Technology

Ski lift evolution is dotted with failed experiments.

(Photo above: The Mount Hood Skiway launched in 1951. The enormous weight of the buses meant the lift hauled 72 skiers per hour—when a chairlift of that era transported 1,000.)

The new high-speed Jordan 8 bubble chairlift at Sunday River, Maine, will be the fastest eight-pack in North America once it’s installed for the 2022–23 ski season. Thirty-two hundred skiers per hour will ascend at 20 feet per second, cradled in heated seats with head and foot rests.

This Usain Bolt of lifts will be the ultimate in uphill transportation, and a far cry from America’s first surface lift—a steam-powered toboggan tow built in Truckee, California, in 1910. The article, “A History of North American Ski Lifts, by Mort Lund and Kirby Gilbert (Skiing Heritage, September 2003) tells the full story of how Alex Foster’s rope tow (1932–33) was succeeded by Ernst Constam’s J-bar and T-bar (1934), and then by Jim Curran’s chairlift (1936). That article traces the story of lift designs that were successful enough to become commonplace. But what about the lifts that didn’t make the Darwinian cut?

Skiers have been transported by devices that look strange to us today, including boat tows, ski-on gondolas, jigback trams, Air Cars, Skimobiles, shotgun tows and sit-sideways chairs. There have been city buses converted to skiways, attempts at monorail lifts and a greasy chain-drive contraption that ruined more than a few ski outfits.

“Consider the trials and tribulations of lift design through the years,” says Peter Landsman, a lift supervisor at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, who started LiftBlog.com in 2015. “People are passionate about skiing. Almost as long as there have been skiers, there have been people trying to determine the best and fastest and most efficient way to get to the top.”

Ski lift engineers have done their best to make the ascent a smooth one, but it didn’t always go as planned. Here are a few of the engineering dead-ends we can charitably consider “nice tries.”

Ahoy, Mateys!

Before its first chairlift, Aspen skiers relied upon repurposed mining equipment. The original Boat Tow on Aspen Mountain was constructed in 1937 by members of the Aspen Ski Club and opened on January 27, 1938. It consisted of two wooden toboggans, or “boats,” each one 12 feet long by three feet wide and containing four plank seats mounted rowboat style. The boats were constructed of pine, including the runners, which had steel banding attached, according to Aspenmod.com.

The boats were connected by steel cable to rotating terminals converted from hoist rigs that had been taken from the Little Annie Mine on Aspen Mountain. The cable was guided up the mountain by wood towers. The motor was a converted Model A Ford engine.

Up to eight people could sit in a boat and be pulled up 600 feet of vertical in less than three minutes, while the empty boat slid down the other side. The fee was 10 cents a ride, 50 cents for a half-day. The boat tow lasted through December 1946, when chairlifts were deemed a higher capacity—and preferred–route uphill.

Leave the Driving to Us

At least the name was impressive: Oregon’s Mount Hood Aerial Skiway. But, in reality, it was two repurposed city buses, each using a pair of 185-horsepower gasoline engines to ascend a stationary 1.5-inch diameter cable—a technology also used in timber operations to haul logs out of the woods, according to Lindsey Benjamin, writing for the Oregon Historical Society.

In January 1951, the Mount Hood Skiway opened, climbing 3.2 miles from below Government Camp to Timberline Lodge. It was the longest lift of its kind in the world and attracted the attention of newspapers, popular magazines and newsreel producers on its preview voyage. In an August 1951 Popular Science article, Richard Neuberger described the Skiway as the “most extraordinary of busses,” scraping clouds to deposit passengers at Timberline Lodge. A 1956 newsreel breathlessly exclaimed, “It flies through the air with the greatest of ease!”

Equipped with streetcar-style seats that flipped to allow passengers to always face forward, each bus had a capacity of 36 riders. When finally hung on the cables, the buses’ behemoth weight resulted in a 5.2–miles per hour, 25-minute trip up the mountain. Each round trip thus took an hour, which meant the Skiway lifted only 72 people per hour—in an era when the typical chairlift hauled 1,000 skiers in the same time frame.

Said Bill Keil, a Timberline Lodge publicity manager during the 1950s, “The tramway crippled its way through five years of marginal operations before suspending” in 1956. By June 1959, despite repeated efforts to carry out experiments for a redesign, a liquidating committee was formed. The lower terminal building was sold in 1960 for $25,000, and Zidell Machinery and Supply Company bought the two buses, a jeep, an engine and other tram parts for $10,080.

“I guess it proved to be not the most successful lift, but it certainly looked cool,” says LiftBlog.com’s Landsman.

It was an ignoble end. To see the Skiway in action, go to skiinghistory.org/resources/video/failure-mt-hood-skiway

How About a Monorail?

New Hampshire was a hotbed of lift innovation, considering the Cranmore Skimobile, Wildcat’s gondola and the Cannon tramway. When Attitash opened in 1966, pitched as the “Red Carpet Ski Area,” its owners wanted a creative way to open the upper mountain.

According to the Mt. Washington Signal (December 1966), plans called for a cog monorail rising

1,800 vertical feet over a 7,600-foot run (1.4 miles). Four trains, each carrying up to 42 passengers in heated cars, would make the one-way trip in 10 minutes. While two trains unloaded and loaded at base and summit terminals, two would be en route, passing at a mid-mountain siding.

It would be the first such monorail in the world, according to the North Conway (N.H.) Reporter (Jan. 26, 1967). That month the manufacturer, Universal Design Ltd., of Cape May, New Jersey, erected a section of track adjacent to the base lodge, on which sat an articulated demonstration car with a Buck Rogers plastic-bubble roof. Photos of the train circulated in newspapers across the country in February 1967.

It wasn’t until a narrow track-line was cut all the way to the mountain’s summit that managers faced up to the difficulty of financing the project. Nor did the landlord, the U.S. Forest Service, appear eager to approve construction. Instead, a much simpler chairlift opened on the upper mountain in February 1969. In the end, the monorail was an idea better suited for Disneyland. The model car and track section were sent back to the Jersey shore.

Tunnel Your Way to the Top

Ski lift designers are nothing if not resourceful. Some look at an abandoned ore tunnel and imagine skiers happily ascending skyward.

When Park City’s last mining company developed Park City Ski Resort, its first “lift” was the Thaynes Shaft lift. In 1963, the “skier subway” opened. Skiers could board repurposed mine cars, journey three miles underground through the Spiro Tunnel (drilled in 1916) to then ride the mine elevator 1,800 vertical feet to the surface and emerge near the Thaynes double chair. Archival photos show skiers in headbands crammed underground with their pencil-skis and screw-in edges trying to make the best of a sometimes dripping-wet experience. The ordeal took 45 minutes. Though popular as a novelty, most skiers rode the train only once before heading back to the much-faster chairlifts. (For the full story, see “Spiro Tunnel,” SH, March–April 2019.)

