Resorts

Pandemics create social change. In the 14th century, the Black Death killed at least one-third of Europe’s population. In western Europe, the resulting labor shortage drove up wages, freed the serfs, inspired adoption of time-saving technologies in agriculture and manufacturing, accelerated the growth of cities and trade, triggered peasant rebellions and hastened the replacement of feudal economic arrangements with capital investment schemes. Wealth inequality decreased. It took 250 years for the aristocracy to regain its 80 percent wealth concentration, and it had to open its ranks to bankers and merchants.

On a smaller scale, in the wake of Covid-19, ski towns and skiing culture are experiencing greatly accelerated social change. Thanks to modern medicine, the virus proved about 150 times less deadly than the bubonic plague, and its social effect thus far is almost the opposite of the 14th-century experience. Across the larger economy, Covid-19 concentrated wealth mightily, into the hands of internet retailers and tech entrepreneurs. Anyone who has lived in or visited a ski town over the past three winters noted ominous changes since Covid arrived early in 2020.

Real Estate Spikes

High real estate prices, and rents, soared higher. Using one prominent region, among many, in Colorado’s Eagle and Pitkin counties (which includes Vail and Aspen), the median selling price of a condo more than doubled between April 2019 and April 2023, from $850,000 to $1.75 million, rising an average of 23 percent per year. (During the previous 20 years, which included the dotcom crash and the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, the average annual increase was about 3.5 percent.) The median price for a single-family home rose 320 percent, or 43 percent annually, from $2.5 million to $10.5 million (compared to an average annual 13.5 percent appreciation over the previous 20 years).

One reason for these spikes in value is that technology enabled wealthy people to work from home, and they chose to do it in the isolated splendor of luxurious mountain retreats. Another is that real estate looked like a sensible hedge against a volatile stock market, especially when mortgage rates fell below 3 percent in 2020 and 2021, while inflation peaked briefly at 9 percent in 2022 before falling to about 4 percent in May 2023. Even a severe recession is unlikely to bring real estate prices down to earth. Finally, any ski town can be an attractive refuge from climate change.

Covid, and resulting low interest rates, drove more modest inflation in other wealthy real-estate markets—prices of the top 5 percent of homes rose less than 11 percent worldwide at the peak of the boom in early 2022. As a result, Bloomberg reported, sales at the top of the U.S. market fell 17.8 percent that quarter.

Employees Driven Out

In all ski towns, rising prices and rents accelerated the flight of service employees. Those who kept their jobs faced long, expensive and sometimes dangerous commutes along snowy mountain roads. Along with labor shortages, the situation was tough on locally owned businesses, too. Many folded, to be replaced by restaurants, hotels and retail stores owned by cash-rich public corporations. NIMBY millionaires have even, perversely, worked to prevent construction of new employee housing. Pity the employee-housing resident forced to leave town at retirement. The exile of longtime residents greatly dilutes the character and flavor of ski towns, both for locals and visitors.

Crowded Slopes

Ah, visitors. Visitation to ski towns skyrocketed. At the height of Covid’s social distancing and masking experiments, outdoor sports boomed. Retailers sold out of bicycles, camping gear and ski equipment. After the ski resorts shuttered in March 2020—they were considered potential Covid super-spreader sites—skier visits for that winter dropped 12 percent, to 51.1 million in the U. S. (according to the National Ski Areas Association), and fell about 18 percent worldwide. But visits at U.S. resorts soared back to 59 million for the 2020–21 season and set a record at 60.7 million in 2021–22. Vail Resorts reported a 67 percent drop in profits for the fiscal year ending in July 2020, but set records in 2022, with revenue above $2.5 billion and profits up 15 percent over pre-Covid 2019.

There’s no evidence, however, that these record skier visits are based on any growth of the skier population. It’s never been more expensive to learn to ski at a destination resort—a well-heeled newcomer might spend $10,000 for lifts, lessons and lodging over the first week of a skiing career (for that kind of money you could earn a private pilot license). But with cheap season passes, existing skiers skied more often. Covid sent them home from the office and their kids home from school; the internet encouraged them to work from hotel rooms. As a result, skiers lined up in droves, creating early-morning lift lines and tromping out the powder by 9:30 a.m.

The rush sparked resentment among the swollen population of second-home “locals” and shrinking cast of seasonal employees. Locals have cursed tourists in the past (remember the “Turkey, Go Home” sentiment of the early ’70s?) but today’s wage-earning locals also resent lack of housing, static income and the entitled attitudes of some wealthy patrons.

