How is it that a young man—raised in the road camps of California’s Central Valley, abandoned at age 15 by his father, deposited with his grandparents in a damp coal-mining town in central Washington by his mother, and thrust into adulthood near the end of the Great Depression—eventually came to build one of the biggest and most successful ski resorts in the country?
Dave McCoy’s work ethic, self-reliance, determination, optimism and ingenuity certainly played roles, but perhaps there was a more determinative influence.
Author Robin Morning returns with her second comprehensive work covering the history of California’s Mammoth Mountain and its protagonists with For the Love of It: The Mammoth Legacy of Roma & Dave McCoy. Note the order of Mammoth’s founders in the title, as Robin (and Dave) both attribute much of his success to his wife of 80 years, local girl Roma Carriere. In the book, Roma’s perspective is intimately shared through first-person chapters alternating with the third-person descriptions that tell Dave’s story.
The book details the lives of Dave and Roma from childhood through the completion of Chair One in 1955, marking the beginning of commercial skiing at Mammoth. While the legends of Dave’s life in the Eastern Sierra are widely known—from aqueduct repair work with the Civilian Conservation Corps, to erecting ski tows throughout the Highway 395 corridor, and his fortuitous hiring as a hydrographer (for his skiing ability)—the familiar stories blossom here in a conversational tone.
Dave and Roma McCoy in Virginia City, Nevada in 1938.
Dave met Roma in Bishop, a shy local girl who had a passion for dance but was soon converted to the rhythms of skiing. Inspired by a desire to have fun up in snow country and share that fun with others, together they built a legendary junior racing program at Mammoth while raising six racers of their own. Kids from near and far gravitated to Mammoth to enjoy Roma’s home cooking and cozy floor space while under the tutelage of Coach Dave.
Mammoth Mountain was developed not through any vision shared with would-be financiers, but through the McCoys’ remarkable resourcefulness. Dave became something of a Pied Piper on the mountain, with a diverse following of former accountants, engineers, World War II veterans and surfers abandoning their former lives to participate. Roma provided the home base where all were welcomed as family after a day of good clean fun moving tows, fixing weasels, clearing roads and skiing.
Morning grew up in Santa Monica and raced for McCoy at Mammoth, competing for the U.S. Ski Team from 1965 to 1968. The day before the opening ceremonies for the 1968 Winter Olympics at Grenoble, she broke her leg on a downhill training run. After coaching junior and master’s racers in Southern California, Mammoth, and Colorado, she became a schoolteacher and eventually found her way back to Mammoth, where she still lives. She’s the author of the ISHA Award-winning book Tracks of Passion: Eastern Sierra Skiing, Dave McCoy & Mammoth Mountain.
Morning has published her new book, For the Love of It, in part as tribute to her friend McCoy, who died in February 2020 at 104 (see Skiing History, March-April 2020). Available in softcover, 426 pages with numerous photos, signed copies available. Order online at www.blueoxexpress.com.—Chris I. Lizza
Ski Bum: The Warren Miller Story
Ski Bum is a 90-minute review of the late Warren Miller’s extraordinary career, told through archival footage and one final interview with Warren himself.
For decades, the ski season didn’t really begin until the latest spectacular film was released by Warren Miller Productions, filled with balletic, slow-motion mountain footage of death-defying ski and snowboard stunts. Director Patrick Creadon’s Ski Bum—titled after the moniker the Seattle-area legend often used for himself—celebrates the life and art of one of the most prolific sports-documentary pioneers.
Credited with more than 750 sports films, Miller started as a surfer in his native Hollywood before moving to the Pacific Northwest to practically invent the winter-sports film genre. As Creadon’s homage shows, Miller’s simple 8mm movies from the 1950s snowballed into a 50-year commercial-film career that set the standard for audacious stunts. But success did not come without hardship; Miller used to promote his films on exhausting 100-city road tours, which took a toll on his family life and finances.
Based on a 2018 interview the then-92-year-old Miller gave shortly before his death at his Orcas Island home, Ski Bum explores the techniques used by the veteran filmmaker, who also served as cinematographer, editor, producer—and often live narrator—of his films. Using interviews with daredevil skiers, never-before-seen outtakes, and home movies, Ski Bum is a must-see for any ripper or shredder forever in search of the gnarliest powder.
Creadon is a director and cinematographer born in 1967 in Riverside, Illinois. He graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 1989 with a BA in International Relations. Creadon is married to his collaborator, producer Christine O’Malley. They co-founded their full-scale media production company, O’Malley Creadon Productions, which is based in Los Angeles and focuses on nonfiction storytelling.
