On the twisting trails that lace the flanks of Vermont's Mt. Mansfield, traffic was so heavy that skiers had trouble keeping out of one another's way. On Michigan's Boyne Mountain, colorfully garbed schussboomers cheerfully endured long waits to ride lifts up the glistening white mountainside. Restaurants on Colorado's Aspen Mountain were overrun with crowds. Thousands left their sitzmarks on the deep powder slopes of California's Sierras and Washington's Cascade range. Whenever there was snow, busloads of weekend skiers left New York and Chicago at first light, and in Nevada deserts, sweaty cowboys watched mountain-bound cars go by, skis lashed to the roofs.
From Fanatics to Families. In less than 25 years, skiing has been transformed from an eccentric practice pursued by a handful of fanatic, chilblained young men to the U.S.'s fastest-growing outdoor winter sport. Today, anybody skis—corporation president and office boy, college student and secretary, parents and children. It is no longer a pastime for the well-heeled who could afford to go to Europe to learn. The skiing establishment at Aspen, Colo, is a typical example of what the sport has added to the face of the U.S. A broken-down mining settlement as late as 1946, Aspen now boasts some 50 ski lodges, offers a wide range of overnight accommodations, from Ed's Beds ($2.75 and down) to the luxurious new Villa Lamarr ($8 and up), financed by Hedy Lamarr's estranged husband Howard Lee and promptly dubbed Hedy's Beddies.
Keys to the U.S.'s ski boom were the rope tow and its more advanced counterpart, the chair lift. The first rope tow, a jury rig powered by a truck engine, was installed at Woodstock, Vt. in 1934, the first chair lift at Sun Valley, Idaho in 1937. Until then a skier had to be young and determined enough to rise at dawn, spend most of the day trudging up the side of a mountain for the sake of one or two swift descents. The tow made skiing a downhill run all the way.
This winter an estimated 3,000,000 skiers will be out on slopes from Maine's Sugarloaf Mountain to Oregon's Mount Hood. There is skiing in Taos, N. Mex. and on North Carolina's Mount Mitchell, and ski clubs have appeared in Amarillo, Texas and Louisville, Ky.
Snow Fever. Resort owners are convinced that the boom is still young, and are pushing ahead with expansion plans, undismayed by the uncertainties inherent in snow itself—not enough of it in the East, where slopes must be closely tended to preserve what falls, often too much of it in the West, where gun crews must shoot down avalanches to ensure safety and jumbo storms can seal off an area for days. Vermont's Mt. Snow opened the first outdoor swimming pool at an Eastern ski resort. California's plush new $1,750,000 inn at Mammoth Mountain was doing a land-office business. Michigan's Boyne Mountain resort was plowing back $250,000 a year into improvements. All in all, there were no fewer than 90 new overhead lifts operating in U.S. areas this winter, and more were on the way.