1960s

Vermont’s first chairlift opened at Mt. Mansfield on November 17, 1940. Management claimed it was the longest in the world, at 6,330 feet, rising 2,033 vertical feet. It delivered 200 skiers per hour to the summit after a painfully slow (and freezing) half-hour ride. Riders on the single chair huddled under woolen blankets, with no one to talk to or cuddle with. As early as 1943, skiers complained of waiting in two-hour lift lines. Across the road on Spruce Peak, a faster double chair arrived in 1954, carrying 500 skiers per hour, but that didn’t solve the Mt. Mansfield waits. So it was big news when the Ski Capital of the East boasted about its “NEW double chairlift” in this 1961 SKI Magazine ad. The new double more than tripled capacity to the summits, and lift lines evaporated for a couple of seasons. But overcrowding returned, and in 1986 the original single chair was replaced by New England’s first high-speed quad, hauling 1,500 skiers per hour.

Coming Up in Future Issues

• Whatever Happened to ruade? Remember hopping your ski tails up and sideways to start a turn? Ron LeMaster explains the “mule kick” turn.
• Aspen’s 75th Anniversary Most of us know how Friedl Pfeifer and Walter Paepcke brought ski lifts to Aspen. We look at the locals who actually built the lifts and lodges.
• The History of Yellowstone on Skis In the late 1880s, Army ski patrols chased poachers in America’s first national park. Add skiing mailmen and tourists, and Yellowstone quietly became a hub of skiing in the West.
• Where Are They Now? He raced for Italy on the World Cup tour from 1981-89, was a teammate of Alberto Tomba and was the 1990 Rookie of the Year on the U.S. Pro Tour. We catch up with Marco Tonazzi.

PLUS

• Spider’s Web More than four decades after his death, the delayed induction of Spider Sabich into the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame illuminates his life.

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Aspen Highlands’ bruising—and short-lived—no-rules race.

By Jay Cowan

Aspen Highlands founder Whip Jones had a knack for publicity stunts. His 1960s Bash for Cash, anything-goes citizen downhill also had a knack for mayhem and injuries. But the race did result in a popular poster of that era.

From its inception in a valley dominated by Aspen Skiing Corporation properties, Aspen Highlands always strived to stand out. Owner and founder Whipple Van Ness Jones, a maverick by nature, centered his area on pushing the boundaries on entertaining customers and garnering publicity.

After the area opened in 1958, Stein Eriksen, Highlands’ first ski school director, did flips—an audacious trick for that era—at the bottom of the mountain every day. A dozen years later, ski patrollers began jumping off the patrol shack roof, pulling toboggans. Eriksen’s eventual replacement, Fred Iselin, performed Reuel christies down the mountain while reading his own book. So it was probably inevitable that something as brash and fundamentally American as the Bash for Cash would be created here. The event featured racers charging en masse, like lemmings, down a cliffy run for a pot of money at the finish.

Jones blamed the event on the original head of the ski patrol. “There’s no question that Charlie Bolte was the biggest character I ever knew at Highlands,” Jones later explained. “On the job he had a fondness for explosives. And after work he was quite a prominent member of the customers at the bar. He also came up with the idea, maybe at the bar, for our famous race the Bash for Cash.”

Early versions of this madness—with a Le Mans-style–start, no gates and few rules—ran on Lower Stein, near the area’s base. In the early 1960s it was moved much nearer to the top of the mountain. It plunged down the Olympic run face and cut across to the Wall, a short, steep, punishing mogul field, with a run-out finish to the $100 cash prize. The winner was the first one down without falling.

“We started it each week by blowing up a case of dynamite. That was a hell of a charge,” recalled Jones. Indeed. And almost as insane as the fact that they ran the race every week.

Not surprisingly, it occasionally produced chaos like that in the mid-1960’s poster (see left), part of a sequence of three images taken right after the start on the Olympic face by the late Tony Gauba of Aspen. Highlands instructor and patrolman Paul Dudley is one of those in the photo, and one of the few who didn’t get hurt. 

“I’m the one still standing in the poster,” he laughs. “Then the s*** hit the fan and people started colliding.” He remembers, “Twenty or less of us lined up side-by-side at the start and right away the run narrowed to about five feet wide with powder on either side.”

He and his friend Doug Rowley had practiced for the event and decided Dudley would try to shoot that gap, and Rowley would follow a little behind everyone and hope to safely pick his way through in case Dudley didn’t make it.

“When the chaos started, I skied off to my left into the powder and stopped and then the screaming started. Everyone was hurt. Broken bones, concussions, cuts. Some of them skied down. They hauled others off, and they found one guy later halfway down the mountain just walking in a daze,” Dudley says.

A story in the Aspen Times about that particular race, published in the February 28, 1964, issue, led with this: “In the worst accident of the Aspen skiing season, two men were hospitalized following a collision during the Aspen Highlands first Bash for Cash race of the winter last Sunday, Feb. 23.”

Jones, who witnessed the carnage, said no one was sure what happened. “Two of them fell or collided,” the story quoted him as saying, then adding its own summary: “The other contestants either fell trying to avoid the first two or ran into them.”

Attending physicians at the Aspen Valley Hospital were Robert Oden and Robert Barnard. Racer Myron Leafblad of Wisconsin had “the worst spiral fracture I’ve ever seen,” Oden said. Highlands instructor Mike Riddell “had his upper jaw broken in two places and his upper front teeth torn away,” the Aspen Times reported.

An angry letter from the doctors to the newspaper was followed by an editorial that noted that “in the excitment of competition,” sports participants “must be protected from themselves,” and that Bash for Cash failed miserably on that front. “Racers and race organizers are lucky that more were not hurt, or that no one died,” the editorial read.

The Forest Service, which owns most of the Aspen Highlands property, along with the ski area’s insurance company, are said to have caused the event’s demise the following season. The Aspen Skiing Company purchased Highlands in 1993. But a faint whiff of mayhem and cordite still lingers over the mountain, the locals’ favorite among ASC’s properties. 

Les Arcs Named “One of the Most Significant Works of Postwar Architecture”

Les Arcs, in Savoie, France, is known for its avant-garde architecture, conspicuously different from the traditional Alpine designs prominent at many European resorts. The New York Times agrees on the resort’s distinction, naming Les Arcs No. 14 in “The 25 Most Significant Works of Postwar Architecture,” by Kurt Soller and Michael Snyder, published in August.

One of the first mega-resorts, Les Arcs consists of five interconnected base areas, each named for its elevation in meters. All but Arc 1950, the last of the areas constructed, were built in a modernistic style. The Times story notes the innovative work of French architect (and skier) Charlotte Perriand, a leading figure of 20th-century design. She took on the project in the late 1960s, at age 65.

“Perriand approached the construction of her ambitious Les Arcs resort as an opportunity to introduce the masses to what she described as the ‘possibility of self-transcendence’ offered by mountain landscapes,” the story reported. Perriand’s portion of the project consisted of “two clusters of hotels and apartments set into the mountain slope with views up to the pastures above.”

With a tight construction schedule, Perriand incorporated prefabrication techniques lifted from shipbuilding. “To assemble a structure that could accommodate 18,000 beds in the span of just seven months, she used mold-formed polyester to make easily reproducible kitchens and bathrooms. Carefully planned setbacks in the facade transformed the building itself into a slope, providing each of its long, narrow rooms with expansive views.”

The Cascade building (above), at Arc 1600, is noted as an example of her inspiration to have the hotel disappear into the mountain environment. “The ski chalet doesn’t rank that brilliantly in terms of sustainability or honorable usage of materials, particularly nowadays, but that modular approach to building—the way she integrated into the landscape and the woodiness of the prefabricated construction—is amazing, as are the furnishings inside,” the story reported. 

