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In 2019, long-distance runner and ski mountaineer Kilian Jornet—with the goal of just testing “how his body will perform”—completed 51 laps on Tusten ski area in Molde, Norway, in 24 hours. He climbed 78,274 feet, crushing previous 24-hour records by a ridiculous margin. To be clear, Molde is at sea level. Jornet climbed 1,535 feet, 51 times, on roughly a one-mile piste. That works out to skinning up at about 2.25 mph for 25 minutes and resting a couple of minutes during a 36-mph schuss. Fifty-one times.

Photo above: Kilian Jornet has been rewriting the record books for ski mountaineering and high-altitude running for more than a decade, sometimes merely as a result of his training regimen. Right: An early ski-endurance competition, the 24 Hours of Aspen attracted elite athletes, television audiences and sponsorship dollars in the 1980s-1990s. YouTube photo

That’s nothing for the Catalan Jornet, who grew up in Chamonix. For more than 15 years he’s been methodically assaulting the records for high-altitude marathons and ski mountaineering. In his recent five-year “Summits of My Life” project, he set the fastest known times (or FKT) for the ascent and ski descent of major mountains including Kilimanjaro, Denali, Aconcagua, the Matterhorn and Mont Blanc, at times shaving hours off previous records. Some of his records have since been broken by Ecuadorian mountain guide Karl Egloff.

Climbing and skiing massive verticals has become a passion with today’s endurance athletes, who are repeatedly blowing by many of the world's best times. Which begs the question, when did vertical-feet-skied become a thing?

Before smart watches and phone apps made vertical-feet scorekeeping easy, it was possible to estimate your numbers from the number of runs completed. Heliski operators charged by the vertical foot, and kept accurate count. You could keep track of your bragging rights whether for 24 hours, a week, a season or a lifetime. Heliski operations certified guest accomplishments with pins and special million-foot prizes, like Mike Wiegele’s silver belt buckles and limited-edition powder suits at Canadian Mountain Holidays.

One of the first vertical-foot-based competitions was the late 24 Hours of Aspen. After 13 events in 16 years, declining television ratings scuttled the show in 2003. But it left behind a slew of records. Chris Kent of Canada did 83 laps for 271,161 feet for the men’s mark in 1991. That’s 216 miles of skiing at an average 66 mph. Kate McBride and Anda Rojs set the women’s vertical record of 261,360 feet in 1997.

Once the genie was out of the bottle, lift- and rotor-assisted records started to topple. In 1994, Canadian speed skier and Chamonix resident Mark Jones logged 212,000 vertical feet in just 12 hours at Les Grands Montets. Next, Dr. Mark Bennett racked up 294,380 feet in 14 hours in the Yukon in 1997 for a new “daylight” world record. Fourteen months later, former U.S. Ski Team racer Rusty Squires chartered a specialized high-altitude helicopter and recorded 331,160 vertical feet in 10 hours and 15 minutes at Big Sky, Montana.

In the meantime, the guides at Wiegele’s were determined to set a record based on the normal constraints of commercial heli-skiing, with a full group of skiers and a single machine. In 1998, Swiss extreme skier Dominique Perret, Chris Kent and Austrian guide Robert Reindl, with Edi Podivinsky and Luke Sauder of the Canadian Alpine Team, logged 353,600 vertical feet in 14½ hours.

Austrian Ekkehard Dörschlag owns the
24-hour record for vertical climbed.

By this point recognition was growing that assisted vertical-foot records were as much about money as skill and endurance. As ski mountaineering boomed (it’ll be a full medal event at the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympics) interest focused on self-powered athletes. In 2009, Austrian Eckhard Dorschlag set a 24-hour world record of 60,350 feet. Ultra-marathoner Mike Foote broke that in 2018 with 68,697 feet. A few months later Norwegian Lars Erik Eriksen took it to 68,697 feet. Then Jornet obliterated that.

Born in 1987, Jornet has captured more Skyrunner World Series and Skimo (ski mountaineering) World Championship medals than we have room to list. He still holds the mark for the Innominata ski traverse on Mont Blanc linking Chamonix and Courmayeur (8 hours 42 minutes), as well as the fastest ascent/descent of Mont Blanc from Chamonix (4:57) and of the Matterhorn from Breuil-Cervinia (2:52).

As for why all the fuss over vertical speed records advancing every season, Nick Heil, writing in Outside, quoted Foote: “How many push-ups can I do in a minute? How long can I hold my breath? How far can I ski in a day? In the end, it’s all arbitrary and contrived, but it gets people to ask, what am I capable of?” 

 

Snapshots in Time

1958 Be Careful What You Wish For
A penetrating statistical study of the ski industry in Colorado and New Mexico has been published by the University of Colorado. Pointing out that a great many more tourists visit Colorado and New Mexico in June, July and August than in the other months of the year, the authors ask if it is not possible to develop the winter tourist industry so that tourist facilities can be used all year. — “Skiers Under Scrutiny in Colorado and New Mexico” (SKI Magazine, October 1958)

1970 The Continuing Death of the Ski Bum
Once upon a time, the ski bum was the ultimate ski insider. As neither an entrenched member of the ski-area management nor a local profiteer, he enjoyed a free-swinging life with lots of time to ski and unlimited access to the inner circles of the ski establishment. It is, therefore, ironic that as the need for ski workers grows, the reputation of the ski bum diminishes. Ski bums, industry management will tell you, are bad news; the title is now synonymous with “hippie.” Many employers won’t consider hiring ski bums, even for temporary jobs. As a result, there are fewer of the old-time ski-bum types than ever before. — Janet Nelson, “But They’re Employed” (SKI Magazine, January 1970)

1978 Risk v. Reward
I have been skiing o.b. for many years. Skiing out of bounds is extremely dangerous. Inevitably some crazy powder addicts (myself included) will continue to leave the “safe” confines of patrolled areas. After reading Lou Dawson’s account and subtle hints (“... how far can you crawl with a spinal fracture?”), I realized certain steps must be taken to ensure the safety or at least the survival of o.b. skiers. Education is what is needed on this topic. — Steven Harrison, Central Valley, New York, “Whistling in the Dark" (Letters, Powder Magazine, Spring 1978)

1981 Crowds and Crashes
The rapidly increasing skiing population has led to an alarming increase in inconsiderate and out-of-control skiers who are a serious menace. Last season, an out-of-control skier crashed into me. He never so much as asked if I needed help. I’ll have a scar I’ll carry for the rest of my life. For too long ski areas have allowed Bonzai Bombers to endanger others on the slope without adequate punishment. It’s time something was done to protect the rest of us from these slope-side criminals. —Thomas F. Warda, Rochester, N.Y., "Slope menaces" (Letters, Skiing Magazine, October 1981)

2007 Bode Rules
Call them the Bode Rules. This year every athlete on the U.S. Ski Team is required to stay in official team housing. Every racer on the team is also prohibited from having a celebratory drink with the coaches after a big win, because it’s a slippery slope from that to, say, being photographed carousing with Miss March 2002 draped on your arm during the Olympics. U.S. Ski Team chief Bill Marolt implemented the stricter guidelines after the strongest American squad in decades limped away from the 2006 Torino Games with only two medals—neither of them won by the phenomenally gifted Bode Miller. —Nathaniel Vinton, “Ski Fast but Party Slow”(SKI Magazine, February 2007)

2021 A Woman’s Place Is On Patrol
“When there are women on a team like this, it lends an important voice and perspective to the job. I can say that having women on patrol keeps everyone connected. Men muscle their way through the job and women do it with finesse,” said Addy McCord, 64, one of the longest-standing professional patrollers in the industry. — Shauna Farnell, “A Surge of Women in Ski Patrols, Once Nearly All Men” (New York Times, February 11, 2021)

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In 2019, long-distance runner and ski mountaineer Kilian Jornet—with the goal of just testing “how his body will perform”—completed 51 laps on Tusten ski area in Molde, Norway, in 24 hours. He climbed 78,274 feet, crushing previous 24-hour records by a ridiculous margin. To be clear, Molde is at sea level. Jornet climbed 1,535 feet, 51 times, on roughly a one-mile piste. That works out to skinning up at about 2.25 mph for 25 minutes and resting a couple of minutes during a 36-mph schuss. Fifty-one times.

Photo above: Kilian Jornet has been rewriting the record books for ski mountaineering and high-altitude running for more than a decade, sometimes merely as a result of his training regimen. Right: An early ski-endurance competition, the 24 Hours of Aspen attracted elite athletes, television audiences and sponsorship dollars in the 1980s-1990s. YouTube photo

That’s nothing for the Catalan Jornet, who grew up in Chamonix. For more than 15 years he’s been methodically assaulting the records for high-altitude marathons and ski mountaineering. In his recent five-year “Summits of My Life” project, he set the fastest known times (or FKT) for the ascent and ski descent of major mountains including Kilimanjaro, Denali, Aconcagua, the Matterhorn and Mont Blanc, at times shaving hours off previous records. Some of his records have since been broken by Ecuadorian mountain guide Karl Egloff.

Climbing and skiing massive verticals has become a passion with today’s endurance athletes, who are repeatedly blowing by many of the world's best times. Which begs the question, when did vertical-feet-skied become a thing?

