Is it too late to start working out for the ski season? It depends.

This is the time of year when any health club worth its mortgage is advertising: “Tune Up Your Body for the Ski Season, Enroll Now!” Most people who belong to a health club are in such good shape that they don’t need that extra tuning up just to drive three hours to stand in a lift line. And for those of you who don’t belong to a health club, it’s already too late to join to get in shape for this season.

Right about now, large groups of the needing-to-get-rid-of-the-flab crowd congregate at sports bars. They’re drinking toasts to the passing of the bikini-watching—or wearing-season. They used to look forward to watching attractive people skiing in stretch pants. But skiers today wear clothes so baggy they look like a sack of cats on the way to the river.

By the way, never talk to anyone about losing weight. All I ever hear about is the 12 pounds that a friend lost while he was on a diet of cabbage and beets for three months and working out three times a week with a personal trainer who charged $100 an hour. The only thing that much exercise will get you ready for is to die healthier.

There are all types of exercises that will get you in shape for skiing. There are those you can read about in magazines, there are thousands of different get-in-shape videos, there’s soft aerobics and hard aerobics, yoga, Pilates, push-ups, sit-ups and jogging. But most people train by remote-control channel surfing. If you have good hand-eye coordination, a precise mental time clock and a capacity for remembering numbers, you can click from one sporting event to another and miss every commercial during a weekend of football.

Regardless of which exercises you do, you have to determine what being in shape means to you by comparing yourself to others. At Boyne Mountain in Michigan, which is a little over 400 feet high, I have heard people standing at the top talking about where they should meet on the way down. “Halfway, by the big pine tree,” seems to be the most common place to stop, rest and talk about how the run has been so far. In their own minds, every one of these skiers is in great shape.

At the other end of the spectrum is Chamonix, France, where two gondolas rise 10,000 vertical feet. This is a place where the locals think nothing of skiing nonstop from top to bottom. The first time I skied there, almost 40 years ago, I rode up on a construction tram, which consisted of a platform about the size of a sheet of plywood. James Couttet and I balanced each other on either side of the platform as we rode up. On the way down, I probably stopped 45 times to take movies of almost every turn the former world champion made. I also stopped a lot of times because I was tired.

I was in better shape then than I am today, because I was four decades younger. My mind is still willing, but my body isn’t. However, being a 14-year-old kid trapped in a senior-citizen’s body is still better than the alternative.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go and start my first workout of the season. There’s still a lot of time left to get in sufficient shape to do more than three sit-ups at a time. Then I’m grabbing my skis and boots—and heading straight to Michigan. 

This column was originally published in the November 2004 issue of SKI Magazine. Photo courtesy Warren Miller Entertainment.

SKI ART: Sir John William Ashton (1881-1963)

Will Ashton emigrated to Australia from England with his parents as a young child. He was educated at Alfred College, a boy’s school in Adelaide, from 1889-97, where he studied painting. In 1900, he left for England to work on seascapes, and was particularly interested in the depiction of the changing light on foaming waves and billowing clouds, which led to his fascination with snowy ski scenes. He spent time at the Académie Julian in Paris and had work accepted by the Société des Artistes Français, as well as the Royal Academy in London.

(Painting above: Though Will Ashton admitted that “snow is not easy to paint,” “Kosciusko” won the Wynn prize for landscapes in 1930. Courtesy National library of Australia, Canberra)

Then, comparatively well-known, he returned to Adelaide in 1905 and exhibited in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth and Adelaide, winning the Wynn prize for landscapes in 1908. Off again to Europe and Egypt, his work was interrupted by World War I. In 1915, denied entry into the army due to his arthritis, he joined the Australian Imperial Forces as a volunteer driver.

Returning to Australia in 1917, he continued to paint landscapes, including a number of skiing scenes. “Snow is not easy to paint,” he wrote. “There is something crisp and precise about its character which always fascinates me.” He made repeat visits to Kosciusko National Park, and one his views of the area won the Wynn prize in 1930. He won it again in 1939.

In 1937, Ashton became director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. A member of several art institutes and societies, he was honored with an Order of the British Empire in 1941 and knighted in 1961. He died from cancer in 1963. —E. John. B. Allen

Why’s It Called That? Alpine or alpine? Nordic or nordic?

At Skiing History, we’re puzzling over when to capitalize nordic and alpine. Our thinking has been that the words should be treated the same way. If one is capitalized, both should be, and vice versa. That’s how we’ve been doing it in recent issues, using the terms nordic combined and alpine combined.

Many books of grammar disagree, suggesting that Nordic is a “proper adjective” referring to a region, while alpine is a plain adjective referring to . . .  a region. French and German writers capitalize neither adjective. They use nordique and alpin in French, nordische and alpine in German. Microsoft spell-checker corrects nordic to Nordic but not alpine to Alpine. National Geographic capitalizes both words. While their style manual specifies Alpine, it has no entry for Nordic at all. The Associated Press manual has entries for neither.

It appears that Nordic became “proper” because of its use to describe a “racial type.” In the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest examples for nordic are from 1898 and came from essays on white-supremacist racial theory. Nordic, capitalized, doesn’t appear in the main edition of the OED (published 1923), only in the First Supplement, published 1933.

In fact, Nordic appears not to have been used by skiers until after alpine skiing was formally recognized by the FIS in 1930, when it became necessary to distinguish between the two. The word appears nowhere in Arnold Lunn’s book History of Ski-ing (1927); instead, Lunn writes of Norwegian ski (plural), ski-runners and ski-ing.

Grammarians also dispute whether a billiard player puts english or English on the ball. And there’s French kissing versus french fries. With no hard rules, and to be consistent with such usages as Mediterranean cultures and Southwest cuisine, Skiing History will henceforth capitalize both words. —Seth Masia 

Snapshots in Time

1969 A Little Night Music
The present interest in night skiing marks a sharp contrast to the attitude of less than a decade ago. Then, almost all ski area operators were convinced that schussing down slopes was a daylight sport only; their opinion was that even a so-called hardy skier would hesitate to cope with the rigors of a cold winter evening. A few farsighted ski area operators, in Massachusetts, among other Eastern states, thought their registers might ring a merrier tune if their resorts remained open at night. —Michael Straus, “Night Skiing Starts to See the Light of Day” (New York Times, December 12, 1969)

1978 The Mahre Method
You have to have a desire to win. It all comes down to that. It comes from your heart. You’ve got to want it so bad that you’ll kill yourself to do it. —Dick Barrymore, “America’s Best” interview with Phil Mahre (Powder Magazine, September 1978)

1979 Who Are You?
Are you a Doer, Watcher, Thinker or Feeler? Understanding how you learn can improve your skiing. And since the final responsibility for learning always falls on the learner—you—your first task is to find an instructor whose teaching style meshes with your learning personality. —Stu Campbell, “The Way You Are” (SKI Magazine, October 1979)

1985 Shadow Instructor
As you ski, use the shadow as an instant replay of your skiing style. Check all parts of your body positioning with your shadow. Is your torso upright and balanced? Are your comfortable and natural? Do your feet work the skis away from underneath your body? One word of caution: If you get too carried away watching your shadow, you might miss seeing another skier or object below you. —Jim Isham, “The Shadow Knows” (Skiing Magazine, Spring 1985)

2005 Bode’s Curse
Bode Miller became the first American in 22 years to win skiing’s overall World Cup title. He finished ahead of his only remaining challenger, Benjamin Raich of Austria, in the season’s final giant slalom. The last non-Europeans to win the overall championship were Americans Phil Mahre and Tamara McKinney in 1983. “It’s been a bit embarrassing it’s taken so long. It was getting a bit like the Red Sox,” said Miller, a New Englander. “It was a bit embarrassing because it was like a curse.” —AP Press, “Miller Ascends to the Summit (Washington Post, March 13, 2005.)

2021 Homeless Olympics?
For those keeping score, here are the future Olympics that are scheduled: Beijing in February (really?), Paris in 2024, Milan and Cortina in 2026, Los Angeles in 2028 and Brisbane four years after that. You’ll notice an unprecedented hole, the 2030 Winter Games, still looking for a home. There’s a reason for that. —Barry Syrluga, “Fewer and fewer cities want to host the Olympics. That should tell the IOC something.” (Washington Post, Aug. 8, 2021)

 

Aspen Highlands’ bruising—and short-lived—no-rules race.

By Jay Cowan

Aspen Highlands founder Whip Jones had a knack for publicity stunts. His 1960s Bash for Cash, anything-goes citizen downhill also had a knack for mayhem and injuries. But the race did result in a popular poster of that era.

From its inception in a valley dominated by Aspen Skiing Corporation properties, Aspen Highlands always strived to stand out. Owner and founder Whipple Van Ness Jones, a maverick by nature, centered his area on pushing the boundaries on entertaining customers and garnering publicity.

After the area opened in 1958, Stein Eriksen, Highlands’ first ski school director, did flips—an audacious trick for that era—at the bottom of the mountain every day. A dozen years later, ski patrollers began jumping off the patrol shack roof, pulling toboggans. Eriksen’s eventual replacement, Fred Iselin, performed Reuel christies down the mountain while reading his own book. So it was probably inevitable that something as brash and fundamentally American as the Bash for Cash would be created here. The event featured racers charging en masse, like lemmings, down a cliffy run for a pot of money at the finish.

Jones blamed the event on the original head of the ski patrol. “There’s no question that Charlie Bolte was the biggest character I ever knew at Highlands,” Jones later explained. “On the job he had a fondness for explosives. And after work he was quite a prominent member of the customers at the bar. He also came up with the idea, maybe at the bar, for our famous race the Bash for Cash.”

Early versions of this madness—with a Le Mans-style–start, no gates and few rules—ran on Lower Stein, near the area’s base. In the early 1960s it was moved much nearer to the top of the mountain. It plunged down the Olympic run face and cut across to the Wall, a short, steep, punishing mogul field, with a run-out finish to the $100 cash prize. The winner was the first one down without falling.

“We started it each week by blowing up a case of dynamite. That was a hell of a charge,” recalled Jones. Indeed. And almost as insane as the fact that they ran the race every week.

Not surprisingly, it occasionally produced chaos like that in the mid-1960’s poster (see left), part of a sequence of three images taken right after the start on the Olympic face by the late Tony Gauba of Aspen. Highlands instructor and patrolman Paul Dudley is one of those in the photo, and one of the few who didn’t get hurt. 

“I’m the one still standing in the poster,” he laughs. “Then the s*** hit the fan and people started colliding.” He remembers, “Twenty or less of us lined up side-by-side at the start and right away the run narrowed to about five feet wide with powder on either side.”

He and his friend Doug Rowley had practiced for the event and decided Dudley would try to shoot that gap, and Rowley would follow a little behind everyone and hope to safely pick his way through in case Dudley didn’t make it.

“When the chaos started, I skied off to my left into the powder and stopped and then the screaming started. Everyone was hurt. Broken bones, concussions, cuts. Some of them skied down. They hauled others off, and they found one guy later halfway down the mountain just walking in a daze,” Dudley says.

A story in the Aspen Times about that particular race, published in the February 28, 1964, issue, led with this: “In the worst accident of the Aspen skiing season, two men were hospitalized following a collision during the Aspen Highlands first Bash for Cash race of the winter last Sunday, Feb. 23.”

Jones, who witnessed the carnage, said no one was sure what happened. “Two of them fell or collided,” the story quoted him as saying, then adding its own summary: “The other contestants either fell trying to avoid the first two or ran into them.”

Attending physicians at the Aspen Valley Hospital were Robert Oden and Robert Barnard. Racer Myron Leafblad of Wisconsin had “the worst spiral fracture I’ve ever seen,” Oden said. Highlands instructor Mike Riddell “had his upper jaw broken in two places and his upper front teeth torn away,” the Aspen Times reported.

An angry letter from the doctors to the newspaper was followed by an editorial that noted that “in the excitment of competition,” sports participants “must be protected from themselves,” and that Bash for Cash failed miserably on that front. “Racers and race organizers are lucky that more were not hurt, or that no one died,” the editorial read.

The Forest Service, which owns most of the Aspen Highlands property, along with the ski area’s insurance company, are said to have caused the event’s demise the following season. The Aspen Skiing Company purchased Highlands in 1993. But a faint whiff of mayhem and cordite still lingers over the mountain, the locals’ favorite among ASC’s properties. 

Les Arcs Named “One of the Most Significant Works of Postwar Architecture”

Les Arcs, in Savoie, France, is known for its avant-garde architecture, conspicuously different from the traditional Alpine designs prominent at many European resorts. The New York Times agrees on the resort’s distinction, naming Les Arcs No. 14 in “The 25 Most Significant Works of Postwar Architecture,” by Kurt Soller and Michael Snyder, published in August.

One of the first mega-resorts, Les Arcs consists of five interconnected base areas, each named for its elevation in meters. All but Arc 1950, the last of the areas constructed, were built in a modernistic style. The Times story notes the innovative work of French architect (and skier) Charlotte Perriand, a leading figure of 20th-century design. She took on the project in the late 1960s, at age 65.

“Perriand approached the construction of her ambitious Les Arcs resort as an opportunity to introduce the masses to what she described as the ‘possibility of self-transcendence’ offered by mountain landscapes,” the story reported. Perriand’s portion of the project consisted of “two clusters of hotels and apartments set into the mountain slope with views up to the pastures above.”

With a tight construction schedule, Perriand incorporated prefabrication techniques lifted from shipbuilding. “To assemble a structure that could accommodate 18,000 beds in the span of just seven months, she used mold-formed polyester to make easily reproducible kitchens and bathrooms. Carefully planned setbacks in the facade transformed the building itself into a slope, providing each of its long, narrow rooms with expansive views.”

The Cascade building (above), at Arc 1600, is noted as an example of her inspiration to have the hotel disappear into the mountain environment. “The ski chalet doesn’t rank that brilliantly in terms of sustainability or honorable usage of materials, particularly nowadays, but that modular approach to building—the way she integrated into the landscape and the woodiness of the prefabricated construction—is amazing, as are the furnishings inside,” the story reported. 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

John W. Lundin
Seattle, Washington

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

Correcting the Record

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

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

The Laurentian Ski Museum finds a new home. 

If you are fortunate enough to be traveling through the mountainous region north of Montreal, make a point of visiting the beautiful Laurentian Ski Museum, which celebrates its 40th anniversary in 2022.

Photo above: Organized in thematic zones, the permanent exhibits constitute a stroll through history. LSM photo.

The museum’s story began in the 1960s when historian Bernard Brazeau indulged his passion for collecting ski artifacts. In 1980, with two colleagues, he created a “research group on skiing in the Laurentians.” Bernard teamed with Jacques Beauchamp-Forget, professor, historian and fellow member of the Société d’histoire et de généalogie des Laurentides, and Fernand Trottier, skier, coach and owner of a local ski shop. The Musée du ski des Laurentides (LSM) became a reality two years later.

