Resorts

Aspen/Snowmass is a valued ISHA Corporate Sponsor.

Can Vail Resorts improve employee and customer relations? Efficient operations, and market share, may depend on it.

Overcrowding and staff shortages at ski resorts first attracted the attention of local and online media at the end of 2021, then in January spread to traditional outlets like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, statewide papers like the Denver Post and Seattle Times, and special interest magazines such as Outside. 

To be fair, resorts faced the same issues as businesses in general: namely labor shortages and slow delivery of inventory. When a shortage-afflicted business takes payment up front, fulfillment and customer services deteriorate. Late delivery angers customers.

That’s what happened at ski resorts this winter. Covid accelerated and exposed long-term trends, creating a perfect storm of employee and customer angst. A booming real estate market and an increase in Airbnb-type short-term rentals pushed the housing shortage from chronic to acute, which, combined with decades of static wages, forced employees into onerous commutes. Many employees simply declined to work that way, and when Covid put remaining employees in isolation, there weren’t enough bodies to shovel or make snow, drive groomers, maintain equipment, bump lifts, patrol and teach, flip burgers, make beds, punch cash registers, fit rental boots and provide childcare. At the same time, skiing seemed a Covid-safe outdoor activity, season passes were cheap, and skier visits on peak days soared. Ski retailers sold out early, highways and parking lots jammed up, and skiers stood in 40-minute lift queues. Skiers tolerate the late arrival of natural snow, but when the snow is great and the lifts don’t turn, they fume.

Vail Resorts was a particular target of consumer fury, incurring an organized protest movement and threats of class-action lawsuits, beginning at Stevens Pass, Washington. There, more than 44,000 skiers signed an online petition calling VR responsible for failure to open lifts and terrain, and about 300 complaints went to Washington’s Attorney General Bob Ferguson. By late January a new general manager, Tom Fortune, was turning the corner, solving some of his staff issues and opening popular backside access. The fixes were simple: more efficient use of available employee housing, increased employee shuttle service and new hiring. VR also offered the resort’s passholders deep discounts to sign up for next winter, and promised to extend the season through April. It’s worth noting that Vail very publicly bumped its minimum wage to $15 per hour in the key states of Colorado, Utah, California and Washington—but in the pre-Covid era VR’s average hourly wage for its roughly 47,000 seasonal employees was around $12 per hour. In mid-January VR offered a $2-an-hour bonus for employees who stay on until the end of the season.

In recent years, VR has set itself up for local disaster. The universal Epic Pass was a huge boon to average skiers, and a tonic to investors; it has transformed the resort industry with one simple, game-changing mantra: Skiing will now be purchased in advance. Meanwhile, VR took steps to bolster the bottom line for shareholders, such as slashing middle-management salaries by centralizing most corporate functions at its Broomfield, Colorado headquarters. The unintended consequence is a corporation slow to react to emerging local problems. Off-site marketing and finance personnel are blind to the nuances of local markets, and local issues. But the bridge too far was the cutback in local human-resources personnel, and the consequent loss of on-site expertise in local recruiting tactics, transportation and housing issues. Payroll functions were moved to an app that didn’t work.

As part of VR’s campaign to maximize margin in every segment, it built retail, lodging, food service and transportation enterprises that compete with local businesses. Building employee housing is always difficult, but alienating prominent locals doesn’t help.

VR cut the price by 20 percent and sold more than 2.1 million Epic Passes last summer, up 76 percent from pre-Covid 2019. According to its December 9 quarterly report, the company sailed into the season holding $1.5 billion in cash. It can well afford to spend what’s needed to fix local problems. Those problems now include settling class-action lawsuits by employees, meeting obligations under new collective bargaining agreements—and fixing housing and transportation issues. While they’re at it, they need affordable learn-to-ski packages for first-timers who get the itch in January, and improved access to free or cheap parking.

The original Vail Associates, from opening day in 1962, set the gold standard for American skiing. Vail offered the best slope grooming in the world. It recruited a top-ranked ski school. Vail’s managers, many of them veterans of the 10th Mountain Division, promoted skiing culture, for example by enlisting well-known skiers like Pepi Gramshammer and Dave and Renie Gorsuch to establish businesses in town, and later, under George Gillett, by bringing the World Championships to town. When the private equity firm Apollo Partners took VR public in 1997, they did what Wall Street always does: managed for shareholder value rather than customer and employee morale. To skiers, it now looks like VR has been cannibalizing VA’s good will.

According to annual reports, in fiscal year 2019 (the last pre-Covid year), VR’s mountain-operations revenue was $1.9 billion, and company-wide gross profit margin (EBITDA) was 36 percent. The National Ski Areas Association Economic Analysis shows the average large North American ski resort EBITDA then at about 26 percent. The difference was not only Vail’s success in selling season passes, but in strict cost control. To solve the employee crunch and relieve skier crowding, VR may have to give back some of that margin. With its 25 percent market share (in skier visits), the sport needs VR to succeed.

Will spending that money affect the stock price? Some 95 percent of VR stock is held by institutional investors, who may not care much about employee and skier morale. Closely held resorts have more freedom of action, and they’ve shown it this season to the benefit of their guests, employees and the communities they operate in. The other major resort conglomerate, Alterra of the Ikon Pass, has from day one taken the decentralized path, ceding control to its individual resorts. Aspen in mid-February gave a $3-an-hour raise to every employee in the company.

Rob Katz, the change-agent who created both the Epic Pass and VR’s 44-resort empire, stepped down as CEO in the fall and is now executive chairman of the board. His handpicked successor, veteran Kirsten Lynch, the data-driven marketer who has brainstormed the Epic Pass metrics, is now in the hot seat. “One of the hallmarks of our company is agility and change,” Lynch told the Wall Street Journal in its January 15 story “Steep Slope for a Ski Empire.” By the time you read this, in March, we’ll have seen how agile VR can be.

Image at top of page: Skiers on the hook, by Rudiger Fahrner

The Forgotten Era of Ski Jumping

Sun Valley opened in December 1936, and the next spring it hosted America’s first international Alpine competition, the combined event that became known as the Harriman Cup. Dartmouth’s Dick Durrance made national headlines by beating the top European racers.

Photo top of page: From left, Olav Ulland, Gustav Raaum, Alf Engen and Kjell Stordalen in formation at Ruud Mountain, 1948. Ulland and Engen were at the end of their jumping careers; Raaum and Stordalen, Norwegian exchange students, were newcomers.  National Nordic Museum photo

Alpine skiing was a fledgling sport. For most Americans of the era, ski competition meant jumping. Norwegian immigrants had made ski jumping into a popular spectator sport, with a successful professional circuit. The best-respected racers were Skimeisters—men who could compete in four-way events featuring jumping, cross-country, downhill and slalom. Sun Valley founder Averell Harriman knew that to make Sun Valley the country’s center of skiing, he needed a ski jumping hill.

Two famous Norwegian ski jumpers competed in the first Harriman Cup: Sigmund Ruud (1928 Olympic silver medalist) and Alf Engen (Professional Ski Jumping Champion 1931­–1935 and holder of five world professional distance records). Harriman asked Engen (whom he later hired as a sports consultant) and Ruud to locate a ski jumping hill on Sun Valley property. They selected a site between Dollar and Proctor mountains, with an elevation of 6,600 feet and a 600-foot vertical drop. Taking advantage of the hill’s natural slope, they helped design a 40-meter jump, intended for distances of up to 131 feet, For major jumping competitions, an 80- or 90-meter jump would have been necessary, but the 40-meter hill offered “splendid competition for all classes of competitors” and was particularly suited for four-way competitions. Named for Sigmund, Ruud Mountain became the resort’s center for jumping and slalom events and was used for freeskiing. Sun Valley was the country’s only ski area eligible to host FIS-sanctioned four-way competitions.

