1940s

Museum reunites Don Amick family with 76-year-old trophy

The Washington State Ski and Snowboard Museum on Snoqualmie Pass in Washington State may be smaller than other ski museums but its mission and abilities to bring together and celebrate ski and snowboard history of the region are far reaching.

Recently, museum founder Dave Moffett was contacted by Darla Baldwin who was in possession of a large silver award platter from the legendary Silver Skis races on Mt. Rainier. Darla came from a non-skiing family in the Yakima Valley of Washington and had no idea how her family came in possession of the trophy which she wanted to donate to the museum.

The 1947 silver platter bore no information on the awardee, only noting a third-place award for the open races. Museum volunteers went to work digging and it did not take long before the museum’s local ski historian Lowell Skoog found that Don Amick, who became a member of the 1948 U.S. Ski Team, was the third-place finisher. Further information was found in the archives of the Seattle Post Intelligencer, the newspaper that sponsored the races from its notorious beginnings in 1934.

The legendary Silver Skis races are well known to local ski enthusiasts as they involved a fast action down mountain kamikaze-like schuss dropping over 4,000 feet. From the 10,000-foot-elevation of Camp Muir on Mt. Rainier, brave racers hurtled down through few control gates over wide-ranging snow conditions, skirting treacherous rock outcroppings leading down toward Paradise Inn (see Skiing Heritage, September 2004).

The post-race account of the 1947 Silver Skis in the Seattle PI noted that Sun Valley instructor Willard South took first place followed by 10^th Mountain Division vet Karl Stingl, just seconds behind, and Washington Ski Club skier Don Amick was awarded third place with a calculated time just 8 seconds behind winner South.

Curiously, the “calculated time” resulted from Amick missing the finish banner by following the traditional course and descending into Edith Creek Basin, losing valuable seconds. The newspaper recap noted that the finish gate was changed by officials at the last minute due to concern over slushy conditions in the lower basin. Further, Amick was not the only skier to miss the finish as the course was advertised, up to the day prior, to end in Edith Basin as it had in previous races. Finish judges and timers compensated for the "runner's errors" by "catching them at an angle across the finish” leading to Don being awarded the “calculated” third place finish.

Such confusion in ski racing is unlikely in today’s events, but races in those days did not benefit from electronic timing gates. Rather race officials appointed timers armed with stop watches to track each participant’s time. To determine the order of the finish the timers’ compared results. Misinterpretation or premature release of result tallies sometimes led to “recalculations”, and notably, this also occurred in the Junior Silver Skis races held the next day.

Armed with intrigue, museum volunteers contacted Russ Amick, the eldest member of the long-time Seattle skiing family. It didn’t take Russ long to recall the event, even though he was only seven at the time. He remembered he and his mother waiting for his dad to finish, noting the incident was bizarre and stills creates a strong memory for him. Russ figured his father never took possession of the trophy because of the mix up.

In corroborating the story further, a 1993 account of the Silver Skis races by John Garibaldi in a 1990s periodical titled “Free Snow”, included an interview with Amick where Don noted in that particular Silver Skis race, organizers failed to tell racers they had changed the course. After not seeing the finish banner he exclaimed - “My God-you’ve lost your marbles kid”.  Don recounted that he tried hiking back up slope where officials asked him if he had been told of the change in finish, to which he immediately replied “no!”. At that point Don packed up his wife and kids and left, but organizers later than night showed up at his home with the silver platter. However, Don said “No, take it back” and what happened next to the silver platter was not clear and in 1993 Don had no idea where the trophy was.

With the mystery somewhat resolved, the close-knit Amick family was please to take possession of the wayward trophy and its saga. For Russ, he did not seem surprised about the mysterious disappearance, thinking of it as another intriguing story about the legacy of his sprightly father.

Leonetto Cappiello has been called “the father of modern advertising” because he broke the norms of poster art. Early advertising tended to look like a painting, too cluttered sometimes. Cappiello often depicted individual figures in motion. In this ski travel poster, he was not afraid to leave the white slope open. It intensified the illusion of speed.

Cappiello was born in Italy but mainly lived and worked in Paris. With no formal art training, he had his first exhibition in 1892. Today, some of his paintings are displayed in the Museo Civio Giovanni Fatori in Livorno. He then worked as a caricaturist for the most popular humor magazines in France, Le Rire, Le Sourire, L’Assiette au Beurre and Femina. In 1896 his first collection of caricatures was published.

From 1900 on, he painted posters that came to revolutionize advertising. This was the era when Paris walls were plastered with posters advertising just about everything. Cappiello realized that he had to distinguish his work from the others. Speed was one of the ingredients of modernization; wasn’t Citius—Fastest—the first of the three goals of the modern Olympics? Altius and Fortius, highest and strongest, came second and third.

This 1929 illustration promotes Superbagnères-Luchon in the French Pyrenees. It has that art deco look in which speed is symbolized by the flying scarf and the swirl of the ski tracks on those vast open snowfields. And how to reach Superbagnères? Look at the top to see the Chemins de Fer du Midi, the railway line that will get you to the palatial hotel.

For those interested in the mechanics of the poster business, look at the bottom left, and you will see the word Devambez. Monsieur Devambez was what can be best described as an agent for poster artists. He would contact clients with whom he would put artists like Cappiello in touch. Cappiello was favored by such big-name businesses as Campari, Pirelli tires, Mistinguett at the Casino de Paris and others. It was a successful arrangement.

And Cappiello’s 1929 ski poster was influential enough to be followed in 1932 by a similar design for the same resort. This time there was one figure, not three. It was by the lesser-known artist R. Sonderer. 

The "horse-kick" turn, introduced by Emile Allais, evolved into down-unweighting.

In the library of ski techniques, ruade is a rarity. At one time it had significant currency in some upper echelons of skiing but is now virtually extinct.

Illustration above: Édouard Frendo’s book introduced ruade—and down-unweighting—to the world.

It was developed in France in the 1940s, and championed by Emile Allais, for the purpose of making short-radius parallel turns. The French wanted skiers to get beyond the stem christiania as soon as possible, and felt that up-unweighting and shoulder rotation imposed too ponderous a tempo to work for short-radius, parallel turns, especially at lower speeds, on steeper slopes and in difficult snow.

What was needed at turn initiation was a way for a skier to unweight and rotate the skis in a single motion, then get the weight back down on the skis instantly. How do you do that on stiff, seven-foot wooden skis while wearing low, soft boots and using imprecise cable bindings?

