Notes from the Sun Valley reunions

While Thousands Cheered: Skiing Heritage Week Scores Record Turnout

By Seth Masia

Skiing Heritage Week, held at Sun Valley in honor of the resort’s 75^th anniversary, drew a record turnout. Well, it had some help from half-a-dozen overlapping events. Running concurrently were the U.S. National Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame Induction, the Pioneers of Freestyle Skiing Reunion, the first Ishpeming Film Festival, and a reunion of Head, K2 and Scott reps from decades past. There was also a very quiet reunion of SKI Magazine staffers in acknowledgement of the book’s 75^th anniversary.

K2 Wet Tee-shirt Contest
2011 Edition

Bernie Weichsel, chairman of the Hall of Fame, ISHA board member and impresario of the early pro freestyle circuit, functioned as the chief conspirator. According to his notes, 110 people attended the ISHA Awards Banquet, 80 old hotdoggers showed up to receive awards as Pioneers of Freestyle (plus about 40 of their parole officers and attendants), 582 people sat down to dinner at the Hall of Fame Induction, with another 70 standing-room folks at the back of the room. Rick Moulton reports that the Film Festival filled 2,000 seats at the Sun Valley Opera House for six evenings straight, and 250 people attended the Jerry Awards on Tuesday night. I don't yet know how many middle-aged adolescents attended the K2-Head-Scott reunion, but I personally trod on the toes of several hundred at the Wet Tee Shirt Contest, held at Whiskey Jacques on Thursday night.

How many people attended?  The permanent population of Ketchum is 3,500, which seems a reasonable estimate.

Beekley Memorial Lecture

The Mason Beekley Memorial Lecture, an annual fixture of Skiing Heritage Week, was conducted this year as a panel discussion on the subject of ski racing on television. Featured speakers were veteran NBC sportscasters Tim Ryan and Christin Cooper, and the session was moderated by ISHA president John Fry and Tom Kelly of the U.S. Ski Team. The burning question: Why do the television networks no longer carry live coverage of ski racing?

Tim Ryan and Christin Cooper

Ryan and Cooper explained the economics, which boil down to increased competition for commercially-valuable air time and reduced budgets for crew travel. Then Cooper made a passionate case for the idea that a tape delay gives the broadcast team the chance to turn ski racing into a better show. They can select the significant runs, and explain what they’re seeing.

During the actual race, Cooper said, she’s busy making sense of what’s happening on the hill. “I use all the technology available,” she said. “I use Skype to call the coaches on the hill to ask if the snow is softening and the course getting slower. Why is the race unfolding the way it is? Then I have a two-hour window to compose the story.”

Part of the problem in preparing a story is that the athletes don’t have time during the season to talk to the press. The World Cup schedule is just too tight.

Ryan pointed out that television is all about audience. Alpine ski racing is still the number two Olympic sport for TV viewership in the United States, he said, behind figure skating. To build an audience, it’s critically important to develop athletes with star quality. “Lindsey Vonn typifies the media-savvy athlete who explains herself to the audience,” Cooper said. “Bode Miller had to learn how to do that, and he was unpopular until he did. Athletes today are aware of how much they owe to the sport, and to the fans.”

Ryan elaborated. “America is celebrity-driven, and the athletes know it. The FIS doesn’t get it. If they want an audience, they have to focus attention on how great the athletes are.”

Cooper thinks the FIS has plenty of opportunity to build ski racing into great television. “Slalom under the lights, at night, is a slam dunk,” she said. “It’s a stadium, with thousands of cheering fans. What a party! I’m a huge fan of dual slalom. The guys with great fundamentals do well, and it’s a show the average viewer understands.”

Cooper is also a fan of Universal Sports, which streams live ski racing on the Internet. “They also run (remote) Skype interviews with all the athletes, from their hotel rooms – five to ten minutes of good talk,” she said.

Movers and Shakers

The annual Movers and Shakers event, held Wednesday evening at the Ketchum Public Library, was emceed as usual by Doug Pfeiffer. In honor of the venue, the program kicked off with a showing of Otto Lang’s 1947 film Skifully Yours, and highlights included colorful reminiscences by Nelson Bennett, 96, one of the original Sun Valley ski patrollers, and Ralph Harris, a longtime fixture in the Sun Valley Ski School whose drawings illustrated SKI Magazine’s ski instructional features for many years.

ISHA Awards

On Friday evening, ISHA held its annual Awards Banquet, honoring the creators of the year’s top books and films on ski-history subjects.

Tim Ryan received a Lifetime Achievement Award for broadcast journalism for his work telecasting major ski races since 1980, including several Olympics and World Championships. He graciously thanked the racers who have worked with him over the years providing “color,” including Billy Kidd, Todd Brooker and his current on-screen partners, Christin Cooper and Steve Porino.

Dick Dorworth, another Sun Valley local, accepted an Ullr Award for his book The Perfect Turn and Other Tales of Skiing and Skiers, a collection of short pieces (reviewed in the March-April issue of Skiing Heritage). The essays (and one short story) reflect on the people and mountains, the lives and deaths that have touched Dorworth across half a century of skiing at the very highest levels.

Stephen Waterhouse accepted an Ullr Award for the book Passion for Skiing, the result of the Dartmouth Ski History Project. Waterhouse raised the money to support publication of this history of Dartmouth skiing, edited the content and wrote the first chapter, which recounts the story of Fred Harris, founder of the Dartmouth Outing Club.

The Kitzbuehel Ski Club sent a delegation to accept an Ullr Award for Hahnenkamm: The Chronicle of a Myth, detailing the 100-year history of the classic downhill race. Half the book is devoted to turn-by-turn and racer-by-racer accounts of every HK race since 1931.

