In This State is a syndicated weekly column about Vermont’s innovators, people, ideas and places. Details are at www.maplecornermedia.com/inthisstate. Andrew Nemethy is a veteran journalist and writer from Calais. He can be reached at Andrewnemethy@gmail.com.
They are a gray-haired or balding clan now, some still plugging away, others retired or gone on to other things – wisely, as many will admit, considering this clan hangs on Mother Nature’s every word. As they readily recall, her language has all too often been meteorological malediction.
Think of them as players in “Survivor: The nordic ski operators game.”
They came together April 18, beckoned by one of their own, Rob Center, who started the Tucker Hill Ski Touring Center in Fayston in 1976, surviving for eight years until he gave up.
“I got tired of going back to the bank,” said Center.
Their gathering, more than 20 strong with a potluck to cap the event, had a purpose other than reminiscences about the dubious ties that bind them, which include (but are by no means limited to, as they say) snowless winters, warm weather, trail-destroying flash floods, trail-destroying ice storms, long nights of grooming, blown-up business plans, endless trail work and fickle landowners.
Don’t forget the all-too-frequent visits to plead with their friendly local banker.
All of the above were a prevalent and bemused theme, but Center actually called the meeting to brainstorm about a historic future gathering of the clan next fall and a new cross-country skiing exhibit to mark the 10th anniversary of the Vermont Ski and Snowboard Museum in Stowe.
It’s entirely correct to think of this group as Nordic Johnny Appleseeds, inn-keeping dreamers, businessmen, outdoor enthusiasts or skiers who planted their ambitions – modest, grand, some fatally grandiose – in Vermont’s fertile rolling snow-covered terrain four decades ago, hoping to grow a new ski touring industry.
Grow it did, turning the state into a cross-country skiing mecca, creating a recreational sport now strongly identified with Vermont and introducing several generations to a healthy activity.
But not without epic growing pains. So, much as they were marked by relentless enthusiasm, promotional passion, tenacity and foolhardy climatic optimism, the group is tied together more by what attendee Johannes Von Trapp, with entirely typical dark humor, said is the ever-present realization that they were never more than one bad snow season away from the fiscal grim reaper.
Von Trapp’s story is the best known, of course. In the 1960s, the youngest member of the famed singing family came up with a then-laughable idea: to draw guests to his family’s lodge in the hills above Stowe by offering cross-country skiing. He opened a touring center in 1968 and virtually built the bandwagon, but many others soon climbed aboard and rode it into the Vermont hills, bumping along rocky snowless trails to success in some cases also into debt, and even bankruptcy. Von Trapp’s own contribution to the tribulation list, he noted, includes having his ski shop burn down in the 1970s, back when a cozy wood stove was the heat source and donation boxes for trail use sat by the door.
Joe Pete Wilson, who joined by conference phone, knows trails and trials as well as anyone. Wilson in the 1960s was one of a hardy anonymous band of Olympic Nordic skiers. This was long before Vermont’s Bill Koch won a silver medal in 1976, putting the sport front and center.
After a year heading Von Trapp’s fledging touring center, seeing “all kinds of buzz about cross country skiing,” he struck out on his own in 1972 with a novel idea to franchise ski touring operations in Vermont under the business name North American Nordic.
“Granola was the most important part,” he joked. It was, after all, the 1970s.
Joe Pete’s enthusiasm and salesmanship were legendary but his timing was awful, hitting the gas crisis of 1973.
“The fact there was no snow one year, and no gas another year, plus a few other mistakes, and that was the end of that,” he said.
Wilson’s franchising fiasco notwithstanding, he lured in some now well-known Nordic names in his shops, such as John Tidd, who ran Mountain Meadows in Killington until 1988 and then founded Tidd-Tec, a maker of trail-grooming equipment Another hire was Waitsfield’s Dick Hall, who later forged a path as the humorous pied piper and guru of telemark skiing, founding NATO (North American Telemark Organization).
Wilson went on to co-author several cross-country ski books, and started up the first association of cross-country ski operators at a gathering at Blueberry Hill Inn in Goshen back in 1973. So it was fitting that the meeting of this “indigenous tribe of Nordic nomads,” in Hall’s words, was hosted by Blueberry Hill’s legendary innkeeper Tony Clark. Clark opened his ski touring center at the inn over 40 years ago. (All too familiarly, this past winter he saw hardly one skiable day.)
Center’s impetus to call the group together was accidental but fortuitous, considering the clan is getting along in years and the history of Nordic skiing’s advent in America, which is mostly a Vermont story, is parked in their many memories, closets and file boxes. In fact, it was a stashed-away box at his Fayston home that got Center started.
“I was going to the basement, the cellar, to do spring cleaning and discovered a large file box of my years in the ski industry from ’76 to ’84 – and having a historical bone in my body I called Meredith up at the ski museum and said, “I think I may have stuff for you,” he said. “She liked what I had, and we got to talking.”
Meredith would be Meredith Scott, the director and curator of the ski museum that sits in the heart of Stowe village. As it turns out, it’s planning for a 10th anniversary bash that includes developing permanent rotating exhibits and updating the whole Nordic aspect to include jumping, telemark and biathlon, as well as archiving information on Vermont’s seminal role in spreading the cross-country skiing gospel.
“It’s a project we’ve been meaning to do,” said Scott, who has been with the museum since it moved to the historic 1818 building in Stowe in 2002.
That was all the encouragement needed by Center, an organizer par excellence who started the rite of spring now known as the Sugarbush Triathlon and went on to market Mad River Canoe to its apex as one of America’s premier watersports manufacturers until it was sold in 1999.
There’s no doubt everyone enjoyed the meeting, passing around and perusing old Nordic ski fliers, promotions and posters, pictures of the defunct American Ski Marathon and still-running Stowe Derby, and photos of more than a few ski touring operators who once had a lot more hair.
But they still have a lot of funny tales.
Clark, who long ran a famous spring “pig race” featuring a pig roast, recalled promotional trips to New York and Boston to demonstrate cross-country skiing on strips of shaved ice or plastic, and a “Women in cross country skiing” clinic sponsored by Dial soap.
“It took us 10 years to get rid of 10 cases of Dial soap,” he recalled.
“This is a crazy idea,” joked Clark about the gathering. But then, they’ve had a lot of those.