Before smart watches and phone apps made vertical-feet scorekeeping easy, it was possible to estimate your numbers from the number of runs completed. Heliski operators charged by the vertical foot, and kept accurate count. You could keep track of your bragging rights whether for 24 hours, a week, a season or a lifetime. Heliski operations certified guest accomplishments with pins and special million-foot prizes, like Mike Wiegele’s silver belt buckles and limited-edition powder suits at Canadian Mountain Holidays.

One of the first vertical-foot-based competitions was the late 24 Hours of Aspen. After 13 events in 16 years, declining television ratings scuttled the show in 2003. But it left behind a slew of records. Chris Kent of Canada did 83 laps for 271,161 feet for the men’s mark in 1991. That’s 216 miles of skiing at an average 66 mph. Kate McBride and Anda Rojs set the women’s vertical record of 261,360 feet in 1997.

Once the genie was out of the bottle, lift- and rotor-assisted records started to topple. In 1994, Canadian speed skier and Chamonix resident Mark Jones logged 212,000 vertical feet in just 12 hours at Les Grands Montets. Next, Dr. Mark Bennett racked up 294,380 feet in 14 hours in the Yukon in 1997 for a new “daylight” world record. Fourteen months later, former U.S. Ski Team racer Rusty Squires chartered a specialized high-altitude helicopter and recorded 331,160 vertical feet in 10 hours and 15 minutes at Big Sky, Montana.

In the meantime, the guides at Wiegele’s were determined to set a record based on the normal constraints of commercial heli-skiing, with a full group of skiers and a single machine. In 1998, Swiss extreme skier Dominique Perret, Chris Kent and Austrian guide Robert Reindl, with Edi Podivinsky and Luke Sauder of the Canadian Alpine Team, logged 353,600 vertical feet in 14½ hours.

Austrian Ekkehard Dörschlag owns the
24-hour record for vertical climbed.

By this point recognition was growing that assisted vertical-foot records were as much about money as skill and endurance. As ski mountaineering boomed (it’ll be a full medal event at the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympics) interest focused on self-powered athletes. In 2009, Austrian Eckhard Dorschlag set a 24-hour world record of 60,350 feet. Ultra-marathoner Mike Foote broke that in 2018 with 68,697 feet. A few months later Norwegian Lars Erik Eriksen took it to 68,697 feet. Then Jornet obliterated that.

Born in 1987, Jornet has captured more Skyrunner World Series and Skimo (ski mountaineering) World Championship medals than we have room to list. He still holds the mark for the Innominata ski traverse on Mont Blanc linking Chamonix and Courmayeur (8 hours 42 minutes), as well as the fastest ascent/descent of Mont Blanc from Chamonix (4:57) and of the Matterhorn from Breuil-Cervinia (2:52).

As for why all the fuss over vertical speed records advancing every season, Nick Heil, writing in Outside, quoted Foote: “How many push-ups can I do in a minute? How long can I hold my breath? How far can I ski in a day? In the end, it’s all arbitrary and contrived, but it gets people to ask, what am I capable of?” 

 

Snapshots in Time

1958 Be Careful What You Wish For
A penetrating statistical study of the ski industry in Colorado and New Mexico has been published by the University of Colorado. Pointing out that a great many more tourists visit Colorado and New Mexico in June, July and August than in the other months of the year, the authors ask if it is not possible to develop the winter tourist industry so that tourist facilities can be used all year. — “Skiers Under Scrutiny in Colorado and New Mexico” (SKI Magazine, October 1958)

1970 The Continuing Death of the Ski Bum
Once upon a time, the ski bum was the ultimate ski insider. As neither an entrenched member of the ski-area management nor a local profiteer, he enjoyed a free-swinging life with lots of time to ski and unlimited access to the inner circles of the ski establishment. It is, therefore, ironic that as the need for ski workers grows, the reputation of the ski bum diminishes. Ski bums, industry management will tell you, are bad news; the title is now synonymous with “hippie.” Many employers won’t consider hiring ski bums, even for temporary jobs. As a result, there are fewer of the old-time ski-bum types than ever before. — Janet Nelson, “But They’re Employed” (SKI Magazine, January 1970)

1978 Risk v. Reward
I have been skiing o.b. for many years. Skiing out of bounds is extremely dangerous. Inevitably some crazy powder addicts (myself included) will continue to leave the “safe” confines of patrolled areas. After reading Lou Dawson’s account and subtle hints (“... how far can you crawl with a spinal fracture?”), I realized certain steps must be taken to ensure the safety or at least the survival of o.b. skiers. Education is what is needed on this topic. — Steven Harrison, Central Valley, New York, “Whistling in the Dark" (Letters, Powder Magazine, Spring 1978)

1981 Crowds and Crashes
The rapidly increasing skiing population has led to an alarming increase in inconsiderate and out-of-control skiers who are a serious menace. Last season, an out-of-control skier crashed into me. He never so much as asked if I needed help. I’ll have a scar I’ll carry for the rest of my life. For too long ski areas have allowed Bonzai Bombers to endanger others on the slope without adequate punishment. It’s time something was done to protect the rest of us from these slope-side criminals. —Thomas F. Warda, Rochester, N.Y., "Slope menaces" (Letters, Skiing Magazine, October 1981)

2007 Bode Rules
Call them the Bode Rules. This year every athlete on the U.S. Ski Team is required to stay in official team housing. Every racer on the team is also prohibited from having a celebratory drink with the coaches after a big win, because it’s a slippery slope from that to, say, being photographed carousing with Miss March 2002 draped on your arm during the Olympics. U.S. Ski Team chief Bill Marolt implemented the stricter guidelines after the strongest American squad in decades limped away from the 2006 Torino Games with only two medals—neither of them won by the phenomenally gifted Bode Miller. —Nathaniel Vinton, “Ski Fast but Party Slow”(SKI Magazine, February 2007)

2021 A Woman’s Place Is On Patrol
“When there are women on a team like this, it lends an important voice and perspective to the job. I can say that having women on patrol keeps everyone connected. Men muscle their way through the job and women do it with finesse,” said Addy McCord, 64, one of the longest-standing professional patrollers in the industry. — Shauna Farnell, “A Surge of Women in Ski Patrols, Once Nearly All Men” (New York Times, February 11, 2021)

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By Seth Masia

By 1950, the Union Pacific Railroad wanted Sun Valley, a playground for the rich, to run at a profit. That meant attracting middle-class skiers. The resort slashed prices: In 1952 you got a full week of skiing for $92, including meals and lodging, lifts and ski school lessons. In today’s inflated currency, that would be $1004. Add $73 (from Chicago) for a coach ticket on the Union Pacific, and you couldn’t afford to stay home. The train left Chicago at 5:30 p.m. and after 27 hours, you got off the bus in Sun Valley at 9:40 p.m. local time. Today, that $73 train fare would be $800, but there’s no train. Rooms at the Inn go for $450 a night (you might find a $250 motel room elsewhere), class lessons are a distant memory (private lessons start at about $900 for a half-day), and you’re on your own for meals (let’s say $100 a day). But a full-price Ikon Pass ($1179) puts you on the lift for seven days, and you can fly from Chicago in about six hours, for $500 or some frequent flier miles. If you already have the Ikon Pass and you don’t need lessons, you might get in seven days and nights, plus travel, for around $4,500. Of course, there’s three times more terrain, the lifts are twice as fast (and more numerous), and who ever heard of grooming in 1952? 

Coming Up In Future Issues

Fifty Years of Ski Academies, Part II: The future of American racing: Are academies the solution or part of the problem?

Resorts Then & Now: Grouse Mountain, British Columbia

In Focus A photo retrospective from Hubert Schriebl

PLUS

  • Mountaineering Records
  • Canadian Ski Hall of Fame Inductees
  • Where Are They Now? Nelson and Caroline Lalive Carmichael

VISIT THE ISHA WEBSITE: www.skiinghistory.org

Join our Facebook page: facebook.com/skiinghistory

 

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By Randy Johnson

How Vermonters, Austrians and Swiss launched skiing below the Mason-Dixon Line.

Yankee skiers often assume that Mount Washington is the highest peak in the eastern United States, but it ain’t. More than a dozen mountains in the southern Appalachians are higher, and they even host some 17 ski resorts. The base village at Beech Mountain, North Carolina, sits more than 1,000 feet higher than the top of Mt. Mansfield’s lift network, Vermont’s highest.

Photo top of page: During 1962 construction of Blowing Rock Ski Lodge in North Carolina, early snow sent skiers hiking. Photo courtesy Appalachian Ski Mountain.


Glen Plake at Beech Mountain. Randy
Johnson collection.

Mile-high ranges wring snow out of storms coming from the moist Mississippi Basin and the Great Lakes. More important, typical overnight temperatures at those elevations allow great snowmaking—on average eight hours each night from mid-December to late March. On a winter’s day at the summit of 5,506-foot Beech Mountain, a New England skier would feel right at home.

Long before the first skiers arrived, early settlers noted the wintry weather. In 1752, Bishop Augustus Spangenberg wanted to establish a new settlement but was turned back by a blizzard near what would become Boone, North Carolina. During the Revolutionary War, the Overmountain Men trudged through September snow while crossing Roan Mountain en route to defeat Loyalists at the Battle of Kings Mountain, South Carolina. And in 1856, snow stopped mail carriers crossing the Blue Ridge Mountains near Cheat Mountain, today the site of West Virginia’s Snowshoe Mountain ski resort—with average snowfall of almost 200 inches.