Frequent Skiing Heritage contributor E. John B. Allen accepted an Ullr Award, in part on behalf of his co-author Egon Theiner, for 100 Years of International Skiing, a history of the FIS. The book breaks new ground in a well-researched section on early alpine events and the formation of competition rules.

Arthur Haechler of the European Broadcasting Union accepted an ISHA Film Award for 100 Years FIS, a collage of film clips drawn from the entire history of skiing competition. The 20-minute film was commissioned by FIS to help celebrate its 100^th anniversary.

Dave Irons accepted a Skade Award for Sunday River, a history of the Maine resort. The ski area opened in 1959, after locals raised $90,000 to build a T-bar, rope tow and base lodge, aided by a $40,000 grant from the Small Business Administration. It grew into the major driver of local business, with 590,000 skier visits annually.

James Benelli, a veteran bartender, ski patroller and instructor, accepted a Skade Award for Ski Tales: The History of China Peak and Sierra Summit. The resort launched in 1958, and Benelli arrived in 1960. He prefaced his speech by pointing out that most of his writing is humor, and that brevity is the soul of wit. He earned the warm gratitude of the audience by delivering the shortest speech of the evening.

As the evening wound down, John Fry and Barry Stone each accepted an ISHA Service Award in recognition of years of hard work to help ISHA grow and prosper.

Hall of Fame Induction

On Saturday night, the week climaxed with the U.S. National Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony.

Carol Holding spoke on behalf of Earl Holding, who revitalized Sun Valley after purchasing the resort in 1977, and went on to do the same for Utah’s Snow Basin, where he turned a small ski area into a world-class venue for the 2002 Olympic speed events. She thanked “everyone in this room for the support and loyalty you’ve given to our Sun Valley.”

Bobby Cochran, Hahnenkamm combined champion and 1972 Olympian, charmed the crowd with good-spirited and self-deprecating humor. “I wrote out a speech, but I’m a physician and I can’t read any of this,” he began. Referring to the fact that his sisters Marilyn and Barbara Ann had preceded him into the Hall of Fame, Cochran noted “I’ve recently heard the term ‘girled,’ which is apparently an insult meaning ‘You got beat by a girl.’ Well, I got girled every day.”

Muffy Davis, a local junior racer who shattered her spine in a downhill training crash in 1989, went on to win several paralympic medals, a World Championship and seven World Cup titles. She burst into tears while thanking her family, coaches and the community for their support in her recovery and career.

Daron Rahlves, winner of 12 World Cup races including the Hahnenkamm, and Super G World Champion, recalled beginning his racing career on the NASTAR course at Alpine Meadows. He thanked his coaches, his wife, and his ski tuner, Willie Wiltz.

Extreme skier Shane McConkey was honored posthumously for his roles in promoting competitive freeskiing and the design of “rocker” skis, and for his film career. The honor was accepted by his widow, Sherry.

Glen Plake, another extreme skier, has parlayed his film career into a platform for promoting the sport at small venues across the country. In the process he has become, arguably, the most recognizable skier of his era. His talk served as a bridge to the final event of the evening, presentation of medals to 80 Pioneers of Freestyle Skiing.

The party went on into the early morning hours.

Pascal “Pete” Heuga, 102

Pete Heuga, father of Jimmie Heuga and a fixture at Squaw Valley from its opening day until his retirement in 1985, died on April 17. He was 102.

Pascal Heuga was born to an impoverished single mother on April 15, 1909, in St.-Jean-Pied-le-Port, on the French side of the Basque Pyrennées. His mother, Marie, departed for America in 1919, leaving Pascal and his infant brother to be raised by their grandmother. At age nine, Pascal was apprenticed to the town’s butcher, and thereafter spent his summers slaughtering pigs, sheep and cows, lambs and calves. The work was brutal, and Pascal, though barely five feet tall, became the toughest kid in town. At 14, on a borrowed bicycle, he won the local Tour de Pays Basque bike race.

The following year, his uncle Jean-Baptiste, then working as a gardener in San Francisco, sent him money for passage to America. After weeks of travel Pascal arrived in Bakersfield, Calif., where his mother had married a sheep rancher named Eugene Chounet. Pascal was sent off into the foothills southwest of Los Banos, California, with a burro, a dog, a wagon and several hundred head of sheep. Knowing nothing of the sheepherder’s art, Pascal promptly lost three dozen of the beasts, many to coyotes, but many more to rattlesnakes surprised in the sagebrush. Over the summer, Pascal learned to control the herd, and killed over 75 snakes.

In the fall, Pascal, now 16, found a job tending bar in Fresno. It was the height of Prohibition, and a tough, underage kid was just what a bootlegger wanted to work in a speakeasy. Whenever the law shut down the saloon and hauled the employees away to jail, the cops were powerless to hold a minor. Within a few hours he’d be out on the street again, ready to work at a new location.

After a summer communicating only with an old sheepdog, Pascal had not yet learned much English. The bartending job did wonders for his command of language. Unfortunately, the language wasn’t English. Most of his customers and colleagues spoke Spanish or Italian. He lasted through five years of busts, brawls and continual changes of venue, and came out a master of Latin patois. In April, 1930, he turned 21 and could be charged as an adult. This made him useless to the bootlegging trade. Out of work in Fresno, he got a ride with a friend to Yosemite and applied for a job as a cook at the three-year-old Ahwahnee Hotel.

