Pioneers

She ruled American stretch pants. Now she sells Skiing History.

Wini Jones, arguably North America’s premier skiwear designer, grew up in Calgary, Alberta, skiing in Banff. Her young father, Johnny Jones, afflicted her with an unpronounceable Welsh name, which she changed to Wini when the family moved from one side of Calgary to another. He taught her to ski at age three on Mt. Norquay in Banff.

By age fourteen, Jones showed grit and laser focus: she ran gates, skied with the big boys and made her own skiwear. “I made it out of impractical things like green felt and leopard pile that had no place on a ski slope,” Jones recalls. “It was ridiculous. I had a green felt cape that flowed in the wind and made a Robin Hood hat with a pheasant feather.”

She had a discerning eye: The popular Fusalp parkas of the era, from France, had a military tunic cut with a silly two-inch-tall collar, entirely inappropriate for winter weather in the Rockies, or anywhere else. She knew she could do better.

Jones, at 16, sold a few outfits from a small fashion show she put on as half-time entertainment at a Dick Barrymore film showing in Calgary. The course was set: She was determined to make a career in ski fashion. That would mean learning French, the language of fashion, and German, the language of ski commerce. And she would have to master textiles and design.

Jones breezed through the University of Montana in Missoula in three years, earning degrees in textile science and French while competing on the ski team. During her freshman winter, she took a week off to get certified with the Canadian Ski Instructors' Alliance. By senior year she realized she needed a specialized design school, and a fellow ski team member, Bärbel Matz from Austria, recommended the Modeschule der Stadt Wien (Fashion School of the City of Vienna), located in the old Hetzendorf palace built in 1690.

So, off to Austria she went, knowing that classes were in German and not being able to speak it. Arriving several weeks early, a lot of study and total immersion with no English changed that. It worked: She got a job teaching skiing at St. Johann in Tirol at Christmas.

There were no exams at Hetzendorf. Instead, there were design contests. Companies would ask for designs that could be turned into products, such as Bally Shoe. If the company used a design, the student got a small cash prize (150 schillings, about $6). Jones, paying her own way without parental support, worked hard and won prizes, which paid for groceries. Next was a summer in Lausanne, Switzerland teaching swimming in French and dating a man who could not speak English or German.  Her French really improved. Now considering herself educated, she wanted to play for the winter; first part was teaching skiing at Zermatt, followed by Axamer Lizum near Innsbruck. Teaching in French, German, and English kept her working and fed.

In October 1967, Jones landed a job in Seattle with Sam Roffe, of Roffe skiwear. He asked, “I haven’t hired a designer. How much do they make?”Starting salary was $450 a month. Only 23 years old, Jones was able to develop a fabric from the fiber selection to the weave, create the finish on the fabric, develop and select the colors, create the garment design, take it through the pricing, build the advertising and promotion, and carry it through to the selling of the product to the 16 salespeople. “I did it all, the whole spectrum from start to finish,” she says. “It was extremely rewarding even though there were some failures. I loved it.”

Roffe, six feet tall and as bald as Howard Head, never skied in his life. His avocation was breeding racehorses, including one named Winihaha.  Jones and “Mr. Roffe,” as she always called him, would often head to Los Angeles to watch his horses run. Originally a tailor of uniforms, he got into skiwear by supplying stretch pants for the U.S. Ski Team for the 1960 Olympics at Squaw Valley.

Roffe was the perfect inside man, collaborative and generous with his employees, skilled in making patterns for stretch pants and as Jones calls him, “impeccably, immaculately honest.” He loved working on the floor with the cutting and sewing staff and left the outside business—sales management, marketing and advertising, research and design—to Jones. He bought into her philosophy: “Nobody goes skiing if they are cold,” she says. The best and warmest stretch pant fabrics came from Schoeller Textil in Switzerland, from whom Roffe bought
$1 million of fabric a year through the 1970s and ’80s “The process is to develop warmth by air entrapment with insulations and fabric construction. And do it in garments with style and the right colors,” she recalls.

Through the ’70s and ’80s, Roffe was the market shareleader in stretch pants in the U.S., making 150,000 pairs each year, well ahead of Number Two, Bogner. The company also made up to 250,000 parkas, overalls, warmup pants and one-piece suits, all sewn in Seattle by a corps of 200 to 280 sewing machine operators, depending on the time of year.

In 1973, when a previous supplier could not complete the project, Roffe stepped in to supply the 30-member U.S. Ski Team and coaching staff with Jones-designed jackets, stretch pants, warmup pants and downhill suits—all custom made. And at the team’s request, not red, white and blue.

Part of Roffe's marketing success came from color-matching with products from partner manufacturers, like Demetre sweaters, that let savvy retailers upsell customers into full
ensembles: “You’ve got the jacket, and that looks great. Do you want the matching sweater? How about the matching knit hat?"

 In 1987, Jones was elected to the Council of Fashion Designers of America, an exclusive club of 250 that produces New York’s annual Fashion Week. In alphabetical order, she was listed just ahead of Calvin Klein.

Sam Roffe died in 1994, at age 85. The company was sold, and Jones—long a partner in the firm—retired after almost three decades in management. She was only 52 and full of energy for causes on Bainbridge Island, Washington, where she lives in a Japanese-style home. She helped found a public-access television station, BITV. She served on the boards of Bainbridge Performing Arts, the Historical Society and the West Sound Wildlife Shelter. She was president of the island’s economic council. For all this, in 2007 she was named Citizen of the Year for Bainbridge Island.

