Manhattan Project Skiers: Los Alamos Ski Club Celebrates 75 Years

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In 1943, Manhattan Project scientists took to the snow. They’ve never quit.

In July, 2018, newspapers around the American Southwest noted the 75th anniversary of the founding of Los Alamos National Laboratory, in 1943 code-named the Manhattan District. Less widely reported, in November: the 75th anniversary celebration of the Los Alamos Ski Club, owner and operator of the nonprofit Pajarito Mountain ski area.

The Los Alamos club, as far as is known, is the only ski club founded by nuclear physicists. Many of the young scientists recruited to develop a British-American atomic bomb were Central European refugees from Nazi-occupied lands – men and women who, in their university days, spent holidays climbing and skiing in the Alps, and some who escaped literally under fire. The rest were PhDs and grad students recruited from physics and chemistry departments across the United States, Canada and Great Britain. According to Deanna Morgan Kirby, in her excellent history Just Crazy to Ski, average age of the new population was 26. If there ever was a demographic destined to ski, it was this population of fit intellectual adventurers.

The new laboratory inhabited the campus of the Los Alamos Ranch School, a college-prep academy for boys that emphasized rugged outdoor living. At 7,320 feet elevation, the school got snow in winter. The kids played ice hockey on Ashley Pond (named for the school’s founder, Detroit businessman Ashley Pond), and skied up 10,440-foot Pajarito Mountain, seven miles to the west. The U.S. Army’s Manhattan Project, under the command of General Leslie Groves, chose the site because its dormitories and classroom buildings offered suitable office and laboratory space in splendid isolation from population centers of any description. The Army then bulldozed much of the site to build new labs, workshops and temporary housing for hundreds of young families, and dormitories for the unmarried folk of both sexes. Scientists arriving at this secret destination in the summer of 1943 found a dusty construction site surrounded by the scenic splendor of high desert. Everyone worked long days, but had Sundays free to hike, climb, ride horses and otherwise recreate in the mountains. Winter brought skating parties and, of course, skiing.

The new arrivals included a number of keen cross-country skiers and mountaineers, including Enrico Fermi (Nobel laureate, 1938) and his longtime associate Emilio Segrè (Nobel 1959); Cornell professor Hans Bethe (Nobel 1967); Niels Bohr (Nobel 1922); Harvard professor George Kistiakowsky and his explosives-lab partner Walter Kauzman; Berkeley grads Ben and Beckie Diven; and several grad students drafted into the Army’s Special Engineering Detachment. By November, 1943, as the first snows of a heavy winter descended on the Los Alamos plateau, the skiers, most equipped with the Army’s ponderous hickory skis, toured into the surrounding highlands.

In April, 1944, one of these trips turned into a grueling four-day rescue when University of Chicago physicist James Coon sustained a spiral fracture of the tibia. None of his seven colleagues had first-aid training, there were no communication facilities, and none of the local doctors knew how to ski. By the time Coon could be loaded into an ambulance, it was clear that the Los Alamos ski group needed a trained ski patrol – which implied a more formal level of organization.

That summer, the skiers began widening the Ranch School’s ski trails on Sawyer’s Hill, a few miles west of the security fence (the Army controlled thousands of acres, free of supervision by county and state authorities). The lightweight one-man chain saw would not reach the market until 1960. To speed the work, George Kistiakowsky, developer of the shaped explosives used to compress the bomb’s plutonium core to critical mass, came up with a “necklace” of plastic explosive meant to blast through each tree trunk near the ground. It worked.

Then three of the enlisted engineers, headed by John Rogers (a future pioneer of cryogenic physics), assembled components for a rope tow. At a junkyard in Albuquerque they scored a 1932 Chrysler engine and some Ford Model A wheels to use as pulleys. Kistiakowsky organized a nonprofit club to pay for the rope tow, and by November 10, 130 people paid dues. The volunteers went back to work, blasting a route for the rope. The Army agreed to plow four miles of road, send a bulldozer to level a parking area, and provide gasoline for the tow. On November 13, the club voted itself into formal existence as the Los Alamos Sawyer’s Hill Ski Tow Association.

The Navy had taken all the new manila rope so the three engineers scavenged short lengths of worn-out rope from a circus tent and spliced them together, enough for a 400-foot run. In operation, the rope shredded going around the Model A bullwheel, and had to be respliced several times a day. And – a serious design flaw – the Chrysler engine sat at the top of the tow, forcing lifty Harry Snowden to drive up an icy road, hauling cans of fuel, to the upper terminus just to start the machine each morning.

With the tow in operation, dozens of nonskiers showed up to learn the sport. Experienced skiers got bored with the short runs. Enrico Fermi began leading ambitious ski tours. Kistiakowsy scrounged up a couple of M29 Weasels that could tow skiers to runs well above the top of the rope.

No one stepped forward to teach beginners, but Kistiakowsy, a Ukrainian Cossack educated in Berlin, skied an elegant feet-together Arlberg style that served as an model for aspirants. Best skier in the group, by far, was the powerful Joan Hinton, who learned to ski at the Putney School in Vermont – so well that she’d been named to the 1940 Olympic squad. Without the distraction of ski racing, she earned a PhD in physics from the University of Wisconsin and went straight to Los Alamos.

As the ski season wound down in the spring of 1945, work on the bomb accelerated and the scientists had little time for recreation. In August the Trinity test, followed by the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, marked the success of the enterprise. Before snow fell again, two-thirds of the Los Alamos population departed to resume science elsewhere. The ski club entered peacetime with access to 2,000 feet of brand new rope, and a high-tech bullwheel engineered in the atomic-bomb shop. The skiers built a second, longer tow – this time with a new International Harvester diesel engine located at the base. Kistiakowsy, with his explosives-lab colleague Les Seely, was on hand to blast trees off the new lift line and some longer trails.

