Bota bags could be having a moment. These holdovers from skiing’s golden age laugh at today’s need for social distancing.

What will skiing, riding and cross-county look like in 2020-2021? Will gondolas be fully loaded? Will six-seat chairs be limited to a maximum of only two to three people from the same family? No one knows for certain, and policies vary between resorts. But one thing is sure: In a time of social distancing, skiers will be reluctant to pass around that pocket flask of
Jägermeister to ward off the chill.

The time is right to bring back the bota bag. 

Martini trees were a legendary and beloved feature of Taos Ski Valley dating back to the mid-1950s. What could be more memorable than coming across a hidden glass porrón buried in a tree well containing a perfectly-chilled gin martini?

Better yet, what if you could carry a martini around all day? And instead of breakable glass, carry it in a bota bag—a wineskin sling pouch traditionally made of leather, which presumably imparted some retsina-like flavor to the wine. Modern versions with plastic liners could carry martinis, wine or some other bracing refreshment that could be consumed while skiing or riding. What’s more, you could share some liquid courage with your friends and loved ones from a safe social distance of six feet—or farther—depending upon your aim.

The forerunner of the bota bag was the waterskin dating back some 5,000 years. Normally made of sheep or goat skin, it retained water naturally, perfect for desert crossings until the invention of the canteen. The first images of these bladders are from ancient Assyrians, who used them as floats in approximately 3000 B.C...

After a career covering skiing, photographer Paul Ryan has seen it all.

Above: Ryan looks for contrasts when shooting. The dark shadows help visually pop the red-suited racer, next to the red gate, in this image from the 1968 Grenoble Olympic Games. Also, “I liked the sense of launching into the unseen downside of the jump.” Right: Jean-Claude Killy flashes his inimitable style on course in Stowe, Vermont in 1966. The following year, Killy earned the first World Cup overall title, winning 12 of 17 races. Next up: winning the triple crown of alpine skiing, with a sweep of all three Olympic golds at that time (downhill, giant slalom and slalom) at the 1968 Grenoble Winter Games. On skis or off, Killy was as photogenic as they come, says Ryan, who worked extensively with the champ over the years.

"I always was kind of a frustrated ski racer,” admits Paul Ryan, who dabbled in competitive racing in the 1960s. Raised in Newton, Massachusetts, Ryan played hockey for Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York, and after graduation headed north to Stowe, Vermont, to work and follow his racing dreams. In Stowe, racer Marvin Moriarty, of the Moriarty ski hat family, gave Ryan his first camera.

As young ski racers of that generation were likely to do, “a bunch of us decided to abandon career expectations and head out West, eventually landing in Aspen,” he recalls. Ryan and buddies made the racing rounds, competing at various Western resorts, including Mammoth Mountain, where “Dave McCoy let us sleep in the unfinished lodge.”

In the early 1960s, a career beckoned, so Ryan went to graduate film school in San Francisco, but continued to race. He found himself at Sugar Bowl Resort in California for the final race of the season, where he received the career advice of a lifetime. “You are not getting anywhere racing,” Ed Siegel, Sugar Bowl’s general manager told him. “But you’re a pretty good photographer. Come work for us.”

He did. “It was my first job getting paid to take pictures,” Ryan says with a laugh. Skiing remained a passion, but he found the time to pursue his craft in San Francisco, and made a name for himself chronicling the 1960s counterculture there. But he had found a home in skiing, and John Fry hired him as the staff photographer at SKI magazine for several years. He traveled the world shooting for SKI and other periodicals.

Ryan’s personal lens was always wider than just the sport of skiing. He studied under the greats of the time, including Minor White and Ansel Adams. His photography has been honored in international shows, with recent exhibits including “The Sea Ranch, Architecture, Environment, and Idealism” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Ryan has always moved fluidly between still photography and cinematography. His cinema credits include Robert Redford’s A River Runs Through It and The Horse Whisperer. His documentary work includes Gimme Shelter, Salvador Dali, and recently a film on George Soros.

Ryan has always found his way back to the mountains. This photo essay illuminates an era in skiing’s history and also the progress of photography, which has changed as much as the sport that Ryan covers. 

“Photography has evolved enormously since the years when I was very involved in photographing the ski world,” Ryan, now 83, says from his home in Santa Monica, California. “Cameras and iPhones have become very mobile and everyone can take photos of anything.”

With the new mobile technology, “images are abundant and personal moments are revealed every day,” he notes. Ever the artist, Ryan sees these advancements not as a threat to his craft, but as new tools to use. “Photoshop makes possible the transformation of photographs into our own impressionistic images, and expressions of our thoughts superimposed onto the events in front of the lens,” he says. “It’s a visually exciting time.”

These images here are from a different time, “when on the side of the mountain, I had to pre-visualize the end result, often not seeing the processed film until days later,” Ryan says.

Though the technology has changed, what constitutes a powerful image has not. Ryan says there are two main components to a successful photo: What he calls “the graphics” or the visual structure of the image, and “the human element,” or the emotions that are shown in the photograph.

Great photography combines both to reveal “Cartier-Bresson’s ‘decisive moment’ in time,” Ryan says. The art is in recognizing that instant. “A compelling photograph is not what happened a second before or a second after. It’s a single moment,” Ryan says. “A photographer’s goal is to capture that decisive moment.” 

This is Part 1 of a 2 part photo essay series from Paul Ryan, with the second installment in the November/December issue. View this photo essay as a mini-master class in photography, as Ryan explains his approach to his craft and the intriguing backstories to each image.

When it snows, skiers ski, even amid calamity. That could change with Covid-19. By Andy Bigford

Skiers and the industry have confronted and overcome a variety of disasters—wars, gas shortages, recessions, and terrorism—none of which affected the sport more than the biggest annual influencer of all: the weather. This disaster is different. The novel coronavirus already has trimmed one-sixth of the prematurely closed 2019-20 season, an estimated 8 million skier days and $2 billion in revenue, according to the National Ski Areas Association (NSAA). Travel concerns, social distancing constraints, and the cratering economy could take a much bigger bite out of the upcoming 2020-21 season. Or not.

Just prior to the modern skiing age, World War II was the obvious exception to the weather rule. Many of the 60 or so “ski areas” operating in the U.S. closed during the conflict, as did countless community rope-tow hills, with resort improvements coming to a standstill. 

Stowe stayed open. With gas rationing in force, skiers commuted by train and bus, but the lifts spun just six hours a day. The sport supported the war effort in other ways. Stowe skier C. Minot “Minnie” Dole, who founded the National Ski Patrol in 1938, persuaded the U.S. State Department to create the 10th Mountain Division ski troops. At the 10th’s headquarters at Camp Hale in Leadville, Colorado, Ski Cooper was created and then opened to the public after the war...

Alpine ski jumpers—sticking Geländesprungs, cliff hucks and gap-jumps—have been sending it for more than a hundred years.