Meanwhile, lodging costs inflated, too. The traditional shoulder and low seasons evaporated, as hotel owners found they could fill $500-per-night rooms until after Easter.

Long Term Trends

It’s likely that most of these changes would have happened anyway, but absent Covid, at a much slower rate. As noted, in Aspen and Vail, home prices rose about 13.5 percent per year for the two decades ending in 2019. At that rate, the median single-family home would be $4.2 million today and wouldn’t reach today’s value of $10.5 million until the year 2031.

All this may prove a boon to smaller resorts. “Independent” has become a valid brand. On the other hand, former ski-bum secrets are in many cases rapidly Aspenizing. Powder havens like Fernie and Big Sky are growing too expensive for the kind of gap-year ski bum who might once have settled in for good.

We’re decades past the era when someone like Whip Jones could respond to an overpriced monopoly market by building a competing resort (in his case, Aspen Highlands). We may be stuck with gentrified ski towns with no room for colorful ski bums, or for middle-class mom and pop with three kids in a van. And if you’re a lifelong skier, your options for retiring to a ski town have narrowed, perhaps vanished.

What can a middle-class skier do? Travel afield. Search out that off-brand indie mountain with cheap motels nearby. Go to Europe, where you can still buy a $50 daily pass for a network spanning three valleys and 120 lifts and get a $120 hotel room. Buy a winterized motorhome. Free your heels: climb for your turns or ski cross-country.

Resorts and ski-towns have proposed dozens of schemes for affordable employee housing. They want to repurpose or replace existing structures, build on city-owned land, incentivize homeowners to rent space on year-long leases (instead of short term), or import tiny homes. Any and all projects can meet with vociferous local opposition. Opponents cite neighborhood impacts on congestion, noise and architectural unsightliness, but it often boils down to anxiety about having working-class families around the corner. It’s a universal problem: Everyone recognizes a social issue but few want to be part of the solution. In May, the Colorado legislature failed to enact a statewide land-use bill meant to encourage construction of affordable housing because counties and towns didn’t want to cede authority to the state.

In economics, the concept of tragedy of the commons describes the overuse of a finite resource by self-interested individuals. That’s where we stand. No zoning law, or peasant rebellion, can restore the original spirit of the ski town. 

Seth Masia is the president of ISHA.

Snow Country December 1988

“She wants to know if it’s got the modified slalom sidecut with pre-preg glass laminate for superior shock absorption.”

Berkshire East and Catamount Resorts are a generous corporate sponsor for ISHA's programs. We are grateful for their support!

After 86 years, the magazine slashes its print run and hopes to persevere online.

After more than a decade of battling losses in subscribers and newsstand sales, SKI recently announced it will publish only one print issue a year. The magazine will continue to publish an annual print winter gear guide, but it will be a “unified” effort with its sister brands, which includes Outside and Backpacker.

In a May email to contributors, SKI editor Sierra Shafer explained that Outside Inc., owner of SKI, “made the difficult decision to reduce print by 80 percent across the company.” SKI will publish an annual print issue “for the foreseeable future,” Shafer writes. “SKI is still producing a traditional issue, our Destination Guide. Beyond that, our print plan for 2023 is still developing.”

After Skiing magazine shuttered just shy of its 70th birthday in 2017, and Powder scuttled in 2020 after nearly 50 years in print, SKI was the sport’s sole surviving mass-market publication. Before its advent, skiers read news of the sport in a variety of regional and club newsletters. The sole national publication was the American Ski Annual, published by the National Ski Association. In 1935 Seattle native Al Nydin had the idea for a national commercial magazine. The first issue of SKI appeared in January 1936, with four issues (November-February) pledged for the following season. SKI was later rebranded as Ski Illustrated and moved to New York City when World War II broke out; it was resuscitated in 1948 in Hanover, New Hampshire, by publisher William Eldred, who combined Ski Illustrated, Western Skiing and Ski News under the present title SKI. In 1962, under New York publisher Arnie Abrahamson, SKI incorporated Ski Life.