 

 

In 1992, Alice Johannsen merged her Musée Jackrabbit with LSM. Founded in 1987, the collection honors the life and work of her father, Herman Smith-Johannsen (1875–1987).

Since its inception, LSM has held an annual soirée at the Laurentian Ski Hall of Fame, which is part of the museum. The list of inductees, some 178 over the past 39 years, includes such luminaries as Émile Cochand, Sr., creator of North America’s first ski resort, Chalet Cochand (1915); Lucile Wheeler-Vaughan, the first North American to win an Olympic medal in the downhill (Cortina d’Ampezzo, 1956) and the honorary hostess of the Hall of Fame for many years; and Linda Crutchfield, a five-time Olympic competitor in skiing and luge, a ski instructor and a Level IV examiner. More recently, in 2016, LSM honored ISHA’s own John Fry and Doug Pfeiffer.

The museum is proud of its extensive holdings, which include more than 7,500 artifacts and 20 private archive collections. Prominent among these collections are Jackrabbit’s memorabilia and mementoes of the ski-racing careers of Rhona and Rhoda Wurtele; LSM also maintains the website of the Repertoire-des-centres-de-ski-du-Quebec (Directory of Quebec Ski Sites), by Pierre Dumas, which documents and geo-locates more than 600 ski centers, extant and abandoned. The site received the ISHA Cyber Award in 2017.

 

 

 

 

Since 2016, Nancy Belhumeur has served as the museum’s curator, and Pierre Urquhart as the director general since 1998.

The long-term home of the museum has been on avenue Filion (in the center of St. Sauveur, just off rue Principale) in a renovated fire station. These premises have served admirably for many years, protecting and displaying, in the museum’s first-class fashion, the permanent and revolving collections. But in early 2021 the museum announced that it will move to the more prestigious, and historic, National Bank building nearby and hopes to be installed there, at the corner of rue Principale and rue de la Gare, in 2022.

The museum welcomes visitors from Wednesday to Sunday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. museeduski.com 

Regular contributor Bob Soden serves as ISHA’s treasurer and heads the board’s museum committee.

 

Photo: Robert Doisneau: Maurice Baquet a Chamonix, 1957/Getty Images

Click here to read the full article and listen to the tunes!

Skiers used to yodel and sing about the sport. 

Two boards upon cold, powder snow, yo-ho, what else does a man need to know? goes the refrain of the Tirolean ballad Der Feinste Sport (The Finest Sport).

As a professor of entertainment law at New York University, I’ve taught courses on the relationship of music to history. I’ve also been skiing, all over the world, for some 50 years. It finally occurred to me that while music and skiing have been culturally intertwined for hundreds of years, and ski songs are woven deeply into the fabric of the sport, little has been written about how and why that incredible melding of art and athletics came to be. That, I concluded, is what else a skier needs to know.

The result is a series of online feature articles entitled Sunshine on My Shoulders, crafted specially for members of the International Skiing History Association for their reading and listening pleasure. Links to 200 musical examples illustrate how skiing and music developed side by side from the 19th to the 21st centuries, mirroring momentous times in history.

This project was inspired by conversations with yodeling superstar Klaus Obermeyer at the 2017 Skiing History Week in Aspen. Sunshine traces the long trail of ski song, from Romantic Age composers and Alpine singing groups of the belle epoque, to the musical influence of the Italian mountain soldiers of World War I, and the eventual collapse of the joyous ski heil singing tradition of the German-speaking Alps into a militarized celebration of hate in the 1930s and ’40s.

Of course, it’s not all serious. We cover the hilarious song-parody traditions developed in North America by the Carcajou Ski Club at Dartmouth, the Red Birds of Quebec and, especially, the U.S. 10th Mountain Division. There are stories of Glenn Miller and his “Sun Valley Serenade,” “Ninety Pounds of Rucksack” and “Happy Wanderers”; the great Jo Stafford’s recording of “Moonlight in Vermont”; and the impeccable contributions of John Denver.

The postwar ski boom and folk music explosion, led by singers like Bob Gibson and Ray Conrad, serve as the prelude to music in ski films, from the works of Roger Brown, Dick Barrymore and Greg Stump to mainstream movies such as the Beatles’ Help! and Robert Redford’s Downhill Racer. From Hansi Hinterseer’s Ski Twist franchise to the rebirth of the après-ski sing-along tradition on steroids at the Krazy Kangahruh in St. Anton, it’s all covered. Did we miss something? Add your own musical memories in the comments section.

American lyrical genius Yip Harburg (“Over the Rainbow”) perhaps explained the phenomenon best: “Words make you think a thought. Music makes you feel a feeling. A song makes you feel a thought.” Klaus Obermeyer knows exactly what Harburg was getting at. “Skiing,” he insists after a century on snow, “is just the realization of the ecstasy music strives to inspire.”

 

 

It began with yodeling

Aspen’s beloved centenarian, the world-class yodeler and ski apparel legend Klaus Obermeyer, has a theory why skiing and music will always be inextricably linked. “To express feelings as happy as sliding down a mountain through powder snow and sunshine,” he philosophizes through his million-watt smile, “they must be sung. Words alone can’t convey that much joy.”

“Yodeling,” Obermeyer insists, “was the beginning. Absolutely. When skiing became popular, those yodeling tunes were turned into songs about the happiness you feel when you reach the summit and go flying down. Sometimes you yodel out loud, sometimes inside. But we all sing in our own way. That’s the basis of all ski music. It’s yodeling for the pure joy of playing in the snow.”

Mountain troops in World War I

 

 

World War I came to the Alps in 1914. The Austrian ski-technique pioneer and “father of modern skiing” Hannes Schneider served as a trainer of his nation’s ski troops on the Sud Tirolean front. Many of the men about to face one another in combat had grown up climbing, skiing and singing together in those same mountains. Going into battle against each other would literally pit friend against friend, an eventuality they sought to avoid for as long as possible.

As a result, even after the First World War began in earnest that autumn, the ski heil spirit of camaraderie among mountain troops persisted. That was especially true after Italy declared its neutrality in the struggle between the Western Allies and Russia on one side and Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey on the other. Austrian and Italian ski troops on either end of the Dolomite border continued to chat bilingually, trade food and bottles of wine, and drink and sing together. Maintaining a code of fellowship in wartime, however, was simply not possible after Italy joined the Allies in April 1915, and declared war on Austria. That reality was later starkly depicted in German actor-director Luis Trenker’s 1931 mountain film Berge in Flammen (Mountain on Fire), which featured military singing as part of its grueling and dramatic war reenactments.

 

 

Austrians in America

[In North Conway, Harvey] Gibson even honored [Hannes] Schneider with a measure of musical revenge against his former captors. When a German diplomat visited the Eastern Slope Inn in 1939, the proprietor told his hotel’s bandleader that he was to play at dinner only music written by “non-Aryan” composers. After a night showcasing the works of George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Yip Harburg and the expelled German composer and lyricist Kurt Weil (most famous for “Mack the Knife”), the Nazi statesman and his entourage understood the insult and stomped out of the dining room. According to Hannes’ son Herbert, the Schneider family was elated over Gibson’s gesture.

North American drinking songs

Prior to the 1939 arrival in New Hampshire of Hannes Schneider’s ski school in exile, the catalog of American and Canadian ski tunes was limited nearly exclusively to humorous, and sometimes risqué, parodies of popular songs, lyrically transfigured by the members of local college ski teams and winter outing clubs to promote bonding among their members. Here and there were smatterings of German language mountain lyrics and melodies carried home by those few who had skied in Europe, but even those compositions were frequently, tipsily translated into American-ese for local consumption.

The Carcajou Ski Club—founded by veterans of the national champion Dartmouth College Ski Teams and local skiers of Hanover, New Hampshire—was a prime example. The members no doubt did ski together, but the real point of the club, according to the lyrics of its favorite ski songs, was gathering on cold New England evenings to sing parodies until the beer and wine ran out. Even Dartmouth’s most sacred, fraternal hymn, the “Hanover Winter Song,” falls hard into the “drinks by the fire” category of both Ivy League and hardscrabble Northeastern fellowship.

 

 

Ninety Pounds of Rucksack

By far the most enduring tune written for the 10th Mountain Division is its ubiquitous anthem, “Ninety Pounds of Rucksack” (sung to the tune of “Bell Bottom Trousers”). Oddly, however, it is the one 10th Mountain Division song whose provenance is most difficult to trace. Charles McLane was certain that he and Ralph Bromaghin had a strong hand in creating the parody lyrics. Other sources, including The Skier’s Songbook (a revered collection compiled by David Kemp, published in 1950), list the song as “Never Trust a Skier an Inch Above the Knee,” credited to 10th Mountaineers Billy Neidner, Dick Johnson and Don Hawkins. Regardless of

 

 

its various sources and titles, no history of American ski music is complete without devout reference to it, if for no other reason than its unique, life-long popularity among those who came home from war, founded the North American ski industry, and invented a good deal of the post-war skiing culture that it sparked.

Bob Gibson and the folksong revival

 

 

It was the commencement of a U.S. folk music boom in the late 1950s, coinciding with the explosion in popularity of North American skiing, that created the opportunity for the first real star of American ski music to emerge. His name was Samuel Robert “Bob” Gibson, a Pete Seeger acolyte from Brooklyn who possessed genuine street cred as a leader of the new American folk movement. Gibson’s career included a stint in Aspen, where he fell madly in love with skiing. Leading a double life by commuting between Ajax Mountain and the folk circuit, Gibson managed to become a creditable Colorado downhiller. Meanwhile, he discover and introduce Joan Baez to the world at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival, and become instrumental in getting Judy Collins to sign with him to Jac Holzman’s up-and-coming Elektra Records. He also found time in 1959 to co-write and record the album Ski Songs, containing both original and classic skiing-based compositions mainly performed in the 1930s New England frat-style. The selections were so humorously impressive that (along with his socially conscious “straight” folk performances), they influenced an entire generation of future singer-songwriters. His fans and disciples stretched from The Byrds and Paul Simon (who covered his non-skiing songs) to Collins, Harry Chapin, John Denver and James Taylor. According to Peter Yarrow of Peter Paul & Mary, the New York folk icon who has spent most of his post-folk era life skiing in Telluride, Colorado, “when you listened to us, you were hearing Bob Gibson.”

John Denver’s mountain spirituality

John Denver, who was born in Roswell, New Mexico in 1943, had by the mid-1970s become the living, international symbol of American Rocky Mountain skiing. His top-rated “Rocky Mountain Christmas” TV specials were by then annually drawing audiences of over 60 million viewers to watch him sing and ski, adding yet another dimension of success to both his career and the sport.

By the early 1980s, over thirty of Denver’s songs and albums had already gone gold or platinum around the world. Those hits included skiing and Alpine favorites like “Starwood in Aspen,” the Gibson-esque ecology masterpiece “Eagle and the Hawk,” “Dancing with the Mountain,” “Annie’s Song,” “Song of Wyoming,” “Wild Montana Skies,” “Alaska and Me,” The Gold and Beyond” (which served as the theme of the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympics), and the extraordinary ballad “Sunshine on My Shoulders,” (written with Mike Taylor and folk bassist Dick Kniss), which featured what many consider the perfect expression of spiritual generosity that defines the skiing and mountain lifestyles.

Suddenly, in bars lining the roads to every ski area in North America, skiers were mouthing the lyrics to John Denver songs played by guitarists on tiny stages urging the crowd to sing out louder. It wasn’t quite the same as the [fireside singing of the] old days, but it was a reasonable facsimile. Ski music sing-alongs in the traditional sense hadn’t returned, but the spirit of celebrating a great day on the slopes with a beer, friends and a sentimental song of the mountains was certainly reborn. 

Charlie Sanders is a director of ISHA and the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame and serves on the advisory board of Protect Our Winters. He is author of the award-winning book Boys of Winter: Life and Death in the U.S. Ski Troops During the Second World War, and of “Skiing the Seven Continents” (Skiing History supplement, 2020).

The cerebral side of ski instruction grew dominant in the mid-1970s. The approach vanished a decade later, but had made its point that mastering technique is only part of the game.

More than three decades ago, skiing was ripe for a change in the way the sport was taught. Amid a new wave of research in psychology and neurology that supported a holistic approach to how people learn, ski instructors were still shouting orders to tense skiers about the placement of their knees and shoulders.

Jean-Claude Killy, it was revealed, had used a form of yoga to help win the 1967 overall World Cup title and his triple gold at the 1968 Olympics in Grenoble, France. Switzerland’s national ski team won seven medals at the 1972 Sapporo Winter Games after employing a Jungian psychotherapist.

Sportswriter and expert skier Denise McCluggage, who’d studied Zen Buddhism, attracted national attention with her concept of Centered Skiing. She urged skiers to control their skis not intellectually from the head, but viscerally from the body’s physical center—a point located just below the navel.

At about the same time, in 1975, Tim Gallwey, the best-selling author of The Inner Game of Tennis, burst onto the ski scene. Skiers, he said, should learn to focus on mental images of how they wanted to ski down a slope and on how a perfect turn should feel. He went on to co-author the best-selling book Inner Skiing.

The nation’s ski schools mostly welcomed the Gallwey influence. Colorado’s Copper Mountain started a dryland program instructing students to feel the motions of skiing before they even put on skis. A rush of workshops and books, such as Ski With Yoga, appeared.

The Hidden Skier claimed a latent talent and unique style of skiing lay within each of us. In Skiing from the Head Down, two psychologists presented skiing as a total mind and body experience.

It wasn’t long before doubts were raised about overemphasizing the inner approach to instruction. Skiing does, after all, involve a technical activity: sliding down snowy slopes at high speeds. A Zen-like inner peace doesn’t address a student’s need to make it down the slopes in one piece.

By the mid-1980s, the Inner Game schools had mostly disappeared. While racers continued to work on the cerebral aspects of skiing, the ski-instruction establishment largely returned to focusing on execution and technique. Nevertheless, the mental approach of the ’70s has left the sport with an enduring legacy: a reminder to instructors that technical expertise is only the beginning of successfully teaching people how to ski. 

Excerpted from the October 2008 issue of SKI. John Fry (1930-2020) was editorial director of SKI and Snow Country magazines and longtime president, then chairman, of ISHA. He authored the award-winning book The Story of Modern Skiing. His final book, published posthumously, is Abandon Foolish Scheme: Deathly encounters that you won’t find in bestsellers about dying.

Part 3: From Folk to Stoke -- The Modern Era of Ski Music

By Charles J. Sanders

The waning of traditional, group performances of ski songs by skiers themselves signaled an evolutionary change in the sport’s culture in the 1960s and 70s, but by no means spelled the demise of ski music.  On the contrary, it reflected a shift toward a more glamorous future tied to higher profile recording artists and bigger-budget ski films.  The sudden emergence of the sport’s appeal as an international touchstone of cool, in fact, soon had major musical acts racing into recording studios, with varying degrees of artistic and commercial success. 

