Loren Griswold: September 2013

The History of Skiing

Have you ever wondered where skiing came from? Well, I have and so I just thought I would find out. So this is what I could find, hope you like it.

The first evidence people have discovered of skiing is some rock carvings discovered around the Arctic rim, many of them showing ski-shod hunters in hot pursuit of game. They date clear back to the Stone Age, which is the same time-frame as the Egyptian pyramid-building. Some ancient ski artifacts were pulled from Scandinavian peat bogs that pollen-dated back as long ago as 4500 years, back to around the age of the stone carvings. Stone-age skiing, obviously, wasn’t to have a blast sliding down hills, but rather a means of travel.

The first written account of skiing appears at 1000 A.D. in the Viking "Sagas" where several kings are described as being superb skiers.

In 1206, during the Norwegian civil war, two scouts on skis carried the infant heir to the throne 35 miles to safety in the middle of winter. This historic event is celebrated today by the "Birchleg Race" over the same route and so called because the scouts wrapped their legs in birch bark to keep them warm and dry. Another traditional ski race takes place every year in Sweden. The Vasaloppet Cross Country race (53 miles) honors Gustav Vasa's ski trip in 1523 when he raised an army and beat the Danes who were then in control of the country. Lots of countries in the 18th and 19th centuries used skis in their armies for winter warfare. A pair of skis consisted of one long runner and one shorter one called an andor. The long ski was used to glide; the shorter one to brake and climb. Skins could be applied to the latter. By 1840 local cross-country ski races (with skis of equal length) were beginning to be held in Norway among military personnel. Soon, civilians were allowed to enter and the popularity of the ski contests spread rapidly among the peasants in the rural countryside. The races were nordic in concept--over rolling terrain and down short steeper slopes where jumping was necessary.

Telemark skiing was just getting off the ground and the binding set up they had didn’t give them the control they needed, so a new binding with a better toe & heel strap had to be invented. The Telemark binding added a heel strap. Now there had been heel straps before, but the Telemark heel strap, made of tough, woven, elastic birch-root tendrils, ran around the boot heel and connected to the toe strap, holding the ski firmly enough to the foot so the skier could maneuver the ski or take to the air without danger of losing the ski. The binding was invented by Norheim about 1850 and led to the flowering of the world=s first "freestyle" contestsCclimbing, running, making turns for the heck of it and flying off natural bumps on unprepared snow.

Jumping eventually became a separate event and Norheim was especially good at these competitions. But Norheim was accomplished at something else more important than jumping. This was first brought to the world=s attention in 1868 when Norheim was 43. He and two companions skied over the countryside for three days running to get from Telemark to the capital city, then called Christiania. There they took part in the second annual Centralforeningen (Central Ski Association) open ski competition whose object was to demonstrate skill at descending a particular slope in the city. The Telemarkers stunned city skiers by demonstrating quick, precise steering and braking. No one in the city had ever seen such a dynamic technique before. The Telemarkers used two separate and distinct turns. One turn described a sweeping arc (it was later named the Telemark) and the other turn made it possible to stop short with an abrupt little uphill swing (it was later named the Christiania). A city newspaper enthused that "Sondre Norheim could come down like lightning and suddenly stop in a second... A new era has risen in skiing." And it was true, skiing was never the same again. To make turning even easier, Norheim reengineered the ski itself, making the waist narrower than the tip and tail. This "sidecut" pattern helped the ski flex into the shape of a turn as soon as the skier tipped it on edge. This new waisted shape came to be called the Telemark ski, and it became the standard for ski design over the next century. The turns from Telemark spread quickly throughout.

In the late 1800s, Norway=s first export in the sport came, their skis. The demand for skis was rising steadily in Norway from 1880 on, inspiring new production methods. Like the first laminated ski, with an ash sole and pine top, that was in 1881. Hand-crafted skis were first exported to Sweden in 1882, but hand making skis took to long to make so the first ski factories opened in Norway in 1886, to make the popular Telemark-pattern ski. The next export was the skiers themselves. Norwegian students, teachers, engineers and businessmen fanned out over Europe at the turn of the century, thanks to the fast-spreading railroad network in Europe. They brought their skis with them and everywhere they skied, they made converts to the sport.