At its peak in the 1980s and 1990s, SKI published eight issues annually, including a summer issue for several years. For the 1988–89 season, a full-time editorial staff of 15 published 1,696 pages of national content, plus regional editions in the East, Midwest and West. The decline began in the mid-1990s, when readers discovered they could find more timely information, for free, on websites—including skinet.com, published by SKI and Skiing magazines, by then under the same corporate umbrella, AOL-Time Warner. Advertising revenue soon followed the audience. Like most surviving legacy media brands, SKI gradually transitioned largely to web publishing. “With a renewed focus on our digital content, we are still actively assigning and publishing work for the web,” Shafer wrote.

A long line of corporate owners fought a rear-guard battle to maintain the viability of the print edition. Most recently, Pocket Outdoor Media went on a buying spree in 2021 and acquired a handful of active lifestyle brands, including SKI, Outside and Backpacker. Pocket rebranded itself as Outside Inc. and refocused its business model with “Outside +” memberships, which provide access to content from the company’s 30-plus brands online. The monthly membership cost has recently been cut from $5 a month to $2.99 a month for the first year. Along with the decision to drastically reduce print runs companywide, Outside Inc. also announced it was laying off approximately 15 percent of its staff across all brands.

Is the party over for SKI and other print magazines? The advertising model for print seems irretrievable. The continued health of Skiing History proves that a small but devoted reading audience remains, perhaps filling the role of the original nonprofit American Ski Annual. Similarly, the quarterlies Ski Journal and Adventure Journal, along with the twice-a-year Mountain Gazette, make entertaining reading. But all charge subscription rates that allow survival without advertising support.

Aspen’s Birthplace of Skiing Preserved

Landowner deal balances development rights with protection for the Highland Bavarian Lodge

An often-forgotten slice of Aspen’s skiing history will be preserved in a deal that gives a landowner additional development rights as a tradeoff to protect the historic site.

The Pitkin County commissioners in June approved an agreement that will preserve the Highland Bavarian Lodge and bunkhouse, the true cradle of skiing in the Aspen area. The structure will receive historic designation and be remodeled to restore its historical significance.

Property owners Meredith Loring and Sami Inkinen funded creation of a documentary film recounting the significance of the site in the development of Aspen skiing, according to coverage in the Aspen Times. The documentary will be donated to the Aspen Historical Society. A brochure on the history also will be created and a road plaque will be installed.

The Highland Bavarian Lodge was built at Ashcroft in late 1936 and opened in time to host Christmas guests. It was part of a grand vision for a ski area in the upper Castle Creek Valley (see “What Might Have Been,” March-April 2021). Ski trails were cut along the valley floor and hardier guests could ascend on climbing skins to Richmond Ridge. The owners’ grandiose plans lost momentum during World War II. After the war, development of Aspen Mountain eclipsed the Ashcroft project.

The Highland Bavarian Ranch covers 82 acres up valley from the confluence of Castle and Conundrum creeks. The property spills over to the east side of Castle Creek Road, but the owners have pledged to place a conservation easement on that section, and on 49 acres in total, the Aspen Times reported. The owners could have torn down the lodge because Pitkin County’s historic preservation program is voluntary.

As a tradeoff to the preservation of the lodge and bunkhouse, the county will grant 7,500 square feet of additional floor area for a home on the property. A home of up to 13,250 square feet can now be constructed. In addition, a density bonus was awarded for a second home of 5,750 square feet on the main ranch parcel. 

Snapshots in Time

1957 More (Not) the Merrier
To handle the army of skiing Americans that was passing last year’s record 3.5 million, slope operators were constructing luxurious lodges and higher capacity lifts, were scientifically grooming trails and putting snow on usually bare slopes. Old-line ski addicts who once welcomed the boom in the sport are now finding it a nuisance with the crowds at the slopes and inns they once had to themselves. — “NEW SLIGHTS ON SLOPES” (LIFE MAGAZINE, FEBRUARY 1957)

1968 PHONING IT IN
A new 24-hour telephone service for the latest ski reports is in operation. By dialing LY4-7500, skiers can obtain information on snow conditions in the East. The 24-hour service is supported by the New York–New Jersey American Motors Dealers Association. — “24-Hour Phone Service Offers Latest Ski Reports” (NEW YORK TIMES, DECEMBER 24, 1968)

1970 POWER PER POUND

Women racers are women, first and foremost. Very often I meet people who remark that they thought I would be much bigger. I suppose they expect us to be Amazons. Actually, the average female ski racer is the same size as the average girl. What is important is the strength per pound. This does not mean bunched muscles, either, because suppleness, gracefulness and balance are extremely important. — NANCY GREENE, “THE WOMAN RACER AS A WOMAN” (SKI MAGAZINE, JANUARY 1970)