The French solution was the ruade—literally a “horse-kick.” The idea was, starting from a tall stance, to pull the feet up and rock forward, thereby lifting the tails while keeping the tips planted on the snow. This was the

introduction of what would later be called down-unweighting. Start to finish, ruade was much quicker than up-unweighting, and it put the skier back on the snow in a lower, more athletic posture to control the rest of the turn. Keeping the tips on the snow provided a pivot point, making it easy to swing the tails sideways while they were unweighted. In loose snow this technique had the added benefit of getting the skis out of the snow during the edge change, thereby avoiding catching an outside edge.

In 1946, Édouard Frendo, then director of Chamonix’s École Supérieure de Ski et d´Alpinisme, provided a detailed exposition of ruade in his book Le ski par la technique française. He described the novel down-unweighting move this way: “The kick is executed only by a sudden bending of the legs under the thighs, by strong bending of the knees and maximum ankle flexion, without a jump. It therefore represents a considerable time saving and allows faster, shorter turns.”

It’s important to note the emphasis on the skier actively pulling the feet up. This isn’t passively down-unweighting by relaxing muscles in the legs, hips and back and letting your body fall. It’s actively down-unweighting by contracting muscles to make your body fold. This novelty would show up later, in a highly evolved form, in Jean-Claude Killy’s skiing. George Joubert called it avalement.

Allais followed in 1947 with his own book, which appeared in the U.S. under the title How to Ski by the French Method—Emile Allais’ Technic [sic]. This book was refreshingly light on text and laden with visuals, providing page upon page of graphically annotated photos and photo sequences.

Ruade comes to California

When Allais came to America in the late 1940s, he brought ruade with him. He had particular influence in California, especially at Squaw Valley, where he founded the ski school. Tyler Micoleau, a denizen of the early Tahoe ski area, wrote two books in the early 1950s, The Squaw Valley Story and Power Skiing Illustrated, in which he described Allais’ influence in general and the use of ruade in particular. California, a melting pot of different approaches to skiing, embraced ruade. Hans Georg, a Swiss veteran of the 10th Mountain Division who settled in Mammoth, gave it special mention in his 1954 book, Modern Ski Systems, and wrote a feature on the technique for the January 1956 issue of SKI.

It’s possible that this American infatuation with ruade was a misinterpretation of Allais’ message, focusing on the exotic and radical and interpreting it as essential and fundamental. It’s also possible that French nationalism motivated the École du ski français (ESF) program to highlight a technique that no one else had ever imagined. In a personal communication, Maurice Woerhlé recalls being told by Georges Joubert that, on returning from the U.S., Allais washorrified to learn that la ruade had become the final stage of the ESF program. Allais had regarded it mostly as a training tool. Bill Lash, who with Junior Bounous got to spend some time with Allais at Squaw Valley, similarly reports that Allais treated it as an exercise.

Ultimately, ruade in its mid-20th century form faded from sight. Woehrlé described it as “quasi-impossible to learn.” Better equipment reduced the need for such dramatic movements for making short turns, and the technique never osmosed very far beyond the Sierra Nevada

mountains in the U.S. The French, too, lost interest.

The technique’s fundamental components, however, didn’t disappear from skiing or, for that matter, from snowboarding. Active down-unweighting, which to my knowledge was first described in Frendo’s book, has been alive and well ever since. And the mechanism of making the skis turn by keeping the tips pressed to the snow while unweighting the rest of the ski is used all the time, even though it’s not a named technique in any system I know of. 

The author would like to thank Maurice Woehrlé and Bill Lash for their help in developing this article.

Meet the folks who built Aspen’s first chairlifts, 75 years ago.

Aspen Mountain celebrates its 75th anniversary of lift-served slopes this winter, but the area’s skiing history started well before that. In 1899, cut off from supplies by a fierce snowstorm, miners fashioned crude skis from the board walls of their homes and schussed down to Aspen. According to the Aspen Historical Society, the refugees dubbed their escape the first race of the “Hunter’s Pass Ski Club.”

Photo above: The lower mountain in 1947, shows Roch Run and Lift One. To the right of Roch Run is the cut path of the boat tow, which carried skiers through 1946 when Lift One was opened. Aspen Historical Society photo.

Most of the mines closed, but skiing survived. In 1936, several skiers, including Swiss mountaineer André Roch, planned a ski area at Mount Hayden, a few miles southwest of Aspen (see Skiing History, March-April 2021). Roch also plotted the first ski run on Aspen Mountain that year, and it was cut the following summer. Skiers could skin up or catch a ride up the backside on mining trucks. Starting in January 1938, the eight-seat “boat tow” ran 600 feet up the front. The boat was a pair of sleds, hauled by a cable along old mine hoists, powered by a Studebaker engine. Skiers built a warming hut and even a 55-meter ski jump.

“From a local perspective, Aspen was already known as a ski place,” says Tim Willoughby, a former schoolteacher who grew up in town and now contributes a weekly history column to the Aspen Times. He adds that ski clubs came from around the country to race, and the national downhill and slalom championships took place on Roch Run in 1941.

Pfeifer meets the Paepckes

Friedl Pfeifer, an Arlberg-Kandahar combined champion and wounded 10th Mountain Division vet, knew Aspen from his time teaching troops at Camp Hale. He envisioned a full-fledged ski resort on Aspen Mountain and returned there after getting out of the hospital in August 1945. By December, partnered with John Litchfield and Percy Rideout, he had a ski school operating, served by a new rope tow as well as the boat tow.

At the same time—the summer of 1945—outdoorswoman and skier Elizabeth Nitze Paepcke brought her husband, Chicago industrialist Walter Paepcke, to Aspen. Paepcke envisioned a cultural center capable of attracting artists, musicians and

intellectuals to a mountain retreat. He immediately invested more than $10,000 in bargain-priced downtown real estate. According to the Chicago Tribune (January 28, 2001), in order to assure the success of his investments and his cultural center, Paepcke threw in with Pfeifer’s ski-resort proposal.

Paepcke, Pfeifer, Litchfield and Rideout formed the Aspen Ski Corporation in 1946. Paepcke undertook to raise $300,000 for lift construction, mostly among Chicago investors. As

they planned the lifts, the new partners had to negotiate leases with the owners of mining claims scattered around the mountain. Denver attorney Bill Hodges was hired to help with the process, and became an investor. Many of the claims belonged to D.R.C. “Darcy” Brown Jr., who then invested in the Ski Corp., too.