Starting in the 1950s, jazz giants Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday had been among the diverse group of performers featured in winter, slope-side publicity events.  Now, everyone was doing it.  In short order, respected musical artists as varied as world famous Brazilian samba guitarist Luis Bonfa (who incorporated his instrumental “Ski Song”[1] into the South American musical repertoire), Polka King Frankie Yankovic (who scored a genre hit with “Let’s Go Skiing” [2]), and surf music genius Brian Wilson (who name-checked the sport among the many wonders of “Salt Lake City”[3]) became representative of the broad public appeal of ski culture in the era of Camelot presided over by the skiing Kennedy Clan in the White House. 

That trend was expanded and highlighted in the summer of 1963, when the infamously eccentric record producer Phil Spector gathered LA’s best studio musicians (known as the Wrecking Crew) along with his own label artists to record perhaps the most beloved winter album of all time.  With the weather outside Gold Star Studios in Hollywood topping one hundred degrees that August, Spector lowered the temperature inside to near freezing, brought in a Christmas tree, and turned non-sectarian, winter pop songs celebrating the magic of snow into rock and roll standards. 

Highlights included new, high-octane versions of cold weather classics like Mitchell Parish and Leroy Anderson’s “Sleigh Ride”[4] and Felix Bernard and Dick Smith’s “Winter Wonderland.”[5]  The project’s climax, a cut by Darlene Love of a new song written by Spector, Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry entitled “Merry Christmas (Baby, Please Come Home),”[6] is still generally regarded as the ultimate winter holiday rock anthem.  Everyone associated with the album left the studio that summer believing it was destined to be an all-time best-seller, the ultimate pop celebration of the winter season.  The release date chosen for A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector was November 22, 1963, a prospective event circled on the calendars of disc jockeys and radio programmers around the world. 

On that ill-fated day, one of the darkest in modern history, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy instantly relegated the recording to the status of cultural footnote.  In spite of those tragic circumstances, however, the project’s enduring excellence has over the years slowly but steadily transformed it into the modern musical landmark of winter that it was always expected to be.  There are few Northern hemisphere ski resorts that at one time or another have not used its continuing, universal appeal to help kick off their seasons in early December.

***

Skiing scenes with upbeat musical accompaniment likewise exploded across Hollywood movie screens in the 1960s.  Director Blake Edwards chose to situate his 1963 comedy classic “The Pink Panther” at Cortina D’Ampezzo, and used the Henry Mancini/Johnny Mercer/Franco Migliacci bossa nova hit “Meglio Stasera (It Had Better Be Tonight)”[7] as both an evocative instrumental background to the skiing action, and as the big ski lodge production number sung by Fran Jeffries.[8]

With a level of incongruity that still boggles the mind, the 1965 Frankie Avalon-Dwayne Hickman “surf-style” teen movie Ski Party[9] similarly featured a lodge performance of the rock and soul hit “I Feel Good”[10] by the great James Brown, fully decked out in ski apparel and trying hard with his Famous Flames to get the guests to clap on the correct beat.  That scene is time-capsule worthy in and of itself.  

So is the Lesley Gore cameo debuting “Sunshine Lollipops and Rainbows”[11] (written by Marvin Hamlisch and produced by Quincy Jones) on the ski bus.  Despite its “B Movie” pedigree, Ski Party turned out to represent a landmark step toward the establishment of commercial, pop music as the new background track of choice to emphasize the hipness of skiing for a new generation, shunting aside the concept that ski music lyrics need to be about skiing.  The surf-guitar infused title track “(Let’s Have A) Ski Party”[12] sung by Avalon --matched to the well-executed skiing scenes backgrounding the opening credits-- represented the only song about skiing in the entire project. 

In an even more significant 1965 film event, by far the world’s most popular band also realized the benefits of incorporating skiing into their celluloid extravaganzas.  For the movie “Help!,” director Richard Lester took The Beatles to Obertauern, Austria and recorded several wince-inducing segments on snow with John, Paul, George and Ringo as they struggled to remain upright and coherent to the musical accompaniment of “Ticket to Ride.”[13]  Consistent with his droll sensibilities, Lester even included a Fanck/Riefenstahlesque torch parade on skis featuring the lads using a WWII-era British flamethrower.  Skiing arrived as the epitome of winter cachet in the music world, even if song lyrics had become wholly disconnected from the sport in the process.

***

When it came to music in the traditional “travelogue-style” ski films, however, the quality of the product was still artistically lagging.  Leading genre film maker Warren Miller continued to insist that utilizing anything other than public domain classical music and generic, orchestral jazz recordings was beyond his 1960s budgets.  In any event, he asserted, those genres unobtrusively fit both the skiing action and his narrations.  If his many fans didn’t mind, why fix what ain’t broke?  It was a logic hard to refute, though Miller later admitted that he had stayed too long with symphonic works and paid too little attention to other musical styles until the late 1980s.

Thus, while NFL Films was pioneering the use of bold, “action music”[14] composed and recorded by sports scoring maestro Sam Spence specifically to support exciting pro-football visuals, the spectacular sequences of deep powder skiing and acrobatics shot around the world by Miller, John Jay and other superb ski cinematographers in the 1960s continued to be dragged down by cliched “rent-a-scores.”  At the same time, the world was changing drastically, and music with it.  

According to 10th Mountain Division veteran Bob Parker, head of public relations at Vail for the first decades of its existence, “as we progressed further into the 1960s, it was as if someone threw a musical switch.  Suddenly, with Vietnam, the political assassinations, and all kinds of social upheaval, singing [lyrics] about skiing and surfing came to be looked at as frivolous. It made sense that music began to be more about highlighting visual images of skiing’s beauty as an action sport, and less about songs . . . celebrating what some were now convinced was the ‘establishment’ lifestyle . . .”

At the same time, music’s booming ascendence in popularity by the latter part of the decade also created fertile ground for the expansion of its influence on all other categories of art.  Songs became the preferred medium not only of social commentary, but also for boosting the appeal of everything from commercials to sports clips, making them feel more contemporary, exciting, and important. Recognizing, just as Hollywood and the NFL had, that a younger audience of fans now appreciated a far broader range of cinematic and musical styles than their parents, Vail ski movie maker Roger Brown and his Jackson Hole partner Barry Corbet (namesake of Jackon Hole's couloir and a world-class ski mountaineer) were ready to experiment. 

In 1968, the two Dartmouth renegades produced the short film Ski the Outer Limits,[15] which featured stunning visual sequences that included the famous front flips into the couloir executed by Tom LeRoy and Hermann Gollner.  Perhaps even more importantly from the standpoint of innovation, they mixed majestic, classical music and the modern jazz of Armand Migiani into the same soundtrack with the surf music of Les Reed and the British dance hall tunes of Tony Allen.  It all somehow held together, enhancing the “outer limits” effect of both the poetic, new age narration and the slow-motion skiing sequences.

Despite a severe injury suffered by Corbet in a helicopter crash at Jackson Hole, he and Brown continued to forge ahead in their efforts to expand modern ski movie-making into a higher art form.  For their next Hart Skis-sponsored project a year later, Moebius Flip,[16] they pushed composer Dick Darnell to incorporate an even wider array of genres and influences into the soundtrack.  Those included electric harpsichord, Native American flute experimentation, psychedelic folk rock, and wildly divergent compositional styles ranging from Erik Satie to The Free Design.  Whether or not you appreciated the acid-tinged sights, sounds and avant garde editing of the film, it represented an even more drastic departure from the formulaic musical template that had been in use since the 1930s, and pushed establishment ski movie makers into paying closer attention to the possibilities that music presented in elevating the appeal of their projects.

The motion picture Downhill Racer,[17] among the best, full-length feature films focused entirely on skiing ever made, debuted that same year and flowed in the same innovative, musical direction.  Starring Robert Redford as an introverted member of the US Ski Team struggling for Olympic glory, it contained a tension-filled score composed by Kenyon Hopkins (best known for his work on the American film noir masterpiece, The Hustler).  The downhill racing scenes featuring stunt skier and later film producer Joe Jay Jalbert were particularly well served by Kenyon’s edgy, minimalist use of music, which was combined with “skis on snow” sound effects to heighten the drama of what suddenly became obvious to viewers was a dangerous endeavor. The film and its score represented another evolutionary step forward in the cohesive relationship between music and skiing imagery. 

The same can be said of the James Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,[18] also released in 1969.  Borrowing liberally from prior “military ski chase” sequences such as those in The Mortal Storm and the classic episode Mountain Man from the television series Combat![19] featuring Bob Beattie, Bond theme composer John Barry made similar use of his trademark sound to boost the excitement of the film’s epic moment: a battle on skis from Switzerland’s Piz Gloria atop the Schilthorn down to Murren, featuring John Eaves as the stunt double for Bond.  That scene alone, and the global prestige of the 007 franchise, helped bring additional attention to the sport as one of the world’s most exciting and glamourous pastimes, made even more so when set to the right music.  As a result of this success, skiing would appear in four more Bond films[20] over the next two decades. 

***

On Christmas day in 1969, the number one record in the US was a Peter, Paul & Mary recording of a song initially titled “Babe, I Hate to Go” written by Henry Deutschendorf.  That fact is central to the story of skiing and music for one important reason.

By Christmastime a year later, Henry Deutschendorf was known and recognized as rising singer-songwriter John Denver, and had earned enough royalties from his composition (which had also been renamed “Leaving On A Jet Plane”)[21] to build a house for himself and his wife Annie in his adopted home town of Aspen, Colorado.  By December of 1971, he had written and recorded an indelible folk anthem, “Take Me Home Country Roads,”[22] and by yuletide one year later, his song “Rocky Mountain High”[23] (written with guitarist Mike Taylor) was a top ten hit and already being proclaimed as the great, classic song of American skiing.  All without ever mentioning the sport:

He was born in the summer of his 27th year
Coming home to a place he'd never been before…

He climbed cathedral mountains, he saw silver clouds below
He saw everything as far as you can see…

And the Colorado rocky mountain high
I've seen it raining fire in the sky
You can talk to God and listen to the casual reply
Rocky mountain high, Colorado

John Denver, who had been born in Roswell, New Mexico in 1943, had by the mid-1970s become the living, international symbol of American Rocky Mountain skiing.  His top-rated “Rocky Mountain Christmas”[24] tv specials were by then annually drawing audiences of over sixty million viewers to watch him sing[25] and ski,[26] adding yet another dimension of success to both his career and the sport.

Not so incidentally, Denver’s skyrocketing popularity nearly eclipsed the career of fellow Aspen music entertainer Andy Williams,[27] whose Christmas variety shows had formerly dominated US television ratings.  The end of Williams’ tv reign coincided not only with Denver’s ascendence, but with the conviction of Williams’ ex-wife, the French-born chanteuse Claudine Longet, in the shooting death of former US Olympic skier and popular Aspen resident Vlad “Spider” Sabich.  That sad and unseemly scandal rocked the Colorado town to its foundations in 1976, and further elevated Denver’s status as the region’s favorite son.

By the early1980s, over thirty of Denver’s songs and albums had already gone gold or platinum around the world.  Those hits included skiing and alpine favorites like “Starwood in Aspen,”[28] the Gibson-esque ecology masterpiece “Eagle and the Hawk,”[29] “Dancing With the Mountain,”[30] “Annie’s Song,”[31] “Song of Wyoming,”[32] “Wild Montana Skies,”[33] “Alaska and Me,”[34] “The Gold and Beyond”[35] (which served as the theme of the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympics), and the extraordinary ballad “Sunshine On My Shoulders,”[36] (written with Mike Taylor and folk bassist Dick Kniss) which featured what many consider the perfect expression of spiritual generosity that defines the skiing and mountain lifestyles: 

Sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy
Sunshine in my eyes can make me cry
Sunshine on the water looks so lovely
Sunshine almost always makes me high

If I had a day that I could give you
I'd give to you the day just like today
If I had a song that I could sing for you
I'd sing a song to make you feel this way

Suddenly, in bars lining the roads to every ski area in North America, skiers were mouthing the lyrics to John Denver songs played by guitarists on tiny stages urging the crowd to sing out louder.  It wasn’t quite the same as the old days, but it was a reasonable facsimile.  Ski music sing-alongs in the traditional sense hadn’t returned, but the spirit of celebrating a great day on the slopes with a beer, friends, and a sentimental song of the mountains was certainly reborn.

In John Denver, the sport of skiing had found its most irreplaceable musical voice to date, from a talent genuinely embraced by the skiing community as one of its own.  His deeply serious commitments to his art, the sport, and to global environmental causes transcended any negatives that might have been triggered by his “country boy” persona that the general public seemed to hold in even higher esteem.  And though Denver, like Bob Gibson, would wrestle with his personal demons for the remainder of his life (cut short by a solo-flight plane crash in 1997), his extensive body of work as a performer, songwriter, and humanitarian is of the highest caliber not just for ski music and skiers, but for all music and all people.[37] 

***

Picking up where Brown and Corbet had left off with Moebius Flip, longtime American ski film producer Dick Barrymore debuted his film The Performers[38] in 1972, featuring the K2 Demonstration Team.  Although some generic, canned music was included, Barrymore demonstrated a growing awareness that authentic, popular songs now played an indispensable role in ski productions geared toward a younger and more artistically edgy demographic.  Perhaps even more importantly, he became the first to truly embrace the reality that the musical groove underlying skiing action scenes is directly related to the level of excitement transferred from slope, to screen, to audience. 

As to musical authenticity, Barrymore used the British folk-infused “City to City”[39] by the songwriting team Bill Martin and Phil Coulter to tie the short film’s “on the road” story line together.  In terms of groove, he jammed driving drumbeats, Spence-inspired, brass-heavy modern jazz, and surf-guitar to highlight his progressive, “hot dog” skiing montages.  That included a version of drummer Sandy Nelson’s surf hit “Let There Be Drums II”[40] in a blue sky, bump bashing finale that set a new standard for ski film action music.  With a tom-tom beat derived straight from Gene Krupa, the skiing of John Clendenin, Charlie McWilliams and the other K2 team members leaped off the screen right into the theater, bouncing the audience off the walls with them.  It was revolutionary.

From the standpoint of musical experimentation, one other project related to The Performers --the one that got Clendenin his gig in the film-- is noteworthy.  In 1970, he and director Steve McAdams choreographed a ski routine to the “Theme from Zorba the Greek” in their film The Fall.  The action commenced with a solo, ski-booted Greek dance routine in the snow (a distant echo of Riefenstahl’s balletic opening in Blaue Licht) as a prelude to some great Sirtaki-infused skiing, and culminated with a jump launched from a kicker by a helmet-less Clendenin so huge that he was knocked unconscious by the landing (hence the film’s title).  So far as is known, this was the first attempt to make a ski action music video of a song, rather than with a song as its background track.  Certainly, more music videos featuring skiing action would soon arrive, but The Fall was likely the first.

