Almost immediately other entrepreneurs copied Foster’s idea. Often, the guy who owned the rope-tow engine, or his bonne apple-cheeked voisine, opened a hot-dog stand at the bottom of the hill. The more considerate operator dug an outdoor two-holer to serve as a latrine. The arrangement—uphill conveyance, modest sustenance, and necessary amenities—was the embryo of the future ski resort.
The first US knock-off of Foster’s invention appeared in 1934 on a farmer’s hillside near Woodstock, Vermont. Fred Pabst, heir to an American beer fortune, once owned a chain of ropetow areas, stretching from Quebec and New Hampshire westward to Wisconsin and Minnesota. In an early invasion of American financial capital into Canada, Pabst started his McDonald’s-like chain of tow areas in the Laurentians with three tows, on St-Sauveur’s hills 69, 70, and 71, which were named after European battlegrounds where Canadian troops fought in World War I. Pabst abandoned his tow-ops when they threatened to exhaust his beer-brewing inheritance.
fewer spills
For skiing to progress, someone had to teach weekend warriors the turning skills necessary to check their speed and change direction. The first North American pro to lead classes in scissor like christies and telemark turns was a Swiss immigrant to Canada, Émile Cochand, in 1911. Cochand’s ski school in the Laurentians predated by eighteen years the first comparable US operation, at Peckett’s-on-Sugar-Hill in New Hampshire.
Until 1960, ski teaching around the world was pretty much divided into two camps: the conservative disciples of Austria’s Hannes Schneider, who applied the Arlberg method, which leads pupils through a progression of turns starting with the snowplow; and the French and Swiss disciples of charismatic 1937 and ‘38 world champion Émile Allais, who taught novices to turn with their skis parallel, starting with sideslipping and traversing exercises.
While most North American ski schools were dominated by Schneider’s method, Swiss instructor Fritz Loosli was actively teaching the lesser-known Allais style to guests of the Château Frontenac. Wearied by the war’s devastation of his native France, Allais himself crossed the Atlantic in 1946 and arrived in Quebec City, where he immediately lent support to Loosli’s rebellious teaching method, like de Gaulle coming to aid the cause of separatism. So highly regarded was Allais that Life magazine featured him on its January 24, 1949, cover, with a story on the christiania léger turn. This parallel approach anticipated the future of ski technique far better than did the Arlberg method. After coaching Canada’s 1948 Olympic ski team, Allais left the country for Sun Valley, in Idaho, and then Squaw Valley, in California.
Swiss, Austrians, and Norwegians did most of the early ski teaching in the broken English they may have learned on the boat crossing the Atlantic. French Canadians also became skilled at teaching the predominantly anglophone clients (the verbiage used in ski-school classes would have sent a Bill 101 language enforcer into paroxysms). Réal Charette at Gray Rocks and Mont Tremblant’s Ernie McCulloch, who was from Trois Rivières, ran two of the best ski schools in North America, and Canadian ski instructors were far ahead of their American counterparts in setting standards for the teaching of skiing. The first national association of ski instructors outside of Europe was the Canadian Ski Instructors Alliance, formed in 1938; its US counterpart wasn’t formed until 1961.
room at the top
The confluence of ski schools, ski trains, and rope tows in the Laurentians in turn gave rise to North America’s first concentration of inns designed to host skiers. The earliest of the ski inns, founded in 1914, was Chalet Cochand at Ste-Marguerite, its business bolstered by the proprietor’s ski school. At Shawbridge, next door to Foster’s rope-tow invention, was the Laurentian Lodge Club, essentially a noisy boarding house with a learn-to-ski program. Its anglophone Montreal members included the eminent neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield. My own family also belonged, my mother reasoning that children should ski, not only for the physical benefits but also because skiing, like tennis and golf, fostered lifetime friendships.
In February of 1929, the year before I was born, New Hampshire writer Corey Ford wrote about the Laurentian Lodge for the New Yorker. Ford had scored an invitation to stay at the club and produced a hilarious account, in which he and his friends scarcely leave the club’s comfortable warm interior, consuming brandy and beer and merely contemplating the possibility of skiing.