Snow came late that winter, the ski tows had a short season, and by the spring of 1946 club members began exploring Pajarito Mountain for higher terrain and more reliable snowpack. Peacetime also brought much free time to the remaining Los Alamos population, and the club transformed. With Seely as president, the newly-incorporated, nonprofit Los Alamos Ski Club formed a five-man chapter of the National Ski Patrol, led by Purdue physicist John Orndoff, and a two-man ski school.

The winter of 1947-48 came early and the snow fell deep. More new skiers came out, and the rope tow engines, which had to be pre-heated and hand cranked to start each frigid morning, were worked hard. On February 29, 300 celebrants turned out for the club’s first Skiesta party, beginning a 70-year tradition. That summer, the Atomic Energy Commission – which now owned and ran the Los Alamos lab and all its supporting infrastructure – authorized $6,800 to build an 800-square foot base lodge. Seely blew up more trees, to make new trails and supply the lodge with firewood.

In fact, the next five winters brought excellent snow, and skiing boomed at Sawyer’s Hill. The club invited Buzz and Jean Bainbridge, from Santa Fe Ski Basin, to take over the ski school. Whole families turned out to cut new trails, armed with cross-cut saws instead of plastic explosives. But 1956 brought drought. In March, 1957, 13 club members set out in a couple of jeeps to find better conditions on Pajarito Mountain, where, years earlier, Ranch School instructor Hup Wallis had cut a short ski trail. When the jeeps bogged down in the four-foot snowpack, the party climbed to the summit on skis. The club quickly voted to move the whole operation to the big hill. The Pajarito terrain – 1,400 vertical feet of it – faced north (Sawyer’s Hill faced east). In every respect Pajarito promised better skiing. But the seven-mile road in was impassable, the nearest electrical supply was at the lab and, of course, everything from trail clearing to lift construction would have to be done – and financed – by volunteer crews.

By this time Los Alamos constituted its own county. The county and the ski club together designated $15,000 for road improvement. Half that went to a construction company to grade the road, $1,200 for gravel, and the rest went to pay local teenagers to do the manual labor. The road opened in September – still a hairy drive but doable by rear-wheel-drive cars and busses, most days. Meanwhile dozens of volunteers devoted weekends to clearing trails through the rainiest, muddiest August anyone could remember. Not all the felled timber could be cleared out before heavy autumn snows, so skiers skittered over deadfall all winter on the trail they called Lumberyard. In October, volunteers crews moved an Army surplus building to the site, through three feet of new snow, to serve as the base lodge.  In November, one of the Sawyer Hill rope tow engines moved to Pajarito, where it powered a 2,300 foot tow rising 600 feet – possibly the longest rope tow in the world. The tow opened for business on November 12. The beginner tow moved in for Christmas, using sheaves machined from solid plate in the Los Alamos government shop. That winter, 365 club members enjoyed 38 days of weekend and holiday skiing, with 14 feet of snow. The following summer, Rope Tow 3 rose 485 feet to the summit.

By now, with H-bomb development finished, security had loosened at Los Alamos and in the years to follow the club could sell passes to the general public. The upper rope was far too steep for all but the strongest skiers, and the club began to plan for installation of a T-bar to the East Summit, with its own complex of trails. The new lift required a four-mile power line. The club raised $60,000 by selling 10-year season passes, and over the summer of 1962 the volunteers dug footings for the power poles and lift towers. The 3,300-foot Hall T-bar ran that winter, carrying 800 skiers per hour to the summit. At the same time, the club built a larger base lodge, complete with cafeteria.

Skiing grew more popular still, and crowding became a problem on the trails, lifts, lodges and parking lot. The steeper trails grew giant moguls. The club acquired 400 additional acres from the Atomic Energy Commission, and by 1965 cleared more trails (finally using modern chain saws), expanded the base lodge, and bought a John Deere 350 bulldozer for contouring and mogul-cutting. As a snow-grooming machine the bulldozer left much to be desired – after it rolled several times, it was replaced with a real snow-cat. The first chairlift went in over the summer of 1969, with more chairs, and new terrain, following in 1976, 1981, 1982 and 1994, with a new base lodge in 1987.

Today, the trail network extends across two miles of Pajarito’s north aspect. Following several snowless winters in the 1990s, club membership fell from its peak of 4,000, leading to financial crisis. After putting in a snowmaking system for the 2010 season – and after a couple of disastrous forest fires -- the club ran out of funds. Over the next several years the club negotiated transfer of the facilities to a public-private partnership between the county and a private management company now called the Pajarito Recreation Limited Partnership, which operates three other New Mexico ski areas. The club still owns the land.

This story is based on Deanna Kirby’s book Just Crazy to Ski: A fifty-year history of skiing at Los Alamos (Los Alamos Historical Society, 2003); “A Short History of the Los Alamos Ski Club” by Paul Allison and George Lawrence (LASC, 2018); and The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes (Simon & Schuster, 1987).

 

Pajarito Facts

Base elevation: 9,000 feet

Summit elevation: 10,440 feet

Skiable acres: 750

Trails: 44 (20% easy, 50% intermediate, 30% difficult)

Lifts: 5 (1 quad, 1 triple, 3 double, 1 Magic Carpet) 

Terrain Parks: 2

Average winter season: mid-November to mid-March

On-mountain facilities: Rentals, Snowsports School, Retail, Pajarito Mountain Cafe