Ski Fever

The snow at Lake Placid, N.Y. was deep and powdery last week, and the temperature was a shivery 3DEG above zero. At one-minute intervals, the 39 best college skiers in the East struck out crosscountry on their narrow racing skis. Tiny, ski-minded St. Lawrence University won Lake Placid's Langlauf (its skiers finished first & second) and won the tournament as well.

Two thousand miles away, beneath Idaho's Sawtooth Mountains in glossy Sun Valley, Utah's team skied to victory last week in the West's intercollegiate championship meet against 125 entrants from 25 colleges. What looked to be the biggest & best U.S. ski season on record had begun.

The fever, which afflicted only a few thousand people 15 years ago and now strikes nearly 3,000,000, was still rising. In New Hampshire, where skiing is good business as well as good fun, there were 52 tows, aerial tramways(and a skimobile) operating; the previous high: 35. Every inn and farmhouse near Vermont's famed runs (among them: Suicide Six, Nose Dive, John Doe's Misery) was heavily booked, at from $2 to $20 a day. This week, the season's first ski train chugged out of Boston's North Station.

The minority aboard it, as always, were the sobersided, skilled skiers, usually in well-worn clothes. They did their best to ignore the "snow bunnies"--the partying, dressed-to-kill wing of the amateurs. Snow bunnies had a habit of weaving off the snow, and often went tumbling downhill like Jack & Jill.

Mecca, with Lift. Skidom's newest center is on the Rockies' western slope. Early in the war, the Army, looking for a place to train its loth Mountain (ski) Division, picked Colorado for its crisp air, and powdery snow, and the Alpine grandeur of its slopes. As a result, a ski mecca with the world's longest ski lift (14,100 feet) will open this month at Aspen, formerly a quiet Colorado mining town. In Steamboat Springs, schools have begun ski-instruction courses, and three Big Seven Conference colleges (Colorado, Utah and Wyoming) have adopted skiing as a varsity sport. As far south as Albuquerque, ski tows and warming huts were dotting the Rockies.

Credit for selling the U.S. public on skiing in the early '30s belonged to no one man. Averell Harriman, as board chairman of the Union Pacific Railroad, had a hand in it. He persuaded his fellow directors that the U.P., hungry for prestige and passengers, should build a resort at Sun Valley. Hollywooders (including Norma Shearer, Claudette Colbert and Darryl F. Zanuck) made it fashionable. Manhattan Banker Harvey Dow Gibson hired Austria's famed skier, Hannes Schneider, and spent $1,000,000 to build his home town, North Conway, N. H., into one of the East's major ski resorts (TIME, Jan. 21, 1946).

It was Hannes Schneider's Arlberg technique of controlled skiing (by which skiers learn to put on the brakes) which did most to tell U.S. beginners how to ski. Its basis, as with all controlled skiing, is the fundamental snow-plow (knees bent, body tilted forward, ski tips pointed inward like an inverted V). In about five weeks, the average student can learn to ride downhill without wrapping himself around a tree.

So far the U.S. has produced only one man, Dartmouth College's Dick Durrance, who could even stay close to the Swiss. Austrians and French in a downhill and slalom. Nor has the U.S. anyone to match the Norwegians in jumping and crosscountry. But the Europeans had been doing it for 400 years.

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