Biggest Season

For fair-weather athletes, it was a time to riffle through travel folders and dream of the south. But millions of America's weekend sportsmen are made of sturdier stuff; from New England to the Pacific they welcome winter with a new burst of energy. Workaday citizens from Monday through Friday, they spend their spare time schussing down steep white slopes, tumbling into pratfalls and shivering in subzero cold. This week in resorts across the U.S. and Canada, cash registers are ringing up their enthusiasm in the biggest ski season on record.

No Favorites. Nowhere did conditions look better, or resort owners happier, than in Squaw Valley, Calif. Powder snow came early and often to the 50 sq. mi. of Alpine terrain near Lake Tahoe and the Nevada border. Normally, skiers on the High Sierra would wait till February or March for a fine, deep base. This season the trails were ready by Thanksgiving, and the big snowstorms conveniently came in midweek, giving road crews a chance to clear the way for weekend customers. Capacity crowds are keeping 14 instructors busy. Last week, while Squaw Valley celebrated its fifth anniversary, the U.S. Olympic Committee voted to recommend the resort for the 1960 winter Olympics.

Unlike the committee, the weather was playing no favorites. More than 2,000 miles away in Stowe, Vt., there were three inches of packed powder over a 30-inch base on the trail-seamed face of Mount Mansfield. With 13,000 feet of uphill tows and lifts that can haul 3,800 skiers an hour, visitors still had to cool their heels for a long hour before getting a crack at the wicked drop of Nose Dive or the fast slopes at Skimeister and Whirlaway.

In the Northwest, where every basement harbors at least one carefully tended pair of skis, weekend crowds were cramming highways leading to Mt. Baker and Snoqualmie Pass. And rain, bane of the Northwest winter, was holding off. Night skiing has become increasingly popular. In Seattle and nearby cities, where sporting-goods stores sold more than $2,000,000 worth of ski equipment last year, merchants have a hard time believing this season's figures, already running 10 to 15% better.

At Alta, high in Utah's Wasatch Mountains, where snow starts sooner and stays longer than almost anywhere in the west, conditions have been all but perfect. There, and at nearby Brighton, U.S. Olympic Ski Coach Alf Engen runs the largest free ski school in the country, sponsored by the Deseret News-Salt Lake Telegram. The slopes were sprinkled with nearly 30,000 enthusiasts a month as the season picked up momentum. At Idaho's plush Sun Valley, where the Shah of Iran worked out on the slopes of Baldy, prices ran higher, but the crowds came just the same.

Fit to Kill. As far north as Canada's Laurentians, ski resorts are thriving on the big boom in U.S. skiing. Since the end of World War II, growing popularity has changed skiing from a breakneck pastime to a relatively sane family sport. Careful teaching and the diligent police work of a volunteer organization known as the National Ski Patrol System have cut the accident rate down to as low as one-half of 1%. Slopes are better cared for, and "Snow Bunnies," the dressed-fit-to-kill show-offs, who seem never to know which end is up, seldom get loose long enough these days to swoosh downhill in a slapstick slalom. Classes attract all ages, from 5 to 65. So many families turn out that many ski schools have started babysitting services.

Perhaps the surest sign of U.S. skiing maturity is the fact that U.S. skiers are finally getting fed up with foreign critics. "All our skiers know something now," said one pro at Aspen, Colo, last week. "We have had a lot of trouble with European skiers. We find our American skiers are outshining them. The Europeans are used to the old equipment and techniques, the slopes at Davos and St. Moritz. Americans are getting good lessons and starting the right way. It stays with them right on through."

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