Mount Snow’s “Clickety-Clack”

Mount Snow in Vermont was way ahead of its time in ski lift design. The resort’s Air Car was right out of TV’s The Jetsons. Installed in time for the 1964–65 season, the short Carlevaro and Savio tramway lasted about 12 years, traversing from Snow Lake Lodge to the base of the mountain, according to NewEnglandSkiHistory.com.

A Mount Snow lift with greater longevity was the Mixing Bowl double chair, nicknamed the “Clickety-Clack” because it ascended an overhead track pulled by a greased chain. Mark Hettrich joked on Facebook that it “looked like a meat drying rack,” with skiers playing the part of beef jerky. Mike Gagne, also on Facebook, remembered, “When it was raining, it was unbelievable the amount of grease that was dripping down and covering us; it was quite a mess and noisy and slow. Basically, it was a conveyor belt-style ski lift.”

Skip King, former vice president of American Skiing Company, the one-time owner of Mount Snow, recalls how the lift was eventually kneecapped. “The fact that the chain needed constant lubrication is the reason it constantly dripped oil.”

The noisy lift was dismantled in 1997, when it was replaced by a surface conveyor belt considered easier for beginners to master. “Besides, our carpet lift had a cover on it like a covered bridge, which was more protective,” says National Ski Areas Association President and CEO Kelly Pawlak, who was general manager of Mount Snow from 2005 to 2017.

Portillo’s Slingshot Lifts

This is a concept utterly unsuitable for the general public, and it should have dead-ended years ago. But Portillo, Chile’s signature lifts have survived decades in use by expert skiers. Built in the 1960s by Jean Pomagalski, the original Roca Jack surface lift was designed to survive avalanches on the steep terrain it serves. It has no towers, so an avalanche passes under the cables with no damage done. The cable wheel is anchored to the rock face at the top. Five skiers ride side-by-side, hanging onto a horizontal bar and dragged by Poma platters under each butt. Poma calls this type of lift a va-et-vient (“go and come”) because as one bar goes up, the empty one comes down.

When the liftie pulls the launch cord, the tow-bar accelerates abruptly to 27 kilometers per hour (17 mph). It takes teamwork and steady nerves to ride successfully. Just don’t cross your skis or your buddy’s skis. At the top, the tow stops just as suddenly. To avoid sliding backward, the five dismounting skiers have to drop into traverse position without knocking each other over. Nonetheless, the lift does what it was designed to do, and Portillo installed three more just like it, on three more avalanche chutes.

Says former U.S. Ski Team coach John McMurtry, “It’s not exactly what you want for a learn-to-ski program.”

The Future of Uphill Transportation (or Not)

A few more recent inventions indicate that innovation in ski lift design continues unabated. The jury is still out on these.

Who Needs a Ski Area?

Why travel on icy roads when you can put a ski area in your backyard with a Towpro Lift—a portable rope tow that weighs 400 pounds, can be put into the back of your pick-up truck or SUV, sets up in an hour (with help) and runs off a 240-volt electrical plug (same as a clothes dryer or electrical stove). The return unit can be mounted to a tree, and the system comes with a rope spliced to a length of your choice.

“One enterprising Vermonter cut down a few trees and set the rope tow up on a hill on his 30-acre property: no parking, no reservations, no lines, no social distancing. He bought a generator at Home Depot to power it. He slows it down for his five-year-old daughter,” writes ski journalist Tamsin Venn, a member of the North American Snowsports Journalists Association.

Cost is about $8,845, which, considering lift ticket prices of about $230 per day at some areas, will pay for itself in a little more than a month. Of course, your backyard isn’t groomed by a PistenBully.

Powered Skiing

Even our friends in the Nordic ski world could use a lift now and then. Another weird ride worth watching is the SkiZee Woodsrunner, “the four-stroke leader in so-called powered skiing.” It’s essentially a baby snowmobile—small enough to fit in a car trunk—that pushes you from behind like an outboard motor. For $4,990 you can zip along a frozen lake or rolling hillside at 25 miles per hour.

Backcountry DIY Tow

Not to be outdone is the Zoe Engineering Zoa PL1, the portable rope tow for the backcountry that fits in a backpack. First you skin up, tie a line to a fixed object or snow anchor, lay 1,000 feet of parachute cord downhill, remove the 10.5-lb. battery-powered winch from your backpack, ride the parachute cord back up, then descend. Repeat as long as the battery—and your legs—hold out. The patent-pending rope tow system promises more laps with less work. It’s still in the beta stage, and prices will start at $1,056.

Clearly, wherever there are skiers, and the rules of gravity continue to apply, there will be creative inventors ready to figure out new ways to go up just so they—and we—can come right back down again. 

Ride the Limo in the Sky

If you had the means, you could charter a Gulfstream IV jet to get to your favorite ski resort. Once there, so long as the destination was Killington, Vermont, you could have also chartered your own gondola cabin with music, leather seats and cup holders.

The 1993 high-speed Skyeship gondola that Skiing History wrote about in its January–February 2021 issue was state of the art at the time, with heating and a different modern art graphic on the exterior of each cabin—which was nicknamed by some wags “FART” for “flying art.” The idea was that for $1,500 daily that particular gondola would be yours for the day.

They meant well.

“The tricked-out Skyeship stayed on the line. They couldn’t pull it and set it aside for you to finish your run,” says Ken Beaulieu, director of the Killington News Bureau at the time.

“You’d have to time your run exactly and make sure you were down in time to pick it up again as it came around the bullwheel. Needless to say, that program didn’t last long. There wasn’t much of a market for it.”

ISHA board member Jeff Blumenfeld is president of the North American Snowsports Journalists Association (NASJA.org).

Sven Coomer recalls the design process leading to Nordica’s groundbreaking boots.

As told to Seth Masia

In 1962, I went to Chamonix to watch the FIS World Championships and got to train with the French team. I also met Hans Heierling, who was meeting with Trappeur to license their Elite boot, in which the French team was having great success. Nordica took a license, too. I wasted no time getting to Davos to see Heierling’s manufacturing operation. I got a job on the trail crew. Every afternoon for two weeks, after avalanche control and snow maintenance, I visited the boot factory, watching every step of the process while they made my first pair of custom leather double-lace boots.

Photo above: Sven today, with the leather Sapporo of 1969. It was the first boot with both a high back and high tongue. Kathy Richland photo.

I first saw plastic boots in 1965, when I skied with Vail Ski School Director Morrie Shepard, and he offered me the job as his assistant. Morrie was Bob Lange’s ski instructor, and he was skiing in Lange’s double-lace, pre-production boot (Morrie soon went to work full time for Lange). Instead of working in Vail, I accepted the ski school director’s job at the PSIA

experimental ski school in Solitude, Utah, which sounded much more interesting in the first years of the PSIA [Professional Ski Instructors Association]. After a year at Solitude, I moved on to run ski schools at Mt. Rose and Slide Mountain near Lake Tahoe. In the spring of 1967, Doug Pfeiffer, editor of Skiing magazine, invited me to Mammoth in April and May for the first magazine ski tests. Over six weeks I found that testing equipment, analyzing and problem solving were my true calling. Doug then invited me to New York each summer to write up our ski test reports and compose technical articles on equipment and the emerging techniques of the time.