She now serves on four of the University of Washington Business School’s advisory boards, helping MBA students establish new companies, which includes acting as a judge in contests that award seed-money grants.

And she went skiing. Whistler-Blackcomb is her “home” mountain, six hours away. She goes there often Monday through Friday—weekends have become too crowded in this Epic-Pass era. “I was in Whistler last week for three days of hard skiing, and it took my thighs two days to recover,” she says. “You feel like you are dancing when there are good conditions. You are just dancing and you don’t want to quit!”

In 2010, David Ingemie, past president of Snowsports Industries America, who had worked with Jones for years, drafted her to serve as a director for the International Skiing History Association. “We need a woman on the board who can get things done,” he told her. Today she serves as vice president and heads the busy marketing, nominations and museum grant committees. She also conducts a spectacular vintage fashion show to kick off Skiing History Week each spring.

Jones brings a clear-eyed business sense to her work for ISHA. “We have an absolutely wonderful product in Skiing History,” she says. “The magazine has top quality printing, great literary guidance and a super editorial board. Now we have to promote this product to the entire skiing world.” And she does it, in English, German and French. 

Melinda Moulton paid tribute to Mad River Glen’s Betsy Pratt in the January-February 2023 issue.

Always in pursuit of the perfect tune, Morrissey’s standard-setting techniques led to smoother turns and faster skis.

On a Friday afternoon in April 1987, speed skier Graham Wilkie faced a dilemma. He had just finished a race in Yllas, in Arctic Finland, and the sport’s premier event, in Les Arcs, France, was scheduled for the next weekend. He was in the final year of a five-year plan to set the world speed record, and he felt a deep sense of duty to Peter Perry, who had freely shared his racing secrets before dying in a 1985 gelande-jumping contest.

Wilkie had virgin skis from Dynastar’s race room, but he wasn’t sure the factory techs had given the skis the unique tune developed by Pat Morrissey, Perry’s ski tech in Colorado. So he embarked on an odyssey to get that tune: catching a ride to Paris, he flew the next morning via Paris-London-Newark-Denver and drove over the Continental Divide to Breckenridge, Colorado.

After a quick turnaround by Morrissey, Wilkie caught the next flight to Paris and then traveled to southern France. Four days, 7,000 miles. And, in storybook fashion, he set a new world record, 131.578 miles per hour, at Les Arcs on Morrissey’s tune. Fulfilling his five-year plan to the week, Wilkie dedicated his victory to Perry. But it wouldn’t have happened without Morrissey’s hand.

In 1980, after five seasons on the amateur and pro mogul circuits, including an amateur national championship in 1976, Morrissey began tuning skis at Precision Sports in Frisco, Colorado, where he had access to the first Montana Sports stone-grinding machine in the U.S. The stone grinder replaced wet-belt sanders and could produce a much flatter, cleaner base. Morrissey found that the grinder could also create fine grooves in the new sintered polyethylene ski bottoms. He discovered that these grooves—which would eventually be called structure—channeled and agitated air into the thin film of water that skis run on, providing greater speed and easier turning with no adverse effect on straight-line stability.

Against the industry norm of glass-smooth bottoms, he experimented to find the best combination of groove depth and pattern. Even now, Wilkie remembers the details of Morrissey’s grind: three separate passes with decreasing groove depth and differing angles on the cross-hatching.

Morrissey supported the local downhillers and speed skiers, especially Perry, and they provided the best testbed for pure ski performance. In addition to improving ski glide speed, he helped racers perfect their aerodynamics. Morrissey had access to Colorado State University’s wind tunnel, where he refined skiers’ tucks and speed-suit fairings. “My guys were running five miles an hour faster than anyone else,” he recalls.

World Cup teams took notice. By 1985, Dave Culp, Dynastar’s ski tech for the U.S. women’s team, was bringing skis to Morrissey. He put his grind on the entire team’s skis for the Vail World Cup downhill in March 1986, and the Dynastar women posted spectacular results—Pam Fletcher took first, and the team placed five racers in the top 15. “Pat Morrissey is a tuning genius,” Culp says. True to form, Morrissey gives the credit to others: great skiers, a fabulous coach in Max
Ramey, and Culp.

With Culp’s endorsement, Dynastar hired Morrissey as the chief tech for the World Cup ski team in 1987. He stayed for three seasons, spending endless hours taking care of the 14 athletes assigned to him, as well as the many other Dynastar athletes who sought him out.

Dynastar’s presence in World Cup and speed skiing during that time speaks for itself. Fletcher was the American favorite for the 1988 Olympic downhill gold in Calgary but was injured during course inspection in a collision with a course worker. Wilkie’s speed record stood for six months. Once Morrissey’s patterns were adopted in the factory’s race room, Dynastar-sponsored speed skiers, including Breckenridge’s own C.J. Mueller, inhabited the small group capable of winning on any given day.

Meanwhile, Morrissey invented or helped develop various ski-tuning tools that have now become industry standards: the durable side- and bottom-guides for filing ski edges, brushes for cleaning structure (including the powered rotobrush) and diamond files.

After three seasons of grueling 16-hour days—knee-wrecking equipment-hauling on the hill, followed by hours of tuning and waxing at night—Morrissey left the World Cup to come home and manage various shops in Colorado. Today, he works with boot-fitter Jeff Bergeron at Boot Fixation in Breckenridge. 

