Resorts

Maple Valley offered a variety of ski trails on its 1,000-foot vertical drop served by two chairlifts and a T-bar, as shown in this late 1980s trail map.

New Beginning for Maple Valley

Lost Vermont ski area starts over as a brewery…with a long-term plan to bring skiing back. By Jeremy Davis

Over the last few decades, many of Vermont’s former ski areas have reopened or found new life as backcountry slopes. Magic, Ascutney and the private High Pond are now lift-served again, while Dutch Hill, Hogback and Timber Ridge (with permission) are available for hike-to skiing. Maple Valley, a lost ski area in the southeast corner of the state, will soon begin its own renaissance.

Located on Sugar Mountain, Maple Valley was a classic family ski area. It was built by the Pirovane brothers, who owned the North Haven (CT) Construction Company, along with Terry Tyler. Opening in 1963, the first lifts included a beginner’s T-bar and chairlift. Five trails ran from the summit on a 1,000-foot vertical drop.

 

 

Maple Valley’s location off Route 30, fifteen minutes north of Brattleboro and I–91 and a gateway to other southern Vermont ski areas, made it easily accessible to skiers from western Massachusetts and Connecticut. Crowds became common, and in 1966, another chairlift was added to relieve lift lines. In the 1970s, snowmaking helped alleviate a lack of natural snow at this low-elevation ski area.

Peaking in popularity in the early 1970s, Maple Valley changed little into the 1980s, and in 1988 financial difficulties closed the ski area for a year and it was auctioned off. New owners reopened the area for the 1989–1990 season and made some modest improvements, including a halfpipe. More financial problems ensued, and the ski area closed in 1996.

Maple Valley was sold at a foreclosure auction the following year to Frank Mercede and Son Inc., owned by Nick Mercede. It reopened for one final season in 1999–2000 on a limited basis.

Over the next decade, Mercede made plans to rejuvenate the property. But it needed significant investment to compete with larger ski areas 45 minutes to the northwest, and his plans to add off-season activities like concerts and mountain biking did not receive local approval. Maple Valley remained dormant.

That’s all about to change. Sugar Mountain Holdings, an investment group led by Keane Aures, purchased the former ski area and base lodge on May 23, 2018 for $745,000. The group has initial plans to open a craft brewery and distillery made with Vermont products inside the former base lodge.

The lodge, while in need of renovations, is structurally sound. Its interior features plenty of natural wood with large windows overlooking the ski slopes. Existing tables will be reused for seating. The group also intends to make the entire building energy efficient. An iconic giant trail map on the exterior, visible to drivers on Route 30, will be cleaned up and remain on display.

The new owners are optimistic that the process of slowly reopening the ski area could begin in the next several years, depending on the success of the brewery. Dormant since 2000, the slopes are overgrown. The archaic diesel-powered chairlifts, although spun a few times for maintenance in the last two decades, are now most likely beyond the point of salvage. In addition, flash flooding caused damage to the lower slopes in the past year.

Although the brewery and distillery are the main priorities, some of the former ski trails may be cleared so backcountry skiers can earn their turns and hikers can ascend in warmer months. In five to ten years, the existing lifts could be removed and replaced with a single chairlift to the summit, along with new snowmaking. The aim is to eventually make Maple Valley an authentic throwback ski area — a unique alternative to the larger areas not far away. And while skiers may chuckle at the concept of a beer-fueled ski operation, it’s nothing new. Fred Pabst, heir to the famous Milwaukee brewing family, founded nearby Bromley and created the country’s first skiing conglomerate when he owned 16 small ski areas in the Midwest, East and Canada. Pabst, a member of the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame who died in 1977, was a snowmaking pioneer and innovator with lifts.
Sugar Mountain Holdings is intent in building good relationships with the local community, where it already has obtained local permits. State approval is currently pending.

It will take a long time for Maple Valley to be a full-fledged ski area again. But by the end of 2020, Maple Valley hopes to welcome visitors, this time to enjoy a craft brew or drink in a classic Vermont setting. Readers can follow Sugar Mountain’s progress at sugarmountainvt.com, where details on the development will be posted.