Jesper Tjader explains what he wants to try on a practice run for the 2014 Nine Knights terrain park competition in Livigno, Italy, and no one thinks it’s possible. But he casually skis onto the in-run anyway. He’s planning a transfer from one big ramp to another one about 50 meters (164 feet) away on a completely different course. Coming up short means a face-full of vertical ice and almost certain serious injury. Overshooting isn’t a consideration since nobody believes he’ll clear the massive gap to begin with. But 20-year old Tjader, without consciously knowing it, is riding a wave of Big Air heroics that will define the first two decades of alpine ski jumping in the 2000s. The Swede sticks the landing three times that day on a jump no one else is even thinking about, and the last time he throws a double back flip.

Photo above: Athletic achievements in action sports often arrive unplanned. Swedish freeskier Jesper Tjader decided to try an unprecedented 50-meter “death gap” transfer between ramps during practice at a 2014 competition. He nailed it three times. And on his final attempt, he threw in a double back flip. Suzuki Nine Knights photo.

When Skiing Big Air debuts at the 2022 Winter Olympics in China, it will be on the back of these kinds of attention-grabbing feats over the past twenty years. Candide Thovex making the first successful jump on 120-foot Chad’s Gap, near Alta, in 1999. Jamie Pierre dropping a 255-foot cliff huck in 2006 in the Grand Targhee, Wyoming, backcountry, only to have Fred Syversen up the ante to a bonkers, and accidental, 351 feet two years later filming in Norway. Rolf Wilson laid down a 374-foot-long alpine jump in 2011 during a competition off the 90-meter jump at Howelsen Hill, and David Wise popped 46 feet above a park jump in 2016 in Italy, upping the record by more than 10 feet. All of this was accomplished on regular alpine ski gear—and it all began with something called the Geländesprung.

Hannes Schneider likely introduced, or at least popularized, the Geländesprung (literally “terrain jump” in German) in the early 1900s in the Austrian Arlberg. Writing in Skiing magazine in 1964, G.S. Bush mentioned Schneider demonstrating a maneuver where he “used two ski poles instead of one, and, an accomplished jumper, he leaped even when there was no ramp. Rushing across a sharp break in a slope, he’d push himself up and forward on the poles, catapulting himself high over the hill’s edge, and then, by twisting his body and skis, he’d change the direction his skis were facing in mid-flight. He called this spectacular trick, ‘Geländesprung.’”

By the 1950s that description was obsolete and gelandes had come to more broadly encompass all alpine-style jumping that includes ski poles and bindings with locked-down heels—two major things that differentiated it from classic heads-and-tips-first Nordic jumping. It began to make regularly noted appearances in the U.S. in the 1930s where it was mentioned as an activity at areas from Glen Ellen, Vermont, to Badger Pass in Yosemite.

Oddly, it also turned up on an American stamp issued in 1932, commemorating that year’s third Winter Olympics, being held in Lake Placid. As noted collector James Riddell remarked in an article, “The Scandinavian disciplines Langlauf and Springlauf only at Lake Placid! This stamp, strangely enough, depicted a Geländesprung, which hardly suited either event.” Ski journalist Mort Lund observed that the stamp displayed “a form of skiing for which there was no Olympic, world or local competitions…” It may have been the 1940s before the first known gelande events started occurring at places like Alta, Utah.

Seeing is Believing

What would primarily propel alpine jumping is photography, which has proven both a blessing and a curse, with detractors claiming that photo fame and peer pressure drive kids to do dangerously crazy things they wouldn’t otherwise. But as the world rolled into the 1960s, magazine photos and movies became major drivers for alpine ski jumping. Not because people were doing it for the cameras, but because the cameras craved it. Big air was dramatic and it sold. Take Jim McConkey, for instance.

A famous early image showed him jumping 100 feet over a ski plane on a glacier in Canada in 1962. He next dropped a 90-foot cliff in the Bugaboos, which was then nearly unthinkable. Ninety feet is still bragging material. And it opened up the mountains to stuff so ridiculous that jumpers had to create wings. Tragically, one who did was McConkey’s son Shane, who died in a skiing and BASE-jumping accident in the Dolomites in 2009.

Jim McConkey’s early 1960s plane-jumping image was followed by a 1963 Hans Truöl photo of legendary Austrian racer Egon Zimmermann, who would go on to win the Olympic downhill gold medal, jumping the Flexenpass highway above Lech and clearing a new 356 Porsche in the process. Zimmermann personally gave visitors a postcard of the photo at his Hotel Kristberg in Lech right up until his death at 80 this past August. He once told me that he’d done the jump mainly as a promo for Porsche, which he thought was ironic since he suffered a bad wreck in his own Porsche several years later. The pic is still iconic today and along with McConkey’s plane jump helped create the modern concept of gap-jumping as an Evel Knievel form of showmanship.

The value of film to big league ski jumping was cemented when skiing action scenes, being shot by Willy Bogner in some of the Alps’ most glamorous locales, began appearing in James Bond movies. The high-octane Bond footage gave a big boost to skiing in general and extreme jumping in particular, the latter as a result of three deeply memorable stunt sequences.

The first was in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service in 1969, where George Lazenby’s stunt skiers were German racer Ludwig Leitner and Swiss downhill ace Bernhard Russi. Near the end of a long chase sequence at Murren, Switzerland, Bond jumps over a highway very reminiscent of Zimmermann’s Porsche-clearing gelande. Only Bond did it over a huge snowplow with a snowblower that devours the pursuing bad guy when he doesn’t go big enough. Unfortunately, “Russi was injured when he crashed on the road,” Willy Bogner once told me. But it definitely raised the stakes on gap-jumping and built on the Zimmermann/McConkey foundation.

Next came Rick Sylvester’s mind-boggling jump off Mount Asgard on Baffin Island in 1977’s The Spy Who Loved Me that ended 3,000 vertical feet later with a parachute landing. It was a game-changer that furthered the blending of skiing with BASE-jumping and fired up ski jumpers by exponentially extending the limits of what was possible. The movie scene took three tries for the camera crew to get the shots, but it awed a global audience and inspired people like Shane McConkey. (Sylvester got the coveted call for the Spy stunt because he had skied off El Capitan in California in 1972, which was filmed by a young Mike Marvin, who went on to Hot Dog—the Movie fame. Sylvester’s El Cap feat is considered the first filmed BASE jump on skis.)

In 1981’s For Your Eyes Only, extensive ski scenes in Cortina, Italy, are capped by former 6-time World Champion freestyle skier John Eaves standing in for Roger Moore and jumping off Cortina’s famed 90-meter Nordic hill—on a pair of 205 Olin Mark VI slalom skis. Almost everyone used at least 215s on gelande jumps a lot smaller than a 90-meter, with 220s more likely under foot. Plus Eaves did it tandem, side-by-side with a regular, properly equipped Nordic jumper.

“I had my own jump,” Eaves told me. “It was set at 0 degrees. The Nordic take off was -11 degrees. They need that to get into the air foil. Mine felt like a good kick when I hit it, allowing me to gain altitude over the Nordic jumper immediately. Then I would slowly lose altitude as he went ahead… I did 200 feet once.” It wasn’t out of his wheelhouse, Eaves explained. “I got second place at the Whistler gelande in 1974 on a pair of Dave Murray’s lead weighted downhill skis.”

