreal architecture firm Fetherstonhaugh and Durnford, the house had a stone foundation, square log construction that weathered to a silvery gray, pink gables, and a black Mansard roof. The front door opened onto a ski room that sported racks for 24 sets of skis, a workbench, and a small stove for waxing. Seven bunkrooms housed 24 built-in bunks. 

Additional items provided by the Molsons, including mattresses, pillows, blankets, furniture, and coal for three years—even 24 toothbrushes in their holders in the bathroom—kitted out the house.  Founding member Betty Kemp Maxwell, who was studying at the École des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, had created a Penguin logo, and it was inscribed over the fireplace. A unique chandelier with ski tips projecting from a pewter center made the Penguin House extraordinary.

Nine years later, in 1948, the Red Birds built a clubhouse just a few hundred yards away, on land also donated by the Molsons. Penguins attended many weekend Red Birds parties, leading to several marriages over the years.

The Penguins’ War Effort

Despite the planning that went into its design, Penguin House did not get the start its members hoped for. Within its first year, Canada declared war on Germany and entered World War II. The club joined in the war effort as part of Operation Pied Piper, a mass evacuation plan born out of British fear of air attack from German bombers. More than 20 British refugee children aged five to 14, plus two English nannies, spent the summer of 1940 at Penguin House. 

Many Penguins also joined the war effort. Seven became members of the Canadian Women’s Transport services. Others took over the jobs local men vacated to serve overseas. Penguin Patricia Paré, for example, became the first female professional ski instructor at Quebec’s Mont Tremblant.

New Directions:
The Winning Wurtele Twins

With many of its original members occupied with the war effort, the club set out to attract new interest by hosting novice races and recruiting.  Among the new members were Westmount-raised identical twins Rhona and Rhoda Wurtele, who, fresh out of high school, became Penguins in 1942. 

It wasn’t long before the Wurteles were winning nearly every race they entered, from Quebec to California. Rhoda won Tremblant’s Taschereau downhill by a convincing 24 seconds, beating both the women and the men. Rhona placed second among the women and ninth overall. The twins’ skiing (and swimming) talents received a lot of attention in the Canadian press. In 1947, Rhona and Rhoda were joint runners-up for the Lou Marsh Trophy, given by the Canadian Press to Canada’s Most Outstanding Athlete. All of it lent to Penguin prestige.

The Penguins and The
Winter Olympics

World War II caused the cancellation of two Olympics, but the Penguins were finally able to compete on the world stage at the 1948 Olympic Winter Games in St. Moritz, Switzerland. It didn’t go so well. The Wurtele twins were the only two members of the Canadian Women’s Alpine Team. Rhoda cracked her anklebone six days before the Games, and Rhona had an accident during her run…leaving Canada without medals.

The Penguins returned to the international arena in 1952 for the Winter Games in Oslo, Norway. Rhona was pregnant and unable to compete, but Rhoda was joined in Oslo by fellow Penguins Rosemary Schutz and Joanne Hewson, as well as Penguin Lucile Wheeler. The four competed as the first complete, four-woman alpine ski team Canada had ever sent to the Olympics. 

In 1956, Wheeler was joined by Penguin Anne Heggtveit on Canada’s Olympic Alpine Ski Team at Cortina d’Ampezzo. Wheeler won a bronze in downhill, becoming both the first Penguin and the first North American to medal in the downhill. She followed this with a spectacular performance at the 1958 World Championships in Bad Gastein, Austria, where she won both the downhill and the giant slalom and came very close to winning the combined…ultimately taking the silver. She was the first North American to win a World Championship downhill. Wheeler won the Lou Marsh Trophy as Canada’s most outstanding athlete of 1958, and was later inducted into the Canadian Olympic Hall of Fame and the Canadian Ski Hall of Fame, and made a member of the Order of Canada, among other honors.

Formation of the Ski Jays

Despite the Penguins’ success, the 1950s were a time when resources for Canadian skiers were extremely limited. Even while winning races and medals, the members remained true to part of the Penguin Club founding mission: “To advance the standard of ski proficiency amongst women.” Penguins Bliss Matthews and Ann Bushell hatched the idea for the Ski Jay Club in 1957 for Montreal teenage girls, envisioning the Jays as a “nonprofit organization, founded, sponsored, and at all times backed by the Penguin Ski Club.” Rhoda Wurtele was head instructor at the ski school for 21 years.