At the same time in Norway came the founding of the first Norwegian ski clubs and, of course, competition in nordic cross country and jumping were held between them; then came competition against other Europeans by individual Norwegians and, finally, teams of Norwegians. The men from Norway inevitably came out ahead, advancing the claim that, on the character of its citizens alone, Norway deserved independence. That claim got another boost from the exploits of the Norwegian hero Fridtjof Nansen, who rose to world renown leading high-risk expeditions on Telemark skis. In 1888, Nansen became the first man to cross the mid-Greenland ice cap, on skis and sledges. His book, On Skis Over Greenland, came out in 1890 in both English and Danish editions and was translated into German the next year. It became a worldwide propaganda vehicle for skiing. Again, in 1895-96, the explorer=s reputation burgeoned when Nansen and a companion survived an 18-month journey over the polar ice by ski, sledge and kayak, making their way back to civilization in a modern saga unparalleled to this day. As a follow-up, in 1911 Roald Amundsen skied all the way to the South Pole, the first man to get there, outpacing Britain=s rival the Scott expedition witch slogging away on foot, or on skis but using them badly, and falling so far behind schedule that, ultimately, although Scott reached the pole, he and his men perished on the return. Amundsen, unscathed, was left to receive the applause of the world.

Telemark skiing thus had, at the turn-of-the-century, a well-earned reputation for developing a strong, adventurous and free-spirited character, veritably a charismatic sport.

The rise of Telemark skiing forms an interesting contrast with contemporary "longboard" skiing, which was really the first form of alpine skiing.

Hundreds of thousands of Swedes, Finns and Norwegians set sail in the last half of the 1800s to better their lot in the New World. Most of the migrants ended up on Midwestern farms, like Sondre Norheim. But some became miners in California, Colorado, Utah and even in the Australian outback. Everywhere they went, they made their own skis, as usual. And they founded some of the world=s oldest ski clubs.

Enterprising men became mail couriers, the Fed Ex of their time, supplying the mining camps their only communication with the outside world in the winter. The most famous was John "Snowshoe" Thompson, born in Jon Tostensen Rue in Telemark. He carried mail on skis from Nevada 80 miles over the Sierra Nevada Mountains to Hangtown, California. Other miners invented, in the mid-1800s, the world=s first downhill speed races. They were run for gold and glory, one mining camp against the other, in an atmosphere of boasting, drinking and gambling. Longboard racers took off on skis twelve feet long, several men at once (depending on the width of the slope) and ran straight down at speeds that were clocked up to 87 miles an hour. This velocity was not reached again on skis for a century thereafter. Longboard competition was spectacular if only for the falls, and proliferated with the rising fortunes of Western mining. In the end, it shriveled along with the mines. Longboarding had little later influence on skiing and was all but forgotten until rediscovered much later by Western journalists. It had been a sport notoriously lacking in self-discipline, modesty and beauty of movement. These virtues were conspicuous in Telemark skiing, which inspired a whole library of praise for Telemark skiing as it made a conquest of the Continent. But it was Continental skiing with a difference. In Norway, the sport had been practiced mostly by mountain farmers, originally, and in consequence considered a sport of the people. Norwegians prided themselves in keeping the sport accessible, affordable and simple. And while Norwegians may have sold skis to the world, they disdained to profit from selling the sport itself, deeming skiing a matter of soul. There was a ski school as early as 1881 in Norway, but ski instruction as a profession was a very small matter and precious few Norwegians taught the sport abroad. This idealistic sport of the Norwegians, stressing endurance on the snow and fearless flight through the air was wrenched around by British skiers on the Continent to focus on the experience of ski descent on the snow, a form much more appealing to many more people. From this came alpine skiingCmainly because skiing developed on the Continent quite differently from the way skiing developed in Norway.

Because going slow and steady on steep pitches using Telemark and Christiania turns required considerable skill, Mathias Zdarsky of Austria invented the stem which was a snow plow. The stem made skiing in a slow, controlled manner a possibility for beginnersCa fine introduction to skiing for a city-bound clientele with limited practice time.

But control turned out to be only half of alpine skiing. The other half turned out to be speed. The change of focus from ski mountaineering to fast ski descent was the initiative of the British. No sooner had they mastered the stem, Telemark, and the Christiania than the British invented the Continent=s first alpine races, then as now called "downhill" and "slalom." This began the transition from ski mountaineering into alpine skiing.