During the tests in 1967, ‘68 and ‘69, Junior Bounous came to Mammoth to test Rosemount fiberglass boots and asked me to try them. They were very comfortable, with the side-hinge entry-exit door and a collection of fitting pillows to insert in several pockets to adjust the comfort and support. With the mechanical hinging action and very rigid sole, it was a significant contrast to my Nordica leather race boots. When the Canadian team trained at Mammoth, Rod “Yogi” Hebron lent me his Lange plastic race boots. They made my feet numb, as if with Novocain. I couldn’t feel the skis. By comparing the plastics directly to my leather boots, one on each foot, I really noticed that the plastic had the effect of isolating the delicate sensitivity and proprioception and balance feeling of the feet for the skis and snow. That is, the “feeling of leather” was absent.

Leather boots, when well fitted, were stiff and sometimes bruising for a week or two, then felt great. They were good for two weeks of hard skiing and then went soft. We tried reinforcing the leather with layers of fiberglass, with disappointing results. Every brand in the boot business was convinced that plastic would be the final cure for the woes of leather boots. But the first generation of plastic boots, and especially the racing Langes, never grew comfortable. It looked like plastic promised only more durability than leather, and maybe drier feet.

During testing in the spring of 1968, I met Norm McLeod from Beconta, the importer of Nordica boots, Look bindings and Völkl skis. Beconta had kindly supplied me with Nordica boots while I was directing ski schools, and I supplied constructive feedback. We rode Mammoth’s Lift 3 and Norm asked what I thought about plastic boots. “They are interesting,” I told him. “Their impressive durability and shell stability marks them as inevitable. It’s obviously the future, but they still have a long way to go. They are unpredictable. There’s perhaps too much support, and I can’t feel or ski with my feet. They force me to emphasize with my knees, using knee-hooking to start turns. And they hurt!”

We talked for hours about ski boots, and he offered me a job. I joined the company at their San Francisco warehouse early in 1969.

Nordica was playing catch-up to Lange and Rosemount. Lange made a big splash at the 1966 World Championships in Portillo, on the new World Cup circuit in 1967 and at the 1968 Grenoble Olympics. Nordica needed a response. They already had injection-molding machines for the outsoles, but Nordica’s designers were leather-boot artisans and didn’t know how to engineer plastic boots to be truly functional. In 1968 they made a big investment in molds and shot a line of “Astral” thermoplastic shells for introduction in ’69, but these were too narrow and worked no better than existing plastic boots.

I settled in at Beconta with a plan to perfect their leather race boot, then find a way to duplicate that fit and performance in plastic. I fed design ideas to Norm, who airmailed them to Nordica in Montebelluna, Italy. The summary that sealed my relationship with Nordica was about developing integrated high-back boots. Norm told me they were very excited about that and wanted to meet me. Nordica asked me to move to Italy and work in the factory.

Their team of brilliant artisans, led by Piero Martin Iego and Otto Heinz Izzo, made dozens of different custom leather boots and we tried them out with the U.S. and Italian ski teams. Our key discovery was that the high-back should be countered by an equally high tongue, so that the tibia was “centered” with the ankle at its optimum-strength angle.

With racer feedback, I compiled a list of 173 functional design criteria. Then we combined all these ideas into the Sapporo leather slalom boot (see photo, top of page). We got it to racers for the 1969 model year, and we had a number of top slalom skiers in it while everyone else was in Langes. A couple of years later, Fernando Francisco Ochoa won the 1972 Olympic slalom in the Sapporo boot.

Long before that, we pushed ahead to translate the design into plastic. We created a beautifully handcrafted leather inner boot and shaped a shell mold to cradle it accurately. The first result, the Olympic, was a one-piece design (shell and cuff molded as a single unit) based on the final version of Ochoa’s boot. It gave racers tremendous edging power and embodied criteria still used today in all top race boots.

But in 1971–72, Henke had trouble with their plastic boots. The weak plastic cuff straps broke and the warranty costs put Henke out of business. The single mold for the Olympic was difficult to inject and we worried about weakening the cuff straps with voids in the plastic. So the boot was retired prematurely.

We reworked the shell shapes into a two-piece design, where the separate cuff was a much easier item to injection-mold. That hinged-cuff design reached the market in 1971 as the second-generation Astral series. The real innovation was subtle. Where every other high-performance boot on the market had adopted a high-back “spoiler,” the Astral had a spoiler and a high tongue—higher than the spoiler, in fact. The following year we offered the locked-hinge Slalom model. In North America, it was bright yellow and thus became the “banana boot.” It made all the other race boots on the market look obsolete and cemented Nordica’s worldwide market share at 30 percent. 

Sven Coomer will be inducted into the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame, Class of 2022, in the spring of 2023.

Polartec is a proud corporate sponsor of ISHA.

By Seth Masia 

The VR17, engineered for French ski racers, was imitated by ski factories around the world.

From the January-February 2022 issue

The Dynamic VR17 remains legendary, and for good reason. With its hickory core, fiberglass torsion-box construction, “cracked” flexible edge, stiff tail and rear-waisted sidecut, the ski set the standard for slalom performance beginning in 1966. For the next two decades most of the slalom racing skis built around the world copied the VR17’s design details. VR17 clones, exact or approximate, were made by Dynastar, Lange, Head, Durafiber, K2, Völkl, Fischer, Atomic, Blizzard, Hexcel, Olin, Elan and possibly others.

Photo top: Billy Kidd en route to the 1970 combined world championship, on the VR17.

The ski was developed in the tiny agricultural commune of Sillans en Isère, population about 830. Sillans lies about 10 miles west of Voiron, where Abel Rossignol had been manufacturing skis since 1907. Two significant workshops comprised most of what might be called industry in Sillans. The Carrier family made shoes for farmers and hunters, and right next door the Michal family made wooden shuttles for the silk factories of Lyons and, occasionally, furniture.

Marcel Carrier, representing the third generation to manage the shoe factory, ran off at age 17 to fight in World War I. Returning in 1918 he was enamored of skiing and started to make ski boots. In 1930, with Alpine racing just emerging as a high-speed spectator sport (see “Alpine Revolution,” January–February 2021), Carrier recognized that the new Kandahar cable bindings, which fastened down the heel, would need stiffer, more specialized ski boots—and he made them under a new label, Le Trappeur. In 1931 he approached 19-year-old Emile Allais, the rising star of French ski racing, who agreed to use the new boots. The following year Carrier began marketing the boot in North America; the success of the brand helped Sillans weather the Depression.