Ski Jay Nancy Holland was the first to make the Canadian ski team in 1960. Holland was joined by Penguin Anne Heggtveit. That same year, Heggtveit won Canada’s first-ever Olympic skiing gold medal in Squaw Valley, California. Her victory in the Olympic slalom event also made her the first non-European to win the FIS world championship in slalom and combined. In Canada, Heggtveit’s performance was recognized by Canada’s highest civilian honor when she was made a member of the Order of Canada. She was awarded the Lou Marsh Trophy as Canada’s outstanding athlete of 1960. These achievements were instrumental in increasing the popularity of skiing in Canada, and particularly in Quebec.

the Penguins Develop Grassroots

As the Laurentians began to thrive as a major ski destination, Penguin alumnae began spending more time recruiting and coaching new talent. Penguins Sue Boxer and Liz Dench started the Polar Bear Club in 1961 and taught four- to eight-year-olds to ski for the next 20 years. Rhona Wurtele founded the Ski Chicks in 1961 for nine- to 11-year-olds, and the Ski Jay program continued throughout these years for teens. All of these clubs groomed young girls to become Penguin members as they reached adulthood.  

At least seven Ski Jays were named to the Canadian national ski team in the 1960s, including Nancy Holland, Janet Holland, Faye Pitt, Barbie Walker, Garrie Matheson, Jill Fisk and Diane Culver. With the Wurteles at the helm of the club throughout the 1970s, membership peaked at more than 1,000.

The End of an Era

In 1972, increasing costs contributed to the need to sell Penguin House. It was later destroyed by fire. Founding member Betty Kemp sang its praises:  “Without the house, we wouldn’t have become and remained friends,” she said. “Without the house, we wouldn’t have had any responsibility to each other or the sport. Bonding. From the house, we learnt the responsibility of maintaining it and the club. From the club, we learnt to work together, to organize races, and to give school girls and others, the opportunity for the young to learn to ski.”

The loss of Penguin House marked the end of an era. By the early 1980s, the Penguin Ski Club had cancelled its formal incorporation. “This definitely had an impact, but we stayed positive,” says Bev Waldorf, a Penguin since 1953. Bev has remained active in the Penguins since the house closed, working with her friend Margie Knight to plan reunions, organize an annual fall luncheon and publish an occasional newsletter. 

While the official club no longer exists, the spirit of the original Penguins continues. Forty-five members of the club celebrated the Penguins’ 75th anniversary in 2007, and 19 members—including five Olympians—gathered to celebrate its 85th anniversary in 2017.  

This article was originally prepared for the Canadian Ski Museum and Hall of Fame by Cara Armstrong, with subsequent research and updates by Lori Knowles and Nancy Robinson. Knowles is a Canadian writer and editor whose work appears in SNOW Magazine and the travel sections of The Toronto Sun and The Globe and Mail. Robinson served as researcher and developer for Byron Rempel’s biography of the Wurtele twins, No Limits. Special thanks to Penguin member Bev Waldorf, who vetted this article for accuracy.

Broadway lensman Werner J. Kuhn ran the patrol, taught first aid and shot PR photos at a popular Catskills ski area. By Jeff Blumenfeld

The image was typical of ski area publicity photos of the early 1960s. That was when skiers, our Long Island family included, received coverage in the local newspaper simply because we were an adventurous family that went skiing. 

In the New York Catskills at the time, Big Vanilla at Davos, an upside down ski area with parking at the summit, was a big deal. It attracted 3,000 to 5,000 skiers on a busy weekend, plus a smattering of celebrities, including TV comic Sid Caesar and other entertainers performing at nearby Borscht Belt hotels.   

Now defunct, Big Vanilla, with a 330-foot vertical drop, offered a quad chair, a J-Bar, a double, and two T-bars that small kids would ride like a chairlift. When it opened in 1959 as simply Davos, named after the Swiss resort, it became the largest in Sullivan County, outsizing Grossinger’s, Kutsher’s, the Concord, the Nevele, the Pines and Holiday Mountain. 

Located about 85 miles northwest of New York, the area offered 23 trails with typical Catskillian names like Sleepy Hollow, and a misspelled Rip Van Winkel (sic) Run, all available for a $4.50 lift ticket, $3 off-peak. 

The New York Times reported at the time, “Its slopes are not long, for the most part, but at least two of them are steep enough to make the skier of intermediate skill take careful stock of what lies below before shoving off.”

Nothing much happened at Big Vanilla that avoided the critical eye of the late Werner J. Kuhn. A Broadway photographer by profession, Kuhn was Mr. Big Vanilla. He ran the ski patrol, taught first aid, shot the publicity photos and even posed in them himself. 