The term J-bar didn’t yet exist, but Sun Valley had one built in 1936, called a drag lift, to take skiers over level ground from near the Sun Valley Lodge to the Proctor Mountain chair. This was converted into a rudimentary chairlift for Ruud Mountain, without so much as a backrest or a place to rest one’s skis. This gave Sun Valley one of the first lift-serviced slalom courses on the continent.

Ruud Mountain was inaugurated during Christmas 1937 at Sun Valley’s first intercollegiate ski tournament, between Dartmouth (Eastern champions) and the University of Washington (West Coast champions). During a jumping exhibition, Walter Prager (Dartmouth’s coach), Alf Engen and Otto Lang (Washington’s coach) each jumped more than 40 meters, exceeding the hill’s design limit. Prager said the hill offered “one of the finest and toughest slalom courses he had ever seen.” Engen said Sun Valley’s jump “for its size comes nearer to perfection than any yet developed.” And Lang said the jump was “impeccably engineered and groomed... virtually fall-proof… the neatest layout I had ever seen” (The Valley Sun, January 11, 1938) .

In 1938, women were invited to compete in the Harriman Cup for the first time. Grace Carter Lindley from Seattle, a 1936 Olympian, won the women’s Harriman Cup. She said “Ruud Mountain is the perfect slalom hill. Having the tow available for unlimited rides, one can become thoroughly familiar with the contours of the hill, the general layout of the slalom, and most important, one can gauge the conservative speed one can hold without tiring...”

The 1938 Open Jumping Tournament attracted some of the best jumpers in the world, including the famous Ruud brothers from Kongsberg, Norway: Birger (the 1932 and 1936 Olympic gold medalist) and Sigmund. The hill, with its lift, delighted the competitors, “who had been climbing for their skiing all season or jumping off rickety scaffolds on artificial snow” (American Ski Annual, 1938–39).

Before the event kicked off, Engen jumped 50.5 meters. It didn’t count for the competition but stood as the official hill record. Birger Ruud jumped 48 meters to win, and seven jumpers exceeded 40 meters. Norway’s Nils Eie (world intercollegiate champion) placed second “in beautiful form,” Sigurd Ulland (1938 National Ski Jumping Champion) was third, and Alpine ace Dick Durrance finished fourth.

In 1939, Sun Valley hosted the nation’s first National Four-Way Open Tournament. Based on his downhill and slalom results, local ski instructor Peter Radacher won both the Harriman Cup and the Four-Way Open. Engen won the jumping event and finished fourth in the open.

In 1940, an invitational meet attracted 18 jumpers from 10 clubs. Engen made two flawless leaps to win. He turned aside the “keen challenge” of 21-year-old Gordie Wren of Steamboat Springs, who would go on to be a star of the 1948 U.S. Olympic jumping team and become the 1950 National Nordic Combined Champion. “Following the regular competition, the spectators were thrilled by double jumps, particularly the pair leap by Engen and Wren. ... The tournament was unlike others, where the contestants must make laborious climbs uphill to the scaffold, the chair-lift eliminating such strenuous going” (Sun Valley Ski Club Annual, 1939). In 1941, Engen beat Wren again in the third National Four-Way Open Tournament. Engen “displayed his supremacy in the air overwhelmingly” and “demonstrated his all-around skiing proficiency today by soaring to first place in jumping and winning the national four-event combined championship for the second consecutive year” (Sun Valley Ski Club Annual, 1941).

Alf Engen’s Legendary Battles with Torger Tokle

Torger Tokle emigrated from Norway in 1939. Before World War II he won 42 out of 48 tournaments and set three American distance records. Tokle was a power jumper. According to Harold Anson in Jumping Through Time, “his powerful, and precisely timed takeoffs provided him with a sufficient distance point to capture victories over more stylish jumpers.”

Engen won the 1940 National Ski Jumping Championships, while Tokle finished fourth. At the 1940 National Four-Way Championships at the Milwaukee Ski Bowl, east of Seattle, Engen competed in all four disciplines, while Tokle competed only in jumping, where he made the longest distance. Engen won the jumping event on form points and the four-way title.

In 1941, at Iron Mountain, Michigan, Engen jumped 267 feet to break the North American distance record. Two hours later, at Leavenworth, Washington, Tokle set a new record of 273 feet. At the 1941 National Jumping Championships at Milwaukee Ski Bowl, Tokle jumped 288 feet to set his second North American distance record in less than a month. Engen was second. In 1942, Tokle bumped the record up to 289 feet at Iron Mountain.

The 1942 Harriman Cup/International Downhill and Slalom Tournament was won by Barney McLean “after a stiff battle with Alf Engen.” They tied at 268 points, but under Harriman Cup rules, the winner in case of a tie was the downhill victor. Dick Durrance was third, and Tokle did not enter.

Sun Valley’s jumping event that spring showed the skills of Tokle, Engen and a rising new star, Art Devlin of Lake Placid, New York. Devlin went on to become one of the country’s elite jumpers as a member of three U.S. Olympic teams (1948, 1952 and 1956) and the 1946 National Ski Jumping Champion.

Ruud Mountain’s jumping hill was designed for 131-foot jumps, but in 1942 the takeoff was moved back 25 feet to allow for longer distances. Tokle’s “prodigious drive” set a new hill record of 188 feet, leaving “far behind the mark of 164 feet set by Engen, who reeled off a 175-foot jump.” Tokle “is a most powerful jumper and is constantly improving. Undoubtedly he has not yet reached his ultimate peak. ...” Afterwards, the competitors jumped in group formations, from two to eight in the air at one time. The Sun Valley Ski Club Annual, 1942, contained pictures of Engen, Tokle and Devlin demonstrating their skills.

On May 3, 1945, Sgt. Torger Tokle of the 10th Mountain Division was killed in Italy by an artillery shell.

Ruud Mountain after WWII

During WWII, Sun Valley served as a Naval Rehabilitation Hospital, where 6,578 Navy, Marine and Coast Guard patients were treated. The resort reopened in December 1946. Ruud Mountain saw less ski jumping, although it continued to be Sun Valley’s primary site for slalom events until 1961, often featuring side-by-side slalom courses for men and women.

In 1947, final tryouts for the 1948 U.S. Olympic Alpine teams for the St. Moritz Games were held at Sun Valley. Friedl Pfeifer’s slalom course on Ruud Mountain was “a championship course, typical of those in European competition.” Walter Prager and Engen were named co- coaches of the 1948 U.S. Olympic Ski Team. A ski jumping exhibition featured visiting Norwegian skiers Arnholdt Kongsgaard (1947 National Ski Jumping Champion), Fagnar Raklid, Harold Hauge and Gustav Raaum (an exchange student at the University of Washington), as well as established stars Engen, Durrance and Wren. The U.S. Olympic Jumping Team was selected at the Milwaukee Ski Bowl. The team then went to Sun Valley for two weeks of intensive training on Ruud Mountain.

The following year the jumping hill hosted intercollegiate meets and regional interstate meets, plus a junior championship and a Christmas jumping exhibition.

After the 1950 FIS World Alpine Championships at Aspen, racers came to Sun Valley for the National Downhill and Slalom Championships. Otto Lang set two side-by-side slalom courses on Ruud Mountain. A crowd of 400 turned out for a jumping exhibition, featuring University of Washington exchange students Raaum, Gunnar Sunde and Jan Kaier.

