For some reason, everyone wants to own a world’s record of some kind. This is especially evident among skiers.
The all-time record for winning ski races might belong to Jean Claude Killy, who won 17 world cup races, including three Olympic gold medals. Or, maybe he’s been surpassed by Bode Miller. Whomever it is, he/she is an amazing athlete.
In the 1940s at Yosemite, you could win a gold, silver or bronze ski pin by how long it took you to ski from the top of the hill to the bottom. All I got the day I tried to win a $2 ski pin was a $20 x-ray of my right knee.
The first winter that I was in Sun Valley I discovered that they had weekly time trials from the top of Baldy to the bottom of River Run. If you did it in less than I think 3 minutes, you won a Diamond Sun. Or, if you could do the shorter race from the Round House to the bottom for a Silver Sun or from the top of River Run to the bottom for a Bronze Sun.
Many other ski resorts have the same type of time trials and skiers make up other marks to try for.
Recently, we had a house guest named Bill Baxter and he wanted to know what the record was for the most vertical feet anyone had ever skied in one day at the Yellowstone Club in Montana. I had no idea whatsoever so I just pulled a number out of my imagination and told him it was 70,000 feet.
The next morning Bill was waiting in the lift line 30 minutes before they dropped the rope. At the end of the day, he was almost 2,000 feet shy of breaking the record. Ever resourceful, he had Jeff Jobe drive him up to the Rainbow Lodge so that he could get that extra 2,060 and he now feels as though he owns the record and bragging rights. I wonder if you have to be a resident member in good standing at the Yellowstone Club for your world record to be valid.
There is a famous mountain in Switzerland called the Eiger. The north face of this beautiful mountain is a 10,000-feet vertical wall of granite. Many men have died trying to climb it and it was not until sometime in the 1930s that someone made it to the top. It took them more than two weeks to make it. Last spring, someone climbed it solo in 1 hour and 42 minutes. Now, that is a real record.
The same thing happened on El Capitan in Yosemite. It took more than two weeks the first time 50 years ago. A few years ago, someone stashed their mountain bike at the summit and hiked back down to the valley floor. The next day, he solo climbed El Capitan, rode his mountain bike back down to the valley floor and over to Half Dome where he soloed the face of Half Dome that afternoon.
There is a ski instructor here who had a contract to teach English in China when the ski season was finished. He has been saving his money to buy a piece of Montana ranch land. He had a rucksack, a sleeping bag, a backpack and a skateboard, so he rode that skateboard all the way to San Francisco from the club in Montana.
When I interviewed him he said, “Big Sky is 9,000 feet higher than San Francisco, so it was downhill most of the way.”
Ward Baker and I set a record after we spent two winters living virtually free in the Sun Valley parking lot in a trailer that was only 4 feet wide and 8 feet long. It was the same temperature inside of the trailer as outside, and one night in the winter of 1948 the temperature dipped to 32 degrees below zero. I think that was the night a mouse gave birth to eight babies in one of my flight boots. I think I still own the record for having the most mice born in a flight boot.
And, no one ever told us we should be cold so we never were.
Last winter, Vail set a record when 26,342 people skied on their hills in a single day. That breaks records in every category imaginable including nearly 75,000 toilet flushes for each of those record-breaking days and other records ranging from places to park your car or buy a hamburger at a mountaintop restaurant.
Record snowfalls are part fact and part fiction. I left Mount Waterman when it turned from a bright, sunny day into a snowstorm and in the next 24 hours it snowed 24 feet.
About a decade ago at Mount Baker, it snowed 99 feet in one winter. Now, that is a lot of snow. They had to close the ski area because they didn’t have any place to put the snow.
In the Sierra Nevada at Lake Tahoe in 1953 or 1954, it snowed almost 10 feet in 24 hours and then rained 8 inches and more than a hundred homes and cabins had their roofs collapse. Dozens of cars had all four tires burst under the weight of the wet snow and many had the roofs collapse. When you are talking about record snowfall, just ask someone who has been around a long time and seen a lot of records set. They will have lots of great stories.
Warren Miller is history’s most prolific and enduring ski filmmaker. Visit warrenmiller.net or visit his Facebook page at facebook.com/warrenmiller.