Whatever Happened to Avalement? "Swallowing" remains relevant today. Early photos made it look like back-seat driving.

Photo above: This photo montage from Georges Joubert and Jean Vuarnet’s 1966 Comment se perfectionner à ski, published in the U.S. as How to Ski the New French Way in 1967, shows Jean-Claude Killy performing avalement: deeply flexing in the transition between turns with a forward movement of the feet.

For many, simply hearing a faux francophone utter the word “avalement” conjures images of skiing’s French new wave of the early 1970s: Patrick Russell winning the FIS Championship slalom in Val Gardena. American hotdog skiers sitting waayyyyy back, supported by Jet Stix. And serious skiers everywhere coming to grips with a low, feet-apart stance often derided as “the outhouse crouch.”

I can’t think of another element of advanced ski technique that was so widely misrepresented, which misrepresentation led so many astray, yet was so important and continues to be so.

Avalement was a natural response to advances in ski design in the 1960s. When skis were made primarily of wood, and the only metal in them was their segmented steel edges, ski designers were faced with a tradeoff between making skis that were soft enough to be bent into reverse camber, yet strong enough to not break. Stein

Eriksen, for one, was known to be partial to softer skis because he could make a sharper, faster turn with them. On the flip side, he was also known for breaking more skis than others. As the sole structural material, wood also made it hard to produce a ski that, while flexible along its length, remained stiff in torsion, a design parameter tied to gripping on hard snow.

By using metal and fiberglass structural sheets to control the bending properties, engineers made skis that could flex more easily without breaking, and whose stiffness lengthwise and torsionally could be controlled more independently. Box-construction fiberglass skis, such as the Dynamic VR7, were particularly good in the latter regard.

Enter Jean-Claude Killy, thought by many to be the most technically innovative skier of our time. Killy understood better than anyone else—whether intuitively or cognitively—that the new skis could in many situations turn themselves by carving rather than being steered by the skier, and in a way that was more effective and

efficient. This led to some significant things happening in the turn: The skier didn’t need to apply as much pressure in the last part of the turn to make the ski bend, or angulate as much to make it hold. This allowed Killy to reduce and often eliminate the edge set that others made at the end of the turn. The ski could also be made to bend earlier in the turn, where there was less available pressure. So avoiding protracted unweighting going into the turn became desirable. Getting the skis engaged, bent, and drawing turning force from the snow earlier in the turn required that the skier be inclined earlier too, so as to be balanced against that force.

In short, making turns on smooth, packed snow became much like skiing in moguls. And what are the most distinguishing technical characteristics of mogul skiing?

Flexing at the end of the turn to absorb the force of the bump. Sliding your feet forward as you ski into the bump to prevent being pitched forward. Then extending once you’ve passed over the bump to keep your skis in contact with the snow for speed and direction control, and so you’re prepared to absorb the next bump.

Georges Joubert observed Killy’s movement of absorption and dubbed it “avalement.” Literally, “swallowing.” Dick Barrymore’s great documentary of the 1966 FIS World Championships, in Portillo, Chile, contains telling footage of Killy, Karl Schranz, Guy Périllat and others in the slalom. The difference between Killy and the rest is immediately evident. Just as striking is footage of Killy and Périllat training slalom on a rutted course. Where Périllat struggles to stay in the course, getting jolted by the ruts and leaving the snow going into every turn, Killy is unflappable.

In November 1967, SKI Magazine ran a cover story introducing avalement with the unfortunate headline “Look! They’re Sitting Back!” The article, written by Joubert and Jean Vuarnet, was far more nuanced than its title suggested. It was part of a series of articles that John Fry, SKI’s editor, ran to introduce America to Joubert and Vuarnet’s new book, How to Ski the New French Way. There was a wealth of worthwhile information in what was being published, but the skiing public was ready for a revolution and struck at the flashiest piece of bait: avalement.

The press recognized avalement’s appeal and played to it. Unfortunately, they often illustrated it with easily misconstrued photos of great skiers at extraordinary moments. As a result, legions of would-be avant-garde skiers were sent down a dead-end rabbit hole.

Did avalement die with the rise of extreme skiing or the advent of shaped skis? Hardly. The constant evolution of skis and ski boots, coupled with snow making and grooming, has enabled skiers to generate, to ever greater degrees, the very dynamics that gave rise to avalement in the 1960s. (Unfortunately, those same dynamics have been partly responsible for the rise in knee injuries.) We haven’t changed our technique, just our nomenclature. Cheapened by the misuse of the term in the ’70s and the ski community’s constant pursuit of novelty, “avalement” all but disappeared from our lexicon in the 1980s. Current fashion refers to the technique as “retraction.” Maybe in a few years we’ll call it “swallowing.” 

Regular contributor Ron LeMaster wrote about “The Comma Position” in the last issue of Skiing History (May-June 2021).

1961 boot paved the way for avalement.

Photo above: The Elite, advertised in Skiing Magazine, November 1967. Skier is Guy Périllat. In that era, factories could not use the names of “amateur” athletes.

In the mid 1960s, when French racers began winning everything in sight using the new “avalement” technique described by Georges Joubert, (see page 18) journalists assumed that the breakthrough technique was enabled by a new generation of fiberglass skis introduced around 1961—notably the Dynamic VR7, the copycat Dynastar RG5 and the Rossignol Strato. Those skis, the gurus opined, stored energy in their tails, launching racers out of each turn toward the next.

They were partly right, but the French team had another advantage, little noticed at the time. In 1961, bootmaker Le Trappeur introduced the Elite race boot. It elevated the skier’s heel for what we would now call a steeper ramp angle, and the upper shaft had more forward lean than any race boot previously available. It was considerably stiffer, too.

Eight years before high-back spoilers, the Elite put skiers in an aggressive knees-flexed position that encouraged application of strong fore-aft leverage. This enabled a skier to selectively pressure shovel, center and tail in a way not easily achieved before. A racer could retract instantly to absorb a roll and then efficiently press the tip of the ski down the backside to pump a little more speed.

The Elite came about when Le Trappeur licensed Henke’s Martin buckle patent, becoming the exclusive maker of buckle boots in France. To support the buckles, company owner and boot designer Marcel Carrier created double-thick reinforcing of the leather outer “shell.” This made for a very stiff structure, supported by a steel shank in the sole connected to reinforcements on either side of the heel. To provide better lateral power, Carrier made the cuff a couple of centimeters higher and added a fifth buckle. Five-buckle boots already existed. Carrier’s innovation was to angle the fourth buckle downward to fix the skier’s heel in its pocket.

The boot was immediately adopted by the French team. So equipped, Charles Bozon and Guy Périllat took gold and silver in the 1962 slalom world championships at Chamonix. Marielle Goitschel took slalom silver and combined gold. Other bootmakers took notice. According to Sven Coomer, who was there, Hans Heierling met with Carrier and bought a license to reproduce the Elite. So did Aldo Vaccari from Nordica, who went home and built the first buckle boot from Italy.

Heierling was the exclusive supplier to the U.S. Ski Team, because Jack Beattie (coach Bob’s brother) was the American importer. When Buddy Werner, Jean Saubert, Billy Kidd, Jimmie Heuga and the rest arrived at Innsbruck in 1964, they skied in Heierling’s version of the Elite. The original Le Trappeur Elite powered five French medals: gold and silver for the Goitschel sisters in both slalom and GS, and downhill silver for Leo Lacroix.