Big Air, Big Competitions

Competitive alpine ski jumping wasn’t hugely successful over the years, but it was the testing grounds for a lot of what followed. While earlier gelande competitions definitely occurred, Alf Engen staged the first-ever National Gelande Championships at Alta in 1964, and just for good measure won it.

That event lasted for ten years (plus occasional resurrections for anniversaries) before insurance companies and lawyers got involved. But by then there were gelande comps, and their direct descendants in the form of “ski splashes,” going on everywhere: Mad River, Sugarbush, Purgatory’s famous Goliath Gelande, Snowbowl Montana, Steamboat Spring’s Winter Carnival off the 70 and 90-meter jumps. Other hosts included Jackson, Whistler, Alyeska, Aspen’s Winterskol, a swimming pool alongside the Silvertree Hotel in Snowmass, and so on, with a tour that included 13 stops at its peak. But Alta’s remained the granddaddy and the big one everybody aimed for.

Interestingly, Porsche stayed allied with alpine ski jumping over the years, supplying a car as first prize for one of the early gelande events in Vail, won by Mark Jones in 1974 at the then world-record distance of 213.5 feet. The prize got everyone’s attention as much as the length, and helped to jump-start (ahem) the gelande tour.

By this time freestyle skiing aerial events had been going on for a few years in the US and around the world. They were formally recognized by the FIS in 1979 and first showcased at the Olympics in 1994. Combining outrageously vertical air (20 feet above the kicker, up to 60 feet above the landing) with full-on gymnastics (three full back flips with five full twists for example), they’ve made for great TV. They also led directly to the jibbing movement and park and pipe riding that rewards tricks as much as amplitude or distance.

For the last 40 years, the sky has literally been the limit for gelandes, gap-jumps and cliff hucks, to the point where some of it has gone almost beyond the pale and stalled a bit as a result. Meanwhile, park and pipe events have combined most of the other forms of alpine jumping and added some new wrinkles, along with wide exposure and money that both attracts and nurtures a lot of the jumping talent.

Freestyle courses, super-pipes and big air kickers provide highly visible venues for people to go huge while emphasizing tricks and still being able to ski away. That’s because the jumps are vaguely within reason, and are regular events instead of one-off stunts to set a record.

Video Revolution

There’s no avoiding the inherent danger of big air. After Paul Ruff’s fatal 160-foot jump in 1993 near Kirkwood, California, in an attempt to set a world record, some industry insiders said it would slow the seemingly endless rush to push skiing’s limits. Not so.

There are still people, of course, getting big air, and there’s still a market for it, primarily in the ski-porn films that are more popular than ever with platforms like Netflix and YouTube. The video cameras were there when Candide Thovex made the first successful flight over Chad’s Gap in Cottonwood Canyon, Utah, in 1999, throwing in a mute grab, and when he came back the next year and did it with a D-Spin. Yes, the same Chad’s Gap where Tanner Hall, after sessioning it well all day in 2005, came up short trying a switch cork 900 and broke both ankles. On video. He returned for redemption in 2017.

The cameras were running in 2006 when Jamie Pierre stuck a 255-foot cliff drop in the Grand Targhee backcountry of the Tetons. He literally stuck it, going in almost headfirst like a dart and having to be dug out. He’d worked his way up since 2003 from 165 feet to 255 during a series of big leaps in Utah, Switzerland and Oregon.

“I just really wanted to hold the record, even if only for a day,” he said afterward. With a young family, he noted he could now happily “retire” to slightly less hazardous skiing. Sadly, he died at 38 in 2009 in an avalanche in the Alta backcountry.

The heart-stopping heights of serious cliff hucks had progressed to the point in the 1990s where no one was even trying to ski away from them. They would simply plant their landings in deep snow, using the tails of their skis when possible to absorb some impact, and just hope to survive. That was Fred Syversen’s plan in 2008 when he made a filmed practice run, during a movie shoot, to a cliff in Norway chosen to break Pierre’s 255-foot record. But he turned too early in his fast-moving descent, and realized it too late.

“Braking or trying to stop was no longer an option, it simply went too fast,” he posted on social media. “So that left one choice: go for it and do it right!” He turned slightly to avoid rocks to his left, got out over snow and tilted so he didn’t land on his ABS pack that could have damaged his spine. He cratered like an unexploded howitzer shell. His only slight injury came when someone hit him with a shovel digging him out—351-feet later.

There’s also nine seconds of wobbly bystander footage (pure gelande still doesn’t get much love) of Rolf Wilson setting the alpine-jumping world record of 374 feet at Howelson Hill in Steamboat in 2011. You probably didn’t see it even if you lived in Steamboat. “It’s such an odd sport,” allows Wilson, who’s from Missoula, Montana. “One of the sports that doesn’t get a lot of recognition, because the guys that do it really just wanna jump, and see how far they go, and have fun. And we’re a bunch of hooligans to be honest with you.”

Jesper Tjader’s giant transfer in 2014, and David Wise’s 2016 blast, rocked the park and pipe world. And since then Big Air has seemed poised for the next big step. As some alpine jumping records near their survivable outer limits, no one has been lining up to try to beat Syversen’s 351 (12 years ago) or Wilson’s 374 (nine years ago). So what’s on the horizon?

More X Games-style productions; more ski movies; more genius films like Candide Thovex’s with amazing stunts that aren’t always potentially lethal; wing-suited jumpers regularly landing on slopes from big drops without ever popping chutes; and someone letting the true gelande crowd build the jump they yearn for with a lightning fast in-run, adjustable kicker, and endless run out.

Meanwhile, if you want to go really long the best bet is still Nordic ski flying on the 120-meter hills, where the current world record by Stefan Kraft of Austria at 831 feet is just shy of three football fields, no tricks involved. 

Jay Cowan has written about skiing for five decades and received Colorado Ski Country USA’s Lowell Thomas Award for print journalism, multiple magazine feature writing awards from NASJA, and has been included in The Best American Travel Writing of the Year. His books include Hunter S. Thompson and his latest, Scandal Aspen.

We’ve all heard that ski resorts will operate this coming winter under social-distancing rules. That means limited cafeteria space, restrooms, chairlift seating, lift-line queues and equipment-rental facilities. Some of these limitations will be addressed by box lunches, new tented outdoor seating and Portapotties, and by online advanced reservation requirements. Many skiers won’t want to fly off on destination holidays, so some major resorts may see a drop in ticket sales.

Meanwhile, in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests, companies say they plan to do more to address diversity issues. CEO Rob Katz of Vail Resorts sent out a letter to employees pointing out the obvious: the skier population is still very largely white, and so is his workforce. Katz has actually been out front on diversity issues, particularly with unprecedented female leadership and training at his company, but also with various programs (and personal donations) to get minority youth on the slopes. It hasn’t moved the needle much, he admits, and he terms this a “person failing.”

