Gliding through the history of skiing

Author: By Jon Marcus, Globe Correspondent

Date: SUNDAY, November 23, 1997

Page: M6

Section: Travel

Early skiers walked uphill on heavy wooden boards with primitive metal bear-trap bindings, thin leather lace-up boots, and flimsy bamboo poles, the women dressed in heavy woolen skirts and the men in shirts and ties. Then they picked their way down logging roads or along remote crude trails they had previously cleared themselves. So many skiers broke their bones, they gave each other medals for it.

All of this -- 130 years of skis, clothes, boots, bindings, broken-bone awards, and other skiing art and artifacts -- is on exhibit now at opposite ends of the country to modern skiers who complain if there's a line at the bar in the base lodge when the lifts close.

``People are so spoiled today,'' says Mary Bird Young, who was a member of the 1936 US Olympic Ski Team. ``It was more of an adventure then. I admit, it sounds awful, and the skis today are much easier to ski on and much faster. But what's the hurry?''

The Colorado and New England ski museums in Vail and Franconia Notch, N.H., both trace the growth of the sport and the technology that fueled it -- rope tows, for example, in the 1930s, windproof nylon in the 1940s, fiberglass in the 1950s, molded plastic in the 1960s.

To see the 10-foot, hand-made, square-tipped wooden skis from Maine, or the single leather toe straps on the comparable Colorado models, is to understand how far skiing has advanced in just those few short decades.

The Colorado Ski Museum commands a central location in the middle of the busy Vail Village transportation center. The New England Ski Museum fills a renovated highway garage at the foot of the nation's first and oldest aerial tramway in New Hampshire's White Mountains. Both are free, though donations are requested, and they generally open and close slightly later than the lifts at the adjacent ski resorts.

Immigrants from Scandinavia brought downhill skiing to New England when they were hired by the northern logging companies and railroads. They formed ski clubs to cut trails through the woods in spring and summer and skied wearing their usual winter clothes, including moccasins and farm boots.

Early Colorado skiers, including ministers who trekked to mining camps to preach, had to resort to primitive wooden flat-tipped boards simply to travel over the deep snow.

``The people who got into skiing in the early days, the pioneers, they were able to really enjoy the whole ambience of being in the mountain and the physical exercise of climbing the mountain,'' said Andrea Meade Lawrence, who started skiing in the 1930s and won two gold medals at the 1952 Olympics. ``It was the whole experience. When we were doing it back then, we didn't know there could be high-tech skis and high-speed quads, and if you didn't know about it, you couldn't miss it.''

Students in New England's wealth of colleges took up the sport in the early 1900s, and many helped perpetuate it after graduating. A photo in the Vail exhibition shows a Denver University ski team determinedly making the difficult journey to New Hampshire for a rare early tournament in what was then considered the center of American skiing. But the greatest single boost came during the Depression, when the Civilian Conservation Corps carved downhill trails out of rugged wooded mountainsides.

Even then, ``We had to climb to the top and then ski down a narrow trail, and if you got going too fast, you sat down,'' says Dick Bennink, who took up the sport in 1932 and still skis today at 80. ``You'd have just about time to climb up again a quarter of the way before you had to go home. And it was damned cold'' in the Army boots Bennink joined to his skis with leather toe straps.

Despite these hardships, the US Eastern Amateur Ski Association, founded in New Hampshire in 1922, reported 67 member clubs by 1932 and 181 by World War II, when makeshift rope tows first appeared and diehards got in more downhill skiing in a day than they could previously manage in a month. Heavy mitts with leather palms were added to the skiers' wardrobe just to cushion the friction caused by the ropes.

C. Minot Dole, a Greenwich, Conn., insurance broker, organized the National Ski Patrol in 1938, and New England's ski museum has a display devoted to him with his uniform jacket still proudly sporting medals indicating that three times he broke his bones while on the slopes.

It was Dole who convinced the government in 1941 to form the 10th Mountain Division, a specialized ski infantry that came to unite Ivy League skiers from the East with cowboys and mule skinners from the West. Nearly 1,000 were killed in the war, but they were credited with breaking the German front in northern Italy by making a 1,500-foot vertical night ascent up an icy rock face in the Appennine Mountains.

