This 616-page book is not something you lug to the beach. It’s a skiing media extravaganza that takes you from the Alpine heart of Europe through the Mediterranean—skiing on Corsica, anybody?—then to the north. Denmark’s green carpet of Neveplast on the roof of Copenhagen’s power plant can give you an 85-foot vertical, 365 days of the year. Move on to Eastern Europe, and to the Americas north and south, and elsewhere on the corners of the globe. This is, after all, Skiing Around the World, Volume II: Collecting Ski Resorts, by Jimmy Petterson.
Journey to the sands of Qatar and Oman, and to the massive indoor-skiing center of Dubai (104° F outside and 25° F inside). Continue to Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, North Korea—Kim Il Jung’s Masikryong does not compare well with PyeongChang, the 2018 Olympic venue in South Korea, especially for lifts.
Petterson travels as far east as Kamchatka and finishes in Antarctica: an exhausting, pleasurable, sometimes enchanting 45 chapters. Whew! You could consider it a hardcover skier’s bucket list.
How does Petterson do it—and on senior-citizen knees? The answer: live a life full of curiosity, as we are all told we should do, spiced up with the athletic joy to keep your body in motion. Every page supports that life theory. Here are magnificent skiing photographs: powder spumes follow Petterson making first tracks at Livigno and on pristine glaciers in Antarctica, then panoramic views of Kamchatka. Then ‘tourist’ photos: the author posing with skis on shoulder at St. Basil’s cathedral in Moscow, Ugandans and their animals, the 1,500-room Atlantic Palace Hotel in Dubai. There are enthusiasts skiing and swimming naked, and not a few celebrations, libations and guitar at hand.
Here I sit in rural New Hampshire and I revel in Petterson’s exploits. I ski along with him in the Alps and Scandinavia, at resorts I, too, have known, and I feel a nostalgic rush.
I turn a page or two and am in Peru, then Lesotho (not highly recommended), Greenland and the Ukraine. Turkey looks intriguing. There is a feel for the spray of powder, living free, and having a heck of a time of it for over 40 years. —E. John Allen
Skiing Around the World, Volume II: Collecting Ski Resorts by Jimmy Petterson, Published by Ski Bum Publishing Company, (2019), hardcover, $97, Winner: 2021 ISHA Baldur Award. www.skiingaroundtheworldbook.com
The Forgotten Race of the 10th Mountain Division
On June 3, 1945, the 10th Mountain Division of the US Army held a special race on Mount Mangart. At first glance, this is hardly a breathtaking announcement, but it was the first peace-time race, only 26 days after Germany’s unconditional surrender ended World War II in Europe. However, the authors of Američani na Mangartu 1945. Smučarska tekma 10. gorske divizije na Mangartu 3. junija 1945 (English translation: Americans on Mount Mangart: Ski Race of the 10th Mountain Division at Mount Mangart, Slovenia, on June 3, 1945) are more interested in detailing “a race long forgotten by Americans,” and one of which Slovenians—whose national winter sport is skiing—were unaware.
The race took place on Mount Mangart, 2,679 meters (8,789 feet), situated in today’s Slovenian Triglav National Park. This corner of the world has a varied border history whose modern roots lie in the line between the Kingdom of Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After World War I, a new border was drawn by the 1920 Rapallo Treaty. After World War II, the Morgan Line of demarcation separated Tito’s partisans and the area under Allied military administration. It was signed on June, 10, 1945, and lasted until September 15, 1947, so this ski race took place during the uncertain days of immediate post-war land settlements.
The book, in Slovenian but with chapter summaries in English, includes 10 papers presented at a conference titled Americans on Mount Mangart. The centerpiece is Brigadier Janez Kavar’s essay on the race itself. The essay details the top times: Sgt. Prager (1.05.2), followed by Sgt. Steve Knowlton six seconds back (1.11.4).
There were an astonishing number of DNFs. I can only suppose this is because none of the men had any real race practice while fighting in Italy. Readers will recognize Herbert Schneider, Dev Jennings, John Litchfield and Arthur Doucette to pick four prominent personalities among the 50 men listed.
Supporting essays explain the border problems (Karla Kofol), the general history of military skiing and the Yugoslav Partisan Olympics held in January 1945 (Aleš Guček). Col. Boštjan Blaznik, commander of the NATO Centre of Excellence for Mountain Warfare, presents an overview of modern military skiing.