Moreover, cool summers meant that by the late 1800s, the high mountains bloomed with resort hotels like Blowing Rock’s Green Park Inn (opened in 1891), where the rich escaped baking lowlands. Railroads made access easy in some spots.

Waldo Holden

During the Depression years, lift-served resorts triggered a boom in skiing across the northern states, and skiers who moved south brought the sport with them. In 1936, federal employees from New England and the Sierra founded the Ski Club of Washington, D.C. (SCWDC). Their first project was to find snow nearby. Waldo Holden, a D.C. lawyer from Vermont and the club’s first president, scouted Washington’s environs and found snowy hills in Glencoe, Pennsylvania, 150 miles northwest of Washington. The club ran seven ski trains there during that first winter.

Thereafter, snow proved unreliable and the search roamed south. In 1939, workers from the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) cut the Whiskey Hollow Trail at New Germany State Park in western Maryland, billed as “the only expert trail south of the Mason-Dixon line.” It was only a three-hour drive from Washington. For the 1939-40 ski season, SCWDC persuaded nearby landowners Samuel and Lorraine Otto to operate a 600-foot rope tow powered by a 1935 Dodge truck donated by the CCC.

About the same time, the new Great Smokies Ski Club began skiing at Newfound Gap, on the border between North Carolina and Tennessee. Great Smoky Mountains National Park opened in 1934, and the Park Service built an all-weather road through the gap. Skiers could drive to a parking lot at the top of the pass. It was a 500-mile drive from D.C. but only 50 from Knoxville, Tennessee.

Legend has it that after World War II, airline pilots flying in and out of Washington National Airport spotted large snowdrifts in the hills near Davis, West Virginia, about 150 miles west of D.C. There SCWDC connected two mega-drifts with tows in 1951 to create Driftland, which evolved into the Cabin Mountain Ski Area a few years later.

Bob Barton

Thus far, every ski tow in the area had been a ski club venture. That changed in 1955, when Bob Barton, then 27 and a graduate of the University of Virginia law school and the United States Air Force, set up a commercial tow on Weiss Knob, adjacent to Driftland. He wanted to put in snowmaking, but the site was too windy. So in 1959 he moved to the lee side of the ridge, a mile away, and put in the pipes and pumps. That winter the U.S. Weather Bureau measured 452 inches of natural snow in the Canaan Valley. Barton couldn’t keep his access road open. Today, the area operates as the White Grass Ski Touring Center.


Austrian Sepp Kober came from
Stowe to lead Virginia's 
Homestead Resort, 1959. Randy
Johnson collection.

Sepp Kober

Barton felt he’d need the cachet of a European ski instructor at the new hill. He contacted the Austrian consulate in New York and was referred to Joseph H. “Sepp” Kober, an Austrian instructor then teaching at Stowe. When Kober showed up in 1958, said Barton, “I could see immediately that there was nothing in Canaan Valley appropriate to a man of his background. Sepp was destined for greater things.”

So Kober moved to the classic spa and golf resort the Homestead, in Hot Springs, Virginia, and launched a ski area there in 1959. With a mere 2,500-foot base elevation and in the snow shadow of West Virginia’s high peaks, the Homestead may have been the first ski area designed from the start to subsist solely on machine-made snow. It opened as the only other resort to build a Cranmore-style Skimobile lift, serving an easy 700-foot vertical.

The ski area occupied less than 2 percent of the Homestead’s property, but the 483-room hotel, with a history stretching back before the Revolutionary War, had the marketing power to pull in skiers. Kober made the most of the modest terrain. He repped for Beconta and other ski-industry companies, and installed a cadre of Austrian instructors, many of whom became influential elsewhere in North America. In 2009, on the Homestead’s 50th anniversary of skiing, Kober was inducted into the U.S. National Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame. He died a year later, at age 88.

Rolf Lanz and Claude Anders

On the western side of the Smokies, a ski resort debuted above Gatlinburg, Tennessee, in 1962. The city owned land along the Newfound Gap Road, including a 3,300-foot peak about 2,000 feet above town. It offered a potential 600 vertical feet of skiing, and the city leased the land to a private ski club.

Rolf Lanz, a native of Bern, Switzerland, had moved to Atlanta in 1953 and worked there as a hairdresser. He became a Gatlinburg regular and in 1965 jumped at the chance to become ski school director. In 1973, real estate developer Claude Anders built a 120-passenger aerial tram—at the time the world’s largest—from the town to the mountain, then purchased the resort itself two years later. Lanz dubbed it Ober Gatlinburg.


Tony Krasovic led on-hill
development at Blowing Rock.
Appalachian Ski Mountain photo.

Bill Thalheimer and Tony Krasovic

In 1962, the first of today’s resorts came to the High Country corner of North Carolina, when movie theater entrepreneur Bill Thalheimer debuted the Blowing Rock Ski Lodge. Ski pros were sparse, and Sepp Kober connected Thalheimer with Austrian instructor Tony Krasovic. He agreed to come south to run a resort but admitted later, “I didn’t know the only thing there was a parking lot!”

While Thalheimer handled financing and publicity, Krasovic managed the hill. He kept the resort making snow as the business struggled. Kober and Krasovic were the only Southerners at the founding of the National Ski Areas Association at Colorado’s Broadmoor Resort in 1962.

In 1968, after a stockholder squabble, Grady Moretz and four partners arranged a friendly takeover from the bank. The resort was renamed Appalachian Ski Mountain and found success as a family-friendly resort. The next winter, Jim Cottrell and Jack Lester arrived to promote their ironically named French-Swiss Ski College. By selling ski lessons in bulk to colleges and even to the U.S. Army and Navy (from 1969–76), they taught GLM skiing to hundreds of thousands of new skiers—an outrageous tale that deserves its own article in a future issue of Skiing History.

Kober protegés Manfred and Horst Locher opened Bryce Resort in Virginia in 1965. The 500-foot-vertical ski area had the advantage of location, less than two hours from downtown Washington. The Lochers, in turn, imported more European pros, including Gunther Jöchl, a Bavarian-educated Austrian ski racer, in 1971.


Doc Brigham launched Beech,
Sugar and Snowshoe resorts.

Doc Brigham

Dr. Thomas “Doc” Brigham, who grew up in Vermont and was an avid skier, was stranded in Birmingham, Alabama, teaching dentistry at the University of Alabama. He also maintained a private practice. His wife showed him an article in Reader’s Digest about snowmaking at the Homestead. Convinced the South could have a vibrant ski industry, Brigham set out to find a mountain.

He found two, in fact, near Banner Elk, North Carolina. He liked the 5,236-foot summit of Sugar Mountain, a few miles south of town, but couldn’t make a deal for the land there. Instead, he purchased an option on the upper slopes of Beech Mountain, north of town and at more than 5,500 feet high. To finance the lifts and lodge, Brigham’s group sold the land to the three Robbins brothers, who had made money developing local tourist attractions. Their idea was to develop Beech real estate, along with a sister condominium resort on St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Beech opened in the winter of 1967–68 and soared to the top spot in the emerging Southern ski industry. A national marketing blitz brought an upscale clientele for second homes.

Brigham felt the investment group spent more than he liked on the Virgin Islands venture. So he decamped and returned to Sugar Mountain, where he was now able to strike a deal with landowners George and Chessie MacRae. Sno-Engineering’s Sel Hannah designed the new resort, with Stein Eriksen’s endorsement. The slopes opened on December 19, 1969. Austrian instructor Erich Bindlechner ran the ski school, fresh from his previous post as assistant ski school director at Killington. In 1971, a former Kober instructor and snowmaker at Bryce named Bob Ash came on as Sugar’s mountain manager—he would later run both Beech and Sugar.

The summer of 1973 brought the OPEC oil embargo, recession and high interest rates, all but halting second-home sales. Real-estate bankruptcies followed. Brigham saw the writing on the wall and bailed again, heading to Cheat Mountain in West Virginia to launch Snowshoe Mountain.

Ash maintained that the debacle of 1973-75 gave Southern skiing an undeserved black eye. “Even during the gas crisis and the bankruptcies, the ski operations at Beech and Sugar and the others were making money,” he said. For a time, Sugar Mountain was the South’s largest ski area.


Gunther Jochl engineered
recovery at Sugar Mountain. 
Sugar Mountain photo.

Gunther Jöchl

Brigham’s departure left a vacuum at Sugar, leading to bankruptcy. In 1976, the court leased the mountain to Jöchl and his Blue Knob partner Dale Stancil.

Jöchl, who held a degree in engineering from the University of Munich, solved the snowmaking, grooming and lift problems, elevating Sugar’s skiing. “It used to be unheard of to start skiing before the 15th of December,” he says. “When I came here, I said, ‘It’s gonna get cold. Let’s make snow.’” Sugar started opening in November. “Everybody thought we were nuts,” he says. “By the time they were wondering what we did, we had fantastic skiing, made some money—and got great publicity.” Eventually Jöchl could cover the entire mountain—all 125 acres—with a foot of snow in 36 hours.

In 2011, Jöchl bought out Stancil’s share to become sole owner, along with his wife, Kim, one of the U.S. Ski Team’s Schmidinger twins. Major slope expansions included a double-black diamond run homologated for FIS slalom and giant slalom events and six new lifts, among them six- and four-passenger detachable chairs.

As a young racer in Bavaria, Jöchl’s sponsor was Völkl, and he had become friends with Franz Völkl, Jr. himself. In 1981 Völkl offered Jöchl the U.S. distribution rights to the brand. Until 1995, one of the world’s premier ski brands was distributed from Banner Elk, North Carolina. Then, for two years, he imported Kneissl skis and Dachstein boots.


