Form over function? Sure, with the help of stretch pants and cool hip angulation.
Those of us of a certain age remember the “comma position”: that very stylish, very modern, very Austrian stance many of us aspired to in the late 1950s through the ’60s. Its confluence with metal skis and stretch pants oozed cool modernity, helping elevate skiing culturally from an outdoor sport for vigorous sportsmen and women to an aspirational leisure activity for the upper middle class—akin to tennis and golf.
When there isn’t enough snow outside, skiers have headed inside for nearly a century.
With trainloads of a mixture of sawdust, soda crystals and mica used to mimic snow, the first indoor ski center in Europe opened in 1927 in Berlin and helped launch the early era of indoor skiing (photo top of page).
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)
Decades later, in the Ashcroft Valley, a
skier enjoys the benefits of modern
track setting. Aspen Historical Society,
Russell Collection
A masterpiece of American alpine architecture was nearly lost. Then a skier came to its rescue.
Timberline Lodge surely rates as one of the most gorgeous examples of mountain architecture ever built. Against the backdrop of the 11,239-foot summit of Oregon’s Mt. Hood, the structure appears to be part of nature itself.
Ski racers take extreme measures to get—and keep—a winning boot.
Ingemar Stenmark spent almost his entire World Cup career in Caber’s blue Alfa boot (top of page). He ran his first World Cup race, at age 17, in 1973. The Alfa was introduced in 1974, and Stenmark won his first slalom championship in 1975. Caber killed production of the Alfa in 1979, but when he ran his last World Cup race in March 1989, Stenmark still wore a banged-up pair of Alfas. Cindy Nelson, another Caber devotee, held onto her Alfas past her own retirement in 1985.
Shuttered for five years, Maine's Saddleback Mountain has reopened. Can it do well by doing good?
December 15, 2020, dawned cold and windy—and with the Covid-19 pandemic raging. But that didn’t stop about 300 skiers and boarders from riding the new Rangeley high-speed quad at Saddleback Mountain near Rangeley, Maine. It was the first time in five seasons that the lifts had spun at Saddleback—one of New England’s hidden gems. And more than just the ski area’s loyalists were happy. The entire region breathed a sigh of relief.
The careful, almost technical, depiction of Norwegians skijoring behind motorcycles in 1906 shows a passion for detail learned when William Russell Flint was a medical illustrator in London from 1900 to 1902. Born in Scotland, Flint had come south from Edinburgh’s Daniel Stewart College and the Edinburgh Institute to study at Heatherley’s Art School and The British Museum.
I enjoyed your article on sand skiing (“History Proves Skiers Will Ski on Anything—Especially Sand,” March-April 2021). My friends and I skied on the banks of the Merrimac River, outside of Concord, New Hampshire, in the early 1960s when I was about 16. I didn’t realize that we were part of such a large group of sand-skiing enthusiasts. We used Ivory soap as wax and skied after the rain. We also tried to ski on wet moss and pine needles.
This 616-page book is not something you lug to the beach. It’s a skiing media extravaganza that takes you from the Alpine heart of Europe through the Mediterranean—skiing on Corsica, anybody?—then to the north. Denmark’s green carpet of Neveplast on the roof of Copenhagen’s power plant can give you an 85-foot vertical, 365 days of the year. Move on to Eastern Europe, and to the Americas north and south, and elsewhere on the corners of the globe. This is, after all, Skiing Around the World, Volume II: Collecting Ski Resorts, by Jimmy Petterson.
Until around 1995, ski instructors and patrollers wore stretch pants as part of the uniform. Thus it was that, in 1992, Steamboat’s 6-foot-4-inch ski-school director, Rick DeVos, and 5-foot ski patroller Carroll Peebles (now Zamzow) posed for a Roffe ad. Rick went on to run the Steamboat Winter Sports Club, and in retirement teaches skiing again. Carroll left the patrol in 2002 and ran the Hahn’s Peak Roadhouse, north of Steamboat, until this year. Sam Roffe died in 1994; his company was sold and resold several times.
On the Cover:
Swiss artist Erich Hermès (1881-1971) depicted ski scenes with a bright, colorful, accessisble style, as in his "Winter in Switzerland" promotional poster, circa 1930.