“If you want something done, see a busy man,” goes the saying. When my father and I posed with him for a publicity photo, Kuhn, in his Tyrolian hat festooned with more than a dozen ski area pins, was apparently too busy to close his beartrap bindings. No matter. He was faking the image in street shoes. There I am at the age of nine in 1962, with bamboo poles, tinted “safety” goggles, lace-ups and stretch pants, launching my career in ski promotion. The photo would later appear in the Long Island Press, our hometown newspaper, in a column by the late Frank Elkins, affectionately nicknamed a “skiloader” for his propensity to never actually pay for a lift ticket.

Kuhn was frequently in the news, posing with WNBC-TV personality Steve Woodman, and other gung-ho skiers who visited, including my own family who posed for yet another publicity photo with ski school director Boris Dernic. Often you’d see Kuhn’s name appear as a Broadway photo credit. He photographed American stage and screen actress Molly Picon in the musical Milk & Honey; Ruth Gordon in The Matchmaker; and dozens more whose names have since faded from the limelight.  

A training advisor for the eastern division of the National Ski Patrol, Kuhn also taught a hands-on first aid class at Sullivan County Community College. Not content with standard drills in CPR and bandaging, he used Simulaids—simulated chest wounds, broken bones, burns, head wounds and puncture wounds, all made out of vinyl. 

Kuhn used these gory props to psychologically prepare his students for the sight of a severely injured victim. It worked. As a young Cub Scout in the course I was assigned a simulated ski-pole puncture; when the “victim’s” hand-held pump ran low on “blood” (water, thickening agent, food dye) and began to spew and spatter, I started to taste yesterday’s lunch rising out of my throat; it was me who needed rescue. Kuhn’s class was about as real as a first aid class gets without actually knifing a volunteer. 

Alan Blumenfeld, a retired menswear retailer from Philadelphia, now a resident of Voorhees, New Jersey, remembers meeting Kuhn in 1960 on a Jamaica (New York) High School Ski Club trip, an organization he co-founded. 

“Werner and I would ski together whenever he put on his skis, which wasn’t often due to the fact that he also ran the ski patrol,” he says. “When he asked me to become a junior member of the patrol, I jumped at the opportunity. He was a stickler for detail, impressing upon me the importance of being a strong skier rather than just showy, and the importance of being totally in control at all times. These were great lessons that served me well for over 50 years of skiing.”

Kuhn died in December 1982 in Harris, New York, after a short illness, at the age of 67, just one week after being reelected president of the Fallsburg Police Department Auxiliary. An avid skier and enthusiastic participant in community activities, it was curtains for one of the Catskills’ most legendary ski-area promoters.  

Jeff Blumenfeld, a resident of Boulder, Colorado, and native of Monticello, New York,  founded Blumenfeld and Associates PR, LLC, in 1980 and today represents Jiminy Peak Mountain Resort, Bromley Mountain Resort and Cranmore Mountain Resort. A skier since the age of five, he’s kept a log of every day he’s spent on the slopes since 1972, but that’s another story. 

A former competitor remembers the Women’s Pro Ski Tour. 

I slid into the starting gate, defined by a low board in the snow four feet behind two “horse gates.” Though I exuded confidence, adrenaline surged through my body. Before me, 25 red panels zigzagged down the slope, next to an identical row of blue panels. The two courses spilled over two six-foot kickers en route to the banner-bedecked finish arena. The racer to my left, Kim Reichhelm, planted her poles and pushed back, lifting her ski tips a foot off the snow as she tested the kick board behind her. Satisfied, she coiled like a puma about to pounce.

Kim and I had been good friends and fellow competitors since our days as high-school students at Stratton Mountain School in Vermont, but at that moment, we dueled for our paycheck. My eyes fixed on the gates while my ears tuned out all but the starter’s familiar husky voice.

“Red course ready?” he shouted. “Blue course ready? Courses clear. Racers ready…” As the ear-splitting horn pierced the air, the gates sprang open. Kim and I rocketed down the hill, matching each other turn for turn. We thrust ourselves across the finish line and glanced at the clock. After two runs, one on the red course and one on the blue, Kim had bested me by 0.003 second, less than the length of a ski tip.

During my six winters on the Women’s Pro Ski Tour, starting in the mid-1980s, sometimes I was on the winning side of those split seconds and sometimes not. It was challenging, exciting and nerve-racking, not to mention one of the few ways a woman could earn a living as a professional athlete.

“Women’s pro ski racing 

was the third-richest pro sport for women at the time,” says Jill Wing Heck, who founded the Women’s Pro Ski Tour in 1978. “It ranked after tennis and golf, but ahead of bowling and rodeo barrel racing.” 