The first alpine race invented was the downhill. The bud of this robust event was a British club race, The Roberts of Kandahar Challenge Cup, run in 1911 at Montana, Switzerland. Contestants skied an unmarked course against the clock down the Plaine Morte Glacier over rough snow and enough natural hazards to prevent contestants from simply running straight like the longboarders. "The Kandahar" was thereafter (and still is) held annually at Mürren, Switzerland. Emphasis on the importance of the descent prevailed in British racing and in everyday skiing as well. In effect, the sport of alpine racing was invented by the British, and alpine skiing along with it.

The second bud of alpine racing was invented by British ski mountaineer Arnold Lunn in January, 1922, on the grounds of the Palace Hotel in Mürren where he persuaded some friends to race through a series of paired short wands stuck in the snow. The race was against the stopwatch and without regard to form, in contrast to contemporary Swiss controlled course contests where form counted. Lunn=s slalom cleverly played speed off against control. The delightful tension between these opposites made the race so intriguing it spread quickly. With slalom gaining popularity, it became possible to run alpine combined races, scoring slalom and downhill together, as jumping and cross country had been scored jointly for nordic combined titles. In 1924, Lunn helped found Mürren=s Kandahar Ski Club to promote alpine combined racing.

Austrians universally glorified the innovation of Arlberg skiing and elevated its hero, Johann Schneider, to the status of most important figure in alpine skiing history. He immediately decided to found his own ski school. He set up a system (based on Zdarsky=s turn): the snowplow stem, the stem turn and the stem christie, in ascending order of difficulty. The Schneider system replaced the tradition of ski guides, each teaching his own grab-bag of turns and operating from scattered hotels throughout the town. Schneider hired teachers to instruct at a location in the middle of town and trained them to teach a fixed sequence based on the stem turn, so that pupils returning after having had lessons could take up at the exact same level they had left offCno matter which teacher headed the class.

Schneider=s school had a half dozen of the best alpine racers in the world on its teaching staffClike Friedl Pfeifer and Rudi Matt who at one time or another defeated every racer in Europe.

In 1920, Schneider collaborated with Arnold Fanck, a pioneer adventure film maker from Freiberg, Germany to make, Das Wunder des Schneeschuhs, ("The Wonders of Skis"). It was the world=s first ski film and it was an out-and-out instructional video, but with an exotic subject. Fanck capitalized on the huge success of this first film by starring Schneider in a half dozen subsequent ski films having dramatic plots, beginning with "Fox Chase in the Engadine". The Fanck films gave European film-goers their first action hero, "Hannes" SchneiderChis film name which he used in real life ever after. By the time Schneider starred in his final film, the romantic comedy ski chase, Das Weische Rausche, "White Ecstasy," released in 1930, Schneider=s technique and teaching format had become the worldwide standard. Schneider=s school at St. Anton remained by far the world=s largest as Schneider=s fame rippled across Europe to America, Japan and Australia.

Meanwhile, alpine ski racing=s acceptance into the official competition world was delayed by at least ten years past its prime. It was a delay marked by a struggle of alpine racing adherents against a Scandinavian ski aristocracy entrenched in the Federation International de Ski or FIS. The FIS ran both the world championship competition and skiing in the Olympics.

A counterattack was nevertheless generating steam by this time. The popularity of downhill competitions had spread in Europe, in 1928, two giants of alpine skiing got together to concoct the first international alpine combined. Schneider=s Arlberg Ski Club and Lunn=s Kandahar Ski Club ran the first "Arlberg-Kandahar" alpine combined, open to all comers. The event by far outshone the St. Moritz Olympics of the same year.

Finally, the FIS caved in to allow the first FIS alpine world championship, at Mürren in 1931. Five years later, the International Olympic Committee relented and sanctioned a single set of alpine combined medals (three for each sex) at Germany=s 1936 Garmisch Olympics

In the 1920s, the alpine nations of Europe began building ski lifts. This made a way of vying for the winter tourist trade. And racing became much more sophisticated as it became possible to practice running tens of thousands of vertical feet a day. The Germans have the honor of being first, having set up a drag lift earliest in the first decade of the 1900s, joined by the Austrian drag lift at Dornbirn in 1908. The French kicked their lift-building off by finishing a cable car for skiers and hikers at Chamonix in 1927, building a drag lift there the next year for less than expert skiers.