Born in New York, raised in Switzerland, he became a California ski-racing star.

Jean-Christophe Fröelicher-Schwarzenbach, known to fellow skiers as Chris Schwarzenbach, was one of California’s fastest and most stylish skiers in the 1940s. He was born on August 6, 1918, in Quogue, New York. His father, Robert J.F. Schwarzenbach, was born and educated in Zurich and moved to New York to manage the American branch of the family business, Schwarzenbach-Huber, which owned silk-weaving factories in Zurich and Hoboken, New Jersey. Before leaving Zurich, he proposed to Madi Fröelicher, who crossed the Atlantic to marry him in New York. En route, Madi and her parents survived the sinking of the Titanic. The couple had three kids: Liselotte, Robert and Chris.

Both boys attended the Browning School in Manhattan. Their father died in 1929, just before the Wall Street crash, and in 1930 their mother moved the family to Zurich. Chris and Robert earned engineering degrees at the Polytechnikum Zurich Hochschule and did more than their share of climbing and skiing. They even skied for the U.S. team at the 1938 FIS Alpine Championships in Engelberg, and Chris was named in 1939 to the 1940 U.S. Olympic team.

The outbreak of World War II sent the family back to the United States, and both brothers went flying. Robert became a fighter pilot in the Swiss Air Force and survived the war to take over Schwarzenbach-Huber. Chris went West for grad school, studying aeronautical engineering at the California Institute of Technology.

Chris, still listing his affiliation as the Amateur Ski Club of New York, entered a number of major races in California and other Western states, flying his own plane to events when weather permitted. California hosted a handful of big mountain downhills and slaloms at that time—the summer Inferno on the slopes of Mt. Lassen, the Flying Skis Invitational from the summit of 10,908-foot Carson Peak north of Mammoth Mountain, and the Silver Belt on the slopes of Sugar Bowl. Schwarzenbach was a frequent competitor in these races.

On the competitive side, 1940 was a stellar year for Schwarzenbach. He scored a number of top-five finishes. At the 1940 Harriman Cup in Sun Valley, Idaho, which doubled as the national championships, he finished fourth in the men’s downhill, behind winner Dick Durrance, Walter Prager and Friedl Pfeifer. Wrote one reporter, “Christopher Schwarzenbach, whom some had neglected to consider, skied such a controlled and intelligent race as to win fourth.” He also finished sixth in the slalom, and fourth in combined.

The week following the Harriman Cup, he raced in the International Downhill and Slalom tournament held at Alta, Utah, finishing third in downhill, fourth in slalom and third in combined, bettering many of America’s best skiers.

Because the 1940 Winter Olympics were cancelled, America’s racers remained on home soil, and California hosted a number of late-season races. It was the inaugural year for Sugar Bowl’s Silver Belt race. Austrian Hannes Schroll founded and developed Sugar Bowl in 1939, and by the end of the first season he began planning a race to rival Sun Valley’s famous Harriman Cup. Sugar Bowl receives an average of 40 feet of snow annually, so Schroll felt that a late-season race would be a fitting way to cap off the end of the ski season.

Rather than receiving the usual trophy or medal, Schroll’s winners would receive a silver belt, an idea he got from California’s famous 19th-century long-board races. “Cornish Bob” Oliver won the first long-board championship in 1867 at LaPorte in Sierra County, reaching speeds of more than 64 mph over a quarter-mile course. His winnings included a silver belt worth $75, so Schroll decided to call his race the Silver Belt. Winners received a belt with silver studs and a silver buckle. The belt was passed on to the winning racer each year.

Sugar Bowl didn’t have the length of European downhills, but Schroll laid out a challenging route that dropped 1,300 feet from the summit. Peter Picard, a German who had escaped Nazi Germany and was instructing at Donner Pass, recalled that, “It was scary! Straight down and then a right turn into the Steilhang and straight again” (see “Sugar Bowl’s Silver Belt,” Skiing Heritage, June 2007). The race earned the reputation of having the steepest terrain of any California racecourse and the fifth most difficult course in North America.

Friedl Pfeifer won the inaugural race in 1940. Schwarzenbach didn’t ski in the 1940 race but was the surprise winner in 1941. He followed it up with another win in 1942, by which time Pfeifer was in the army. Races were not held from 1943 to 1945, and after the war Schwarzenbach entered every Silver Belt but one from 1946 to 1953. He never won again but always finished in the top 15. Mikkel Vehn, summarizing the 1941 race in the Western Ski Annual, described Schwarzenbach’s technical skill: “To watch Chris Schwarzenbach swing down the course was one of those rare sights to be seen in the realm of skiing. The precision, ease and speed with which he manipulated the hairpin turns and the tiring flushes was a thrilling sight.”

In February 1941, with his friends Chapman Wentworth and Clarita Heath, Schwarzenbach proposed a challenging race from the top of Carson Peak to the shores of June Lake’s Silver Lake, scheduled for April 26–27. Dubbed the Flying Skis Invitational, the race covered some of the most precipitous terrain in the Sierra, dropping 3,700 feet over four miles. It was claimed to be more difficult than Italy’s Marmolada and New Hampshire’s Tuckerman Ravine. The trio invited top-notch skiers from around California. Along with Schwarzenbach, the entries included Luggi Foeger, Clarita Heath, Hannes Schroll, Wayne Poulsen, Sepp Benedikter, Boots Blatt, Kathleen Starret and Bill Janss, among others.

