Jumpers work to reopen Michigan's
Copper Peak ski-flying hill

By DAN EGAN
In the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

Kusz has been grounded since a "freaky wind" tossed him head-first onto the landing slope at a jump competition at nearby Pine Mountain in 1987. He landed in a coma for a week, and when he was released from the hospital four months later, he had lost his right peripheral vision and to this day suffers balance problems. "To tell you the truth, I don't really remember anything about it," he says of the crash. "It's probably a good thing, because I'd hate the sport otherwise."

Instead, Kusz is among a small group of Ironwood residents toiling to bring competitions back to Copper Peak Ski Flying Hill, billed as the world's largest - and loneliest - free-standing ski jump. The steel-and-wood ramp, the tip of which towers about 600 vertical feet over its spectator zone, is a Knievel-meets-Eiffel contraption built to launch skiers about 300 feet beyond what it typically takes to win Olympic gold.

But there are no medal ceremonies at Copper Peak these days. There are no jumpers. There is only the dream to bring "ski flying" - ski jumping's big and braver brother - back to the United States, back to Copper Peak.

Faster, farther

Ski flying is exactly the same as ski jumping - same equipment, same technique. The difference is scale. Ski fliers sail down a supersize ramp and launch at speeds around 60 mph, about 10 mph faster than ski jumpers. That bump in velocity can propel a skier on an 8-second free-fall, and a full football field beyond distances typically achieved on a standard jump such as Pine Mountain, about 90 miles north of Green Bay. It is a fringe-type version of ski jumping that is not an Olympic sport but worthy of an X-rating, as in extreme.

There are only six ski-flying hills in the world, and Copper Peak is the only one on this side of the Atlantic. Ski-flying competitions are held only once or twice a year, and nowadays always in Europe. "There is a fear factor in it that you don't get" on a regular-sized jump, says Luke Bodensteiner, Nordic director for the U.S. Ski Team. "It's incomprehensible to watch these guys do this," says U.S. Ski Team spokesman Tom Kelly.

"It's big ski jumping, is what it is," says Charlie Supercynski, president of the non-profit Copper Peak Inc. and wintertime caretaker for the jump, which is perched on a rocky outcrop in the middle of a hardwood forest about 10 miles north of the Wisconsin border. Supercynski spends his free time patching up Copper Peak's dilapidated outbuildings and doing his best to keep vandals and other mischief-makers at bay.

One of the biggest problems is the perilously steep landing slope, which was dynamited out of a cliff during the jump's construction in 1969. "We can't keep people off that hill. People want to climb it, sled it, snowmobile it," Supercynski says after spending a recent morning patching a fence that snowmobilers had knocked over to get to the slope. "That place is a magnet, and that's why I say its future is bright."

TV clip cited as downfall

Copper Peak hasn't hosted a competition in more than a decade, and money is a big reason. It can cost the city of about 6,000 residents hundreds of thousands of dollars to bring in jumpers, and most of the athletes who can handle a hill this size live in Europe. While the sport thrives in pockets of the U.S., including the central U.P., western Wisconsin and the Chicago area, the small ski jumps in Ironwood built for youth have been idled for the better part of a decade.

For Americans, the sport has been reduced to an Olympic curiosity. Some point a finger at the opening crash scene on ABC's "Wide World of Sports," when Slovenia's Vinko Bogataj flipped like a rag doll after botching a takeoff at a 1970 European ski-flying competition. The human Gumby doll wobbled away from the crash. But some think the enduring image caused a whole generation of American skiers to walk away from the sport.

"Basically, the 'Agony of Defeat' ads that ran for 30 years pretty much killed the sport. . . . They made ski jumping look like people were getting killed every day," says Minnesota ski-jumping enthusiast Rick Bergquist. "If they had shown a kid taking a hockey puck to the eye, I doubt the NHL would exist today."

But Copper Peak's problems run deeper than a lack of money and a shallow pool of homegrown talent. It can take an army of workers to strap on skis and pack snow on the landing and the ramp, which is so windblown it almost never has natural snow cover. So while the steel beams that support the jump might be as sturdy as ever, some fear the facility has a eroded in a much more critical area - public support. "It's a stunning place, it's beautiful, but I frankly don't think there will be ski flying there again," says Ken Anderson, a U.P. native who has explored ending the 10-year competition drought at Copper Peak. "It's not the structure. It's the people infrastructure that just seems to have faded away."

Supercynski is undaunted, noting that the place has never been more popular - in summertime. As many as 3,000 visitors people pay $10 to ride a chairlift up the ridge, which climbs more than 30 stories. From there, it is an 18-story trip up an elevator, followed by an eight-story climb up a fire escape-like stairway to the tip of the ramp and probably the best views in the Midwest, provided you can stay focused. "You get on top of that thing on a windy day and it scares the . . . out of you," Kelly says. "It's just scary-huge."

Once the summer tourists leave, Supercynski is often the only one at the site, about a 20-minute drive from downtown Ironwood. He picks up trash, recoats flaking paint, repairs broken windows. He has a five-point plan to get the jump back into competition shape, which includes smoothing the eroded landing slope and lowering the start gates to reduce launch speeds from the designed 70 mph range to accommodate modern equipment and techniques that allow skiers to fly farther. Fencing also needs to be installed along the landing slope to keep skiers from crashing into trees or spectators. Supercynski figures it will take $15,000 to get all that done, and a load of volunteers.

"There is an outside chance that we would fly next winter, but it certainly looks like the following winter is a definite goal," he says. "The pieces of the puzzle will be in place."