The Swiss constructed the first cable car built expressly for the ski trade, at Engelberg in 1928. In 1932, Gerhard Müller of Zurich struck a blow for economy by patenting an inexpensive rope tow run by a motorcycle engine, and began building them. In 1933, Davos finished the giant of its time, the Parsennbahn, a cog railway that rose 3000 vertical feet to the top of the Parsenn.
The Austrians followed with St. Anton’s Galzig cable car in 1938 as the era of popular walk-up skiing drew to a close, and alpine skiing parted definitively from ski mountaineering. They were now separate and distinct sports, alpine skiers using lifts at least several times a day and ski mountaineers using them not at all, if they could help it.

In 1931, America’s first Arlberg teacher came along, by chance. Sig Buchmayr of Salzburg had begun to work in ski shops in New York City when he was invited to join the school at Peckett's Inn. So Peckett’s had the first American resort school offering Arlberg, a fact that led to the development of Cannon Mountain as the East’s first big mountain resort.

By the mid-1930s, Austrian instructors were arriving in the U.S. to teach skiing and incidentally to get out of Austria, which was being systematically terrorized by Nazi Germany bent on Anschluss, or annexation. German threats were a persuasive reason for leaving the Alps altogether, yet only a modest number of Austrian instructors managed to make the admittedly difficult decision to leave for America.

Small in number, this exile group wielded an enormous influence, far beyond their numbers, bringing their deep expertise to bear at a time it was badly needed to help get American alpine skiing on the right track. Coast to coast the Austrians had an immense impact. Hundreds of Americans worked with these Austrian ski maestros during the 1930s and, in turn fanned out across the country, infiltrating Austrian know-how throughout the entire body of American alpine skiing.
Americans did their part, too: Charles Proctor Jr. and John Carleton of the 1928 U.S. Winter Olympic team, laid out ski trails in New Hampshire with manpower from President Franklin Roosevelt’s novel creation, the Civilian Conservation Corps. Charlie Lord of Montpelier, Vermont, an early Mt. Mansfield skier, without benefit of European travel, was hired by the CCC, to cut trails on Mt. Mansfield above Stowe. A bit later, in 1938, Sel Hannah began cutting trails on Cannon Mt. and soon was designing other eastern trail systems.

The larger influence, though, was that of the Austrians.
In 1935, Hannes Schroll from Salzburg, arrived to head the school at Badger Pass in Yosemite Park, California. Otto Lang, the first instructor to leave for America from Schneider’s school, came first to Peckett’s, then founded the Northwest’s first official Arlberg ski schools—at Mt. Rainier, Mt. Baker and Mt. Hood.

In 1938, the long-threatened Anschluss came down on Austria as Nazi troops marched into Vienna. To the shock of the ski world, the Nazis promptly imprisoned Hannes Schneider. Schneider told friends he’d been done in through the influence of Leni Riefenstahl, the co-star who feuded with him during White Ecstasy and thereafter befriended Germany’s Adolf Hitler who let her direct several films glorifying the Nazis.

Schneider’s fate prompted several more St. Anton instructors to get out: the town’s best young racer, Toni Matt, fled to Mt. Cranmore; Friedl Pfeifer fled to Sun Valley—there he replaced Hans Hauser as ski school director and designed the trails and lifts on Sun Valley’s Mt. Baldy, the first large lift system in the U.S. Luggi Foeger, Schneider’s lieutenant at St. Anton, eventually took over at Badger Pass while Schroll moved on to Sugar Bowl.

In February 1939, after strong pressure had been applied by Harvey Dow Gibson, a man with the means to twist arms, Hannes Schneider was freed by the Nazis and allowed to emigrate to the U.S. where he took over Mt. Cranmore while Rybizka moved to Mt. Tremblant in the Laurentians.
And with that, the center of gravity of the ski world had shifted to America.

Dick Durrance, who had gone to grade school in Austria to become America’s only world class male racer was financed by New York steel heir and avant garde publisher James Laughlin to buy out a group of Salt Lake City businessmen at Alta, Utah, in 1941. There he founded another important American high-altitude resort.

Generally, the Austrian émigrés were the gurus of the growing American sport, as well as key resort founders, mountain managers, ski school directors, race coaches and trail designers in the growth of alpine skiing.

