Major storms and massive snow years are the stuff of every skier's dreams. And access-road nightmares.
Photo above: Clearing Chinook Pass, elevation 5,430 feet (1,635m), in Mt. Rainier National Park, Washington, in 2011. Photo courtesy Mt. Rainier National Park.
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.
Michel Arpin (left) and Charles Bozon
talk boots with Le Trappeur exec
Pierre Barbaroux. Joubert photo.
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.
Resorts: From CCC-cut trails to a new gondola, the state-owned ski area has become a public-works success story.
Photo above: Opening day in January 1950, launched the first chairlift in New York State. The Roebling single was built by the New Jersey company that built the Brooklyn Bridge. Belleayre Mountain photo.
Photo above: Tracks across Sterling Pond show the way from Smuggs to Spruce. The reverse trip is all downhill.
For Alpine skiers, “interconnect” is a route connecting two separate lift networks. The granddaddy of all interconnects, created in 1956, may be the trail between the top of Stowe’s Spruce Mountain and the summit of Sterling Mountain at Smugglers’ Notch. It’s still possible to ski both resorts the same day, although the experience is no longer encouraged by the two Vermont ski areas.
Eliasch to step back at Head, pledges to modernize race formats
Billionaire businessman Johan Eliasch was elected president of the International Ski Federation on June 4, pledging to re-energize competitive skiing with possible new race formats and more dynamic broadcasts.
Sun Valley, Idaho, will host the 30th annual ISHA Awards Banquet next March.
Mark these dates: ISHA will hold its 30th annual ISHA Awards Banquet on March 24, 2022, at Sun Valley! We’ll renew our long-standing Skiing History Week collaboration with the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame, which will hold its induction banquet on March 26. In addition, ISHA will send a contingent to the NESM’s Hannes Schneider Meister Cup Race at North Conway, New Hampshire on March 5, followed by the HOF’s Eastern Banquet that evening at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire.
The cerebral side of ski instruction grew dominant in the mid-1970s. The approach vanished a decade later, but had made its point that mastering technique is only part of the game.
More than three decades ago, skiing was ripe for a change in the way the sport was taught. Amid a new wave of research in psychology and neurology that supported a holistic approach to how people learn, ski instructors were still shouting orders to tense skiers about the placement of their knees and shoulders.
Wayne Wong, of Vancouver, British Columbia, at age 19, took third place in the very first International Championships of Exhibition Skiing, held in March 1971 at Waterville Valley, New Hampshire (grand prize was a Corvette). In 1976, Wong endorsed the new 230-horsepower Dodge Aspen R/T—the performance version of the “compact” Aspen introduced that year. The code-name for the development program had been Aspen-Vail, and the Plymouth version was named Volaré (without the accent it means “to fly” in Italian). Wong flew on to stardom, but the Aspen/ Volaré was a lemon.
On the Cover:
A. Adams's poster, circa 1950, pitches membership in the French Ski Association with an abstract style unusual for posters of the era.