In 1951, Sun Valley hosted the final tryouts for the U.S. Olympic Alpine team for the 1952 Winter Games in Oslo, Norway. Side-by-side courses for the slalom events on Ruud Mountain had 32 gates for women and 40 for men. Chris Mohn and Sunde each jumped more than 150 feet in another exhibition of exchange student talent.

By this time, jumping had faded as a spectator draw, and the Ruud Mountain jump was used only for the annual American Legion Junior Three-Way Championships. The last jumping competition there came in 1956.

The 1961 Harriman Cup slalom race was the last held on Ruud Mountain, and it had special significance. Seventeen-year-old Billy Kidd won the slalom when Buddy Werner, winner of the downhill, fell but scrambled up to finish. Jimmie Heuga, also 17, won the Harriman Cup, with Kidd second and Werner third. Dick Dorworth said the 1961 Harriman Cup “will go down in history as the tournament in which youth manifested its right to compete on even terms with the elite of ski racing, as young American racers dominated the events.”

Ski Jumping at Ruud Mountain Ends with a Movie

In 1965, "Ski Party" was filmed at Sun Valley. A lightweight musical-comedy knock-off of beach party films, it starred Frankie Avalon and Dwayne Hickman, with an appearance by Annette Funicello, and musical appearances by Leslie Gore and James Brown. The absurd plot included Frankie Avalon going off the Ruud Mountain jump wearing an inflated clown suit and soaring like a helium balloon. This was the last recorded use of the ski jump. Maintenance records show the Ruud Mountain chairlift was last serviced in 1965, likely for the movie. 

John W. Lundin has won four ISHA Skade Awards for books on the history of Pacific Northwest skiing and Sun Valley.

Can Vail Resorts improve employee and customer relations?

By Seth Masia

From the January-February 2022 issue

(Posted February 12, 2022) Overcrowding and staff shortages at ski resorts first attracted the attention of local and online media at the end of 2021, then in January spread to traditional outlets like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, statewide papers like the Denver Post and Seattle Times, and special interest magazines such as Outside. 

To be fair, resorts faced the same issues as businesses in general: namely labor shortages and slow delivery of inventory. When a shortage-afflicted business takes payment up front, fulfillment and customer services deteriorate. Late delivery angers customers.

That’s what happened at ski resorts this winter. Covid accelerated and exposed long-term trends, creating a perfect storm of employee and customer angst. A booming real estate market and an increase in Airbnb-type short-term rentals pushed the housing shortage from chronic to acute, which, combined with decades of static wages, forced employees into onerous commutes. Many employees simply declined to work that way, and when Covid put remaining employees in isolation, there weren’t enough bodies to shovel or make snow, drive groomers, maintain equipment, bump lifts, patrol and teach, flip burgers, make beds, punch cash registers, fit rental boots and provide childcare. At the same time, skiing seemed a Covid-safe outdoor activity, season passes were cheap, and skier visits on peak days soared. Ski retailers sold out early, highways and parking lots jammed up, and skiers stood in 40-minute lift queues. Skiers tolerate the late arrival of natural snow, but when the snow is great and the lifts don’t turn, they fume.

Vail Resorts was a particular target of consumer fury, incurring an organized protest movement and threats of class-action lawsuits, beginning at Stevens Pass, Washington. There, more than 44,000 skiers signed an online petition calling VR responsible for failure to open lifts and terrain, and about 300 complaints went to Washington’s Attorney General Bob Ferguson. By late January a new general manager, Tom Fortune, was turning the corner, solving some of his staff issues and opening popular backside access. The fixes were simple: more efficient use of available employee housing, increased employee shuttle service and new hiring. VR also offered the resort’s passholders deep discounts to sign up for next winter, and promised to extend the season through April. It’s worth noting that Vail very publicly bumped its minimum wage to $15 per hour in the key states of Colorado, Utah, California and Washington—but in the pre-Covid era VR’s average hourly wage for its roughly 47,000 seasonal employees was around $12 per hour. In mid-January VR offered a $2-an-hour bonus for employees who stay on until the end of the season.

In recent years, VR has set itself up for local disaster. The universal Epic Pass was a huge boon to average skiers, and a tonic to investors; it has transformed the resort industry with one simple, game-changing mantra: Skiing will now be purchased in advance. Meanwhile, VR took steps to bolster the bottom line for shareholders, such as slashing middle-management salaries by centralizing most corporate functions at its Broomfield, Colorado headquarters. The unintended consequence is a corporation slow to react to emerging local problems. Off-site marketing and finance personnel are blind to the nuances of local markets, and local issues. But the bridge too far was the cutback in local human-resources personnel, and the consequent loss of on-site expertise in local recruiting tactics, transportation and housing issues. Payroll functions were moved to an app that didn’t work.

As part of VR’s campaign to maximize margin in every segment, it built retail, lodging, food service and transportation enterprises that compete with local businesses. Building employee housing is always difficult, but alienating prominent locals doesn’t help.

VR cut the price by 20 percent and sold more than 2.1 million Epic Passes last summer, up 76 percent from pre-Covid 2019. According to its December 9 quarterly report, the company sailed into the season holding $1.5 billion in cash. It can well afford to spend what’s needed to fix local problems. Those problems now include settling class-action lawsuits by employees, meeting obligations under new collective bargaining agreements—and fixing housing and transportation issues. While they’re at it, they need affordable learn-to-ski packages for first-timers who get the itch in January, and improved access to free or cheap parking.

The original Vail Associates, from opening day in 1962, set the gold standard for American skiing. Vail offered the best slope grooming in the world. It recruited a top-ranked ski school. Vail’s managers, many of them veterans of the 10th Mountain Division, promoted skiing culture, for example by enlisting well-known skiers like Pepi Gramshammer and Dave and Renie Gorsuch to establish businesses in town, and later, under George Gillett, by bringing the World Championships to town. When the private equity firm Apollo Partners took VR public in 1997, they did what Wall Street always does: managed for shareholder value rather than customer and employee morale. To skiers, it now looks like VR has been cannibalizing VA’s good will.

According to annual reports, in fiscal year 2019 (the last pre-Covid year), VR’s mountain-operations revenue was $1.9 billion, and company-wide gross profit margin (EBITDA) was 36 percent. The National Ski Areas Association Economic Analysis shows the average large North American ski resort EBITDA then at about 26 percent. The difference was not only Vail’s success in selling season passes, but in strict cost control. To solve the employee crunch and relieve skier crowding, VR may have to give back some of that margin. With its 25 percent market share (in skier visits), the sport needs VR to succeed.

Will spending that money affect the stock price? Some 95 percent of VR stock is held by institutional investors, who may not care much about employee and skier morale. Closely held resorts have more freedom of action, and they’ve shown it this season to the benefit of their guests, employees and the communities they operate in. The other major resort conglomerate, Alterra of the Ikon Pass, has from day one taken the decentralized path, ceding control to its individual resorts. Aspen in mid-February gave a $3-an-hour raise to every employee in the company.

Rob Katz, the change-agent who created both the Epic Pass and VR’s 44-resort empire, stepped down as CEO in the fall and is now executive chairman of the board. His handpicked successor, veteran Kirsten Lynch, the data-driven marketer who has brainstormed the Epic Pass metrics, is now in the hot seat. “One of the hallmarks of our company is agility and change,” Lynch told the Wall Street Journal in its January 15 story “Steep Slope for a Ski Empire.” By the time you read this, in March, we’ll have seen how agile VR can be.