The book also maintains that Alpina boots and Elan skis made their mark in North America as a result of the American connection. At just over 100 pages, with many photographs, the book brings this uncelebrated military race out of the shadows of
history. —E. John Allen
Americans on Mount Mangart: Ski Race of the 10th Mountain Division at Mount Mangart, Slovenia, on June 3, 1945. Editor: Janez Kavar. Proceedings Editor: Matijo Perko. Editor: Bohinjska Bela, Association of the Slovenian Military Mountaineers. Winner: 2021 ISHA Ullr Award. Available from tomaz.pirjevec@telemach.net.
Visions of Arlberg Past
There has been a recent focus on ski-history photography. In the United States, the interest ranges from an upcoming exhibition of 1950-2000 photos by the New England Ski Museum in Franconia, New Hampshire, to the donation of Ray Atkeson’s photo archive to the University of Oregon. In Europe, an exhibition is planned of the works of Emanuel Gyger and Arnold Klopfenstein, Swiss photographers of the 1920s and ’30s, by the Swiss Alpine Museum in Bern. And now here is Martin Rhomberg and Christof Thöny’s Sichtbar: Eugen Heimhuber: Fotographien am Arlberg und Hochtannberg (English translation: Eugen Heimhuber’s Vision: Photographs of the Arlberg and Hochtannberg.) It’s 128 pages of stunning photographs by Heimhuber (1879-1966), mostly from the 1920s but some earlier.
The book is sourced from a trove of 30,000 glass plates from Heimhuber and covers a number of his excursions. This is, the editors tell us, probably the largest photo collection (estimated 250,000 taken from 1876 to 1960) from a single source with documentation to go with it.
Sichtbar has four short essays in German and translations in English. Sections portray Stuben, St. Christof, St. Anton, Lech, Zürs and Warth. We see the Arlberg before any lifts. We see single and double ski spoor in a lonely line up the Widderstein in February 1911, and on the Schindler Spitz in 1920. It’s a world gone by.
There is St.Anton before the razzmatazz of industrial downhill skiing. And Zürs, today claiming 88 lifts, but the photos show the Edelweiss and Alpenrose inns alone in the landscape.
We learn the importance of regional pioneers such as Dr. Max Madlener of Kempten and Dr. Christof Müller of Immenstadt and, yes, there is a photo of Hannes Schneider jumping off the Rendelschanze (Rendel jump) in 1914. This book is a wonderful evocation of the Arlberg, through the lens of a skilled photographer. — E. John Allen
Eugen Heimhuber’s Vision: Photographs of the Arlberg and Hochtannberg edited by Martin Rhomberg and Christof Thöny. Published by Lorenzi Verlag (2019), 128 pages, hardcover, $30. Winner: 2021 ISHA Skade Award.
Mount Assiniboine: The Story
This coffee-table book, with 336 pages and 382 images, is a tribute to the many people who made Mount Assiniboine so special. Historian Chic Scott has written more than a dozen books on the Canadian Rockies and knows the collections of the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, perhaps, like no other. So it’s not surprising to find Mount Assiniboine: The Story full of evocative photos of the mountains and its people.
The first section starts with the local First Nations, followed by the explorers, priests, and early mountaineers. It ends with James Outram’s first ascent of Assiniboine in September 1901. Four more sections are dominated by personalities.
During 1913-1927, A.O. Wheeler promoted the area to mountaineers and tourists, and in 1922 the Mount Assiniboine Provincial Park came into existence. Then came two mercurial skiers, the Marquis degli Albizzi and Erling Strom, who brought the first skiers into Assiniboine and got the initial Assiniboine Lodge constructed. Strom’s 55-year tenure at the lodge introduces all sorts of characters: horse wranglers, Chinese cooks, guitar-strumming cowboys, dog-sled drivers, Swiss guides, pilots, and a parade of strong women, not least Lizzie Rummel, who ran her own camp for 20 years.
During World War II, the lodge was open only in summer. After the war, although summer tourism picked up, skiing tourists preferred the rope tow, t-bar, and chairlifts. The long haul to Assiniboine on cross-country skis was no longer attractive to clients who did not have a month to spend, but only a weekend for mountain skiing.
Part Five covers the Renner Years (1983-2010), introducing many improvements. It tells how regional bureaucracy at its worst almost removed Sepp and Barb Renner as hosts; they were about to leave the lodge when they learned that their contract had been renewed. After 2010, their work was taken on by their son and two friends—a happy ending.