After Allais visited the shop in 1931, Carrier popped next door and asked his close friend Paul Michal, then training to take over the family woodworking shop, to make some skis. Michal knew little about skiing, but local ski champion André Jamet loaned him a pair of Norwegian skis to copy. Michal found making skis far more interesting than turning out shuttles and bobbins (just as Abel Rossignol had done a generation earlier). With his brother-in-law, Jean Berthet, in 1934 he began selling Alpine skis under the brand name Skis M.B. (Michal and Berthet). In 1937,  the brand name became Nivôse. Derived from the Latin word for snowy, it was the name of his distributor, a new ski-clothing company in Lyon.

After 1934, with the introduction of laminated skis, ski-making on an industrial scale became an innovative business. Rather than license the Splitkein patent for laminated skis, Dynamic continued to carve skis from single planks, in hickory or ash. In 1936, in order to more accurately pair skis, Michal invented a “dynamometer,” a device to test the flex of each ski before the final varnish sealed the matching serial numbers. And he rebranded his skis as Nivôse -Dynamic, for “DYNAmometer” and “MIChal.” It was the first Alpine Olympic year.

During World War II, ski production ceased as the Nazis forced Michal to make wooden shoe-soles for export to Germany. After Liberation in August 1944, he was reluctant to resume making the old pre-war ski designs. Michal resumed production, now building skis with 24 hardwood laminations.  (Berthet remained a partner but left Sillans to run a factory in Reims). In 1946, Michal hired downhill world champion James Couttet as ski tester and technical adviser.

Michal and Couttet hoped to improve glide speed, and among other solutions, Michal sought out Xavier Convert, who manufactured celluloid plastic for combs. Convert was trying to revive business for his factory in Oyonnax, which today is the center of the French plastics industry. He proposed to create solid celluloid bases for skis. Celluloid would make a tough and permanently waterproof base that should also glide well.

Little was known about how to make a ski glide faster, other than to paint on a slick waterproof lacquer and hit the right wax (see “Walter Kofler Invents the Polyethylene Base,” November–December 2021). Insulating bases did work better than heat-conducting surfaces like aluminum and steel, however, so a plastic armor plate showed promise. The new “Cellolix” base offered an advantage to racers, especially in combination with a new Michal invention: the hidden, low-drag continuous L-section edge. Michal applied for a patent on the edge in 1949 and built the Dynamic K race ski with it beginning around 1950. Recreational skiers, however, didn’t see a reason to pay extra for that edge, and eventually he let the patent lapse. Truth be told, Michal wasn’t interested in selling recreational skis. If a ski worked for racers, he claimed, it should work for every skier.

Michal thought of himself as an artisan in wood, tweaking his skis to meet the needs of the ski racers who came to Sillans to talk to him. In the years before bombed-out Austrian factories rebuilt, Michal equipped Austrian as well as French racers. By 1950, dozens of top racers from all the Alpine nations rode to victory on Dynamic’s K model, with 24 laminates of hickory, continuous edges and Cellolix bottoms. The list included Othmar Schneider, Anderl Molterer, James Couttet, François Bonlieu and Charles Bozon. Then in 1954 Austrian and Swiss skiers got Kofix polyethylene bases and Dynamic lost its speed advantage. Dynamic finally offered polyethylene as an option on the ash Slalom Leger and hickory Slalom Géant in 1959. Michal called the new base Polyrex.

By 1950, metal skis were edging into the market, in part because celluloid had solved the problem of bare metal’s poor glide. Michal was never a fan of metal in skis, and around 1955 he turned his attention to fiberglass, partly at the behest of Claude Joseph, who manufactured polyester resin and corrugated fiberglass panels. Progress was slow, based on trial-and-error tests with racers, notably Olympic medalist Charles Bozon. In 1960 Michal realized that he needed a more systematic approach to product development. He took a number of structural engineering courses at the University of Grenoble, focusing on spring rates and inertia. He also hired Michel Arpin, the racer who had become Jean-Claude Killy’s mentor and technician.

In 1963 the team built the glass-wrapped polyester-resin/fiberglass Compound RG5 racing ski, built by Dynamic in Sillans. Joseph founded Dynastar, in Sallanches, to make the consumer-sales version. The name meant resin-glass, five years in development.

Dynamic and Dynastar parted ways. In 1964, Michal introduced the VR7 as Dynamic’s new race ski, largely of Bozon’s design. The name meant Verre Resine (resin glass), seven years in development.That summer, Bozon was one of 14 climbers killed in an avalanche above Chamonix. Michal’s son Jean joined the company and created its first logo, the familiar double-bar chevron.

That summer, Bozon was one of 14 climbers killed in an avalanche above Chamonix. Michal’s son Jean joined the company and created its first logo, the familiar double-bar chevron.

Arpin, with Killy’s input, created the VR17 to help racers take full advantage of the new forward-canted boots and avalement technique (see “Le Trappeur Elite” and “Avalement,” July–August 2021). The VR17 moved the waist back from the ball of the foot to the heel, because that was where French racers were driving the turn, and for the same reason had a stiffer tail. The ski was also built with tough epoxy rather than polyester resin, and – perhaps most important -- had a new super-flexible “cracked” edge—one continuous piece of steel with segments engineered into the visible part of the L-shape. This construction took the vibrational frequency of steel out of the ski’s dynamic behavior, letting the glass-wrapped box dampen chatter at its natural rate. Because the edge no longer contributed to lengthwise flex, the ski was made thicker, which significantly increased the torsional stiffness. The segmented edge also cut into ice like a serrated knife.

In 1966 Arpin dropped off the ski team to work full time building skis for Killy and a few more top French skiers, at a time when the team, and Killy in particular, dominated Alpine racing season after season. Racers weren’t allowed to endorse products directly, so French skiers were free to use Rossignols or VR17s, depending on which they felt would be fastest on the day’s course conditions.

In 1963, Michal turned over day-to-day operations to his son Jean, and served as fully involved chairman. He still focused on race skis, built by a small, elite crew headed by Paul Serra. But Michal, at heart an artisanal woodworker, regarded every Dynamic ski as a custom build for some racer, somewhere. The torsion box had been a genius idea: fiberglass wrapped around the core eliminated any chance of structural delamination, and the glass fibers could be spiral-wrapped to fine-tune the balance between torsional and beam flex. Racers like Killy and Billy Kidd won races and championships on their Dynamics, and other factories imitated the design.

Paul Michal retired for good in 1967. Under Jean Michal’s management, sales boomed. In 1969, Bob Lange signed a contract to import Dynamic to North America and even to build VR17s in his new factory in Broomfield, Colorado.

The market became increasingly competitive, and rival brands sold many thousands of recreational skis to subsidize their custom-built race models. Paul Michal’s assurance that anyone could ski on the VR17 was pure nonsense. The ski required strength, speed and catlike reactions. “It rewards brilliance and punishes mediocrity,” said one wag at the time.