So Long, Squaw Valley?

Squaw Valley Ski Resort in California may change its name to remove the word “squaw,” a derogatory term for Native American women. As coast-to-coast protests forced a national reckoning about racial inequality in America, resort president and CEO Ron Cohen said in mid-July that the company was taking inventory of the many places that the name appears — both on and off the property — and assessing how much it would cost and how to manage the switch. California tribes have requested this move many times over the years, but only now is the proposal gaining traction.

Derived from the Algonquin word for “woman,” over time the word evolved into a misogynist and racist epithet, said Vanessa Esquivido, a professor of American Indian Studies at California State University, Chico. “That word is an epithet and a slur. It’s been a slur for a very long time,” she told the Reno Gazette-Journal. She explained that when settlers first arrived in the 1850s, they saw Native American women working in a meadow near the Lake Tahoe resort, and that may be how the area got its name.

Cohen said it would be a long and expensive process to remove “squaw” from the resort name. It appears on hundreds of signs and is printed on everything from trail maps and marketing material to uniforms and vehicles. In a statement, he said that resort management is meeting with shareholders, homeowners and local business leaders, as well as local Washoe tribal leadership. He didn’t yet know when a decision on the potential name-change would be made.

Washoe chairman Serrell Smokey supports the name change and suggested “Olympic Valley” as a replacement. —Associated Press, Reno Gazette-Journal

Fernie: 9 Legends and One Myth

Fernie Skiing Heritage inducted its Class of 2020 on March 6, 2020. Established in 2012 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Fernie Alpine Resort in the southern Canadian Rockies, in British Columbia, the mini-museum maintains a permanent Ski Wall of Fame in the Cornerstone Lodge that includes photographs and displays honoring the region’s pioneers. More than 130 attendees showed up to celebrate the contributions of the evening’s honorees.

A highlight of the evening was the induction of Griz—a legendary man, myth and snow god of the southern Canadian Rockies. —Mike Delich (Founder, Fernie Skiing Heritage and Wall of Fame; FIS Technical Director Emeritus, former board member, Alpine Canada)

60 Years of Utah Factoids

In writing ski articles about Utah for 60 years, you encounter all sorts of quirky quotes and factoids. Some disappear like the mist; others become encamped in your brain. Here are a few from the latter category:

• In 1957 I asked Bob Barrett, Utah’s bulldozer operator-turned uranium mining multi-millionaire, why he invested a good portion of his newfound fortune in developing Solitude Ski Area. “It’s the only business I know where people stand in line in a blizzard to pay you money,” he said.

• To lure Japanese skiers to Snowbird in the 1970s, the fledgling resort launched a campaign that included trail signs, menus, trail maps and lodging brochures printed in Japanese. A major “whoops” occurred when translators could not match the name of a ski run derived from the name of resort developer Dick Bass. The word? “Bassackwards.” —Mike Korologos

Skiing History Underground

Researchers using ground-penetrating radar have found what may be a buried Viking Age longship in the town of Horten in Norway. Until the ship is excavated, examined and archaeologically dated, much remains unknown. But most of the burial mounds uncovered to date by scientists from the Midgard Viking Center are from the Viking Age (793–1066).

In addition to a ship, a burial mound almost always contained possessions. At Tune, there’s a burial mound of a man whose possessions indicate high status: In addition to his longship, the mound contains the remnants of horses, a sword, spearheads, chainmail, a saddle, and parts of a ski.

From the radar images, the Horten contents suggest that the man was expected to travel to the afterworld on skis or on horseback, and to do battle on his journey there.