It was a test of endurance as well as skiing skill: Times were a combination of a hike to the top plus the race to the bottom. Racers began the climb at 5 a.m.; the downhill start came after all skiers had reached the summit, at 10:30 a.m.

As reported in the Christmas 1941 issue of Ski Illustrated: “The course was innocent enough at the start…a slight slope with perfect powder…then stark empty spaces…top speed which seemed to accentuate the enormity of the drop-off over the precipitous wall with rolling spiraled schusses…an abrupt corner onto a parapet, a sheer snow ledge hanging over jagged cliffs. At the end of this the racers found a sudden turn into the Skaggerak, a steilhung buttressed with ragged rocks…then a schuss down across the former remains of an earlier avalanche…through some tricky jagged rocks…a sheer jump of some twenty feet onto a level timbered ridge…through timber for some yards…then abruptly downhill through a tricky ravine with heavy timber and finally out onto the middle of the lower course…down headlong over an icy surface full of rough bumps. A real thrilling down-mountain race!”

Schwarzenbach won in five hours, five minutes—five hours of climbing and less than six minutes downhill to reach the finish. And this on 7-foot-long wooden skis and leather boots!

The Flying Skis Invitational was held for the second and last time in April 1942. Eastern Sierra skier Cliff Banta won the race in 6:47, nearly an hour slower than Schwarzenbach’s time. There were several serious injuries; those, together with the war emergency, led to the end of the Flying Skis Invitational.

After graduating Cal Tech in 1942, Schwarzenbach joined the navy. In 1943 he founded U.S. Propellers in Pasadena, manufacturing laminated wooden propellers for army liaison planes (light aircraft used for artillery spotting) and target drones. This was war-critical work that kept Schwarzenbach stateside. He produced 12,000 propellers a year into the late 1940s. The company also made ammunition boxes, cartridge ejection chutes and control sticks for Lockheed, North American, and Vultee.

After the war, Schwarzenbach remained active in skiing, serving as Far West Ski Association president in 1947-48. Under the U.S. Propeller label, he ventured into the production of laminated wood skis in the early 1950s and also produced and sold the popular U.S. Star binding, designed by one of his Swiss classmates. In later years, with his son Fred, he operated Paschall International, selling parts and equipment for aircraft maintenance operations, and trekked in the Himalaya. In 2003, at age 84, he retired from the company, and from flying. He died in 2017, at age 98.

Oliver Kehrlein summed up Schwarzenbach’s ski racing reputation: “Schwarzenbach’s record includes all of the toughest races in Switzerland and America, and he is universally recognized as the most daring amateur in the country. In the downhill he is unbeatable, while his spectacular style in the slalom often costs him a second or third place behind the champions.”

Summing up his father’s life, youngest son Bobby commented that, “My dad certainly lived a long and full life, with verve and brio. He pursued what he loved: flying, aeronautics, engineering, skiing, travel, hiking in mountains all over the world and spending time with his family.” 

Ingrid Wicken, five-time ISHA Award–winning historian, operates the California Ski Library. She wrote about Walter Mosauer, the father of Southern California skiing, in the January-February 2021 issue. All photos from her collection.

Photo: Walter Mosauer earned a medical degree, taught zoology and found planted seeds of a vibrant ski industry in Southern California.

Vacationers and adventurers have always flocked to Southern California’s famous sunshine and scenic shoreline. Walter Mosauer dreamed bigger. He saw the snowy high peaks of the region and asked: Why not skiers?

California skiing in the early 1930s was in its infancy, as was ski technique. Skiers descended steep slopes with long traverses, kick turns, and many falls. A downhill turn was unheard of. Mosauer, with his enthusiasm and exuberance for skiing, tackled both challenges, introducing a generation of skiers to ski mountaineering and, using the Arlberg technique, how to maneuver skis on any type of terrain.

Born in Vienna, Austria, in 1905, Mosauer was a man of divergent interests. He earned a medical degree at the University of Vienna, but his life-long fascination with reptiles led him to a Ph.D. in zoology at the University of Michigan. He became an instructor of zoology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1931 and was able to engage in his two passions—snakes and skiing.

Not long after arriving in Los Angeles, he began teaching at UCLA, where he soon developed and coached the ski team. One of his best athletes was Wolfgang Lert, an early member of ISHA.

On a trip to Washington in 1932 to speak at a scientific meeting, Mosauer and Pomona College student Sandy Lyon stopped and skied Garfield Peak at the rim of Crater Lake, Oregon. Two days later they skied to the summit of Mt. Hood. They then joined ski mountaineer Otto Strizek, with ski racers Hans-Otto Giese and Hans Grage, to make the first ski ascent and descent of 12,280-foot Mt. Adams.

In 1934, Walter and a dozen or so of his most enthusiastic skiers formed the Ski Mountaineers of California. The club was created to promote ski mountaineering throughout the state. They set out to provide instruction for beginners, build ski huts near popular snow fields and sponsor and publicize races. The Ski Mountaineers soon became a section of the Sierra Club, and the group is still active today.

Two of Mosauer’s favorite ski destinations were 10,046-foot Mount San Antonio, aka Mt. Baldy, located only 10 miles from Pomona College, and San Gorgonio Mountain, with an elevation of 11,503 feet, Southern California’s highest peak. Mosauer and his made numerous trips to both locales.