But expert skiers around the world wanted VR17s, and the factory couldn’t meet demand. U.S. production stopped when Lange lost control of his company in 1973. Ian Ferguson, Lange’s sales manager, noted that manufacturing quality for consumer-market skis deteriorated, at least in the Boulder factory. The assembly process was sloppy, he said. A worker wrapped the core in the requisite layers of fiberglass cloth, soaked it with liquid resin and placed the assembly in the mold. Variations in the resin volume plus wrinkles, folds and air bubbles made the ski’s ultimate flex and strength unpredictable. Pair-matching wasn’t precise, either, because skis were measured for shovel and tail flex but not for full-length flex or torsion.

In 1971, to finance larger production, the partners Paul Michal, Jean Berthet and Marcel Carrier sold a share of the company to an investment group. Within a year, they sold all their shares, leaving the new management company in control. Jean Michal left, in disgust, in 1973. 

The fact was that cloned designs from other factories worked just as well and had better quality control. Eventually a mass-production version, the VR27, was marketed worldwide, along with a series of softer recreational skis.

Unable to expand production profitably, the new owners sold the company to Atomic in 1988. Atomic moved production to Austria and closed the Sillans factory in 1994.

Today you can find the Dynamic VR17 brand on boutique skis made in Italy. As for Paul Michal, he remained innovative, filing for a patent as late as 1975. He died in 1983. 

Sources for this story include Jean Michal; Nicole Chabah: Sillans, petite cite de grandes aventures (Editions Alzieu 2000); Juliette Barthaux, L’innovation dans l’histoire du ski alpin (unpublished master’s thesis, 1987); and interviews with Michel Arpin, Ian Ferguson and Maurice Woehrlé. Many thanks to Albert Parolai and Jean-Charles Verhilac for research assistance.

Seth Masia, president of ISHA, wrote about Kofix in the last issue of Skiing History.

Before Hans Gmoser and Mike Wiegele made it a success, heliskiing had unsung pioneers.

The helicopter has been called the God Machine for its ability to hover and land on almost any kind of terrain. One has even summited Mount Everest: On May 14, 2005, test pilot Didier Delsalle braved high winds to perch a Eurocopter AS350 B3 on the summit for 3 minutes, 50 seconds, repeating the landing the next day. No one has done it since.

Photo above: Hans Gmoser (right) with five guests and a pilot, with a Bell 47B1, at Valemount in 1969. Courtesy CMH.

In decent weather, helicopters can land anywhere on earth. That wasn’t always the case. An early Bell 47G2 with a 260-horsepower piston engine could barely hover and land at 10,000 feet (3,048 m) in still air. That was just high enough to reach the ridgelines, if not all the summits, in British Columbia’s Bugaboos.  

Hans Gmoser, widely credited as the inventor of heliskiing, came to Canada from Austria in 1951, at age 19, and quickly became known as a top climber. He opened his own guide service in 1957, and in 1963 helped found the Canadian Mountain Guides Association. Gmoser himself said that the idea of heliskiing was first brought to him by Art Patterson, a Calgary geologist and a skier. Patterson had used helicopters in the mountains for summer fieldwork, and he knew that a lot of these machines were sitting idle during the winter months. He thought that hauling skiers could be an interesting new business. He also realized that to make the idea work, he would need professional guides who understood routefinding, snow and avalanches. Gmoser and Patterson teamed up, with Patterson handling the business side and Gmoser the guiding.

Their first heliski adventure began in late February 1963. Twenty clients, organized by Brooks and Ann Dodge, paid $20 each (approximately $160 in today’s dollars) for a day on Old Goat Glacier, 10 miles south of Canmore, Alberta. The result was disappointing. The two-seat Bell 47G2 helicopters could fly only one passenger at a time and climbed at less than 850 feet per minute; it took hours to get everyone to the 8,200-foot (2,500 m) summit. Then the snow conditions turned out to be less than ideal. They tried another heliski day in May, but encountered high winds that limited the possible landing zones. Patterson decided that heliskiing was a risky business and dropped out. But Gmoser saw the potential in helicopters.

He eventually renamed his guide service Canadian Mountain Holidays and, with the advent of fast-climbing, heavy-hauling, jet-powered helicopters, was able to create a successful heliski and helihike operation.

That’s the accepted version of heliskiing’s genesis. But earlier pioneers preceded Gmoser and Patterson.

1948

Writing in Vertical magazine (March 2012), Canadian aviation writer Bob Petite reported, “The first recorded occurrence of a helicopter being used to airlift skiers into mountains was back in 1948, by Skyways Services, which was one of three Canadian commercial operations at the time.” This wasn’t heliskiing proper—it was an air taxi service from Vancouver to the summit of Grouse Mountain ski resort (1,231 m, 4,039 ft). The fare-paying passengers then skied the lift network.

1950

In 1950, pioneering avalanche expert Monty Atwater used a helicopter while surveying Mineral King Valley, the proposed Disney ski resort in California. Elevations ranged from the valley floor at 7,400 feet (2,300 m) to surrounding peaks of more than 11,000 feet (3,400 m). In his book
Avalanche Hunters, Atwater wrote:

“In Northern California I once did a job surveying a complex of ski areas of the future. My companion and I used a chopper first of all to jump over the snowbound (i.e., closed for the winter) highways. Then we used it as a ski lift with an infinite number of lines. It flew us to the top, picked us up at the bottom, flew us to a different top. In three days of about three hours of flying time apiece we did more work than we could have in a month on foot and with Sno-Cats, and we did it better. It was an aerial platform for making maps and photographs. If one of us got hurt, our angel of mercy was slurruping overhead. I have ridden helicopters from Chile to British Columbia, and I have great affection for them.”

Clearly, Atwater was heliskiing. His wife, Joan, did realize how much fun it could be. Atwater wrote: “As soon as she knew that there was a chopper on the program, Joan began propagandizing for a ride in it. ‘Not a chance,’ I told her. ‘Do you have any idea how much it costs per hour to fly this doodlebug? Besides, it’s a government job and the government doesn’t approve of using its equipment for joy riding.’”

Much later, in 1965, Disney also hired Swiss avalanche researcher (and Aspen skiing pioneer) André Roch to study Mineral King. Roch, too, used a helicopter to access the higher bowls, and he brought along other skiers on these trips. If Disney had known, he might have become the first heliski vacation developer. Regardless, Mineral King Ski area was never developed due to opposition by environmental groups.

1957–58

Bengt “Binx” Sandahl moved to Alta, Utah, in 1953 and worked as a bartender in the Alta Lodge. There, he became interested in snow and avalanche work, and, according to his daughter, he talked frequently with Atwater, who was by then director of the avalanche research center. The following year he left to take a job in Alaska, where he eventually worked as a ski instructor at Alyeska. Skiing magazine (February 2007) reported that in 1958, Sandahl guided skiers using a helicopter. Video exists of an Alouette II—the first turboshaft helicopter, introduced in 1956—carrying four skiers and a pilot at Alyeska, around that time. Sandahl apparently hauled skiers to Max’s Mountain on the south rim of Alyeska’s bowl, charging $10 per ride for up to 100 skiers per day. Sandahl later became Alyeska’s snow safety director. Returning to Alta, he was hired as the U.S. Forest Service snow ranger in 1964. He then used helicopters to drop explosives into avalanche chutes.