The Berkshires of Massachusetts have long been known as a winter sports paradise. Forty-four ski areas popped up across the region from the 1930s to the 1970s. The legendary Thunderbolt Ski Trail put the Berkshires on the map for challenging terrain, while major resorts like Brodie Mountain sparked the popularity of night skiing with lighted trails. All-inclusive areas—like Oak n’ Spruce, Eastover and Jug End—brought thousands of new skiers into the sport between the 1940s and 1970s. Meanwhile, snow trains made it fun and easy for metro-area skiers to plan weekend ski excursions.
But despite the surge of interest in skiing in Berkshire County, the majority of these ski areas would not last. Early areas closed permanently during World War II, followed by lift relocations and the shutdown of the snow trains. In the 1970s and 1980s, the pace of closures increased due to competition from larger areas to the north, gasoline shortages, a dearth of natural snow, and a lack of volunteers at community ski centers. Over the last few decades, these once-storied places faded away and were nearly forgotten. Trails became forests once again, base lodges rotted into the ground, and lifts rusted away.
In Lost Ski Areas of the Berkshires, author Jeremy Davis has brought these lost locales back to life, chronicling their rich histories and contributions to the ski industry.
Each former ski area, no matter how small or brief in operation, is chronicled, along with 75 historical photographs and trail maps, and the stories of those who skied them. For those who wish to explore these areas and see their ruins, a hiking guide is included for publicly accessible locations. The seven still-surviving ski areas have their own chapter.
Jeremy Davis is the founder of the New England and North East Lost Ski Areas Project (www.nelsap.org) and has written five books on lost ski areas. He serves on the Skiing History editorial review board and the board of directors of the New England Ski Museum. He is a senior meteorologist and operations manager at Weather Routing Inc., forecasting for the marine industry.
Lost Ski Areas of the Berkshires by Jeremy Davis. 240 pages. The History Press. $21.99 softcover, Kindle edition available. Winner: 2019 ISHA Skade Award.
DrySlopeNews.com
Patrick Thorne, creator of dryslopenews.com
Artificial slopes, using carpet or matting in place of snow, bring skiing to areas without reliable natural snowfall. Skiers have used them for over a century, but the earliest artificial surfaces manufactured specifically for skiing date from the 1950s. Since then, more than 1,000 have been built in 50-plus countries worldwide. The slopes come in many different shapes and sizes, with several companies involved in their manufacturing over the past 70 years, so no two are ever the same.
Dry ski slopes are essential for teaching millions of people to ski or snowboard. They can take the basic skills acquired on artificial slopes and then ski at conventional resorts around the world. Indeed, claims ski writer Patrick Thorne, dryland slopes have been a major factor in the success of the global ski industry. Many established dry slopes have strong community support, enabling children and people with special needs to learn to ski or board as well as practice regularly. They’ve also bred some of the world’s best skiers and snowboarders who’ve gone on to World Cup and Olympic glory.
The website DrySlopeNews.com includes an extensive directory of existing and former dry slope operations, with a timeline history going back to the Vienna Schneepalast of 1927. The site is the brainchild of Thorne, who learned to ski on a dry slope as a youngster in the late 1970s.
Thorne has covered skiing from his base in the United Kingdom for more than 30 years and has recently joined ISHA as a contributor to Skiing History and skiinghistory.org. He operates the news site InTheSnow.com and a sister site, indoorsnownews.com, covering the snowdome universe. DrySlopeNews.com won a 2019 ISHA Cyber Award. —Seth Masia
North Country
In Littleton, New Hampshire, near Cannon Mountain, Lahout’s Country Clothing and Ski Shop has done business at the same location since 1920. Fourteen-year-old Herbert Lahout emigrated from Syria in 1898, and became a railroad laborer. He married his wife Anne in 1919 and the couple sold groceries from a horse-drawn wagon. The following year they moved the business into Littleton’s Old Grange Hall, and lived upstairs. Herb died in 1934 and, in the depths of the Depression, Anne was left to run the store with her kids Gladys, 14, and Joe, 12.
Joe learned to ski, and the sport became his lifelong passion. After returning from service in the South Pacific during World War II, he added skis to the store’s inventory of hardware, dry goods, beer and groceries. Under the management of Joe’s three sons, and now of his grandson Anthony, Lahout’s developed into a full-service ski and outdoor store, with six locations in Littleton and Lincoln, half an hour south.