Local crews pitch in

In summer 1946, construction began on two single-chair lifts that together would ferry skiers more than 3,000 vertical feet to the summit, opening a vast swath of terrain and creating one of the country’s premier ski destinations. A September 1946 article in the Aspen Daily Times reported that Lift 1 would be the world’s longest (at 8,400 feet in distance) and fastest chair (550 feet/minute), as well as the one with the most capacity (275 riders/hour) and largest vertical rise (2,400 feet). The lifts would serve more than 22 miles of ski trails.

As lift lines were cleared and construction started, a trail crew headed by Litchfield and Rideout cut new runs and widened Roch Run. Wrote the Aspen Times in 1945, “Contrary to the popular belief that skiing on Aspen Mountain will be only for the above average, there will be many places on the upper slopes … that will satisfy and delight every class of ability.”

Delayed parts

The transformation into a ski hill overlapped the end of the mining era. Willoughby’s uncle, Frank, a mining engineer and president of the ski club, surveyed the lift lines. Willoughby’s father, Fred Jr., worked in the family’s Midnight Mine on the mountain’s backside, and helped oversee construction of Lifts 1 and 2. As Willoughby relates, the lift tower foundations had been prepped, but the towers themselves were delayed and didn’t arrive until late in October, when snow had already begun to fall.

Paul Purchard, a Swiss-born engineer then living in Denver, designed some of the Lift 1 components. His future son-in-law Harry Poschman, a 10th Mountain veteran, worked on the construction crew pushing to get the chairs in place for the winter. “He said it was miserable work,” said Harry's son Greg Poschman, today a Pitkin County Commissioner. “They got the last bullwheels on as the snow was flying.”

Then the Lift 1 electric motor didn’t show up (partially due to a post-war copper shortage), and a backup gasoline engine ran it the first winter. When Fred Willoughby became superintendent of lift operations, he had to go partway up the mountain every morning to fire up the engine (an electric motor could have been turned on from the base). Meanwhile, Lift 2 had a money-saving design that used recycled mining-tram parts. “The whole winter my father kept fixing that lift,” says Tim Willoughby. The next season, Fred Jr. was back with the family business. “He was a miner,” Willoughby adds. “Running the ski lifts wasn’t what he wanted to do.”

The mountaintop Sundeck, an innovative octagonal day lodge designed by prominent Bauhaus architect Herbert Bayer, was completed in November.

When Lift 1 debuted on December 14, 1946, rides were free for the day; afterward, a day pass cost $3.75 ($1.50 for locals), about $53 and $21 in today’s money. Lift 2 opened the following week. On January 11, 1947, the official grand opening took place, with Colorado’s Governor-elect William Lee Knaus, Senator Edwin Johnson, other dignitaries and a slew of media on hand.

45-minute ride

A ride to the summit via the two chairs lasted 45 minutes. Skiers shivered with cold. A yellow, wool-lined canvas tarp covered the chair, with a poncho-style hole for the passenger’s head, recalls Marilyn Wilmerding, whose father, Bill Hodges, served as Ski Corp. president from 1951 to 1957. “We all wore raccoon coats that we found at the thrift shop,” she adds. Once off the lift, “you’d take off your fur coat, throw it on the chair, and it would go back down. There was a big, flat table at the bottom of the mountain with a pile of these fur coats. You’d rifle through them and find yours, then put it back on and get in line for the lift.”

The long, frigid lift rides inspired Klaus Obermeyer, who arrived in Aspen in late 1947, to design and sell his first down jackets.

By the second season of lift-served skiing, the new Little Nell run had been cleared at the base to accommodate beginners, served by a T-bar. Friedl Pfeifer had resigned as head of the Ski Corp., though he continued to lead the ski school, which was a separate entity. Aspen was on its way to becoming a celebrated ski destination. In 1950, thanks to the lobbying efforts of Frank Willoughby and Ski Corp. general manager Dick Durrance, the FIS World Alpine Championships came to Aspen, the first time the event was held outside of Europe.

Not everyone shared the enthusiasm. Even before the lifts opened, some locals worried that a sport catering to the rich would lead to inflated prices and an insurmountable class divide. “There is a possible danger in the current campaign to dust off and refurbish the mining camps of yesteryear,” wrote columnist Lee Casey in a 1946 Rocky Mountain News opinion piece titled “Worry About Aspen.” He warned of “Sun Valley prices” and an “invidious distinction” between wealthy tourists and locals.

Aspen attracted an eclectic mix of new residents drawn by the developing economic base, new cultural organizations like the Aspen Music Festival and the charm of a remote and scenic community. Recalls Poschman, “It was a place for refugees, heirs and heiresses thrown out of their families, gay people shunned by their East Coast families. The stories my parents would tell.” He adds, “There were former German soldiers who were skiers, next to 10th Mountain guys, all drinking beer together in the Red Onion.”

Ski bum life

Poschman’s parents met as young ski bums in Alta and became engaged in the summer of 1946, when Harry was working on the Aspen lift-building crew. They moved to town full time in 1950 and ran the Edelweiss Inn out of an old Victorian on Main Street before building their own lodge, with Swiss-style chalets, later in the decade.

“We thought it was the most wonderful way to make a living in the world,” says Jony Larrowe (Greg Poschman’s mother). Larrowe skied for a few hours whenever she could get a babysitter, and Harry instructed in Pfeifer’s ski school, by that time co-directed by Fred Iselin. “Aspen became pretty famous, pretty fast,” says Larrowe. Most of the early Edelweiss guests came from Texas and elsewhere in Colorado and included college students, who paid just $2.75 a night if they brought a sleeping bag.

Larrowe’s own experience to the contrary, she says that skiing was still more of a man’s sport in the early 1950s and that lodge guests were “either single men or families who loved to ski and wanted their kids to learn how.”

Of course, Aspen kids didn’t have to wait for a family vacation to tackle the slopes. “The first time I skied Aspen Mountain was in 1949,” says rancher Tony Vagneur, whose great-grandparents settled in the area in the 1880s. “I was three years old.” Vagneur remembers struggling with too-long skis as he descended the Little Nell run. Too small to ride the T-bar, he needed someone else to pull him up the hill.

By first grade, Vagneur and friend Jimmie Johnson were skiing together every weekend, covering most of the mountain. “Every run was an adventure,” he says. “It probably still is for kids today.”

The elementary school released kids early on Wednesdays, and they could either ski on Aspen Mountain, ice skate or go to study hall. Vagneur, no surprise, opted to ski. When Vagneur was in fifth grade, his father worked on the mountain, running Lift 2 from its bottom station. Vagneur would sneak a ride up Lift 1 with his father in the early morning, then ski down and head to school—until the time mountain manager Red Rowland caught him doing it. “He was at Midway [at the top of Lift 1] when I got off the lift that morning, and he said, ‘What are you doing here?’” relates Vagneur. “He made me quit.”

Vagneur spent seven years on ski patrol in the 1970s and today gives weekly history ski tours on behalf of the Aspen Historical Society. Despite the addition of lifts and a gondola, as well as more runs, “It still seems like the same place to me,” he says. “I start down the top of Copper and think, ‘Yeah, I’m home.’ It’s kind of like walking up the sidewalk to your house.”

Darcy Brown took over as president of the Ski Corp. in 1957, and his daughter Ruthie Brown grew up skiing Aspen Mountain. One of the resort’s best-known trails, Ruthie’s Run, is named after Darcy’s wife. As Brown tells it, her mother didn’t like skiing the standard route down the mountain. So she asked Red Rowland to cut a new trail for her. Ruthie’s Run opened to the public in December 1948. “It’s flowing and has great views of Aspen,” says Brown. “And my mother loved the sun. It gets the last sun of the day.”

Marilyn Wilmerding’s family came to Aspen on weekends and holidays, and during the summer, as her father fulfilled many of his Ski Corp. responsibilities from Denver. The Hodges first shared ownership of a Victorian with the Robinson and Coors families, then built an A-frame on Red Mountain, where Wilmerding lives today. As a young girl, she skied Aspen Mountain every chance she had. Angling for first chair each morning, she and her brother would arrive at the base of Lift 1 at 7 a.m. and line up their skis, then eat breakfast at the nearby Skier’s Chalet and board the lift when it opened at 9 a.m. “We would ski until the very end of the day,” she says.

After skiing, Wilmerding says, “Everyone would gather at the Hotel Jerome. Kids would run up one set of stairs in the lobby and down the other. It was like our own little club.” Dinners out were at the Red Onion, and the Isis Theatre showed the latest movies. She also remembers her parents going to lively parties at the “Pink House,” owned by the Browns. “It was a magical time to be here,” Wilmerding says. “Aspen has marked so many people, hasn’t it?”

Indeed, those heady early days of lift-served skiing launched Aspen on a trajectory that’s soared beyond what anyone may have imagined 75 years ago. And whether they were miners, ranchers, 10th Mountain veterans, ski visionaries or souls in search of a beautiful and free-wheeling place to live, residents during the first years of the new era were indelibly affected—perhaps none more so than the people who labored to create the new ski area.

Twenty-five years after the lifts opened on Aspen Mountain, in 1971, Lift 1A replaced Lift 1, starting farther uphill. Tim Willoughby relates seeing a photo in the Aspen Times of a helicopter removing the original lift towers. “I was with my father, who was living in California at that point,” he says. “He just looked at the photo: ‘I spent a whole year building that sucker, and in something like four hours they pulled it all out.’ It was one of his great achievements in life, and in a few hours, it was gone.” 

Author Cindy Hirschfeld is editor-in-chief of Cross Country Skier magazine. She spent six years as chief editor, successively, at Aspen Magazine and Aspen Sojourner.

There is an interesting postscript to the article about bringing fashion to the Olympics (“Halston on Netflix: How Fashion Came to the Olympics,” July-August 2021). It involves Sun Valley and Kathleen Harriman, the daughter of the resort’s founder, Averell Harriman, who brought high fashion to the 1948 St. Moritz Olympics, well before Halston or Levi Strauss did so many years later.

(Photo above: 1948 U.S. Women's Ski Team in uniform; Utah Ski Archives)

Sun Valley played an important role in getting American skiers ready to compete in St. Moritz. Sun Valley hosted the 1948 Olympic tryouts “in a style that has surely never been equaled,” and paid for accommodations for the 40 men and 20 women skiers competing for Olympic berths, according to the 1948 American Ski Annual.

Kathleen Harriman was not only a fixture at Sun Valley, often accompanying her father to official events, she was an outstanding racer. She was on Bennington College’s ski team and won an Eastern Ski Championship. Kathleen and Gretchen Fraser were good friends, often skiing together at Sun Valley.

Kathleen Harriman Mortimer (in 1947, she married Stanley G. Mortimer, heir to the Standard Oil fortune) was in charge of the women’s uniforms for the 1948 Olympics. Drawing on her father’s contacts, according to the book Gretchen’s Gold, Kathleen collected a wardrobe designed by Fred Pickard of Pickards of Sun Valley. Jantzen did the grey-worsted gabardine ski suits. There also were poplin parkas with fur trim plus hand-knit sweaters by Marjorie Benedickter. Most impressive were wool alpaca coats, long black après-ski skirts and pure silk scarfs decorated with delightfully drawn skiers that Max Barsis—Sun Valley’s official watercolorist and cartoonist-in-residence—had dreamed up. As the ski suits did not come with belts, Gretchen added her own belt with the buckle she had won in the initial California Silver Belt race at Sugar Bowl in 1940.

There is no record of who paid for the Sun Valley inspired wardrobe for the 1948 U.S. women’s team, but the U.S. Olympic Committee, with a limited budget, certainly did not. One suspects that a small part of the vast Harriman or Mortimer fortunes paid for the fashionable outfits at St. Moritz.

John W. Lundin
Seattle, Washington

John W. Lundin is a lawyer, historian and author, and is one of the founding members of the Washington State Ski and Snowboard Museum (WSSSM). His book, Skiing Sun Valley: a History from Union Pacific to the Holdings, received a 2021 Skade award from ISHA. His most recent book, Ski Jumping in Washington State: a Nordic Tradition, was the companion to an exhibit on ski jumping at the National Nordic Museum in Seattle, co-sponsored by WSSSM, which John helped organize. 

Correcting the Record

The book review of Skiing Sun Valley (Media Reviews, July-August 2021) contains an error by the reviewer. The book did not include a misspelling of Marilyn Monroe. 

In “Seven Decades at Belleayre,” also in the July-August issue, a trail on Mt. Greylock was misidentified. It is the Thunderbolt Trail, not the Thunderbird Trail.