Powder day at Snowshoe. Snowshoe
photo.

Snowshoe: Brigham’s Final Mountain

Brigham’s new venture, Snowshoe Mountain, grew even bigger than Sugar. It consisted of three lift networks on 257 acres, topping out at 4,848 feet elevation. The west side of the ridge offers an uninterrupted 1,500 feet of steep vertical.

Snowshoe, named for its population of hares, represents that “developed-out-of-nowhere” side of Southern skiing. The resort debuted in 1974 with little lodging, and Brigham realized he couldn’t run a destination resort with nowhere to sleep. Refinancing was needed and the state helped, but Snowshoe’s growing pains continued, with bankruptcies in 1976 and again in 1985, even as the resort became the South’s largest ski area.

Between the bankruptcies Brigham again withdrew from one of his ski resort projects, developing the Euro-style Whistlepunk Village and Inn on the mountaintop. Stability arrived under coal magnate Frank Burford. Acquired by Intrawest in 1995, Snowshoe was hosting nearly a half-million skiers annually by the late ’90s. Over a handful of years beyond the turn of the century, Intrawest spent $100 million building one of its signature resort villages. In summer 2017, Snowshoe stepped up to national Ikon Pass status when it was acquired by Alterra Mountain Company.

Brigham, with long time protégé Danny Seme, moved on to another West Virginia summit, Tory Mountain, but this last resort never opened. Trees again cover its runs. With son Peter, Brigham spent his later years involved in Colorado’s Sunlight Mountain Resort. He passed away in 2008. 

The Other Guys

After the early heyday of natural snow skiing in Canaan Valley, skiing came back in 1971 as the state developed Canaan Valley Ski Resort where Bob Barton’s 1955 original Weiss Knob had been located.

Adjacent Timberline ski area, with 1,000 feet of vertical, opened in 1982 and in 2019 was purchased by Indiana ski area operator Perfect North Slopes after falling on hard times. The new owners installed West Virginia’s first six-person detachable chairlift. Timberline’s two-mile Salamander Run, the region’s longest, is the only Southern slope requiring a U.S. Forest Service public land use permit.

Wintergreen, now Virginia’s biggest ski resort, opened in the winter of 1975–76 with slopes designed by Sel Hannah. Clif Taylor, originator of the graduated length method of ski instruction (GLM), was ski school director. In 1982, manager Uel Gardner, another New Englander, added the ski area’s challenging Highlands slope system, taking the vertical drop just past 1,000 feet.

Randy Johnson is an award-winning travel writer based in Banner Elk, North Carolina. His most recent book is Southern Snow, published in 2019.

 

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In 1929 one of the best-known climbers in Europe emigrated to New York and began putting up first ascents in New England and then across the country. Before World War II, Fritz Wiessner (1900-1988) led major expeditions to Nanga Parbat and K2 in the Himalaya. A trained chemist, on first arriving in New York he set up a factory to manufacture paint and waxes. With the growing popularity of Alpine skiing, his Wonder Wax sold widely, Wonder Cream was a pioneering sunblock, and Leath-R-Seal waterproofed boots. Wiessner was 41 years old when the United States entered World War II, and the 10th Mountain Division wouldn’t take him as a soldier. Instead, they hired him as a consultant, and he manufactured plenty of ski wax and boot-seal for the army. After the war, Wiessner moved his business to Burlington, Vermont, and launched Fall-Line waxes. This ad, from a 1957 issue of SKI Magazine, came at a time when many skiers were confused about waxing. Most skis were still sold with celluloid or phenolic plastic bases, or with wood bases sealed with celluloid lacquer, and skis could refuse to glide in very cold or very wet snow unless correctly waxed. Wiessner, who settled in Stowe, sold the company in 1969. He continued to climb until just a year before his death, at age 88.

COMING UP IN FUTURE ISSUES

Fifty Years of Ski Academies: What they have accomplished. Is it enough? And what’s next?

Southern Comfort: The history of skiing below the Mason-Dixon Line.

Resorts Then & Now: Mount Seymour, B.C.

PLUS

  • ISHA Award-winning films
  • Canadian and Colorado Ski Hall of Fame Inductees
  • Where Are They Now: Sun Valley’s Ed King,
  • Nelson and Caroline Lalive Carmichael, Hedda Berntsen

VISIT THE ISHA WEBSITE: www.skiinghistory.org

Join our Facebook page: www.facebook.com/skiinghistory

 

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Ski lift evolution is dotted with failed experiments.

(Photo above: The Mount Hood Skiway launched in 1951. The enormous weight of the buses meant the lift hauled 72 skiers per hour—when a chairlift of that era transported 1,000.)

The new high-speed Jordan 8 bubble chairlift at Sunday River, Maine, will be the fastest eight-pack in North America once it’s installed for the 2022–23 ski season. Thirty-two hundred skiers per hour will ascend at 20 feet per second, cradled in heated seats with head and foot rests.

This Usain Bolt of lifts will be the ultimate in uphill transportation, and a far cry from America’s first surface lift—a steam-powered toboggan tow built in Truckee, California, in 1910. The article, “A History of North American Ski Lifts, by Mort Lund and Kirby Gilbert (Skiing Heritage, September 2003) tells the full story of how Alex Foster’s rope tow (1932–33) was succeeded by Ernst Constam’s J-bar and T-bar (1934), and then by Jim Curran’s chairlift (1936). That article traces the story of lift designs that were successful enough to become commonplace. But what about the lifts that didn’t make the Darwinian cut?

Skiers have been transported by devices that look strange to us today, including boat tows, ski-on gondolas, jigback trams, Air Cars, Skimobiles, shotgun tows and sit-sideways chairs. There have been city buses converted to skiways, attempts at monorail lifts and a greasy chain-drive contraption that ruined more than a few ski outfits.

“Consider the trials and tribulations of lift design through the years,” says Peter Landsman, a lift supervisor at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, who started LiftBlog.com in 2015. “People are passionate about skiing. Almost as long as there have been skiers, there have been people trying to determine the best and fastest and most efficient way to get to the top.”

Ski lift engineers have done their best to make the ascent a smooth one, but it didn’t always go as planned. Here are a few of the engineering dead-ends we can charitably consider “nice tries.”


With parts salvaged from local
mine hoists, Aspen's boat tow
opened in 1938. and hauled
skers, at 10 cents a ride, until
1946. Aspen Historical Society

Ahoy, Mateys!

Before its first chairlift, Aspen skiers relied upon repurposed mining equipment. The original Boat Tow on Aspen Mountain was constructed in 1937 by members of the Aspen Ski Club and opened on January 27, 1938. It consisted of two wooden toboggans, or “boats,” each one 12 feet long by three feet wide and containing four plank seats mounted rowboat style. The boats were constructed of pine, including the runners, which had steel banding attached, according to Aspenmod.com.

The boats were connected by steel cable to rotating terminals converted from hoist rigs that had been taken from the Little Annie Mine on Aspen Mountain. The cable was guided up the mountain by wood towers. The motor was a converted Model A Ford engine.

Up to eight people could sit in a boat and be pulled up 600 feet of vertical in less than three minutes, while the empty boat slid down the other side. The fee was 10 cents a ride, 50 cents for a half-day. The boat tow lasted through December 1946, when chairlifts were deemed a higher capacity—and preferred–route uphill.

Leave the Driving to Us

At least the name was impressive: Oregon’s Mount Hood Aerial Skiway. But, in reality, it was two repurposed city buses, each using a pair of 185-horsepower gasoline engines to ascend a stationary 1.5-inch diameter cable—a technology also used in timber operations to haul logs out of the woods, according to Lindsey Benjamin, writing for the Oregon Historical Society.

In January 1951, the Mount Hood Skiway opened, climbing 3.2 miles from below Government Camp to Timberline Lodge. It was the longest lift of its kind in the world and attracted the attention of newspapers, popular magazines and newsreel producers on its preview voyage. In an August 1951 Popular Science article, Richard Neuberger described the Skiway as the “most extraordinary of busses,” scraping clouds to deposit passengers at Timberline Lodge. A 1956 newsreel breathlessly exclaimed, “It flies through the air with the greatest of ease!”

Equipped with streetcar-style seats that flipped to allow passengers to always face forward, each bus had a capacity of 36 riders. When finally hung on the cables, the buses’ behemoth weight resulted in a 5.2–miles per hour, 25-minute trip up the mountain. Each round trip thus took an hour, which meant the Skiway lifted only 72 people per hour—in an era when the typical chairlift hauled 1,000 skiers in the same time frame.

Said Bill Keil, a Timberline Lodge publicity manager during the 1950s, “The tramway crippled its way through five years of marginal operations before suspending” in 1956. By June 1959, despite repeated efforts to carry out experiments for a redesign, a liquidating committee was formed. The lower terminal building was sold in 1960 for $25,000, and Zidell Machinery and Supply Company bought the two buses, a jeep, an engine and other tram parts for $10,080.

“I guess it proved to be not the most successful lift, but it certainly looked cool,” says LiftBlog.com’s Landsman.

It was an ignoble end. To see the Skiway in action, go to skiinghistory.org/resources/video/failure-mt-hood-skiway


Attitash set up a model monorail
in 1967. It got no farther than the
base lodge. Attitash photo.

How About a Monorail?

