September 8, 2008 E-MAIL PRINT

Ski patrol springs into action

by Jeff Leich/

During the 1938 Nationals at Stowe, discussions were held that led to the development of national ski patrols. (photo: New England Ski Museum)

During the 1938 Nationals at Stowe, discussions were held that led to the development of national ski patrols. (photo: New England Ski Museum)

The spring of 1938 marked a turning point in the organization of American skiing. While there were ski clubs, ski tows, snow trains, infant ski resorts, local ski patrols and lots of press attention to skiing before then, it was in that spring 70 years ago that organized ski patrolling in the form of the National Ski Patrol originated. The NSP in turn was prominent in founding a U.S. Army mountain warfare division, whose veterans profoundly changed postwar skiing in the country. The origin of all this can be said to have taken place on the Nose Dive Trail on Vermont’s Mt. Mansfield at the 1938 National Downhill and Slalom Championships.

Charles Minot Dole, known to all as Minnie, was a Yale-educated insurance man with a friendly demeanor and a gift for articulate dialogue and correspondence. He had joined the Amateur Ski Club of New York and learned to ski — though never at an expert level — at Lake Placid and Peckett’s. Stowe was his ski destination of choice in the mid-1930s, and in early 1936, Dole, skiing on the Mt. Mansfield Toll Road with his wife, Jane, and their good friends Frank and Jean Edson, fractured an ankle some distance from the road. The women went for help and returned in time with two men from Stowe and a short piece of metal roofing on which they were able to transport Dole to the trailhead.

In March 1936, Frank Edson, like Dole not a notably accomplished skier, entered a downhill race in Pittsfield, Mass., and died after colliding with a tree. Roland Palmedo, as president of the ASCNY, immediately appointed Dole to chair a club committee to make a study of ski safety. The committee did so by means of questionnaires on the prevalence, causes and remedies of ski injuries. Dole became one of the only existing experts on the topic.

Another key figure in the development of the ski patrol came on the scene in 1936. Roger Langley became President of the National Ski Association in that year, and almost immediately was questioned about what his group was doing about ski accidents, which the mainstream press lost no opportunity to cover.

Langley, Palmedo and Dole all converged, along with most other important ski figures, at the 1938 National Ski Races at Stowe on March 5 and 6 of that year. Dole and David Parsons of Manchester, Vt., had been asked to spearhead an event patrol comprised of the Mt. Mansfield patrol and several other local ski patrols to cover the competition. The “super patrol” that resulted was well organized and amply staffed. Langley and Dole, not previously acquainted, met along the Nose Dive at Dole’s station above Shambles Corner. During the course of the race, Langley suggested that similar ski patrols could be organized on a nationwide basis, and he asked Dole if he would agree to head a national ski patrol committee of the National Ski Association. Dole agreed, and the two toasted the concept with sips of Vat 69 from Dole’s pocket flask.

Less than a week after the close of the Nationals, Langley sent a letter to the membership of the NSA announcing the formation of the ski patrol committee and requesting help. The existing structure and hierarchy of the national organization meant the ski patrol committee was not starting with a blank slate, but already had a communication method and an organizational pattern in place. The leadership structure of the NSA could serve as a skeleton plan for the ski patrol, while the ski clubs that formed the support base of NSA would provide the volunteers that would fill the ranks of the patrols.

Nonetheless, responsibility for implementation rested with Dole, and he spent long hours in his Greenwich, Conn., home, and during summer at his family’s Adirondack camp, writing letters recruiting key people for the patrol. In the next few years, the NSP blossomed under Dole’s leadership, with more than 1,800 trained patrollers in 89 patrols established by 1940.

In 1939, as war engulfed Europe, Dole and the NSP became the leading advocates of specialized military units trained in mountain warfare. Dole’s drive and persistence led to the acceptance of the idea by the War Department, and the NSP was contracted by the Army to handle recruiting for the mountain troops. Veterans of the resulting unit, the 10th Mountain Division, had an immense impact on the direction of American skiing after the war as founders of the next generation of ski resorts.

The names of resorts founded or managed by veterans of the 10th is astonishing. Arapaho Basin, Aspen, Attitash, Belleayre, Mt. Bachelor, Breckenridge, Cranmore, Crystal Mountain, Mt. Hood Ski Bowl, Loveland Basin, Mad River Glen, Sun Valley, Vail, Winter Park, White Pass and Whiteface are some of the more familiar. Nike, Ski, Skiing, Ski Business, the A&T Ski Company, National Outdoor Leadership School, the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth are other organizations whose major figures served with the 10th. Hundreds of other 10th veterans were instructors, patrollers, shop owners, marketing directors or otherwise involved in skiing. To the extent that the NSP helped found the 10th Mountain Division, it can fairly be credited with initiating a ripple effect that ultimately built and shaped an American ski business.

Dole and Langley’s vision in the swirling snow of the 1938 Nationals became a continental humanitarian organization that, along the way, spun off a division of American mountain soldiers whose veterans changed the way America skied.

Jeff Leich is the executive director of the New England Ski Museum in Franconia, N.H.

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