Perhaps impressed by his French accent, the Ahwahnee’s chef took him aboard. But it wasn’t a French kitchen, and the boss dubbed him Pete. The hotel sent him out into a paradise of waterfalls, meadows and towering peaks, to cook for guests camping up-valley. In the winter, Pete learned to skate on the lodge rink. 

Late in the spring of 1931, Pete met Lucille Dutton, who had dropped out of UCLA after her junior year for want of funds. Sights set on a government job in Washington, D.C., she was working a summer job in the Chinquapin post office. They spent a year together.

In the fall of 1932, Lucille received notification that her position in Washington awaited. She boarded an east-bound train.

Pete bought a new 1936 Dodge sedan and followed. They lived together for a few months, and then drove one night to Frederick, Maryland to make the marriage legal.

Arms production for the looming World War II was quickly transforming the American economy, especially on the West Coast. Lucille found work as a secretary in San Francisco, while Pete worked at the Kaiser shipyards in Richmond. Two boys were born, Robert Pascal Heuga in 1939, and James Frederick Heuga, in September, 1943.

After the war, the couple moved to Lake Forest, just north of Tahoe City, and bought a tiny grocery store cum gas station cum post office. For Pete, running a store was a simple matter, at least compared to operating a speakeasy. It was hard work, but nonviolent. The store was a natural focal point for village social life, and Pete soon organized a round of community events. His mid-June barbecue became an annual happening, drawing 500 people from towns all around the lake.
 
The kids grew up skating and skiing. In the fall of 1949, Pete started work as a lift operator at the new Squaw Valley ski area, which opened for Christmas. Young Jimmie wasn’t old enough for school yet, so Pete took him to work. The ski school director Emile Allais, pre-war world champion, could barely speak English, and began hanging out in Pete’s shack, drinking wine and gossiping in French. Allais began coaching six-year-old Jimmie.

Within a couple of years Jimmie was winning local races. Pete and Lucille took turns driving kids from the Squaw Valley Ski Club to races up and down the Sierra. At 12, Jimmie was a nationally-ranked junior, and friends pitched in to get him to races in Sun Valley and Aspen.

For years Pete supervised operation of the Squaw Valley tram, and every Tahoe skier knew him well. His life after retirement took tragic turns: both sons, Bobby and Jimmie, were crippled by multiple sclerosis; after Lucille’s death, Pete lost his eyesight. But in 2005, he returned to St.-Jean-Pied-le-Port with Jimmie, to visit his grandfather’s grave. –Seth Masia

Tyler Palmer

February 14, 2011

Dear Friend of Tyler:

We are reaching out to a list of Tyler Palmer’s friends to ask for your help in supporting him in his fight with diabetes and Addison’s disease. Tyler’s fierce independence and pride served him well through a ski racing and coaching career that is legendary but these same traits make it extraordinarily difficult for Tyler to reach out to his many friends and the skiing community to ask for assistance at a time when he truly needs our help. In fact, it was not easy to obtain Tyler’s consent to make this request and he is adamant that any contributions to his cause do not diminish by a single dollar, money that would otherwise go to kids.

Here is the situation. Tyler resigned his coaching position with the Sun Valley Ski Education Foundation and returned to New Hampshire last summer. He now lives part of the time in his home in North Conway NH and part of the time with his daughter Taryn, son-in-law and 10 month old grandson in Portland ME. Tyler’s departure from the Sun Valley was very sudden and caught many of us by surprise but was precipitated by a sudden and life threatening downward spiral in his health.

As many of you know, Tyler has had diabetes for years. He has learned to live with the disease although there is no question that hard living in his younger years and the physical and mental stress of coaching more recently has taken a toll. Tyler is considered a brittle diabetic yet he often seemed to be trying to ‘out tough’ the disease by pushing himself so hard and ignoring warnings that his health was deteriorating. This came to a head at a race camp in Mammoth Mt. last June when Tyler reached a point where his heart rate was chronically elevated and he suffered from constant headaches and dehydration. Finally his body shut down and he became physically incapable of getting out of bed.  He was diagnosed with Addison’s disease by Dr. Bob Hall after being rushed to the hospital.

Addison’s is very rare; only 2 people out of 100,000 will contract it in their lifetime. It is a disorder that affects the adrenal glands causing them to produce insufficient hormones resulting in extreme fatigue and muscle weakness. Like diabetes, there is no cure for Addison’s disease and the combination of the two is debilitating. Tyler is now on a lifetime regime of steroids and cortisone in addition to insulin. His health has stabilized although, as of late, he is again not feeling well and recently remarked that he has had some ‘dark days’. He does not have medical insurance, and has not been to a doctor in months owing to his financial situation. Tyler is facing a long struggle to regain his health.

There are only a handful of experts on Addison’s in the US and Tyler desperately needs to be seen and treated by one of them. He is facing a lifetime regime of drugs to manage these two diseases and the prospect of significant and ongoing medical expenses.

Everyone receiving this letter knows Tyler well but we’d like to summarize his amazing achievements particularly in the ski world.  Tyler’s ski racing career was legendary. As a young ski racer he was known for his go-for-broke style and carefree attitude. He was a slalom specialist who became the first American male to win a World Cup race, a slalom in St. Moritz, Switzerland in 1971. That season Tyler finished third
in the World Cup Slalom standings. During his career he had two World Cup victories and nine top ten finishes. Tyler and his brother Terry represented the US at the Sapporo Olympics in 1972 with Tyler finishing ninth in the slalom. Tyler joined Bob Beattie’s World Pro Ski Tour in 1972, won 5 events and was the top American skier from 1976 through 1978.