It’s hard to recruit new customers of any ethnicity at a time when businesses must ration access—and with the state of the economy. But staffing should be another issue. NSAA president Kelly Pawlak reports that half of resorts are understaffed, by an average of 44 positions. If visas for foreign workers remain unavailable and if international travel remains restricted, resorts won’t be able to staff up with young Latin Americans on temporary work permits. Resorts instead will need to find new seasonal staff, for jobs from mountain operations to cafeteria workers, perhaps in nearby cities—and local recruiting needs to begin now. Some of the new employees will be people of color. Close-in resorts may bus in workers. Destination resorts will have to ramp up availability of employee housing. If hundreds of nearby hotel rooms and condos are empty, as was the case at destination resorts during the Great Recession, that may not be a challenge.

One of the barriers to minority entry into the sport is that newcomers often don’t feel welcome when they don’t see other people like themselves in town. So more Black and brown faces in customer-facing staff positions would help to recruit new populations to the sport, once marketing outreach becomes practical again. Best of all: Some of the new employees will catch the mountain bug, stick around, and advance up the ranks.

Henri Rivers, president of the National Brotherhood of Skiers (NBS), has been talking to resort managers in Colorado, Utah and elsewhere. He points out that diversity needs to happen at all levels. Recruiting people of color for profit-center and senior management jobs isn’t hard. “But you can’t recruit the traditional way,” he said. “Outsource recruiting or look for other resources. Partner with the Black MBA Association or NBS, or with a Black lawyers’ association. Start by hiring four managers. They’ll be successful. There’s no shortage of highly qualified people eager to move out of the city into the mountains, for a better lifestyle.”

Skiing’s history is on the side of diversity. Going back to the early 20th century, once Norwegian immigrant ski clubs got over their resistance to the admission of English-speaking members—and notwithstanding the 119-year-history of anti-Semitism at Lake Placid and other Adirondack communities—the sport has generally accepted new arrivals. European refugees populated resorts beginning with the rise of Nazism, staffing ski schools and launching businesses. Postwar skiing in North America had strong roots in the fight against racist Axis governments.

Officialdom has had more trouble with new forms of snow-sport than with ethnicity. FIS took at least a decade to come to terms with alpine skiing, then with freestyle. More recently, in the 1980s and ‘90s, the sport’s leaders, and many skiers, fumbled badly with the integration of a new kind of customer—snowboarders. This relatively diverse group would eventually become saviors, pumping new life into a stagnant sport, then helping birth the freeskiing movement, which has been welcomed to resorts with untold resources dedicated to terrain parks. Back in February, a few months before George Floyd’s murder, the outdoor and ski industry suppliers banded together on a DEI pledge (diversity, equity and inclusivity). Pre-BLM, there had also been an upsurge in advocacy groups for diversity, ranging from industry- (Outdoor Afro) to consumer-based (Share Winter).

While the general skier population has remained largely of European ethnicity, ski areas have long drawn local ethnic groups as employees and customers, with several marketing efforts launched in the 1990s. Native American and Latinx skiers are unremarkable at resorts in New Mexico and Arizona, Asian skiers common at West Coast resorts. Black skiers remain under-represented despite the success of the NBS. This needs to change. The combination of the pandemic business disruption and the Black Lives Matter movement is an opportunity to accelerate that change. 

Pie chart at top of page comes from 2013 SIA particpant study.

Photo: Alf Engen rides Sun Valley's Ruud Mountain chairlift, location of the jumping hill he designed with Sigmund Ruud, circa 1938. Photo by Charles Wanless, courtesy Alan Engen.

Alf Engen in Sun Valley (the saga continues...)

In a recent letter in Skiing History (May-June 2020), my colleague Kirby Gilbert raised several questions about Alf Engen’s role in Sun Valley’s early days. Kirby wonders whether Alf was in Sun Valley in 1936, since his presence was not mentioned in other accounts at the time.

In his 1985 oral history, Alf said he met Count Felix Schaffgotsch in Utah in early 1936, when the Count was searching for a place for Averell Harriman to build a destination ski resort. Alf showed the Count both Alta and Brighton, before the Count visited Ketchum in February 1936, and found the area that would become Sun Valley. According to Alf, “When I found out that he had picked this place [Ketchum], the Forest Service sent me up here just to see what he had actually picked out…There was lots of snow that year, and it was beautiful. And at the end of the road...of the railroad...there was only one building, there was Pete Lane’s store…I just came to see what he had picked out.”

From 1935 to 1942, Alf worked for the Forest Service as a technical advisor, assisting with planning and developing winter sports areas in four western states. Alf’s son Alan provided me with a list of 31 ski areas in which Alf played a role in planning or developing, which included Sun Valley’s Bald Mountain.

In January 1939, Sun Valley general manager Pat Rogers told Harriman that the Forest Service released Engen to work at Sun Valley. Count Schaffgotsch, Alf Engen, Dick Durrance and Friedl Pfeifer were on Baldy marking trees to be removed for a new downhill course designed by Durrance, the work would be rushed through, and the course would be ready for the 1939 Harriman Cup. Engen also supervised Civilian Conservation Corps workers stationed at a camp in the Warm Springs area, to clear new runs on Baldy to open the mountain for general skiing in winter 1940, after chairlifts were installed. In his oral history, CCC worker Fred Joswig described working with Alf on Baldy. Joswig said Pfeifer, who had a “good eye for a downhill course,” marked trees for removal, and Engen contributed “more than any one person to Bald Mountain’s development than anyone I know.”

As a part-time resident of Sun Valley, I appreciate interest in the history of our country’s first destination ski resort that Durrance said was “the most important influence in the development of American skiing ... Its concentrated and highly successful glamorization of the sport got people to want to ski in the first place.”

John W. Lundin
Seattle, Washington

John Lundin is the author of Early Skiing on Snoqualmie Pass (2018 ISHA Skade Award winner); Sun Valley, Ketchum and the Wood River Valley (Arcadia Press, June 2020); Skiing Sun Valley, a History from Union Pacific to the Holdings (History Press, publication date November 9, 2020); and Ski Jumping in Washington —A Nordic Tradition (History Press, publication date January 2021). John and Kirby Gilbert are both founding members of the Washington State Ski and Snowboard Museum (www.wsssm.org).

Engen’s Son Remembers

I received the latest Skiing History and was interested in the short piece by Kirby Gilbert that talked about my father in Sun Valley during the mid 1930s. I can’t comment much about my father’s early years at Sun Valley working for the Forest Service during summer months. I know he did some early trail cutting. He told me about encountering a wolverine face to face while cutting trails on Warm Springs. Dad backed away without incident, but it was a lasting memory.

I know my father played an important role in the design and construction of the Ruud Mountain ski-jumping hill near the old Proctor Lift. That would have been in 1936–1937 and he did have a good association with Averell Harriman during those years. I used my father’s blueprint design of the Ruud Mountain ski jump as a guide for the one I designed on a hill for Bob Barrett, original owner of the Solitude ski area, in the late 1950s. It was used for intercollegiate competitions for several years in the early 1960s, but was torn down and replaced with a regular run in later years.

Alan K. Engen
Salt Lake City, Utah

Where Grooming and Geometry Intersect

In his “Paradise Lost” article (Skiing History, May-June 2020), Jackson Hogen eloquently explained how carving represents the Nirvana of alpine skiing. I would add that carving stands at the confluence of two evolutions: ski geometry and slope grooming. 