 

 

Longship burial mounds are often located in marshes, where the acidic environment destroys wooden objects, like skis. So the best places to look for Viking-era skis are mountain ice fields that in prehistory may have been crossed by travelers or foraged by hunters. In 2014, a 1300-year-old ski was found in Norway in the Reinheimen ice field (“Home of the Reindeer”), evidence that hunters had been there on skis more than 13 centuries ago. The Reinheimen Ski is 172 centimeters long and 14.5 centimeters wide. Remarkably, that’s about the same dimensions as the laminated ash wood cores now made by Skibaumarkt of Germany (https://www.skibaumarkt.de/en/) for those who wish to build their own. —M. Michael Brady 

SNAPSHOTS IN TIME

1959: WHO SAYS THIS IS A NOVICE TRAIL?
In the days when the rope tow was the mainstay of ski areas, it was relatively easy and inexpensive to provide separate slopes for each class of skiers. But with the introduction of the chairlift, originally intended to serve only more experienced skiers, the situation changed. Operators found that the attractions of the chairlift tempted beginners to ski way over their heads. To alleviate the problem, they cut novice trails from the top of the mountain over lengthy but gentle routes. This solved one problem, but created others. These novice trails frequently merge with more-advanced trails, or worse, advanced trails branch off novice trails. The answer seems to be a radical increase in trail marking. —John Southworth (SKI, December 1959)

1968: TEENY-TINY SKI HOUSE
The “Nutshell” house is an 8-by-18-foot cubicle that comes completely furnished, with kitchen, bath and sleeping spaces for five people. The little house is like a ship’s cabin inside, with the addition of wall-to-wall carpeting and a fireplace that warms the space in 15 minutes. The price is $4,000—delivery and connection to sewage, power and water are extra. The buyer’s best bet is to lease a lot from Acorn for $180 a year at Killington (Vermont), Jackson (New Hampshire) or Sugarloaf (Maine). —SKI (February 1968)

1978: HERE WE ARE, BUT WHERE ARE WE?

You know the kind of skier who strives to prove they are “in” by using names that are officially “out?” They insist on calling Aspen Mountain “Ajax” or referring to Vail’s Tyrolean Inn and Garton’s as the Blue Cow and the Casino, so you’ll know they were here before the masses followed them. Well, snobbery is getting to be more difficult with a spate of new names for ski areas that are actually old names, revived. You can no longer get insider points by referring to the area on the back side of Stowe as Smuggler’s Notch instead of its second-generation name, Madonna Mountain. You’d now have to call it Madonna Mountain because management has given it its third-generation name: Smuggler’s Notch. And now comes Keystone’s purchase of A-Basin. Throughout the 70s, Rocky Mountain skiers have been proving their pioneerhood by using the area’s original name, Arapahoe Basin. Sorry. The Keystone folks have changed the name back to Arapahoe Basin, so the in-name is the one that was the out-name before last May.  —SKI (December 1978)

1989: MOVE TO PENTURBIA

Jack Lessigner, professor emeritus from the University of Seattle, and a land and urban development economist, predicts that by 2010, one-third to one-half of the American and Canadian middle class will live outside metropolitan and suburban areas. Many of these people will move to the mountains, where resorts will develop a four-season economy. He has identified “rural-urban counties” with small-town populations but big-city resources: ready access to university education, the lively arts, computer data banks and good communications via modems and fax machines. His “best bet” counties for growth include Grafton, New Hampshire (Cannon Mountain, Loon Mountain, Waterville Valley); Carroll, New Hampshire (Attitash, Cranmore); Green, New York (Hunter Mountain, Windham); Lamoille, Vermont (Stowe); Emmet, Michigan (Boyne), and Summit, Utah (Deer Valley, Park City). —MORTEN LUND (SNOW COUNTRY, FEBRUARY 1989)

1989: GOING UP IN SMOKE

Perhaps no other aspect of the total ski experience is as traditional as returning home after an invigorating day on the slopes to sit in front of a roaring fire. But the air-pollution problem linked to wood-burning fireplaces and stoves stems from the fact that many picturesque Western ski valleys are encircled by high mountains. This terrain, combined with common temperature inversions, creates a situation in which air pollution simply cannot escape. Thus, the atmospheric conditions that frequently contribute to terrible build-ups of air pollutants create similar conditions in many mountain resort towns, especially in the Rockies and High Sierra. —GEORGE RAU (SNOW COUNTRY, JUNE 1989)

 

 

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SKIING BEFORE THE WAR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frozen in Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Since 1977, the Holding family has transformed this historic Idaho resort while honoring its fabled past.