Skiing has always been and always will be Tyler’s life and passion. In the early ‘80’s he transitioned from ski racing to coaching. For the past 11 years Tyler has been coaching for the Sun Valley Ski Education Foundation. He was an extraordinary coach…. knowledgeable, committed, passionate and somewhat perilously, totally selfless. He imbued his kids with a sense of respect for the sport by teaching them its history and how it helped him develop personal values. In turn, he encouraged them to grow with and through the sport.


Tyler has touched all of us with his humor, compassion and enormous appetite for life. He has coached many of our children and taught them life’s lessons through ski racing. He has asked for very little in return for his lifelong dedication to the sport we all love. Tyler is rich in spirit but not in coin. Now he needs our help. Over the next few weeks we will be following up with each of you to ask for financial help in the form of a contribution to the Bald Mountain Rescue Fund (501c3) to benefit Tyler and/or to reach out to others on behalf of Tyler and ask for their help.

Please consider making a tax deductible donation to help Tyler by sending your check to the Bald Mt Rescue Fund. Please state “In honor of Tyler Palmer” on the memo line of the check.  Funds will be used by the BMRF to defray medical and living expenses resulting from Tyler’s catastrophic illness.

The Bald Mt. Rescue Fund
c/o Brian Barsotti
PO Box 370
Ketchum, ID 83340
pstine@dadco.com

Yours truly,

Doug Woodcock
Kipp Nelson
Thom Weisel
Holley DuPont
Jonathan Neeley
Paul Fremont Smith
Chuck Ferries
Michael Lafferty
Bob Beattie
Michael Halstead
Kiki Cutter
Otto Tschudi
Hank Kashiwa
Michel Rudigoz
Billy Kidd

Vintage ski race at Steamboat: Sunday, Jan 23

On Sunday morning, Jan. 23^rd, at 10:00 AM, at Steamboat Springs, CO there is going to be a Vintage Ski Race!  All interested in joining in the fun need to meet at the base lift, in front of the Sheraton Steamboat Resort Hotel, by 9:00 to register, and take a practice run or two. Look for Billy Kidd and his famous cowboy hat. Richard Allen will also be there with his Vintage Ski World van, & possible ski gear for you, but you have to call him ahead of time. Dig through your stuff to find any ‘old’ gear & outfits. But if you don’t have any, call Richard & he can may be able to bring something for you. VSW Office #800-332-6323 & his cell #970-948-0591. After the race they will all be gathering in the Sheraton to hang out, drink a beer, watch old ski movies & maybe even do a fashion show. All of this will occur in the Bear River Bar & Grill. It promises to be a really fun time!

The Man Who Taught Us Modern Skiing

Georges Joubert studied world-class skiers and translated their winning techniques into lessons that recreational skiers could learn

By Ron LeMaster

Georges Joubert, a giant in the world of ski coaching and instruction, passed away on November 1, 2010. From the late 1950s through the late 1970s he analyzed and described, in print and pictures, the significant movements of skiing being developed by the best competitive skiers in the world, and how the rest of us could learn to make them ourselves. It is fair to say that no single person has had a greater impact on our understanding of how modern skiing works, and how it can be taught.

Joubert was a professor of physical education and the president of the Grenoble University club when Jean Vuarnet joined its skiing program in the mid-1950s. Vuarnet was eighteen years old, and had done little skiing before then. After four years of training under Joubert, he was the French national champion in slalom, giant slalom and downhill, and in 1960 won the Olympic gold medal in downhill at Squaw Valley. Joubert went on to train many top-level racers, including world championship and World Cup winning skiers Patrick Russel and Perrine Pelen, and did an ill-fated stint as head coach of the French Ski Team. Although it is commonly thought that Joubert unilaterally fired the leading members of the French men’s World Cup team in 1973, that action was the majority decision of a panel of five, one of whom was Joubert, who cast a dissenting vote and later characterized the panel's decision as a “gross error.” Yet, over the following decades, he accepted responsibility and suffered the ensuing criticism without complaint. Read more!

Squaw Valley sale marks end of Cushing era

By Seth Masia

In November, when the Squaw Valley Development Co. was sold to KSL Capital Partners, it marked the end of 61 years of control by the Cushing family of California’s winter Olympic venue.

Squaw Valley was the brainchild of Reno's Wayne Poulsen (at right, with wife Sandy), who first skied into the valley in 1931, two years out of high school. A powerhouse athlete and coach in Sierra ski competition in the late 1930s, Poulsen became a pioneer of rope-tow skiing in the Tahoe area, then an instructor at Sun Valley and then a U.S. Army Air Force pilot flying Pan Am Clippers to supply Pacific combat zones. He invested every dime he earned in Squaw Valley real estate. In 1945, after discharge as a lieutenant colonel, Poulsen pioneered new routes for Pan Am. With his wife Sandy he built a home at Squaw, and began looking for investors.

He found Alex Cushing, a New York socialite, Wall Street attorney and Navy veteran. Cushing and his friends, including Lawrance Rockefeller, in 1948 invested about $400,000 to build a lodge and lifts; Poulsen’s contribution was the 640 acres he owned right where the lodge and lifts were to be built (he then bought another 12,000 acres on the valley floor for future development).

Cushing (left) proved to be an aggressive developer and promoter, eager to build the resort fast. Poulsen wanted to plan and build with conservative respect for the harsh alpine enivironment. A month before the resort opened in 1949, Cushing took advantage of Poulsen’s absence on a Pan Am flight to vote him off the board of directors. Thereafter Poulsen’s business was real estate development in the Valley, while Cushing ran the resort and the mountain.