Ski designers began experimenting with new sidecuts back in the 1960s. For instance, Dynamic designers moved the waist back about 18cm to take advantage of new racing techniques. Two decades later, alpine races were still taking place on decently prepared but significantly wavy and irregular terrain, making carving choppy and imperfect. As trail grading and grooming improved, resorts created flawless and wide snow ribbons. When shaped skis came of age, they showed their magic power on these smooth new ski runs. 

Do all skiers need to carve? I’m not convinced. Many are content with letting their boards skid into each turn. In fact, accomplished carvers account for a small portion of the skiing public. Besides, significant momentum is required to trigger carving. Its maximum efficiency promotes higher speed, but doesn’t allow for slow motion. And it often creates stress on the joints that can prove tiring after a full day on the snow. 

If carving is one useful skiing skill, skidded turns are essential in countless circumstances like moguls, crud, steep spots, blue ice, deep snow, trees and out-of-bounds skiing. A skier who doesn’t master skidding will be ill at ease on surfaces that aren’t perfectly groomed. Skidding is in fact a progressive form of edge control while carving is binary; you either carve or you don’t. As a result, I use a variety of skills when I ski, depending on the terrain, the snow and the day: carving, skidding and stem-christies (yes, these too!).

Finally, about the danger of rocker and fat skis: Those are part of the ebb and flow of “cool trends” that we’ve seen come and go in skiing. As the industry pushes them, they grow, stay for a while and falter. Rocker skis are made for the elusive deep snow while fat skis are sluggish and heavy to carry, so when their heydays are gone, they might return to niche status.

J.F. Lanvers
Park City, Utah

Jean-Francois Lanvers, who capped his ski-teaching career with a stint on the French Demo Team, came to North America as a marketing executive, first with Look and then with Lange.

Notes on the New Northlands

I want to thank Jackson Hogen for his article in the May-June issue, which brings to light the concept that we built Northland Skis around. Wider rockered skis degrade the true ski turn.

We pride ourselves in making one of the finest all-mountain carving skis on the market. We went against the trend to go wider and rockered by creating dimensions and ski construction not seen in other skis in the industry. To do this, we went back to the original Northland design. The vintage skis were made from hickory that provided strength, snap and durability. With the new Northlands, we make the core from hickory and white ash, strong hardwoods with excellent performance characteristics. To that we add a full-length layer of Kevlar to quiet and dampen the ski bottom and add strength.    
I applaud Hogen for stepping out and speaking his mind about products that the industry has dropped on the skiing public that diminish the ski experience. 

Peter Daley
Steamboat Springs, Colorado

SKI Magazine, January 1968

Thousands learned to ski at the Borscht Belt hotels of New York's Catskill Mountains.

Starting in the early 1950s, hundreds of thousands of Americans learned to ski not on the slopes of major resorts like Sun Valley, Stowe or Aspen, but at more prosaic ski areas and resort hotels with names like Big Vanilla at Davos, the Concord, Gibber’s, the Granit, Grossingers, Homowack Lodge, Kutsher’s, Laurels, the Nevele, the Pines and the Raleigh. These were among the Borscht Belt hotels in the Catskills, about 90 miles northwest of New York City.

The Borscht Belt—named for a sweet-and-sour beet soup associated with immigrants from eastern Europe—identifies the show-biz culture that arose from Yiddish theater and spawned comedians such as Lenny Bruce, Red Buttons, Sid Caesar, Billy Crystal, Buddy Hackett, Danny Kaye, Carl Reiner and Jerry Stiller. They honed their stand-up acts in the region also affectionately nicknamed the Sour Cream Sierras (sweet red borscht was often served with a dollop of sour cream), or even the Jewish Alps.

The resorts became fictional locations for movies like Dirty Dancing and A Walk on the Moon, and TV shows like The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, although some were actually shot at look-alike resorts in Virginia, North Carolina or the Adirondacks.

“From the early ’50s up to the early ’70s, the area’s hotels were a haven for upwardly mobile Jewish families who came year-round to eat prodigious amounts of food and chortle at comedians like Jerry Lewis who defined their era,” says Steve Cohen, who wrote lively articles about the Catskills for SKI in 2000 and 2006.

Legendary New York Times snowsports journalist Michael Strauss wrote in SKI in January 1960 (subsequently reprinted in “Borscht, Bagels and Bindings,” Skiing Heritage, December 2000) that “The Catskills were the Alps of mid-coast, middle-class Americans on ski vacations in the mid-20th century.”

He credits Swiss-born instructor Tino Koch for taking “dime-sized beginner’s areas and turning out hundreds of polished beginners yearning for the more trying slopes of upper New York State and New England.”

For me, it was my boyhood home. Living just a few miles from tiny Holiday Mountain was a dream come true for me, although not so much for drivers who had to contend with machine-made snow drifting onto the adjacent Route 17. Holiday offered only a 400-foot vertical, but I remember the glee of endlessly yo-yoing its narrow white-gauze-bandage runs, riding a Poma and two slow double chairs on weekends and Wednesday evenings after school. I was part of a local vacation attraction that dated back almost 100 years.

SKIING BEFORE THE WAR

Beginning in 1936, Liberty Winter Sports operated the Walnut Mountain rope tow in Liberty, on the site of the now-demolished Walnut Mountain House. Skiers brought refreshments in knapsacks and sunned, like lizards, atop a boulder, according to the CD-ROM Liberty, NY: Memories, produced by Between The Lakes Group (Taconic, Connecticut). In the era before snowmaking, Walnut Mountain depended on natural snowfall. With World War II, and the departure of its male skiers to war, Walnut closed.

October 1948 saw the launch of Christmas Hills in Livingston Manor, now a partially gentrified second home community in the northern part of Sullivan County. According to Sullivan County historian John Conway, writing for the New York Almanack, Christmas Hills had a lot going for it, and there were high hopes for its success. Conway quotes Jeffersonville’s Sullivan County Record (October 21, 1948): “During its first season of operation Christmas Hills will be open every weekend, except during the holiday season when a daily schedule will take effect. It will provide two of the latest type electric ski tows, varied slopes, including alternate ski trails through the woods and a professional ski school.”

The Republican Watchman reported the next day, “There will be the added feature of ‘ski-joring’—the use of a horse for level towing on skis—is planned (sic) as an added thrill for the fast growing ski public.

“The Christmas Hills slopes compare favorably with the best on the Eastern Seaboard. More than 1,500 feet long, the main ski run varies in rise from 30 degrees for the ski expert to a mild 10 to 15 degrees for beginners. Snow conditions should be ideal over a long period and the southern exposure of the slopes afford an exceptionally beautiful setting.”

Conway writes, “Just as it had with the Walnut Mountain ski hill a decade before, the lack of snow prevented Christmas Hills from ever becoming as successful as it might have been.”

The Concord Hotel in nearby Kiamesha Lake has claimed to be the first ski area to make its own snow (that honor belongs to Mohawk Mountain, which installed Wayne Pierce’s new snow gun in 1950). But the Concord was certainly the first ski area to blow pink and blue snow. Michael Strauss of the New York Times reported that the dye used to color Concord snow badly stained the pants and sweaters of beginners who fell in it.

