80th anniversary of 1st GS in the US

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f.a.s.t.
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80th anniversary of 1st GS in the US

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I copied the following to this post. Interesting how they had to cope with lack of snow and r*in in Jan-Feb of that year.

New England Ski Museum Newsletter
April 3, 2017
Preserving the future of skiing's past


Giant Slalom Turns 80

April 4, 2017 marks the 80th anniversary of the first giant slalom race ever held in the United States. The event took place in Tuckerman Ravine on New Hampshire's Mount Washington, and a Harold Orne photograph of the race day that has long been available in ski shops throughout the region is perhaps the best-known image of the ravine in any decade.

The Franklin Edson Memorial Race, as the April 4 event was formally named, was born in tragedy. Frank Edson, an enthusiastic racer from the Amateur Ski Club of New York (ASCNY), fell in a downhill race on the Ghost Trail near Pittsfield, Massachusetts in 1936, suffering mortal injuries. At the time, the difficulty of the narrow ski trails just recently constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps often exceeded the skills of the skiers entering the races so that injuries were not uncommon, but even so, Edson's death was a shock to the skiing community.

Roland Palmedo, the president of the ASCNY and the most influential ski organizer of his generation, promptly convened meetings of the club to discuss how to respond to the tragedy. One outcome was a study of ski injuries captained by Charles Minot Dole which led within a few years to the founding of the National Ski Patrol. Another consequence was the establishment of the Edson Memorial Race, which adopted a brand-new format from Europe in which gates were introduced to control speeds, spaced much more widely than in the slalom format. "The course will be neither a true slalom nor a downhill, but will seek to combine the best features of each type," noted the US Eastern Amateur Ski Association organizers.

Roland Palmedo, an early naval aviator, often commuted from New York by plane to find skiing.

Dick Durrance, the best American ski racer at the time, was the chief advocate of the experimental race format and would set the course in the ravine and down the Sherburne Trail to Pinkham Notch.

The widely distributed Harold Orne photograph of the Edson race shows a majestically snow-covered Tuckerman Ravine headwall with the tracks of several loose snow avalanches prominent in the center of the ravine. The image suggests that the winter of 1937 must have been one of the great seasons for snowfall in the region, perhaps the equal of the legendary winters of 1926 or 1969. This was far from the actual reality.

The winter of 1936-37 was the year that European ski instruction first came to the White Mountains, introduced by Carroll Reed in the form of the Eastern Slope Ski School in Jackson. Austrian ski instructor Benno Rybizka from the Hannes Schneider Ski School in St. Anton, Austria trained a handful of American assistants and gave thousands of ski lessons in Jackson that year, attracting great interest and publicity. Prominent in the many written accounts of the ski school's first year is the shock and dismay at the lack of snowfall and abundance of r*in in January and February, when ski lessons were limited for many weeks to golf courses at the Crawford House and Eagle Mountain House.

It was only at the end of February 1937 that the snowpack at Pinkham Notch exceeded the 4 to 12 inch totals that were reported in The Ski Bulletin before that. By the time publication ceased for the season on March 26, the report from Pinkham listed 29 inches and "snowing hard", with 37 inches on the ground on the summit.

By the time the course for the Edson Race was under preparation on April 2, the snow conditions were such that Swiss-born Walter Prager, head coach of the Dartmouth ski team, recognizing that the danger of avalanche precluded using the headwall for the course as planned, dispatched race organizers to set dynamite charges on the headwall in an attempt to stabilize the slopes. This was ineffective, and the race course began partway up Right Gully and ran down the Sherburne Trail to Pinkham.

The field of racers was a Who's Who of eastern skiers, with Olympians Alec Bright and Bob Livermore, and Dartmouth stars Ted Hunter, Warren Chivers, Ed Wells, and John Litchfield among the best-known. Hollis Philips, winner of the first Inferno race in 1932, was on hand, but finished well down the results. Walter Prager, racing as a professional, won the race in 6 minutes, 4.9 seconds, while Dartmouth skier Ted Hunter won the Amateur division in 6 minutes, 35.9 seconds.

"The complete absence of injury in the race, as compared to the usual casualty list, seems to represent progress," stated a footnote to the results in the American Ski Annual. Judged by the durability of the giant slalom format in the years since, Dick Durrance's experimental race was a great success, and the place of its U.S. birth, Tuckerman Ravine, remains the magnificent mountain landscape that the ski pioneers of an earlier day would recognize.




New England Ski Museum
is located at Exit 34B, Interstate 93
next to the Cannon Mountain Aerial Tramway in Franconia Notch State Park.
The Museum also maintains satellite exhibits at the Intervale Scenic Vista in Intervale, and on the ground floor of the base lodge at Bretton Woods Mountain Resort in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire.
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