The 10th is generously represented in both museums. New England's exhibits a full set of the 122 pounds of equipment and supplies each ski trooper had to carry and charts their missions from the Alps to the Aleutians, where 23 died accidentally after finding that Japanese occupiers already had evacuated the Alaskan islands. Vail displays an equally authentic fully assembled 10th Mountain Division winter campsite.

On the home front, skiing gradually was becoming more accessible, if not immediately more comfortable. Vail's museum has an Aspen chairlift from the 1940s, a time when second-hand motors from abandoned mines were used to haul Colorado skiers in the Rockies, for example. The Cannon Mountain tramways in New Hampshire opened in 1938, and still operate just a few dozen yards from the New England Ski Museum, where one of the two original cars is firmly anchored to the vestibule and which displays a cross section of the original 2-inch cable, the longest ever made in the United States.

It also was in 1938 that a single-chair lift, the first in New England, was installed at a New Hampshire ski resort by the Works Progress Administration, another Depression-era labor force. One of the originals is on display beside a type of lift that didn't catch on: the ``ski mobile,'' which looked something like a soapbox derby car with hard wooden wheels and dragged 1940s skiers up a trestle on Mount Cranmore.

The New England museum's collection of more than 100 pairs of skis includes an 1890 handmade wooden Finnish number, the wooden skis used by John Carlton in the 1924 Olympics and one of the first skis to feature steel edges, circa 1928. There's even an Austrian ski with sealskin on the underside for uphill traction. An aluminum-and-wood combination was introduced in 1948, then plastic and, later, fiberglass.

Similar advances in materials have influenced the clothing skiers wear, from the early pleated gabardine wool knickers that made a neat snapping sound on fast downhill runs to the body-hugging suit of water-resistant Spandex sported by the 1995 US Ski Team, the museum has 1993 World Championships medalist A.J. Kitt's.

The need to stay warm on the slopes also hastened the development of fabrics such as a water-repellent nylon taffeta called Blizzard Cloth, Adirondack Poplin, Spandex, Gore-Tex, Thinsulate, and Polartec, which is recycled from plastic soda bottles. Stretch pants arrived in the 1960s, when buckle boots and safety bindings also were introduced. And visitors to the museums will wince when they recognize the psychedelic designs and neon colors of 1970s and '80s skiwear.

All the displays in the New Hampshire exhibition are framed by old ski posters, magazines, and trophies spilling out of cases, including the giant Hochgebirge Challenge Cup, the oldest amateur ski trophy still in competition, used since 1931 and inscribed with names of America's ski pioneers and legends. In Vail, there is an equally extensive collection of ski posters and art, some of it for sale.

The oldest object in the Vail museum's collection is a pair of 14-foot wooden skis dating from about 1880; one of the newest, a 1963 plywood contraption that inspired today's snowboards. Complete with bindings made of rubber inner tubes, it's the centerpiece of a new display about the history of that sport. There also is a continuous video that shows the swift evolution of the industry; personal mementos of the 111 members of the Colorado Hall of Fame; and a relief map of the Rockies.

The New England museum has one of the nation's largest collections of carefully designed ski pins, each representing a different US ski area, and a display of quirky antique ski club patches from the Swiss Ski Club of New York, the Riski Runners, the S-Kimos, the SnowKats, the SnowChasers, the Schussmeisters, and dozens of others. There's even an early snowmaking machine from 1956, which combined water and air to produce crystalline snow.

``You've got to be amazed at what has transpired in a relatively short period of time,'' said Lawrence, now 64. ``It's like knowing the history of anything. The more you know, the more enriched you are by the sport.''

The New England Ski Museum is at the base of the Cannon Mountain tramway. Take Exit 2 on New Hampshire's Franconia Notch Parkway (Interstate 93). It is open from noon to 5 p.m. daily except closed Wednesdays from Dec. 1 through March 31. Admission is free. For more information, call 1-603-823-7177.

Both museums have extensive gift shops and catalogs offering reproductions of vintage skiwear, book, posters, postcards, T-shirts, hats, and pottery.