Follow-up, March 14: Vail Resorts raises minimum wage to $20 an hour  --Vail Daily

Image at top of page: Skiers on the hook, by Rudiger Fahrner

Catamount/Berkshire East is proud to support ISHA as a corporate sponsor.

Megève celebrates 100 years as the first purpose-built ski resort in France.

Megève, the posh ski resort just off the main road between Geneva and Chamonix, has been managed by the Rothschild banking family for the past century. In fact, the Alpine skiing tradition at Megève owes its origin to the family.

Photo above: The Hotel Mont d'Arbois in the 1930s.

During the First World War, Noémie de Rothschild, wife of financier Baron Maurice de Rothschild, converted her family’s grand home in Paris into a military hospital and worked there for the Red Cross. In 1916 she traveled to St. Moritz, Switzerland, for a ski vacation at Badrutt’s Palace Hotel. The Palace had a distinctly English atmosphere, dating from 1856, which was when proprietor Johannes Badrutt allegedly invited his upper-class British guests to spend the winter.

Ugly encounter in St. Moritz

Because of that tradition, the baroness did not expect to see any Germans during her holiday. Instead, St. Moritz was packed with them. She was horrified to encounter Gustav Krupp, who built artillery and U-boats for the Kaiser (and was a notorious anti-Semite). She stormed out, determined to create a French ski resort—a “Saint-Moritz à la française.”

War won, de Rothschild went exploring with her Norwegian ski instructor from St. Moritz, Trygve Smith (who was also an Olympic tennis player). After a good deal of leg- and survey-work, they settled on the Mont d’Arbois region above Megève, a medieval village in the Haute-Savoie, as the ideal location. In 1920, with the assistance of her father-in-law, Baron Edmond de Rothschild, she set up the Société Française des Hôtels de Montagne (SFHM). Baron Edmond kicked in 100,000 francs, and Noémie bought a family pension. With the help of Parisian architect Jacques-Marcel Auburtin and others, she transformed it into the Hôtel Prima (also affectionally known as the Palace of Snows, or Palais des Neiges), which opened in December 1921.

Skiing tradition

Megève already had something of a skiing tradition. Before the war, the sport had become popular in neighboring Chamonix, just 10 miles away as the crow flies. Megève held its first recorded cross-country ski race in 1914. With the opening of the Hôtel Prima, the town needed a Sports Club, which held its first meetings in 1923. One of the beneficiaries was 11-year-old Emile Allais.

Royal guests

Early guests at the hotel included King Albert and Queen Elisabeth of Belgium, with their children. Albert and Elisabeth vacationed there in 1922 and 1923. They shared Noémie’s values: Albert had personally led the Belgian

Army against the Germans during the war, and Elisabeth had worked as a nurse at the front. Albert was also a keen sportsman–his climbing partner was the St. Moritz skiing pioneer Walter Amstutz (Albert would die in a solo climbing accident in 1934). More royals followed, with predictable benefit for the hotel’s reputation. Noémie reached back to another St. Moritz friend, the Hotel Badrutt’s concierge and 1918 Swiss Nordic Combined champion François Parodi. Parodi was tasked with teaching Noémie ‘s husband to ski. More sportsman than banker, Maurice caught on quickly.

In 1926 the SFHM acquired more property, again with Baron Edmond’s help. Noémie engaged Henry-Jacques Le Even, a young French architect, to build what would become the Hotel Mont d’Arbois. Le Even had very strong design guidelines: stone foundation, structure of Combloux granite, ground floor in Tyrolean plaster, second story in stained fir, southwest alignment, steep roofs and wooden stairs. A skating rink went in in 1929. By then, Noémie was known to locals, fondly, as Baroness Mimi.

First cable-car, 1933

A signal event occurred in 1933 with the opening of Megève’s Rochebrune cable-car. Mont d’Arbois got its own cable-car in 1934. Alpine skiing was becoming a hugely popular sport, and Emile Allais was just two years away from a bronze medal at the Garmisch-Partenkirchen Olympics. He would follow that up with triple gold at the Alpine World Championships at Chamonix in 1937. Meanwhile, another dynasty came into being: Adrien Duvillard, future downhill world champion, was born in 1934. His younger brother and son would become top skiers, too.

When Germany occupied France in the summer of 1940, the Rothschilds fled—Maurice to New York, Noémie to Geneva. The high Alps bordering Switzerland and Italy became hideouts for the Resistance; the people of Megève hosted about 2,000 displaced children, a quarter of them Jews. With Liberation, by August 1944 American forces began using Megève’s hotels as rest-and-recreation centers for recuperating airmen. A year later, Parisians were ready to resume the custom of winter holidays in the Alps. Ski racing restarted and a new downhill course, named for Emile Allais, became one of the highlights of the FIS Alpine season. It proved wickedly dangerous, however, and was dropped from the World Cup schedule in 1975, after the 1970 death of 19-year-old Michel Bozon.

In 1955, at age 67, the Baroness turned over management of the hotels to her only son, Edmond. Baron Maurice died in 1957, and Edmond assumed the title. Instead of royalty, the new Baron focused on bringing in the newly emerging “jet set” of film stars and tycoons (Boeing 707s entered commercial service in 1958). In addition to throwing up many new lifts, Edmond established an altiport at the foot of the Radaz lift. His wealthy guests could then fly from Paris straight to the snow. He also established a golf course and renovated a dozen more chalets.

Baroness Noémie passed away in 1968 at age 79. On the death of Baron Edmond in 1997, leadership of the Domain du Mont d’Arbois passed to his wife, Nadine.

Today the resort is operated by Baron Benjamin de Rothschild, the only son of Nadine and Edmond, and his wife, Ariane. The complex of 88 lifts serves three peaks, with a gondola to the town of St. Gervais. The hotels and restaurants are as stylish as ever, the skiing nonthreatening and below tree line, and there’s a gorgeous view of Mont Blanc. 

Author Bob Soden, of Montreal, wrote about the Laurentian Ski Museum in the September-October 2021 issue. He serves as ISHA’s treasurer.

Meet the folks who built Aspen’s first chairlifts, 75 years ago.

Aspen Mountain celebrates its 75th anniversary of lift-served slopes this winter, but the area’s skiing history started well before that. In 1899, cut off from supplies by a fierce snowstorm, miners fashioned crude skis from the board walls of their homes and schussed down to Aspen. According to the Aspen Historical Society, the refugees dubbed their escape the first race of the “Hunter’s Pass Ski Club.”

Photo above: The lower mountain in 1947, shows Roch Run and Lift One. To the right of Roch Run is the cut path of the boat tow, which carried skiers through 1946 when Lift One was opened. Aspen Historical Society photo.

Most of the mines closed, but skiing survived. In 1936, several skiers, including Swiss mountaineer André Roch, planned a ski area at Mount Hayden, a few miles southwest of Aspen (see Skiing History, March-April 2021). Roch also plotted the first ski run on Aspen Mountain that year, and it was cut the following summer. Skiers could skin up or catch a ride up the backside on mining trucks. Starting in January 1938, the eight-seat “boat tow” ran 600 feet up the front. The boat was a pair of sleds, hauled by a cable along old mine hoists, powered by a Studebaker engine. Skiers built a warming hut and even a 55-meter ski jump.

“From a local perspective, Aspen was already known as a ski place,” says Tim Willoughby, a former schoolteacher who grew up in town and now contributes a weekly history column to the Aspen Times. He adds that ski clubs came from around the country to race, and the national downhill and slalom championships took place on Roch Run in 1941.