1981 STEIN'S ADVICE
I don’t care what people say about nightlife and drinking. If you want to be on top of your skis, your mind has to be absolutely crystal clear, and you have to be in top physical condition. — STEIN ERIKSEN, INTERVIEW (POWDER MAGAZINE, JANUARY 1981)

1990 PLEASE STICK TO SKIING
The January issue of your magazine devoted six pages to snowboards and snowboarding. With all due respect to the interests of others, if I wanted a magazine about snowboards, then I would subscribe to Snowboarding Magazine, if it existed. Please stick to skiing. — DAVID R. SEGAL, REDONDO BEACH, CALIFORNIA, “NO MORE SNOWBOARDS,” LETTERS (SKIING MAGAZINE, MARCH 1990)

2003 WHERE'S THE DISCOUNT?
I’m glad you recognize that there are people over 70 who still like to ski. How about an article called “The Top Resorts for Seniors?” With the current trend of not offering free lift tickets to seniors, I would like to know which resorts still value us. After all, what we don’t spend on hefty lift ticket prices, we make up for in food, beverages and a lifetime of dedication to the industry. — JIM MORGAN, MIDLAND, MICHIGAN, “SENIORS SKI,” LETTERS (SKI MAGAZINE, MARCH-APRIL 2003)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Waldo Holden

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

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

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

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

Bob Barton

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

Sepp Kober

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

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

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

Rolf Lanz and Claude Anders

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

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

Bill Thalheimer and Tony Krasovic

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

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

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

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

Doc Brigham

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gunther Jöchl

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

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

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

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

Snowshoe: Brigham’s Final Mountain

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

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

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

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

The Other Guys

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

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

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

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

They spent almost an hour in line, yet more and more skiers came, bonding as they waited ... and waited.

Lift lines have been part of the ski experience as long as there have been lifts. Is there such a thing as a line that’s too short?

Beginning after World War II and for the next 40 years, a weekend skier waited in liftline so long that the person next to him had a time to describe where he was born, his best powder day, his favorite music, why he deserved a promotion at the office and … hey, check out those vintage skis over there. Skiers could wait in line for an hour, all for a 12-minute ride up the mountain and the reward of a quick descent.

Snail-paced lift queues—usually exasperating and sometimes bone-freezing—arose from the relentless supply of young baby boomers demanding to ski. Their numbers exceeded the growth of a new ski areas and lifts, even though that growth itself was spectacular. In the 10-year period between 1956 and 1966, more than 580 ski areas with chairlifts and T-bars came into being, many of them previously equipped with ropetows. Yet it wasn’t enough.

The number of U.S. skiers quintupled over the same period. And when a million or more of them arrived at the bottom of the mountain with their kids on a Saturday morning, the place looked like a standing-room only Beatles concert. Waits of 45 minutes and more were common across the country, from Stowe to Boyne to Big Bear.

Some relief arrived with the advent of tripe and quad chairlifts, but the big breakthrough came in the early 1980s with the introduction of the detachable lift. Climbing speeds doubled, and lift-shutdowns from boarding mishaps were sharply reduced. The new chairs and gondolas were line-busters.

In the past five years of the 20th century, North American ski resorts installed 250 high-capacity lifts, collectively capable of carrying more skiers uphill than all of the lifts that existed in the winter of 1965-66 combined.

In the 1950s and 1960s, observed writer Morten Lund, liftlines allowed enough time “to meet a member of the opposite sex, get infatuated, engaged and plan the wedding.”

Today, a Saturday or Sunday liftline scarcely allows time to land an après-ski date. No one wants to regress to slow lifts, but history suggest that long queues once helped develop skiing reputation as an irrepressibly sociable sport. 

Excerpted from the March-April 2008 issue of SKI magazine. 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.

Hemingway's hideaway still makes a fine escape.

In November 1924, a relatively unknown writer named Ernest Hemingway came to Austria’s Montafon Valley at the suggestion of a friend. Hemingway was living in Paris at the time, on a shoestring, and the friend assured him that this cozy, snowy Alpine valley near the Swiss border was an affordable paradise. Hemingway clearly agreed. With his wife and young son, he stayed the entire winter, and then the next.

