Wartime Skiscape

> All national and sectional championship ski events have been canceled for the duration.

> Most topflight tournament skiers are in the armed forces.

> All snow trains have been crunched by ODT.

> Manufacturers of skiing paraphernalia are working on war orders. >Shortage of manpower, food and fuel have closed famed Sun Valley and other isolated winter-sport resorts.

Despite these bunkers on the U.S. ski-scape, America's thousands of ski trails and slopes will not lie fallow this winter. The Government has urged winter-sport promoters to stress recreational skiing, particularly among teen-age tyros, as part of the national keep-fit program. But the snow belt--from the White Mountains to the Sierras--will have a thumping headache: transportation.

West Coast. In the Far West, where the most popular skiing terrain is above the timberline and far from populated centers, several hotels have been forced to close. Mt. Hood's Timberline Lodge, Mt. Baker Lodge and Paradise Inn have already gone the way of Idaho's Sun Valley. California's Yosemite Lodge and the Soda Springs Hotel (250 miles northeast of San Francisco)--both accessible by railroad as well as automobile--were packed as in peacetime over Christmas and New Year's weekends. But farther north, at Mt. Rainier National Park (100 miles from Seattle and closer to Tacoma), only 60 automobiles pulled up to the slopes of once-swarming Paradise Valley. Last year the average weekend crowd numbered 2,200.

Mt. Waterman, 45 miles from sunbaked Los Angeles, is a popular rendezvous for ski-mad Angelenos, transplanted war-plant workers and aviation cadets who take to skis as sailors take to rowboats. Mt. Waterman's slopes will be the scene of several impromptu tournaments this winter.

East. Eastern ski resorts, closer to railroad stations, are not so hard hit. New York's Lake Placid, fed by two daily trains from Manhattan, is going ahead with a full wintersports program. Last week as a curtain raiser the Lake Placid Club played host at its 22nd annual College Week. As a special attraction--in addition to crosscountry, downhill and slalom races among the East's best college skiers--Lake Placid had Ola, spectacular Norwegian refugee now training in Canada with the Royal Norwegian Air Force and keeping his surname secret lest his family be punished.

At the national ski-jumping tournament at Duluth last year, Ola soared away with the U.S. championship. Last week on Lake Placid's 70-meter Olympic jump, he had a chance once again to match his "yumps" against those of Art Devlin, 18-year-old Lake Placid homebred who finished second in the national tournament last year. This time Devlin nosed out the Norseman, 230.9 points to 229.8. Devlin's best jump: 63 meters (approximately 206 ft.)

Ski meets of the caliber of Lake Placid's will be few. But New England can boast the cream of European ski teachers. The world's most famed Skimeister, 52-year-old Hannes Schneider, is continuing at North Conway, N.H. the school he founded in the Austrian Tyrol. At Manchester, Vt. his onetime assistant, Otto Lang, has transplanted the school he operated at Sun Valley during the past two years. Among Lang's corps of assistants are many famed Alpine experts, including Shirley ("Elli") Stiller, one of the few women instructors in the U.S.

Another novelty for Eastern skidoodlers is an automatic timer. Downhill runners on the Green Mountain's Whippersnapper Trail, by dropping a coin in a box at the starting line, can find their time--registered in split seconds--in a box at the finish line.

Rockies. In Colorado, site of some of the country's most hair-raising ski runs, resorts are enjoying an unprecedented boom. Reason: within fairly easy reach of its skiing terrain are 13 Army posts, including Camp Hale (training grounds for U.S. ski troops), Camp Carson, Fort Logan, Buckley Field and Lowry Field. The huge Colorado Hotel at Glenwood Springs, where Teddy Roosevelt often tarried, is now full for the first time in years.

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