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From the beginning, the typical North American ski area was operated and promoted by a single entrepreneur. Resorts in the Alps, by contrast, typically are governed by various lift owners, hotel and restaurant owners, the instructor-owned ski school, and taxpayers, and coordinated by an Office of Tourism.

Veterans of the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division established the ski industry. They built lift towers on mountains like Aspen and Vail. They operated shops. They eventually founded, managed, or directed no fewer than sixty-two ski schools.

The ski area founders came from varied backgrounds—gnarly blue collar and bluestocking, homesteader and land baron—sharing a passion for skiing. They were a dynamic, risk-taking lot. They were tough and determined, brash in the face of possible failure.

Among the destination resorts, Stowe, Sun Valley, and Mont Tremblant were the preeminent trio that had been started before World War II. By the 1950s, Stowe declared itself to be the capital of eastern skiing, and for a while it really merited the description. C. V. Starr, who made his fortune in Shanghai and who was the chairman of what would become the huge AIG insurance company, poured money into the expansion of the Mount Mansfield Company. His general manager was the capable ski school director Sepp Ruschp. With Starr’s money and Ruschp’s organizing skills, the two made Stowe the focus of international racing—as prominent as Vail and Beaver Creek became in the 1990s.

In Aspen, Walter Paepcke, the wealthy Chicago industrialist and patron of Bauhaus art, and his brother-in-law Paul Nitze provided the seed money for the Aspen Skiing Corporation in 1946. Former racers, led by Friedl Pfeifer and Dick Durrance, cleared the trails and built on Aspen Mountain what was, at the time, the world’s longest chairlift. Two years later, Paepcke succeeded in establishing a cultural and musical base of summer tourism for Aspen by organizing the Goethe Bicentennial. Albert Schweitzer and a host of intellectuals and musicians descended on the town. The following year, Aspen hosted the 1950 FIS World Alpine Ski Championships. Aspen now rivaled Sun Valley and Stowe as a destination resort.

California’s two largest ski areas—Mammoth Mountain and Squaw Valley—were launched by two strikingly different characters. Alexander Cushing, who built Squaw Valley, came from aristocratic Boston and Newport stock. Dave McCoy, who built Mammoth Mountain, was a gritty, determined, self-made man, a working stiff. McCoy’s struggle to lay out trails and build Mammoth’s lifts in the national forest mirrored the struggles of dozens of pioneering, boot-strapping ski area builders around the country after World War II. He started with rope tows. Saving every penny, occasionally extracting a loan from the bank, oiling the lift gears, serving hot dogs, he painstakingly built Mammoth into a Mecca for Los Angeles skiers.

Alex Cushing built Squaw Valley with profits from a Tahitian coconut plantation investment and with crucially needed funds from Laurance Rockefeller. His discovery of Squaw Valley was the unintended consequence of a winter trip to the Laurentians. Arriving at Mont Tremblant, he found that a rainstorm had washed away the snow. Cushing caught a train to Chicago to find a place to ski in the West. During the trip, Cushing met Californian Wayne Poulsen, an airline pilot and a skilled skier who had been looking for someone just like the seemingly affluent Cushing to raise the money to build the ski area he had long dreamed of at Squaw Valley in the Lake Tahoe Basin. The two quickly formed a partnership, which just as quickly broke up. Cushing was not an easy sort to deal with. The place didn’t really develop until he won the 1960 Olympic Winter Games.

Dozens of future destination resorts were started in the decade of the fifties. Mount Snow in southern Vermont was founded by Walt Schoenknecht, a tall, stuttering ex-Marine with a serious crewcut. Schoenknecht started Mount Snow in 1954 with two lifts on land that had been owned by a farmer, Reuben Snow. Schoenknecht’s vision shaped the resort. He built a heated swimming pool in front of the base lodge, tropical pools and gardens inside the hotel, and a monstrous 300-foot-high fountain in the middle of man-made lake, across which soared an aerial cable car connecting his Snow Lake Lodge to the mountain’s lifts. He dreamed of having a village perched high on a cliff, with a cable car connecting hotels, shopping areas, and ski slopes. A theatrical stage would float on a man-made lake. He even had the idea, happily never realized, that he could persuade the Atomic Energy Commission to give him access to an atomic bomb, the detonation of which would create a vast skiing amphitheater on one side of the mountain. Few of Schoenknecht’s ideas materialized. But his widening of trails designed for intermediate skiers was ahead of its time, and was quickly copied by other area operators.

They were a strong-minded, individualistic lot, these ski area founders. Preston Leete Smith was an economic libertarian and a conscientious objector from a Quaker family, whose salient qualities, wrote Morten Lund, were “straight talk, bullheadedness and a slight case of monomania.” Smith chose Killington Peak, Vermont’s second-highest mountain, as the site of what would become the Northeast’s largest ski area. Smith’s partner was Joe Sargent, a Hartford, Connecticut, stockbroker, a climber and outdoorsman. Sargent recruited investors for the proposed ski area, then drove to Vermont on the weekends to help Smith chainsaw trees and brush. The two men, both twenty-six, persistent, frugal, and stubborn, built Killington against formidable obstacles. They lacked rich investors, and the mountain had no ski history or even a viable town at its base. Nor did the place possess the panache of Sugarbush to the north, a favorite of New York café society.

Smith opened Killington in 1958 with a secondhand Pomalift, and as winter succeeded winter, battling thaws and recessions, he added T-bars, double chairs, a gondola, and high-speed quadruple chairlifts. Smith’s marketing reflected his own asceticism. The discomforts of sleet, fog, or arctic winds were merely part of the sport of skiing. Killington’s marketers insisted that if you were a real skier, you should not be bothered when it rained, for example; skiers weren’t given partial rebates on their lift tickets, but rather plastic garbage sacks that they could pull over their heads to stay dry. Killington’s snow reports were notoriously shy of accuracy. Ice was called “hardpack.” Snow was measured at the top of the mountain, not at the bottom where unmentioned rain might have melted everything to the bare ground. Thanks in part to Killington, three out of five New England skiers, questioned in a 1974 survey, came to disbelieve ski area snow reports.



“The Story of Modern Skiing” is available from University Press of New England, 1 Court St., Suite 250, Lebanon, NH 03766; 1-800-639-6102, ext. 238; sherri.strickland@dartmouth.edu.