Pfeifer meets the Paepckes

Friedl Pfeifer, an Arlberg-Kandahar combined champion and wounded 10th Mountain Division vet, knew Aspen from his time teaching troops at Camp Hale. He envisioned a full-fledged ski resort on Aspen Mountain and returned there after getting out of the hospital in August 1945. By December, partnered with John Litchfield and Percy Rideout, he had a ski school operating, served by a new rope tow as well as the boat tow.

At the same time—the summer of 1945—outdoorswoman and skier Elizabeth Nitze Paepcke brought her husband, Chicago industrialist Walter Paepcke, to Aspen. Paepcke envisioned a cultural center capable of attracting artists, musicians and

intellectuals to a mountain retreat. He immediately invested more than $10,000 in bargain-priced downtown real estate. According to the Chicago Tribune (January 28, 2001), in order to assure the success of his investments and his cultural center, Paepcke threw in with Pfeifer’s ski-resort proposal.

Paepcke, Pfeifer, Litchfield and Rideout formed the Aspen Ski Corporation in 1946. Paepcke undertook to raise $300,000 for lift construction, mostly among Chicago investors. As

they planned the lifts, the new partners had to negotiate leases with the owners of mining claims scattered around the mountain. Denver attorney Bill Hodges was hired to help with the process, and became an investor. Many of the claims belonged to D.R.C. “Darcy” Brown Jr., who then invested in the Ski Corp., too.

Local crews pitch in

In summer 1946, construction began on two single-chair lifts that together would ferry skiers more than 3,000 vertical feet to the summit, opening a vast swath of terrain and creating one of the country’s premier ski destinations. A September 1946 article in the Aspen Daily Times reported that Lift 1 would be the world’s longest (at 8,400 feet in distance) and fastest chair (550 feet/minute), as well as the one with the most capacity (275 riders/hour) and largest vertical rise (2,400 feet). The lifts would serve more than 22 miles of ski trails.

As lift lines were cleared and construction started, a trail crew headed by Litchfield and Rideout cut new runs and widened Roch Run. Wrote the Aspen Times in 1945, “Contrary to the popular belief that skiing on Aspen Mountain will be only for the above average, there will be many places on the upper slopes … that will satisfy and delight every class of ability.”

Delayed parts

The transformation into a ski hill overlapped the end of the mining era. Willoughby’s uncle, Frank, a mining engineer and president of the ski club, surveyed the lift lines. Willoughby’s father, Fred Jr., worked in the family’s Midnight Mine on the mountain’s backside, and helped oversee construction of Lifts 1 and 2. As Willoughby relates, the lift tower foundations had been prepped, but the towers themselves were delayed and didn’t arrive until late in October, when snow had already begun to fall.

Paul Purchard, a Swiss-born engineer then living in Denver, designed some of the Lift 1 components. His future son-in-law Harry Poschman, a 10th Mountain veteran, worked on the construction crew pushing to get the chairs in place for the winter. “He said it was miserable work,” said Harry's son Greg Poschman, today a Pitkin County Commissioner. “They got the last bullwheels on as the snow was flying.”

Then the Lift 1 electric motor didn’t show up (partially due to a post-war copper shortage), and a backup gasoline engine ran it the first winter. When Fred Willoughby became superintendent of lift operations, he had to go partway up the mountain every morning to fire up the engine (an electric motor could have been turned on from the base). Meanwhile, Lift 2 had a money-saving design that used recycled mining-tram parts. “The whole winter my father kept fixing that lift,” says Tim Willoughby. The next season, Fred Jr. was back with the family business. “He was a miner,” Willoughby adds. “Running the ski lifts wasn’t what he wanted to do.”

The mountaintop Sundeck, an innovative octagonal day lodge designed by prominent Bauhaus architect Herbert Bayer, was completed in November.

When Lift 1 debuted on December 14, 1946, rides were free for the day; afterward, a day pass cost $3.75 ($1.50 for locals), about $53 and $21 in today’s money. Lift 2 opened the following week. On January 11, 1947, the official grand opening took place, with Colorado’s Governor-elect William Lee Knaus, Senator Edwin Johnson, other dignitaries and a slew of media on hand.

45-minute ride

A ride to the summit via the two chairs lasted 45 minutes. Skiers shivered with cold. A yellow, wool-lined canvas tarp covered the chair, with a poncho-style hole for the passenger’s head, recalls Marilyn Wilmerding, whose father, Bill Hodges, served as Ski Corp. president from 1951 to 1957. “We all wore raccoon coats that we found at the thrift shop,” she adds. Once off the lift, “you’d take off your fur coat, throw it on the chair, and it would go back down. There was a big, flat table at the bottom of the mountain with a pile of these fur coats. You’d rifle through them and find yours, then put it back on and get in line for the lift.”

The long, frigid lift rides inspired Klaus Obermeyer, who arrived in Aspen in late 1947, to design and sell his first down jackets.

By the second season of lift-served skiing, the new Little Nell run had been cleared at the base to accommodate beginners, served by a T-bar. Friedl Pfeifer had resigned as head of the Ski Corp., though he continued to lead the ski school, which was a separate entity. Aspen was on its way to becoming a celebrated ski destination. In 1950, thanks to the lobbying efforts of Frank Willoughby and Ski Corp. general manager Dick Durrance, the FIS World Alpine Championships came to Aspen, the first time the event was held outside of Europe.

Not everyone shared the enthusiasm. Even before the lifts opened, some locals worried that a sport catering to the rich would lead to inflated prices and an insurmountable class divide. “There is a possible danger in the current campaign to dust off and refurbish the mining camps of yesteryear,” wrote columnist Lee Casey in a 1946 Rocky Mountain News opinion piece titled “Worry About Aspen.” He warned of “Sun Valley prices” and an “invidious distinction” between wealthy tourists and locals.

Aspen attracted an eclectic mix of new residents drawn by the developing economic base, new cultural organizations like the Aspen Music Festival and the charm of a remote and scenic community. Recalls Poschman, “It was a place for refugees, heirs and heiresses thrown out of their families, gay people shunned by their East Coast families. The stories my parents would tell.” He adds, “There were former German soldiers who were skiers, next to 10th Mountain guys, all drinking beer together in the Red Onion.”

Ski bum life

Poschman’s parents met as young ski bums in Alta and became engaged in the summer of 1946, when Harry was working on the Aspen lift-building crew. They moved to town full time in 1950 and ran the Edelweiss Inn out of an old Victorian on Main Street before building their own lodge, with Swiss-style chalets, later in the decade.

“We thought it was the most wonderful way to make a living in the world,” says Jony Larrowe (Greg Poschman’s mother). Larrowe skied for a few hours whenever she could get a babysitter, and Harry instructed in Pfeifer’s ski school, by that time co-directed by Fred Iselin. “Aspen became pretty famous, pretty fast,” says Larrowe. Most of the early Edelweiss guests came from Texas and elsewhere in Colorado and included college students, who paid just $2.75 a night if they brought a sleeping bag.

Larrowe’s own experience to the contrary, she says that skiing was still more of a man’s sport in the early 1950s and that lodge guests were “either single men or families who loved to ski and wanted their kids to learn how.”

Of course, Aspen kids didn’t have to wait for a family vacation to tackle the slopes. “The first time I skied Aspen Mountain was in 1949,” says rancher Tony Vagneur, whose great-grandparents settled in the area in the 1880s. “I was three years old.” Vagneur remembers struggling with too-long skis as he descended the Little Nell run. Too small to ride the T-bar, he needed someone else to pull him up the hill.