(Photo above: Left to right, Sara Murphy, Hemingway, John Dos Passos and Gerald Murphy, touring above Schruns. Hemingway sought solitude in order to finish his breakthrough novel, The Sun Also Rises.)

Nearly a century later, an even-less-known writer and her husband came to the Montafon at the suggestion of a friend, seeking a similar escape. As it did then, the valley delivered.

My friend Mo discovered the Montafon about a decade ago, after an expensive and unsatisfying ski vacation at a big Western resort. Since then, he’s been back—winter and summer—at least once every year, with some or all of his family. After years of hearing his sales pitches, and eager for some European travel, my husband and I committed to the journey.

It was not my first visit to the Montafon. I had vague memories of racing a World Cup there in 1992, and, after the two-hour drive from Zurich, I recognized the cobblestoned Kirchplatz of Schruns. The 39-kilometer-long (23.4 miles) Montafon Valley—bound on the north by the Verwall Alps and by the Silvretta and Rätikon mountain ranges to the south—extends from the outskirts of Bludenz past Schruns, the valley’s main village, to the tiny village at the Partenen, where we stayed.

The Vorarlberg (literally “before Arlberg”) is a part of Austria that’s often overlooked by skiers who head to the better-known resorts on the eastern side of the Arlberg Tunnel in Tirol. Even to Austrians, the Vorarlberg often feels more Swiss than Austrian, and the heavy, musical dialect reflects that. After World War I, the region even tried unsuccessfully to become part of Switzerland.

For some history of skiing in the valley, I stopped by the Montafoner Museum in Schruns, where historian and author Dr. Andreas Brugger is an archivist and resident expert. Within moments of our meeting, he delved into the extensive rows of floor-to-ceiling archives and retrieved full documentation of my participation in the 1992 World Cup on the Golmer Joch, which was the last major international Alpine competition in the valley.

FIRST SKIING

Winter sports clubs started in the Montafon in 1906, first in Schruns and two months later in adjacent Tschagguns (the area is also referred to as Schruns-Tschagguns). Though initially the main activity was toboganning, in 1910 the area hosted the first Vorarlberg state championships in downhill skiing on the Golmer Joch, on the northwestern end of the valley.

Ski development stopped during World War I, though soldiers still trained to ski in the valley. During the interwar period, skiing boomed, as it did throughout the Alps. Starting in 1919, as villages throughout the valley established their own winter sports clubs, skiing overtook tobogganing in popularity. During this period, Hemingway installed himself at the Hotel Taube for $2 a day, writing in the early mornings before climbing up the mountains with sealskins on the bottom of his skis to race downhill on runs like the Silvretta, the Versettla and the Kapell, then drinking kirsch schnapps and playing poker into the evening.

The area hosted the Vorarlberg state championships again in 1933, with competitions in downhill skiing, cross-country skiing and jumping; meanwhile, ski jumps were built in
Tschagguns. Just as ski-sport development was taking off, World War II again stalled it.

Gargellen, tucked up another valley in the Montafon’s southwest area, was a well-established smugglers’ path. The (Swiss) Silvretta and (Austrian) Rätikon ranges, explained Brugger, “were a mountain border between war and peace twice.” Beginning in the 18th century, locals maintained a vigorous smuggling trade via rough trails over the ridge to Switzerland, which had neither a road nor an official border crossing. During World War II, locals helped shuttle people escaping Nazi persecution, including Jews, political refugees and draft dodgers. At the end of the war, Nazis allegedly escaped via the same route. Those smuggling trails are now summer hiking routes, and in winter Gargellen is a popular jumping-off point for cross-border ski tours to Switzerland.

Skiing enjoyed its second heyday after the war. Schruns-Tschagguns again hosted the Vorarlberg state championships in 1946 and the first Austrian post-war Alpine and Nordic championships in 1947. For these events local clubs built Vorarlberg’s first chairlift, and a new combined ski jump that hosted Austria’s first night event in the sport.

During this time the area was occupied by the French army and under strict food rations. Racers, officials and press were treated to extra food procured on the black market, earning the area the reputation as Austria’s “Golden West.” By 1949, in order to cooperate on building facilities and hosting events, the various clubs started associating as the Ski Club Montafon, Events included the “Two Piste” races in the 1950s, where men and women sped down a pair of descents—the Kapell, from Hochjoch to Schruns, and the Hartmann, from Grabs to Tschagguns.

