Feature article

Sun Valley Skier Shares Rare Find

By David Butterfield

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was the plan. How it unfolded follows.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Jeff Blumenfeld

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

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

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

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

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

Kings of the Press Rooms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No Better Advocates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rise of the Internet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the January-February 2020 issue of Skiing History.

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

By John Fry

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

MAD #173 © E.C. Publications, Inc.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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). ...