Soon, more factories in Austria and Italy sold unlicensed imitations. In 1965, Canadian coach Dave Jacobs told Bob Lange to cant his new plastic race boot forward and lock the cuff—in other words, make it ski like the Elite.

From 1962 onward, Jean-Claude Killy used the Elite throughout his amateur career. The boot evolved over the course of the decade. By 1968, it had an injection-molded sole (a Nordica innovation) and a waterproof polyurethane laminate on the outside. The final version was the Elite Pro Blue of 1969-70. Killy stuck with the Elite until he signed with Lange in 1971. A year later, as he geared up for his championship pro-racing career, he was back in all-plastic Le Trappeurs. 

Seth Masia is president of ISHA and editor of Skiing History. 

Where are they now? The first American to win a World Cup race starts a new life.

Photo above: Kiki at the World Cup GS in Val d'Isere, December 11, 1969. Popperfoto/Getty Images.

Blasting out of her driveway onto River Road in Hanover, N.H., Kiki Cutter on her bike looks every bit the “Bend Fireball” that she was known as in her prime. Cutter is intent on prepping for her fifth knee surgery in as many years by riding up and down the Connecticut River from the home she shares with Jason Densmore, her friend for five decades, and husband of four years. Head down, focused, determined, this is the woman who, in 1968, became the first American, man or woman, to win on skiing’s World Cup Tour. Over a short three-year career, her five wins were a record until Phil Mahre surpassed it 11 years later.

OFF TO THE RACES

Cutter grew up in Bend, Oregon, the fourth of Dr. Robert and Jane Cutter’s six children. She rode her horse to grade school from their 1,000-acre property, and in winters skied for the Bend Skyliners junior race program. Coach Frank Cammack, lumberman and national Nordic combined champ, taught his charges first and foremost to ski fast. “Every morning we would meet at the top of the mountain and we would scream down as fast as we could,” Cutter says. In those two to three runs before the mountain opened, Cutter fought all the boys to follow first behind Cammack. Among those young Skyliners, who as a group became a force in junior racing, was futuredownhiller Mike Lafferty. “I was at the lift first and she was second,” says Lafferty. “I don’t know if she ever beat me.” The two rode the lift together often and Lafferty remembers Cutter as “a great competitor who did everything full-tilt.”

Tough, kind-hearted and devoted, coach Cammack assumed an important role for Cutter when she was age 12 and her parents divorced. Cutter, already outspoken and independent, was now filled with anger. “She was an ornery brat under some circumstances and I didn’t hesitate to tell her that,” recalls Cammack. “When push came to shove she could really perform.” Cammack also appreciated the bigger picture, and what skiing could offer kids, especially young Kiki. “He saw what was happening with my family and directed my anger into skiing,” says Cutter. “He changed my life.”

At age 14, Cutter remembers sitting on the rocks at Mt. Bachelor, watching her U.S. Ski Team heroes—Heuga, Kidd, Barrows, Werner, Sabich—and wanting to be part of it. When she was invited to train with the team, at age 15, she caught the eye of Rossignol race room legend Gerard Rubaud, who gave Cutter her first pair of Rossi skis and started her lifelong relationship with the brand.

After winning the junior nationals downhill at age 17, in weather so severe it was said she “skied underneath the storm,” Cutter was named to the U.S. Ski Team, but not to the 1968 Olympic squad. Seven women were named to that squad in the spring of 1967. The following season, however, they had a few nagging injuries, and fewer good results. After Christmas, coach Bob Beattie brought three youngsters—Cutter, Judy Nagel and Erica Skinger—to Europe, hoping to spark some pre-Olympic fire in his team.
A WHIRLWIND TOUR

“Ferocious,” “tough,” “ornery,” “in-your-face” are all words teammate Karen (Budge) Eaton uses to describe Cutter’s loud entrance. “She made me laugh, and she fought back,” says Eaton, referring to Cutter’s liftline assertiveness, and how the rookie famously chided French superstar Marielle Goitschel to speed up or get out of the way on a training run. “She taught me how to be tougher and more aggressive,” adds Eaton. “We all got better.”

Despite their inexperience and poor start numbers, the youngsters immediately made a mark, and none more so than Cutter. She scored two seventh place finishes, then a second and third place, earning a spot, along with Nagel, on the Grenoble Olympic team.

Cutter was the only U.S. woman to ski all three events, placing as the top American in downhill, despite a bout with measles that the press never confirmed. Later that season, Cutter became the first American to win a World Cup race, taking the slalom at Kirkerudbakken, Norway. At the awards ceremony she was congratulated by King Olav V, and came home to a caravan welcome in Bend.

In an era when news stories referred to women as “girls,” called one champion skier “a hefty lass” and referred to the “good looks of the ski damsels,” the press loved the spirited Cutter. Dubbed by the French team “La Dangereuse Américaine,” she was simply “Kiki” in the local Oregon headlines. Elsewhere Cutter was described as a “105-pound fireball,” “fiercely tiny,” “pocket-sized,” “pixie-like” and “no bigger than a bar of soap.” Sports Illustrated asserted that Cutter “belies her ladylike cuteness with a fighting temperament,” and called her “the embodiment of the American skiing spirit.”

Much of this lives in scrapbooks kept by Cutter’s mother, Jane, who then lived in Geneva, Switzerland. Also preserved are letters from Kiki to Jane, recounting her travels, conveying how much she missed her, and defending her choice to interrupt her studies at the University of Oregon to commit to ski racing. Racing in Europe allowed Kiki and Jane to reunite, and provided a home base that was a respite for Kiki and her closest friend, Judy Nagel. Traveling by train with all their gear, as ski racers did then, was “a blast, that never felt like a job,” but was nonetheless exhausting.

Cutter notched three more victories in 1969, two slalom and one GS. She finished that season fourth in the overall World Cup standings, and second in slalom, while teammate Marilyn Cochran won the GS title. The following season, despite struggling with early season injuries, she managed to score her fifth World Cup win (and 12th podium) in St. Gervais, France, and many assumed her best years were ahead of her. But she had different ideas: “I was pretty burnt out and it wasn’t fun anymore,” she says. She quit in 1970, at age 20. Nagel quit the following year, with three victories, at age 19.

EARLY (AND BRIEF) RETIREMENT

Part of Cutter’s decision was the tense atmosphere on the U.S. Ski Team. Created by Beattie ten years earlier, the team was still establishing itself. Another major factor was that, to her mother’s displeasure, she had started dating Beattie, who in April 1969 had been ousted from the U.S. Ski Team. They married in July 1970.

At the 1972 Sapporo Olympics, which might have been Cutter’s Olympic moment, she attended as a spectator, while Beattie commentated for ABC-TV. She remembers Barbara Ann Cochran’s gold medal–winning performance: “I watched from afar and she made every turn perfect--so low down to the ground. I remember watching her and how proud I was of her.” Cutter says she was not a bit envious. “It was over for me.”

Cutter started racing on the pro tour, Beattie’s 1970 creation. She described the women’s competition as “a frill to the men’s race,” where the women were “stuck in after the men made their big ruts.” Cutter suffered her first serious injury in a collision off the six-foot-plus bump at Hunter Mountain.

While Beattie was traveling, a group of kids from Aspen High School asked Cutter to coach them. She would later coach junior skiers at Sunlight, and tennis at Colorado Rocky Mountain School. Working with kids was rewarding—especially with the rebels. She could redirect their energy positively, as Cammack had done for her. “Those were periods of my life I absolutely loved,” she says.

Meanwhile, the marriage with Beattie, who was often on the road, was not going well. “What can I say about it? It happened,” Cutter offers. Their life in New York, where Beattie did much of his work, was especially chaotic. “I don’t think we ever had dinner alone together. I hated it.” They divorced after two and a half tumultuous years.