By 1960, Ski Club Montafon included all nine clubs from valley towns: Schruns, Tschagguns, Vandans, St. Gallenkirch, Gaschurn, Partenen and Bartholomäberg as well as the side valleys of Silbertal to the north and Gargellen to the south. A successful era of cross-country skiing also started in Gaschurn, and by 1977 locals had garnered 10 national titles.

From 1963 to ’83, Ski Club Montafon drew top women to the Montafon Gold Key Races. Starting in 1967, the Gold Key was a regular stop on the women’s World Cup circuit. When a blizzard struck in 1983, 18 teams left town in spite of the jury’s decision to hold the downhill. The local club suffered a major financial loss and ended the Gold Key series. The area hosted one final Women’s World Cup in 1992, where hometown hero and 1988 Olympic gold medalist Anita Wachter competed on the course named for her.

Savoring the Slopes

Our friend Mo wanted to show us all of the Montafon, and we tried our best to comply, falling into the easy routine of a European skiing vacation. Each day started with the dreamy Austrian buffet breakfast at the Hotel Sonne, complete with fresh semmels, cheeses, meats, muesli, yogurt, fruit and carafes of strong coffee and hot milk. From there we headed across the street to catch a quick bus ride down to Gaschurn, where we could hop on the Versettla Bahn up the western side of the valley or, just down the road, St. Gallenkirch and the ultra-modern Silvretta complex, where gondolas went up the Valisera to the west or the Hochjoch to the east. At the Silvretta base are retail and rental shops and a ski testing center, plus a market hall with restaurants and cafés serving local specialties. Beneath it is the largest e-charging garage in Vorarlberg. The development is just one example of the Montafon’s resort investments, aimed at modernizing rather than expanding.

The Silvretta Nova side, above St. Gallenkirch and Gaschurn, features a massive variety of steep frontside and backside terrain, while the expansive Hochjoch, above Schruns and Silbertal, includes the Montafon Snow Park, whch hosts the annual World Cup snowboard events. From the top of the Hochjoch, we skied back to Schruns via the Hochjoch Totale, a 12-kilometer (7.2 miles ), 1,700-meter (5,600 feet) descent. If you hit the gas, the run feels like the ultimate citizen super-G.

In 2008 Silvretta Nova and Hochjoch merged as the Silvretta Montafon, including Golm and Gargellen, to become one of Austria’s 10 largest ski areas. With a weekly ticket that works out to some $50 a day, it doesn’t take much wind in the face to get your money’s worth. By the time we stopped for lunch at one of the modern mountain-top lodges or, even better, gathered around the stammtisch (the table for local regulars) at a cozy hut for coffee and schnapps, homemade soup and apfel strudel, we were usually ready to call it a day. Later on, dinner at the hotel, included in the room rate, was dependably delicious.

A highlight for any skier is the Silvretta Ski Safari. It starts from Partnenen with a tram ride up the Vermunt Bahn, then a white-knuckle bus ride through two tunnels to the Bielerhöhe Pass, which connects Vorarlberg to Tirol. (In summer this area is accessible by the Silvretta-Hochalpenstraße, home of an annual vintage car rally. From Partenen the road rises 700 meters [2,300 feet] over three kilometers [1.8 miles] with 25 hairpin turns, then mellows to its high point on the Silvretta reservoir.) From the pass, the ski safari follows the gentle descent of the summer road; at the bottom, snowcats pull skiers across a snowfield to Galtür. The route then loops back to Partenen.

We were disappointed to find the trek closed due to avalanche hazard, so we based out of the Berggasthof Piz Buin. Smack on the border of Tirol, this is one of three hotels/huts at the Bielerhöhe Pass. Hemingway roomed in one of the others, the rustic Madlenerhaus, now a base for the German Alpine Club. From there, we skinned up a less hazardous exposure to glimpse the Piz Buin and surrounding 10,000-foot peaks that make this the largest ski touring area in Vorarlberg.

It’s easy see how a soon-to-be-famous writer found the fortitude to rewrite The Sun Also Rises, or call up the vivid imagery in the Snows of Kilimanjaro, or capture the emotion of an era gone by in A Moveable Feast. Hemingway may have moved on to fame and Gstaad, but some of us will be happy to get right back here to the Montafon. 

Regular contributor Edith Thys Morgan wrote about Spider Sabich in the March-April issue.