Joe died in 2016, on his 94th birthday. The 21-minute film North Country tells the family’s story, with plenty of vintage ski footage from the Franconia Notch region. Lahout’s became integral to the history of skiing in New Hampshire. It’s a story of tough people thriving in a harsh climate—people who ventured out into the wider world but returned to the store to support their parents and grandparents.
Director Nick Martini runs Stept Productions, making commercials for brands like Toyota, Oakley, Columbia, The North Face and Under Armour. He grew up in the Boston area, skiing in New Hampshire. After earning his MBA, executive producer Anthony Lahout worked in finance before taking marketing jobs at Smith Sport Optics and Spyder Skiwear. He returned to Littleton in 2015 to take over the family business. So far, the film has been shown at the Telluride Mountainfilm Festival, Banff Film Festival, and the Kendall Mountain Festival in the United Kingdom. The next step: Finding partners to bring the film to the public. —Seth Masia
North Country, produced by Anthony Lahout, written and
directed by Nick Martini. Winner: 2019 ISHA Film Award. Learn more at steptstudios.com.
"Ski Bum: The Warren Miller Story," is now showing on Amazon Prime.
The 90-minute film, produced by Patrick Creadon and Christine O'Malley, is based largely on archival footage provided by Warren Miller Entertainment. It follows Miller's dramatic life story from the beginning, starting with a childhood spent escaping from a dysfunctional family by surfing and skiing. The story is told through interviews with Warren himself, shot a year before his death, and interviews with his children and close friends. More interviews and plenty of action footage feature skiers Scot Schmidt, Jonny Moseley, Colby James, the Egan brothers, Kristen Ulmer, Greg Stump and many more.
Amazon Prime members can see the film for free; nonmembers can rent it here.
Kalle Bror Emil Aejmelaeus-Äimä (1882–1935) grew up on skis in Finland, when it was still a duchy in the Russian Empire. At age 17 he ran off to fight in the Boer War, on the losing side. He then fought in a South American revolution, became a sea captain and joined the U.S. Army as a cavalry sergeant stationed in Texas. He then worked as a cowboy.
Back in Europe in 1906, he entered the Imperial military academy in St Petersburg, became a Russian cavalry officer stationed near Kiev, earned a degree in archaeology (a cover for spying in Ottoman lands), taught skiing and fencing, and competed in the first modern pentathlon at the 1912 Olympics. That year he wrote Skis in the Art of War, in Russian, hoping to update Russian Army skiing tactics based on the Finnish model. He barely survived cavalry action in the Great War.
After the Bolshevik Revolution, Finland declared independence, and Eimeleus joined the Finnish army to help win a civil war with the local communists. He joined Finland’s right-wing government as head of the War Office, as adjutant to two presidents, and later, as military attaché in London, Moscow and The Hague. The new Soviet Army took skiing seriously, but not seriously enough: In the Winter War of 1939–1940 the Finnish army, 20,000 strong, inflicted half a million casualties on Soviet troops. In response, the Soviet government organized a massive ski mobilization prior to the German invasion in 1941. The Soviet counteroffensive against Nazi Germany during the winter of 1941–1942 owed much of its success to the ski battalions formed during the ski mobilization, and to Skis in the Art of War.
This new translation by William D. Frank, in collaboration with ISHA’s own E. John B. Allen, includes most of the original illustrations, plus essays on the historical context of European military skiing by the two collaborators. The footnotes contain a wealth of historical detail. Frank, a competitive biathlete in the early 1980s, is now a leading authority on the history of biathlon, especially in Russia. Skiing History published his fine history of Russian biathlon in the June 2009 issue. He expanded that work into a doctoral dissertation in history at the University of Washington, and it became his book Everyone to Skis!, which won the ISHA Ullr Award in 2015. —Seth Masia
Skis in the Art of War by K.B.E.E. Eimeleus. Translation and commentary by William D. Frank, with additional commentary by E. John B. Allen. 288 pages. Northern Illinois University/Cornell University Press, $37.95 hardbound; Kindle edition $9.95. Winner: 2019 ISHA Ullr Award.
Alpine Cooking
This is a lushly photographed cookbook and travelogue showcasing the regional cuisines of the Alps, including 80 recipes for the elegant, rustic dishes served in the chalets and mountain huts situated among the alpine peaks of Italy, Austria, Switzerland, and France.