STARTING OVER

Cutter emerged with nothing but a condo in Snowmass (with two mortgages), and her name. She needed to make a living, doing whatever she could.

She soon teamed up with Mark McCormack of International Management Group, Jean Claude Killy’s agent and Beattie’s archrival. McCormack secured endorsements for Cutter with Nutrament, Ovaltine and Ray Ban, and was instrumental in getting her into the lucrative ABC Superstars competitions in 1975 and ’76. She excelled, thanks to months of intensive multi-sport training. In writing about that event for his 1976 book Sports in America, James Michener called Cutter “the best athlete pound for pound of the whole excursion, men or women.” When Martina Navratilova was heard to say “Who needs this?” of the grueling competition and training required to win the $30,000 purse, Cutter responded, “I do!”

Other endorsements she got on her own, including Busch CitySki, and citizen race clinics through the Equitable Life Family Ski Challenge. After her second knee injury racing on the Women’s Pro Ski Tour (started in 1978), Cutter reserved her competition for dominating the tamer celebrity events. She won the Legends of Skiing GS in 1987 and the initial Tournament of Champions series in 1990. Throughout, Cutter kept up her relationship with Rossignol, leading the women’s clinics they started. In 1994 she took on the role as Ritz-Carlton’s Ski Ambassador.

Cutter supplemented her promotional business by producing special inserts for SKI Magazine that doubled as on-site programs at World Cup events, and also hosted a monthly “Ask Kiki” column in SKI. She founded The Spirit of Skiing, a nationally televised fundraising event for People magazine, where the ski and celebrity world convened to raise money for ovarian and prostate cancer. Cutter was elected to the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame in 1993 and to the Colorado Ski Hall of Fame in 1998.

BACK TO BEND

After 30 years in Aspen, Cutter returned to Bend in 2000. There, she parlayed her publishing experience into her own magazine venture, Bend Living. The hefty quarterly averaged 160 glossy pages, filled with premium editorial, ads and photography, and became the top selling publication in central Oregon, winning awards for both design and editorial. It was a perfect fit for Bend, which was experiencing a spectacular real estate boom.

Managing the magazine and 14 employees was also an enormous amount of work, and all-consuming for Cutter, who took no time off. “It goes right back to why she was good at ski racing,” says Lafferty. “Her competitive nature is what carried her through.” In 2008 the financial crisis, and the collapse of the real estate market, hit publishing—and Bend—especially hard. As advertisers reneged on their agreements, and the magazine struggled for cash, Cutter scrambled to get loans and enforce contract payments. Eventually, however, the magazine folded, leaving her in substantial debt. “I had never experienced a loss like that,” says Cutter, who felt that she had failed her employees and her town. Once again, she faced rebuilding her life.

NEW LIFE AND AN OLD LOVE

It was just around then that Jason Densmore got in touch. The two knew each other from their days in Aspen, when Jason (former member of the U.S. Nordic Combined team) owned a woodstove store, The Burning Log. Then, each of them had been in other relationships, but they became friends and had stayed in touch. As her business was folding, so, too, was his marriage. While consoling each other they realized that rather than trying to resurrect a marriage and a business, they could instead try starting something new. They did, and it was a life together. Kiki moved across the country with Jason in 2010, to his home in Hanover, New Hampshire. The two have lived there ever since, marrying in 2017. After selling properties in Colorado and Oregon she is now debt free, and the couple has time to enjoy the outdoors with their shared menagerie of animals that match their demeanors. The terrier and cat are Kiki’s. The retriever is Jason’s.

Looking back on what she is proud of, there are the ski racing accomplishments, but what resonates more are the less celebrated products of her lifelong hard work, like the magazine and helping others, as when coaching rebellious teens. When asked what she is proudest of in her life, Kiki responds without hesitation: “Jason. I truly have been blessed, starting with Frank [Cammack] and then with Jason.” Whatever comes next, Cutter, now officially Densmore, will live by one of her friend Jimmie Heuga’s favorite mantras: “Keep on keepin’ on.” 

Top: Early trail prep was achieved by snowshoeing first, then skiers next. Elizabeth Paepcke follows that format in 1956 in Colorado’s Ashcroft Valley. (Aspen Historical Society, Durrance Collection)

For any sport, the condition of the playing surface is vital to success. For that reason, ski-touring centers strive to provide guests with well-designed trails groomed to perfection. Over the last half-century, setting and maintaining cross-country tracks has progressed from an arduous process requiring many workers to an efficient, machine-reliant method that uses just one person to operate the levers, buttons and switches.

Before the 1960s, trail preparation required significant effort. Trails could be created simply by snowshoeing, then skiing over the route. But prepping for major events or competitions required trail crews to shovel, rake, pack—and then set parallel ski tracks. It took a lot of time and effort. Consider the early staging of the annual 50-km Holmenkollen race in Oslo, which first started in 1888. Two 25-km laps translated into roughly 15 miles of snow that needed to be shoveled, packed and prepped.

Leading up to the 1960 Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley, two young American Nordic coaches, Al Merrill and Chummy Broomhall, started experimenting with a new grooming method. Both New Englanders with farming backgrounds and a Yankee knack for problem solving, they were familiar with the fine-toothed rotary tillers used to grade soil, leaving it soft and workable. Attaching a rototiller behind a Tucker snowcat, they realized, did the same for snow. Just one person operating a tiller could roll out
kilometer after kilometer of smooth, snow-carpeted trails.

Although the gyro-groomer, as it came to be known, was a major advance, other work was still required; skiers had to follow the groomer to stamp in a ski track. At Squaw Valley that job was done by the race forerunners and post-runners—skiers who had just missed the Olympic team cut.

But help was not far off. Enter Sven Johansson, who raced for the United States at the Squaw Valley Games, then took the job of US biathlon head coach. Starting in 1961, the team was stationed in Fort Richardson, Alaska, which regularly received snowfall that filled in the ski tracks. Partly out of desperation, Johansson devised a remarkably easy and effective solution to track setting: a 28-inch by 36-inch wooden box with two runners on the bottom that simulated skis. When pulled behind a snowcat, with a cinder block or two added for weight, the sled created parallel ski tracks for the afternoon’s training session—likely one of the first mechanical track setters.

Thanks to this breakthrough, the days of strenuous and time-consuming snow shoveling, snowshoe packing and stamping in ski tracks were on their way out.

Johansson sent me a hand-drawn copy of the track-sled building plans. (We had become good friends during a three-week Olympic training camp in Idaho, where I was a coach.) At the time, I was working with the Lyndon Outing Club in Vermont, and we built a prototype sled to set tracks for a race in December 1963. Afterward, a group of high school and college coaches swarmed around the sled, asking for plans, which I later mailed out.

A similar scenario was unfolding in southern Vermont. John Caldwell, a former Olympic skier and a coach at the Putney School, had recruited a skilled carpenter to help him invent a comparable track-setting sled. Just as in Lyndonville, at the end of each race, coaches gathered around the new contraption, asking questions and taking measurements. Mechanical track-setters began cropping up at other schools and colleges, and at Eastern-sanctioned races.

Around this time, Ski-Doo snowmobiles became popular, and these machines turned out to be perfect for pulling a track setter. A typical Nordic setup in the mid-1960s consisted of a Ski-Doo pulling a homemade box sled with a clothesline. It got the job done, but it was still a far cry from what we use today.

Soon, modifications improved the design of track-setting equipment. Wooden sleds

were outfitted with metal blades to cut ski tracks in frozen show, and then polycarbonate bottoms were added to the sleds to reduce friction. Side runners could raise the frame in places where tracks were not wanted or for road crossings. Metal sleds replaced the wooden ones.