On a February morning in 1977, Sun Valley executive Wally Huffman was summoned to owner Bill Janss’ office. There he met a middle-aged couple, Earl and Carol Holding, and was told to show them around the resort. Two days later, Huffman responded to a disturbance in Upper 5, a dormitory above the Ram Restaurant. There he found the Holdings stuffing mattresses through the windows to fall two stories onto the kitchen loading dock. Huffman called Janss and asked, “What should I do?” Janss replied, “I think you should do whatever Mr. Holding tells you to do.” The Holdings had purchased Sun Valley.

Janss had bought the resort from Union Pacific about 13 years earlier. He was an accomplished skier and had revitalized the mountain, but he was not a hotelier. They were now in a severe drought with minimal snowmaking, few skiers, and little cash flow. A sale was imminent. Corporate giants Disney and Ralston-Purina passed. The Holdings had built up the Little America franchise and owned Sinclair Oil; they knew the hotel business and had working capital. They had driven through Sun Valley only once, that summer, and then Earl saw an article in the Wall Street Journal about Disney’s play on the property. Something clicked. He made some calls, visited the resort again, and within two weeks had a deal. Janss said, “His timing was perfect.” And the mattresses flew out the windows.

(Photo top of page: Sun Valley in 1937.)

The Holdings were not skiers and to the locals, according to Huffman, “a complete unknown.” Unemployment was running at 27.5 percent that dry winter, yet the first reported act by the Holdings was to fire 1,400 employees. Under Janss, anyone with a pulse could get a job that came with a season pass or limited access to the mountain. Poof! The jobs and perks were gone. Not a good start for the new owner of a legendary ski area. Locals were incensed. But in truth it was the Janss Corporation that had to fire the employees as the Holdings had purchased only the assets; many workers were hired right back. There was, however, a new mission and strategy. Carol Holding remembers, “Why would anyone who didn’t know how to ski buy a ski resort? That wasn’t why we bought it—to come here to ski. We bought it to run as a business.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Earl Holding came from a poor Salt Lake City family and even at eight years old was mowing lawns and doing minor landscaping. He had an extraordinary work ethic and kept at it. He served in the Army Air Corps in WWII and then pursued a degree in civil engineering at the University of Utah. One night while studying in the library he was introduced to Carol Orme, an 18-year-old student from Idaho Falls, Idaho. “He was tall, had brown hair, and piercing blue eyes,” she remembers. They were soon inseparable. Earl had saved nearly $10,000 from his landscaping work, and Carol had $400. With that they purchased a fruit orchard at the mouth of Little Cottonwood Canyon. It was the first of many diverse and profitable businesses that would eventually run Earl Holding’s net worth to over $3 billion. With a smile Carol says, “He got my $400 before we were married, but it turned out to be a good investment.”

From the orchard, to the Little America gas station/hotel in Wyoming (with its famous repetitive highway signage featuring a penguin), to Sinclair Oil, to more hotels, the Holdings were hands-on owner/operators. They learned to be self-sufficient and deal with chores and problems themselves. That was the work ethic they brought to Sun Valley and it was not initially well-received.

“It wasn’t easy when you see bumper stickers that said, ‘Earl is a Four-Letter Word,’” says Carol. “We weren’t very welcome to begin with, but Earl started to turn this into a profitable business, and more people came, and everything got better. I couldn’t ask for more wonderful people than the local people. They really supported us and if it hadn’t been for them, we wouldn’t have made it.”

Earl Holding’s love of growing things is traceable to his landscaping years, the orchard, and his Wyoming and Arizona hotels. He brought that with gusto to Sun Valley. In the first spring he directed the planting of over 7,000 aspens and conifers around the village and golf course. The people doing the work were the newly re-hired employees. They had to learn to break down corporate departments and chip in where required. The Holdings worked right alongside them. Huffman remembers making beds and cleaning rooms, others served food and bussed tables. Hours were long, the work strenuous, and not everyone cottoned to the Holding’s methods, but the new owners never asked anyone to do something they wouldn’t do themselves and eventually found people who supported their style.