In Alpine Cooking, food writer Meredith Erickson travels through Europe’s Alps—by car, on foot, and via funicular—collecting the recipes and stories of the legendary stubes, chalets, and refugios. On the menu is an eclectic mix of mountain dishes: radicchio and speck dumplings, fondue brioche, the best schnitzel recipe, Bombardinos, warming soups, wine cave fonduta, a Chartreuse soufflé, and a host of decadent strudels and confections (Salzburger Nockerl, anyone?) served with a bottle of Riesling plucked from the snow bank beside your dining table.
Organized by country and including logistical tips, detailed maps and narrative interludes discussing alpine art and wine, the Tour de France, high-altitude railways, grand European hotels, and other essential topics, this gorgeous and spectacularly photographed cookbook is a romantic ode to life in the mountains for food lovers, travelers, skiers, hikers, and anyone who feels the pull of the peaks.
Erickson has co-authored The Art of Living According to Joe Beef, Le Pigeon, Olympia Provisions, Kristen Kish Cooking, and Claridge’s: The Cookbook. Among other titles, she has written for The New York Times, Saveur and Condé Nast Traveler.
Alpine Cooking: Recipes and Stories from Europe’s Grand Mountaintops by Meredith Erikson. Published by Ten Speed Press (2019), hardcover, 352 pages; $50 on Amazon. Winner: 2019 ISHA Baldur Award.
James Niehues has published a new coffee-table book that includes more than 200 of his hand-painted trail maps.
Ski artist James Niehues has published a new coffee-table book that includes more than 200 of his hand-painted trail maps, with text by journalist Jason Blevins. With eight geographically themed chapters, the hardcover book is the definitive collection of the art created by Niehues during his 30-year career.
In the modern digital age, Niehues may be the last of the great mapmakers. The book showcases his exacting process, in which he first captures aerial shots and then explores the mountain himself before painstakingly illustrating every run, chairlift, tree and cliff band by hand. Over the years, he has created maps for resorts across North America, South America, Europe, Asia and Australia, with hundreds of millions of printed copies distributed to skiers on the slopes.
“I’ve always enjoyed the challenge of fitting an entire mountain on a page. Mountains are wonderful puzzles, and I knew if I painted with the right amount of detail and care, they would last,” says Niehues. “A good design is relevant for a few years, maybe even a decade. But a well-made map is used for generations.”
With Big Sky Resort chosen to illustrate the cover and a foreword by pioneering big-mountain skier Chris Davenport, the compilation includes trail maps from iconic destinations such as Jackson Hole, Squaw Valley, Alta, Snowbird, Aspen Highlands and Vail. The book is 11.5 inches tall and opens to a spread of 24 inches wide, the perfect size to showcase the biggest ski mountains in the world. Niehues went all-in on the production process, with Italian art-quality printing, heavyweight matte-coated paper, and a lay-flat binding.
Funded by a successful Kickstarter campaign that raised capital from 5,000 donors, The Man Behind the Maps had over 10,000 pre-orders. The book retails for $90 and ISHA members qualify for free shipping, a $12.99 savings. To purchase, go to jamesniehues.com and use the code Skiing History. Offer valid until February 8, 2020.
The book was constructed with a lay-flat binding and opens to a spread of 24 inches wide, making the maps—like this illustration of Big Sky, Montana—easy to read.
U.S. Skiing could learn a lot from the success formula within its own women’s cross-country team. By Edith Thys Morgan
The FIRST, EVER, cross country gold medal for the U.S.!” Those words, screamed by commentators in joyful disbelief, capped off one of the most memorable moments of the 2018 Winter Olympics. When Americans Kikkan Randall and Jessie Diggins won the team freestyle event, it was not only a triumph of persistence and hard work, but also the ultimate validation of the power of team.
The U.S. victory was particularly interesting against the backdrop of Norway’s record 39 Olympic medals in Pyeongchang, accomplished with a mere 109 athletes (Team USA won 23 medals with 242 athletes). The buzzwords behind Norway’s success—culture and team—echo the values portrayed in World Class, a new book by Vermont author Peggy Shinn. They also stand in stark contrast to the dynamics that have evolved on the U.S. Alpine Ski Team in the past decade, where individual superstars have assembled private teams that cater exclusively to their needs. U.S. Alpine success in Pyeongchang was underwhelming, and U.S. Skiing could learn much from the success formula within its own organization. Through extensive research and interviews, Shinn recounts the history of the U.S. Nordic Ski Team, and details the team’s journey from the low point in 2005–2006—when the U.S. did not even name a women’s Nordic ski team for the World Cup season—to the spring of 2017, when a full team of medal-ready women stood poised to make history.