By first grade, Vagneur and friend Jimmie Johnson were skiing together every weekend, covering most of the mountain. “Every run was an adventure,” he says. “It probably still is for kids today.”

The elementary school released kids early on Wednesdays, and they could either ski on Aspen Mountain, ice skate or go to study hall. Vagneur, no surprise, opted to ski. When Vagneur was in fifth grade, his father worked on the mountain, running Lift 2 from its bottom station. Vagneur would sneak a ride up Lift 1 with his father in the early morning, then ski down and head to school—until the time mountain manager Red Rowland caught him doing it. “He was at Midway [at the top of Lift 1] when I got off the lift that morning, and he said, ‘What are you doing here?’” relates Vagneur. “He made me quit.”

Vagneur spent seven years on ski patrol in the 1970s and today gives weekly history ski tours on behalf of the Aspen Historical Society. Despite the addition of lifts and a gondola, as well as more runs, “It still seems like the same place to me,” he says. “I start down the top of Copper and think, ‘Yeah, I’m home.’ It’s kind of like walking up the sidewalk to your house.”

Darcy Brown took over as president of the Ski Corp. in 1957, and his daughter Ruthie Brown grew up skiing Aspen Mountain. One of the resort’s best-known trails, Ruthie’s Run, is named after Darcy’s wife. As Brown tells it, her mother didn’t like skiing the standard route down the mountain. So she asked Red Rowland to cut a new trail for her. Ruthie’s Run opened to the public in December 1948. “It’s flowing and has great views of Aspen,” says Brown. “And my mother loved the sun. It gets the last sun of the day.”

Marilyn Wilmerding’s family came to Aspen on weekends and holidays, and during the summer, as her father fulfilled many of his Ski Corp. responsibilities from Denver. The Hodges first shared ownership of a Victorian with the Robinson and Coors families, then built an A-frame on Red Mountain, where Wilmerding lives today. As a young girl, she skied Aspen Mountain every chance she had. Angling for first chair each morning, she and her brother would arrive at the base of Lift 1 at 7 a.m. and line up their skis, then eat breakfast at the nearby Skier’s Chalet and board the lift when it opened at 9 a.m. “We would ski until the very end of the day,” she says.

After skiing, Wilmerding says, “Everyone would gather at the Hotel Jerome. Kids would run up one set of stairs in the lobby and down the other. It was like our own little club.” Dinners out were at the Red Onion, and the Isis Theatre showed the latest movies. She also remembers her parents going to lively parties at the “Pink House,” owned by the Browns. “It was a magical time to be here,” Wilmerding says. “Aspen has marked so many people, hasn’t it?”

Indeed, those heady early days of lift-served skiing launched Aspen on a trajectory that’s soared beyond what anyone may have imagined 75 years ago. And whether they were miners, ranchers, 10th Mountain veterans, ski visionaries or souls in search of a beautiful and free-wheeling place to live, residents during the first years of the new era were indelibly affected—perhaps none more so than the people who labored to create the new ski area.

Twenty-five years after the lifts opened on Aspen Mountain, in 1971, Lift 1A replaced Lift 1, starting farther uphill. Tim Willoughby relates seeing a photo in the Aspen Times of a helicopter removing the original lift towers. “I was with my father, who was living in California at that point,” he says. “He just looked at the photo: ‘I spent a whole year building that sucker, and in something like four hours they pulled it all out.’ It was one of his great achievements in life, and in a few hours, it was gone.” 

Author Cindy Hirschfeld is editor-in-chief of Cross Country Skier magazine. She spent six years as chief editor, successively, at Aspen Magazine and Aspen Sojourner.

Photo above: Tracks across Sterling Pond show the way from Smuggs to Spruce. The reverse trip is all downhill. 

For Alpine skiers, “interconnect” is a route connecting two separate lift networks. The granddaddy of all interconnects, created in 1956, may be the trail between the top of Stowe’s Spruce Mountain and the summit of Sterling Mountain at Smugglers’ Notch. It’s still possible to ski both resorts the same day, although the experience is no longer encouraged by the two Vermont ski areas.

It’s not marked, nor patrolled, and skiers are advised against trekking alone. Still, this little-known half-mile link between resorts continues to delight intermediate to advanced skiers with a taste of easily accessible backcountry that harkens back to when skiing was a true adventure pursued on rudimentary equipment.

Home to Colorful Characters

Smugglers’ Notch derives its name from a history filled with shady characters.

From 1807 until the War of 1812, the U.S. Congress placed an embargo on all British imports, which was a hardship for American farmers and merchants who needed manufactured goods. So “importers” smuggled British merchandise from Canada, through what is today called Smugglers’ Notch Pass. State Route 108 now follows that trail.

More than 100 years later, the Notch was again used for smuggling when the 18th Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibited the manufacture and sale of alcohol. Bootleggers moved booze through Smugglers’ Notch Pass and from there south to central and southern New England. Caverns in the Notch were ideal for storing alcohol at close to room temperature, while the smugglers avoided revenue agents. Visitors today can still visit the caves.

Alpine skiing came to Stowe with construction of downhill trails by the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1933. In 1935, the old 1919 Toll House was converted to a real base lodge. Sepp Ruschp supervised construction of lifts in 1937. Starting in 1949, Ruschp developed the sunny slopes of Spruce Peak, across the road from Mt. Mansfield, starting with a T-bar.

In 1954, Spruce constructed a double chair to access the Outlook Restaurant perched on the summit, with stunning views to the south.

Calling it a restaurant is being charitable: it had no running water, no electricity and no restrooms, according to Stowe ski area historian Brian Lindner, son of a forest ranger, whose bedroom was in the original base lodge.

Beginning in 1956, adventurous skiers who followed the Long Trail half a mile northward from the Spruce Peak patrol shack (elevation 3,250 feet, 991m) could cross frozen Sterling Pond (3,040 feet, 927m) and ski down the other side to the new Madonna Base Lodge at Smugglers’ Notch ski area. They could then ride a pair of Poma lifts back to the top of Sterling Mountain (3,080 feet, 939m) and reverse course back to Spruce.

Reciprocal Ticket Offered

In the 1990s, Stowe and Smuggs, as Smugglers’ Notch is still called by locals, offered a reciprocal ticket based on a multi-day ticket purchase, used to bolster non-holiday midweek vacations. It was an effective marketing novelty, but Smugglers’ Notch vice president of marketing Steve Clokey says, “They stopped promoting it due to the logistical headaches of grooming, patrolling, and the skill levels of those who were experiencing an intermediate-plus level experience.”

What’s more, when an accident occurred in the mid-1990s, Stowe and Smugglers’ executives became even less enamored with marketing off-piste skiing.

“A Stowe snowcat driver didn’t calculate the turn radius correctly and extended the cat too far onto the ice,” Clokey tells Skiing History.  “The cat broke into shallow water and was stuck on the side of the pond. It was pulled out that night and the incident was reported to the proper authorities.” 

SKI magazine writer Steve Cohen took his family across in 1998. In his story “Ski East: Going over the Top,” (Dec. 1998) he reports, “The two trails connecting Stowe and Smugglers’ are marked with green circles and require more in the way of conditioning than ski skills; parts of the traverse are so flat we needed to herringbone and skate. Still, the 15-minute jaunt has joined two very different worlds.”