New Hampshire was a hotbed of lift innovation, considering the Cranmore Skimobile, Wildcat’s gondola and the Cannon tramway. When Attitash opened in 1966, pitched as the “Red Carpet Ski Area,” its owners wanted a creative way to open the upper mountain.

According to the Mt. Washington Signal (December 1966), plans called for a cog monorail rising

1,800 vertical feet over a 7,600-foot run (1.4 miles). Four trains, each carrying up to 42 passengers in heated cars, would make the one-way trip in 10 minutes. While two trains unloaded and loaded at base and summit terminals, two would be en route, passing at a mid-mountain siding.

It would be the first such monorail in the world, according to the North Conway (N.H.) Reporter (Jan. 26, 1967). That month the manufacturer, Universal Design Ltd., of Cape May, New Jersey, erected a section of track adjacent to the base lodge, on which sat an articulated demonstration car with a Buck Rogers plastic-bubble roof. Photos of the train circulated in newspapers across the country in February 1967.

It wasn’t until a narrow track-line was cut all the way to the mountain’s summit that managers faced up to the difficulty of financing the project. Nor did the landlord, the U.S. Forest Service, appear eager to approve construction. Instead, a much simpler chairlift opened on the upper mountain in February 1969. In the end, the monorail was an idea better suited for Disneyland. The model car and track section were sent back to the Jersey shore.


In 1963, Park City skiers rode
mine cars three miles, then a
hoist 1800 feet to the surface.

Tunnel Your Way to the Top

Ski lift designers are nothing if not resourceful. Some look at an abandoned ore tunnel and imagine skiers happily ascending skyward.

When Park City’s last mining company developed Park City Ski Resort, its first “lift” was the Thaynes Shaft lift. In 1963, the “skier subway” opened. Skiers could board repurposed mine cars, journey three miles underground through the Spiro Tunnel (drilled in 1916) to then ride the mine elevator 1,800 vertical feet to the surface and emerge near the Thaynes double chair. Archival photos show skiers in headbands crammed underground with their pencil-skis and screw-in edges trying to make the best of a sometimes dripping-wet experience. The ordeal took 45 minutes. Though popular as a novelty, most skiers rode the train only once before heading back to the much-faster chairlifts. (For the full story, see “Spiro Tunnel,” SH, March–April 2019.)


Chain-drive "clickety-clack" 
dripped oil on chic skiwear.
Mount Snow photo.

Mount Snow’s “Clickety-Clack”

Mount Snow in Vermont was way ahead of its time in ski lift design. The resort’s Air Car was right out of TV’s The Jetsons. Installed in time for the 1964–65 season, the short Carlevaro and Savio tramway lasted about 12 years, traversing from Snow Lake Lodge to the base of the mountain, according to NewEnglandSkiHistory.com.

A Mount Snow lift with greater longevity was the Mixing Bowl double chair, nicknamed the “Clickety-Clack” because it ascended an overhead track pulled by a greased chain. Mark Hettrich joked on Facebook that it “looked like a meat drying rack,” with skiers playing the part of beef jerky. Mike Gagne, also on Facebook, remembered, “When it was raining, it was unbelievable the amount of grease that was dripping down and covering us; it was quite a mess and noisy and slow. Basically, it was a conveyor belt-style ski lift.”

Skip King, former vice president of American Skiing Company, the one-time owner of Mount Snow, recalls how the lift was eventually kneecapped. “The fact that the chain needed constant lubrication is the reason it constantly dripped oil.”

The noisy lift was dismantled in 1997, when it was replaced by a surface conveyor belt considered easier for beginners to master. “Besides, our carpet lift had a cover on it like a covered bridge, which was more protective,” says National Ski Areas Association President and CEO Kelly Pawlak, who was general manager of Mount Snow from 2005 to 2017.


Portillo's va-et-vient lifts serve
avalanche chutes.

Portillo’s Slingshot Lifts

This is a concept utterly unsuitable for the general public, and it should have dead-ended years ago. But Portillo, Chile’s signature lifts have survived decades in use by expert skiers. Built in the 1960s by Jean Pomagalski, the original Roca Jack surface lift was designed to survive avalanches on the steep terrain it serves. It has no towers, so an avalanche passes under the cables with no damage done. The cable wheel is anchored to the rock face at the top. Five skiers ride side-by-side, hanging onto a horizontal bar and dragged by Poma platters under each butt. Poma calls this type of lift a va-et-vient (“go and come”) because as one bar goes up, the empty one comes down.

When the liftie pulls the launch cord, the tow-bar accelerates abruptly to 27 kilometers per hour (17 mph). It takes teamwork and steady nerves to ride successfully. Just don’t cross your skis or your buddy’s skis. At the top, the tow stops just as suddenly. To avoid sliding backward, the five dismounting skiers have to drop into traverse position without knocking each other over. Nonetheless, the lift does what it was designed to do, and Portillo installed three more just like it, on three more avalanche chutes.

Says former U.S. Ski Team coach John McMurtry, “It’s not exactly what you want for a learn-to-ski program.”

The Future of Uphill Transportation (or Not)

A few more recent inventions indicate that innovation in ski lift design continues unabated. The jury is still out on these.


Towpro is an electric winch on
wheels.

Who Needs a Ski Area?

Why travel on icy roads when you can put a ski area in your backyard with a Towpro Lift—a portable rope tow that weighs 400 pounds, can be put into the back of your pick-up truck or SUV, sets up in an hour (with help) and runs off a 240-volt electrical plug (same as a clothes dryer or electrical stove). The return unit can be mounted to a tree, and the system comes with a rope spliced to a length of your choice.

“One enterprising Vermonter cut down a few trees and set the rope tow up on a hill on his 30-acre property: no parking, no reservations, no lines, no social distancing. He bought a generator at Home Depot to power it. He slows it down for his five-year-old daughter,” writes ski journalist Tamsin Venn, a member of the North American Snowsports Journalists Association.

Cost is about $8,845, which, considering lift ticket prices of about $230 per day at some areas, will pay for itself in a little more than a month. Of course, your backyard isn’t groomed by a PistenBully.

Powered Skiing

Even our friends in the Nordic ski world could use a lift now and then. Another weird ride worth watching is the SkiZee Woodsrunner, “the four-stroke leader in so-called powered skiing.” It’s essentially a baby snowmobile—small enough to fit in a car trunk—that pushes you from behind like an outboard motor. For $4,990 you can zip along a frozen lake or rolling hillside at 25 miles per hour.


Zoa, a handheld winch, rides on
your back for the ski down.

Backcountry DIY Tow

Not to be outdone is the Zoe Engineering Zoa PL1, the portable rope tow for the backcountry that fits in a backpack. First you skin up, tie a line to a fixed object or snow anchor, lay 1,000 feet of parachute cord downhill, remove the 10.5-lb. battery-powered winch from your backpack, ride the parachute cord back up, then descend. Repeat as long as the battery—and your legs—hold out. The patent-pending rope tow system promises more laps with less work. It’s still in the beta stage, and prices will start at $1,056.

Clearly, wherever there are skiers, and the rules of gravity continue to apply, there will be creative inventors ready to figure out new ways to go up just so they—and we—can come right back down again. 

Ride the Limo in the Sky

If you had the means, you could charter a Gulfstream IV jet to get to your favorite ski resort. Once there, so long as the destination was Killington, Vermont, you could have also chartered your own gondola cabin with music, leather seats and cup holders.


For $1500, you could rent a
luxury gondola car, but on each
run you'd have to wait for it to
come back around. 
Killington photo.

The 1993 high-speed Skyeship gondola that Skiing History wrote about in its January–February 2021 issue was state of the art at the time, with heating and a different modern art graphic on the exterior of each cabin—which was nicknamed by some wags “FART” for “flying art.” The idea was that for $1,500 daily that particular gondola would be yours for the day.

They meant well.

“The tricked-out Skyeship stayed on the line. They couldn’t pull it and set it aside for you to finish your run,” says Ken Beaulieu, director of the Killington News Bureau at the time.

“You’d have to time your run exactly and make sure you were down in time to pick it up again as it came around the bullwheel. Needless to say, that program didn’t last long. There wasn’t much of a market for it.”

ISHA board member Jeff Blumenfeld is president of the North American Snowsports Journalists Association (NASJA.org).

 

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In 1958, Stein Eriksen was at the height of his fame, and had just moved to Snowmass as director of skiing. For years, he and his older brother Marius popularized a red-white-blue sweater pattern, knitted by their mother Birgit and designed by Unn Søiland, called the Marius sweater. Patterns were distributed by the wool-producer Sandnes Uldvarefabrik. Then Jantzen came calling. Founded in Portland, Oregon, in 1910, the knitwear company made sweaters, but the main product was swimwear. Much of Jantzen’s national advertising was cheesecake (or beefcake) featuring swimmers glistening with water, but the sportswear ads featured top pro athletes looking dapper off the court. The Eriksen sweater campaign, with this action shot, was a change of pace. You can still buy Marius-pattern sweaters from Dale of Norway, and find vintage Jantzen sweaters on eBay. The ad ran in the November 1958 issue of SKI Magazine. –Seth Masia

 

Coming Up in Future Issues

History of Dynamic A tiny factory in Sillans, France, built skis to order for French racers. That’s how the VR17 happened. And with Le Trappeur right next door, racers got their boots made on the same visit.

Prehistory of Heliskiing Founding guides awaited the evolution of reliable helicopters, and then had to train more guides.