As commercial versions of the devices became available, the whole cross-country scene took on a new look and feel. Ski-touring areas could now offer wide, smooth trails with perfectly straight, machine-set tracks, and their guests loved these beautifully prepared surfaces.

In Scandinavia and the rest of Europe, the evolution of trail preparation seems to have progressed much more slowly. According to Caldwell, the Norwegians were still shoveling snow to prepare the tracks at the 1966 FIS Nordic World Championships in Oslo. He recalls skiing behind a large snow machine at the 1968 Olympics in France—eight years after the more efficient methods of trail preparation had been used at the Squaw Valley Winter Games. But eventually, the Europeans caught up. In 1971, for example, Harry Brown imported an all-metal heavy frame sled from Sweden that produced good tracks in hard-packed and frozen snow.

Want to see what enables a modern ski-touring center to weave its trail magic? Next time you are at Craftsbury Outdoor Center, the Trapp Family Lodge or any other major cross-country operation, take a look through the window of the maintenance shop. You will probably see a wide-track Pisten Bully with a hydraulically controlled snowplow up front and a multi-purpose groomer/grader/track setter behind. This rig can lay down kilometer after kilometer of corduroy, with twin tracks for classic skiers.

Picture the modern-day trail worker who drives the machine. Replacing dozens of workers on snowshoes, he or she simply hops into the cab, turns on the heater, and switches on the stereo. A press on the ignition switch, and the 250-horsepower engine roars to life. Hit the horn twice, slip into first gear, and roll out into the winter to begin an hour or two of grooming. 

Rick Eliot is a former collegiate racer and coach who lives in Massachusetts. Thanks to John Caldwell for his help with this article.

courtesy Pisten Bully

courtesy Pisten bully

A typical track-setting rig in the mid-1960s consisted of a Ski-Doo pulling a homemade box with a clothesline.

Modern groomers are high-tech, multi-use masters that can pack, smooth and create tracks in one pass. Groomers can now customize trail prep, for instances by varying the number of tracks and the width between tracks.

Top: Improved grooming provides classic tracks and skate-ski options on the same trail. Left: A snowmobile pulling a roller remains a low-cost constant at many cross-country centers.

Backcountry boon: Bolton Valley skiers head off-piste during the pandemic

Capitalizing on its backcountry roots from the 1920s, Bolton Valley, Vermont, is enjoying a business bump during the pandemic, as skiers are looking to continue to ski, just with more personal space.

The snow was deep, the surrounding hillsides dappled in low-angled winter sunlight. As we caught our breath from the two-hour skin-up to Nebraska Notch, below the summit of Vermont’s Bolton Mountain, we looked down at a bowl of untracked powder. No one else was around, only a few of us with randonée gear and some backcountry smarts.

This year, Bolton Valley Resort, located 30 minutes east of Burlington, Vermont, began offering season-long leases on backcountry equipment: alpine touring gear for skiers, split boards for snowboarders. The leases are not cheap—about double the price of alpine equipment leases. But they sold out immediately. It was a bright sign for the small ski resort that was about to face an uncertain winter with the Covid-19 pandemic raging. It showed that people wanted to get outside on skis, but with more space around them.

Adam DesLauriers was not surprised. He’s director of Bolton’s backcountry program and part of the family that started Bolton in the 1960s, then rebought the area in 2017. That’s when the resort began offering backcountry lessons, tours, rentals, and tickets, and the program has sold well. “I think our timing was spot on, especially this year,” Adam said. “Our backcountry program has exposed Bolton to a whole new market share—at least half of the people hiring guides or taking clinics have never been here before.”

DesLauriers notes that “while the backcountry program isn’t a huge profit generator for the resort, there’s no question it’s a worthy value added.” Plus, “we love it—and that stoke reverberates.”

Backcountry is not new at Bolton. It’s how the ski area got its start almost 100 years ago. In 1922, Edward Bryant—a World War I veteran and the grandnephew of Frederick Law Olmstead, the landscape architect who designed New York City’s Central Park—purchased 4,400 acres in Bolton. A graduate of the Harvard School of Forestry, Bryant wanted to reestablish spruce stands in the area. He was also a skier, cruising the woods on seven-foot-long skis, dressed in heavy wool pants and a long wool coat. Off the flank of Ricker Mountain, he cut Heavenly Highway, North Slope, and Snow Hole—trails that still exist in Bolton’s backcountry. He also built Bryant Lodge (which is now called Bryant Cabin). In the 1920s and ’30s, skiers hiked almost five miles up a logging road from the Winooski Valley to ski Bryant’s trails.

After World War II, to keep up with the times, Bryant wanted to install a rope tow and build a new base lodge. But he was unable to obtain financing. In failing health, Bryant died in 1951, and the loggers returned.

Then in 1963, dairy farmer Roland DesLauriers sold farmland in South Burlington and used the proceeds to buy 8,000 acres of mountainside in Bolton Valley. Roland’s son, Ralph, had recently graduated from the University of Vermont and liked to ski. Father and son formed the Bolton Valley Corporation and began developing a modern alpine ski resort. It would include a nordic area for traditional kick-and-glide cross-country skiing. Alpine ski equipment at the time did not lend itself to easy backcountry access. Only intrepid telemark skiers ventured into Bolton’s backcountry or side-country.

The master plan called for 14 chairlifts, five base areas, 75 miles of trails stretching 3,100-vertical feet, from the top of Bolton Mountain to I-89 in the Winooski Valley below. Also planned: a gondola up from the valley, a golf course and a village.

The initial buildout was more modest: 968 vertical feet, three chairlifts, nine trails, a base lodge, and 24 hotel rooms. At 2,050 feet elevation the base lodge was—and still is—Vermont’s highest, and New England’s highest Zip Code. Work began on May 1, 1966 on the 4.6-mile access road, and Bolton Valley opened the day after Christmas 1966. Twenty years later, the Timberline lift and lodge expansion extended the vertical to 1,625 feet.

Over three decades, DesLauriers added more amenities and terrain, including glades cut by sons Rob and Eric, who would go on to extreme skiing fame. But the master plan was a far-off Shangri-La that remained out of reach. In financial trouble, DesLauriers began to sell off parts of the resort, including the village base area and much of the land. With foreclosure looming, he sold the rest in 1997. “It was,” said son Adam, “a relief.”

Over the next two decades, owners came and went, making few expansions. Then on April 14, 2017, Ralph DesLauriers, daughter Lindsay, son Evan, and a small group of investors bought Bolton back. The landscape, they realized, had changed. Many skiers and boarders were looking for an antidote to megaresorts. And slowly backcountry skiing was growing thanks mostly to modern equipment, which made it more accessible. Perhaps Bolton’s future could be found in the powder stashes in the area’s less populated backcountry, spread across Mt. Mansfield State Forest. State land abuts the alpine resort to the west, north and east.

Adam, who skied in California’s Sierra Nevada in his ’20s, looked at Bolton with 21st century eyes and saw backcountry access as one of the resort’s strongest assets. Among other attributes, the Catamount Trail—Vermont’s skiing version of the Long Trail—runs through Bolton’s nordic center and backcountry terrain. It takes skiers to Nebraska Notch and then over to Stowe’s Trapp Family Lodge. “We have a strong history of backcountry access,” Adam said. “The amount of terrain we have access to here is unique, and there’s already a strong contingent of backcountry skiers in the area.”

Over the past four years, the DesLauriers—with Ralph now chairman of the board, Lindsay as president, Evan as special projects director, and Adam running the backcountry and nordic programs—have brought Ed Bryant’s vision back to life. And it’s been popular. Skiers boot up in Bolton’s sports center and head out for their own exploration or sign up for a lesson or guided tour.