Pretty Tame

Today, the Stowe-Smuggs Interconnect trail is only open when Sterling Pond is frozen—some seasons as early as the first week of December.

From Smuggs, it takes about 20 minutes to pole across Sterling Pond and then descend into a meandering narrow trail that rolls easily to the Sterling trail on Stowe’s Spruce Peak. Take that down. Then, from the base of Spruce, take the Sensation high-speed quad back up to the peak. Ski Snuffy’s trail to the peak of Sterling Mountain, then take Rumrunner to Smuggs base. You’re back where you started in less than an hour, roundtrip.

“The toughest part is having to trek the flat surface of Sterling Pond—a little work-out but then it’s all downhill to the base of Spruce,” says Clokey.

Adds Stowe resort historian Brian Lindner, “It’s a pretty tame trail, except for some drop-offs, and is as narrow as a one-lane road. It harkens back to the way skiing used to be when I started as a kid in the 1950s, but I certainly don’t miss that vintage ski equipment.

“During my first experience with the Stowe-Smuggs Interconnect, it was 1960 and I was around eight years old. The best gear available at the time was wooden skis and leather boots. I realize now skiing was much more dangerous back then. The improvement in gear has made skiing so much better and safer. “Don’t ever make me ski in beartraps again,” he jokes.

Apparently, that’s another kind of ski adventure entirely.

ISHA board member Jeff Blumenfeld, of Boulder, Colo., is president of the North American Snowsports Journalists Association (NASJA.org). He remembers skiing the interconnect as a kid in the 1960s. The trail seemed a whole lot scarier.

Snapshots in Time

1960 Ski Like a Girl

Pretty Penny Pitou is the likeliest American bet for an Olympic gold medal. But unlike the hapless U.S. men’s team, which lost all of its chances when Buddy Werner broke his leg, the women’s team could win with any of its six girls. —“Pretty girls of highly promising American Team get set for Winter Olympics,” which profiled Pitou, Renie Cox, Linda Meyers, Joan Hannah, Beverly Anderson and Betsy Snite before the 1960 Squaw Valley Games. (Life magazine, February 1960)

1969 Ski and Smell the Roses

“South Americans are like Europeans. It’s important to have fun and watch the scenery,” said Othmar Schneider, the former Olympic slalom champion who heads the 13-instructor ski school at Portillo, 55 miles northeast of Santiago. “Americans are more serious. They are too involved in skiing and don’t see the scenery.” —Enid Nemy, “Where Ski Buffs Migrate in Summer” (New York Times, August 31, 1969)

1971 Plowed into Oblivion?

Currently, the most widely taught method, The American System, can, in my opinion, be a woefully long process that starts the beginner in the venerable “snowplow” position and frequently leaves him there for life. —Stan Fischler, “The Ski’s the Limit” (New York magazine, November 1971.)

1985 Booting Up

By the time ski shops call it a season this year, they will for the first time have sold more rear-entry than traditional boots. Although this is no great surprise, it still represents a major shift in our boot-buying habits. Five years ago, rear-entry boots were still exotic footwear for skiers who wanted something different. This season, they’re commonplace. —John Henry Auran, “Rear Entry Redux” (Skiing magazine, Spring 1985)

1990 Fear Is My Copilot

Fear is a constant companion. The racers themselves admit freely that this is “the race of fear,” head and shoulders above any other test of concentration, skill and plain ordinary guts in the world. Dr. Sepp Sulzberger, who raced it long before it reached legendary status, reports that racers in his era would lose bladder and sometimes bowel control right at the start. —Serge Lang, “The World’s Toughest Race” on the Hahnenkamm downhill. (Snow Country magazine, January 1990)

2008 Skiing Real Estate Not Recession-Proof

After years of rising prices, ski-town real estate has cooled. Sales were down as much as 50 percent across all resort markets in the first half of 2008. “The resort market could not be sustained,” said James Chung, a New York real estate consultant for the ski industry. “People aren’t buying stupidly anymore.” —Paul Tolme, “Mountains of Real Estate” (SKI Magazine, October 2008)

2021 High-Class Aspen Caper

Thieves cut a hole in the storeroom wall of the Louis Vuitton store in downtown Aspen and stole as much as $500,000 worth of merchandise, police said. One man and one woman, along with two vehicles, were caught on surveillance video. The thieves entered an unlocked hallway at the back of the store and cut a hole in the drywall just large enough for one person to enter. —Jason Auslander, “Aspen’s Louis Vuitton store targeted in brazen $500k burglary” (Aspen Times, June 8, 2021)

Must-Read for Sun Valley Fans

Skiing Sun Valley is a deeply researched, scholarly book about the connections between the Sun Valley of today and the people, places, cultures, economics, wars, inventions, wilderness, ecology, risks and personal relationships in the 19th and 20th centuries that made it what it will be in the 21st. Every aspect of the story is accompanied by an abundance of photos that on their own are worth the price of the book. Every person with a connection to and love for Sun Valley will be better informed, inspired and wiser after reading it.

The first paragraph of the epilogue says it all: Sun Valley has had a history like no other ski resort, since Averell Harriman started it in 1936 as a tool to restore passenger revenue for the Union Pacific Railroad in the middle of the Great Depression, saying, “We didn’t run it to make money; we ran it to be a perfect place.” Sun Valley had a monopoly on skiing grandeur for several decades, and it influenced areas that were developed later. In its over 80 years of existence, the resort has had only three owners, each showering it with love, support, and money, and each taking it to a higher level.

Skiing is a microcosm of the larger world, and Skiing Sun Valley explores some of its racism, sexism, inequality and Nazi connections, as well as its better-known ties to Hollywood glamour and celebrities from world and U.S. politics, economics, athletics, cuisine and crime. These dynamics are still alive in the world, but the reader learns how Sun Valley has contributed to making it a better place than it was in 1936.

The profound and lasting impact Sun Valley has had on American and world Alpine ski racing, backcountry skiing, Nordic racing, ski jumping and freestyle skiing is more rigorously and clearly explored in this book than in any other.

There are enough typos, misspellings (my favorite is Monroc for Monroe, as in Marilyn) and errors in attribution of sources to show that the book was not as deeply copyedited or proofread as it was researched. Some of my own work is included in the book, where there are mistakes in attribution. One excerpt I don’t remember writing, and which is not the sort of material I would write, is attributed to something I did write—but that excerpt is not in it. Like every history, Skiing Sun Valley is not perfect—but it is a must-read for Sun Valley aficionados.

Skiing Sun Valley begins with this:

This book is dedicated to filmmaker and philosopher Warren Miller (1924–2018). Warren will always be associated with Sun Valley through his ski movies and his early days living in a freezing cold trailer in a parking lot at the resort with the approval of Sun Valley’s manager Pat Rogers, who felt Warren offered “local color.” He inspired my generation to seek freedom through skiing. When I was growing up, the ski season in Seattle did not start until Warren showed his new movie. He asked people to ski their favorite run when they heard of his death. His was Christmas Ridge at Sun Valley. Thanks for the memories.

And ends with this: Sun Valley, like all ski areas, faces severe challenges from global climate change. In the last few decades, 272 ski areas have closed in the United States, more than a third of the country’s total, because they could no longer count on sufficient snow. Snow conditions that currently exist at 6,000 feet will rise to 7,000 feet by 2025. A two-degree Celsius temperature change means ski resorts will have 32 fewer days each season for snowmaking at 7,400 feet. “Ski resorts are going to have to reconfigure their operations to get skiers and boarders higher than they currently go,” according to one environmental planner. “Then they are going to have to figure out a way to get them back to the bottom—a bottom that may be more mud than snow in another 30 years. Some resorts may have to go to plastic grass that can be skied on year round.” No matter what happens in the future, Sun Valley will remain one of the world’s great ski areas and a lasting memorial to the vision of Averell Harriman, as enhanced by Bill Janss and the Holding family. 