Americans were ripe for this new and exhilarating sport. The U.S. work week was contracting as "the weekend" made its debut. The CCC had cut ski trails from Maine to the Rockies and the Sierras. Ski areas had begun to draw the American young to the slopes where healthy, virtuous, and economical skiing awaited.

The first recorded lift in America was a drag tow at Truckee, California, in 1910, but it did not inspire imitators elsewhere. In 1933, Alec Foster built the Northeast’s first rope tow at Shawbridge in the Laurentians outside Montreal, and lift skiing really took off. The tow idea was copied quickly the next winter of 1934, by David Dodd, run off the back wheel of a jacked-up car, in Woodstock, Vermont: rope tows were simple—any competent mechanic could put one up.

Six ropes went in at Woodstock within two years, along with dozens elsewhere in the Northeast. There were upward of a hundred ropes on the continent within five years. North America was outpacing Europe in the number of tows. By 1940, rope tows were drawing thousands of Americans into skiing every season.

The next step up in technology was the overhead cable lift. The first overhead cable in the world was the single-passenger J-bar built in 1934 at Davos, Switzerland, by Ernest Constamm. The first in America was the J-bar built the next year, 1935, at Oak Hill in Hanover, New Hampshire. In 1936, Constamm converted his Davos lift to a two-passenger T-bar, then moved to Denver and installed dozens of T-bars around the U.S. to make it the workhorse lift of the generation.

In 1938 America’s second funicular, the Skimobile, was installed on Mt. Cranmore at North Conway, New Hampshire. That same year at Cannon Mountain, Franconia, New Hampshire the first Aerial Tramway in the United States is installed. In 1958 at the Wildcat New Hampshire ski area the first U.S. Gondola was installed.

Finally, what became the most effective uphill transport of all was invented in the U.S., the chairlift, designed by Union Pacific engineer Jim Curran for the 1936 opening of Sun Valley. It took a while for the chair to catch on; however, by the mid-1960s, chairs were being installed at a clip of fifty to seventy a season.

In November 1981 at Breckenridge, Colorado, the first modern detachable quad was installed it was called the Dopplemeyer quad. Now there were detachable prototypes as far back as 1952 at Snow Summit, California, in 1955 at Wengen, Switzerland, in 1969 at Utica, New York and in 1972 at Mt. Ste. Anne, Quebec, but this was the first one that was modern. The gondola had always been detachable, but now that same technology had been applied to the chair lift. The detachable has the double effect of doing away with both waiting line and "fear of loading," being hit hard from behind by a fast-moving chair on a high-capacity lift.

The rest of the big resorts followed suit in putting in high-speed detachables. The speed of detachables and fixed-grip high-speed chairs is giving most skiers more skiing than they can handle. Lunches have become longer. Sipping, shopping and napping begin earlier. Skiing on this side of the Atlantic has acquired some of the more leisurely pace of European resorts.

Early on, fast overhead cable lifts posed a challenge: to take advantage of these lifts’ ability to provide thousands of vertical feet of skiing in a day meant the skier had to know something about technique beyond falling down to stop, commonly the best-honed maneuver in the repertoire of many, if not most, American skiers in the 1930s.

Fortunately, Arlberg schools stood ready to offer sane skiing to all comers, having been enthroned at ski areas like Moosilauke, Jackson, Cannon, Gunstock, Cranmore and Hanover in New Hampshire; Mansfield and Woodstock in Vermont, North Creek and Bear Mt. in New York; Sun Valley in Idaho and Badger Pass and Sugar Bowl in California. Business was good: fifty to ninety percent of the skiers signed up for class (versus ten percent today).
In addition, with all that terrain to ski there needed to be some sort of police and medical help. So in 1938 the first U.S. Ski Patrol was established at Stowe under Minot Dole as chairman of the national committee.

By 1940, Alpine skiing was solidly entrenched coast-to-coast, partly through hard work and partly through random factors—the Nazis, the CCC, and the dense railroad network. Then, in December 1941, everything stopped. World War II came to the U.S. with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.
Most U.S. ski areas closed. The one bright spot was that the work of the National Ski Patrol Director Minot Dole had persuaded the Army to establish an alpine corps: the First Battalion, 87th Infantry, activated in June 1941, at Fort Lewis, Washington, became the core of the 10th Mountain Division.