While Bolton’s alpine terrain may be small by modern standards, the 4,000 acres of mapped backcountry terrain is world class, with everything from mellow maple and birch glades to narrow gullies, cliff bands, and large rocks to launch off. “After 50 years, we’re about seven years into the master plan,” Ralph recently said in a vlog titled “Story Time With Ralph.”

Bolton’s original master plan never included backcountry skiing, but it should have. It really is Bolton’s ace in the hole. Even without a pandemic. 

If you drove the family to a New England ski area in the 1950s and ’60s, lunch might be hot dogs. This ad from the Eastern section of SKI Magazine (January 1961) pitched Tobin First Prize frankfurters. The firm was founded by Fred Tobin in Rochester, New York in 1921, and by 1957 he’d built additional plants in Albany, then two locations in Iowa, then Buffalo. Tobin weathered a post-war meat rationing crisis to become the largest maker of hot dogs in the Northeast. After Fred Tobin’s retirement in 1969, the company suffered chaotic management and declared bankruptcy in 1981.

Coming Up in Future Issues

Suitable for Framing Everett Potter reports on the annual Swann Galleries vintage ski-poster auction.

Going Deep As droughts and weather events grow weirder, we look into the history of the world’s biggest storm cycles.

Yellowstone on Skis In 1886, U.S. Cavalry troopers protecting the park swapped horses for skis in winter.

Spider’s Web The lasting legacy of Spider Sabich may surprise you.

PLUS

Listen Up! Remember singing “Super Skier” around the ski lodge fireplace? From yodeling odes to “90 Pounds of Rucksack” to modern ski-video soundtracks, music has always been part of ski culture. Listen to the classics through ISHA’s multi-media reconstruction of ski-music history.

US Ski Team training at Aspen, 1967. Karen Budge is front center, Gordi Eaton far right.

Team Players: Gordi and Karen Eaton made skiing a living and a life. 

As senior supervisors of “Team Chaos,” Gordi and Karen Eaton juggle many roles. Helping shuttle and care for three active grandchildren, ages eight to eleven, all learning remotely while pursuing the available sports and activities in Hood River, Oregon, including ski racing, is logistically daunting.

Dealing with team dynamics, however, is familiar territory for the couple, both two-time Olympians and Hall of Famers. Now retired from careers that ranged from athletics to coaching to sales reps to restaurants, it’s best to catch them when the grandkids are on vacation and the powder isn’t too deep.

In The Beginning

Gordi Eaton calls himself “a beneficiary of rope tows in small towns.” His tow was Eustis Ski Hill in Littleton, New Hampshire, where he and his friends walked to the hill in their Levis and spent 25 cents for a hot chocolate and a day ticket. Inspired by skiers like Brooks Dodge, Bill Beck and Tom Corcoran, Eaton took his ambitions to bigger mountains, like Cannon where his father worked, and then to Middlebury College in 1958, skiing for Bobo Sheehan. Over the next seven years Eaton would juggle racing for Middlebury on the NCAA circuit and for the United States in Europe, before there was a U.S. Ski Team or a World Cup.

To prepare for the 1960 Olympics, Eaton took a year off school and went to CU Boulder to train with Bob Beattie. “I loved the guy,” says Eaton of Beattie. “He was so passionate about skiing. Everything was focused on ski racing, on us—raising money, training, films. This football kind of approach was new to us, and we all bought in because we were so eager for that kind of feedback.”

The following year, Eaton won the 1961 NCAA DH title racing against Olympic teammates Chuck Ferries (DU) and Buddy Werner (CU). “It was delightful,” Eaton, 81, recalls of skiing both circuits, and learning to manage the pressures of team and individual skiing. “As soon as the race was over, we had a great time together.” They’d come together again as teammates for FIS Worlds and Olympics “We gathered in New York, got a uniform and went to Europe. We competed and then came back and went to school the next year.”

Building Team USA

Eaton competed in the 1962 World Championships, made the 1964 Olympic Team (but did not compete due to injury) then graduated from Middlebury in 1965. Beattie immediately recruited him to coach the U.S. Ski Team on the newly formed World Cup circuit. Because the national team had little money, Beattie made Eaton a coach at CU. With athletes like Billy Kidd, Jimmie Heuga, Spider Sabich, Moose Barrows and Jere Elliot, CU was the national team. “Typical Bob,” says Eaton. “He got CU to pay my national team salary under the auspices of coaching the NCAA team.”

The team trained at CU in the fall, competed in Europe in the winter, then gathered for summer camps at Mt. Bachelor, where Beattie had started bringing the top young athletes from across the country. He hired his older athletes as player/coaches, thus creating the first ecosystem for U.S. Ski Team development.

Karen Budge was 13 years old at her first U.S. Ski Team development camp, in 1963, when Gordi was still competing. “We got to be intimidated by everyone!” she remembers. “I probably met her at that camp,” says Gordi “…but he didn’t remember me,” Karen, now 75, finishes the thought. Eaton shifted seamlessly from athlete to coach, leading his former teammates at the 1966 World Championships in Portillo and the 1968 Grenoble Olympics. Robert Redford shadowed this team to research “Downhill Racer.”

Budge, then 18, was also on the ’68 Olympic Team. She grew up in Jackson Hole, where “there was nothing to do but ski,” she says. By age 16 she was racking up Junior National titles and traveling with the U.S. Ski Team. Budge would go on to score two podiums and 30 top 10 results on the World Cup. Though she was on two Olympic teams (’68, ’72), a freak race-day on-hill accident prevented her from competing in 1968.

With Beattie setting the team’s tone, Chuck Ferries coached the women’s team, and Eaton the men’s team. US slalom racer and two time Olympian Rick Chaffee (’68,’72) enjoyed one of his best seasons with Eaton. “We worked hard but he made it fun,” recalls Chaffee. He also bolstered the shy Chaffee’s confidence: “He’d say ‘Stand up straight and carry yourself as the athlete you are.’ He was a gift to me.”

Off the hill, Beattie nicknamed Eaton “the Phantom” for his tendency to slip away unnoticed. ”When it was time to go, I just left,” says Eaton, whose coaching had a similar straightforward simplicity, heavy on action and light on talk. “There is lots of wasted time talking. We spend way too much time on technique.” He recalls watching the Americans and Austrians skiing an icy mogul field at a training camp. The Austrians danced down it while the Americans made perfect, controlled technical turns. Head Austrian coach Franz Hoppichler told him: “You have better technicians but I have better snow athletes than you.” Eaton encouraged his athletes to freeski, and to find fun while going fast.

In 1969, Beattie and Eaton were ousted from the national team in a regime change. Beattie would go on to organize and run the World Pro Tour. Eaton transitioned into working for K2, both in R&D testing and developing skis, and in building their race program.

In addition to assembling talent for the Pro Tour’s Team K2, led by Spider Sabich, he prepared skis for downhiller Mike Lafferty on the World Cup Tour. He also brought on new young skiers, including Phil and Steve Mahre. K2, which had started out building fiberglass cages for animals, was now hiring engineers and production staff and converting their Quonset hut on Vashon Island into a full-blown factory to keep up with growing market demand.

At the 1972 Olympics, Beattie was commentating for ABC, Eaton was preparing skis for Lafferty and Budge was competing in her second and final Olympics. Budge retired from ski racing after Sapporo. The couple married in October of that year, in Jackson Hole, and Team Eaton was launched.