As ski coach, Mosauer understood how the allure of racing helped grow the sport. He established the San Antonio Downhill in March 1935, and started the race at the summit. The Ski Mountaineers completed construction of an alpine-style ski hut at the base of the downhill course in 1936. The ski hut is still in use today.

After frequently skiing the slopes below the summit, Walter and seven companions from the Lake Arrowhead Ski Club and the Sierra Club scaled San Gorgonio on skis in 1934. They camped at 6,000 feet on Saturday night and started their ascent before dawn on Sunday morning. They reached the summit at 10:00 a.m.

Mosauer, along with his students and members of the Ski Mountaineers, made a number of notable ski ascents in the eastern Sierra. In 1933, Glen Dawson, Louis Turner, Dick Jones and Mosauer skied to Kearsarge Pass on the Sierra Crest, elevation 11,709 feet. The next year, Mosauer’s group skied Bishop Pass with mountaineer Norman Clyde.

In 1935, incomplete ascents, due to weather, were made of Mount Emma and Dunderberg Peak. And after one failed attempt of Mammoth Mountain, the group was able to make a successful ascent of the peak. Mosauer and Ski Mountaineer Bob Brinton finally made a successful ski ascent of 12,379-foot Dunderberg Peak in 1936.

When Mosauer arrived in Los Angeles, there were no formal or organized ski schools in the region. He soon began teaching eager locals wanting to learn the sport and recognized the need for a pocket-sized instructional manual to complement what he was teaching. This led him to write On Skis Over The Mountains, the first instructional book published in California.

The first edition was published in 1934, the second in 1937. The small book was illustrated with line drawings taken from movies of Mosauer teaching on the slopes of Mt. Baldy. The second edition included two new chapters—one on ski touring and ski mountaineering, the other on the Tempo Style and Tempo Turn.

Mosauer acknowledged Hannes Schroll in the preface for turning him on to the tempo-turn style.

Mosauer’s summers were spent on his second love: zoology. He went on reptile hunting excursions to California, Arizona, and Mexican deserts. Sadly, on a month-long expedition to Mexico, he became ill and passed away on August 10, 1937, at the age of 32. His death has been attributed to acute leukemia, but the actual cause of death is still a mystery.

In his short life, he left a literary legacy, publishing 39 herpetological papers and 20 articles on skiing, in addition to his pioneering instruction book On Skis Over The Mountains.

Mosauer arrived in Southern California when skiing needed an enthusiastic trailblazer to reveal the undiscovered slopes so close to the burgeoning beach communities.

His frequent ski companion, Murray Kirkwood, wrote “this dynamic young Austrian rapidly surrounded himself with a band of followers from his own university, and its neighbor, Pomona College, who not only shared his love of snow-capped peaks, but his eagerness to spread the knowledge of how to negotiate them on skis.”

Mosauer’s pioneering work set the stage for today’s vibrant California ski scene, with dozens of resorts that regularly tally more than 7 million annual skiers visits between them. Through his efforts, Mosauer has rightly been named the “Father of Skiing in Southern California” and left his legacy through the Sierra Club Ski Mountaineers and the Sierra Club Ski Huts that are still in use today. 

Ingrid Wicken, founder of the California Ski Library (skilibrary.com), has recently completed her fifth book on California ski history. Lost Ski Areas of Tahoe and Donner (History Press) is scheduled to be published in November.

"If not for the mountains my religion would be much too arid," confessed the celebrated convert, apologist and controversialist.

(Photo above: Lunn in May 1925, when with Walter Amstutz he made the first successful ski ascent of the Eiger. Photo courtesy New England Ski Museum)

The paths to faith are many, and they can be eccentric. Such was the conversion of Arnold Lunn in 1933. A British mountaineer and ski pioneer, Lunn was already famous then for his invention of the slalom race.

Mountaineers from time to time experience a spiritual, even profound religious feeling when they gaze upon the beauty of snow-capped peaks and the shadowed valleys below. Lunn profoundly shared that poignant experience. “The mountains were my door to the supernatural,” he wrote. “Their visible beauty was the initial impulse which led me to devote so much time in the years which followed to the most important of all problems, the real nature of man.”

Arnold was the eldest son of Sir Henry Lunn, Methodist lay preacher and author as well as visionary entrepreneur. In 1892, Henry organized a conference of ecclesiastics at Grindelwald, focused on re-uniting the splintered Protestant churches. It was an effort with little chance of success, but it led him to become a premier travel agent.

“The result of the Grindelwald Conference,” recalled Arnold, “was not—alas—the reunion of Christendom, but the foundation of a travel agency, later known as Sir Henry Lunn Ltd.” Lunn Travel ran tours to such Swiss resorts as Adelboden, Klosters and Grindelwald’s neighbors, Mürren and Wengen. Ten-year-old Arnold donned his first pair of skis when he accompanied his father’s earliest organized sports party to Chamonix in 1898.

The young man’s initial step toward supernatural awareness occurred in Switzerland when he was 19 years old, and a student at Oxford. During the previous year, by his own description, he had become “an agnostic, if not an atheist by belief.” Then it struck him. “I was resting on an Alpine pass after a climb (and) a sunset of supreme beauty,” he recalled. “Suddenly I knew beyond immediate need of proof that a beauty which was not of this world was revealed in the visible loveliness of the mountains. From that moment I discarded materialism for ever.”