***

Experimentation wasn’t just confined to the arts in the 1970s.  In a new age of athletic improvisation very much remindful of modern jazz, competitors ranging from boxer Muhammad Ali to basketball’s Earl Monroe began rebelling against the stultifying constraints of tradition that they believed were keeping them from advancing their sports.  Nowhere was this effect more evident than in the continued imposition by ski coaches of regimens that had been in place for generations, even if the skill and experience of skiers had already pushed far beyond the levels of achievement those rules were meant to inspire.   By the beginning of the decade, freestyle skiers in particular would have no more of it.

According to Clendenin, a college literature major-turned-free-style ski champion, “it was finally just time to break out of the old strictures.  Competitive skiing needed to be improvisational and fun again, paralleling the stretching out that musicians were doing.”  And so improvise and solo they did. 

A professional freestyle circuit was established principally by Skiing magazine editor Doug Pfeiffer, in which skiers competed in moguls, aerials and ballet-- and improvisational style was prized in scoring far more than regimentation in form.  According to Genia Fuller Crews, a four-discipline freestyle world champ, three-time winner of the Freestyler of the Year Award, and a professional musician to boot, one of the single, strongest elements in establishing that stylistic individuality was music:

In 1971, we all just decided that it would be more fun to ski to music.  [Former Olympian and skiing innovator] Suzy Chaffee was the person who first insisted we should get to choose our own songs in competition, which made sense to me coming from a figure skating background…. So, at every competition, Barry Hollister, who was a sound guy, would rig up huge speakers along the mogul and ballet courses to blast our individual tunes, and it all worked beautifully.  We loved it, and it psyched us into higher levels of performance, which the crowds loved, too…. Looking back, being consistent in all three events was important to me, but I was happy as long as I had a crowd to turn on and music to ski to.

The music chosen by the competitors followed some interesting patterns, too, often providing the same levels of eclecticism that ski film producers had been reaching for in the run-up to the freestyle era.  Fuller Crews, at one time content with the sedate accompaniment of Mozart and Johann Strauss to her figure skating, now frequently blew up the crowd to Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” in her ski ballet routine.  “They would roar just hearing the snare hits at the beginning of the track,” she remembered, a cue familiar to the fans from the openers of both the film Blackboard Jungle and the contemporary 1970s tv show, Happy Days. 

The rocker Clendenin, counterintuitively, often opted for Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 1 in G Minor (“Winter Reveries”) to demonstrate his own ski ballet chops.  And everyone, of course, pulled the most kickass tracks they could find for the bump competitions, including pounding surf beats (a la Barrymore) and the pulsating drive of bands like the Doobie Brothers (per Brown and Corbet).  Was life imitating art, or the other way around?  It was the early 70s.  No one remembers.  It just worked.

***

Once having achieved the highest levels of success as freestylers, Chaffee, Clendenin, Fuller Crews and others began sharing their skills by becoming coaches, while also headlining as ski film performers.  It was one of the students whom Fuller Crews mentored --a witty kid and former radio disc jockey from Maine-- who would go on to capture the US National Amateur Ski Ballet Championships of 1978 and 1979 and the North American (FIS) Freestyle Championship in 1979.  Even after those triumphs, however, he confided to her that what he really wanted to do was to direct.  In his case, ski movies.  His name was Greg Stump. 

Stump skied some live industry shows for Harry Leonard on the recommendation of Pfeiffer, met and skied for Dick Barrymore, and talked his way into some scenes for Warren Miller as a self-promotion vehicle for his own initial projects (a ploy to which Miller took exception and removed Stump from the credits).  It was Barrymore, though, who personally taught Stump the art of independent film making by inviting him on remote project shoots, and letting him learn how a one-person film production company operates from the ground up.  By the early 1980s, he was ready to ply his new trade. 

The young film maker’s influences already included not only the revolutionary works of Barrymore, but those of Dick Lester (A Hard Day’s Night) and later, Chris Spain (Impact Zone).  All of them emphasized music as a primary focus of their projects.  Stump thoroughly embraced that approach, and made audio mixing and music supervision priorities of nearly equal importance to his selection of the skiers who starred in his films. 

“Remember,” he recalled. “I came out of both radio production and ski ballet, two disciplines that rely on music to drive another art form.  So making films was to me an extension of programming and choreography.  I was simply editing to make the skiers dance to the music I chose.”  Stump mainly tried to do that with subtlety, but once in a while to create crazed excitement, and always to get the audience deeper into the story he was telling.

Beginning with his “Time Waits for Snowman,” “Maltese Flamingo,” and “The Good, the Rad and the Gnarly,” Stump’s approach changed the dynamic of ski films forever.  Like the works of other ski film directors, his productions were still irreverent and funny.  They still had extraordinary visuals of bad boys and girls killing it on skis.  But they also had soundtracks that didn’t just underscore and enhance the action.  They propelled it. 

In Stump’s films, Scott Kennett wasn’t just skiing the bumps with Zudnick the Wonder Dog on his tails, he was doing so in slow-motion to the reggae flow of Barrington Levy’s “You Say You Love Me”[41] and Cocoa Tea’s “Rockin’ Dolly.”[42]  Extreme freestylers Glen Plake, Mike Hattrup and Scot Schmidt weren’t just boogying down Squaw Peak with insane moves, they were doing so to the equally unhinged, multi-genre “Escape from New York”[43] by Nasty Rox Inc.   And Stump was just getting started.

For many, his true breakthrough was the 1988 film The Blizzard of Aahhhs.[44]  With a narrative that traced the adventures of Plake, Hattrup and Schmidt fleeing American lawyers and insurance companies in search of extreme skiing Nirvana, the film settles into a heroic tale of the trio ripping up Chamonix. 

Stump took to heart suggestions that he had in the past locked his skiing action --especially in the bumps-- a bit too tightly to the beat of the music tracks.  Even Zudnick held down a steady back-beat bouncing around Telluride on all fours in early Stump films.  This time he cut the skiers loose in his edits (which he was now enabled to experiment with at his leisure through new home technologies), allowing the action to feel more improvised, flowing to the groove as he switched back and forth between synchronous and slow-motion visuals. 

The result was magnificent.  The scenes shot in the Poubelle Couloir mixed to the screaming guitars of Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Warriors of the Wasteland,” and the dreamier sequences captured on Les Grands Montets synched to Act’s “The Third Planet,” are two of the reasons why the film has become perhaps the most influential of the entire era of freeskiing.

While all of this was transpiring, music video programming had exploded with the launch of the Music Television “MTV” cable network in the early 1980s.  The new media phenomenon had commenced with the inflammatory rock hit “Video Killed the Radio Star” by a group called The Buggles, signed to Chris Blackwell’s enormously popular reggae-based label Island Records.  That band featured British singer, bassist and record producer Trevor Horn, who also happened to be a huge fan of skiing.  Horn’s wife and manager Jill Sinclair had recently purchased Stiff Records, and together with record executive Liam Teeling they were alternating between running the label and skiing with Trevor at Courcheval. 

Stump, who had been turned on to Horn’s music by a friend, managed to wangle a meeting with Sinclair and Teeling.  They loved both his free-wheeling directorial and editing styles, and in turn gave him a very unorthodox business proposal.  Stump would be free to use their music catalog (including some stupendous Horn tracks) in his future films, with one caveat: “the movie must be great,” he was told. “or it will never see the light of day.”  Properly motivated, Stump went back to work.

His next projects, including License to Thrill, P-Tex, Lies and Duct Tape, and Groove Requiem: In the Key of Ski, were all benchmarks in the melding of music to skiing imagery.  And the secret sauce wasn’t only his marriage of insane footage to Horn-produced cuts from bands like Propaganda, as though the tracks were the co-stars right along with the skiers.  It was the other innovations and chances he took, too. 

Stump enthusiasts were actually getting even more musical eclecticism than before under his new arrangement with the Horn organization.   How about, for instance, segueing Khachaturian’s Sabre Dance into Shambala by the Beastie Boys[45] --complete with Tibetan throat droning-- in a scene of big mountain skiing at La Grave, France?  Yup, he did that in P-Tex.  Audiences ate it up. 

Of course, there were still the usual Stump ski ensemble members crushing it on screen in every production.  But now, they were captured in state-of-the-art video images synched with front-line, cutting edge new music like “If I Could” (featuring Seal and the iconic Joni Mitchell), and Seal’s soon-to-be massive global hit, “Crazy.”[46] That latter use in a sequence of Requiem is credited by the snowboarding singer as having launched his career in North America.  Through Stump’s dogged determination, the ski film had not only evolved as cutting-edge sports art, but into a genuine method of music discovery, as well. 

***

Stump’s influence on next-generation film makers did not extend, unfortunately, to the two, big feature releases of the 1980s that most prominently incorporated the sport.  Neither the John Cusack vehicle Better Off Dead,[47] nor the Shannon Tweed romp Hot Dog …The Movie,[48] utilized music to greatest effect in enhancing their superbly shot if sophomoric story lines.  While those films did feature works from legitimate musical artists and songwriters including Duran Duran, Patti Austin, and even Prince, the ski scenes repeatedly drifted back into the more economical accompaniment of pre-fab, synthesizer schlock.

Alternatively, the use of music to elevate the numerous ski scenes shot for the 1993 feature film Aspen Extreme seemed calibrated to a higher standard.  Most notably, the opening, mass skier salvo launched to Bob Seger’s hard rocker “Feel Like A Number”[49] had a similar effect to the use of his hit “Old Time Rock and Roll” in Tom Cruise’s faux rock-star scene for Risky Business a decade earlier.  It got the film off to a rollicking start.  In the case of Aspen Extreme, however, even the stunt skiing of Doug Coombs and Schmidt couldn't save the script. 

Ironically, the contemporary film maker on whose work Stump had the most profound effect was Warren Miller himself.  Though Miller refused to his dying day to acknowledge even having watched a Stump film, the members of his organization certainly had.  In 1984, Miller’s crew ventured into new musical territory with a self-produced, folk rock send-up, “I Wanna Be A Ski Star,”[50] featured in the comedy reel Bloopers, Blunders and Bailouts.  By 1986, Miller’s crew had gone so far as to hire Colorado Music Hall of Famer Dan Fogelberg to write and perform the title song to their annual feature, Beyond the Edge.[51]  Though the results of those and subsequent musical novelties seemed as forced as Frankie Avalon’s ancient Ski Party movie theme, they at least represented a stab at a fresher direction. 

It would take a bit more time, but eventually Warren Miller releases would follow Stump in featuring title songs and full soundtracks comprised of new, commercially released musical tracks, making his time-honored, ski film-making formula that much more satisfying to his legions of fans.  Among the Miller highlights over the years were 1993’s groundbreaking “women in skiing” segment in Black Diamond Rush featuring Wendy Brookbank swooping down the Bugaboos to Kristy MacColl’s beautiful “Angel,”[52] a spectacular Whistler sequence choreographed to “Dreams of Our Fathers”[53] by the Dave Matthews Band in 2001’s Cold Fusion, and the stunningly effective use of Pearl Jam’s “I Am Mine”[54] to close out Journey (2003).

In 2005, however, the Miller team reached a musical and cinematic pinnacle.  The film Higher Ground contained as its opening segment perhaps the most sublime ski film scene of the post-Stump era, a panoramic, big mountain series of descents in the Alaskan Chugach above the North Pacific levitated by Damien Rice’s experimental folk-operatic piece “Eskimo.”[55]   So stunning was the cinematography, and so emotional the warmth and grandiosity of the track (sung as a duet in Finnish with the mezzo soprano star of the Irish National Opera Company, Doreen Curran), that it moved theater audiences to genuine awe. 

There are many who believe that the “Eskimo” segment was exactly the achievement Dr. Fanck had in mind for the future of the ski film as art when he pioneered it in the 1920s.  Technology had finally made it possible to celebrate the terrifying beauty of the high alpine with the grandeur of soaring, classically influenced orchestrations of folk music themes, all with pristine, digital clarity and a thoughtful story line. And it worked.

Within that same framework, generational admirers of Dr. Fanck were likewise gifted in 1998 with the re-release of a completely restored print of his silent film classic The White Hell of Piz Palu (1929), featuring a new, symphonic score written by Emmy Award winning composer Ashley Irwin (replacing the lost, original, live performance score by Willy Schmidt-Gentner).  Few better examples can be found demonstrating the enhancement of stunning mountain and skiing images with new, appropriately resplendent classical accompaniment.  Of particular note were the themes utilized to accompany the acrobatic flying scenes of German World War I flying ace Ernst Udet[56] (later a notorious Third Reich Luftwaffe commander under Hermann Goering) amid the great peaks of Switzerland’s Bernina Alps. 

The score’s finest achievement, however, was in breathing new life into Fanck’s spectacular, torchlight rescue scene shot among the icefalls of the Piz Palu massif. [57]  The film’s star, Leni Reifenstahl, would later torture that extraordinary, nighttime footage into inspiration for the Nazi torch parade she featured in Triumph of the Will (1935).  Irwin’s music reclaimed the original scene some six decades later with Fanck’s true intention in mind: the on-screen depiction of the Alpine code of honor, bravery and selflessness in action.

***

In the wake of Warren Miller and Greg Stump came a new generation of millennial ski movie makers who had been both mesmerized and schooled by their predecessors.  It was wholly unsurprising, therefore, that these young lions further elevated music as an indispensable storytelling tool.  The best of the 21st century leaders of the new-school movement have included Teton Gravity Research (TGR) of Jackson Hole, Matchstick Productions (MSP) of Crested Butte, Sherpas Cinemas of Whistler, BC, and several other commendable production teams spread around the world (including the Warren Miller organization, which continues to turn out quality productions even without its late founder’s narration and hands-on influence). 

The list of impressive, expansive uses of music by these contemporary film makers has grown to considerable size over the past two decades.  Its highlights include experimental incorporation of ethereal Native American chants (from A Tribe Called Red’s “Electric Pow Wow Drum”)[58] into the soundtrack of Sherpas’ groundbreaking Into the Mind (2013), MSP’s inspired choice of Moontrick’s electric harmonica blues jam “Home”[59] with Spindrift’s flamenco track “The Matador and the Fuzz”[60] in the film All In (2018), and TGR’s selection of female belter Findlay’s “On and Off”[61] to highlight epic scenes in Winterland (2019). 

The brief but brilliant use of various Andean guitar tracks such as Novalima’s “Se Me Van”[62] in the MSP production Days of My Youth (2014) is likewise noteworthy for its continuation of the tradition begun by Miller and Stump of respectful use of indigenous music to enhance developing world travel and skiing sequences.  In that segment, shot in the Cordillera Blanca amid the tiny mountain towns that dot its dirt roads, the impact of the music on the film’s theme of exotic adventure and cultural discovery is particularly uplifting.  