John Allen did a great job with “What Might Have Been” (March-April 2021), describing the possible mega-resort up at Ashcroft instead of down where we ski today in Aspen. In characterizing Billy Fiske, the spark plug behind the proposed development, I would offer a few details. Fiske produced Hopalong Cassidy movies and was an adventurous flyer known for his island-hopping flights across the Pacific. When he saw the above-treeline terrain in Joe Flynn’s photographs, he flew into Glenwood Springs to take a look. There was no airfield, so he picked a field and landed but had to pay the local power company to drop the power lines so he could take off. Fiske was a figure in British Society, reportedly arriving at the RAF airdrome, white scarf flying in his Bentley convertible, to fight in the Battle of Britain. In those early days of World War II, there were more pilots than Hurricane planes. Knowing their scarcity, Fiske coaxed his shot-up plane back to the field, landing despite a cockpit fire that was roasting him alive. He was the first American to be officially killed in action fighting the Germans. Just the year before in Colorado, he and Ted Ryan, his partner in the Highland Bavarian Company, purchased the Ashcroft ghost town and thousands of adjoining acres. John refers to my 1981 interview with Ryan that I featured in the film Legends of American Skiing. Without Fiske, the plans for the mega-resort fizzled. HBC’s surviving partner, Ted Ryan, passed Ashcroft and all the surrounding land to the U.S. Forest Service.

Rick Moulton
Chairman, ISHA Board of Directors
Huntington, Vermont

Painting of Fiske's final landing by John Howard Worsley/Tangmere Military Aviation Museum.

Inside the Domes

Patrick Thorne’s piece on indoor skiing (May-June 2021) was informative but didn’t address a key question: What’s the skiing like? Fifteen years ago, I did an October tour of what I called the Rhenish Alps: Four ski domes in four days in Germany, France and the Netherlands. The goal was to test a new ski design on winter snow, something unavailable in either hemisphere at that time of year. We skied Amnéville, Neuss, Bottrop and Landgraaf and found edgeable firm surfaces—not ice but not packed powder. What impressed me most were the buses parked outside each venue, transporting ski-club kids and coaches for off-season slalom training. The terrain isn’t steep enough for FIS-level slalom racing, but the snow surface was appropriate. Under the mercury-vapor lamps, it felt like night skiing. Sounds echoed off the walls and roof. 

Seth Masia
President, ISHA
Paonia, Colorado

Skiing inside the Alpincenter Bottrop: Youtube video

Learning to paint while recovering from tuberculosis, Paul Sample painted what he knew best: rural ski scenes.

Paul Sample, Dartmouth College’s heavyweight boxing champion, class of ’21, came late to painting. While recovering from tuberculosis at Saranac Lake, New York, he studied painting under the Norwegian artist Jonas Lie in the early 1920s. From 1925, he taught in the art department at the University of Southern California, before taking up the appointment of ‘artist in residence’ at his alma mater in 1938. Other than his war service as an artist-correspondent, he remained at Dartmouth until 1962. He died of a heart attack in 1974.

Sample started exhibiting in 1927. In 1934, Time ranked him as “one of America’s most important living painters.” Between 1927 and his death he had more than 30 solo exhibitions and was involved in about 75 group shows.

He painted “Winter Holiday” in the late 1940s. By this time, he had become a member of the Associated American Artists, which include luminaries Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood. This organization marketed its members’ works, and “Winter Holiday” fit into the regional category, with Sample’s art exhibiting the pleasures of skiing in and around Dartmouth.

Rural joys and story-book New England towns (this one looks quite like Stowe), were typical of Sample’s style. “Winter Holiday” was chosen by the West Virginia Inspirations for Printers, a magazine that advertised paper products to designers, artists and teachers. The printer’s guide always had a special cover, which was common in the 1950s for calendars, magazines and trade publications. Sample joined Charles Dana Gibson, N. C. Wyeth, Maxfield Parrish and Saul Steinberg as cover artists in 1950.

Some of Sample’s skiing paintings are held in Dartmouth’s Hood Museum of Art, including “The ski jump” and the “Slope near the bridge.” Dartmouth’s Rauner Library holds Sample’s papers. — E. John B. Allen

The Lighter Side of Ski Movies

Hall of Famer Sverre Engen influenced many aspects of the sport. Perhaps none as enduring as lightening the load for ski movie production. 

By Mike Korologos

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, when ski movie-making was in its infancy, major outdoor filmmakers used “Hollywood methods” of production. Ski-movie shoots were built on the foundation of cumbersome 35-mm cameras affixed atop bulky tripods, with these setups hand-carried from ski lifts to scenic locations by camera crews that did not ski. Often these daylong efforts resulted in 10 to 15 seconds of usable footage.

Pioneering filmmaker Sverre Engen helped turned that laborious process on its head, forever changing how action sports films were made, according to his son, Scott Engen. “Dad may not have been the first to make ski movies, but he sure helped revolutionize the way they were produced,” Scott says.

Sverre honed his film-making skills in the early 1930s and early 1940s while hiking, hunting and working for the Utah Fish and Game Department as he produced and shot informational and educational movies as part of his job.

He also produced, while assigned to the 10th Mountain Division at Camp Hale, Colorado, morale-boosting broadcasts for the Free Norwegian expatriate members in the U.S. and Canada. “In those jobs, Dad came to fully appreciate the virtues of moving fast and traveling light when it came to carrying equipment in the mountains in the winter,” Scott says.

Unlike most ski-movie filmmakers at the time, Sverre was an accomplished skier, which greatly helped him with his movie projects. Traveling light and being nimble with his on-snow production methods provided cost- and time-saving efficiencies, which allowed him to travel into the wilderness to film spectacular scenic footage. Those scenic shots became the signature look of the dozen or so 90-minute ski movies he would later produce.

Born in Norway in 1911, Sverre learned to ski at 2 and moved to the United States at 18, soon settling in Utah. He was among the last of a colorful generation of Norwegian immigrants who were deeply involved in many aspects of the sport. Sverre gained fame as a jumping champion, resort operator, ski instructor, pioneer in the study of avalanche control and maker of ski movies. He served as Alta’s ski school director and as the cofounder and first manager of the new Rustler Lodge at Alta. The U.S. Forest Service named him as Alta’s first snow ranger in 1947 and he coached the University of Utah Ski Team to its first national collegiate championship that same year. He also found time to help build ski jumps at Ecker Hill, Becker Hill and Landes Hill, all in Utah.

Engen was inspired to make his own movies while appearing in several of Fox Movietone’s Ski Aces vignettes. These short films, shown on movie screens across the country as lead-ins to the day’s feature film, starred Sverre and his brothers Alf and Corey skiing down gorgeous powdery mountainsides or in zany ski scenes.