Puzzle is an appropriate word for Copper Peak. A poster-sized version hangs in the lobby in Ironwood's AmericInn motel, where desk clerk Marcy Thomas answers questions about it a half-dozen times day. "Where is that?" people ask. "What is that?"

Perhaps a better question: Why is that there? Samuel Davey knows. The 96-year-old Ironwood native was among a group of ski-jumping pioneers behind the push to build one the world's most spectacular ski jumps. It was the mid-1930s, and he and the other jumpers around town decided that they wanted to keep up with the ever-increasing jump sizes in Europe. Davey and his group decided they would make their corner of the U.P. home of the biggest jump in the country, maybe even the world.

The improbable project finally got off the ground after the region's last iron mine shut down in the late 1960s and unemployment soared to about 33%. Largely federally funded, it was billed as an economic stimulus package, but today Ironwood native and ski shop owner Dave Johnson, 50, thinks it was more about community pride and a celebration of its Nordic heritage than a bottom-line economic project. He remembers glass milk bottles posted as collection jars at all the local shops, stores, restaurants and bars. The pennies and nickels eventually piled up, enough for Davey and his crew to hire an engineer.

"They first showed up in my office in Duluth, three or four guys with the idea of what they wanted to do. They said, 'Could you get enough preliminary planning together so we can get some money,' " engineer Lauren Larsen, 70, recalls. Larsen says part of his business requires investing a hefty amount of preliminary work in projects that may never get the green light. He remembers thinking chances for this one were exceedingly dim. "But they were such nice guys," he says. "I said I'd do what I can."

Larsen remembers that the group returned about two weeks later, with $1 million. Actually, Davey recalls with a smile cracking, it was $1,032,000. To give some perspective to what the little city pulled off, Green Bay's Lambeau Field was constructed just over a decade earlier at a cost of $960,000. "I was floored," Larsen says. "I thought, 'This is the last thing I could ever imagine.' "

Larsen determined the most economical way to make a ski-jumping mountain out of a 365-foot hill was to build single tower, with a cantilevered ramp. It was built of core-10 steel, a top grade that won't rust away. And it was built to last. Hundreds of years, perhaps. The result was a functional but elegant structure some up here have called "Eiffel Towerish."

"I don't want to sound like I'm some type of wacko, but I shake when I look at it," says Minnesota's Richard Bergquist, a former amateur ski jumper who has explored restoring competition at Copper Peak. "You know how certain things just move people? Well, this thing has moved me forever."

'You want to get the best'

Minnesota jumper Greg Swor was the first to launch off Copper Peak at its inaugural competition in 1970. He confessed to being "terrified." He wasn't the only one. Standing at the bottom, among all the ant-sized spectators, was a particularly fidgety Larsen. He was confident in his design, but he fretted for weeks about how the first jumper would actually fare - if a slide-rule calculation was off by merely a sliver, the jump could easily kick a skier out of control, and into the next world. He says many of his calculations were based on information provided by a German engineer named Heini, who designed a similar jump that was carved into a mountain in Europe.

"About two weeks before the first person was to jump off, I got a telegraph that said Heini died. I thought, 'Oh, God. I can't even blame this on Heini if it doesn't go well,' " he says. "I was one nervous cookie, I'll tell ya." Swor touched down safely and a party raged that night. Ironwood's ski boosters, largely a group of retired or out-of-work miners and laborers, celebrated their arrival on the world ski stage.

It didn't last long. Copper Peak events typically lost money, and it proved difficult to lure the Europeans to a competition. "If somebody had a dream in Romania, and built a state-of-the-art baseball stadium, could they get a major-league game over there?" asks Anderson. "To the ski-jumping world, we are the edge of the Earth." Only 10 competitions would be held at Copper Peak during the next three decades.

"We didn't have enough ski jumpers in this country who could ride a hill like that, that's why it was a stop-and-go deal," Davey says. "If we knew in advance, we probably would have made a (regular-sized) hill and left it at that. But when you do it, you want to get the best that there is."

'That was my dream'

Today there is only one person in Ironwood who ever jumped at Copper Peak - Kusz. He and his father worked together as welders on the Copper Peak construction crew. Some days on the job, Kusz's dad would catch his son gazing at the landing area below. "Don't get any ideas," he would tell his son.

Too late. "That was my dream," says Kusz, an amateur jumper who first took to the skis - and skies - as a 5-year-old. "Living here, you want to ski-fly." At 29 and after impressing national judges at competitions held around the country, he finally qualified for a crack at Copper Peak. The moment he pushed down the ramp at a competition in 1979 is burned into his mind. "I thought I was going faster than I ever had, then I looked over and saw I was only halfway down (the ramp)," he says. "I thought: uh-oh."

Kusz jumped again in '81 and says he probably would have jumped at Copper Peak in '89 as well, but his crash at Pine Mountain ended his amateur career. Those Copper Peak jumps remain a highlight of his life. "I still get get goose bumps when I go by it," he says.

While many in town look at the jump the same way they look at all the closed mines - as a monument to or remnant of a proud past - there are people across the country and even the world who still see loads of potential in the place. "People know about it," says the U.S. Ski Team's Bodensteiner. "There are plenty of kids who would jump at the opportunity, literally, to get on that hill."

Those kids are the reason Kusz won't throw away his skis, which are tucked behind an old fridge in his garage. "I figure maybe I could help pack the landing," he says.

From the Feb. 29, 2004 editions of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel