Skiing Stories

You may know of me from my alpine skiing background. I was an alpine ski racer and coach who worked for Carrabassett Valley, University of Oregon and Alta, Utah. I used to ski a lot, culminating in two 200+ day seasons forty years ago. I was forced to quit entirely in 2021.

We learned to ski at Frost Ridge, a tiny 100’ tall rope tow area that hosted school clubs. This was at the end of the low leather buckle boot era. Had to take the never-ever lesson three times simply to get up and down the beginner hill intact. Now Frost Ridge has been converted into a trailer park.

Dad also wanted to learn to ski, I remember he told me, a 15-year old, to, “Pick the best place to learn to ski and we’ll go”. I had a Ski magazine (from Fisher’s Newsstand in Albion) that recommended Alta, Utah and the Rustler Lodge. First time just he and I went but the next season he took everyone. Once he was competent Carl snuck out there on his own several times a year, taking private lessons and becoming quite an enthusiast. He was as fanatical as I was and it built a strong bond between us.. Alta was a perfect place for learning because of its huge beginner area in Albion Basin where you could practice on long, gentle runs on perfect soft snow. Flying into Salt Lake City was easy, sometimes you could even catch two hours of skiing if the timing worked out. I forget the price of lift tickets but they were single digits.

I don’t know if you can imagine how incredible it was to be in those mountains after growing up in Albion, New York. They were jaw dropping surreal.

My Mom was no wimp either, she loved skiing and worked at it, going out in the worst condition. She kept it up well into the early 2000s, her late 60s. Even after they divorced Mom would go on solo ski vacations. More than once she shocked me when I was playing hooky at Bristol Mountain and I’d look over to see my Mother in doing the same thing. My sister Deb was likewise dedicated and I am in awe of her husband Doug, the strongest skier I know.

The Blizzard of 1977 (my senior year of high school) meant I got to spend an entire month-plus at our Kissing Bridge rental. Peter Paganelli and other friends were down there too and we behaved as adults or at least college kids. Had a Ford Galaxie 500 land yacht. Did a Christmas freestyle and racing camps, I remember jumping 30’ high from the freestyle jump and running gates, learning how to carve. Kissing Bridge was the opposite of Alta but the ice, slush and mud toughened us up and improved our skills better than the perfect packed powder out west.

Dad made a wide range of skier friends who incorporated themselves into our lives. The kind-hearted (Dave and Marge) Becking family arranged a blind date for me with the nicest, most beautiful girl, they introduced us over a home cooked dinner and suggested I take her night skiing at Holiday Valley (nearby Ellicotville). However I got diarrhea that hit harder than Hell at top of lift. I had to abandon her and tuck back to the lodge to spend an hour on the can. Never saw her again. Damn! Sorry Marge.

While we eventually migrated to Holimont for local skiing but Alta, Utah held our hearts for so many reasons like the rustic, communal lodge and its historic place in American skiing. The fact that Alta remained a dangerous, untamed place with avalanches, mine shafts and unmarked cliffs. And it was simply beautiful. Cripes I named my first daughter Alta.

The morning after it snows — over 900” in the 2022-23 season — you were awaken by Howitzers firing at the avalanche prone areas. I remember skiing when the snow was falling at about a foot an hour (no joke). While most of the better skiers were skiing the upper slopes, I was bagging clean powder lines by myself on the lower mountain. Stopping for a rest, I spied a hat in the snow. Thinking I would score a free hat, I snatched it. But there was a head underneath! The almost frozen skier had passed out, thanks to a combination of altitude and recreational drugs, and if I had come by just a few minutes later he would have been entirely buried! I wrapped him up in my coat and got the ski patrol; he lived. My coat did not — he managed to spew at least a quart of bloody mucus all over it.

Once I foreran the Alta Snow Cup GS during a snowstorm and missed an offset gate that resulted in most of the subsequent “real” racers also missing the gate. Sorry, it was a great course without that stupid extra gate!

I worked at Rustler lodge in the Summer of 1980. Before and after Dad took or met me there every year, sometimes twice on school breaks and throughout my early adulthood into the mid-90s, so at least twenty years. By the late 80s he was an experienced, fast, smooth skier, albeit he didn’t do jumps or moguls but on groomed terrain he maintain a safe and prudent 40-45mph trucking speed. He held his own with skiers far more experienced and I know he truly loved it. We bonded during these trips, I learned my early political philosophy from our long conversations, and we made up for me not being in the construction business as I know he loved the time as I did.

The  last time I visited Alta with Dad it blew, iced and stormed for most of the week. He retired early for lunch and nap. The skiing was about as bad as it could get and I was pissed. It was the end of a poor ski season back east as well and we never had a single nice day. The mile-long High Traverse was empty at 4 pm and the visibility was zilch. I almost bailed out on Sunspot or one of the closer runs, but instead I climbed higher. Nobody was left on the mountain, the wind was howling and I was wondering what would happen if I had an accident? I decided to go down High Rustler for no other reason than I’d have a better chance of being found on a wide open run instead of in the trees. To get into Rustler at the highest point you come around the mountain top and — boom — you’re right there, overlooking the entire canyon. You have to jump in to get over the rocks. As I lept it was almost a white-out but suddenly everything stopped, the clouds opened up and the sun came out. I was above a completely untracked field of wind-blown powder all to myself. It was quasi-religious to be honest. I was on long Super G racing skis… turned left, turned right, maybe five times down the entire mountain. I managed to cram all the joy of an entire ski season into that single run.

In the Spring of 1980 I was at Clarkson studying civil engineering as I was groomed to do so throughout my childhood. Except I was profoundly unhappy, only going to appease my father who begged me to stay enrolled even though I was miserable. I was sort of a junior after losing my academic scholarship, failing and dropping many courses and was forced to change my major to “professional studies” because I had bombed everything but my construction technology classes (actually doing something like surveying, road building, bridges). As a sophomore I pledged Delta Upsilon so I could go to parties and have friends as the dorm was pretty sad and I had terrible luck with douchebag roommates. Lived in apartment with three guys, slept all day skipping class, depressed and doing nothing good at all. Reading Mountain Gazette (when it was good) and “Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, Edward Abbey, I was a nascent environmentalist and an ideological and academic failure at civil engineering. Finally one night I threw my stuff out of my second story window and drove home, begged $200 and drove XC to Vail. Was offered a job doing night watch at the sewerage plant since I had experience building sewerage plants for Dad (and bullshitted a bit). Probably should have took it but my heart took me to Rustler Lodge at Alta. Lived in the dorm and did handyman stuff, parked cars as a valet. Painted Grateful Dead murals on dorm room walls. Hiked a lot and got in great shape living at high altitude. Cured my depression.

First roommate was a “Jack Mormon” or a teenage boy who escaped or was thrown out of his family unit to spend a year or more living in the real world. From a family too poor to send him on a mission. A round drunken lout of a kid. Luckily he moved on and eventually I had a private dorm room high in an idyllic mountain resort with plenty of women, hiking and hot tubs. You can still get seasonal jobs at Rustler Lodge and other Alta locations, you won’t save much money but you’ll automagically get into fantastic shape by living at altitude. And most likely make really great friends and have adventures. I highly recommend this for any young lost soul, even Mormon ones.

Met a lot of mountain characters. The ski patrol in particular attracted some eccentric personalities. I don’t know what personal demons T-Bone was running from but I do know he had a plate in his head courtesy of Vietnam. He roughnecked on oil rigs two weeks on/two weeks off all summer and ski patrolled Alta all winter. On his days off he would speed climb the chute on Mt. Superior and ski down past the up climbing ice climbers. When he was drinking, he tended to lear at women — of all sizes and shapes — but his fellow patrollers kept him in line. If they lost him to jail they’d end up with the nasty job of carrying grenades and shells to the top of the mountain every morning.