Sverre’s penchant for traveling light found him embracing the latest equipment that came on the civilian market at the end of World War II. This included the classic Bell and Howell 70-D series 16 mm camera. Sverre would have seen this camera used by John Jay when filming for the 10th Mountain Division. Driven by a hand-wound, clockwork spring motor, it didn’t require batteries, which annoyingly would fail in the wet or cold of the mountains or merely peter out during a shoot.

The camera’s downside, explains Scott, was the time and total darkness required to change rolls of film in the mountains. It had to be done only by feel and often by cold and numb fingers. He said his dad stashed a heavy, black canvas lightproof film-changing bag with arm sleeves in his rucksack. In a pinch, he would use his ski parka, folding over the neck and waist hems to improvise a film-changing bag, using the sleeves for access.

“Never wanting to miss a great action scene, Dad sometimes carried three fully loaded D-70 cameras,” Scott said. “Later he used a compact Bell and Howell 16 mm camera that used 50-foot long film magazines that could be instantly installed in the camera. The magazines were about the size of a small paperback book and designed for the gun cameras used in WWII fighter planes.” Sverre now had his “ideal film-making package,” Scott said. “He could ski anywhere with several small, lightweight, spring-driven cameras, each featuring instant magazine loading.”

He also was a natural promoter, helping to build brand awareness decades before that was a concept. The three Engen brothers barnstormed the country in the 1930s and 1940s, staging ski-jumping shows before tens of thousands of spectators. He touted that fame in his promotional posters and media interviews. And Sverre also had an influential friend: Lowell Thomas, the famous radio commentator, who skied with him several times a year at Alta.

In his book, Skiing a Way of Life, Saga of the Engen Brothers, Sverre describes golden advice from Thomas. “He suggested I talk more about the action. He said, ‘you know, Sverre, a good commentary is almost as important as the film itself . . . speak louder so people can hear and understand you.’ I worried about my Norwegian accent, but he assured me that it was okay and might add a little flavor.” Often when Sverre appeared on stage for his screenings, especially in New York or Los Angeles, Thomas either would introduce him personally or via recorded messages.

In addition to being a main character in Ski Aces (1944) and Margie of the Wasatch, Sverre’s feature length movies included Champs at Play, Dancing Skis (1956), The Snow Ranger, Skiing, Their Way of Life (1957), Skiing America, Ski Fever (1958), Ski Time USA (1959), Skiing Unlimited and Ski Spectacular (1962). He also produced numerous Fox Movietone episodes and short ski promotional vignettes.

Alta purchased most of Sverre’s original reels in the 1990s, says Alta general manager Michael Maughan. The film rolls have been digitized and stored for posterity.

Mike Korologos’ ski articles have appeared in newspapers and periodicals worldwide for more than 60 years. He was skiing editor for The Salt Lake Tribune for 25 years and a correspondent for SKIING Magazine for 30 years. He served as press chief for the organizing committees for the 2002 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games in Salt Lake City, his hometown.

photo courtesy Scott Engen

Arnold Lunn and Sandra Heath

With the passing of John Fry earlier this year, Sandra Heath was motivated to reach out to Skiing History to convey how John always appreciated, and supported, the telling of a good tale. Heath, who modeled for Bogner in the 1950s and 1960s, writes: “John Fry encouraged me to tell this story. In the winter of 1961, when I was being filmed in the Alps, the Fox-Movietone crew and I had the good fortune of visiting the Bellevue Hotel in Mürren, Switzerland. I was introduced to Sir Arnold Lunn, who asked me to join him watching the dangerous climbing activity on the Eiger. He was enchanting: a poet, philosopher and inspirational genius to the ski world. Some 30 years later, in England, I had a drink at the home of Elisabeth Hussey, with her sister Philippa. Elisabeth was Sir Arnold’s secretary and confidante. She sprang from her chair to retrieve something and said ‘This photo is such a mystery. Do you happen to know who this gal is?’ I was flabbergasted—it was me!”

ISHA VP Jeff Blumenfeld Wins Prestigious Exploration Award

Jeff Blumenfeld, ISHA vice president and a self-described “groupie for adventures and explorers,” was recently named the winner of the prestigious 2020 international Leif Erikson Exploration History Award.

Blumenfeld, the editor and publisher of the Boulder, Colorado-based Expedition News website, was recognized for his ongoing work to promote and preserve exploration history. Blumenfeld says that “receiving the award and recognition from the exploration community is quite rewarding. I am privileged to tell their stories.” But what keeps him on task is a bigger mission.

“Exploration is critically important,” he says. “It’s through exploration and field research that we’ll answer many of the questions, many of the mysteries of this planet and hopefully make the world a better place for our children.”

In addition to his work on his website, Blumenfeld is active in helping new explorers gain international exposure, peer recognition and, critically, funding for their research and expeditions.

“If I can foster their efforts, I’m totally rewarded by that,” he says.

The Leif Erikson Exploration awards, which include the History Award and the Young Explorer Award, were established by the Exploration Museum in 2015, and are presented for achievements in exploration and for media coverage and documentation of exploration history.

The museum, located in Húsavík, Iceland, 30 miles from the Arctic Circle, is dedicated to the history of human exploration, from early adventurers through space exploration. Blumenfeld received the award in August in a Zoom ceremony, as part of the annual Húsavík Explorers Festival.

Blumenfeld is an active member of the Explorers Club, and is president of the North American Snowsports Journalists Association. He has written several books to promote travel and exploration, including Get Sponsored: A Funding Guide for Explorers, Adventurers and Would-Be World Travelers and Travel With Purpose: A Field Guide to Voluntourism. 

SKI ART

Ewald Thiel (1855-before 1939)

For such a prolific social painter and illustrator, it’s surprising so little is known about German artist Ewald Thiel; we don’t even know when his death occurred. We do know he was born in Kamanten, in East Prussia (now Klimowka in Kaliningrad, Russia) on August 12, 1855. He studied at the Prussian Art Academy in Berlin and in 1878 at the Royal Academy of Art in Munich. He settled in the Halensee region of Berlin.

Thiel became an illustrator of many Berlin scenes, and his work appeared in popular weeklies. He illustrated books and created wood engravings; he drew scenes of lakes and drainage works, the lighting of bridges, exposition openings, and dancers, lawyers, workers, and politicians. Perhaps his most famous sketch (turned into a color portrait) was the drawing of Otto von Bismarck addressing the Reichstag on February 6, 1888 when he proclaimed: “Wir Deutsche fürchten Gott, aber sonst nichts auf der Welt!” (We Germans fear God, but nothing else in the world!).