The Holdings and their children, Kathleen, Ann, and Steven, all learned to ski. For Earl, it was not recreation; he needed to ski to attend to mountain operations. According to Carol, “His work and his play were one and the same.” Carol and the kids, however, enjoyed the fun and challenge of skiing. Carol set a goal to ski Exhibition, one of Sun Valley’s more intimidating runs, and she did. She also became a dedicated runner and eventually competed in a marathon. But Earl was all about work. His contributions to the resort have been an inspired mix of maintenance, modernization, and masterpieces.

Almost every roof in Sun Valley—previously heated by a steam plant to promote snow melting—had to be redone as a modern cold roof. The Lodge and Inn were remodeled, the golf course redesigned. On the mountain, quad lifts replaced single and double chairs. Three spectacular day lodges were built at the Warm Springs and River Run bases and high on Seattle Ridge. These grand log and rock structures have interior finishes that exceed most resorts and delight guests. Two other mountain lodges, the fabled Roundhouse and the Lookout Restaurant, have also been remodeled. Over the years, a huge automated snowmaking system has been dialed in and a quality snow surface is virtually guaranteed from Thanksgiving to Easter. Expanded skiing acreage came with the development of the Frenchmen’s Bend area, a sheltered bowl with adventurous runs just above Ketchum. Grooming, the ski school, and patrol are all top-notch. And in addition to all the Sun Valley improvements, Holding acquired Snow Basin in Ogden, Utah and was a key player in the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics.

Holding was relentlessly thorough in both his new projects and day to day management. According to Wally Huffman, he would discuss details and alternatives ad nauseum, far past the point when most felt a decision was nigh. “He had the vision…way beyond the standards of what any of us were used to.” Carol was always there as a sounding board and affirms he was tireless: “He set a very high bar for everyone and he didn’t want to waste any time.” He was driven: “He just always said…give it all you’ve got, and that’s what he’s done.”

Then tragedy struck. Perhaps it was due to his herculean workload or simply a natural life event, but just after Christmas in 2002, Earl suffered a stroke.

It was devastating for the family, staff, and locals whose respect and admiration he had earned. He was 76, and according to his doctors, this was the endgame. Carol recalls a remarkable moment in the ICU when a physician addressed the family: “’We can’t do any more. We suggest you call hospice.’ And Kathleen looked at the doctor and said, ‘You don’t know my Dad.’” And she was right.

Earl recovered, and in time, returned to work, though Carol stepped up and took on more responsibility. She was the driving force behind a new day lodge at Dollar Mountain because she wanted a better facility for children. She told Earl: “If you don’t build me a lodge over there, I’m going to put a tent up.” The lodge was completed in 37 weeks. They then forged ahead on other projects.

A gondola was built connecting River Run plaza to the Roundhouse, serving skiers by day and diners by night. They sculpted the White Cloud Nine golf course with tons and tons of topsoil graded onto a ridge above the valley. The landscaping and views are stunning. The luxurious Sun Valley Club restaurant was added nearby, and it took the golf and Nordic skiing experiences to new heights. They also created a marvelous amphitheater for outdoor events. With sweeping contours that echo the surrounding mountains, structural elements with bold flourishes, and the same elegant travertine marble that adorns the Getty Museum and St. Peters Basilica, the Sun Valley Pavilion is a work of art unto itself.

Earl Holding died in April 2013. Most people connected to the resort and local communities have only gratitude for his vision and contributions. The Holdings have now been stewards of the resort longer than Union Pacific and Bill Janss combined. Yet despite all the improvements, it remains much the same as it was during the formative years of the late 1930s. In addition to what they did, it’s what they didn’t do—radically change or over-develop Harriman’s storybook Austrian village. Today one can walk into Sun Valley feeling the same ambiance skiers experienced over 80 years ago. It’s like stepping into your grandmother’s snow globe.