***

In considering the importance of these millennial ski film producers to the preservation of ski culture as it progresses through the 21st century, there should also be no discounting their “life imitates art” influence on today’s young skiers and their musical tastes.  That phenomenon, of course, is nothing new. 

By the time images of new century skiing stars like Ingrid Backstrom, Shane McConkey, and Candide Thovex began appearing on screens, skiers had already been choreographing their own, on-slope moves to music in real time for two decades.  The trend traces back to the original free-style movement that launched a multitude of new competitive events, including the short-lived musical experiment of ski ballet[63] in the Olympics.  It was, however, the introduction of the Sony Walkman back in the early 1980s --when cranking tunes through personal stereos first became a thing-- that allowed recreational athletes to finally begin re-imagining themselves as their own ski film heroes with personal, on-mountain soundtracks inspired by modern ski films.  By 1984, so pervasive had skiing to music tracks become that one head-bobbing racer in Hotdog…The Movie comically never removed his headphones throughout the entire film.

Over the ensuing decades, as smart phones replaced the need for separate portable music players, the practice of privately accessing tunes on chairlifts, in gondolas, and on the snow has grown more popular than ever.  Despite the facts that some skiing purists and safety proponents continue to eschew the idea of blocking out the sounds of winter --and others curse the loss of traditional social interaction that headphones inhibit-- music and skiing are today probably more powerfully linked than ever.  They are merely joined together in different ways than in the past. 

Rather than skiers writing, collecting and trading songs about skiing to be sung together, it is now almost exclusively the case that the music being shared is professionally produced and to be skied to and appreciated through personal devices in the form of electronic playlists.[64]  Thousands of such lists (often derived directly from ski film soundtracks) are published annually on the Internet, or informally shared among friends who create the compilations themselves.  That cultural exchange is driven in part by the knowledge that many in the top ranks of international skiing and snowboarding, from Olympic freestylers to hardcore ski film risk-takers, are doing the same.  It is a practice, at this point, that is baked into modern ski culture. 

Music on the slopes today isn’t just confined to earbuds, either.  Harkening again back to the freestyle circuit of the 1970s, songs still frequently boom out through racecourse, terrain park and resort speakers as athletes enjoy, practice, and compete in skiing, snowboarding, aerials, moguls, and slopestyle events.  Some participants and spectators opt to ignore or drown out the piped-in music with personal devices blasting their own preferred tunes, but most seem to enjoy the venue-programmed jams and the party atmosphere they create just fine.  Either way, recent academic studies of athletes and their use of music in both preparation and competition have revealed what many skiers and boarders already knew: they are often more relaxed and perform better when music they enjoy is used to calm, focus and energize them. 

At the 2018 Winter Olympic Games in South Korea, American halfpipe bronze medalist Arielle Gold announced she had been pumping “8 Mile”[65] by Eminem through headphones throughout her ride.   American ski racing superstar Mikaela Shiffrin[66] (an amateur musician herself) concurs about Eminem, but also adds solo piano music to her mix if she needs to turn the energy down a notch while visualizing a course prior to a race.

Five-time Olympian Kelly Clark credits the religious-tinged “The Stand”[67] by Hillsong United that accompanied her in the halfpipe, for relaxing, reassuring and energizing her enough to win a bronze medal in the 2014 Sochi games.  American ski hero Ted Ligety always prefers classic rock in his preparations.  And Swiss Racer Lara Gut, who took the Bronze in the downhill at Sochi, channeled electronic dance music to get herself psyched for her run.  “I know it’s the worst music ever,” she admitted, “but if it helps me to be fast, I’m gonna listen to it.” 

***

On the opposite end of the popularity spectrum, the use of skiing imagery in song lyrics has continued to fully recede since the 1960s.  That current reality appears traceable to the fact that despite multiple public relations campaigns stressing the contrary, the sport continues to be perceived as a pastime mainly of the privileged, and therefore commercially unviable as a musical subject other than as satire. 

Nevertheless, the practice of celebrating geographic ski locations has emerged as a convenient alternative for songwriters and recording artists seeking to evoke winter images and ski lodge intimacy for their fans, without the presumed elitist baggage.  Country music superstar Tim McGraw, for instance, has recorded two different songs titled “Telluride,”[68] one sung on his own and one as a duet with his wife, Faith Hill.[69]  There are numerous progressive rock and country tributes (both lyrical and instrumental) to winter in Jackson Hole,[70] to travels in the snows of the High Sierra,[71] Taos[72] and Aspen,[73] and to numerous other ski towns throughout the world (with Chamonix[74] generally leading the pack).

Another workaround to the “elitist” conundrum --the use of visual skiing imagery without any lyrical connection whatsoever-- has also proven effective.  In that regard, the most popular use of skiing to highlight the music video of a song having nothing to do with the sport appeared in 2017, when British singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran used ski scenes on the Hintertux Glacier in Tirol as the visual backdrop for his mega-hit, “Perfect.”[75]  The video, which co-starred popular actress Zoey Deutsch as the singer’s skiing love interest, drove the song to number one on the singles charts in eighteen different countries (including the US and the UK), and generated over 2.5 billion (yes, billiion) views on YouTube alone.  It also served as a tremendous advertising vehicle for the Zillertal region of Austria. 

The question of whether others will follow Sheeran in the use of ski mountain backdrops for future music videos remains, but the issue of where the heart of ski music currently resides has been settled for some time now.  In many odd and surprising ways, it has come full circle back to its Alpine roots.

***

As the 21st century approached, many ski resorts throughout the world began staging large, outdoor concerts in their base villages to keep customers amused after a day on the slopes. That was especially the case in connection with premier events such as the X-Games and the FIS world championships, which often featured musical headliners performing against the spectacular, natural backdrop of mountains, snow and stars. 

As compelling as such events might be, the perpetuation of the “bystander” music model for the new millennium still did not sit well with some ski community entrepreneurs, especially those in the Tirol and Arlberg regions of Austria.  By the mid-1990s, they were already seeking to augment live concert events by infusing traditional, participatory group energy back into their apres-ski social scenes. 

It was actually two slope-side bars located in the birthplace of modern alpine skiing, Hannes Schneider’s adopted hometown of St. Anton, whose proprietors most famously decided that the keys to their future success lay in modernizing apres-ski musical traditions rather than abandoning them.  Both the Moosewirt[76] and the Krazy Kangaruh[77] saloons helped lead the Y2K charge toward rebuilding party atmospheres for skiers, reinvigorating the sing-along camaraderie that once characterized the post-skiing experience.  On steroids.

For decades since then, Austrian ski area bars have specialized in successfully convincing massive crowds of snockered apres-skiers that shouting along with favorite anthems vaguely associated with the sport, while dancing half naked in ski boots on tabletops at twilight, is a terrific idea.  The songs, which range from plain, good fun (“Auffe Aufn Berg”),[78] to energetically obnoxious (“Johnny Däpp”),[79] to the downright awful (“Schifoan”),[80] do actually achieve those intended results most of the time, with the help of DJs who egg on singing revelers through round after round of adult refreshments.  Needless to say, the cash registers ring even louder than the customers sing.

According to Jimmy Petterson, perhaps the world’s most widely travelled ski journalist and a three-decade veteran of writing, playing and singing ski songs like "Global Warming Dirge" (written by his son Erik)[81] in venues across Europe, that new generation of Austrian ski bar owners succeeded in recreating the apres-ski music scene as a 21st century phenomenon.  “I’ve certainly benefitted from it,” he admits, “Every musician wants a place to play for an engaged crowd having a great time.  As long as it doesn't get too out of hand, and people are just happily engaged in singing along, it’s fantastic.  You preserve the joy and traditions of the past, but accommodate the changing tastes of the present.  I want to see the whole scene continue forever.” 

Even those like Petterson who have been most closely connected to this happy musical renaissance, however, remain mystified by one last, insanely whimsical success story. 

***

In 1994, former Austrian Olympic ski team star Hansi Hinterseer[82] (whose father Ernst took gold in the slalom at Squaw Valley in 1960), retired from racing to embark on --of all things-- a career as a serious singer and recording artist.  Despite the considerable skepticism of his colleagues, Hansi’s initial efforts were laudable, including his release of one of the best-ever German language versions of the classic Frank and Nancy Sinatra duet “Something Stupid.”[83]  

Emboldened, Hinterseer counter-intuitively turned to a neue-alt source for his modern, pop music hooks: yodeling. Grabbing onto an obscure Swiss recording by Vico Torriani[84] first released in 1963 at the height of the original twist dance craze and predictably called  “Ski Twist,” Hansi’s 2001,[85] 2008[86] 2013,[87] and 2017[88] video re-makes of the song (yes, he’s done more) feature him wedeln down the slopes of the Tirol principally in a white, two-piece ski suit with hair coiffed to a Stein Eriksen sheen, tossing off the occasional Royal Christy and ballet spin before letting loose with a song whose chorus consists solely of a yodel.

Stunned but amused viewers at first debated whether the initial videos were a serious, pop music effort, a hilarious self-parody, or a brilliant satire of the entire state of the sport.  Some characterized it as a spectacular misfire, while others saw it as a zany but bravely artistic statement.  It didn’t matter.  The sheer skill and campiness of the entire undertaking somehow crossed the line into ironic edginess, and the skiing public in Austria and elsewhere began unabashedly to drink, sing, and yodel along with him, from South Korea,[89] to Ukraine,[90] to Mongolia.[91]  So far, Hansi’s Ski Twist video series has garnered millions of internet views, and has kept him slyly grinning in the limelight for twenty years and counting. 

Few stories in the history of the music industry can match the looniness of the project, or his aplomb in actually pulling it off.  But he has. And true, the measurable success of Ski Twist has not signaled a return to the sing-along ski culture of the mid-20th century--not by a long shot.  But the music has in its own wacky way circled all the way back to its roots --even if satirically -- to the joyful yodel of the Alps and the unique musical camaraderie and excitement that the sport and its soundtrack have always generated.  

***

In the long and complex history of ski music, there have been many other unexpected twists and turns, and doubtlessly there will be many more.  The one constant, however, has been the fascinating element that may best explain what binds these two disciplines together:  both skiing and music are expressions of the soul.  The adoration for each emanates from the same place deep within the individual, the part that determines who and what we love, what drives and fulfills us, and who we really are or want to be. 

Music, as a result, has always been the artistic medium that best enhances the ability of skiers not only to understand their own devotion to their sport, but also to explain and share that passion with others.  It is no surprise that American lyrical maestro Yip Harburg (“Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” “Brother, Can You Spare A Dime”) perhaps explained this curious phenomenon best. “Words make you think a thought.  Music makes you feel a feeling.  A song makes you feel a thought.” 

Klaus Obermeyer seems to know exactly what Harburg was getting at.  “Skiing,” he continues to insist after a century on snow, is just “the realization of the ecstasy that music strives to inspire.”[92]

Part 2: The Golden Age of Ski Songs

By Charles J. Sanders

By the mid-1930s, like the singing von Trapp family, Hannes Schneider could feel the Tirolian snows shifting beneath him.  So could many of the instructors at his world-famous ski school in St. Anton, Austria.  One by one, Austrian ski heroes Otto Lang, Friedl Pfeifer, Benno Rybyzka, Sepp Froelich, Sigi Engl, Toni Matt and a host of others departed for the United States in search of greater economic opportunity, and to avoid being caught in the Nazi vise-grip slowly tightening around the fiercely anti-fascist Schneider.  They emigrated with his blessings to establish Arlberg Method ski schools throughout America, and he remained in Europe with their prayers that he avoid the reprisals being directed against those with the courage to speak out against Nazism. 

Safety for Schneider, however, was no longer possible.  Purportedly at the urging of his vindictive, former co-star Leni Riefenstahl (with whom he had feuded over politics and lifestyle), the world-famous ski-meister was placed under house arrest by Nazi leaders after the Austrian annexation.  Only with the aid of American financier and ski resort entrepreneur Harvey Dow Gibson was Schneider released in 1939, and along with his family, permitted to emigrate to the Mount Washington Valley of New Hampshire and Gibson’s Eastern Slope Inn.  With Schneider’s arrival came not only the highest level of Alpine ski instruction in the world, but also the pre-fascist cultural and singing traditions that had defined ski music in Europe since the 19th century.  Suddenly, all things Austrian (including Schneider himself) were now de rigueur in US skiing circles, both on and off the slopes. 

Gibson even honored Schneider with a small measure of musical revenge against his former captors.  When an important German diplomat came for a visit to the Eastern Slope Inn in the spring of 1939, the proprietor secretly told his hotel’s bandleader that he was to play at dinner that evening only music written by “non-Aryan” composers.  After a full night showcasing the works of George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Yip Harburg, and the expelled German composer and lyricist Kurt Weil (most famous for “Mack the Knife”), the Nazi statesman and his entourage stomped out of the dining room after realizing the insult.  According to Hannes’ son Herbert, the Schneider family was genuinely elated over Gibson’s gesture.

***

Prior to the arrival of Schneider’s ski school in exile, the catalog of American and Canadian ski tunes was limited nearly exclusively to humorous and sometimes risqué parodies of popular songs, lyrically transfigured by the members of local college ski teams and winter outing clubs to promote bonding among their members.  Here and there were smatterings of German language mountain lyrics and melodies carried home by those few who had skied in Europe, but even those compositions were frequently, tipsily translated into American-ese for local consumption.

The famed Carcajou Ski Club --co-founded in 1935 by veterans of the national champion Dartmouth College Ski Teams and local skiers of Hanover, New Hampshire-- was the prime example. (Current members of the team were forbidden to attend meetings.) The members no doubt did ski together, but the real point of the club, according to the lyrics of its favorite ski songs, was gathering on cold, New England evenings to sing parodies until the glüwein ran out.  Even Dartmouth’s most sacred, fraternal hymn, the “Hanover Winter Song,”[1] falls hard into the “drinks by the fire” category of both Ivy League and hardscrabble, Northeastern fellowship. 

Bill Briggs, the esteemed Dartmouth ski mountaineer, singer and musician (famous for his climb and first ski descent from the summit of the Grand Teton in Jackson Hole), preserved several of those Carcajou ditties in his popular 1950s ski songbook “Crud and Corruption.”  That included the Yankee favorite “No Falls at All,” an ode to skiing New Hampshire’s treacherous Tuckerman Ravine headwall.  The “F” in the song’s title, Briggs confided to the audience at one of his cherished International Skiing History Association performances, was always pronounced with the traditional Hanover inflection as a “B.” 