In addition to his minor perversions, T. Bone also was cheap. He would dumpster dive and find orphaned skis from broken pairs. Most mornings he would ski the eastern side of the mountain with 215 GS skis on the left foot, 204 Slaloms on the right. As he explained it, the bigger GS skis made longer, sweeping arcs that bore him westward across the open slopes. When he got to the western side of the mountain he would switch the left and right skis so he could ski back home.

Besides the obvious hazards of skiing with explosives, patrollers like T. Bone had to deal with powder hungry skiers that often escaped into the backcountry. The avalanche prone boundaries of Alta are marked with metal warning signs staked to metal posts. On a rather prodigious powder day, T-Bone was in hot pursuit of some out-of-bounds skiers when he impacted a boundary sign buried in the fluff. Ripped open from belly button to anus, T-Bone eventually recovered. Minus his testicles. His voice got sweeter and his beard abit thinner — but he continued skiing just as hard.

My friend Gretchen Woodward was a more influential person to me, a good platonic friend and the first hippie organic crunchy person I knew. First Birkenstocks. She  invited me along on a trip to her home town of Steamboat to hang with all her girls. We visited an elderly White Russian ballerina who lived in a cabin high above town. The next Summer Gretchen was going to school at U of O while I was at Mt Hood so I went down to visit and ended up staying for the second summer session where I took physical training and coaching classes. A couple years later with Nina, post climbing accident, I became the NCAA Div 2 head ski coach at University of Oregon in exchange for tuition. The team sucked, they were mostly Californians, one even had a Porsche. Still it was cool to go around Oregon and Idaho for races. Loved the mountain and town at Ashland, Oregon.

On July 4th, 1980 I drove to Telluride and my two-wheel drive truck made it up the 4x4 trail to the old mining camp at altitude where I raced in the annual Lunar Cup. I remember everyone signing in the bar afterwards, “Marijuana, Marijuana, LSD, LSD! Carter takes them, Congress makes them, Why can’t we?”.

I did a lot of Summer skiing on marginal snowfields. Glad I didn’t kill myself but had a few close calls involving running water under snow bridges, glissading with sharp crampons on, and climbing way above my limits with zero protection. Classic beginner mountaineering with zero instruction. Best was climbing Mt Superior and skiing down into the next valley, Big Cottonwood Canyon, walking miles out to the road and hitchhiking down and back to Little Cottonwood all in a day. I hitchhiked a lot during those years to save on gas, including Eugene to Mt Hood, even camped inside a highway cloverleaf in Portland. Learned to rock climb in lower Cottonwood Canyon, we went climbing everyday in mid-Summer. Could lead 5.6 and follow 5.9 with EB shoes, a shoplifted rope (bad karma) and early Chouinard Equipment (became Black Diamond) nuts. Beautiful easy 4th class climb along a waterfall stream remains favorite memory.

At the end of Summer in Alta I met Sarah who was on a Geology Field Trip to the Wasatch with UMass. We had a fast mutual infatuation, she was blonde and smart, I was tan and rugged. She was going to Mt Holyoke and that’s how I came to know the Pioneer Valley and thus Hampshire College (sorry Liz). That Fall I visited her at the all woman’s college, which was weird because all the girls would came out to greet me when they heard me walking. She made me sleep on the floor. When I went to use the pay phone on the dorm floor I noticed she had written “I hate Frank” on the wall so I left without saying goodbye. Saw the writing on the wall as they say.

Art and Cindy Hammond were waiters who I met at the Rustler. One June evening I climbed to the top of High Rustler and skied down to the delight of the dinner guests, they had a spectacular view of my every move. When I got back to the lodge, Art offered me a job as a ski instructor. In wintertime, Art and Cindy were the ski school directors at Sugarloaf, Maine, a major New England resort noted for racing, rocks and ice. The opposite of Alta. But to my thinking at the time I would learn more on Sugarloaf’s icy slopes than by enjoying myself in Alta’s powder and sunshine. If I wanted to be a good ski coach I had to serve a couple of years back East to develop my technique.