The Lodge and Inn interiors were recently remodeled again. New service buildings and employee housing have been constructed. There’s a lift and more skiing acreage planned for Seattle Ridge. Additional development at the River Run base may be coming as well.

Sun Valley is one of the last great family owned resorts and Carol feels their children will carry the legacy on: “They all have the work ethic…I think they love Sun Valley like we do and want to keep it like it is…where people can walk the streets and feel like they’re in the country…the soul of Sun Valley, that’s what we want to keep.” 

David Butterfield is a filmmaker and writer who grew up in Sun Valley.

 

Stewards of Skiing History

The Holding family will be honored with a Stewardship Award for the preservation of Sun Valley’s skiing heritage at the 28th annual ISHA Awards banquet on December 10, 2020 in Sun Valley.

 

See https://www.skiinghistory.org/issue/digital/volume-31-no-6-november-december-2019

Small vertical, big results: A 750-f00t-high ridge in Ontario has spawned many of Canada’s Olympic and World Cup champions. By Lori Knowles

Creative Canadian marketers call it the Blue Mountains but locals know it as the escarpment—a rim overlooking Georgian Bay, a geological landmark of Southern Ontario with a vertical drop of 750 feet and a 2.5-mile-long strip of steep ski runs that have produced some of the world’s greatest ski racers: 1980 Olympic bronze medalist Steve Podborski; four-time Olympian Brian Stemmle; three-time World Cup downhill winner Todd Brooker; and six-time World Cup ace Laurie Graham. An impressive number of Canada’s top competitors spent their formative winters along this ridge: riding tows, dancing through gates, schussing icy chutes.

It started in the early 20th century, as it always does, with an intrepid group of men and women wearing laced boots and gabardine suits. Recognizing the ski potential of a snowy escarpment 100 miles (160 kilometers) north of Toronto near Collingwood, the Toronto and Blue Mountain ski clubs made their mark. Through the 1920s and ’30s they built ski jumps and cut runs. History books say a fox-hunting trumpet called skiers to the slopes; horses hitched to sleighs carried them to the runs. With names like Wearie, Gib, Nipper and Hans, these pioneers persevered...

In this historic Swiss resort town, visitors are immersed in the wellspring of winter sports. By Everett Potter

A case can be made that the origins of modern winter sports lie in the Swiss resort and spa town of St. Moritz. In the late 1850s, Johannes Badrutt welcomed a steady stream of well-heeled British guests to his Kulm Hotel. They came in summer to hike and take the waters. But in winter he shut down for lack of visitors.

As the oft-told story goes, he wagered four of his best guests that they would love the winter in a town that claims 300 days of sunshine a year. He asked them to return with their families. If they didn’t have fun, he would pick up the tab. The Brits accepted the bet and ended up staying—and paying—until spring. They spread the word back home, at a time when first ascents of Alpine peaks were making headlines in London, and soon other sports-minded English families followed. Over time, more hotels opened and a host of activities were formalized, from skiing and ice skating to curling and taking death-defying descents on the Cresta run, the first skeleton course in the world. A winter sports capital was born...

Skiing has always been a perilous journey for public companies.

By SETH MASIA

If you had put $1,000 into Vail Resorts stock in 2004, your investment would have grown to $14,000 by August 2018. Vail, a supernova of skiing investments, now faces its most daunting competition ever in the nascent, privately held Alterra Mountain Company.

In truth, Vail is the only public company in the history of North American skiing to have shown long-term health. Other than Vail, the stock market has been a bad marriage for skiing. S-K-I  Ltd. was a steady if unspectacular stock for many years, until purchased by Les Otten. Peak Resorts returns a modest dividend and has shown no price growth.

Sometime in the late 1970s, commenting on a ski-equipment anti-dumping action, Fortune Magazine noted that “Skiing is an odd little segment of industry better left to people who understand it and deeply care about it.” For many years those have been words to live by, especially for investors from outside the peculiar business...

Read full article, pages 10-11.