He drew skiing scenes, too, including a hunter on skis, a skiing postman, and skiers on the Feldberg. He based the scene pictured here on a sketch by Ernst Hosang of the crowd enjoying the Spreewald, Berlin’s nature preserve. In 1866, a railway from the capital reached Lübbenau, a village at the center of the 200-square-mile area of heathland and pine woods crisscrossed by canals.

An enterprising teacher, Paul Fahlisch, had begun promoting tourism here in 1882. The Spreewald soon became the bourgeois’ place to enjoy summer and winter. Many of the skiers in the scene are locals; the women are wearing the traditional headgear of the Sorb community, Slavic immigrants who settled here in the 6th century. Thiel’s careful depiction of the skier with scarf tying down his cap and protecting his ears, one with a pipe, another carrying a sack, and a third putting on a ski, all attest to a well-grounded knowledge of the skiing world of 1899. The picture was published in Das Buch für Alle, a magazine that appealed to the middle class. — E. John B. Allen

Why's it called that?

Sneg, Schnee, Neige: Why do we have different words for snow?

Five or six thousand years ago, near the beginning of the bronze age, a tribe in what is now Ukraine domesticated horses and learned to ride. They quickly spread their culture, and language, in all directions.

No direct record of their language survives, but scholars call it Proto-Indo-European or PIE. By comparing words in Sanskrit, ancient Greek and Latin and modern languages, linguists have come up with a list of about 200 root words from PIE—white was albus, the root of our word Alps.

The PIE word for snow was sneygh. Cultures close to the PIE homeland kept that word: Slavic languages use some variant of sneg, and the tribes north of Central Asia’s Altai mountains, where bronze-age skiing survives to this day, say snig.

In Northern Europe, the word evolved to schnee (German), sneeuw (Dutch), snow (Friesian and English), snø, snö and snjorr (Norwegian, Swedish and Icelandic). In the Mediterranean, proto-Latin (Italic) turned sneygh into snix. Then the s dropped, becoming nix (Classical Latin), neige (French) and nieve or neve (Italian and Spanish). —Seth Masia

SNAPSHOTS IN TIME

1936 RACING ON KENYA’S GLACIERS
British ex-pats held a ski meet on the Lewis glacier on 17,057-foot Mount Kenya, in central Kenya about 90 miles northeast of Nairobi. The sole female contestant—the dashing Nancye Kennaway—won the women’s division and Bill Delap, who started organized skiing on the glacier starting in 1933, won the men’s downhill. The true ski pioneers of the region, however, were German geographer Hans Meyer and Austrian mountaineer Ludwig Purtscheller, who in 1889 became the first people to reach the 16,893-foot summit of Kibo — the highest of Kilimanjaro’s three cones, 200 miles to the south. —E. John B. Allen (Historical Dictionary of Skiing)

1944 CLOSED ON SUNDAYS
For the first several years after its opening in 1944, Timp Haven in Utah’s Provo Canyon was the only ski area in the country that closed on Sundays, due to the religious beliefs of its owner. Paul “Speed” Stewart, a sheep rancher, ran the resort with his brother Ray for more than 20 years. “We just don’t believe in working on Sunday,” Speed’s wife Hilda told the Deseret News in 1965. By that time, his busy resort offered skiing, skating and tubing — but Speed never did learn to ski. “Don’t have the time,” he said. Actor Robert Redford and other investors bought the resort in 1968 and renamed it Sundance. —Mike Korologos

1967 SHOVEL-RIDING GNOMES
While skiing down for our last run, we stopped in the lee of a big cedar tree to look at the view of endless Laurentian hills and frozen lakes stretching out below us. Suddenly, as we all stood there leaning on our ski poles, six little men who looked like tassel-capped gnomes came laughing by us—hell-bent and sliding straight down the mountain—sitting on big, wide snow shovels. Clutching the handle up between their legs, they were having the ride of their lives, speeding with merry abandon over the bumps, down the chutes and through the trees. Their shouts and laughter echoed up the slopes as they went at crazy speeds down the fall line. “Who are those crazy little men?” said Johnny. “Zee trail packers, Monsieur,” said Pierre. We shoved off and chased the “gnomes” to the base of the mountain, swinging through slalom glades, losing them, finding them and laughing all the way. We were in love with the day, the mountain, and the French-Canadian people.  —Frankie and Johnny O’Rear,
“Chateau Bon Vivant: The Hilariously True Misadventures of Two Vastly Unequipped Innkeepers Who Run a Ski Lodge in Winter in Old Quebec”

1978 STICK TO THE TRAILS
Don’t go blithely whipping off the trails at Vail, Colorado, this season. Under a new get-tough policy, the U.S. Forest Service is planning to prosecute people who ignore ski-area boundary and trail-closing markers. The penalties: six months in jail and a $500 fine. —SKI (October 1978)

PARKING THE MIND AT KEYSTONE
First the instructor asked us to think of a word that described our skiing. I chose “wobbly.” Mark, a Los Angeles advertising man, chose “strain.” Judy said “tense.” We each acted out our bad quality, exaggerating and clowning. We skied down a gentle intermediate run, clenching our teeth and holding our arms out like scarecrows. “Look at them,” said a voice on a chairlift. “Oh, they’re just doing Inner Skiing,” said its seatmate. —Abby Rand on the Inner Skier Week at Keystone, based on the best-
selling book Inner Skier (SKI, November 1978)

1989 UNITED NATIONS IN THE ALPINE LIFTLINES
Our State Department should analyze national deportment in liftlines across the Alps as an aid to understanding the character of Europeans. The Germans are the most aggressive. The French step all over everyone’s skis. An Englishman slammed into the line and knocked over my daughter. The Swedes make a wedge of six skiers and slowly surge through the line. The polite Japanese make block reservations on the cable cars. As for the Americans, they’re so afraid of making the wrong impression that they get squeezed to the back—the wimps of the European liftlines. —Peter Miller (Snow Country, August 1989)

Seven decades ago, Roger Sylvand and Emile Allais invented a safer new way to get injured skiers off the mountain.

By Thomas Sylvand

During the summer of 2019, Bonneville, the ski-resort town in the French Alps, lost a landmark. The factory Traineau Sylvand (Sylvand Sleds) was torn down to make way for real estate development.