Never having visited Maine, I didn’t realize that the closest town to Sugarloaf — Kingfield, Maine — was settled in the early 1700s. They logged the tall Spruce trees that helped the British Navy build larger, faster ships to defeat the Spanish.. Isolated from railways and modern transportation, it remained a closed, tight-knit community for nearly 300 years. (Its limited gene-pool manifested itself through birth defects, mental retardation and physical abnormalities. But more on this later.) My ski town experiences had been with relatively sophisticated places like Alta, Killington and Telluride. I was about to learn something.

When I showed up on a muddy, grey November day you could smell the paper mill in Rumsford on the damp Atlantic wind. I picked up a night job as a ski mechanic. The tourist housing in Kingsfield was overpriced, so I rented a room in the logging hamlet of Eustis. On the first floor the shop sold giant professional Husquavarna chainsaws. The entire building was heated with a wood stove made from scrap metal and a 55-gal oil drum. I think I used 3-4 quilts and some nights it froze. You had to wear a hat to bed.

By mid season I had made great strides as a ski instructor, graduating from the pure baby-sitting assignments to taking intermediate skiers onto the upper mountain. But Sugarloaf was not without its challenges. The liftlines had mirrors so you could inspect your face for frostbite. A sign in the locker room advised us whether it was a “one-hat” or “two-hat” day. And I had to use a Bernzomatic torch to unfreeze my truck’s locks.

During January, it never got above zero the entire month. We went 100 days straight with below freezing temperatures. I took to wearing my skin tight one piece downhill racing suit under my clothes (the suit was usually sufficient to wear all by itself in a ski race.) I learned to ski very well. My thighs became huge and strong like hydraulic pistons. I had to buy new pants and take in the waist so they’d fit over my quads.

Once I gave a private lesson to two sisters, I figured they were 11-13 years old as they were bundled to the max in Michelin Man layers. But once we stopped for cocoa they partially disrobed to reveal two beautiful young women, a high school senior with her Bowdoin college sister. Ended up drinking with them into the night, attracted to both but weirded out too. I corresponded with the older sister for a while. Her family managed a banana plantation in Central America, old classy New England money. Probably should have kept in touch. Back then we wrote letters because long distance phone calls were too expensive. How romantic and wonderful to get a real letter from a friend. How much we’ve lost since.

Most mornings the mountain would open the lifts for employees up to an hour before opening to the public. My friend Karl Johnson and I would don our 223cm downhill skis and do three top to bottom downhill runs at only slightly less than full race speed — about 75 mph on the steepest headwall. We would sail off shallow risers, only a few inches off the ground but flying forward for hundreds of feet. The temperature and the airspeed burnt a permanent frostbite scar into my chin. Years later it’s there to remind me of Sugarloaf. (In hindsight I was probably competitive with any domestic downhill speed skier - this was before Super G was even an event - because training for downhill is so difficult to arrange as you hav to close trails and install safety measures (back then it was frozen hay bails!) But I do this every morning, 2-4 runs in an hour over three months. That’s about 250 solid downhill runs, which is more than what many full time World Cup downhillers get. Needless to say I was ripped clocking race speed runs on a trail I knew by heart. I’ve always been a naturally clumsy athlete — the sort of kid who was picked last for baseball. But skiing is a sport that I could practice on my own, and thus I was able to log a disproportionate amount of ski time.

Despite my great improvement as a novice professional skier, one female instructor consistently outskied me. A local, I was wary of her at first. But amongst the fellow instructors, she appeared to be the only one who actually read books for pleasure — Darwin’s “Evolution of the Species” was her Winter book — and she liked to drink beer. Inevitably, I fell for Julie. As we got to know each other I learned that her parents were second cousins, legally married. That was good — many local couples were closer kin. Glancing through her High School yearbook was more disconcerting — it showed an array of pastey-white hunchbacks, jug-heads and Prince Charles-like ears. She was the single attractive — normal — person in her entire class… although she did have webbed toes.

Once news of our budding romance spread through the community the change was palpable and immediate. The locals started to nod their heads in quaint acknowledgement. Sometimes they’d even smile and ask me how she was. People learned to spell P-E-T-R-0-N-I-O without making a face. (Remember, this is a place where submarine sandwiches are referred to as “Italians” and tomatoes come in cans.)