The January 1959 issue of SKI magazine ran an article entitled “By Helicopter to Virgin Snowfields,” about replacing ski-equipped planes with helicopters for glacier skiing in Alaska and the Alps. “By helicopter it is possible to ski unbroken powder all day long without ever seeing ski tracks except the ones you make yourself.” The reference to heliskiing in Alaska is to Sandahl’s operation. The article reported that at Gstaad and at Val d’Isère, skiers could ride for $22 to $52 per flight—about $176 to $416 today. Heliskiing has never been cheap.

1960s

In 1963 Bob Hosking was flying skiers from the Rustler Lodge at Alta. It’s not clear if he held a special use permit that allowed this. It’s said that for $5 or $10 one could buy a lift to Mount Superior, above Alta.

The big breakthrough, as Sandahl had found, came with jet engines. In 1961 Bell introduced the turboshaft-powered 204/205 series helicopters, capable of flying 10 to 14 passengers and climbing 1,750 feet per minute. That was more than 20 times the performance of a Bell 47.

Before long, the 205 was outfitted with a 1,500-horsepower engine. So equipped, by the late 1960s, Gmoser really had CMH up and running. Sun Valley owner Bill Janss skied with Gmoser in the Purcell range and in 1966 launched Sun Valley Heliski. Mike Wiegele started his operation in Valemount, British Columbia, in 1970 and moved down the road to Blue River in 1974. In 1973 Wasatch Powderbird Guides started operations in Utah (Hosking was a partner). By November 1982, Powder magazine listed 15 heliskiing operations in the Lower 48 states alone.

Learning curve

The early leaders in heliskiing learned by trial and error. Protocols were needed for both helicopter and avalanche safety. Once the boom started, Gmoser and Wiegele, in particular, faced a shortage of qualified guides, the reason for the foundation of the Canadian Ski Guides Association (CSGA) in 1990. CSGA now has about 130 members, and heliskiing contributes more than $160 million annually to the economy of British Columbia. 

Fat skis: A second boom

By the late 1980s, the rising cost of aviation fuel was cutting into profits for heliski operators. The crunch was exacerbated by a limited pool of capable powder skiers—there simply weren’t a lot of skiers who could handle bottomless powder on the 68 millimeter–waisted straight skis of the era. Then in 1988, one of the competitors in Mike Wiegele’s Powder 8 contest contacted Rupert Huber at the Atomic ski factory and asked for a fatter powder ski. Huber responded in 1990 with the Powder Plus fat ski (112 mm waist width). Wiegele adopted and promoted the concept. Fat skis took off, and heliskiing resumed growing.

First Heavy Lifter

Use of helicopters in mountainous terrain depends critically on engine power. The first machine to lift significant loads at higher elevations was the German Focke-Achgelis Fa-223 Drache (Dragon), a twin-rotor design that first flew in 1940, powered by a 1,000-horsepower radial engine. Climb rate was 1,700 feet per minute. Theoretical service ceiling was 23,000 feet (7,100 m) at light weight, and 8,000 feet (2,440 m) with a full payload of 1,000 kg (2,200 lb). This was better than twice the performance of the much smaller Bell 47.

A Fa-233 is known to have crashed on Mont Blanc in 1944 during an attempted mountain rescue. Mountain flight testing resumed in Mittenwald in the Bavarian Alps in September 1944, with an emphasis on hauling heavy cargo to mountain troops—howitzers, for instance. The highest landing was at 2,300 meters (7,549 ft) while testing performance as an air ambulance. By then the factory had been repeatedly destroyed by Allied bombers and the project was abandoned. Of 11 built,only three survivedthe war. Neither of the Austrian-born pioneers of Canadian heliskiing, Hans Gmoser and Mike Wiegele, were aware of the German experiments.

Halsted Morris is president of the American Avalanche Association. His patrol handle is “Hacksaw.” See his website at heliskihistory.com.

Before P-tex, there was Kofix. It drove a revolution in ski racing.

When Alpine skis had wooden bases, it was common to waterproof them with celluloid lacquer, made by dissolving celluloid in ether, acetone or alcohol. Each factory had its own name for this stuff – Plasticite, Celloblitz and so on. It made a smooth glossy surface but soon wore thin. When the wood started to show through, skiers could paint on a lacquer sold in cans, under brand names like Faski and Blue Streak.

Photo above: Kofix headquarters, Hall im Tirol near Innsbruck. All photos courtesy of Barbara Kofler.

With the end of World War II, European ski factories resumed production, with a few new adhesives and plastics. Early in 1945, within months of Liberation, Dynamic began using a solid sheet of celluloid – not a lacquer – to improve glide speed. “Cellolix” repelled water, held wax and resisted rock damage, but as it aged it often cracked. Nonetheless, celluloid was a great solution for the first aluminum skis, and was used, in the form of a softer sticky-tape film, by TEY on their Alu-60 ski. Attenhofer coated the bottom of its metal ski with Araldite, an epoxy resin invented during the war in Switzerland, and called it Temporit.

Polyethylene: Classified secret in WWII

Polyethylene (PE) waited in the wings. PE production was devised in England in 1939. With the outbreak of war, the material was classified secret, because it was perfect for insulating coaxial cables used in radar sets and for wiring insulation in Allied warplanes. In 1951, a cheaper form of PE came into wide use for packaging.

Walter Rudolf Kofler (1928-2004) grew up in Innsbruck as an enthusiastic ski racer. He turned 17 in May, 1945, just a week after the American 409th Infantry Regiment occupied Innsbruck. That summer Kofler entered the University of Innsbruck. He earned his doctorate in physics, at age 21, in 1949.

How to glue it?

Before graduating, Kofler noticed that the new PE material felt a lot like the solid form of paraffin wax. Its chemical structure was perfectly compatible with paraffin, and Kofler thought it might make a useful ski base. But PE was so slippery that, unlike celluloid, no glue could hold it to the bottom of a ski. Kofler hit on the idea of partially melting one side of a PE sheet to a strip of cotton fabric; the fabric could then be glued to the ski. He also mixed a lot of wax into the molten plastic.

Local ski factories Schlechter, Halhammer, Vielhaber and Messerer tested the new base successfully, and in October, 1952, Kofler applied for an Austrian patent for a “ski base made of fabric-laminated polyethylene.”

In 1954 he set up a factory in Munich and pitched the product to major ski factories, under the brand name Kofix. It was expensive. Swiss and American factories, with the advantage of strong currencies, could buy the stuff easily, and the Swiss company Montana purchased a license to make its own version of Kofix, for sale to Swiss and French ski factories.