Cushing envisioned a vast and varied resort on the European model. He hired Emile Allais as his first ski school director. Allais, and his successor Joe Marillac, made sure that Squaw became a magnet for world class skiers. Top skiers loved Squaw’s cliffs, and its immensely varied and often challenging snow conditions. The steep terrain drew the attention of photographers and film-makers like Warren Miller, who spent a couple of winters there in the early days and helped to popularize the resort. The extreme terrain also produced powerful native skiers like Jimmie Heuga, the Poulsen and McKinney clans, Edie Thys Morgan, Kristin Krone and Jonny Moseley. Meanwhile, the resort became one of the incubators for the craft of extreme skiing, famous for producing talents like Rick Sylvester, Robbie Huntoon and Scot Schmidt.

Characteristically, Cushing.threw lifts up every peak within reach, opening super-steep terrain that would have been considered prohibitively dangerous anywhere else. Lift towers were built in avalanche zones, and some were swept away. Squaw employees habitually hooked an arm around the chairlift hanger in anticipation of a catastrophic stop.

In 1954, with backing from Lawrance Rockefeller and the governor of California, Cushing submitted a bid to host the 1960 Winter Olympics – and after dogged lobbying of the IOC, scored one of the great sports marketing coups of all time. The ’60 games were the first ever to be televised, the first with an Olympic Village to house the athletes, and the first to be electronically timed. Television made Squaw Valley a household name, and helped the heady growth of the ski industry through the following decade. In the course of development Poulsen staged a successful fight to keep the Meadow from being paved over for Olympic parking.

Cushing’s aggressive growth policy drew the ire of state bureaucrats and environmentalists. He was a great believer in “build it first, then get permission.” He was an early investor in every ski lift innovation proposed, and the result, for some decades, was the most efficient uphill transport network in North America. At one point some 33 lifts served 4,000 acres of patrolled terrain, hauling 49,000 skiers per hour. Cushing paid a price: Squaw was repeatedly fined for cutting trees and building before permits were final. The low point of Squaw’s lift operation history was the 1978 disaster when a cable derailed in a wind storm and fell onto a tram car, killing four passengers.

Cushing acquired a reputation as a difficult man to do business with. Over the course of decades, a number of projects to build lodging at the base area collapsed amidst recriminations. With an inadequate bed base, most Squaw Valley skiers had to drive in from lodging in Truckee and Tahoe City. Despite clearing snow from a vast parking lot, Squaw never seemed to have enough parking. The lot gained a few more acres when Blyth Arena, the historic Olympic hockey venue, collapsed under the weight of uncleared snow in 1983. Eventually, Intrawest Corp. was successful in negotiating a deal to build a village with about 285 rooms in the parking lot, beginning in 2001. Ironically, the village reduced the available parking and actually cut the number of lift tickets sold thereafter. Intrawest, crippled by the 2009 recession and facing foreclosure, sold the village to Squaw in January 2010 for an undisclosed sum that probably represented a small fraction of its cost to build. KSL is thus acquiring a viable resort at well below its original value.

Poulsen was elected to the U.S. National Ski Hall of Fame in 1980, and died in 1995. Cushing was inducted into the Ski Industry Hall of Fame in 1999 and into the U.S. National Ski Hall of Fame in 2003. He died, at 92, in 2006.

The new corporate owner, KSL Capital Partners, owns dozens of golf resorts and a cruise line. It’s part of the Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. complex headed by financier Henry Kravis. Its managing directors are two former Vail Resorts executives: Michael S. Shannon was president and CEO of VR from 1986 to 1992, and Eric C. Resnick was treasurer, and then VP of strategic planning and investor relations from 1996 to 2001. Another executive, Marla Steele, was Vail’s director of strategic planning from 1998 to 2007. The company is pledged to invest $50 million in capital improvements.

For the Wayne Poulsen biography, see "Finish Line" by Eddy Ancinas, Fall 1995 Skiing Heritage; http://tinyurl.com/waynepoulsen

Go to skiinghistory.org/squawsale.html

Query from Maurice Woehrle

Maurice Woehrle, who was a top design engineer at Rossignol for several decades, wrote to ask about some old skis:


As regards Kästle slalom skis, I had no answer from Kidd. I suppose that he does not remember if there was fiberglass in his skis. Another question about winning skis of the 64 Olympics: the downhill was won by Egon Zimmerman with Alu Steel from Fischer. As far as I remember, the edges of these skis were not bonded by glue but fixed by screws. Have you some idea about it? 

The question matters because Head had purchased the Chris Hoerhle patent on the continuous bonded edge, and was defending it aggressively. Thus a factory like Kneissl that refused to pay a royalty to Head had to use screws to hold on the edges, even if they were covered by the base plastic. Some 30 years ago I asked Joe Fischer about the Alu Steel. He had no access to the flexible contact cement used by Head to glue the steel to the aluminum. Instead he put rubber strips -- neoprene -- above the steel as shear layers, He believes he was the first to do this. So the answer, I believe, was no screws in the Alu Steel, and I don't know if Fischer paid royalties to Head.