Shinn got her inspiration while watching the U.S. Women’s Nordic Team during its breakout season of 2011–2012. The women had just notched their best World Cup relay finish ever, fifth place, and they had done it without their longtime superstar, Kikkan Randall, who was ill that day. When Shinn asked the women about their success, she writes: “They did not credit their individual strengths…to a person they credited teamwork.” As a former competitor in many sports, and a journalist covering Olympic sports for Team USA.org, Shinn was intrigued. She set about understanding the power of team, and showing it work through the lens of a sport that is known for being solitary, brutally demanding, chronically underfunded and not particularly fun.
After that breakthrough season, the team would go on to win eight medals in three World Championships in the next five years, and they would accomplish this decked out in patriotically striped goofy socks, pink-streaked hair, glittery face paint and huge smiles. The medals validated their own individual journeys of hard work, optimism and uncompromising standards, but also their unwavering commitment to each other. As Shinn writes of the Nordic team: “They have everything from the transformational leader, to the coach who connects with his athletes, to the agreeable, conscientious energizers who comprise the team.”
THE LEADER
The transformational leader is Kikkan Randall, an Alaskan who graduated from high school in 2001 with the nickname “Kikkanimal” and a ten-year plan to win an Olympic medal. She soon became a star on the U.S. Ski Team. Like top U.S. Nordic women before her, she did this as a solo star, traveling and training with the U.S. men or with women from other countries. Unlike many stars, Randall is also the consummate teammate and leader, who hordes neither control nor attention, and is “as happy for her teammates’ successes as she [is] for her own.” In the spring of 2006, inspired by the steady and remarkable ascent of the Canadian Nordic team, Randall lobbied hard for a women’s team, with teammates and a dedicated coach. Coach Pete Vordenberg demanded a $1 million budget for the Nordic Team and U.S. Skiing president Bill Marolt agreed, putting the money towards coaches and a young development team.
THE COACH
Matt Whitcomb, who had built a Nordic program at Burke Mountain Academy, joined the U.S. Cross Country Ski Team in 2006 and was named head women’s coach in 2012. He brought the structure, discipline, patience and inclusiveness to turn Randall’s team vision into a reality. Friendly and approachable, his positive coaching style—gleaned from his own coaches growing up in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts—reinforced what athletes did right, versus dwelling on what they did wrong. He also adopted Burke’s motto of, “All leaders, no leaders.” Whitcomb explains that only four of the seven podium-level women can be on a relay team. “But it’s the three who aren’t selected who hold the key in their hands. The tone that they set—from the moment they find out they are not selected for the relay—can either add or subtract from the team atmosphere.” That realization of interdependence is a cornerstone of how the team viewed and treated each other.
THE ATHLETES
In addition to these remarkable leaders, World Class is about the entire team that buoyed, pushed and lifted each other to greater heights. This includes Liz Stephen, Holly Brooks, Jessie Diggins, Ida Sargent, Sadie Bjornsen, Sophie Caldwell and Rosie Brennan—women
who range from young phenoms to college athletes to working adults, and come from points all across the country—as well as the many women before them who steadily emboldened Team USA. They did so by their performances but also by cheering wildly from the sidelines, being patient with rookie moves and costly mistakes, or embracing rituals like group karaoke and writing personalized Secret Santa poems. Working hard together, inside a supportive, communicative, and optimistic environment, they became a high-performance engine.
THE ATTITUDE, AND LACK THEREOF World Class is also about cooperation for a common cause, and how a sport becomes a family. The decades it takes to fully develop talent, combined with notoriously shoestring budgets, mean the U.S. Nordic Ski Team must rely heavily on privately funded, post high school feeder programs. These include the Craftsbury Green Racing Project and the Stratton Mountain School T2 in Vermont, along with Alaska Pacific University and top NCAA schools that fund development through their ski teams. The National Nordic Foundation—a nonprofit grassroots organization—also lends support to up-and-coming Nordic skiers. Success depends on cooperation and communication between all these organizations and the national federation. Here, too, the Alpine team can take notes on how to fully embrace and optimize development resources.
World Class captures many pivotal moments, be they inspirational success, resilience after failure or the necessary readjustments when the magic seemed to be gone, and tells a story that goes well beyond the success of one team. As Sadie Bjornsen said after her first individual World Cup podium: “…We are dreamers. But we are also believers. It’s crazy how much confidence you can get from a teammate’s success if you allow yourself to stand beside them.”