Racing advantage

But the cash-strapped French and Austrian factories were slow to adopt Kofix for mass production skis. Its superior glide speed obviously conferred an advantage for racing, and by the 1956 Olympics in Cortina, racers on Kästle and Kneissl skis had Kofix bases. Austrians won nine of the eighteen medals, including Toni Sailer’s three golds plus Anderl Molterer’s silver and bronze, and Swiss skiers on Kofix won another three.

Sailer was unbeatable on any ski base—he whipped Molterer, also equipped with Kofix, by six seconds in the GS. French racers, still skiing on Cellolix bases, were shut out of the medals entirely—eight seconds off the pace in GS and almost ten seconds out in slalom and downhill. A year later the entire Austrian team

had Kofix bases, and they took six of the top seven places at the Hahnenkamm. According to Maurice Woehrlé, who joined Rossignol’s engineering team in 1962, in 1957 Rossignol used a form of PE, called Naltene, on the Metallais—but that wasn’t a race ski.

Woehrlé also reports that Charles Bozon and Guy Périllat used Dynamic’s Slalom Leger, with a PE base, at the Squaw Valley Olympics. Bozon took bronze in slalom. That was the breakthrough year for Rossignol’s Allais 60, the first aluminum ski to dominate downhill racing, and it got a PE base. So it would appear that all the men’s medals in 1960 were won on PE bases. Rossignol’s slalom and GS Stratos didn’t get PE until 1964—which is when the French team began its dominant Killy-Périllat-Goitschel era.

In 1960, Kofix turned up in the Head, Hart and Northland catalogs. But as late as 1958, skiers were still confused about what constituted a “plastic” base. In their book The New Invitation to Skiing, Fred Iselin and A.C. Spectorsky classed Kofix with half a dozen brands of celluloid lacquer.

A problem arose with the cotton backing: If a ski absorbed moisture, the fabric softened and swelled, deadening the ski. Kofler kept working on upgrades: harder, tougher plastics, plus PE extruded onto steel and fiberglass strips, which replaced cotton while functioning as a structural layer. By 1959, most Austrian, Swiss and German factories offered Kofix recreational skis, but resented Kofler’s monopoly.

Competition from P-tex

In 1964, Swiss licensee Montana introduced P-tex. Because it didn’t use a cotton backing, it didn’t violate Kofler’s patent. Instead, the bonding side of the plastic was flame-treated, which put a carbon “tail” on each of the long polyethylene molecules, so it could be glued solidly to a fiberglass or aluminum ski.

Beginning with Fischer, Kofler’s customers stampeded to adopt Montana’s P-tex, going so far as to exclude Kofler from trade shows. In 1966, Montana introduced a sintered base called P-tex 2000. It was far harder and more durable than the extruded forms of PE previously available. That was the end of the line for Kofix. In 1970, Kofler turned his patents over to an employee, who continued to manufacture the product as Fastex.

Kofler then developed a ski made of extruded strips of ABS plastic, rolled out on laminating equipment he designed. He built his own line of Rebell skis, and licensed the process to Maxel and Sarner in Italy. By 1976 it was clear that extruded skis couldn’t compete with the major factories, and the concept evaporated.

Kofler continued to ski, and to innovate. In 1988 he patented a lightweight fiberglass leaf spring for cars, trains and trucks, and a tough surface for Kneissl’s Big Foot skis and for snowboards, produced in his lab in Innsbruck. He consulted with the Austrian ski team on glide speed issues. In 2004, at age 76, while driving to a masters ski race, he suffered a fatal heart attack.

Many thanks to Werner Nachbauer and Arno Klien for their generous assistance in gathering German-language sources for this article, and to Barbara Kofler for fact-checking.

Seth Masia is president of ISHA. He writes frequently for Skiing History.

How Christian Lund mopped up rivals while making the world’s best-known hickory skis.

Illustration above: Henry Hall (1893-1986), of Ishpeming, Michigan, was just one of many professional ski jumpers who swore by Northland’s hickory skis. After his 1917 world record, he served in World War I, and returned to reclaim the record in 1921, jumping 229.5 feet at Revelstoke, British Columbia.

America’s ski-making industry, as a mass-production enterprise, began along the banks of the upper Mississippi River in Minnesota. Fueled by a ready market of Norwegian immigrants and the availability of high-quality timber, men like jumping champions Mikkel and Torjus Hemmestveit set up workshops to hand-carve dozens, perhaps hundreds, of skis each year. It was Martin Strand, a civil engineer born in Rendalen, Norway, who in 1896 began mass-producing skis using power equipment, in St. Paul. But the signal success was the Northland Ski Manufacturing Co., which grew to be the largest ski-maker in the world, while producing what many considered the best hickory skis available (at least until Thor Groswold began making skis in Denver in 1934).

Northland’s history has for decades been shrouded in a fog of self-promotion by Christian A. Lund, who claimed, inaccurately, to have founded the firm in 1911. That was the story he pitched in the pages of his catalogs and advertising. By midcentury, the brand held iconic status, and fans had no reason to doubt the “official” origin story. The truth was more complex.

A one-page sketch of C.A. Lund’s life in the Northland 50th-anniversary catalog, published in 1961, summarized the company’s version. Titled “The Northland Story,” it includes the citation accompanying Lund’s induction into the Hall of Fame of the National Sporting Goods Association, which reads, in part:

“After coming to the United States (1901), [Lund] founded the Northland Ski Mfg. Co in 1911. The fifty years since have been spent in the development of skiing and ice hockey in this country. . . . His introduction of plastic ski bottoms, metal edged skis, perfected techniques of hickory laminations and other innovations, boosted his company to its present eminence as the world’s largest ski manufacturer... he created a new important segment of the sporting goods industry.”

But a search of archived materials in Minneapolis and St. Paul has changed the accepted narrative of the history of Lund and his ski companies. The real story is full of intrigue, betrayal and four-alarm fires. Northland, in fact, grew out of previous enterprises dating back to Strand’s first workshop in 1896.

For context, understand that between 1840 and 1910, about 250,000 Norwegians and 180,000 Swedes landed in the Minneapolis–St. Paul area. According to Gunnar Thorvaldsen of the Arctic University of Norway, one out of every nine Norwegians left Norway and one out of every 12 Swedes left Sweden during that period. The immigrants lost no time in setting up their own winter sport clubs. The St. Paul Winter Carnival, launched in 1886, was a Scandinavian winter celebration modeled after the Montreal Winter Carnival. The one-week event ended up lasting four and was a showcase for all winter activities, including tobogganing, horse racing on ice, sleigh rides, skating, curling, and, of course, snowshoeing and skiing.

This was the spirit of the place when Martin Strand arrived in 1888, at age 25. He enrolled in the University of Minnesota and worked as a surveyor, then as a civil engineer in Superior, Minnesota. When Fridtjof Nansen’s book On Skis Across Greenland was published in 1890, Norwegian nationalism soared and skiing became an expression of Norwegian pride everywhere, especially for young men like Strand.