Concerning the Kastle Slalom of 1964, I wrote an article about it for Skiing Heritage, because it was the last great wooden race ski and was used by all three medalists in slalom at the Innsbruck Olympics that year. The ski was of laminated ash top and bottom with a light core of okoume, and a decorative red plastic top skin -- but no fiberglass. Read the article here:

http://books.google.com/books?id=ylgEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA25&lpg=PA25&dq=masia+last+great+wooden+race+ski+kastle+kidd+heuga&source=bl&ots=XEu0ZnMDr0&sig=UlyO_fZxa_KyfpYn_V9IKA73B44&hl=en&ei=peXQTK-BMoWcsQPVsvi6Cw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBYQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=masia%20last%20great%20wooden%20race%20ski%20kastle%20kidd%20heuga&f=false 

 

ISHA Benefit, Essex Junction, Nov 21

A BENEFIT FOR THE INTERNATIONAL SKIING HISTORY ASSOCIATION
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 21: 5:20 PM
ESSEX CINEMAS
Essex Outlet Shops, Essex Junction, Vt.
A private screening of “THE EDGE OF NEVER”
Followed by Italian dinner at RUSTICO’S
$65 PER PERSON
Send check to 
ISHA
P.O. BOX 4236
SOUTH BURLINGTON, VT 05406-4236
Include your email address for ticket delivery
The International Skiing History Association is a 501 (c) (3) organization.

Jake Moe on Jean Claude Killy

I just received John Fry's sales pitch letter and the reference to Jean Claude.

 

And, immediately my mind races back to 1969 - a couple of years before I started Powder.  I was one of the professional ski patrolmen on the Sun Valley Ski Patrol.  One afternoon, the patrol director pulled Richie Bingham and me into a meeting and informed us that we were not going to be patrolling the next day.  He had chosen us to do avalanche control workfor Jean Claude Killy in the back country.  Killy was starring in a Disney film and the film crew needed to have some pre-skiers attack the slope to make sure that it wasn't going to slide on him during the filming.  Talk about being honored with a most incredible project - hanging out with Killy for a day?  Obviously, it was impossible to sleep with all that excitement.

 

We arose early and got all of our gear for the helicopter ride - and, with Olympic Champion Killy on board we were dropped at the top of a high ridge.  Over the radio, we heard the film director say - "send the patrolmen"!  We jumped off the cliff and immediately were shocked to be in the middle of the most impossible breakable crust that we had ever experienced in Sun Valley  The wind apparently had hit the slope hard the night before and turned a perfectly awesome powder field into 'sheet of crust' three inches thick - and a foot of fresh snow stuck underneath.  We would get some speed up and just barely start to make a turn and our skis would break through and as a result the hard crust would just kill our shins like ice driving into our legs and bringing us to a complete stop creating somersault after somersault.  After falling atleast seven times each from the top of the ridge to the specially built filming platform far down the slope, we slid up to the director and announced that it was no use filming because the slope was completely and totally UN-SKIABLE!  "Like @#$%" he said, "I didn't spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to cancel this!"  And, with that he waved for Killy to launch into the slope and ordered film to roll.

 

We had never seen Killy fall in the days that he ripped the slopes of Sun Valley - and, we almost couldn't keep our eyes open knowing that our hero was about to do headers just as we had done multiple times each.  To our surprise, Killy blew through the crust with such power and grace from top to bottom that it left our mouths wide open.  Richie and I turned to each other with the look that said "Did he just ski the slope we skied?"  Later, when reviewing the footage shot that day in slo-motion, it looked as though blocks of snow the size of rail cars were exploding off his ankles and shins.  I have never seen such execution in such impossible conditions in my life.

 

He is definitely my hero

 

Jake

Historic storm opens Colorado season

Great snow at Copper: From Sunday to Tuesday, a storm of historic proportions pounded across the Great Plains. Its western edge brought blizzard conditions to the Colorado Rockies, with strong winds drifting snow up to two feet deep in places. On Thursday, PSIA and AASI demo team members had clear skies for their final day of pre-season training, and Copper mountain lift operators were still digging out. Midwinter snow on Oct 28: Very sweet!

Entries for ISHA Awards

Authors of ski histories published in 2010, and makers during the past year of films and videos about the sport’s past, are invited to submit work for judging. Deadline for entries is Dec. 15, 2010. Three copies of the work should be sent to Rick Moulton, Chairman, ISHA Awards Committee, Box 97, 109 Moulton Drive, Huntington, VT 05462. Winners will honored at Skiing Heritage Week in Sun Valley, Mar. 31, 2011.


See http://skiinghistory.org

Stratton photos from Kimet Hand

Stratton ski school director Emo Henrich, and his daughter Benzi, around 1968.

Frank and Jessie Snyder in 2004.

From Ken Moore

Has Skiing Heritage done a piece on Fritz and Moo-Moo Wiesner? They spent a season in Aspen. a lot of fun and Moo-Moo never took off her fur coat. Their xmas card had a photo of their two very good looking kids.


Did you ever use HuxFlux on your x-country skiis? Dick Durrance gave me some a long time ago. I was with the rescue party that went up Snowmass Creek with Charlie Houston when he discovered that some high altitude sickness was a heart, not a lung, condition. We used skins but Dick used wax and beat us all to the victim.
This rescue began around 5 am on new year's day which meant no partying for the group. Our wives were not too happy about this. I had a medical book with this story in it but moved and lost it. It had a  photo of the rescue group on the trail. Maybe Bob Craig has a copy?

Also, has Skiing Heritage done an article on  the New England college ski team competitions after the Durrance years?  I was skiing for Williams in 1940-41 & 42. Dartmouth and New Hampshire were strong. Great bunch of guys  in those years. That's when Percy Rideout put Beat Me Daddie Boogie on a victrola before anyone was awake and the Dartmouth team ran across all the lined-up cots the teams were sleeping on in the Middlebury gym.


I am more or less house bound and working to keep my memory alive. Skiing Heritage is a great help in this endeavour.