Briggs likewise included the club’s eponymous theme song in his set, noting its early, tongue-in-cheek endorsement of a healthy lifestyle in the great outdoors:

Here’s to the Ski Club Carcajou, the social skiing bums,                                                           
We can wiggle round those turns, take anything that comes.                                                    
With a timber, track and long ski heil, we’ll jump right to the gun,                                           
We drink…And then we have another.
Hurrah Hurrah We’re schussing down the trails.                                                                 
Hurrah Hurrah We’re landing on our tails.
Here’s to the Ski Club Carcajou, we’re rough and tough as nails,                                                    
We drink…and then we have another.

The historic Red Birds Ski Club, quartered in the Laurentian Mountains of Quebec close to McGill University, had its own, Canadian lager-soaked versions of similar ski tunes (often bilingually performed in French).  The club’s official “Red Birds Ski Club Song,” for example, is ample proof of its members’ noble intentions to uphold tradition both on and off the hill:     

We all owe a debt to a Norseman of old,                                                                                       
Who came from a land that was snowy and cold,                                                                       
He fashioned a couple of planks to his feet,                                                                                   
A scheme that I think you’ll admit was quite neat                                                                    
The lads of the village were at quite a loss,                                                                                       
For during the winter the feminine Norse,                                                                                       
Were at the disposal of Herman the skier,                                                                                  
And that is the reason the Red Birds are he-ere.

Chorus                                                                                                                                           
o on with our skis and get out in the snow,                                                                                     
We don’t give a damn if it’s forty below,                                                                                           
For what can life offer that starts to compare,                                                                               
With the joys of the snow and the bite of the air?

If you think we other accomplishments lack,                                                                               
You should just spend a night at our St. Sauver shack                                                                                                                                               
You can count on an evening of song and good cheer,                                                                  
When we start to confine our attentions to beer….                                                                                                                                                  
So here’s to [your] health with a rousing “ski heil!”                                                                              
Let us drink “bottoms up” in the best Red Bird style.

Into this boozy musical mix had come Schneider’s Austrian ski instructors, seeking to assist Gibson in turning the Mount Washington Valley into the eastern version of America’s first destination ski resort, Sun Valley.  Gibson, himself a semi-professional musician as well as a gifted promoter, seized upon musical performance as yet another way to import Alpine European ambiance to New Hampshire as the counterpoint to its frat-based, musical ski culture.  He soon had the instructors yodeling and singing to guests on a regular basis at near-by Mount Cranmore, and drinking with them deep into the evenings.

When that wasn’t enough, Gibson snatched Switzerland’s award-winning mountain music star Charlie Zumstein and his yodel group from the 1939 New York World’s Fair to serve as the Eastern Slope Inn’s house band.  Zumstein actually made several recordings for the Decca record label in the early 1940s featuring corny yet historically interesting, original ski songs, collected in the LP “Ski Time Jingles.”[2]  He was also captured on film performing a set with his band and Gibson himself in the 1940 Eastern Slope Inn promotional movie short “Ski Larks.”

Not to be outdone by their European counterparts, local New Englanders seized upon every chance to lampoon the occasional haughtiness on the slopes and around the fire of their new Austrian and Swiss friends.  One of the cleverest of these musical jabs was the faux “Arlberg Ski School Song,” whose lyrics sought to skewer the sharply dressed, equally hard-drinking progenitors of the Hannes Schneider ski method:

Oh, we’re from the Arlberg Ski School,
An honorable clan are we,
We’ll iron out your faults for a dollar,
For a dollar we’ll teach you to ski
Pressed pants for fifty cents extra,
We throw in the ski school pin free….

And when you hear the cry “slalom,”
Rally round if you’re able,
And if you find the beer’s all gone,
You’ll find us under the table.

***

The musical culture developing out west in Sun Valley, Idaho took off in an entirely different direction.  With the US in the midst of a 1930s big band craze that thoroughly dominated the national radio airwaves, railroad magnate and resort owner W. Averell Harriman opted to utilize America’s own, native genre of jazz as his mountain’s musical signature.  Big band leader Eddy Duchin, an immensely popular swing pianist, was hired to headline at the Sun Valley Lodge in what became known as the “Duchin Room” (named for his wife Marjorie, who designed many of the resort’s fashion accents).  He and his band invariably received rave reviews from the torrent of glamourous guests flooding in from Hollywood.  Even hard-to-please local celebrity Ernest Hemingway swore by the unique ambiance that the band brought to Dollar Mountain, although he privately admitted that his love for the Duchin Room was rooted primarily in his conviction that “drinking makes other people so much more interesting.”

It was, in fact, a Hollywood motion picture focused entirely on music, skiing, and the resort itself that indelibly stamped Sun Valley on the global ski map.  The film Sun Valley Serenade (1941)[3] featured one of the world’s most popular bands led by trombonist Glenn Miller, and was tremendously successful not only in branding the Lodge as one of the world’s premier celebrity and ski destinations, but also in further linking both the resort and the sport of skiing to the free spirit of swing. 

Aside from the spectacular mountain backdrops that accompanied the on-screen performance of the song “It Happened in Sun Valley”[4] --and the popularity of the instrumental sensation

“Sun Valley Jump”[5] subsequently chosen as the Glenn Miller Army Air Force Band theme-- the film also introduced the hit “Chattanooga Choo-Choo.”[6]  That 78 rpm recording stayed at the top of the US music charts for fourteen consecutive weeks, and became the first record since the beginning of the Great Depression to sell over a million copies.  It also helped Sun Valley continue to boom, even as ominous signs of American involvement in yet another global conflict loomed on the horizon.

Like Harvey Gibson, Harriman not only grasped the enormous value of musical branding, he also recognized the wisdom of cultural diversification.  He was therefore quick to join Gibson in incorporating subtle, European musical touches into his American-centric resort beyond its swing-time beginnings.  Yodeling accordionists were no strangers to the sun decks and ice rinks of Sun Valley, any more than were the indigenous, local Native American dancers and chanters he hired to entertain.  The guests wanted mountain ambiance and music in abundance, and Harriman gave it to them in every form in which it was available.

Actual Austrians were never in short supply at the Sun Valley Resort, either.  To the contrary, there were as many Hannes Schneider proteges teaching at Sun Valley as in New England, led primarily by champion ski racer Friedl Pfeifer and ski-stylist turned film-maker Otto Lang.  

Lang was already famous for having produced the block-buster ski instruction documentary Snow Flight[7] (edited into the movie short Ski Flight during its extended run at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall in 1938).  The film, a cinematic homage to the work of Arnold Fanck, was shot in the spectacular Cascade Range of the Pacific Northwest.  Its symphonic soundtrack featured as its main theme the equally majestic “Die Moldau”[8] by Bohemian composer Bedrich Smetana, continuing the central European tradition of linking classical music to images of big mountain skiing. 

That same musical trend carried over to other films linked in various ways to Sun Valley during its inaugural era, including the bravely anti-Nazi classic The Mortal Storm (shot there in 1940 and starring future war hero Jimmy Stewart).  It featured both a Tirolian folk and classical music score to heighten the tension of its traumatic final ski chase scene,[9] and an unsettling sing-along in a crowded mountain bar featuring the Nazi anthem Der Fahne Hoch.[10]  These films were all regularly screened at the resort, adding to the glitz provided by the regular visits of stars and celebrities ranging from Gary Cooper and Clark Gable to Claudette Colbert and Sonja Hennie.  All that came to an abrupt end, however, with the arrival of the Second World War.

***

It was already autumn of 1941 when former Dartmouth Ski Team Captain and Glee Club member Charles McLane showed up at Fort Lewis near Mount Rainier straight from Sun Valley.  He was looking for the US 87th Mountain Regiment, the group that had only recently been designated as America’s first, specialized mountain warfare unit and for which he had volunteered.  He was met by the legendary retort from the grizzled gate sentry after scouring the roster: “Son, according to my list, you ARE the 87th Mountain Regiment.” 

With attacks by the Nazi and Japanese militaries already underway throughout Europe and East Asia, however, it wasn’t long before McLane’s one-man unit was joined by hundreds of other US ski troop volunteers now billeted at Mount Rainier National Park’s Paradise Inn.  That group, often jokingly referred to as the greatest ski club ever assembled in the largest fraternity house ever built, included many of the world’s best Alpine and Nordic skiers.  It also, incidentally, featured some of its finest (or at least most enthusiastic) creators and singers of ski songs that had ever gathered in one place. 

Among the illustrious new arrivals from colleges and ski clubs around the nation were three individuals who would soon carve their names alongside McLane’s into the ski music history books: Charlie Bradley of the skiing Bradley family from Madison, Wisconsin; Sun Valley ski racer Glen Stanley; and another Sun Valley instructor and Otto Lang protégé from the University of Washington, Ralph Bromaghin.  Led by Bromaghin’s skilled guitar and vocal arrangements, the four together formed the legendary Latrine Quartet and began singing on local radio stations, creating parodies that would eventually evolve into some of the most humorous and popular American ski songs of the era.

To dissuade the Army from considering the use of snowshoes as a dreaded alternative to skiing, Bromaghin (himself of Norwegian descent) adapted the stock characters “Oola and Sven” as foils to star in his songs, representative of the large number of newly arrived volunteers of Scandinavian heritage. The parody “Sven”[11] (sung to the tune of "A Bold Bad Man") included a race between Oola on skis and Sven on the other, hated contraptions:

Two seconds later Oola finished in a mighty schuss,
Passing on the way poor Sven a-lying on his puss.
The moral of this story is that snowshoes have no use,
And poor old Sven no longer gives his war whoop.

Chorus

Oh, give me skis and some poles and klister
And let me ski way up on Alta Vista
You can take your snowshoes and burn them, sister
And everywhere I go you'll hear my war whoop.

The song played an important part in convincing the Army to stick with skiing as mountain military transport for the sake of the unit’s morale and safety. 

“Oola, Ski Yumper From Norvay”[12] (the protagonist of which many believed was a composite caricature of the unit’s beloved world ski jumping champion Torger Tokle), was a related Bromaghin parody with music by Sverre Elmso.  In it, Oola this time proclaimed his love for the US ski troops (soon to be re-named the US 10th Mountain Division) despite its unfathomable preference for Alpine over Nordic skiing.  The chorus was a mountaineer favorite:

I’m Oola, they all call me Oola,                                                                                                                 
Don’t know where dey get hold of my name,                                                                                            
I never told any ‘dem fellas,                                                                                                                          
But dey call me Oola, yust the same

Yet another classic Bromaghin and McLane lyric, “A Happy Lad” (sung to the “Yodeling Song”[13] from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs), summed up the views of Army life held by ski troopers with perhaps a bit too much honesty for some military higher-ups, especially following the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941 by the Japanese that commenced formal US involvement in the Second World War:

A happy lad and just eighteen, I got into the Army
By official poop to the Mountain Troops, so the enemy couldn't harm me.
Ho hum, I'm not so dumb, the Mountain Troops for me.
Men are made in defilade, but I would rather ski. (Yodel)….

 Every morning, half past eight, we take our calisthenics.
The ladies sigh as we pass by, we are so photogenic.
Ho hum, I'm not so dumb, the Mountain Troops for me.
Other guys may fight this war, but I would rather ski. (Yodel)

By far the most enduring tune written for the 10th Mountain Division is its ubiquitous anthem, “90 Pounds of Rucksack”[14] (sung to the tune of “Bell Bottom Trousers”).  Oddly, however, it is the one 10th Mountain Division song whose provenance is most difficult to trace.  McLane was certain that he and Bromaghin had a strong hand in creating the parody lyrics.  Other sources, including “The Skier’s Songbook” (a revered collection compiled by David Kemp and published in 1950), credit the song as “Never Trust A Skier An Inch Above the Knee” to 10th Mountaineers Billy Neidner, Dick Johnson and Don Hawkins.  Regardless of its various sources and titles, no history of American ski music is complete without devout reference to it, if for no other reason than its unique, life-long popularity among those who came home from war, founded the North American ski industry, and invented a good deal of the post-war skiing culture that it sparked:

Ninety Pounds of Rucksack

I was a barmaid in a mountain inn
There I learned the wages, of miseries of sin.
Along came a skier fresh from off the slopes,
He's the one that ruined me and shattered all my hopes.

 CHORUS

Singin' ninety pounds of rucksack, a pound of grub or two,
He'll schuss the mountains like his daddy used to do.

He asked me for a candle to light his way to bed,
He asked me for a 'kerchief to cover up his head.
I like a foolish maid thinking it no harm,
Jumped into the skier’s bed to keep the skier warm.

 CHORUS

 Early in the morning before the break of day,
He handed me a five note and with it he did say;
Take this my darling for the damage I have done.
You may have a daughter, or you may have a son.
Now if you have a daughter, bounce her on your knee.
And if you have a son, send the bastard out to ski.

 CHORUS

The moral of the story, as you can plainly see,
Is never trust a skier an inch above your knee.
For I trusted one and now look at me,
I've got a bastard in the Mountain Infantry.

According to Bromaghin’s best friend in the ski troops, Captain Ralph Lafferty, it was these musical parodies that helped turn the 10th Mountain into one of the most well-trained and tight-knit outfits in US Army history.  “Those songs helped get us through three years of extremely tough, high-altitude winter training at Rainier and Camp Hale in Colorado,” he recalled, “and then kept our spirits up through months of tough mountain combat in which we lost a lot of good buddies.  That’s why we’ve sung them, and will keep singing them, for the rest of our lives.” 

It’s worth noting that the 90 Pounds of Rucksack tradition continues within the 10th Mountain Division, even as the number of living, original members dwindles to a precious few.  A new, albeit bowdlerized version of the song was recorded by the 10th Mountain Division Light Band[15] to honor their forbearers in 2021, the year after two new versions faithful to the original were recorded by Mark Anderson and WWII veteran Dick Over for an Icelantic Ski Company promotional film[16] honoring the Division’s history.  

Sadly, the war took the life of Major Glenn Miller of the US Army Air Corps, whose plane was shot down off the English coast just before Christmas in 1944. It also took the lives of Sergeant Torger Tokle, and of Captain Ralph Bromaghin, both of whom were killed in action as the 10th Mountain Division helped liberate the Apennine Mountains up to Lake Garda at the foot of the Italian Alps at the end of the War.  Nearly a thousand other young, American ski troopers suffered that same, heart-breaking fate in the brutal process of vanquishing genocidal fascism. 

In some small way, the continuing knowledge and performance of these songs among skiers has served to keep the sacrifices and contributions of their original creators and singers alive these many years.  Of no less importance, the fact that these songs survive today is indisputable proof they fulfilled their original intent: making us smile just a little bit at the sharp-witted humor that marked American ski music before, during, and after those exhilarating, terrible and tragic days of sport and war.   

***

When the surviving members of the US ski troops returned home in 1945 to establish the modern American ski industry, they arrived with both their aspirations and their sing-along repertoires to find a nation whose entertainment industry had already re-embraced the romance of the ski lodge lifestyle.   It now figured prominently not only in films (such as the light-hearted Barbara Stanwick feature My Reputation[17]), but also in the lyrics of one of the most popular songs of the era. 