After the war, several thousand 10th Mountain survivors, Army-minted Arlbergers, went into skiing—a vigorous cadre of inventors, developers, teachers and entrepreneurs. Friedl Pfeifer founded the ski resort at Aspen and later Peter Seibert founded its closest rival, Vail, the two giant resorts of the era. In all, some 62 resorts were either founded by, directed by or had ski schools run by 10th Mountain veterans; two thousand of them had gone into the ranks of ski instructors.

It was time. A 1940s skier was forced to endure a set of fragile and obdurate equipment. First came a ski made of wood that warped and splintered. Ski bottoms were coarse and needed wax every few runs; bamboo poles broke frequently. Lace-up leather boots stretched frustratingly.
Bindings had to be laboriously fastened on by hand-operated buckles, and would release only if unlatched or forced. The mis-named "safety strap" required to tether a breakaway ski to the boot often caused the ski to windmill in a sliding fall, slashing mercilessly at the skier’s legs. If the strap broke, a loose ski became a lethal missile, drawing warning shouts of "Ski! Ski! Ski! across the slope.

Then, to dress for skiing called for bundling in what amounted to converted hunting and hiking clothes, wool long-johns, sweaters and scarves topped by a windbreaker or canvas parka over wool hiking pants. Lunching meant eating in a room permeated by the strong smell of wet wool mixed with a potent aroma of ski wax.
Finally, in getting up the hill, one to two-hour weekend lift lines were not uncommon—less than 30 minutes was considered good luck.

It was a great sport with great inconveniences. The 1940s skier had to love it or leave it, and many left. But more came a-running in response to the new technology that came out like shiny new Christmas presents every season.

The unprecedented post-World War II surge of technology, in other words, was crucial to keeping skiing from stalling.
It began with bindings: In 1939, Seattle skier Hjalmar Hvam broke his second leg in two seasons and invented the Saf-Ski from his bed of pain. It was the first swiveling toepiece, sold under the advertising motto, Hvoom with Hvam! Saf-Ski inspired other releasing toe pieces; the first toepiece with two swivel points was the popular Ski Free.
In the 1950s, Mitch Cubberly and Earl Miller independently came out with fully integrated heel-and-toe release bindings, using boot plates at the juncture of boot and binding. But the boot still had to be latched in. The first Look step-in came out in the late 1950s, ending centuries of awkward bending-over preliminary to skiing. The double concept of the full release and the step-in entry was here. But its evolution was anything but hvoom! It took another generation before binding geniuses mastered the arcane complexities of step-in bindings which released reliably as required. But arrive such bindings did, by the mid-1970s.
Skis improved much more rapidly.
The first high-tech U.S. ski, the aluminum Alu-60, came out in 1947 only to be buried under an avalanche of Heads, wood-core aluminum skis with plywood cores, also invented in 1947 by Howard Head of Baltimore. Heads turned so readily by comparison with wood skis that Heads were known universally as Cheaters (and "banana skins" for being so easy to flex).
Skis became user-friendly. In 1946, Dynamique came out with the first hard, super-smooth ski sole, the Cellulix plastic bottom put an end to mandatory coating of ski bottoms with pungent preparations that had to be re-applied every hour.
The process accelerated after 1954, when the first all-plastic ski arrived, the Holley: but plastic really did not come of age until the 1960s when Rossignol and Kneissl began making fiberglass skis universal today because they give an easier ride than aluminum and do not take permanent bend after a collision.
Ski clothes made a quantum leap in 1949 when Aspen instructor Claus Obermeyer brought out his version of the insulated quilted parka, allowing skiers to shuck layers of wool and yet ski warm! Quilted parkas meant that billowing "baggies," could now be traded in for sleek "stretchies," invented by the Bogner ski clothing company in 1953, without the skier’s courting hypothermia—at least in the East. Serious ski chic had been launched.