This book includes the sources used, a good bibliography and index, which all add to the tales of camp and lodge living, to knowledge of the prime movers and to the story of those for whom the mountain came to dominate their lives. —E. John Allen
Mount Assiniboine: The Story by Chic Scott. From Assiniboine Publishing (2020), hardcover, 336 pages and 382 images. $75. Available from The Assiniboine Lodge (assiniboinelodge.com)
The Winter Army, Les Peuples du Ski, Marcel Hirscher
Ullr Award: The Winter Army, by Maurice Isserman
With the publication of his new work, The Winter Army (a 2020 ISHA Ullr Award Winner), Professor Maurice Isserman of Hamilton College has made a valuable contribution to the substantial body of literature tracing the history of the US 10th Mountain Division in the Second World War. Using a variety of available sources written by both historians and the troopers themselves, he has woven a readable history of America’s ski troops from their founding in a New England tavern in 1940, through their rigorous training at Mount Rainier and Camp Hale in the Colorado Rockies, and to their very bloody but victorious campaign in Northern Italy at the very end of the war.
Though the book’s concentration is on the military rather than the skiing aspects of the 10th Mountain Division story, there are still many interesting references to the giants of American ski lore connected to the 10th, including Minnie Dole, Friedl Pfeifer, Pete Seibert and the rest. The author’s real strength is realized, however, when he explores aspects of the 10th Mountain Division’s combat experience that have not been fully covered in the many past works on the famous unit.
Isserman relies heavily on the memoirs of several Division members, especially Marty Daneman’s superb autobiography Do Well or Die. First-hand accounts detail unexplored events, notably the utter carnage on Mount della Torraccia immediately following the Division’s victories on Riva Ridge and Belvedere in February of 1945. Lt. Colonel John Stone made a tragic tactical error, placing his men in a forest to conceal them from German mortar and artillery fire. Isserman cites Daneman’s account of the horrendous results caused to hundreds of soldiers when explosives hit trees above and rained shrapnel into their foxholes and dugouts. While the 10th was perhaps the most well-conditioned and best-educated unit in the U.S. Army, no training could have avoided that catastrophe of failed battlefield leadership.
Another valuable contribution is Isserman’s focus on often-overlooked Nazi atrocities against the local Italian population. In Ronchidoso and elsewhere, SS units had recently murdered Italian children as retribution for partisan activity. When American troops found the bodies, they reacted with a renewed sense of urgency to beat back the Nazis and end the war in Europe.
Despite a few minor quibbles and oversights (the failure to note that ski champion Torger Tokle’s death was caused by friendly fire, the specific insistence that the 10th was not populated with an abnormally high percentage of Catholic, Jewish and Native American members when anecdotally it clearly was), The Winter Army is a fine addition to any ski and 10th Mountain Division library. —Charles J. Sanders
The Winter Army: The World War II Odyssey of the 10th Mountain Division, America’s Elite Alpine Warriors by Maurice Isserman. From Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 336 pages. Hardcover, $33; softcover $16.99, and Kindle editions.
Ullr Award: Skiing Peoples: 10,000 years of history, by Maurice Woerhlé
Where and when did skiing originate? The Ullr Award-winning Les Peuples du Ski: 10,000 ans d’histoire (Skiing Peoples: 10,000 years of history) tackles that question. In 1888, Fridtjof Nansen and his friend, the amateur philologist Andreas Hansen, theorized that it arose in the region between Lake Baikal and the Altai Mountains of Central Asia. From there, they surmised, it spread with migrating tribes to the rest of Siberia and Europe. In recent decades this theory has been accepted and promoted by Chinese and Mongolian anthropologists. Archaeological evidence for skiing in Central Asia goes back about 5,000 years, to the local bronze age.
But archaeological sites in European Russia and recent DNA evidence suggest that skiing began in the Southern Baltic region at the close of the last Ice Age. It then spread eastward all the way across Asia before Arctic tribes settled in what is now Finland, teaching their Scandinavian neighbors to ski.
This is the argument proposed by Maurice Woerhlé in this exhaustively researched book. Drawing on 50 years of Russian archaeology not previously published in the West, and on copious new DNA research, Woerhlé reconstructs the migrations of prehistoric tribes across Eurasia. As glaciers retreated from Europe beginning 15,000 years ago, nomadic hunters moved northeast from near the Pyrenees, and northwest from what is now Ukraine, to create a stable culture south and east of the Baltic. Here, flat marshy land promoted winter travel using sleds and dogs, snowshoes and skis. Tribes so equipped migrated quickly to the Urals and beyond. The Russian archaeologist Grigori Birov has unearthed sled runners and skis carbon dated more than 9,000 years old.