By 1958, Conway wrote, the hotel was operating an Austrian-manufactured T-bar capable of transporting 460 skiers per hour. Vertical drop was 139 feet.

“At Grossinger’s, before snowmaking equipment was installed in 1952, it was a common practice to physically move as much snow as possible from the hotel’s extensive property to the ski area in order to accommodate the skiers,” Conway wrote. “It was not a foolproof plan, and only occasionally provided satisfactory results.” They also experimented with a surface of ground-up plastic collar buttons.

In the late 1950s, Holiday Mountain Ski Area in Bridgeville was fully operational and billed itself as the closest ski area of its kind to New York City.

“It will be no layout to captivate the imagination of experts accustomed to tearing down Stowe’s Nosedive or Mount Greylock’s Thunderbolt, but it will more than suffice for the run-of-the-mill sports lover who wants to test his legs as well as enjoy the sport with a minimum risk of injury,” predicted Michael Strauss in the New York Times on December 8, 1957.

According to Conway’s book, Remembering the Sullivan County Catskills (History Press, 2008), “Holiday Mountain continued to improve its operation over the next several years, and managed to survive the opening of the larger and better equipped Davos in Woodbridge in 1959, as well as the advent and expansion of other ski hills, including the nearby Columbia and the Pines, which, in 1965, became the first hotel to feature a chairlift.”

By 1960, Holiday Mountain was facing stiff competition. There were numerous Sullivan County hotels offering skiing, along with ice skating, tobogganing, endless games of Simon Sez, and the attraction of all-you-can-eat meals. Yet today, Holiday is the county’s only stand-alone ski area, helped in part by reinventing itself as a Ski and Fun Park.

Frozen in Time

Barry Levinson, 59, is a 40-year veteran of the ski industry who teaches part-time at Vail. He was born in Monticello, the county seat of Sullivan County, where he lived for 18 years—in fact, next door to me. We sledded and skied on the hill between our homes. Last summer he returned to the southern Catskills to document the lost ski areas of his youth.

His Catskill Skiing History page on Facebook documents the remains of dozens of Borscht Belt ski areas. One photo shows a solitary cableless bullwheel at the remains of Big Vanilla at Davos, where at its prime, a waiter in the base lodge would warm your hot toddys with a glowing poker. There are images of chairlifts rotting into the ground and a vintage snowcat stored in a shed with mechanic tools nearby. A YouTube video of Nevele Resort shows skis strewn in the base lodge. A sign offers $20 group
and $60 private lessons (see https://tinyurl.com/neveleruins).

In a recent call with Skiing History, Levinson likened abandoned Catskill ski hills to Chernobyl. “It’s totally frozen in time,” he said. “A post apocalyptic scene. It’s depressing as hell, but fascinating…I documented these lost ski areas out of a sense of nostalgia. Growing up in the Catskills when I was a kid was a nice place to be,” he says.

“While I thought Holiday Mountain was too small, I realized in the grand scheme of things we were lucky to have it. What else would we have done up there in the winter?”

Southern Catskill hotel skiing failed to prosper into the 21st century, with the exception of a small still-operating hill at the Italian-American Villa Roma Resort in Callicoon. Nonetheless, as Michael Strauss wrote in SKI, “there are tens of thousands of Americans skiing today on bigger, better mountains, thanks partly to the early chutzpah of Catskill hoteliers.”

ISHA vice president Jeff Blumenfeld is president of the North American Snow-sports Journalists Association (NASJA.org) and author of Travel With Purpose: A Field Guide to Voluntourism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019). Learn more at travelwithpurposebook.com.

Skiing put Aspen on the map. But bad behavior keeps the town in the news.

In one of the best known and most scandalous ski towns in the world, it’s inevitable that some of the headlines spill over onto the slopes. But scandals were a regular feature of Aspen’s existence from its start in the 1880s as one of the richest and wildest silver mining camps in the West. The most notorious early stories often concerned money, sex, drug abuse and murder, which is still the case today.

Wyatt Earp, for instance, helped make an arrest in Aspen in 1884. That same year, Earp’s buddy Doc Holliday used a pistol in a poker-game shooting elsewhere in the valley, when both men, inconveniently, were wanted in other states for murder. As in every other mining town, Aspen’s population supported thriving cathouses and opium dens.

An early skiing-specific scandal involved uber alpinist Fritz Stammberger who lived in Aspen during the 1960s and 70s when he was a founder of Climbing magazine and became one of the leading ski mountaineers of the time. He once chained himself to a tree in town in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent the property owner from cutting it down to build what is now the Miner’s Building hardware store. In the mountains he attracted attention for using no supplemental oxygen and could often be seen skinning to the top of Aspen Mountain with his mouth duct-taped in order to acclimate for the 8,000-meter mountains of Asia.

Based out of Aspen, Stammberger became a flamboyant figure locally, but also in climbing’s elite global community. He survived a controversial disaster that claimed the lives of the rest of his 1964 expedition on 27,725-foot Cho Oyu, on the China-Nepal border, where he successfully solo summited and skied down from 24,000 feet to try to get help.

The most scandalous insinuations about him came when he disappeared on a solo skiing and climbing expedition to Tirich Mir in Pakistan in 1975. He spent the night with John McMurtry’s family in Denver on his way to begin that fateful trip, and McMurtry says, “I remember asking him where he was going. He would only say it was top-secret.” Rumors circulated that he may have been spying in the tense region where Russia, China, Afghanistan and Pakistan all shared borders. Multiple efforts to find some trace of him failed. In 1994 Stammberger’s widow, former Price is Right model Janice Pennington, wrote a book called Husband, Lover, Spy, where she said he had been recruited by the CIA and either killed in jihad fighting or imprisoned by the Soviets.

During World Cup and IPSRA ski races in Aspen in the 1970s, several visiting racers and officials got in trouble. Brothers Terry and Tyler Palmer once drove a loaner Jeep up the Little Nell ski run and halfway up Spar Gulch in the middle of the night before getting it stuck. At least they had permission to use the vehicle. Austrian ski stars Hermann Maier and Andreas Schiffer got arrested for stealing a bicycle from a house where they spent the night partying. Their excuse: They needed it to get back to their hotel so they wouldn’t miss their flight out that morning. If they had been a little more ambitious they could have matched World Cup journalist (and Skiing History contributor) Patrick Lang, who was once arrested in Aspen for stealing a car. It was all a misunderstanding. Sort of.

Those hijinks paled alongside the 1976 shooting death of American ski-racing superstar Spider Sabich by his lover, the singer/actress Claudine Longet. Longtime Denver journalist and ski writer Charlie Meyers wrote an excellent story about it for Skiing Heritage (now Skiing History) in 2006.

I had access to some of Spider’s close friends, including Bob Beattie, and have been able to report details that Charlie and others couldn’t. Among them are allegations that Claudine actually stole the pistol she shot Spider with from the house of Spider’s brother Steve, two weeks before the shooting. This potential evidence might have turned the manslaughter conviction into something much different.