Then came boots.
After buying the buckle patent from a Swiss inventor, Henke Boots came out in 1955 with Speedfit, the first buckle boot, ending the hard work of unlacing/lacing for just the right tightness. But buckles alone were no solution because the boot stretched as the buckles tightened. In 1957, Bob Lange created the first Lange Boot out of plastic to solve the stretchy-boot problem. Buckles in combination with plastic provided the close fit that gave skiers the precise control over the skis taken for granted today.
The next invention that surfaced was Ed Scott’s tempered aluminum pole in 1958, the first viable metal ski pole, ousting bamboo as the last natural primary material used in major ski equipment.
In 1960, at Squaw Valley, the first alpine Olympics were held in America. It stands as the first Olympics in which a gold medal wasn’t won by a person riding a pair of wooden skis.

The same year, Mitch Cubberly and Earl Miller independently came out with ski brakes to replace the inherently risky safety strap—the invention looked lethal: long unsheathed prongs sprang into position, sticking out like daggers from the breakaway ski. Brakes were dubbed "stabbers." But the prongs were sheathed, became shorter, and the reluctant were eventually convinced. Ski brakes became universal by 1975.
The boom in technology had a huge effect: a huge grouth in skiers.

The number of ski areas in America shot from 78 in 1955 to 662 ten years later—an astounding expansion. By 1970, alpine skiing was supporting large rural populations in the American hinterland. Remote regions, which before 1950 could have done without skiing, now in 1970 could no longer make ends meet without it. Whenever there was a snow drought, sizable lodging, entertainment and recreation businesses simply dried up, leaving thousands unemployed. The ski regions were by and large blessed with economic prosperity because skiers had been blessed with a cornucopia of technological advances which made the sport attractive.

And there was more to come.

By 1960, counter-rotation, also called wedel, and godille, had taken over, the first marked change in technique since the original Arlberg and its challenger, the French parallel method of Emile Allais. The new technique did away with the need for long, sweeping, slow-starting turns by dividing the skier in half. In the new technique, the feet turned, the legs turned, and sometimes the hips but the upper body remained facing roughly in the original direction as a counterweight. The skier gained the ability to make short, swift turns and thus became more maneuverable—with wonderful consequences in terms of safety, and enjoyment.

The next round of revolution came in the snow itself. When nature refused to make it, man did.
In the bad old days before snowmaking took hold in the Northeast, a bad snow drought could leave the New England mountains bare while the rural economy sank to its knees, which led a speaker at an economic summit to preface his talk with, "Well, so much for the much talked about economic alternatives to skiing."
The first intentional snowmaking device was put together by Wayne Pierce in Milford, Connecticut, out of a garden hose and a spray nozzle. It was first tried in the fall of 1950 at nearby Mohawk Mountain, where it produced a supersonic whistle that drove dogs all over the entire county berserk. That problem overcome, the first extensive systems were installed in February 1950 at Grossinger’s in New York and Split Rock Lodge (Big Boulder) in Pennsylvania.
By the mid-1970s, snowmaking was a major factor in eastern and midwestern skiing. For the first time, these resorts were guaranteeing snow from Christmas to Easter. (Today, even the West’s more plentiful natural snow is increasingly backed by snowmaking.) The snow drought problem had been largely solved, with great economic benefit.
As important as the snow making itself, or even more so, was the supporting cast for snow-grooming. Increasingly large and expensive snow-grooming machines magically turned random piles and old icy moguls in to nice new smooth runs. The trail-grooming schedule became the skier’s daily planning guide. Today an eastern resort suffering a typical day-rain followed by night-freeze can have decent skiing on at least a few trails the next morning, a result that works wonders for the relationship of skiers to the resorts in general.

This reincarnation of skiing through snowmaking and snow grooming has had the almost magical effect of tripling the acreage accessible to the average skier without felling a single tree. Grooming, snowmaking and high speed chairs have brought the exclusive preserve of the experts—that third of resort terrain traditionally made up of steep slopes—within reach of the average skiers who can now enjoy steep slopes to their heart’s content—or at least until they run out of steam.

Looking back, one can affirm that skiing has continually come up with new forms—freestyle, telemarking, speed skiing, snowboarding and extreme skiing—at the same time preserving or reviving older forms as it goes along. Cross country and backcountry skiing, the classic Telemark mode of the 1920s, is alive and well, very close to the 1920s sport but with the added comfort of over a hundred major, groomed layouts at skiers’ disposal in the U.S., and several times that in Europe.

Loren Griswold

Monday, September 9, 2013

The way life goes...

Sunday, September 8, 2013

The History of Skiing. A paper I wrote back in high school.