Energetic Iconoclast

Following his Oxford studies, Arnold Lunn took up a writing career, and between 1907 and 1968 produced more than 50 books—nearly a title annually. In addition to 15 books on skiing and mountaineering and six travel guides, he wrote 30 serious books ranging across religion, philosophy, politics and autobiography. The alpine wonderment that propelled him from skeptical agnostic to fervent believer is scattered through his work.

Lunn’s enthusiasm for skiing was boundless. He originated the timed slalom race in 1922 at Mürren, Switzerland. In 1927, he and Austria’s most famous skier, Hannes Schneider, invented the Arlberg-Kandahar competition, having a combined result in downhill and slalom that exists to this day. For years, he edited the British Ski Year Book, one of the more literate sports periodicals ever published. So encompassing and detailed was Lunn’s writing and organizational work in skiing that it’s difficult to imagine he had time for anything else.

Lunn was influenced by the 19th century writers, poets and artists who articulated the beauty of the high mountains. In 1816, the young Byron, high on the Kleine Scheidegg in Switzerland’s Bernese Oberland, positively swooned at what he beheld: “Clouds rose from the opposite valley, curling up perpendicular precipices like the foam of the ocean of hell during a spring tide…the
glaciers like a frozen hurricane.”

The august Victorian author, critic and artist John Ruskin had “a genius for expressing his passionate love of mountain scenery,” wrote Lunn. It found expression not only in Ruskin’s prose but also in his painting. And Lunn was not alone in observing how the revival of Gothic architecture aroused Victorian England’s appreciation of the Gothic landscape of soaring Alpine peaks.

Lunn once described his experience on a ledge high above Zermatt, as he watched “the first wayward hints of colour creeping back into the rich gloom of the valley. And then, just as the sun leapt above the distant bar of the Oberland, a Church peeled out … a joyous carillon … re-echoed until the whole long valley … overflowed with spontaneous melody.”

Leap of Logic

Despite his spiritual arousal in 1907 at the age of 19, Lunn for the next 26 years was consistently disappointed by Protestantism, and decidedly unsympathetic to the arguments for conversion to the Roman Church. England was witnessing an extraordinary number of conversions—as late as the 1930s, some 12,000 a year. The Church welcomed literary celebrities, who came to include Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and Malcolm Muggeridge. The Anglican Church was in decline. Should not one become a Catholic?

It was a popular discussion topic, and furnished a ready market for book publishers, and an opportunity for a professional writer like Lunn. His Roman Converts openly criticized Cardinal John Henry Newman, G.K. Chesterton, and leaders of the Oxford Movement who had become converts. Lunn was daunted neither by Newman’s fame nor by the illustrious Cardinal’s arguments, which he compared to misguided mountaineering. “For all their brilliance, (they) are too often like the tracks of an Alpine party wandering around a mist-covered glacier. Perhaps this does not matter,” remarked Lunn acerbically, “for all roads lead to Rome, even those which go around in a circle.”

So persuasive was his writing that in 1932 his London publisher commissioned a book, Difficulties, co-authored by Lunn and Monsignor Ronald Knox, himself a convert. In each chapter, Lunn furnished examples—such as the Inquisition and the treatment of Galileo—for why people should not join the Roman Church, while Knox sought to destroy Lunn’s line of reasoning.

Yet less than a year after the publication of Difficulties, a remarkable thing happened: Lunn himself became a convert. He was received into the Roman Catholic faith in July 1933 by none other than Knox, and recounted the story of his conversion in a new book, Now I See, published in November of the same year.

His conversion, Lunn confessed, was not a leap of faith. Rather, it was a decision founded on research and reason. He likened the scientific logic that he employed in studying snow surfaces and avalanche conditions to the historical analysis he used in proving Christ’s resurrection: “The mental process in both cases seemed much the same.”

It may have seemed the same to him, but not to critics, as witnessed by this letter from a friend: “My Dear Lunn: It was very kind of you to send me your book. I have often observed (that) when a writer goes over to Rome his work falls to pieces…I would have given all your pages on the infallibility of the Pope…for one paragraph on the argument which induced you to believe that bread and wine can be turned into the actual flesh and blood of a man who died nineteen hundred years ago.”

None of this deterred Lunn. He was a brilliant debater, controversialist, and a tack-sharp logician. His style of arguing was the same—whether exposing the underlying illogic of the fatuous Norwegian opposition to downhill and slalom, or of the claims to benignity by a Church that had tortured people in Inquisition. Lunn often fueled his arguments from his experiences in skiing. Two weeks before his death in 1974, at the age of 86, he wrote:

“A country ceases to belong to Christendom when the architects of public opinion begin to preach what they practise…I have seen the process at work in my own sport, ski-ing…Olympic shamateurism began with the highly paid Nazi ‘amateurs’ at the 1936 Olympics…What was of ultimate significance about Hitler and Stalin was not that they were anti-democratic but that they were anti-God and, therefore, anti-truth.”