World Class: The Making of the U.S. Women’s Cross-Country Ski Team by Peggy Shinn. Published by ForeEdge (2018); 248 pages, 38 color illustrations; $19.95 paperback, $14.99 e-book (www.ForeEdgeBooks.com).
The Fall Line: How American Ski Racers Conquered a Sport on the Edge
By Nathaniel Vinton
Reviewed by Seth Masia
Followers of American ski racing should feel a bit dizzy at the prospect that the U.S. Ski Team goes into the 2015 Alpine World Championships with a baker’s dozen of racers who have achieved the podium in World Cup races, and six who have won gold medals in recent World Championships or Olympics. The team has never before had this kind of depth – even at the 1984 Sarajevo Olympics, when five Americans medaled, the team claimed only six or seven world class performers.
This era of heady success had its first flowering in Vancouver, in 2010, when Americans won eight alpine medals – five of them by the outsize personalities Bode Miller and Lindsey Vonn. These two athletes, dramatically different in temperament, have piled up World Cup championships while winning in all disciplines. Nathaniel Vinton, who has followed both racers closely for Ski Racing, the New York Times and the New York Daily News, has produced a classic study of the way Miller and Vonn came their separate ways to the top of the sport.
The book is a dual biography, following Miller and Vonn from early childhood, but diving deep into their recoveries from the disappointments of Torino, to triumph at Whistler. Both athletes skied and won while hurt, and both showed fierce determination in recovering after injury, scoring their greatest triumphs in come-backs after surgery.
Miller and Vonn are natural talents, but in Vinton’s account they emerge as wildly different in character. While Vonn is a study in focused, disciplined ambition, Miller seems chiefly fascinated by the ways he can move through space. Vonn’s family made extraordinary sacrifices to support her talent; Miller’s family, supremely at home in their environment, gave him the freedom to expand in it. The young Miller trained himself by the running the smooth round rocks of the Carrabassett River and speeding, unsupervised, across the ice at Cannon Mountain; the young Lindsey Kildow grew up skiing endless runs of slalom at Buck Hill and Golden Peak. Miller can be said to have supervised his own development, to the extent of splitting off from the U.S. Ski Team for two years to hire his own support crew (he won the World Cup overall title as an independent); Vonn relied on the support of expert coaches, from Erich Sailer and Chip Woods to husband/mentor/manager Thomas Vonn. Vonn is savvy and polished in dealing with the press; Miller’s indifference to appearances has often led reporters into undignified frenzies of gossip-mongering.
Vinton tells a complex story involving dozens of racers, coaches, technicians, sponsors and family members. In a year-long competition like the World Cup circuit, the decisions and accidents of any single racer can have a cascade of consequences through the entire shifting hierarchy. His turn-by-turn descriptions of the ways skiers win – or crash – in significant races are among the best you’ll find in the literature. The Fall Line is a must-read for ski racing fans. Official publication date is February 2, which coincides with the opening event of the World Championships, the women’s Super G. You might want to read it while Vonn and Miller, plus Julia Mancuso, Ted Ligety, Mikaela Shiffrin and their international rivals, make new history at Beaver Creek.
A new ski film by Greg Stump attempts to tell the history of the ski film.
Seldom has a new ski movie been awaited as impatiently
as Greg Stump’s Legend of Aahhh’s…at least not since skiers stood eagerly in line in 1949 to view John Jay’s new 16mm annual opus at high school auditoriums around the country. Stump’s film toured North America last fall and winter and is now available on DVD.
A former national junior freestyle champion from Maine, Stump is the cinematographer who in 1988 produced a stunning work that captivated the emerging freestyle, extreme and snowboard generation and its hitherto little-known stars. The movie was Blizzard of Aahhh’s.
Melding ski action hyped with cutting-edge music by Britain’s Trevor Horn, Blizzard is Stump’s best work. Two more action films followed. Then the well ran dry, or Stump feared for the lives of the risk-taking performers, or both. He turned to producing music videos and commercial work. More than 18 years have passed since he last made a significant extreme ski flick. And now we have the historical Legend of Aahhh’s.
Stump has spent the past couple of years trying different cuts and approaches to redact his film to a running length of 93 minutes. It was a struggle because the director found himself trying to make two films in one. Legend endeavors to tell the history of ski moviemaking, as well as the cultural history of extreme skiing, powerfully visible today on magazine covers and in equipment and resort advertising.
