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For the past year, the most feverish of all ski area preparations have been centered in and around a narrow, steep-sided valley high in the California Sierras, 200 miles northeast of San Francisco, 40 miles southwest of Reno, and six miles from Lake Tahoe. Despite the snow and cold last week, work crews poured into Squaw Valley to put the finishing touches on four handsome, pastel-shaded dormitories, transform a shell of bright orange girders into a skating rink, build lift towers. Navy snow-compaction teams experimented with tamping down a large meadow to serve as a parking lot. A year from now, some 1,000 athletes and 35,000 spectators from all over the world will jam Squaw Valley daily during the 1960 Winter Olympic Games; to make sure that all will go right, the state of California and the U.S. Government are pouring millions into a place that only a decade or so ago was wilderness.
Tact & Tactics. Squaw Valley's position as a ski resort and Olympics' site is the work of a tall (6 ft. 5 in.), slat-lean man of Eastern socialite background (New York, Newport) and upbringing (Groton, Harvard) named Alexander Cochrane Cushing. With no experience at developing or running such a place, Alec Cushing proceeded purposefully through trial and error at Squaw Valley, made some horrendous mistakes in judgment and tact en route. But he pulled a master coup in wangling the Olympics for his own backyard, a tactic that will leave him, after the Olympics are over, in the center of a $14 million establishment which will put Squaw Valley squarely in the top rank of U.S. ski areas.
Such figures no longer startle ski men, for skiing has become big business. This year skiers will spend an estimated $120 million on accommodations, transportation, lift tickets and equipment. They will pay $5,000,000 for skis, a like amount for pants and parkas, $4,000,000 for boots. East and West, ski shops reported business at new highs, up as much as 40% from last season.
Floating & Defying. Ski equipment comes in a wide price range—most of it expensive. Most beginners find themselves impelled to spend at least $150 if they are to feel properly equipped. As for clothes, an old pair of jodhpurs and an old sweater will no longer do. Even the raw novice feels a compulsive need for skintight Bogner stretch pants ($50), quilted parka ($30) and Alpine sweater ($30).
But the dedicated scorn details of money. Sometimes they seem to consider skiing less a sport than a mystical experience. They get rhapsodic when they try to explain the feeling that makes a few hours on a slope worth the long tortuous trip to get there and the possibility of a broken bone. "When I ski," explains one buff, "I feel like a fellow in a dream, floating through the air, defying gravity, conscious only of the hissing of the skis through the snow. The only thing that vaguely resembles the sensation is flying. Unlike any other sport, the skier is completely on his own. Once he begins his descent, no one can help him."