Beijing Olympics No World Cup skiers have seen the courses. Are they too easy for world class racing? Edie Thys Morgan investigates.

PLUS

  • Whatever happened to Bend Ze Knees, $5 Please?
  • World’s weirdest ski lifts.
  • How Spider Sabich changed American racing.
  • Genesis of the Canadian Alpine Team.

Join our Facebook page: facebook.com/skiinghistory

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By Seth Masia

Before P-tex, there was Kofix. It drove a revolution in ski racing.

When Alpine skis had wooden bases, it was common to waterproof them with celluloid lacquer, made by dissolving celluloid in ether, acetone or alcohol. Each factory had its own name for this stuff – Plasticite, Celloblitz and so on. It made a smooth glossy surface but soon wore thin. When the wood started to show through, skiers could paint on a lacquer sold in cans, under brand names like Faski and Blue Streak.

Photo above: Kofix headquarters, Hall im Tirol near Innsbruck. All photos courtesy of Barbara Kofler.

With the end of World War II, European ski factories resumed production, with a few new adhesives and plastics. Early in 1945, within months of Liberation, Dynamic began using a solid sheet of celluloid – not a lacquer – to improve glide speed. “Cellolix” repelled water, held wax and resisted rock damage, but as it aged it often cracked. Nonetheless, celluloid was a great solution for the first aluminum skis, and was used, in the form of a softer sticky-tape film, by TEY on their Alu-60 ski. Attenhofer coated the bottom of its metal ski with Araldite, an epoxy resin invented during the war in Switzerland, and called it Temporit.


Kofix logo featured a
speedometer-headed skier.

Polyethylene: Classified secret in WWII

Polyethylene (PE) waited in the wings. PE production was devised in England in 1939. With the outbreak of war, the material was classified secret, because it was perfect for insulating coaxial cables used in radar sets and for wiring insulation in Allied warplanes. In 1951, a cheaper form of PE came into wide use for packaging.


Walter Kofler (center) with his family, 
c 1933. 

Walter Rudolf Kofler (1928-2004) grew up in Innsbruck as an enthusiastic ski racer. He turned 17 in May, 1945, just a week after the American 409th Infantry Regiment occupied Innsbruck. That summer Kofler entered the University of Innsbruck. He earned his doctorate in physics, at age 21, in 1949.

How to glue it?

Before graduating, Kofler noticed that the new PE material felt a lot like the solid form of paraffin wax. Its chemical structure was perfectly compatible with paraffin, and Kofler thought it might make a useful ski base. But PE was so slippery that, unlike celluloid, no glue could hold it to the bottom of a ski. Kofler hit on the idea of partially melting one side of a PE sheet to a strip of cotton fabric; the fabric could then be glued to the ski. He also mixed a lot of wax into the molten plastic.

Local ski factories Schlechter, Halhammer, Vielhaber and Messerer tested the new base successfully, and in October, 1952, Kofler applied for an Austrian patent for a “ski base made of fabric-laminated polyethylene.”


Dr. Walter Kofler.

In 1954 he set up a factory in Munich and pitched the product to major ski factories, under the brand name Kofix. It was expensive. Swiss and American factories, with the advantage of strong currencies, could buy the stuff easily, and the Swiss company Montana purchased a license to make its own version of Kofix, for sale to Swiss and French ski factories.

Racing advantage

But the cash-strapped French and Austrian factories were slow to adopt Kofix for mass production skis. Its superior glide speed obviously conferred an advantage for racing, and by the 1956 Olympics in Cortina, racers on Kästle and Kneissl skis had Kofix bases. Austrians won nine of the eighteen medals, including Toni Sailer’s three golds plus Anderl Molterer’s silver and bronze, and Swiss skiers on Kofix won another three.

Sailer was unbeatable on any ski base—he whipped Molterer, also equipped with Kofix, by six seconds in the GS. French racers, still skiing on Cellolix bases, were shut out of the medals entirely—eight seconds off the pace in GS and almost ten seconds out in slalom and downhill. A year later the entire Austrian team


Kofler skiing a Masters race, 1970.

had Kofix bases, and they took six of the top seven places at the Hahnenkamm. According to Maurice Woehrlé, who joined Rossignol’s engineering team in 1962, in 1957 Rossignol used a form of PE, called Naltene, on the Metallais—but that wasn’t a race ski.

Woehrlé also reports that Charles Bozon and Guy Périllat used Dynamic’s Slalom Leger, with a PE base, at the Squaw Valley Olympics. Bozon took bronze in slalom. That was the breakthrough year for Rossignol’s Allais 60, the first aluminum ski to dominate downhill racing, and it got a PE base. So it would appear that all the men’s medals in 1960 were won on PE bases. Rossignol’s slalom and GS Stratos didn’t get PE until 1964—which is when the French team began its dominant Killy-Périllat-Goitschel era.

In 1960, Kofix turned up in the Head, Hart and Northland catalogs. But as late as 1958, skiers were still confused about what constituted a “plastic” base. In their book The New Invitation to Skiing, Fred Iselin and A.C. Spectorsky classed Kofix with half a dozen brands of celluloid lacquer.

A problem arose with the cotton backing: If a ski absorbed moisture, the fabric softened and swelled, deadening the ski. Kofler kept working on upgrades: harder, tougher plastics, plus PE extruded onto steel and fiberglass strips, which replaced cotton while functioning as a structural layer. By 1959, most Austrian, Swiss and German factories offered Kofix recreational skis, but resented Kofler’s monopoly.


Kofler introduces Rebell ski, 1972.

Competition from P-tex

In 1964, Swiss licensee Montana introduced P-tex. Because it didn’t use a cotton backing, it didn’t violate Kofler’s patent. Instead, the bonding side of the plastic was flame-treated, which put a carbon “tail” on each of the long polyethylene molecules, so it could be glued solidly to a fiberglass or aluminum ski.

Beginning with Fischer, Kofler’s customers stampeded to adopt Montana’s P-tex, going so far as to exclude Kofler from trade shows. In 1966, Montana introduced a sintered base called P-tex 2000. It was far harder and more durable than the extruded forms of PE previously available. That was the end of the line for Kofix. In 1970, Kofler turned his patents over to an employee, who continued to manufacture the product as Fastex.

Kofler then developed a ski made of extruded strips of ABS plastic, rolled out on laminating equipment he designed. He built his own line of Rebell skis, and licensed the process to Maxel and Sarner in Italy. By 1976 it was clear that extruded skis couldn’t compete with the major factories, and the concept evaporated.

Kofler continued to ski, and to innovate. In 1988 he patented a lightweight fiberglass leaf spring for cars, trains and trucks, and a tough surface for Kneissl’s Big Foot skis and for snowboards, produced in his lab in Innsbruck. He consulted with the Austrian ski team on glide speed issues. In 2004, at age 76, while driving to a masters ski race, he suffered a fatal heart attack.

Many thanks to Werner Nachbauer and Arno Klien for their generous assistance in gathering German-language sources for this article, and to Barbara Kofler for fact-checking.

Seth Masia is president of ISHA. He writes frequently for Skiing History.

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By Ron LeMaster

The keystone of skiing for decades, it’s largely been replaced by terrain-unweighting. 

Photos above: Fred Iselin demonstrates “lift and swing” in a stem christiania. From Invitation to Skiing, F. Iselin and A. C. Spectorsky, 1947.

Exhortations of “down-UP!” used to ring from the lips of instructors and aspirational skiers as they initiated their parallel turns with up-unweighting. Countless one-page instructional tips in ski magazines reminded readers of its importance. Today, this former foundation of sound skiing is considered déclassé by many technically minded skiers. What happened?


The new Austrian technique of the 1950s
eschewed rotation, but still espoused up-
unweighting. It was all in the knees and
ankles. From The New Official Austrian
Ski System
, 1958.

The idea of “unweighting,” freeing the skis from the snow to facilitate starting a turn, goes back to the earliest days of Alpine skiing. And the obvious method of doing it was to toss the body upward. This was expressed well by Charles Proctor and Rockwell Stephens in their 1936 book, Skiing – Fundamentals, Equipment and Advanced Techniques. “[the] Christiania … starts with a rise or upward lift of the body, followed by a pronounced dip… The primary purpose of the rise and dip is to unweight the skis, for it is obviously easier to flick the heels out and thus start the turn when they are unweighted than when the runner’s weight is pressing them down into the snow.” In the days when slopes were ungroomed and the skis were long and stiff, “flicking the heels” demanded some significant unweighting. Brute force was needed, and the big “down-UP!” provided it. The technique was a cornerstone in ski instruction systems of all nationalities. Tyros were introduced to the first part of the movement pattern with “Bend zee knees!” The “UP!” came with the stem christiania, coupled to a strong upper-body rotation in the direction of the new turn.

Even as slopes became packed down and upper-body rotation disappeared from some teaching systems, making short, snappy turns with stiff wooden skis was more of an exercise in linked edge-sets than the linked arcs that became possible with the second generation of metal and fiberglass skis. Linking those edge-sets required significant “flicking of the heels” and pivoting of the skis, which in turn required significant and prolonged unweighting. Up-unweight was still the obvious choice.