I loved skiing with a woman that could challenge me. She was much more talented skier than I ever was — and while I could ski fast enough, I wasn’t able to hang onto her. My immaturity, her independence? — We broke apart as quickly as we came together. I spent the entire season mooning for her, forced to share locker room proximity. None of the waitresses or tourist girls could compare. The townspeople began to shun me again. Years later I returned to Sugarloaf and signed up for a private lesson. Her knees had long since blow out, so we skied slowly on some gentle runs. She had married the flamboyant French Canadian plumber she had started going with towards the end of my tenure. She was up three kids and an old mini-van. But she didn’t have any regrets and, I guess, neither did I. Back at the lodge we had a cup of coffee before she had to pick up her kids. She slipped off her boots. Her toes were still webbed. I hugged her goodbye. My hand brushed the nub of her vestigial tail. It was kind of sweet.

Marcia Merritt adopted me platonically as her house boy in Maine. In exchange for chores, pet watching and protection I was given a room in her magnificent early 1700s pioneer cabin that had been gradually been extended into one of those rambling Lego block homes with multiple fireplaces and an attached barn. Marcia went to RISD and became a 60s biker chick who was the first woman to race the Baja 500. She edited Cycle World magazine. Later at the end of the season I gave her a ride to Detroit or more properly Gros Pointe, to her family mansion next to the Fords. I think she thought I came from money too, and I did sort of but certainly not that level. Quite a lady.

I drove on to Oregon, a mystical place in my mind. At first Mt Hood was still very Wintery with narrow lanes carved between 30’ walls of snow. I lived in the parking lot and worked as a maid at Timberline Lodge. I walked the owner’s St Barnards. Skied everyday from 6am to 11am, from hard snow to slush. Before the racers arrived in late June I had the place to myself and explored the serious mountain with all the crevices and debris fields of tumbled house size blocks. I had only read about mountains like this. Never climbed it other than up to the shoulder where I saw the still steaming crater of Mt St Helens that had erupted only a year before. Most days in May were like skiing inside of a ping pong ball because everything was in fog and you had no frame of reference, only white above and below. Sometimes I had to stop and sit lest I get vertigo and start spinning. Occasionally a confused bird would fly by, making circles, as confused as I was. I learned to ski sideways until I found the lift towers or the big ravines. Listening to distant sounds helped orientate me too. Very surreal, like being on stage in some avant garde theater production.

In late June the sun came out and the race camps started. I worked for the US Ski Team as a lackey, carrying bags of salt to harden the snow, moving gates around. Harald Schoenhaar cracked the whip. I also qualified for a pro tour dual giant slalom that was broadcast on ABC Wide World of Sports for a few minutes. Nobody I know watched but I think I was in it - this was before most people had VCRs. I went out with a cute girl named Lizzie Walsh from Squaw Valley, also a nice lift attendant local girl (Beth?) and hung with like minded good skiers from all over the world. Debbie came to visit and we toured around. Dad came out and skied a day then we drove down the Californian coast to San Francisco. He likes telling the story of arriving at the swanky Stanford Court hotel in my rusticated pick up truck. After I left him I went to Yosemite for a week and did easy solo friction climbs in Tuolumne Meadows. Sometimes being hundreds of feet up a granite dome I’d loose my senses, it was like being in the middle of the ocean or that Mt Hood ping pong ball.

Later that Summer I took the August session of summer school at U of O and lived with two girls. I had a Sony Walkman and a pair of the first Nike All Court sneakers. I’d go to the local butte where there was a top rope climbing area of Basalt columns. I’d climb with anyone, topless lesbians, French guys, winos. Richard Wasserman (a well know Himalayan climber) showed me how to rig an ascender so I could self belay from a top rope, after which I practiced crack climbing for hours.