In 1892, Strand traveled home for a short visit and may have investigated how Norwegian skis were made. The Panic of 1893 in the U.S. brought economic collapse and a multi-year depression. For Strand, work dried up in Superior, and he returned to Minneapolis to work as a draftsman. He experimented with making skis in his basement, bending the ski tips over a steaming teapot. By 1896 he was selling skis but kept his day job as a draftsman, then later as a civil engineer again.

In 1899, city records list Strand as a ski manufacturer on Cedar Avenue in Minneapolis, but he needed another source of income and sold insurance for New York Life. There he met another salesman, a Wisconsin Swede named Frederick J. Youngquist. In 1905 they set up shop as Strand & Youngquist Manufacturing Co. As their foreman, they hired a young expert carpenter, Ole Sigurd Ellevold, who arrived in Minneapolis in 1901, to supervise manufacture of skis, oars, toboggans and baseball bats.

Little is known regarding the contractual relationship between Strand and Youngquist, but in 1907, Strand was out and Youngquist reorganized the company as the National Boat Oar Manufacturing Company.

Strand bounced back and by 1909 was again listed as a ski and oar manufacturer doing business at 2427 University Avenue, near the campus of the University of Minnesota. Strand was determined not to fail in the ski business. He did well enough to recruit Ellevold as a foreman. Then, on May 29, 1910, a fire consumed the entire plant, including his manufacturing machinery.

Any shop making wooden skis was a fire hazard. The building was full of sawdust, paint and varnish, and lumber and finished skis. Strand and Ellevold rebuilt two miles away, only to lose that building in a second fire. Three decades later, in the July 21, 1940, edition, the New Richmond News (Wisconsin) told Strand’s story:

“Two fires six months apart almost crushed him. Both times his stock was completely destroyed and the machines were ruined. The foreman of his shop [Ellevold] gave him another headache [as Strand explains]. “He knew the second fire almost broke me and he knew it automatically cancelled my lease on the building. I did not know that, but he did and he bid up on the lease so I was forced out.”

Strand, who never gave up, traveled 25 miles to New Richmond, Wisconsin, where the Chamber of Commerce desperately wanted new manufacturing businesses. They offered Strand an unbeatable deal, building him a “fireproof” masonry building. In less than a year (in 1911) Strand was back in business making skis and toboggans. He made inexpensive skis of white pine and jumping skis of hickory. Some years later he would claim to be the largest ski manufacturer in the world.

Ellevold rebuilt the Hampden Avenue factory in 1911, and in 1912 adopted a new company name: The Northland Ski Manufacturing Company, Ole S. Ellevold, President. The first two catalogues featured the young Crown Prince of Norway on the covers.

From across the street, at the Gold Coin Stock Food and Chemical Works, Christian A. Lund watched the new enterprise open with more than passing interest. Lund had arrived in Minneapolis in 1903 and by 1910 was a manager at Gold Coin.

Northland Ski Company had been established with stock values of $50,000 and a maximum liability on debt of $20,000. In 1913, Lund purchased some Northland stock. Two years later, he incorporated the C.A. Lund Company as a shell but continued selling wood finishes for Gold Coin. As a stockholder in Northland, he advised Ellevold on business matters and probably sold him wood preservatives and varnishes.

A block or so down the street from the Northland plant, another Norwegian, Hans Gregg, manufactured wooden farm implements and skis under the Park label. By 1919, Gregg was making high-quality skis for the Dartmouth Cooperative Society in Hanover, New Hampshire. Lund may also have been selling varnishes to Gregg. It was obvious to Lund that the ski business was thriving. He continued investing in Northland stock.

By 1916 Lund owned enough Northland stock to control the company. He resigned from Gold Coin in 1918 and activated his C.A. Lund Company for the sale, and possibly manufacture, of wood preservatives. Ellevold, then 36 years old, left the business and moved to North Dakota, where he took up farming.

Lund grew the Northland brand of skis, bindings and related products, selling to high-end sporting goods and department stores. In 1927 he opened a factory in Hastings, Minnesota, to manufacture Lund-branded skis, snowshoes and toboggans as a cheaper line for hardware and general-merchandise stores.

Aside from aggressive marketing, Northland owed its success to hickory—the hardest wood available for skis (and for ax handles, wheel spokes and the like). Prohibitively expensive for European factories, hickory was a reasonable purchase in Minnesota. Northland bought boatloads, shipped from Louisiana sawmills as planks ready to be carved into skis. Northland’s hickory skis became the first choice of ski jumpers and, after 1930, for Alpine downhillers—at least until challenged, beginning in 1932, by the Groswold Ski Company in Denver.

Then on June 4, 1937, the Woodware Worker’s Union Local 2048 filed suit against Lund, DBA the C.A. Lund Company and Northland. The suit alleged that C.A. Lund et al. had engaged in unfair labor practices, in violation of the National Labor Relations Act at both plants—six charges in all. The trial examiner and the National Labor Relations Board ruled against Lund on all charges. He was ordered to correct violations and make restitution. The incident didn’t turn Lund into a model employer afterward. The union took him back to court in 1939, and again the court ruled against Lund et al.

Meanwhile, in a bid to penetrate the New England market, Lund opened a plant in Laconia, New Hampshire. It was promoted in the New York Times as “the largest ski factory in the world.” Lund’s son, Carl, managed the plant. Lund also hired Walter F. Tubbs to manage the Northland snowshoe line.

In 1945, the Hastings plant burned to the ground, and Lund relocated to the suburb of North St. Paul.

In an era when most ski factories served local markets, the C.A. Lund Company, marketing nationally, produced more skis than any other enterprise in the world. Less aggressive companies couldn’t compete. Martin Strand filed for bankruptcy in 1945 and died two years later. On December 3, 1953, Lund’s old St. Paul plant, the one founded by Strand and rebuilt by Ellevold, burned. Lund strolled a couple of blocks down the road and purchased the Gregg factory, then on the verge of bankruptcy. Within a couple of weeks, Northland skis were shipping from the old Gregg plant.

To be fair, we don’t know if Lund plotted to drive Ole Ellevold out of his own business, or if Lund simply bought him out when Ellevold wanted a farm. We don’t know if Youngquist pushed Strand out of their partnership, or if they parted on friendly terms. Strand did confirm that Ellevold forced him out after the 1910 fires. It is interesting that Lund, with all of his success behind him in 1961, felt the need to exaggerate his own considerable accomplishments at the expense of others.

When Lund died in 1965, the wooden ski was fast going the way of the wooden ship, washed out in an unstoppable tide of change. At the close of that year, his sons, Carl and Ambrose, sensibly sold the Northland Ski Company to Larson Industries, makers of fiberglass boats. In 1968 Larson hired Stein Eriksen to promote a line of glass skis, but it was too late. The last Northlands shipped in 1970. 

Greg Fangel is the proprietor of woodenskis.com in Tofte, Minnesota. Paul Hooge and his wife run the Hooge Haus, a bed-and-breakfast with a ski museum in Crested Butte, Colorado.