--Ken Moore

Head Flexible

Dick Crumb, who had a long career in sales and marketing at the original Olin Ski Co., writes:

Seth, 
While cleaning out my in-laws basement I came across a pair of Head "Flexibles" which look like a late 50's - early 60"s model based on the bindings. I have never seen or heard of these. A few questions for you: 
1.) Are you familiar with these? 
2.) If so, are they rare or am I not as good a ski historian as I think I am? 
3.) Is there someone or some place (museum) that might want these? They will just continue to gather dust I if keep them. I'm not looking for $ for them, just a good home. 


The Ski Free bindings look like they're no later than around 1954, and probably earlier (I have a pair on my 1948 Northland Hickories). Ian Ferguson, who joined Head in 1955, confirms that the Flexible pre-dates his era. He says it's a soft-flexing ski built in the same mold as the original Standard, and meant for lighter skiers. "It's not a powder ski," he said. "No one was thinking about specialized skis for powder yet. The first real powder ski we made was the Deep Powder, about 1956."

Lovett XC skis

Had lunch with John Lovett yesterday. One of the advantages of living and working in Boulder: From my office I can see the entire history of the Colorado ski industry.

Lovett began making cross country skis in high school, and selling them, too. In 1970, at age 19, he set up his own factory in Boulder to make what may have been the world's first mass-produced fiberglass cross country skis -- and sold about 2,500 pairs that first year. By 1976 the factory was moving 30,000 pairs of skis a year and Lovett was also building alpine skis for a couple of boutique brands. By then he'd sold the company to Eastern Mountain Sports and was getting ready to move on.

John has some adventures to relate, involving helicopters and three Bobs named Burns, Lange and Redford. We'll get to some of those stories soon.

V-Link and electronic speed training

By Seth Masia

VLink, a high-tech device invented by Hewlett-Packard scientist Richard Kirby, is now in use by the U.S. Ski Team to improve the carving precision of world class athletes and Development Team trainees. The chip, attached to the ski behind the binding, uses three microminiaturized optical tracking circuits to record movement through space in three dimensions and three axes. In training mode, the VLink transmits an audio signal to a set of earbuds, telling the skier about any sideways drift, to a precision of half a millimeter. VLink records data 6500 times per second, and is accurate to 70 miles per hour.

Bill Johnson at Sarajevo, 1984 (Sports Illustrated photo)

By looking at the graphic readout, a racer and coach can see where in the course of the turn the ski is skidding or slipping enough to cost speed.

This development reminds me that back in the ‘80s some of the national teams used downhill training skis equipped with pressure-sensing transducers above the steel edges. If a racer could equalize the pressure on the two edges of each ski, it meant that he was riding a perfectly flat ski and the theory at the time was that this was the way to maximize glide speed. Bill Johnson's string of downill victories in 1984 -- including the Olympic gold medal -- was thought at the time to be due to his talent for riding a "loose" flat ski.

I’d be interested in hearing from anyone who can tell us more about the transducer-equipped skis. If you were a racer or coach who used them, or if you were a tech working with the skis, please give us more detail on how they worked and whether they were effective in improving glide speed.

The Great Rossignol Boondoggle

By Seth Masia

I’ve just stumbled across a reminiscence by Jackson Hogen of a Rossignol-sposored junket to the Alps in the winter of 1993-1994 (see skinet.com/skiing/2009/01/musings-from-the-pontiff-of-powder-vol-1). Because Jackson mentions me in the article, I feel some obligation to elaborate, and to set the record straight on a few minor points.

Jackson is entirely correct on the market situation of the era. Salomon was on a roll, and had recently introduced its line of “monocoque” alpine skis. They were growing very quickly, mostly at the expense of Rossignol and Dynastar. Salomon was a powerful marketing machine. One of its tools was the full-bore press trip – the company would round up a dozen or so ski magazine staffers and fly us off to some snowy venue for a three-day new-product introduction. On occasion, the Austrian Trade Commission did something similar for Austrian ski and boot manufacturers. But Salomon seemed happy to spend the most money. By 1993, Rossignol’s management felt they needed to put on a full-court press in answer. The company sent invitations to all the American ski magazines (SKI, Skiing, Powder, Snow Country, Ski Racing) and flew us off to Europe.

In attendance were two or three writers plus a publisher or advertising rep from each publication, escorted by the senior management of Rossignol’s U.S. subsidiary, and Rossi had hired Andy Mill as athlete-host. We were supposed to have a good time. Jackson’s idea of a good time consisted very largely of ingesting whatever fell to hand, and then skiing hard.

The woods above Val Floret, Tignes.

First stop was Tignes. In theory there was a FIS race to be attended, but a blizzard was in progress so four of us (Mill, Hogen and me, and a local guide) jumped on some GS skis and headed for a steepish out-of-bounds hardwood forest on either side of the Les Lanches lift. The upper slopes were a complete white-out but in the trees we could see perfectly and the new snow lay about 18 inches deep. I should have felt sleep-deprived and jet-lagged but it was one of the glorious mornings of my life. I love skiing with Andy Mill – his knees are trashed enough that I can keep up with him, but not so trashed as to keep him out of trouble. Les Lanches was then a double chair, and because Mill and I were well-matched for speed (at least in powder) we sort of lost touch with Hogen and the ESF guide.

At lunch, Hogen passed out. In addition to the sleep deprivation and jet-lag, he was hung over and dehydrated. I was the volunteer who helped him stagger back to the bus and found him an overdose of aspirin and eau minerale.