Lunn was ahead of his time in attacking the failure of intellectuals to identify Stalinist communism as a form of totalitarianism. His mistrust of the Soviets later came into play when he fought the International Olympic Committee over the amateur status of athletes. IOC President Avery Brundage wanted to bar alpine ski racers from the Olympics for their acceptance of money from sponsors. Lunn argued that state-employed Eastern bloc athletes competing in the Olympics were just as professional as the western “shamateurs” taking payments under the table from businesses. In Lunn’s mind, the Soviets were as ruthless in the telling of lies to defend their version of ski competition as they were in their closing of Christian churches.
Inspirited by the Mountains

Lunn’s Christian faith—erected as it was on an infrastructure of syllogistic reasoning—left him feeling deprived. He envied the mystic or the simple peasant who had a direct phone line to God. “I envy the mystical just as the tone-deaf envy the musical,” he remarked.

“It has always been a distress to me that I have so few religious feelings. I have far too little feeling of being in contact with God when I say my prayers or even when I receive communion.”

But a commitment to religion as firm as Lunn’s is not brought about without an emotional component. “I should probably still be an agnostic,” he wrote to a priest friend in 1969, “if I had not felt an urgent need to explain the sense of worship which mountains arouse in me, and if it were not for the mountains, my religion would be much too arid, a synthesis of intellectual conclusions rather than a personal relationship with my creator … There are moments in the mountains when the words of the Sanctus rise unbidden to my lips.”

Lunn believed that writing about the mountains surpassed the literature of any other sport. It is impossible to describe snow and peaks “without unconsciously betraying your attitude to the invisible and mystical … Mountain literature is unique in sport, unique for its immense range of interests, physical and metaphysical.”

Lunn, who died in 1974, was knighted by the Queen in 1952 for his contributions to skiing and Anglo-Swiss relations. The honor should have cited his contributions to the literature of religion as well.

Lunn’s voluminous correspondence can be found today in the Special Collections of the Georgetown University Library in Washington, D.C. This article is based on a paper presented by the late John Fry at the 2009 International Ski History Congress at Mammoth Lakes, California and excerpted in Commonweal (June 1, 2009). To read John’s obituary, see the March-April 2020 issue or skiinghistory.org/lives.

Marie Marvingt achieved fame as an aviator, but she was also a pioneering skier and inventor of an early aluminum ski. 

She’s famous in France, but nearly unheard of in North America. Marie Marvingt (1875–1963) was an athletic phenomenon who forged a path for women into mountaineering, martial arts, skiing, cycling, aviation and military service. Combining her careers as a surgical nurse and military aviator, she invented the concept and technology of the air ambulance, and promoted air-evac services around the world.

(Photo top of page: Marie Marvingt at Chamonix in January 1913. The pants were a practical but daring fashion statement.)

With few exceptions, women of her era who succeeded in alpinism and aviation had the support of their wealthy families or husbands. In fact, Marie never married and had to work for her adventures. Marie’s father, Felix Marvingt, was postmaster of Aurillac, a decidedly middle-class occupation. After 1879 when, at age 52, Felix fled his stifling career as a bureaucrat, the family lived on his pension. A champion swimmer in his youth, Felix was 48 years old at Marie’s birth, and encouraged her to excel in sports—first swimming, then cycling, canoeing, mountaineering and gymnastics. From the age of five, she followed Felix on his swims in the Moselle and on trekking holidays in the Alps. At 15, she trained with the Alphonse Rancy Circus, learning to do acrobatics on horseback. With a preternatural sense of balance, she quickly became a leading equestrienne. Equitation put her in touch with cavalry officers, who dominated the sport. For the rest of her life Marie maintained a close relationship with officers of the French Army.

Marie’s mother, Elisabeth, died in 1889. At age 14, Marie lost any maternal influence Elisabeth may have exerted. Though she dressed fashionably and flirted easily, Marie increasingly devoted herself to sports. While attending the equivalent of high school in Metz in Lorraine, then a part of Germany, she learned archery, riflery, fencing, boxing, tennis, golf, track and field. (And, of course, German.) While studying medicine at the University of Nancy, she earned a reputation as a fierce competitor in all sports, winning against women in swimming and track, and against men in target-shooting. More passionate about sports than about medicine, she settled for a nursing license and supplemented that income as a sports and adventure writer. She sold articles, under the pseudonym Myriel, to dozens of newspapers. Returning to the Alps, she was the first woman to summit many of the high peaks around Chamonix.

Many women rode bicycles, but few entered races. Marie won the Nancy-Bordeaux race (600 miles) in 1904, Nancy-Milan (350 miles) in 1905 and Nancy-Toulouse (560 miles) in 1906.

That year, at age 31, she took up skiing in a serious way. Skiing in France and Italy was largely a military endeavor, as armies focused on frontier defense in the rising tensions with Germany and Austria. Marie set up the first civilian ski school in France, and at the second military ski meet, at Chamonix in 1908, she ran in the first organized cross-country race for women, a three-kilometer sprint. While the army races were covered widely in the French press, reporters paid not much attention to the women’s race. Coached by the Swedish expert Harald Durban-Hansen, Marie and her peers used two poles at a time when the French Army team was still paddling away with a single pole (see “End of the Single Pole,” Skiing History, March-April 2019). She apparently won the race, though no official records survive. Perhaps there were none to begin with. Durban-Hansen also taught her ski-jumping.

In 1909 Marie repeated the win, at the Gérardmer meet. This time, all the women racers showed up in culottes rather than skirts, greatly improving their performance and setting ski fashion forever. The threepeat came at Ballon d’Alsace in 1910. Meanwhile, she won events in skating, luge and bobsleigh.