Except in moguls. Once there were enough skiers on the slopes to create them, skiers figured out that they could employ the bumps to do the unweighting. Better skiers realized that oftentimes a bump could provide too much lift, turning each mogul crest into a ski jump. To avoid catastrophe, they learned to make the “down” but forgo the “UP!” entirely. Skiers’ bodies were still getting projected upward, but it was being done by the terrain, not the legs. Whether or not this is up-unweighting is an academic question, but the “down-UP!” was gone. (Some called this “down-unweighting,” but many technical aficionados argue that down unweighting is something quite different.)


Mike Rogan, PSIA Alpine Team coach,
flexes to absorb most of the unweighting
force as he links two short turns. Ron
LeMaster photo.

As skis and slope grooming steadily improved, the nature of short turns on all terrain has become more and more like skiing in moguls. The reason for this was revealed by Georges Joubert and Jean Vuarnet in their 1966 classic, How to Ski the New French Way (Comment se perfectionner à ski). At the beginning and end of a turn, the skis are traveling on a slope that is shallower than the fall line. So making a turn on a smooth slope is like skiing through a dip, and linking turns on that slope is like skiing through moguls. The sharper the turn and the steeper the slope, the bigger the “virtual bumps.”

A key aspect of improved ski design has also reduced the need for unweighting: The skis initiate turns more easily, and shape tighter arcs due to their shorter length and deeper sidecuts.

Through time, the details of the up-unweighting movement evolved. Before the Austrian school stormed the ski world with wedeln, short-swing and their innovative system of the late 1950s, skiers were taught to flex and extend at the ankles, knees, and waist. The new Austrian method encouraged skiers to do it all at the knees and ankles, thrusting the knees forward as they were bent, while remaining erect from the waist. This became the fashion, even though the best racers of the time bent much less at the ankles and more at the waist. In the mid 1960s, it became apparent that the best racers were skiing in more of a seated position: still bending their knees a lot, but bending more at the waist and less at the ankles. This presaged the advent of tall plastic boots in the 1970s that greatly limited the range of ankle flex but greatly improved the skier’s ability to work the skis. Since then, that way of moving up and down has remained with us.


PSIA Alpine Team member Josh Fogg
uses a variety of unweighting techniques, 
including up-unweighting, to achieve
different ends in each turn. Ron LeMaster
photo.

Today, snow grooming and ski design are so good that not only is less unweighting usually required than in the old days, but that which is needed is often provided by the dynamics of the turn itself. The skier simply goes along for the ride or, in more dynamic turns, flexes to absorb the excess unweighting that the turn would otherwise produce.

This is not to say that up-unweighting is gone from the repertoire of the good skier. Whether you define up-unweighting as leg-powered lift, or broaden the definition to include terrain-induced lift, it’s still with us. Even under the narrower meaning, it’s the sharpest tool in the skier’s kit for many situations. Used with a bouncing rhythm, it’s a go-to technique for introducing tyros to powder snow, and all experts often find themselves doing a big down-UP with a forceful upper body rotation in heavy, unpacked snow. In good skiing generally, unweighting by extending is often useful, effective and commonplace. Moreover, it gives your leg muscles a chance to relax, expands your chest so you can breathe deeper, gives you a better view of the slope below, and just plain feels good. 

 

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By Jeff Blumenfeld

Photo above: Tracks across Sterling Pond show the way from Smuggs to Spruce. The reverse trip is all downhill. 

For Alpine skiers, “interconnect” is a route connecting two separate lift networks. The granddaddy of all interconnects, created in 1956, may be the trail between the top of Stowe’s Spruce Mountain and the summit of Sterling Mountain at Smugglers’ Notch. It’s still possible to ski both resorts the same day, although the experience is no longer encouraged by the two Vermont ski areas.


Undated photo shows interconnect trail signs. The route may no longer be posted.

It’s not marked, nor patrolled, and skiers are advised against trekking alone. Still, this little-known half-mile link between resorts continues to delight intermediate to advanced skiers with a taste of easily accessible backcountry that harkens back to when skiing was a true adventure pursued on rudimentary equipment.

Home to Colorful Characters

Smugglers’ Notch derives its name from a history filled with shady characters.

From 1807 until the War of 1812, the U.S. Congress placed an embargo on all British imports, which was a hardship for American farmers and merchants who needed manufactured goods. So “importers” smuggled British merchandise from Canada, through what is today called Smugglers’ Notch Pass. State Route 108 now follows that trail.

More than 100 years later, the Notch was again used for smuggling when the 18th Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibited the manufacture and sale of alcohol. Bootleggers moved booze through Smugglers’ Notch Pass and from there south to central and southern New England. Caverns in the Notch were ideal for storing alcohol at close to room temperature, while the smugglers avoided revenue agents. Visitors today can still visit the caves.

Alpine skiing came to Stowe with construction of downhill trails by the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1933. In 1935, the old 1919 Toll House was converted to a real base lodge. Sepp Ruschp supervised construction of lifts in 1937. Starting in 1949, Ruschp developed the sunny slopes of Spruce Peak, across the road from Mt. Mansfield, starting with a T-bar.

In 1954, Spruce constructed a double chair to access the Outlook Restaurant perched on the summit, with stunning views to the south.

Calling it a restaurant is being charitable: it had no running water, no electricity and no restrooms, according to Stowe ski area historian Brian Lindner, son of a forest ranger, whose bedroom was in the original base lodge.

Beginning in 1956, adventurous skiers who followed the Long Trail half a mile northward from the Spruce Peak patrol shack (elevation 3,250 feet, 991m) could cross frozen Sterling Pond (3,040 feet, 927m) and ski down the other side to the new Madonna Base Lodge at Smugglers’ Notch ski area. They could then ride a pair of Poma lifts back to the top of Sterling Mountain (3,080 feet, 939m) and reverse course back to Spruce.

Reciprocal Ticket Offered

In the 1990s, Stowe and Smuggs, as Smugglers’ Notch is still called by locals, offered a reciprocal ticket based on a multi-day ticket purchase, used to bolster non-holiday midweek vacations. It was an effective marketing novelty, but Smugglers’ Notch vice president of marketing Steve Clokey says, “They stopped promoting it due to the logistical headaches of grooming, patrolling, and the skill levels of those who were experiencing an intermediate-plus level experience.”

What’s more, when an accident occurred in the mid-1990s, Stowe and Smugglers’ executives became even less enamored with marketing off-piste skiing.

“A Stowe snowcat driver didn’t calculate the turn radius correctly and extended the cat too far onto the ice,” Clokey tells Skiing History.  “The cat broke into shallow water and was stuck on the side of the pond. It was pulled out that night and the incident was reported to the proper authorities.” 

SKI magazine writer Steve Cohen took his family across in 1998. In his story “Ski East: Going over the Top,” (Dec. 1998) he reports, “The two trails connecting Stowe and Smugglers’ are marked with green circles and require more in the way of conditioning than ski skills; parts of the traverse are so flat we needed to herringbone and skate. Still, the 15-minute jaunt has joined two very different worlds.”

Pretty Tame

Today, the Stowe-Smuggs Interconnect trail is only open when Sterling Pond is frozen—some seasons as early as the first week of December.

From Smuggs, it takes about 20 minutes to pole across Sterling Pond and then descend into a meandering narrow trail that rolls easily to the Sterling trail on Stowe’s Spruce Peak. Take that down. Then, from the base of Spruce, take the Sensation high-speed quad back up to the peak. Ski Snuffy’s trail to the peak of Sterling Mountain, then take Rumrunner to Smuggs base. You’re back where you started in less than an hour, roundtrip.

“The toughest part is having to trek the flat surface of Sterling Pond—a little work-out but then it’s all downhill to the base of Spruce,” says Clokey.

Adds Stowe resort historian Brian Lindner, “It’s a pretty tame trail, except for some drop-offs, and is as narrow as a one-lane road. It harkens back to the way skiing used to be when I started as a kid in the 1950s, but I certainly don’t miss that vintage ski equipment.

“During my first experience with the Stowe-Smuggs Interconnect, it was 1960 and I was around eight years old. The best gear available at the time was wooden skis and leather boots. I realize now skiing was much more dangerous back then. The improvement in gear has made skiing so much better and safer. “Don’t ever make me ski in beartraps again,” he jokes.

Apparently, that’s another kind of ski adventure entirely.

ISHA board member Jeff Blumenfeld, of Boulder, Colo., is president of the North American Snowsports Journalists Association (NASJA.org). He remembers skiing the interconnect as a kid in the 1960s. The trail seemed a whole lot scarier.

Snapshots in Time

1960 Ski Like a Girl

Pretty Penny Pitou is the likeliest American bet for an Olympic gold medal. But unlike the hapless U.S. men’s team, which lost all of its chances when Buddy Werner broke his leg, the women’s team could win with any of its six girls. —“Pretty girls of highly promising American Team get set for Winter Olympics,” which profiled Pitou, Renie Cox, Linda Meyers, Joan Hannah, Beverly Anderson and Betsy Snite before the 1960 Squaw Valley Games. (Life magazine, February 1960)

1969 Ski and Smell the Roses

“South Americans are like Europeans. It’s important to have fun and watch the scenery,” said Othmar Schneider, the former Olympic slalom champion who heads the 13-instructor ski school at Portillo, 55 miles northeast of Santiago. “Americans are more serious. They are too involved in skiing and don’t see the scenery.” —Enid Nemy, “Where Ski Buffs Migrate in Summer” (New York Times, August 31, 1969)

1971 Plowed into Oblivion?

Currently, the most widely taught method, The American System, can, in my opinion, be a woefully long process that starts the beginner in the venerable “snowplow” position and frequently leaves him there for life. —Stan Fischler, “The Ski’s the Limit” (New York magazine, November 1971.)

