New book tells story of skiing in America

updated 12:07 p.m. ET Jan. 5, 2007

NEW YORK - Wooden skis and leather boots gave way to metal and Fiberglas skis and plastic boots. Chairlifts eclipsed rope tows. Ski trains lost out to cars and planes. Bumpy trails with uneven coatings of natural snow were made nearly perfect by snowmaking and grooming. And for resorts, condo sales and snowboarding became as crucial to the bottom line as skiers buying lift tickets.

Throughout all these changes, as documented in John Fry's recent book, "The Story of Modern Skiing" (University Press of New England, $27.95), Americans have maintained their passion for zooming down a snowy slope. And if you think Hollywood stars living it up in Vail is something new, guess again. One of the book's highlights is Fry's depiction of the luster that celebrities and power brokers have long added to skiing.

Walt Disney and Charlie Chaplin enjoyed skiing in California in the '30s, writes Fry, who is the former editor-in-chief of SKI magazine. Mont Tremblant in Quebec, Canada, was a favorite spot for the likes of Nelson Rockefeller and tobacco heiress Doris Duke. Sugarbush opened in Vermont in 1959 and became a hangout for designer Oleg Cassini and his crowd, while, according to the book, Bobby Kennedy and his family spent Christmas at Aspen in 1964 along with the recently widowed Jackie Kennedy and her children. One of Bobby's children, Michael Kennedy, died in a skiing accident there 33 years later.

Sun Valley, Idaho, which Fry describes as North America's first destination ski resort, was created by William Averell Harriman, a politician and diplomat who was also the chairman of Union Pacific Railroad. Located at the end of the railway line, Sun Valley opened in 1936 with the very first chairlifts, which Fry writes were designed by an engineer based on his knowledge of how fruit companies loaded bananas on ships in Central America.

While Fry says that modern skiing really didn't begin until after World War II, ski trips and outings organized by Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., and by the Appalachian Mountain Club, helped create interest in the sport in the East in the 1920s. Even earlier, immigrants from Scandinavia and Central Europe helped popularize it, both as a participatory sport and as a spectator sport of jumping and speed skiing. At shows in Madison Square Garden and the Boston Garden, skiers hurled themselves off ramps covered with shaved ice; in 1936, Saks Fifth Avenue let customers practice skiing on an indoor slide covered with Borax.

By the 1930s, Fry writes, there were several hundred rope-tow areas in New England, and by the mid-1930s, tens of thousands of skiers from New York and Boston were filling weekend trains to Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, the Berkshires in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania's Poconos. San Franciscans began riding the Snowball Express train to Truckee in Lake Tahoe, while Chicagoans took ski trains to Wisconsin and Michigan.

Nathan Bilow / AP file In this photo provided by Colorado Ski Country, Herb Manning from Telluride, Colo. enjoys another powder day at the Telluride Ski Resort in Telluride with the beautiful views of 13,000 and 14,000-foot mountain peaks.

The first Winter Olympics ever held in the U.S. took place in 1932 in Lake Placid, N.Y. Godfrey Dewey, creator of the Dewey Decimal System used to categorize library books, helped establish the village as a winter sports destination and was instrumental in bringing the games there.

But the biggest developments in the sport happened after World War II with the creation of modern resorts and ski areas, and "a big factor in that was the 10th Mountain Division troops who trained at Camp Hale" in Colorado's Rockies, Fry said in an interview. The 14,000 soldiers from the 10th Division were trained on skis, and after the war, some of them returned to Colorado. Among the veterans were Pete Seibert, who started Vail, and Friedl Pfeifer, an Austrian ski racer who founded the ski school at Aspen, cleared trails and convinced an investor to build the resort's first chairlift.

MORE FROM WINTER TRAVEL

Winter Travel Section Front

Mountain resorts redline the fun meter Top 10 black diamond ski runs Amazing adventures America's most dangerous slopes Celebrity winter hideaways Top 10 cities for shopaholics Winter Travel Section Front   Add Winter Travel headlines to your news reader: