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Saturday, February 4, 2012 |
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New Exhibit Depicts Skiing in Mount Washington Valley
- By AlpineZone News
The skiing history of the region is rich, and it can be argued that Jackson and North Conway were the first towns in the US where a ski business arose. Beginning in 1936, professional ski instruction and a pioneering ski tow were available in Jackson, and with the opening of a comprehensive resort at Mount Cranmore in 1938, it became the first mechanized American ski area located in a populated village, a combination that favored further ski industry developments. The exhibit begins with a grainy image of three female skiers taken at the Eagle Mountain House in Jackson in 1887, and concludes with a photograph dating from the early 1970s of cross-country skiers in the same location. In the intervening years several unique contributions to skiing originated in the Eastern Slope Region, as the area was known in the decades before the 1960s. The first overhead cable ski tow of original design in the country was installed at what is now Black Mountain in the winter of 1936; the first (and with one exception, the only) Skimobile lift came to Cranmore in 1938; the first systematic ski area grooming in the country was performed at Cranmore in the early 1940s; and the first state ski lift safety board was chaired by Phil Robertson, a North Conway man. Two further unique features of the area's ski history are the residence of master ski teacher Hannes Schneider beginning in 1939, and the looming presence of Mount Washington's Tuckerman Ravine, a natural snow collector where skiers can find snow well into the springtime. Schneider, who devised a system of ski technique and instruction in Austria and was considered by many to be the father of modern skiing, relocated to North Conway prior to World War II after being forced out of his native land by political turmoil. It was one of Schneider's Austrian prot
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