1985 Booting Up

By the time ski shops call it a season this year, they will for the first time have sold more rear-entry than traditional boots. Although this is no great surprise, it still represents a major shift in our boot-buying habits. Five years ago, rear-entry boots were still exotic footwear for skiers who wanted something different. This season, they’re commonplace. —John Henry Auran, “Rear Entry Redux” (Skiing magazine, Spring 1985)

1990 Fear Is My Copilot

Fear is a constant companion. The racers themselves admit freely that this is “the race of fear,” head and shoulders above any other test of concentration, skill and plain ordinary guts in the world. Dr. Sepp Sulzberger, who raced it long before it reached legendary status, reports that racers in his era would lose bladder and sometimes bowel control right at the start. —Serge Lang, “The World’s Toughest Race” on the Hahnenkamm downhill. (Snow Country magazine, January 1990)

2008 Skiing Real Estate Not Recession-Proof

After years of rising prices, ski-town real estate has cooled. Sales were down as much as 50 percent across all resort markets in the first half of 2008. “The resort market could not be sustained,” said James Chung, a New York real estate consultant for the ski industry. “People aren’t buying stupidly anymore.” —Paul Tolme, “Mountains of Real Estate” (SKI Magazine, October 2008)

2021 High-Class Aspen Caper

Thieves cut a hole in the storeroom wall of the Louis Vuitton store in downtown Aspen and stole as much as $500,000 worth of merchandise, police said. One man and one woman, along with two vehicles, were caught on surveillance video. The thieves entered an unlocked hallway at the back of the store and cut a hole in the drywall just large enough for one person to enter. —Jason Auslander, “Aspen’s Louis Vuitton store targeted in brazen $500k burglary” (Aspen Times, June 8, 2021)

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By Phil Johnson

Resorts: From CCC-cut trails to a new gondola, the state-owned ski area has become a public-works success story. 

Photo above: Opening day in January 1950, launched the first chairlift in New York State. The Roebling single was built by the New Jersey company that built the Brooklyn Bridge. Belleayre Mountain photo.


Christmas Day 2020, brought a
wet-snow avalanche to the
Overlook Lodge.

On Christmas Eve 2020, as Belleayre Ski Area was settling into operation under Covid-19 restrictions, six inches of rain fell overnight. Christmas dawn revealed that a wet-snow avalanche had cascaded through the windows and across the floor of the upper-mountain Overlook Lodge. The resort closed for two days. The lower base lodge was not affected.

It hasn’t always been easy going for Belleayre, the Catskills ski area owned and operated by New York State. But over the past four years, the state has come through with $25 million to build a bottom-to-top gondola and a new quad lift, plus other upgrades. After 70 years, the resort’s viability seems assured.

Just a two-hour drive north of the George Washington Bridge, and in the heart of the Catskills resort region, Belleayre has always had the advantage of location. Partly because of the state’s involvement, in 1950 it became the first chairlift-served ski area in New York. But as a public entity, Belleayre has had a complex legal history.

Partly to assure clean water for New York City, the state instituted a “Forever Wild” article in the state constitution in 1895. That was amended by referendum in November 1941 to allow construction of a ski area on Marble Mountain near Lake Placid (see Skiing History, May-June 2015). World War II halted work on that ambitious project.


Catskill Thunder Gondola, installed in
2017, brought Belleayre into the
21st century.

Maltby Shipp of nearby Newburgh, with his son, gained local fame in 1929 as the first to hike up and ski down Belleayre’s 2,000 vertical feet, and the Civilian Conservation Corp cleared a trail—one of seven Catskill ski trails cut during the Depression years.

Returning WWII veterans led the resurgence of interest in skiing, and beginning in 1945, the Central Catskills Association, a group of local business and civic leaders, pushed for the development of a state-owned ski area that would add winter recreation to this already popular summer tourist destination. In 1947, the state passed legislation to allow additional ski area development at Belleayre and at North Creek.

Skiing was just an extension of what New York was already doing, according to Lowell Thomas, then the spokesman for the state’s Chamber of Commerce: “Both ski centers should offer in winter the same sort of inexpensive recreation as Jones Beach offers in the summer,” he said.


Art Draper, 10th Mountain Division
veteran, drove Belleayre’s
construction in 1949.

The construction of the ski area started in 1949 under the supervision of Art Draper. A Harvard graduate and New York Times reporter, Draper fled the city in 1938 to become a forest ranger. He helped to launch the Marble Mountain project, then, at the relatively advanced age of 32, he volunteered for the 10th Mountain Division and saw heavy combat as a medic. He would serve as Belleayre’s first superintendent, the state’s quaint term for what anyone else would call a general manager. 

The state allocated the manpower and $250,000 to build three main trails, a summit lodge, a temporary base lodge, a cafeteria, a workshop, a mile of access road and a 400-car parking lot.

Draper brought in Otto Schniebs, the one-time Dartmouth ski coach, who by then was living in Lake Placid and coaching the St. Lawrence University ski team. In the 1930s he had been involved in the layout of the Thunderbird race trail on Mt. Greylock in the Berkshires and then in planning for Marble Mountain. He would advise on Belleayre’s trails and lifts layout.


Otto Schniebs, former
Dartmouth coach,
advised on lift and trail
layouts.

Draper also brought to Belleayre Dot Hoyt Nebel, whom he knew from North Creek, where she had been the director of the Ski Bowl Ski School (Ski Bowl got a rope tow in 1935, to serve ski-train tourists). A math teacher turned ski racer, Nebel had been selected to the U.S. Alpine team for the cancelled 1940 Winter Olympics and during the war taught skiing at Pico Peak, where she was Andrea Mead’s first race coach. She was not impressed with the trail layout proposed for Belleayre. Nebel believed the ski trails should follow the fall line. And she knew how to make that happen. “You just go to the top of the mountain and drop a ball,” she said years later. “You see where it goes and that is where you make the trail.”  She would remain at Belleayre for 17 years as head of the ski school. The Dot Nebel is a black-diamond run at the mountain today.


Dot Hoyt Nebel fixed the
trail layout and founded
the ski school.

At the opening on January 22, 1950, Belleayre featured an electric rope tow and a 3,000-foot long Roebling single chair, the first chairlift in New York State. There wasn’t enough snow to ski that day but several hundred sightseers rode the lift for free. Enough snow arrived in February for Belleayre to co-host the New York State Alpine Combined Championships (the other co-host was Highmount, a rope-tow area on the north side of Belleayre, founded in 1947). The cost of the Belleayre lift ticket that winter was $3.50. 

Belleayre grew in the next decades and its separate lower mountain beginner terrain was especially popular. In the meantime, the Marble Mountain ski area had proven a wind-scoured bust. With Draper in the lead, supported by Gov. Averell Harriman, the state opened nearby Whiteface in 1956. Gore Mountain opened in 1964.

At the time, the three ski areas were managed by New York’s Department of Conservation. The state’s budget year ended on March 31, and that meant each of the areas closed on that date, no matter what the snow conditions at the time. 

In 1974, after years of trying, Lake Placid was awarded the 1980 Winter Olympics. Leading up to the games, the state ponied up millions of dollars for facilities upgrades. There wasn’t much money for the other two state areas.  

Then the games were over.


Dreamcatcher Glades are marked
double-diamond. Beware of hardwood.

New York State officials had paid attention to the aftermath of the 1960 Olympics. Twenty years later little evidence remained at Squaw Valley that the event had ever occurred. To assure that its investment would be preserved and utilized, in 1981 New York’s legislature created the Olympic Regional Development Authority (ORDA) to manage and market the Lake Placid facilities. The first CEO was Ned Harkness, a prominent hockey coach and facilities executive, who served until 1993.

While the Olympic facilities got the attention, Belleayre and Gore were initially left out of ORDA. Facilities had aged and snowmaking, the lifeblood of Eastern skiing, was minimal. Gore was folded into ORDA in 1984, but at the same time the state comptroller recommended closure of Belleayre. Governor Mario Cuomo budgeted only $100,000 for the area, just enough to shut it down.

A grassroots organization, the Coalition to Save Belleayre, quickly sprang up, headed by Joe Kelly, a New York City securities industry executive and long-time Catskills second-home owner. Thirteen thousand people signed a petition to save the ski area.

The New York Times and the New York Post were the two most prominent newspapers to run editorials supporting Belleayre. The economic impact of the ski area on the regional economy was a major argument. It worked. Before the end of 1984, the decision to close Belleayre was reversed. Over the next eight years, the state allocated $6 million to upgrade machinery and equipment at the area. In 1987, voters approved another constitutional amendment allowing expansion of the ski terrain and improvements to the trail layout.

Finally, in 2012, ORDA took over Belleayre, under a blended board of directors that includes representation from all three state-owned ski areas. It seems to be a good arrangement. Belleayre now has expanded snowmaking to cover 96 percent of the terrain, which includes 50 trails spread over 175 acres, plus increased base lodge capacity. With the Catskill Thunder gondola installed in 2017 and a new detachable quad lift in 2020, the future of the area seems solid. Avalanches notwithstanding. 

Phil Johnson is a ski columnist for the Syracuse Daily Gazette. His last Skiing History article was a visit with Hunter Mountain’s Karl Plattner (May-June 2017).

 

 

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