Extreme skiing—mastering the descents of precipitous couloirs and the world’s highest mountains—was born in the Alps, around Chamonix. The world first learned about “extreme” in the 1960s in the person of the skieur de l’impossible Sylvain Saudan, who made Chamonix his home. Chamonix is where Stump’s film characters—Scot Schmidt, Mike Hattrup and Glen Plake, with his 15-inch-high, bleached-blond Mohawk hair ensemble—established their extreme reputations. So it’s odd that Saudan is ignored in Legend of Aahhh’s. That is just the beginning of the historical omissions and factual errors that mar the film.
Frenchman Patrick Vallençant, who created the pedal-hop turn still used on the steepest terrain, goes unmentioned in Legend. Stump does include Bill Briggs, who made the first ski descent of Grand Teton.
In Legend, Stump suggests that Schmidt’s and Plake’s interview with Greg Gumbel on the Today Show in 1988 first drew mass media attention to extreme skiing. Correction needed. Japan’s 1975 theatrical film The Man who Skied Down Everest was viewed a dozen years earlier by hundreds of thousands of people around the world.
What is true is that a new genre of extreme skiing was pioneered 25 years ago by young Americans. That they came to be better known than extreme skiing’s founders is because a young, extraordinarily talented cinematographer—Greg Stump—displayed them in a spectacular, innovating way. Their notoriety is inseparable from Stump and filmmaking.
In Legend of Aahhh’s Stump pays generous tribute to his filmmaking antecedents, beginning in the 1920s with Arnold Fanck, Leni Riefenstahl, and on to John Jay, Dick Durrance, Warren Miller, Dick Barrymore and Roger Brown. Inexplicably overlooked by Stump, however, is the work of Germany’s Willy Bogner, Jr., whose exotic filming, commencing in the 1960s, visually anticipated the 21st century ski movie. And who other than Bogner has made a ski movie for IMAX?
The apotheosis of the historical ascent of ski cinematography in Stump’s mind is Stump himself, buttressed by scores of admirers who tiresomely iterate that Blizzard of Aahhh’s is “the greatest ski movie ever made.” Added is the claim, made in the Denver Post, that Stump was the first ski moviemaker to cut his film to music. He wasn’t. The first was Barry Corbet who did it in his 1968 editing of Ski the Outer Limits.
At least half of Legends of Aahhh’s is devoted to Blizzard…rather like Alfred Hitchcock making a flattering movie to establish the claim that Psycho is the greatest suspense film ever made. It’s doubtful Hitch would have so indulged himself.
Of course, the best ski movie ever made, textured with a real story, was director Michael Ritchie’s Downhill Racer, starring Robert Redford and Gene Hackman, with screenplay by best-selling author James Salter. As much as anything, Downhill Racer owes its primacy over the years to the continued filming of ski flicks having plots, if any, that barely rise above the level of children’s nursery literature.
To his great credit, Stump proceeds toward the end of Legend to show the outstanding latter-day work of Teton Gravity, and notably of Matchstick Productions, the production quality and visuals of whose 21st century films largely exceed those of Stump, for reasons having a lot to do with advances in cinematographic technology. Stump was not a rival anyway. He withdrew from making films that exposed the actors to risk of death after two of his performers were almost killed in an avalanche in 1995. His was a wise, ethical, calculated decision, worthy of imitation, and partly inspired by his hero Barrymore.
Much of the visual in Legend of Aahhh’s consists of action-packed series of skiers leaping and streaming down spectacular, precipitous terrain. The viewer gets a full serving of cliff-jumping, steep gully turn sequences, triggering of avalanches, and high-speed straight shots that take the breath away. It reminds us, however, that the downside of ski movie-making over the past 30 years is its repetitive mindless, unlinked sequences of spectacular action accompanied by loud acid rock soundtracks.
Intermittently throughout Legend, Stump cuts to talking heads (Warren Miller’s appears most often) who offer their perspectives and recollections. Miller tells Stump that he would like to see one latter-day ski film “different from the other hundred and ninety-three that are identical.” Typically absent are human-interest stories about the performers themselves.
“You have no idea who they are,” comments former top freestyler John Clendenin. “You can only watch someone throw dirt off the cliff before you tire of watching.” But for the better part of an hour, it’s what Stump gives us in Legend, perhaps not unaware of the self-criticism. The culmination of some 75 years of ski films is going off a cliff.