The .22 caliber Luger replica was said to have belonged to Spider’s dad, Vlad Sabich Sr., and passed to Steve when the father died.

But Pinkie, as Steve’s friends called him, had been convicted of a felony marijuana charge in 1971, and wasn’t allowed to own any guns. Testimony ultimately declared that the gun passed to Spider’s possession after Pinkie’s conviction. There was also supposedly a substantial payment to Pinkie from entertainer Andy Williams, Longet’s former husband, presumably to keep him from revealing any theft of his gun.

Pinkie never clarified the issue, and died of cancer in 2004. Longet got off with a one-month jail sentence and then married her local attorney (who was married when he went to work for her). To this day, the tragic farce is a black mark on Aspen’s legal system.

That legal system dropped the ball again a year later, when, in June 1977, convicted serial killer Ted Bundy escaped from Aspen’s Pitkin County Courthouse. Bundy was an avid skier and stalked some of his victims at resorts in Utah and Colorado. He was on trial in Aspen for the 1975 Snowmass murder of a visiting nurse from Michigan, Caryn Campbell, whom he had lured into helping him by faking a ski injury.

Recaptured, in December he broke out of the Glenwood Springs jail and committed several more murders in Florida. Bundy was caught in February 1978 and finally executed in 1989.

Donald Trump was making bad relationship news long before he became President of the United States. Several different versions of his 1990 Christmas holidays imbroglio in Aspen made the next day’s front pages in tabloids from Hong Kong to the New York Post. What was known for sure was that both Ivana Trump and Marla Maples were in town with him, and only Ivana was married to him. The rest of the details varied considerably.

Most witnesses (undoubtedly more than there actually were) claim Ivana went off on Marla at Bonnie’s restaurant on Aspen Mountain, called her “Moolah” Maple in her wicked Czech accent and demanded, “You bitch, leave my husband alone!”

Afterward Ivana, who is a former ski instructor, reportedly skied backwards down the slope in front of the Donald, hurling invectives and the occasional snowball at him. It eventually turned into his costliest ski trip ever, reportedly in the neighborhood of $50 million all told for the subsequent divorce. It was rumored that Trump liked to brag, “It was the biggest divorce ever!”

The death of Michael Kennedy while skiing on Aspen Mountain during the Christmas holidays of 1991 was considered scandalous by some, inasmuch as the family was playing football on skis, something they had previously been asked by ski patrol not to do. So the Kennedys had waited for their game until the sweep of the mountain, when there were fewer other people on the slopes.

But it wasn’t other people who were in danger when Michael, having just caught a pass while skiing, pulled it down and then hit a tree head-on. And at that time no one wore helmets. The Aspen Mountain ski patrol cut the tree down the next day to avoid the potential for morbid shrines.

The terrible accident immediately created gossip, including speculation that alcohol or drugs were involved, but toxicology reports said no. And people talked about other Kennedy family excesses (destroying rental houses, illegally trying to buy prescription drugs, heavy partying, etc.) in a town they’d been visiting since the 1960s. However, many who live in Aspen where death in the mountains isn’t a rarity, saw it not as a scandal but simply and sadly what can happen, especially in a large, adventurous and willful family.

A 1993 fiasco made some non-celebrities temporarily famous when five skiers from Denver became lost and stranded on a backcountry hut trip during a brutal February blizzard that had been widely forecast. They were discovered alive after four days of intensive and dangerous searching and quickly went from being semi-heroic survivors to fools in way over their heads. They had gone into the mountains in spite of warnings and put dozens of other lives at risk looking for them. Sports Illustrated magazine gave it four pages. The so-called leader of the group was Ken Torp, and for years afterward any dumbass move in the backcountry was called “Torping.”

Aspen has had no shortage of controversies over the years. Locals have quarreled over aggressive ticket pricing, unionization of the ski patrol, underground ski school instructors and terrain expansion, among other issues.

History suggests that it won’t be long before another major scandal puts Aspen in the news again.
Stay tuned.

This piece contains excerpts from the book Scandal Aspen. Jay Cowan has written about skiing for five decades from his home near Aspen (and now in Montana) and has received multiple writing awards, as well as inclusion in The Best American Travel Writing. His many books include Hunter S. Thompson and Scandal Aspen, his latest.

World Pro Ski Tour draws star athletes but suffers short season due to COVID-19.

The World Pro Ski Tour never got to the meat of its season, which would have seen seven-time gold medalist Ted Ligety contending with silver-and-bronze Olympian Andrew Weibrecht for $150,000 in championship prize money.

Before the pro season was canceled, Ligety, at age 35, did break away from the World Cup season to compete in two Pro Tour races at Steamboat’s Howelsen Hill and Eldora. He had trouble learning to time the barn-door starting gates and his best finish was a fourth place at Steamboat—proving, he said, that the Tour was serious competition.

The Tour entered its third season with six events scheduled. A long list of sponsors, led by Tito’s Handmade Vodka, offered $300,000 in prize money. When COVID-19 canceled the final three events, Rob Cone of Killington and Middlebury College, a former NCAA champ and U.S. Ski Team Europa Cup racer, topped the field of 21 racers who finished in the money, winning $30,200 for the truncated season. Michael Ankeny, of Buck Hill and Dartmouth College, a veteran of eight years on the U.S. Ski Team, came second ($12,200). Garrett Driller of Squaw Valley and Montana State, an NCAA All American and U.S. Alpine Championship parallel slalom winner, finished third ($8,350).

The Tour Finals at Sunday River and the World Pro Championships at Taos were scheduled for April, after the close of the World Cup and national championships. Ligety and Weinbrecht were on the schedule to compete at those races. “To succeed, the tour needs those top athletes,” said tour chief Jon Franklin, who earned his chops managing top skiers for International Marketing Group. Because the Taos championship event would have awarded $150,000 in prize money, the participation of FIS superstars might have upended the full-season leaderboard. All the events were televised by CBS Sports Network (see season highlights at https://worldproskitour.com/multimedia/).

Franklin predicts a longer, richer tour for the 2020-2021 season. “We don’t have a schedule yet because it has to fit around the NorAm and World Cup schedules,” he points out. He hopes to open the season before the Beaver Creek World Cup in November.

Pro skiing has always depended on the star power of World Cup racers, beginning when Bob Beattie’s new World Pro Skiing circuit recruited the likes of Jean-Claude Killy and Billy Kidd. Fifty years ago, in 1970, Kidd won the FIS World Championship combined gold medal, promptly turned pro and then won the WPS championship the same season. He’s still the only skier to pull that one off. —Seth Masia

A Day for Jake

On March 13, snowboarders around the world took a ceremonial run to honor the late Jake Burton Carpenter —pioneer, innovator and entrepreneur—who died last November of testicular cancer. Though the global “Day for Jake” took some serious hits, most notably from the novel coronavirus and nasty weather, the event still came off at about a dozen resorts, from Avoriaz (France) to Boyne Mountain (Michigan), Big Sky (Montana) and Copper Mountain (Colorado).