Woerhlé retired 20 years ago after a four-decade career as research engineer at Rossignol (he helped to create the Strato, and all alpine race skis thereafter). Since 2000, he has been traveling to archaeological sites, interviewing scientists, arranging for translations of their studies, and compiling this impressive book (in French). Skiing History will publish, in English, an extract later this year. –Seth Masia
Les Peuples du Ski: 10,000 Ans d’Histoire by Maurice Woehrlé. From Books on Demand, 324 pages, illustrated. €33 softcover, €11.99 e-book.
The 2021 ISHA Awards will be presented April 29 via webinar. See skiinghistory.org/events for details..
Marcel Hirscher: The Biography, edited by Alex Hofstetter
This is the official biography, in German, of Marcel Hirscher, Austria’s recently retired most celebrated skier. Assembled by sports journalist Alex Hofstetter, it draws on diary entries by trainer Michael Pircher, and input from PR chief Stefan Illek. They offer an explanation of the extraordinariness of Hirscher’s skiing career. “Sometimes,” as Hirscher himself said, “I found myself a puzzle.”
The book contains many short essays illustrated by numerous black and white photographs and several sixteen-page folios of photos. At the end are 27 pages of statistics, followed by 17 pages covering the years from Hirscher’s birth in 1989 to his first race in 1996, and on to his retirement in September 2019: a phenomenal career. For those who do not read German, these appendices are easily understandable.
One of the first photos shows airport wagons loaded with equipment, and five members of Team-H setting off for the 2019 Olympics in PyongChang, where Hirscher won gold medals in giant slalom and combined. The photo illustrates that Hirscher’s success was tied to people he trusted implicitly: the vital service-man, ski trainer, physical trainer, psychotherapist, and media man.
Hirscher also relied on the Ferdl-Factor, referring to his father Ferdinand, well known on Austrian television. Ferdinand ran a ski school at Annaberg and had put Marcel on skis at age two. As he grew up, Ferdinand recognized his son’s talent. “It was unbelievable how fast the kid skied,” said Ferdinand.
Ferdinand shot endless videos, piled up notes on equipment used, snow conditions, training. (“Our feet fit in the same shoes”). By 2006, Michael Pircher, at that time training the Austrian World Cup slalom team, saw “einen neuen Star kommen!” And so they worked on “Project Speed,” racing trips in America, all chronicled in Pircher’s diary entries, which give the tale immediacy.
Hirscher had also become an internet star: 605,000 followers on Instagram, 582,000 on Facebook, 179,000 on Twitter. His ‘retirement’ press conference in 2019 was held on prime-time ORF television and live-streamed around the world. It would not surprise me if his flashing style soon graces an Austrian postage stamp, joining the likes of Hermann Maier, Karl Schranz, Benjamin Raich, and Elisabeth Görgl.
In attempting to answer the puzzle of Hirscher, the authors have chosen the “race of all races,” the world championship slalom at Schladming in 2013. The previous winter Hirscher had won his first (of eight) overall World Cup titles. Now all of Austria waited for him to win gold, on native soil. The night before the race, he had not slept, had a stiff neck, migraine and was absolutely washed out. But the next day, 55.47 seconds after he left the starting gate, the 1.9 million Austrians watching on television and 50,000 watching from the side-lines let loose; Hirscher had not failed them.
If he had not skied to the gold medal, he said, “They will slaughter me.” The Schladming race, where he had felt that “a herd of wild dogs was at his heels,” remained for him “the most emotional, impressive victory of my career.” The authors conclude that Marcel no longer has to function like a machine, but has to learn how to live. He will manage all right, “ganz sicher,” that’s certain. —E. John B. Allen
Marcel Hirscher, die biografie, by Alex Hofstetter, Stefan Illek and Michael Pricher. Available from: Egoth Verlag (egot.at). € 29.90
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 1953, 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 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.blueoxpress.com. —Chris I. Lizza
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
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. $22 softcover, Kindle edition available. Winner: 2019 ISHA Skade Award.
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 Forgotten Race of the 10th Mountain Division
Visions of Arlberg Past
Mount Assiniboine: The Story
Ullr Award: Skiing Peoples: 10,000 years of history, by Maurice Woerhlé
Marcel Hirscher: The Biography, edited by Alex Hofstetter
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. 