While selling sponsorships for the co-ed pro freestyle tour, Wing Heck had befriended Judy Nagel, Susie Corrock and a number of top female alpine ski racers who had switched to freestyle. “There was nothing else,” says Wing Heck. “They talked about how much more fun it would be to race. Then the freestyle tour started having insurance problems, lawsuits due to injuries. Its sponsors fled. No one wanted women’s pro ski racing, so I wrote up a proposal. Anheuser Busch bought it! Then I thought, now what do I do?”

Tony Furman, a New York publicist who was involved with the ski industry, gave Wing Heck office space and offered to do P.R. for the fledging tour. She hired a tournament director, Eric Hvoslef, and put together three events (comprising six races) at Waterville Valley in New Hampshire, Alpine Meadows in California and Vail in Colorado, with a $40,000 purse for the inaugural season. Though Norwegian Toril Forland won the most prize money and three of the four races she entered, Lyndall Heyer of Stowe, Vermont, who entered all six races, accumulated more points and was named the first overall champion.

Over the two decades the tour existed, though many female World Cup standouts competed periodically after retiring from their national teams, most of the stars on the start list were middle-of-the-pack World Cuppers, collegiate All-Americans and Europa Cuppers who never made an Olympic team due to lack of ability or mental toughness, politics or injury. The Women’s Pro Tour gave these athletes a second chance to be world-class, particularly those who thrived on the dual format and the lack of team structure. They tuned their own skis, coordinated their travel and training, and drank adult beverages whether they liked them or not, as Budweiser, Michelob and DeKuyper sponsored the tour at various times. The three overall champions of the women’s pro tour during my era—American Cathy Bruce, Austrian Rowitha Raudaschl and Swede Catarina Glasser-Bjerner—fit this profile. Norwegian Toril Forland, who retired the year after I joined the tour, did not.

Bruce, who never finished higher than 22nd in a World Cup event, dominated the women’s tour during the mid-1980s. “I had a slight confidence problem after being dropped from the [U.S.] team before the 1980 Winter Olympics,” said Bruce in an interview with Los Angeles Times (March 5, 1987). “It took a while for me to grow up mentally, and ski racing is definitely a mental sport.”

Toril Forland was a master at the mental game. A bronze medalist in alpine combined at the 1972 Winter Olympics, she skied for the University of Utah and then joined the pro tour. She won five overall pro titles—in 1979 and from 1981–84. She had an uncanny ability to dial up her intensity as needed, sneaking by a newcomer in an early round before pouring it on for the finals.

Roswitha Raudaschl, a diminutive brunette from Austria, joined the tour as a teenager. She spoke little English but skied with lots of tenacity. She returned to the Alps many thousands of dollars richer. Ditto for Glasser-Bjerner and a handful of women’s pro tour standouts, though not entirely from prize money.

By the time I joined the women’s pro tour in 1985, prize purses at an event varied from $10,000 to $25,000 split between two races per weekend—usually a giant slalom and slalom—with the top 16 each day earning a check. Though no one revealed exactly what they made each year, a top racer with victory bonuses from her sponsors and a willingness to do photo and film shoots and make public appearances could accumulate anywhere from $40,000 to more than $100,000.

When I retired from the tour in 1990, Wing Heck had sold the tour to North American Pro Ski Corporation, which also owned the men’s tour. ESPN was on board with a two-year agreement to broadcast events. Television brought in more sponsors, prize money and athletes. By 1993, the women’s tour boasted a $325,000 prize purse over nine events, but a couple of years later, the women’s tour began to unravel. It’s not clear whether the television coverage disappeared because sponsorships dried up or vice versa, but a year after the millennium, the women’s pro tour was no more.

A member of the Women’s Pro Ski Tour from 1985 to 1990, Lisa Densmore has written about, photographed and televised ski racing for more than 20 years (www.LisaDensmore.com). 

The critical role of skis in 130 years of Arctic exploration and adventure.

By Jeff Blumenfeld

Throughout the modern era of polar exploration, skis have played an invaluable role in propelling explorers forward -- sometimes with dogsled teams, sometimes without, and more recently with kites to glide across the polar regions at speeds averaging 7 mph. Modern-day polar explorers including Eric Larsen, Paul Schurke, Will Steger and Richard Weber all continue to use skis today, taking a page right out of history. Were it not for skis, reaching the North and South poles in the early 1900s might have been delayed until years later.

To read the rest of this story, see the November-December 2017 issue of Skiing History magazine. To read the digital edition online, you must be a member of ISHA. Not a member? Join today!