In 1944, Alaskan native Karl Suessdorf and his writing partner John Blackburn had utilized nostalgic, Currier and Ives imagery to help capture the winter spirit of New England in their sophisticated masterpiece, “Moonlight in Vermont.”  The poetic second verse, which remains perhaps the most prominent reference to skiing (however brief) in any pop music composition in the great American songbook, was memorably released first by Margaret Whiting and then as a duet by Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald:[18]

Frozen winter streams,
Withered leaves of sycamore,
Moonlight in Vermont,

Icy finger waves,
Ski trails down a mountain side,
Snow light in Vermont.

As a matter of lasting popularity, however, the most beloved version was recorded in 1956 by the great American ballad singer Jo Stafford[19] on her classic album, “Ski Trails,”[20] dedicated entirely to songs of winter romance.  Also included in that landmark collection was Stafford’s cover of Ray Noble’s 1930s hit “By the Fireside,”[21] and her stellar version of the Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne 1946 smash “Let it Snow.”[22]  While the latter does not overtly mention skiing, its triple tag line has remained a rallying cry for skiers around the world for eight decades or more. 

The re-discovered romance of the ski lodge was similarly celebrated in the 1954 hit film White Christmas,[23] a loose remake of the earlier Irving Berlin musical Holiday Inn, about a New England resort saved from bankruptcy by a Christmas Eve snowfall.  Aside from the title song by Berlin being one of the most popular musical compositions in history, a four-part round by stars Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Marjorie Reynolds and Virginia Dale entitled “Snow”[24] emphatically proclaimed skiing to be one of the great joys of winter life. 

The year 1954 also marked the release of Canadian “cowboy music” legend Wilf Carter’s “My Mountain High Yodel Song,”[25] illustrating that the country and western yodeling genre pioneered by the father of American country music, Jimmie Rodgers, was still very much alive.  The song, telling the story of a cowboy’s love for a yodeling, skiing Swiss mountain girl, represented Carter’s nod back to Rodgers’ groundbreaking hit single, “Blue Yodel #9”[26] (recorded with jazz genius Louis Armstrong in 1930).  It also proved that the romance of skiing as a theme was so pervasive in post-War North America that it could serve as a popular lyrical topic, even in the country music market.

***

While not in any way minimizing America’s deadly serious struggles over civil rights, the Korean War, and McCarthyism, when it came to skiing as a cultural reference point, a significant segment of the US public was clearly enjoying idyllic depictions of snowy days of winter sport followed by cold nights of fireside cheer in the post-War era.  Those Rockwellian moments in songs and films remained standard entertainment fare in America throughout the late 1940s and across the decade that followed.

In stark contrast, the situation in devastated Europe remained fraught with poverty and political turmoil.  Though superstar Bavarian yodeler Franzl Lang succeeded in recording some upbeat, post-War tributes to regional mountain beauty --including his popular recording of Karl Ganzer's love letter to the Tirolean village of Kufstein (“Kufsteiner Lied”[27]) and a new cover of “Schi Heil”[28]-- the two most popular mountain songs to emerge from the post-War period in Austria and Germany more accurately symbolized the complexities of the times. 

The first was a world-wide hit recasting Bavarians and Tiroleans (now ostensibly living under western Allied occupation in West Germany and Austria) as the carefree vagabonds of the Alps.  Based upon a 19th century German lyric composed by Florenz Friedrich Sigismund, the song “Der Frohliche Wanderer”[29] (“The Happy Wanderer”) was reworked from a military tune popular with Nazi mountain troops into a faux Bavarian folk song in the early 1950s by songwriter Friedrich-Wilhelm Möller.

Möller’s sister happened to be the conductor of a West German youth singing group known as the Obernkirchen Children’s Choir, comprised mainly of war orphans.  In 1953, the group was recorded by the BBC singing the refashioned song, which upon broadcast back in England became an instant, global sensation.  At a time when Cold War tensions between the Soviet Union and the US over nuclear arms and control of divided Berlin were raging, the record stayed at the top of the British pop charts for nearly six months, and transformed the choir (constantly replenished with younger members) into a popular international attraction. 

If a propagandist had wanted to rehabilitate the image of West Germans --particularly Bavarians-- in the post-War world, it would be difficult to imagine a scenario more compelling than the playing of “Happy Wanderer” at practically every international youth, skiing and mountaineering gathering in the western world.  And that is exactly what transpired, whether by happenstance or design:

I love to go a-wandering, 
Along the mountain track, 
And as I go, I love to sing, 
My knapsack on my back. 

Chorus:
Val-deri, Val-dera, Val-deri,
Val-dera-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha 
Val-deri,Val-dera. 
My knapsack on my back.[30]

The second post-War, German-language mountain hit was an oddly traditional march entitled “Dem Treue die Land Tirol (Loyalty to Tirol).”[31]  Penned by composers Florian and Sepp Pedarnig in the mid-1950s, and like “Happy Wanderer” sounding very much like a traditional Alpine song of much earlier vintage, it represented an unmistakably aggressive celebration of renewed Tirolian pride.   

Having expected as a result of the Third Reich’s World War II alliance with fascist Italy to achieve the reunification of the Tirolian Alps they had been seeking since 1918, Austrians had instead once again witnessed the bloody liberation of the region’s southern tier by the Western Allies.  American and international army units (including the US 10th Mountain Division), fighting alongside Italian partisans and Alpini who had overthrown Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, reclaimed and occupied the Sud Tirol and restored it to democratic, Italian control as the Alto Adige in the spring of 1945.   

The lyrics of “Dem Treue die Land Tirol” controversially revived laments over Austria’s loss of the region in World War I.  That disappointment was presented in a manner that some also viewed as both incompatible with de-Nazification efforts, and potentially even threatening to the post-War political balance when read in the context of the song’s pledge of Austrian and Bavarian loyalty to the whole of a reunified Tirol:

A hard fight broke you in two,
South Tirol was torn from you.
The Dolomites greet us from afar,
in red glow for our last farewell.
You are the country that I am loyal to,
because you are so beautiful, my Tirolean land!

The composition’s adoption as the “Secret National Anthem”[32] of Tirol eventually moved its creators to suggest that it not be performed on certain celebratory occasions because of the passions it stirs.  In 2017, however, the song was nevertheless judged still to be among the three most popular at the Munich Octoberfest, just as it has been over the past several decades, and so it is expected to remain for the foreseeable future.

***

In post-War Japan, meanwhile, pressure to vanquish the militaristic extremism that had led to the country’s near complete destruction placed an even greater emphasis on music as a calming influence under American occupation.  New Japanese musical works of the 1950s tended, as a result, toward flowing melodies and lyrics of hope for peace in the mountains, including the updated re-emergence of the traditional folk favorite “Aoi Sanmyaku”[33] (Song of the Blue-Green Mountains).  

Overall, as the horrendous suffering that the two world wars had inflicted slowly began to recede into history, the world was clearly eager to move on.  Even though tensions over international political ideologies continued to simmer, humankind across the globe seemed finally poised to recreate outdoors again, and perhaps to relax a bit by the fireside with guitars after a day in the mountains.  As with so many other aspects of the new age, however, this shift included a general recognition that in the realms of both skiing and music, the spotlight had for the time being shifted definitively to North America.

***

It was the commencement of a US folk music boom in the late 1950s --which coincided with the explosion in popularity of North American skiing-- that created the opportunity for the first real star of American ski music to emerge.  His name was Samuel Robert “Bob” Gibson, a Pete Seeger acolyte from Brooklyn, NY, who possessed genuine street cred as a leader of the new American folk movement. 

Gibson had migrated to Chicago in the mid-1950s, where he met and impressed club owner and music manager Albert Grossman (later the molder of the careers of Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, The Band, Peter Paul & Mary, and Gordon Lightfoot, among others).  Grossman launched Gibson’s professional singing career, which included a stint in Aspen where the singer fell madly in love with skiing.  Leading a double life by commuting between Ajax Mountain and the folk circuit, Gibson managed to become a creditable Colorado downhiller, discover and introduce Joan Baez to the world at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival, and become instrumental in getting Judy Collins to sign with him to Jac Holzman’s up-and-coming Elektra Records. 

He also found time in 1959 to co-write and record the album “Ski Songs,”[34] containing both original and classic, skiing-based compositions mainly in the 1930s New England frat-style.  The selections were so humorously impressive that (along with his socially conscious “straight” folk performances), they influenced an entire generation of future singer-songwriters.  His fans and disciples stretched from The Byrds and Paul Simon (who covered his non-skiing songs) to Collins, Harry Chapin, John Denver and James Taylor (who accepted his 2021 Grammy Award for the album “American Standards” on a chairlift[35]).  According to Peter Yarrow of Peter Paul & Mary, the New York folk icon who has spent most of his post-folk era life skiing in Telluride, Colorado, “when you listened to us, you were hearing Bob Gibson.”

The album cover of Ski Songs featured Gibson, his skis leaning against a sizable fireplace, seated in an armchair holding a banjo and sporting an enormous leg cast.  A blond woman in ski clothing lies nearby, choosing to cuddle a St. Bernard rather than offer so much as a glance in his direction. The liner notes reflect that same, tongue-in-cheek spirit:

There may be, somewhere on this improbable planet, sports enthusiasts who are more fanatical than skiers. Fishermen, croquet players and golfers have been known to develop some nasty, though clinically interesting, obsessions.  But few addicts to other sporting vices are deliberately willing to risk life, limb, body and soul to satisfy their caprices.  The skier, however, … is…. All for the thrill of barreling downhill at 70 miles an hour, balanced precariously on a pair of wooden slats….  And so to YOU --intrepid, impetuous, damn-fool skier-- this album is dedicated.  The songs herein are certain to pluck the heartstrings of any true devotee. Many of them are akin to the stories oft told by hearth-light in the lodges from Squaw Valley to Aspen to Stowe. That is to say, they are outright and outrageous lies. Set to music.

The lead off song, “Celebrated Skier,”[36] continued the joke with pointed reference to the penchant of certain skiers to exhibit more courage in spinning tales of athletic daring while sitting in the bar than they demonstrate on the hill.  Other comedic cuts poking fun at everything from ski clothing, patrollers, instructors, and the various physical ineptitudes of skiers themselves, included the traditional “Super Skier’s Last Race (Gory, Gory It’s A Helluva Way to Die),”[37] “Talking Skier (Blues),”[38] “Ski Patrol,”[39] and the cult-inspiring “Super Skier,”[40] which features the solemn opening verse:

They called him “Super Skier,” as he sat around the sun deck,
And he swore that he’d never spill,
When they finally took him down, they had to use three toboggins,
To carry all the pieces down the hill.

Gibson really shone brightest, however, when he turned to serious reflection about the sport he loved.  His song “In This White World”[41] profoundly influenced --and presaged by well over a decade-- John Denver’s musical contemplations on skiing and ecological conservation.  It includes the lyrics (with co-writer credits extended to Denver Post journalists Shirley Sealy, Gail Pitts and Blanche Hardin): 

In this white world, that reaches the sky,
I found a future for me.
Just standing there, on a high mountainside,
I’m ruler of all I can see.

The snow is my lover, the sun is her kiss,
The wind sings a love song to me.
With the wind and the sun, and a vast, snowy run,
Just like an eagle, I’m free.

Similarly, the album’s closing song, “Skol to the Skier,”[42] foreshadowed Denver’s remindful hit “Calypso”[43] by some fifteen years. 

Unfortunately, Gibson struggled with substance abuse issues that severely impacted the remainder of his career, and though he later formed a lasting, collaborative writing partnership with renown poet Shel Silverstein, he never achieved the promise that his talents might otherwise have dictated.  For the entirety of skiing’s explosive growth period in the United States and Canada during the 1960s, however, Bob Gibson’s music rang from ski trains and lodges to apres-ski bars and ski club parties with a regularity that would not be matched until the appearance of John Denver himself.

***

Elektra Records’ willingness to take a chance on Gibson’s ski song project resulted in opportunities for several, similarly oriented folk singers at competing labels.  Alta, Utah humorist and folk singer Ray Conrad (then working as a chef in the base village’s Gold Miner’s Daughter) got his big break from the Prestige jazz imprint, which released his album “The Cotton-Pickin’ Lift Tower”[44] in 1962.  He was joined on the project by respected folk-circuit regular Rosalie Sorrells.  The humor was genuine, if derivative, and included a classic new take on the old drinking standard “Two Boards Upon Cold Powder Snow/ Der Feinste Sport,” re-titled “Two Cubes and a Shot of V.O.”[45]

Two cubes and a slug of V.O., yo ho
Is better than cold powder snow
Two cubes and a slug of V.O., yo ho
What else does a man need to know?
…So let’s have a couple more snorts,
Cause drinking’s the safest of sports

Other solid efforts included an outdated re-casting of “Ninety Pounds of Rucksack/Bell Bottom Trousers” into a ski instructor’s appreciation of female skiers in stretch pants entitled “Round Bottomed Trousers,”[46] and the title track, “The Cotton-Pickin’ Lift Tower,”[47] which reprised the time-honored theme of skiing being hard and sustaining catastrophic injury being easy.  For instance, Conrad sang, poor results are produced by hitting a lift tower at the speed of a “runaway guided missile:”

With broken bones, and injuries internal,
I made page one of the medical journal
My doctor said how I survived was a mystery

A little book that dealt with my affliction
Got the Pulitzer Prize for fantastic fiction
But it was just the simple facts of my case-history

New York City folk music star Oscar Brand was next in 1963, with Electra’s release of Snow Job For Skiers: Ribald Songs for the Stretch Pants Set, which featured the philosophically rhetorical “Why the Hell Do We Ski?”[48] and included a version of Ray Conrad’s serious, contemplative ballad “Skier’s Daydream.”[49]  Brand, who had been blacklisted for his activism in the 1950s civil rights movement, took time out to appear on the album cover leaping off an imaginary ski jump with his ski pants around his ankles, before heading off to participate in the Selma, Alabama freedom marches in 1965.

Meanwhile, the aforementioned Dartmouth and Wyoming skiing legend Bill Briggs was busy organizing historic ski sing-alongs at Snow King Mountain and the Stagecoach Bar[50] in Jackson Hole featuring classics like “Bend In His Knees.”[51] At Sugarloaf in Maine, Jud Strunk[52] was doing the same with songs such as the wistful “Farethewell,”[53] and John Winn was singing his mountain songs from the Rockies to New England, including his popular yodeling parody “We Sing Yahoo When We Ski.”[54]   All three were key members of a folk circuit that now extended to ski area bars and lodge lounges throughout the US and Canada.  So were the University of Colorado-based band The Hustlers, who chipped in with the classic travelogue LP “In Ski Country”[55] in 1965.