We then toured the new ski factory. Rossignol had built this production line to make the 4SV, a light squirt ski meant to replace the popular 4SK recreational slalom ski in the line. Fat skis were already in wide use for powder skiing, Elan had already introduced the SCX shaped ski and the Austrian factories had their own shaped skis in prototype, so I thought it curious that Rossi had just spend about a million bucks to create a light, overdamped straight ski that would be obsolete before it cooled.

Then it was off to Grenoble for cocktails chez Boix-Vives, a fabulous penthouse. Then a late-night charter flight on a ratty but durable old Gulfstream I turboprop, to Venice. About two dozen of us were massed into what was really a 19-passenger airplane, so we got to make use of the cockpit jumpseat, the head, and the overhead luggage bins.

Jackson here begins to make frequent reference to a “whacked-out” boot editor. I won’t identify this personage, save to note that he seemed a marginal Asperger case, obsessively focused and oblivious to social skills. His obsession on this trip was to annoy the hell out of our host, Jacques Rodet, president of Rossignol's North American operations.

We toured the Caber factory in Montebelluna. Rossignol had just purchased the facility and begun making a bright yellow race boot under its own label, a stiff four-buckle boot that would eventually make a suitable stable-mate to the Lange race boots Rossignol already made in Bolzano.

There was some kind of mix-up over luncheon plans but we wound up in a wonderful haute-cuisine country inn somewhere between Montebelluna and Venice. Our table made far too much noise, disturbing a dining room full of well-dressed civilized folk. Jackson showed off his Italian with a loudly-declaimed toast in the form of an obscene bit of doggerel.

The Gulfstream I lofted us over the alps at dusk, and I was glued to the window watching the alpenglow from a new perspective.  We landed at Le Bourget half an hour after dark. On the bus to our hotel – an old monastery on the Left Bank converted to deluxe rooms -- the whacked-out boot editor asked Rodet, in all seriousness, “What river is that?” Rodet, who had graciously suffered fools for three days, finally lost it. “There’s only one river in Paris!” he barked. 

Dinner was at a three-star establishment overlooking said river. My chief memory of the meal is watching Rodet glare as the boot editor served himself with bare hands. The good-time tour concluded at the Crazy Horse. Like Jackson, I’ll leave that experience to your imagination.

Back at the hotel, we found that our hosts had thoughtfully left us each a pair of 4SV skis and a pair of bright yellow race boots. I’m sorry to say that the skis proved to be submarines, going to the bottom of any soft snowpack and staying there. They lasted one season in the market, then got blown away in the shaped-ski revolution. The boots worked well.

Related articles: 100 Years of Rossignol.

Tribute to climate scientist Stephen Schneider

2007 NOBEL PEACE PRIZE RECIPIENT, DR. STEPHEN SCHNEIDER, PARTNER OF TRIBES, ASCENDS

By Suzy Chaffee

Stanford's Dr. Stephen Schneider, 2007 Nobel Peace Prize recipient, (shared with his IPCC team), who publicly praised the Native American Elders for saving ski areas from snow droughts since 1963, passed on July 19.  This Climatologist skier also praised the ski areas for reaching out to share the joy of skiing and snowboarding with tribes in their beloved ancestral mountains, which inspired them to lead the snowdances.  

Dr. Stephen Schneider

The first known snowdance, which saved Vail,  was covered on the CBS Huntley-Brinkley Report.  Southern Ute Elder, Eddy Box Jr, whose father so graciously led it, and four generations, who are treated like family, have continued, said, "We wanted to create more harmony between our cultures and Nature." 

Snowdances are prayer ceremonies led by gifted Elders of many tribes.., often with singing and drumming that calls in the Spirits, and magnificent dancers in regalia at the base of the mountains, like Aspen’s Gondola Plaza.  The tribes sincerely thank Creator, Mother Earth and the Nature Spirits/Angels/Divas in advance for the gracious snow blessings.  I was surprised to find this is similar to how Essenes like Jesus prayed, also facing the "Sacred Four Directions." 

Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment was the first university known to exchange environmental wisdom with Indigenous Peoples - the Hawaiians and Maori of New Zealand.  As a Senior Fellow of the Institute, Dr. Schneider went on to create a partnership with many North American Elders through our Native American Olympic Team Foundation (NAOTF), a partnership of tribal Elders and leaders and Olympians.  


Read the rest of this post at SkiingHistory.org/StephenSchneider.html.

Durrance and breakaway poles, 1932

John Fry's column in the new September 2010 issue SKI Magazine recounts the modern history of the breakaway slalom pole. But he reports that he missed an earlier development. John writes:

In John Jerome's book The Man on the Medal, when Dick Durrance was racing as a teenager in Bavaria in 1932 he recalled, "A friend of mine named Hannes Totenhaupt and I devised slalom flags that would stay put when they were hit. We'd take an old bedspring, wind it around a steel spike on one end, and stick a dowel on the other end to hold the flag. I guess we sort of invented precursors to the breakaway poles they use nowadays."

1964 Olympic poster: Who is the skier?

Hey, Corky here...   I received an inquiry from a skiing fan in Michigan who recently read the article on my career in SKIING HERITAGE...  He asked me if I knew who the skier is in this 1964 Winter Olympic poster.  I remember the poster well as it was hanging on the wall in the Pine Chalet where I lived during my first winter in 1964 as a ski instructor on the Sun Valley Ski School staff...  I dimly remember thinking it was shot by Fred Lindholm or maybe Willy Bogner...  Not sure, though, and never did know who the skier is...

If anyone knows, could you please send me a note and I'll pass the skier's identity along to the skiing "fan" in Michigan...

Thanks and have a good one! 

--Corky Fowler