During the summer of 1908, Marie made bicycling history. At age 33, she tried to enter the Tour de France and was refused—the race would be for men only. That year the race covered 2,800 miles over 14 stages. An average of 200 miles a day on dirt roads with single-speed bikes was punishing even for the strongest cyclists, so organizers allowed a day of rest after each stage. Marie simply cycled each stage on the rest days. She finished handily, while 76 of the 114 male starters dropped out.

In the summers during her ski-racing career, Marie took up aviation. She first piloted a balloon in 1907, and during an October 1909 storm piloted the first east-to-west crossing of the North Sea from Europe to England, nearly drowning herself and her passenger. That year she soloed in an Antoinette, a fiendishly tricky monoplane designed before the standard stick-and-rudder control system was devised.

Like skiing, French aviation was heavily promoted by the French Army. Among Marie’s student-pilot friends was the cavalry and artillery officer Paul-Maurice Écheman. Écheman was also an accomplished skier and skater. The two became constant companions on the flying fields and in the mountains. While Marie set some of the first aviation records for women, Écheman was promoted to captain and put in charge of one of the first French Army airfields. In 1910, Marie had the idea of combining her surgical and piloting skills to create an air ambulance service. With Écheman’s encouragement, she presented the idea to the Army. It was too early, and the War Department wasn’t interested. Écheman died in a solo crash in 1911.

Now 35, Marie continued to set aviation records, which were featured in newspapers around the world. The fame enabled her to earn money flying in exhibitions. In winters, she continued to compete in winter sports. Increasingly she devoted time to developing the medical air-evacuation concept. She organized conferences to promote the idea and raised enough money to order a specially designed Deperdussin monoplane to carry a pilot plus two stretcher patients or a patient and doctor. The company went bankrupt before the plane was delivered; its designer, Louis Béchereau, went on to create the SPAD fighter series of World War I.

When war broke out, Marie went straight to work as a surgical nurse. The Army wouldn’t let her fly military missions, but she became a part-time civilian flight instructor training new Army pilots. After all, she was one of the world’s most experienced aviators, with a sterling reputation. She had completed more than 900 flights without ever seriously damaging an airplane, while more than 15 percent of pilots licensed in 1910 were killed before the war—and that doesn’t include the student pilots who died before being licensed (77 percent of French pilots died during the war). In March, 1915, one of her surgical patients was an injured pilot, and she learned there was no replacement for him in his bombing squadron. She talked her way into the cockpit and flew two bombing missions over a German airfield. She was thus the world’s first female combat pilot. The army turned a blind eye. Officially, she was a nurse. Unofficially, she flew missions as a “scout”—that is, solo reconnaissance in a fighter plane. Then, with the collusion of an infantry lieutenant (and some help from her friend Marshall Foch), she put on a private’s uniform and served in the trenches. After six weeks she was wounded lightly and sent to infirmary. That was the end of her infantry career, but Foch assigned her to the Italian alpine troops fighting Austria in the Dolomites, officially as a combat nurse. It was the perfect job. As a skier and alpinist, for six months she engineered the evacuation of wounded soldiers from the mountain peaks and passes, and skied in food and medical supplies. After that, she spent most of 1916 at the Italian front, ostensibly as a war correspondent. There are big gaps in what is known about her travels, and friends assumed she was working for military intelligence. What with flying, fighting, nursing and spying, at the end of the war Marie earned both the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honor.

After the war, Marie campaigned tirelessly for her medical air-evacuation program, and this, oddly enough, led to the invention of an aluminum ski.

Travelling with French and Italian forces in the Sahara, as both a medical officer and war correspondent, in 1923 she designed aluminum skis for an experimental medevac airplane to land on sand. That led her to think about skis for herself. Back in France in 1927, she found a metal shop in Nancy that could forge skis from solid aircraft-grade aluminum alloy. She had two pairs made, one pair for sand in the desert. She tested the other pair on snow in Chamonix. The sand skis were certainly better than walking up dunes in sandals, but the snow skis failed, compared to ash and hickory. Undamped, they were nearly uncontrollable on firm snow, and as they didn’t absorb wax, could glide in soft snow only in a very narrow temperature range. Nonetheless, her skis represented a start, and French aluminum foundries near the Alps began looking for a way to combine wood-ski performance with aluminum durability—a problem eventually solved in 1947, in the United States.

Marie had many more adventures, including leading early motorized expeditions across the Sahara, first in a modified Fiat truck and later in Citroën six-wheelers. By the early ‘30s her flying ambulance concept was on a roll, and she held many international conferences to promote the concept. She established the Captain Écheman Award for the best-equipped medical aircraft, and launched the first training course for medevac nurses. During World War II she returned to the Red Cross, and was honored after the war for unspecified actions on behalf of the French Resistance.

Into her 80s, Marie was widely honored by the aviation community and French government, but she descended into genteel poverty and died in a hospice, penniless, in 1963, at age 88. 

Seth Masia is the president of ISHA. Sources for this article include Une histoire du ski by Franck Cochoy; Marie Marvingt: Fiancée of Danger, by Marcel Cordier and Rosalie Maggio; “Bride of Danger,” in The Strand Magazine, September 1913; The Culture and Sport of Skiing, by E. John B. Allen; and Before Amelia: Women Pilots in the Early Days of Aviation, by Eileen F. Lebow.