But no, it’s not the culmination. The problem with ski filmmaking all along has been absence of story line, or the prevalence of inane, inconsequential plots scorched in negative reviews by critics.
Stump dedicates Legend to Barrymore, who defined why ski moviemakers have been unable to create works attractive to viewers living outside the ski world. The absence of intelligent or intelligible plot, Barrymore once told me, is due to the uncertainty of mountain weather. It limits the aspiring ski moviemaker’s ability to plan ahead. Story lines and scripts, thought out in detail in the office, are thrown out after the first week on location.
“With a normal motion picture,” said Barrymore, “you shoot a film about a story. With a ski film, you make a story about the film you’ve shot.” Legend of Aahhh’s is among the better ones.
John Fry was chief editor of SKI Magazine between 1965 and 1980, publishing multiple stories about early extreme skiers. His book The Story of Modern Skiing, published in 2006, contains an entire chapter devoted to the history of ski moviemaking and broadcast on television. For more information, go to johnfry.net
Legend Of Aahhh's, with a running time of 93 minutes, is available on DVD for $19.95. To order go to blizzardsnowstore.com and click on “Movies.”
If you’re among the thousands of cross-country skiers who’ve won a Canadian Ski Marathon award during the past 45 years, you’ll find your name printed in this voluminous history of what is billed as the world’s longest ski race. It is also North America’s oldest long-distance Nordic race.
Held annually in the second week of February, the Canadian Ski Marathon runs for 160 kilometers over a trail between Lachute and Gatineau, Quebec, with an overnight stop at the classic Chateau Montebello resort. The two-day event is divided into sections. Participants can ski as few as 12 kilometers, or the maximum of 160 kilometers.
Bill Pollack, a Canadian forestry engineer, has assembled the colorful adventures, fierce weather, mishaps and triumphs of each winter’s competition from 1967 to 2011, as told by participants. The book is in French as well as English, and is colorfully illustrated with photographs.
Canadian Ski Marathon: Its History in Stories and Pictures, by Bill Pollack, 300 pages. 140 short stories. $50 including shipping. To order, send check to Bill Pollack, 7123 Chemin du Lac Noir, Ste.-Agathe-des-Monts, Qc J8C 2Z8, Canada. E-mail: bill@tuckamor.ca
Ski Bum is a 90-minute review of the late Warren Miller’s extraordinary career, told through archival footage and one final interview with Warren himself.
The Berkshires of Massachusetts have long been known as a winter sports paradise. Forty-four ski areas popped up across the region from the 1930s to the 1970s. The legendary Thunderbolt Ski Trail put the Berkshires on the map for challenging terrain, while major resorts like Brodie Mountain sparked the popularity of night skiing with lighted trails. All-inclusive areas—like Oak n’ Spruce, Eastover and Jug End—brought thousands of new skiers into the sport between the 1940s and 1970s. Meanwhile, snow trains made it fun and easy for metro-area skiers to plan weekend ski excursions.
In Littleton, New Hampshire, near Cannon Mountain, Lahout’s Country Clothing and Ski Shop has done business at the same location since 1920. Fourteen-year-old Herbert Lahout emigrated from Syria in 1898, and became a railroad laborer. He married his wife Anne in 1919 and the couple sold groceries from a horse-drawn wagon. The following year they moved the business into Littleton’s Old Grange Hall, and lived upstairs. Herb died in 1934 and, in the depths of the Depression, Anne was left to run the store with her kids Gladys, 14, and Joe, 12.
"Ski Bum: The Warren Miller Story," is now showing on Amazon Prime.
Alpine Cooking
The U.S. victory was particularly interesting against the backdrop of Norway’s record 39 Olympic medals in Pyeongchang, accomplished with a mere 109 athletes (Team USA won 23 medals with 242 athletes). The buzzwords behind Norway’s success—culture and team—echo the values portrayed in World Class, a new book by Vermont author Peggy Shinn. They also stand in stark contrast to the dynamics that have evolved on the U.S. Alpine Ski Team in the past decade, where individual superstars have assembled private teams that cater exclusively to their needs. U.S. Alpine success in Pyeongchang was underwhelming, and U.S. Skiing could learn much from the success formula within its own organization. Through extensive research and interviews, Shinn recounts the history of the U.S. Nordic Ski Team, and details the team’s journey from the low point in 2005–2006—when the U.S. did not even name a women’s Nordic ski team for the World Cup season—to the spring of 2017, when a full team of medal-ready women stood poised to make history. 