The Work Of Making It Work

When it was time to start a family, the Eatons moved to Middlebury and together with Charlie Brush coached the Middlebury ski team from 1975-1978. The couple soon realized it was time to start figuring out how to make money at the sport, and it wasn’t through coaching.

In addition to ongoing ski testing and product development with K2, Gordi and Karen started repping Serac skiwear. “I knew a lot of people in the rep business,” explains Gordi. “The people were a lot like ski racers—they liked risks and fun times.”

In the mid-Eighties they took on Spyder as reps, just as the Boulder, Colorado, based company was expanding from mail order and needed to break into the New England market. “They were the perfect pair to get it done,” says Jeff Temple who ran Spyder with founder Dave Jacobs. Karen’s expertise in both racing and soft goods also helped Spyder develop its women’s lines. “They were a 1-2 punch. I saw several times where Gordi and Karen would actually write the order for the dealer. That is trust!”

In the midst of this run, in 1986, they also started a restaurant. “When you’re in the ski business you have to be doing a lot of things to make money,” Gordi explains. Partnering with Gordi’s childhood friend Bob Copenhaver and his wife Muffy, they opened Gordi’s Fish and Steak House in Lincoln, New Hampshire. The 5,000 square foot restaurant at the base of the scenic Kancamangus Highway is in the heart of the White Mountains summer and winter recreation region. The family spent each summer working long hours at the restaurant, then driving 40 miles home to their camp on Parker Lake. When Spyder sold, in 2004, Gordi and Karen thought they had retired from sales, but then took on Sun Ice for another few years.

The K2 Family

Throughout, K2 was a constant in their lives. Gordi’s ski testing required travel throughout the year, from late March in Europe, to Mt. Hood through the summer, to the southern hemisphere and back to the glaciers in the fall. “I skied 12 months a year for six or eight years in a row,” says Gordi, who admits this dream gig required ample support. “I had a very talented wife who kept everything together at home.”

Time spent as a sales rep brought the Eatons income and also keen industry insight. Jim Vandergrift, who had idolized Gordi as a competitor, went on to ski for Middlebury, then became K2’s lead engineer. He explains that Gordi’s perspective of the industry was invaluable. “Gordi’s biggest contribution was in the development side, feeding us info on what skis should do and what was happening in the retail environment so we could combine those variables,” Vandergrift says.

Vandergrift, who spent more than 40 years working with Eaton on product design, explains, “He’s got continuity of being involved from the very beginning to 2017.” Among the tight group of engineers and regular testers, including Tim Petrick, George Tormey and Hannes Rupft, “The Phantom” continued his reputation by always managing to make a few laps before the rest of the crew arrived. He had an uncommon ability to articulate how a ski performed and an unwavering allegiance to the consumer. This provided a critical, sober balance to the rock-star allure of building bigger, wider skis for big mountain skiers. “Every time I went for a ski test I’d always think, ‘Who are these for?’” says Eaton. “In my mind, I would be that person. I’m not making a ski for me.”

Occasionally, a ski would work for everybody. The K2 Four, the first of the factory’s deep-sidecut designs, was that ski. Eaton recalls first testing the Four: “It was the first I ever had been able to put a ski on edge at the top of the turn, continue to feel the edge through the middle of the turn, on to the completion of the turn.” It did this all without sliding, turn after turn, and at high speeds. “I was in my mid 50’s and I had spent the previous 45 years trying to make that kind of turn.” Based on tester feedback, K2 hastily put the Four in its upcoming line and Tormey, who Eaton calls “the best ski technician of his time,” convinced young unconventional K2 athlete Bode Miller to try the ski. Miller rode the Four to Junior National victory, then to the national team and forever changed race—and therefore consumer—ski design.

Staying In The Game

While business kept the Eatons in touch with consumers, Gordi stayed on the cutting edge of competition as well. “His knowledge of the ski world is encyclopedic,” says former U.S. Ski Team racer Mark Smith, who went on to coach Middlebury and the U.S. Ski Team. Smith has the highest regard for the couple. In long chats on skiing, and racing, “Gordi gave me great historical perspective,” says Smith. “He’s a real players’ coach, able to understand it from the athlete’s perspective. In a sport with gigantic egos he’s the polar opposite.”

Gordi’s talent for quietly cajoling people toward improvement is extraordinarily effective on the hill coaching, in debrief sessions, managing employees and accounts, and also in effecting meaningful change. “He’s a really humble guy but he’s not a pacifist,” Charlie Brush says. “Criticism is hard to give. He always found the way to give it in an encouraging way.”

Brush recalls how Gordi used this influence to help upgrade safety standards at race venues across the country to better accommodate the speeds and forces generated by modern equipment. When Brush’s daughter, Middlebury skier Kelly Brush, had a tragic ski accident in 2006 that left her paralyzed after hitting an unprotected lift tower, Gordi’s efforts gained urgency. He leveraged his relationships throughout the ski world to encourage compliance with new national standards. The Kelly Brush Foundation now provides grants to help purchase safety equipment and make venue improvements at clubs across the country.

When son Chris and his family left Middlebury and moved to Hood River, Gordi and Karen followed. Grandparent duty is especially busy now, but Gordi typically still manages to head to the slopes several times a week, on sunny days.

When asked what he skis on, Gordi answers in true ski tester language, with no mention of brand or model. “It’s 84 underfoot, and I also have something 70-73 underfoot. It took me 60 years to carve a turn, and I like to move my skis.” 

Gordi Eaton is a member of the Vermont Alpine Racing Association and Middlebury Athletics Halls of Fame. Karen is a member of Intermountain Skiing and Jackson Hole Ski Club Halls of Fame.

Amateur photographers: Paul Ryan feels your pain.

Blue sky, green trees, white snow, happy skier. Every ski photographer risks producing cliché images.

Paul Ryan understands. “In today’s world, we are saturated with photographs in the media and online. Sometimes when I go out to shoot, these images pop up and scream at me ‘Someone’s done that! I’ve seen that!’” he says.

Ryan, 83, offers this wisdom gleaned from six decades behind a lens: “Be open for something odd and new, not necessarily strange, but a different vision of the familiar. Perhaps a juxtaposition of disparate elements in the same frame. Wash from your mind all the classic images that linger from the past. Images by others you’ve seen and loved, even images that you see right away—the obvious.”

To that end, when shooting, he strives for “an empty mind, or at least a clean vision,” a reference to the 1970 book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, which he found inspiring early in his career.

Photo top of page: Ryan started his career as the staff photographer at California’s Sugar Bowl resort. The Silver Belt, the final big race of the season, was held in the late spring. Part of the post-race festivities was a softball game on skis between the racers. “The European racers, unfamiliar with baseball, found the game amusing,” Ryan says. Buddy Werner, a natural athlete and a born competitor, took the softball game—and winning it—seriously. Those are American Olympians Tom Corcoran and Linda Meyers watching the action.

Ryan grew up in Boston and, after taking a BS in engineering, moved to Stowe to pursue what he imagined could be a career in ski racing. An Eastern snow drought in 1960-61 led him to Aspen, and for a few years he spent winters racing and summers in San Francisco, going to film school. He eventually found himself at Sugar Bowl Resort in California for the final race of the season, where general manager Ed Siegel candidly told him that his future wasn’t in ski racing, and hired him as resort photographer.

It was a good fit. John Fry eventually hired Ryan as the staff photographer at SKI magazine for several years. He traveled the world shooting for SKI and other periodicals.

But his professional pursuits expanded beyond skiing. He chronicled the 1960s counterculture in San Francisco. He studied under the greats of the time, including Minor White and Ansel Adams. His photography has been honored in numerous shows, with recent exhibits including “The Sea Ranch, Architecture, Environment, and Idealism” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

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

He has always found his way back to the mountains. Here are some of his favorite images from a different era. “When on the side of the mountain, I had to pre-visualize the end result, not seeing the film until days later,” Ryan says from his home in Santa Monica, California.