Jake’s wife and business partner, Donna Carpenter, and his sons George, Taylor and Timi, attended the festivities at Stowe, Vermont. A gentle beginner’s trail, Lullaby Lane, was renamed “Jake’s Ride” and Jeff Boliba, Burton’s vice president of global resorts, read a Vermont General Assembly resolution honoring Jake for his role in pioneering and promoting the sport. Just a few days earlier, Boliba had dropped by the statehouse to meet Rep. Kathleen James, a first-term legislator and the editor of Skiing History. James sponsored the resolution, which received unanimous approval from all 180 of Vermont’s Representatives and Senators.

Burton Snowboards then quickly turned its attention to the COVID-19 response, delivering more than 200,000 KN-95 masks to hospitals across Vermont and to Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, just across the border in New Hampshire. ISHA has launched a digital archive project to document how the ski industry is responding to the pandemic; see page 26.

Looking for Vintage Ski Books?

The word ski is derived from the Old Norse word skið, which means “snow-shoe” and “billet of cleft wood.” It first appeared in print English in 1755, in Volume 12 of The Monthly Review of London, an English periodical.

With such deep linguistic roots, it’s no surprise Norway is a key source of vintage ski history books. And one of the country’s top shops is Ruuds Antikvariat on Ullevålsveien, a busy north-south artery in Oslo. From the Latin antiquarius, also the root of the word “antique,” Antikvariat means “vintage bookseller” in Norwegian.

The shop was founded in 1972 by Jon Ruud and is now managed by his daughter, Vibeke Ruud. Its glass display cases and shelves include such ski-history classics as Farthest North by polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen (1861–1930), with its many drawings of skiing, then called “snow-shoeing” in English. Another hallmark is Voyage picturesque aux alpes norvégennes (Pictorial Journey Through the Norwegian Alps) of 1821 by Finnish-Swedish military officer and cartographer Wilhelm Maximilian Carpelan (1787–1831), among the first to survey and describe the interior of the country.

Bibliophilism is a cherished part of Scandinavian culture, reflected in the presence of no less than 72 antiquarian and used bookshops in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. They’re all interconnected in an online network, where you can search more than 1.5 million titles in English, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish (https://www.antikvariat.net/en/?currency=USD). To learn more, go to: https://ilab.org/booksellers/ruuds-antikvariat. —M. Michael Brady

Typo Makes Trump Into X-C Skier

As a leading journal of skiing’s historical record, we feel compelled to correct an error noticed by an eagle-eyed Skiing History correspondent.

Not known as a fitness buff in this COVID-19 time or any other era, U.S. President Donald Trump was recently described (incorrectly) as a Nordic destination skier. On May 9, 2020, Positively Scottish carried the headline “IVANKA TRUMP’S PERSONAL ASSISTANT TESTED POSITIVE FOR CORONAVIRUS, ACCORDING TO A CNN SOURCE.” Included in the text was the startling statement that, “The day after breaking his self-isolation of the White House for a cross-country skiing trip intended to report the country’s willingness to start again, Trump received the news one of his Oval Office waiters tested positive for the virus.” While the route may have been cross-country, ski gear was not involved. —Jonathan Wiesel

Mount Ascutney Adds T-Bar

Mount Ascutney, a former major ski resort in southern Vermont, operated from 1946 to 2011. Generations of skiers learned to ski at this family-friendly area and were sad to see it become a “lost” ski area. But it wasn’t lost for long.

Several years after it closed, the nonprofit group Ascutney Outdoors worked hard to reopen a few trails, served by a brand-new rope tow in 2016. This past season featured the opening of a refurbished T-bar, expanding the lift-served vertical to just over 400 feet and 10 trails. The upper slopes, under a conservation easement, are maintained as hike-to terrain for those who earn their turns. The lower slopes also host a tubing facility, and an Outdoor Center serves as a hub for skiers, hikers, mountain bikers and community events.

Purchased from Le Relais, a ski area just outside of Quebec City, the T-bar was donated by Glenn and Shelley Seward in 2017 in preparation for future installation. Over the next two years, a fundraising campaign collected enough money for the T-bar to be installed at the end of 2019 and fired up in February 2020.

Ascutney’s humble beginnings are similar to many Vermont resorts. It was founded in 1946 as a rope-tow area by investors Bob Bishop, Catharine “Kip” Cushman, Robert Hammond, Bob Ely, Dr. Peter Patch and Dick Springer. Over the next six decades, the area went through many ownership changes, experiencing financial setbacks but also expansions, including a large hotel in the mid 1980s and a high-speed quad to the summit in 2000. Mounting fiscal problems led to its closure in 2011, and the ski area assets were sold off bit by bit.

Mount Ascutney is now a shining example of a new paradigm for smaller ski areas throughout New England that had financial difficulties or closed. Strong volunteer support, generous donations, and operating as a nonprofit can help these areas to succeed where prior operating attempts have failed. Loyal skiers have refused to let their favorite mountains fall by the wayside and are doing whatever they can to save special places like Ascutney.

Just ask Glenn Seward: “Those of us who love Ascutney don’t give up easily.” For more information, go to www.ascutneyoutdoors.org. —Jeremy Davis

SKI ART

Rolf Winkler (1884–1942)

The solid shape of any silhouette is what gives the image its power. In the mid-18th century, Louis XV’s finance minister, Étienne de Silhouette, levied a wealth tax on the citizens of France. This brought ignominy upon him; he was mocked and associated with cheapness. In the art world, a quick outline became known as a drawing à la silhouette.

At the time, portraits were painted, and therefore only those who could afford to sit for an artist were portrayed. But some artists had the ability to cut the profile of a person: These “silhouettes” were both quick and cheap and therefore, before photography, increasingly popular with the middle classes. And the cutting was done extremely quickly—for example, if you were visiting a country fair and happened on an artist with scissors in hand. One of the most well-known of these artists used to advertise “three-minute sittings.”

With the development of photography in the mid- to late-19th century, the call for silhouettes declined. However, in the early 20th century, probably inspired by the Arts and Crafts Movement, silhouette artists became extremely popular as they seemed to portray, in a curiously old-fashioned and nostalgic way, a treasured past. Nowhere was this more obvious than during World War I, as displayed here: These troopers are emerging from the woods and heading for the village below, just as they would have done in peaceful years.

Rolf Winkler, born in Vienna in 1884, was a painter, illustrator and silhouette artist. He studied at the Landeskunstschule (State Art School) in Graz, Austria, and later he spent time in Dachau, Germany in a vibrant art colony under the leadership of Ludwig Dill and Adolf Hölzel, landscape painters who were embracing modern trends. Dill was a founding member of the Munich Secession. Winkler settled in Munich in 1905 and over the decades illustrated over 400 books, mostly for juveniles. He also worked for the satiric weekly, Fliegende Blätter (Flying Pages). The illustration here is entitled “Skipatrouille” and was published by Teubner in Leipzig. This extraordinary publishing house specialized in Greek and Roman texts, mathematics and the sciences, and yet here in 1915 is Winkler’s “Ski Patrol,” one of six silhouettes contained in a special folder. Maybe this was their way of supporting the war effort. —E. John B. Allen