Skiing Sun Valley: A History from Union Pacific to the Holdings by John W. Lundin. Published by History Press (2020), 528 page, hardcover, $50; Winner 2021 ISHA Skade Award.

Resorts: From CCC-cut trails to a new gondola, the state-owned ski area has become a public-works success story. 

Photo above: Opening day in January 1950, launched the first chairlift in New York State. The Roebling single was built by the New Jersey company that built the Brooklyn Bridge. Belleayre Mountain photo.

On Christmas Eve 2020, as Belleayre Ski Area was settling into operation under Covid-19 restrictions, six inches of rain fell overnight. Christmas dawn revealed that a wet-snow avalanche had cascaded through the windows and across the floor of the upper-mountain Overlook Lodge. The resort closed for two days. The lower base lodge was not affected.

It hasn’t always been easy going for Belleayre, the Catskills ski area owned and operated by New York State. But over the past four years, the state has come through with $25 million to build a bottom-to-top gondola and a new quad lift, plus other upgrades. After 70 years, the resort’s viability seems assured.

Just a two-hour drive north of the George Washington Bridge, and in the heart of the Catskills resort region, Belleayre has always had the advantage of location. Partly because of the state’s involvement, in 1950 it became the first chairlift-served ski area in New York. But as a public entity, Belleayre has had a complex legal history.

Partly to assure clean water for New York City, the state instituted a “Forever Wild” article in the state constitution in 1895. That was amended by referendum in November 1941 to allow construction of a ski area on Marble Mountain near Lake Placid (see Skiing History, May-June 2015). World War II halted work on that ambitious project.

Maltby Shipp of nearby Newburgh, with his son, gained local fame in 1929 as the first to hike up and ski down Belleayre’s 2,000 vertical feet, and the Civilian Conservation Corp cleared a trail—one of seven Catskill ski trails cut during the Depression years.

Returning WWII veterans led the resurgence of interest in skiing, and beginning in 1945, the Central Catskills Association, a group of local business and civic leaders, pushed for the development of a state-owned ski area that would add winter recreation to this already popular summer tourist destination. In 1947, the state passed legislation to allow additional ski area development at Belleayre and at North Creek.

Skiing was just an extension of what New York was already doing, according to Lowell Thomas, then the spokesman for the state’s Chamber of Commerce: “Both ski centers should offer in winter the same sort of inexpensive recreation as Jones Beach offers in the summer,” he said.

The construction of the ski area started in 1949 under the supervision of Art Draper. A Harvard graduate and New York Times reporter, Draper fled the city in 1938 to become a forest ranger. He helped to launch the Marble Mountain project, then, at the relatively advanced age of 32, he volunteered for the 10th Mountain Division and saw heavy combat as a medic. He would serve as Belleayre’s first superintendent, the state’s quaint term for what anyone else would call a general manager. 

The state allocated the manpower and $250,000 to build three main trails, a summit lodge, a temporary base lodge, a cafeteria, a workshop, a mile of access road and a 400-car parking lot.

Draper brought in Otto Schniebs, the one-time Dartmouth ski coach, who by then was living in Lake Placid and coaching the St. Lawrence University ski team. In the 1930s he had been involved in the layout of the Thunderbird race trail on Mt. Greylock in the Berkshires and then in planning for Marble Mountain. He would advise on Belleayre’s trails and lifts layout.

Draper also brought to Belleayre Dot Hoyt Nebel, whom he knew from North Creek, where she had been the director of the Ski Bowl Ski School (Ski Bowl got a rope tow in 1935, to serve ski-train tourists). A math teacher turned ski racer, Nebel had been selected to the U.S. Alpine team for the cancelled 1940 Winter Olympics and during the war taught skiing at Pico Peak, where she was Andrea Mead’s first race coach. She was not impressed with the trail layout proposed for Belleayre. Nebel believed the ski trails should follow the fall line. And she knew how to make that happen. “You just go to the top of the mountain and drop a ball,” she said years later. “You see where it goes and that is where you make the trail.”  She would remain at Belleayre for 17 years as head of the ski school. The Dot Nebel is a black-diamond run at the mountain today.

At the opening on January 22, 1950, Belleayre featured an electric rope tow and a 3,000-foot long Roebling single chair, the first chairlift in New York State. There wasn’t enough snow to ski that day but several hundred sightseers rode the lift for free. Enough snow arrived in February for Belleayre to co-host the New York State Alpine Combined Championships (the other co-host was Highmount, a rope-tow area on the north side of Belleayre, founded in 1947). The cost of the Belleayre lift ticket that winter was $3.50. 

Belleayre grew in the next decades and its separate lower mountain beginner terrain was especially popular. In the meantime, the Marble Mountain ski area had proven a wind-scoured bust. With Draper in the lead, supported by Gov. Averell Harriman, the state opened nearby Whiteface in 1956. Gore Mountain opened in 1964.

At the time, the three ski areas were managed by New York’s Department of Conservation. The state’s budget year ended on March 31, and that meant each of the areas closed on that date, no matter what the snow conditions at the time. 

In 1974, after years of trying, Lake Placid was awarded the 1980 Winter Olympics. Leading up to the games, the state ponied up millions of dollars for facilities upgrades. There wasn’t much money for the other two state areas.  

Then the games were over.

New York State officials had paid attention to the aftermath of the 1960 Olympics. Twenty years later little evidence remained at Squaw Valley that the event had ever occurred. To assure that its investment would be preserved and utilized, in 1981 New York’s legislature created the Olympic Regional Development Authority (ORDA) to manage and market the Lake Placid facilities. The first CEO was Ned Harkness, a prominent hockey coach and facilities executive, who served until 1993.

While the Olympic facilities got the attention, Belleayre and Gore were initially left out of ORDA. Facilities had aged and snowmaking, the lifeblood of Eastern skiing, was minimal. Gore was folded into ORDA in 1984, but at the same time the state comptroller recommended closure of Belleayre. Governor Mario Cuomo budgeted only $100,000 for the area, just enough to shut it down.

A grassroots organization, the Coalition to Save Belleayre, quickly sprang up, headed by Joe Kelly, a New York City securities industry executive and long-time Catskills second-home owner. Thirteen thousand people signed a petition to save the ski area.

The New York Times and the New York Post were the two most prominent newspapers to run editorials supporting Belleayre. The economic impact of the ski area on the regional economy was a major argument. It worked. Before the end of 1984, the decision to close Belleayre was reversed. Over the next eight years, the state allocated $6 million to upgrade machinery and equipment at the area. In 1987, voters approved another constitutional amendment allowing expansion of the ski terrain and improvements to the trail layout.

Finally, in 2012, ORDA took over Belleayre, under a blended board of directors that includes representation from all three state-owned ski areas. It seems to be a good arrangement. Belleayre now has expanded snowmaking to cover 96 percent of the terrain, which includes 50 trails spread over 175 acres, plus increased base lodge capacity. With the Catskill Thunder gondola installed in 2017 and a new detachable quad lift in 2020, the future of the area seems solid. Avalanches notwithstanding. 

Phil Johnson is a ski columnist for the Syracuse Daily Gazette. His last Skiing History article was a visit with Hunter Mountain’s Karl Plattner (May-June 2017).