By the mid-1960s, the popularity of both folk music and traditional ski tunes had reached its North American zenith.  The time was right for a new ski songbook to catalog for posterity all of this sudden fireside, musical creativity.  Into that breach stepped Mike Cohen, an environmental activist who also happened to be an avid skier, songwriter, and co-founder of the highly respected Greenwich Village, NY folk trio known as “The Shanty Boys.”

Cohen was at the time also running the Trailside Ski Camp at Killington Ski Resort, where he had become a beloved figure among New York and New England city kids experiencing ski life in Vermont for the first time.  According to US Ski and Snowboard Hall of Famer Bernie Weichsel, ski music was an integral part of the Trailside experience.  “Mike would wake all of us up from the bunks by singing folk songs in the morning, and everyone would join the hootenanny sing-alongs until late at night.  He wanted skiing to be a communal experience, with everyone participating together on the slopes during the day, and socially bonding through music in the evenings.  If there was one ski program in the world that tried to blend those experiences, it was Trailside.”

Cohen’s 1967 book, To Hell With Skiing: A Tragic-Comic Collection of Some 70-Odd Ski Songs of the USA, is now a treasured collector’s item not only for the lyrics and sheet music he preserved, but also for its vivid narrative of ski life in the golden age of American skiing and the music and lyrics that accompanied it.  Strikingly, however, the philosophical introduction to this bible of ski music at once both lovingly celebrated the genre, and conversely mourned its anticipated passing.   With the fading of public singing into a relic of a more innocent time, Cohen seemed to fear he was more writing an elegy for a doomed cultural era than a paean to the genre’s future:

With skiing now a major form of recreation in America, newcomers to the sport, vastly outnumbering the old, have flocked…to an active, fashionable and well-organized ski industry….  Before the sport was revolutionized into…a chic form of diversion, singing was a natural counterpoint….  Somehow, however, neo-skiers have let the tradition of song fall by the wayside, preferring, it would appear, to be a spectator to their entertainment, rather than part of it.  It might be that they feel ski songs are obscure…known only to an “in” group.  For whatever reason, they don’t seem to sing…. [But there still] exists a solid core of rugged individuals to whom skiing is a very meaningful way of life….  These are their songs.  They were written by them for the fun of communicating and sharing experience.  They are sung to relive all the fun of skiing they contain.  The songs thrive on the joviality of an after-ski evening by the hearth and are close to the heart of all ski enthusiasts…. 

Cohen ended his remarks by asserting with the deepest conviction that “this book is published with the hopes of encouraging a ski-sing revival.”  Whether his last-ditch effort succeeded in that mission or not, To Hell With Skiiing preserved many of the most pointedly humorous ski songs of the golden age of North American skiing, including the quintessentially sardonic, “Have You Skied Tuckerman’s?”  That song skewered poseurs of every variety by recreating barroom conversations about New England’s most notorious, off-piste ski challenge (accessed only by hours of icy climbing on Mount Washington), and included the crushing Len Steiner lyrics:

Oh, have you skied on Tuckerman’s, and how did you get there?
Did you ride the poma lift or go up in the chair?
So did I, So did I, I rode up in the chair!

And were you in the novice class, and weren’t you a wow?
Flying down the headwall trail, learning to snowplow?
So you were, so you were, I can see it now!

***

Even as Mike Cohen (who would later be recognized as one of America’s most revered environmental scientists) was grieving over the decline in group singing as part of the ski experience, yodeling was making an unlikely comeback of sorts in both Southern California and Southern Vermont.   That odd development first emerged at Anaheim, California, of all places, in the early 1960s. 

It was there that skiing enthusiast Walt Disney had constructed his famous Disneyland amusement park, and lovingly incorporated as one of its centerpieces the “Matterhorn Bobsled” ride, built inside of a fifteen-story scale replica of the emblematic Swiss peak.   Disney, in fact, had such a strong affinity for the Alps and skiing that he had been an early investor in Sugar Bowl ski area at Lake Tahoe during the 1930s, and boosted the sport in the 1940s through his cartoon shorts, including one famously starring Goofy[56] as a hapless Alpine skier.  Now, decades later, he was hoping to build a new, Swiss-themed ski resort in the Sierras a few hours east of Disneyland near what is now Sequoia National Park, to augment his expanding entertainment empire.   

While pursuing that eventually unsuccessful venture, Disney decided to use his faux granite mountain in Anaheim to try out various Alpine-themed entertainment gimmicks he anticipated might come in handy at the Sequoia site.  That included hiring live, “on-mountain” yodelers, and blaring out an inescapable soundtrack of Swiss music[57] over the Matterhorn section of the park.  In that manner were millions of Disneyland devotees first hypnotized by the music of the Alps.  After more than fifty years, when recalling what they remember most about visiting Disneyland as children, many adults still cite the incessant background music of Alpine Switzerland as among their most evocative memories, absorbed subliminally while awaiting their turn in the Matterhorn queue. 

On the other side of the country, a parallel trend emerged near Manchester, Vermont.  There, Stratton Mountain owner and Tirol aficionado Frank Snyder decided in the early 1960s that with The Sound of Music recently having set box office records on Broadway (and with the real von Trapp family still singing at their lodge in nearby Stowe), the time was right to fulfill his dream of building a retro ski resort focused on Austrian mountain and musical culture. 

Snyder hired émigré Austrian ski instructor Emo Henrich to put his plan into action, and within months there were yodeling tunes blasting from the resort’s slope-side loudspeakers, and sing-along musicians in lederhosen and dirndls entertaining in the crowded bars and restaurants.  In the midst of the British Invasion led by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, “imitation Tirolean” wasn’t a cultural or musical direction that appealed to everyone, but the contrast managed to intrigue enough skiers to send thousands streaming there by mid-decade.

With its Austrian-themed marketing strategy established, Stratton next hired Austrian bandleader and trick skier Stefan Schernthaner and accordionist Otto Egger to teach at the ski school, at the same time forming the nucleus of a resort house band that became famously known as “The Stratton Mountain Boys.”[58]  More than a half century later, and with several self-produced albums featuring traditional Tirolean and Swiss mountain songs to their credit, the band (with revolving membership) was still performing at Northeastern ski resorts in the 2020s. 

***

Despite these occasional, nostalgic revivals, it remains clear that Michael Cohen’s doubts about the future of ski music had been prescient.   The Stratton strategy would turn out to be a relatively short-lived anomaly, as the novelty of imported Tirolean kitsch wore thin and eventually faded away within a few years.

In the end, there was no real movement leading back to apres-ski musical sing-alongs elsewhere in the country, and the ski song tradition continued its long slide toward a more jaded, spectator-oriented entertainment model.   Rather than following Stratton’s lead, nearly all other ski resorts (including Vail, whose new, mid-1960s village was the realization of 10th Mountaineer Pete Seibert’s vision of an Austrian ski station) opted instead for an updated version of the old Sun Valley approach: a professional, apres-ski musical atmosphere principally to be listened to, imbibed by, and looked at, but generally not to be touched.

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Author Charlie Sanders is a director of ISHA and the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame and serves on the advisory board of Protect Our Winters. He is author of the award-winning book Boys of Winter: Life and Death in the U.S. Ski Troops During the Second World War, and of “Skiing the Seven Continents” (Skiing History supplement, March 2020).

SKI ART: William Russell Flint (1880-1960)

The careful, almost technical, depiction of Norwegians skijoring behind motorcycles in 1906 shows a passion for detail learned when William Russell Flint was a medical illustrator in London from 1900 to 1902. Born in Scotland, Flint had come south from Edinburgh’s Daniel Stewart College and the Edinburgh Institute to study at Heatherley’s Art School and The British Museum.

Flint’s national recognition began when he became an artist for the Illustrated London News, the well-to-do’s glossy weekly that covered politics, society, fashion, and sport. In 1906, Flint had been intrigued by skiing and then had learned how the speed and excitement of skijoring behind motorcycles was opening up a new sport in Norway.

Skijoring behind horses originated to transport military dispatches. It was a new social sport taken up in the St. Moritz area in the early years of the 20th century. Would motorcycle skijoring become the latest attraction? Enough to titillate the English skiing class, for certain. But not, in fact, enough to make it part of the skiing holiday, at least not in Switzerland, nor in Norway.

This was not Flint’s only skiing work. Years later he painted “Winter Sport,” in his own words a “big watercolor of five girls skiing on the practice slopes of Flims in the Engadine” of Switzerland. Flint also illustrated Ryder Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1907), W. S. Gilbert’s Savoy Opera (1909) and a 1913 edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

Flint exhibited five watercolors in the 1922 International Exhibition in Chicago and in 1936 was elected president of the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolours (now the Royal
Watercolour Society), a post he held for 20 years.

In 1947, he was knighted for his contributions to art. Details of Flint’s art life can be found in In Pursuit: An Autobiography, published in London by the Medici Society in 1970. —E. John Allen

Lady Day Hits the Slopes

In 1952, John Sihler, owner of the Red Onion Bar and Restaurant in Aspen, Colorado, hired Billie Holiday to sing at the Onion as part of the Wintersköl events in January. The town was already attracting Hollywood stars and famous musicians. In the 1950s, the Onion alone hosted greats Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Oscar Peterson and Ray Brown. Holiday performed for six nights and put Aspen firmly on the live-music map.

“My mother was a waitress at the Red Onion when Billie sang there,” says artist and former longtime Aspen local Judy Haas. “There used to be a photo of her on the walls of the Red Onion, with Billie Holiday singing on stage!” At the peak of her fame, Holiday got to know some of the Onion’s employees who were aspiring performers, and after closing each night would sit and watch and give them tips while they sang. It wasn’t the usual behavior for a huge star and those who were there never forgot it.

It also wasn’t standard for visiting performers to learn to ski, but Holiday did that as well. This image shows her in a fur coat with a pair of what appear to be 10th Mountain Division signature white skis slung over one shoulder and 10th Mountain poles to match over the other. The photographer was the late Patrick Henry, who worked with the Berko studio in Aspen, and as far as anyone knows never provided many details on the shoot.

While this may have been a publicity photo for her Red Onion booking, she was seen by many people taking a lesson with a ski instructor on Aspen Mountain.

During her 1954 European tour, UPI distributed a photo of Holiday getting up from a tumble on skis. The shot ran in Jet magazine, on February 25, 1954. The UPI caption read: “Billie Holiday Clobbers. While satisfying her newfound enthusiasm for skiing, singer Billie Holiday—now touring Europe—takes a spill in Zurich, Switzerland. Miss Holiday first tried skiing in Aspen, Colo.”

The Red Onion, built in 1892, at the height of Aspen’s silver boom, closed briefly in 2007. At that time it had been serving guests for 115 years, making it the oldest such business in Aspen. It reopened in 2009 but closed for Covid-19, and needs renovation before reopening.

Honoring the Red Onion’s legacy as a music venue, Jazz Aspen Snowmass (JAS) has purchased space above and adjacent to the Onion that will host the JAS offices, as well as rehearsal, lesson and performance spaces—and a gallery featuring some of its thousands of images of legendary artists. This photo is one of its prizes.— Jay Cowan

Rites of Spring

At the end of April, about 1,800 enthusiasts celebrated the end of the Siberian winter by skiing Sheregesh resort in swimwear. It was the eighth annual Grelka Fest, named for a Russian hot-water bottle. Numbers didn’t quite reach the Guinness-certified world record of 1,835 set here in 2015, according to The Siberian Times. Originally billed as a bikini-skiing event, the rules were relaxed to allow one-piece swimwear for women and trunks for men. Swimwear skiing has been a rite of spring around the world at least since 1948 when Mt. Baker, Washington, staged its first Slush Cup pond-skimming contest. Inevitably, bikini slaloms followed, held at dozens of resorts on all continents. Many of these are charity
fundraisers. Some skiers go too far. For a quarter century, Crested Butte allowed nude skiing on the last day of the season, but after a few rowdies got drunk and disorderly, a dress code was enforced around 1996.

Two First Descents

On April 30, Polish mountaineer Andrzej Bargiel made the first ascent of 20,269-foot (6,178m) Yawash Sar II in the South Ghujerab Mountains in Karakorum, Pakistan. He immediately skied back to base camp and turned his attention to nearby 20,000-foot (6,096m) Laila Peak. With Jędrek Baranowski, he summitted on May 10. They then made the first ski descent, from just below the summit.

Bargiel, 33, is most famous for the 2018 first ski descent of K2, the second-highest peak in the world and considered by many as the most dangerous. He reported that his descent of Yawash Sar II was an altogether different experience. “The wall was very demanding, especially in the summit cone, but the descent was quite enjoyable,” Bargiel posted. “The descent itself took about 2 hours; It was icy at the summit, ropes were needed. Jędrek Baranowski, who also took part in the summit attack, waited for me halfway.”

Snapshots in Time

 

1955 A RELAXED NEED FOR SPEED
When the news came over the radio that Ralph Miller had just skied 109.04 miles per hour on August 26, SKI editors phoned him in Portillo, Chile, to get the story straight from the horse’s mouth. What did it feel like? “Pretty fast.” What were you wearing? “Oh, just goggles and a t-shirt.” —“SPEED RECORD” (SKI MAGAZINE, October 1955)

1981 TEACUP STEEPS
The headwall of Tuckerman Ravine on Mount Washington in New Hampshire is shaped like the inside of a teacup—and it is just about as steep, relatively speaking. On Memorial Day weekend, the most populous time for the headwall, skiers at various stages of paralysis, bravado and skill will be found adhering to the slope one way or another. —PETER MILLER, “SKIING THE STEEPS” (NEW YORK TIMES, JANUARY 25, 1981)

1996 YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION
The Shaped Ski Revolution is here and it will make skiing more fun. It’s a revolution that will free thousands of skiers from the drudgery of the skidded turn, and thousands more will ski longer, stronger and faster. —JACKSON HOGEN, “REVOLUTION” (SNOW COUNTRY MAGAZINE, OCTOBER 1996)

2018 ONE MORE REASON TO KEEP SKIING
Skiing is a form of interval training, which has lately become one of the hottest fads in the fitness world. After pushing yourself for anywhere from 20 seconds to 15 minutes during a run, you get a nice break as you ride back up the hill. A growing body of evidence suggests this on-off style of training—working hard for a few minutes, then taking a breather—can provide a range of benefits, from extending your life to improving your fitness levels. —MARKHAM HEID, “WHY SKIING IS A RIDICULOUSLY GOOD WORKOUT” (TIME MAGAZINE, JANUARY 25, 2018)

2021 50 YEARS A COWBOY William Winston Kidd celebrated his 50th anniversary as the indefatigable Director of Skiing at Colorado’s Steamboat Resort in April. At the 1964 Innsbruck Games, Kidd and teammate Jimmie Heuga were the first American men to win Olympic medals in alpine skiing, taking home slalom silver and bronze, respectively. Ever since, the always approachable Kidd, now 78, has helped bring skiing to the masses. He also influenced ski fashion—as only he could.