For six decades, beginning in 1947, that factory produced rescue sleds (traineaux de secours) for ski patrols across France and around the world. The inventor of that sled was my grandfather, Roger Sylvand. He created the prototype at the request of Emile Allais, the world champion skier who was the guiding light for French ski resort development in the post-war years.

The Sylvand family has lived in the high mountains for many generations. My great-grandfather Louis, wounded in World War I, moved his young family to Praz-sur-Arly, just outside Megève, in 1922, when Roger was 11 years old.

As my father, François, tells the story, Roger was greatly impressed by Robert Flaherty’s classic documentary Nanook of the North, and especially fascinated with the dogsleds. He built his own sled, from barrel staves, and tested it with his infant brother André as passenger. Naturally, the sled came to pieces on a curbstone. Fortunately, André was wrapped in layers and layers of swaddling, and came to no harm. Roger suffered a severe scolding.

The family lived in a hillside cottage. Like the neighbors, in winter they hauled groceries and firewood on sleds and sledges, and throughout the 1920s witnessed the rapid growth of alpine skiing (Megève was the first of the French lift-served resorts). As a teenager, Roger helped to set up the first ski-tows, on land owned by cousins, and drove buses hauling skiers uphill. He became an inventive mechanic, rigging up a rack-and-pinion system to simultaneously operate all the window-shutters on one side of the cottage. In the years leading up to World War II, he served in the mountain artillery and was tasked with devising over-the-snow transport solutions. He got to build more sleds.

Hilaire Evrard, a maternal uncle, owned a hardware store in Megève and an up-to-date factory in Bonneville that produced steel cable and elevator machinery, plus skis sold under the Brévent, Buet and La Para brands, and the Swiss-designed “Luge de Megève.” Evrard died suddenly in 1946. The family split up the businesses—the Evrards took over the hardware store and Roger Sylvand managed the factory, gradually buying ownership. He dropped the cable and elevator operations to focus on wood products: skis and sleds.

Roger set to work modernizing the carpentry operations. After a loose router bit nearly killed him, he focused on safety issues, ventilating sawdust to the basement to reduce fire hazard, installing an elaborate fire-alarm system he designed himself, and even setting up a system to stop the machinery automatically whenever a stranger came through the door.

It was an era of rapid innovation in ski resort management. Emile Allais returned from the Americas, where he had designed new trail systems and set up new ski schools. He brought with him Howard Head’s new metal skis, and a lot of great ideas about mechanical slope grooming and ski patrol operations.

In consultation with Allais, in 1947 Roger Sylvand came up with a great improvement for ski patrol rescue sleds—a simple and robust braking system that would allow a single patroller to bring the sled down safely on most pistes. Very simply, he put the meter-long steering handles on hinges, and when the steering skier pressed the handles down, they levered a pair of steel claws into the snow (or ice), slowing the rig efficiently. The claws were spring-loaded so as to retract when pressure was released on the handles. He applied for a patent in 1950, and it was granted in 1952. Allais helped to sell the system to other European ski patrols. In 1954, Allais demonstrated the new sled at a convention in Davos, and it won a gold medal. 

Photo top of page: Roger Sylvand encourages his son François to demonstrate how little muscle it took to operate the rescue-sled prototype.

The sled, made of hardwood, aluminum and steel, with a thin canvas-covered mattress, was light and tough enough to be handled by one “pisteur” in most skiable terrain. It sold well, and kept the factory operating long after wooden skis and luges went defunct.

Even after retiring, my grandfather kept a close eye on the factory until his death in 1995, and it continued to produce sleds until closing in 2008. Recently the village of Praz-sur-Arly opened a new medical clinic, Chalet Sylvand, named in his honor.

ISHA president Seth Masia translated this story from its original French version and added editorial notes and clarifications.

A Short History of Rescue Sleds

The first patent for a sled with a braking system was issued in 1869 to Constantine de Bodisco, of St. Petersburg, Russia, who created a heavy iron contraption for coasting down icy hillsides. A spring-loaded steel plunger was mounted on the steel runners on either side. A rider would press down on the knob at the top of the plunger to engage the bottom end into the ice. Thus could a gentleman calm the nerves of his lady passenger.

The need for rescue sleds became evident during World War I, especially for use in the bloody alpine battles between Italy and Austria. Beginning in 1914, dozens of patents were issued for devices to mount a canvas stretcher onto a pair of skis, presumably the skis belonging to the evacuee. The inventors were Swiss, Austrian, Canadian, Norwegian, American and French. None of these systems addressed braking. On a schuss, ski-borne operators had to control speed by wedging or side-slipping. As alpine skiing developed in North America during the 1930s, early ski patrollers rigged toboggans with a variety of steering-handles and dragging-chain braking systems.

Also during the 1930s, Finnish skiers used newly available aluminum sheeting to bang together a lightweight trough-shaped sled they called an akja. It was designed to float boat-like in deep snow, and with steel runners it could be safely handled on ice. With a skier at each end, it could haul munitions cross-country, and was so used during the Winter War with Russia in 1938. The German Army took note and stamped out akjas for its own mountain troops, going so far as to mount machine guns on some. Thus came the akja to Austria, where it is still manufactured, thousands per year, for ski patrols around the world. Austrian mountaineer Kurt Beam, who emigrated to Seattle in 1941 and became a fixture in ski patrolling, introduced the akja to North America in time for the 1960 Squaw Valley Olympics.

In 1940, soldiers of the nascent 10th Mountain Division came up with their own rescue-and-cargo toboggans. Lieutenant Colonel Avery Cochran, who had begun working with dogsleds in Alaska in 1939, in 1943 was issued a patent on behalf of the 10th’s Mountain’s rescue sled—a toboggan equipped with a light steel framework at each end, attached via quick-linking rods to belts worn by skiers in front and in back. Thus the troopers had their arms free for the use of poles in cross-country skiing.

Then, in 1946, 10th Mountain veteran Nelson Bennett returned to his job as ski patrol director at Sun Valley and began working on his own sled design. Introduced in 1948, the Bennett sled used a wooden toboggan stabilized with a couple of steel skegs at the back corners, a detachable wire-mesh Stokes litter, and folding or removable steering steering arms. Braking was aided by a drag chain under the nose of the sled, controlled by the pilot with a rope. Not only could it be piloted by a single patroller, it could be uploaded on a single chair by the same patroller. It became a standard item of equipment at North American resorts.  —Seth Masia