Ryan said that White, one of his early mentors, introduced him to the idea that a compelling photograph is more than a static image—it has an afterlife, of sorts.

“White spoke of ‘Equivalents,’ which is a photographic concept that the photograph mirrors something in ourselves—something that remains in mind after the literal image has faded,” Ryan explains.

To reach that end, Ryan says, the strongest images touch upon a commonality, something universal across the human experience. These images draw the viewer into the frame and into a broader narrative. “The most powerful photos evoke something beyond what was literally in front of the lens. This may come from the implication of what happened just before or of what might happen a moment after,” he says. “What remains is not only the image of the time and place, but a visual residue connected to a broader spectrum of our own experience.”

Of course, in order to achieve White’s concept of “Equivalents,” the photographer does have to first nail the shot. These days, with everyone shooting an endless stream of digital photos at the press of a button, that’s an achievement that’s often underappreciated.

Not by Ryan. “To achieve a high level of visual acuity is demanding,” he notes, “particularly while simultaneously navigating deep powder, an icy mogul field, high speeds or the intensity of race day—all with an array of cameras in check.” 

This is the second installment of a two-part photo essay series from Paul Ryan. (See part 1 in the September/October issue.) View this photo essay as a mini-master class in photography, as Ryan explains his approach to his craft and the intriguing backstories to each image. Find more of Ryan’s work at paulryanphotography.com.

Ryan first got to know Billy Kidd during the 1960 season at Stowe. “He was always friendly and curious about photography and actually filmed some of the Megève downhill for me when I was making the Lange film, Ski Racer. This photo was taken at Kidd’s home in Stowe circa 1967. The wall was lined with trophies and his bibs from the 1964 Innsbruck Olympics, where Kidd and Jimmie Heuga became the first American men to win alpine medals. “Ever since 1966, Billy was plagued with recurring ankle injuries,” Ryan recalls. “It was interesting to see a young admirer realizing that even a hero is vulnerable.” Ryan was fascinated throughout his career with catching athletes away from the competition, believing that these moments can tell a story as revealing as the athletic action itself.

One of the many challenges of nailing a great image is “photographing people up close in difficult situations,” Ryan says. Fortunately, Ryan had spent a lot of time with the Canadian team and earned its trust, such as after a nasty downhill tumble by racer Andrée Crepeau, who recalls the crash. “It was on the flats at the bottom of the downhill in Stowe, where I learned that catching an edge is not always reversible. And down I went, face first—real quick.” The resulting image captures both the physical toll of the crash and the indominable spirit of the Canadian’s women’s team. “In photographing emotional situations, it’s always better to be physically close to the people rather than standing farther back with a telephoto lens,” Ryan says.

Great photography is at the intersection of art and science, according to Ryan. Getting the technical aspects right, such as the light, focus and framing, is key. But some of it is just heading into the field and hoping for the best. “Shooting ski action at slower than normal shutter speeds, here 1/8 second, is photographing without the luxury of certainty,” Ryan says. “After a while you get better at anticipating the results, but it’s still guesswork.” Here, at Stowe, the “obscuration of the subject promotes an awareness of the overall graphics in the frame.” Ryan also liked the flame-like gate banner flickering above the racer’s head.

Contrasts help bring a viewer into the frame, seeking out details of the surprising image. “In this case it was the ominous dark tree in the white landscape that attracted me,” Ryan says. “I waited for a bit, assuming a skier would come into the frame. He did and that completed the image.”

In 1970, Ryan made a documentary film on Austrian ski champion Karl Schranz. He filmed for several weeks on the World Cup circuit. “But I was curious to film Karl’s off-season life in his hometown of St. Anton,” Ryan says. He traveled to St. Anton in the summer, after the race season, and talked to locals who knew Schranz since his boyhood. “Karl brought us to meet his mother, who lived in the same small house she had for the last fifty years,” Ryan recalls. “As a widow, she had raised five children.” With photos and medals decorating this modest shrine to her son, Ryan likes the image because it tells as much about Schranz and his upbringing as it does about his mother.

Mammoth was one of the first destinations on Ryan’s unofficial resort itinerary when he headed West as a young racer in the 1960s. “I spent a lot of time there, both skiing and photographing the Mammoth racing program.” The racing operation was a top-notch group, whose roster frequently included members of Mammoth founder Dave McCoy’s family. At the end of a training day, racer Kandi McCoy chats with Dennis Agee, a junior coach at the time, who went on to become the Alpine Director of the U.S. Ski Team. “I liked her shy reaction to a coach’s compliment,” Ryan says.

In 1968, John Fry “had the idea to send me to do a photo story on skiing in the flatlands of the Midwest” for SKI. Ryan ended up at Boyne Mountain, Michigan, with its modest vertical of 500 feet. “For Othmar Schneider, a past Olympic champion and previously at Stowe where I knew him, it must have been confining,” Ryan says. “This image had a feeling of him reaching for something greater—or at least higher.”

John Fry and Mort Lund assigned Ryan to do a photo essay for SKI specifically on the experience of the downhill discipline. “This is the only event where there is a day or more to prepare, inspecting the course and taking a practice run,” Ryan says. “But there is never the sense of totally understanding what it will be like on race day.” At the end of the day prior to the race, there’s one last inspection down the course. Ryan strived to capture the intense preparation and anticipation in this early evening shot of a solitary racer looking down the course. Ryan: “I often find it rewarding to hang around for that extra hour at the end of the day, after the main action has ended. The light is dramatic and interesting things sometimes happen.”

All photographers have favorite assignments. This was one of Ryan’s. “One of my first and most gratifying assignments at SKI was a photo essay on Nancy Greene on the 1967 race circuit. I followed her travels for three weeks, on and off the course,” Ryan says. As well as being a superb racing talent, Ryan learned that Greene was a good friend and dedicated mentor to her teammates. Greene also didn’t let any aspect of her gear go uninspected. “Like many racers of the era, she personally paid exacting attention to the details of her skis,” Ryan says.

For Ryan’s 1969 photo essay, “The Steepness of Stowe” for SKI, he began experimenting with colored gel filters on the lens. “I liked the creative effect and usually made a few photographs this way on most other assignments,” Ryan notes, such as here as part of a story on Roger Staub at Vail (see right). With the analog film of the time, there was no way to know how the gels were working until the film was processed days later.

Digital photography now provides instant feedback (see above). “In contrast, a couple of years ago at the World Cup finals at Aspen I was fascinated with the maze of blue lines left by the multiple course markings. Shooting digitally, I could see the image right away and later, in Photoshop, I was able to exaggerate my impression of the intensity of the blue dye,” Ryan says. “Photography now has evolved to allow for, and even expect, imagery beyond simple representation of reality.”

Beat writers are often accused of writing stories for the audience of other beat writers, bringing nuances into play that can only be picked up on by other pros. The same goes for photographers. Ryan was attracted to the action in this shot for a SKI assignment. The racer is in sharp focus at the 1968 Grenoble Winter Games, with other elements blurred. However, “I liked the patrol sled waiting in the background behind the fencing,” Ryan says. “It quietly portrayed a sense of risk and danger.”

Ryan competed in the Roch Cup slalom in 1962, which became a hinge point in his career. “This was the last of my efforts at ski racing,” Ryan says. “I was decent, but when I was up against world-class racers, I realized I should spend more time at photography.” And for that decision in 1962, skiing’s visual legacy is, indeed, a bit richer.