Eventually I made it back to Albion and worked construction until the season started at Sugarloaf. For my second year I wanted to get my full ski instructor certification (had gotten the first part the prior year) which required an expensive week of testing and trials. But Cindy, who was the boss of everything while Art skied, denied me because I was too young (turned 22 in Nov). So I went to the racing club and asked their director hire me as a coach. She signed the papers and I went to Wyndham, NY to do the week long testing, becoming the youngest fully certified EPSIA ski instructor on the East Coast (Western was a different organization then). Then I did my Level II Coaches certification (one below the top) and worked as a coach rather than as an instructor. Problem was I only made $50 per week. And Cindy hated me (while Art loved me). Eventually Art talked her into letting me make some money teaching but she made me do SkiWee, the babysitting program as punishment. Once I shook a kid upside down over a toilet because he pooped his pants and I didn’t want to dig it out.

When I passed the EPSIA certification week I went free skiing for a run right before the mountain closed – after doing a week’s worth of tedious and needlessly technical ski instructor drills – by launched myself full speed down their steepest mogul field carving only on the tops of the bumps and never absorbing, only launching and flying as far as possible. It was inspired, suicidal skiing that became one of the best runs of my life, on the edge of serious injury, but I released all my pent up angst and rage at being confined to ski instructor regimentation.

One of the best parts of the coaching job was simply taking the racers free skiing as fast and wild as possible. One of these kids was 9-year old Forest Carey, who later became Bode Miller’s friend, mentor and coach. Forest kept up with everything I threw at him so I can only imagine how good Bode must have been a few years later.

By mid season I was back as a top ski instructor and also youth coach, setting courses for state level races and doing a good job in spite of my age. I was even making good money ($600-$800 week with tips in 1981-82). Once the ski school was doing a mogul demonstration and I flew in, launched off every other mogul and hammered 50mph down the hardest trail. All the other instructors clapped and I was king of the mountain for a day. To me that was my grandest moment as Sugarloaf was a top tier mountain, it was a legit honor.

Alas the bone spurs became unbearable and I had surgery followed by a long recuperation, during which Nina and I drove West. Once we settled into Eugene, Oregon we discovered that we both had gotten lice either from the prisoner hitchhiker I we picked up or the seedy motels we stayed in. We spent two days bathing in Kwell and picking tiny crabs off each other’s privates with tweezers. Then to celebrate I decided to crawl (I couldn’t walk after the bone spur surgery) up the good olde top rope cliff in order to teach my girl how to rappel. For fun. I did one perfectly fine rappel but she asked me to demonstrate again so the next time I emphasized and exaggerated how you want to get perpendicular to the rock rather than smearing up against it. Unfortunately my extension provided just enough leverage to dislodge a 3x3x9’ Basalt column that included my anchor bolt, taking me down 65’. Luckily the rock didn’t crush me but I still broke my pelvis, ankle and ACL.

Back then the surgeries required putting hardware in and taking it out a few weeks later. I was in a rigid lower body cast. Since I was knocked out for most of the first two weeks I became very constipated until a nurse manually removed my rabbit pellets. But something else was amiss, I was itchy, had a rash and found more crabs! They sent the most beautiful, innocent 16-year candy stripper trainee nurse who wheeled me to a tiled shower room where she spent an hour reaching down into my crotch of my cast to spread medicine and scrape any bugs out. I doubt she continued in nursing after that and I almost died of embarrassment.

Luckily Nina stood by me and nursed me back to health, which was very lovely and I figured I should marry her after all that. I started college at University of Oregon that Fall but because I had left Clarkson in the middle of the night and had a 0.0 cum their architecture school laughed at me and I was forced to became an art major. In the hospital I had read a few photography books and manuals, deciding that photography seemed pretty cool so I took the first photo classes I could. Since I could no longer be a ski coach, much less an engineer or architect, I would be a photographer and I did just that.

My injuries did heal and I was able to continue skiing in moderation thanks to a fancy knee brace. I remember once at Holimont the entire mountain was encased in blue-black ice after frozen rain. Nobody else was on the hills but because I had mastered skiing at Sugarloaf I had the grandest time on the fastest surface ever. Balancing on a ski edge at high speed, slicing these sharpened sticks across ice cube terrain and actually enjoying it was proof I had figured out how to ski, for at least a little while.