The Curious Lives of Ski Migrants

Look closely and you see something that has been left behind, mourned, and reassembled from new parts.

I had on dark green woolen knickerbockers, cream knee-high socks, and a gold stretch turtleneck. My kit consisted of rubber boots that attached to a steel-edged touring ski with a three-pin binding. Ahead of my first cross-country ski race as a teenager in the Australian high country, my dad told me, “This is what everyone will be wearing.” It was 1994, and the facts did not bear him out. Everyone was in neon Lycra and zipping about on ultralight skating skis, while I looked as though I was ready to trap hares in the Scandinavian tundra.

The Norwegians were to blame. In the 1860s, the gold rush brought them to Kiandra, New South Wales, on Ngarigo country, the northern tip of what Australians know as the “Snowy Mountains”—or, more aspirationally, the “Australian Alps.” There, the Norwegians turned strips of mountain ash and spotted gum timber into skis. Later, their work huts from the hydroelectric scheme were converted into ski clubs. Go into any club lodge today and you’ll find black-and-white photos of those early Norse immigrants skiing in skirts and dinner jackets. Next to those photos on the wall, you’ll usually see some cream climbing skins on display too, testaments to what looks like a lost Australian ice age chasing down wooly mammoths.

My father taught me to ski as a small child by simply dragging me along a snowy road above the hydroelectric dam below the village of Guthega. Back then, we had a box of identical navy bib and brace suits bought at a secondhand sale, a progression of sizes. My whole family would go downhilling together, watching out for yard sales under the chairlift. Later, my dad taught me to use touring skis, taking me out over the dam to where the first surface lift, long abandoned, was being reabsorbed into the landscape. In my early twenties, working on ski patrol, I began to venture out into the backcountry as my father did in the 1970s and early ’80s with his crew, one of whom was a Norwegian who emigrated to Australia as a child. I have Jan to thank for the felt knickerbockers.

Some migrants re-create the dumplings or gardens they left behind, but Europeans are experts at finding ways to slide about on patches of snow. Thanks to these émigrés, there is not only skiing in Australia, but also an outcrop of “chalets” and “Tyrolean villages” mixed in with the caravan parks, pubs, and bowling clubs. The scene is just as confusing in the United States, particularly in the northeast, where I now live. Driving toward a mountain, you will see CITGO gas stations disguised as alpine chalets and Swiss A-frames selling barbecue wings, followed by red barns, ranch houses, and Victorians—an architectural manifestation of what Edward Said described as the “unhealable rift” that exiles feel.

Exile is relative. Said differentiated the expatriate from the refugee: “Expatriates may share in the solitude and estrangement of exile, but they do not suffer under its rigid proscriptions. Émigrés enjoy an ambiguous status.” Importantly, they can go back. Travelers can be “​​wanderers across language,” but also, I think, susceptible to the deep bone-chill of ascending someone else’s mountain.

I first came to the US on a seasonal H-2B visa to work as a ski instructor, part of a carousel of people from Argentina, New Zealand, France, Japan, Scotland, and the Czech Republic who chase winter; as good an argument I’ve seen for the idea that we exist in an “extraterritorial” world that transcends nationalism, everyone moving on before questions of citizenship and residency need be addressed. I taught Texans to parallel, fell in love with my American husband by the Continental Divide, and the rest is history, as they say. But whose history? This is what I want to know: What does leaving one’s home country do to a person? What does it do to the land one tries to call home?

I find some answers in the gestures toward the craggy drama of Innsbruck among Vermont’s gentle hills and the woman in the dirndl next to the table of guys in the Carhartt beanies and beards; in the muddy car park across which a pair of punters shuffle their skis forward, the bases rasping with every glide, toward their destination, two figures moving on the gear over a landscape bereft of snow. Look closely and you see something that has been left behind, mourned, and reassembled from new parts.

Consider Ski Haus, a ski shop and rental in Patterson, New York, fifty miles north of Manhattan, with its green gabled roof, chocolate weatherboarding, and white medieval lettering. (There are many Ski Hauses across the United States, all unaffiliated, all almost guaranteed to be positioned near the local slopes in Annapolis, Maryland, or Steamboat Springs, Colorado.) This particular Ski Haus sits alongside New York State Route 22, three hundred yards down the road from the red-and-white-striped Red Rooster drive-in, anchored on the map by a large plaster rooster who stands indignantly over a frozen minigolf course. Catty-corner, a McDonald’s is parked at the entrance to a strip mall, the yellow M visible from the Ski Haus car park through a mist of snow. Six miles north on Route 22 is Thunder Ridge Ski Area. Its brown shingled lodge looks out at a lolling hill, up which two blue chairlifts have been strung since the 1960s; a third was added in the 1980s to replace the T-bar.

It’s no Aspen, but Ski Haus is something of a gateway—to Thunder Ridge, and to the ski resorts of New York and Vermont. Winter brings a stream of Poles, Brits, Germans, and Swiss through the Ski Haus doors, some who have settled nearby, some who have struck out from the city in search of a hill. It’s where my American husband got his ski rentals as a kid, and where we got the first rentals for our kids. The building used to be owned by a farmer who ran a produce stand in the warmer months, but in 1962, an avid skier in the area named Denslo Hamlin convinced the farmer to let him run a ski shop out of the space when it was dormant.

“[Hamlin] jokingly told me that, the first year, they bought ten thousand dollars of equipment and clothing, and at the end of season they did inventory and had ten thousand dollars of inventory,” said Ross Nichols, who has run Ski Haus for the past fifty years. I spoke to Nichols for an interview in midwinter, just prior to his weekly trip to Vermont. Nichols recalled Hamlin’s love of skiing: “He wanted to pass it on to as many people as he could. Often he’d be at a cocktail party and he’d say, ‘You should take up skiing, I just want you to give it a try,’ so the next morning he’d load up his station wagon and bring the gear to them.” This was how Hamlin created a ski scene in Patterson—by levering ankles into boots and cranking bindings, one by one.

Hamlin and his wife, Myra, were the parents of Nichols’s friend. When Nichols was nine, the Hamlins took him on his first trip to Stowe, Vermont, the presumptive ski capital of the East, peer to the West’s Sun Valley. They stayed in a bed-and-breakfast that didn’t have room for the kids, so Nichols and his friend slept in the barn. This kicked off Nichols’s love of the sport.

It’s no Aspen, but Ski Haus is something of a gateway

“Denny was a terrible skier, but he loved it,” says Nichols with admiration, referring to Hamlin by a familiar nickname. Hamlin asked Nichols to take over the store in 1972 when he graduated college, and he never looked back. “I had a great career. At age seventy-two, that’s why I’m still here. I never once felt badly about going into work.” He spends Mondays and Tuesdays skiing in Vermont each week. Flying down a mountain, he says, “there is an exhilaration that you feel, a freedom that you feel.”

I took my six-year-old skiing just up the road at Thunder Ridge recently. There are no guarantees with kids: She cried the whole way up and the whole way down for two laps. So we sat on the picnic tables outside the lodge, snow beginning to flit down as she ate dried fruit. An older man sat down to rest next to us. We talked about how easy it is to learn to ski today with magic carpets and parabolic skis. I had been taught on a rope tow that tore your gloves, I told him. He had learned on a rope tow that ran off a tractor.

“Someone had to sit there all day with their foot on the pedal to make it run!” he told me.

“I’m surprised they didn’t just tie a brick to it,” I joked.

The man’s face turned serious. “You need to be able to stop it, though.”

I have never seen a rope tow stop for anyone. And I’ve seen a few. Being dragged by the rope tow, one arm flung over, used to be a rite of passage. You can still see the old T-bar track at Thunder Ridge looking like the ruins of a lost empire. If you poke around, you’ll find abandoned lift lines across New England—somewhere, someone trying to make skiing happen. Some of these lifts were sometimes built or designed by European migrants who had brought their know-how to the US. In turn, they became a beacon for later migrants looking for a glimpse of the old land.

The von Trapp family fit the latter category. Just prior to the onset of the Second World War, as Nazi power grew, Maria and Georg von Trapp made the decision to leave their home in Austria. They traveled to Italy in 1938 with their children and arrived in the US in 1939, when Maria gave birth to her youngest child, Johannes. Their story has been partly told through The Sound of Music, but war touched the family in a number of ways. Born in what is now Croatia, Georg was a naval commander with the Austro-Hungarian army in World War I, and several of his children would join the 10th Mountain Division to fight in World War II with the US on skis with rifles and ninety-pound packs. Commandos in white onesies, the 10th Mountain Division would later seed ski culture across the US as founders of ski resorts like Vail and Whiteface and a force behind many ski schools.

The von Trapps settled in Stowe, Vermont—a decade before the Hamlins brought Nichols there to ski—because the town reminded them of Salzburg. “People want to give us credit for the number of Austrians, but we think the mountains brought people,” says Johannes von Trapp, who is now eighty-three and spoke to me on the phone alongside his son Sam. Though the family brought pieces of Austria with them to the US, von Trapp said, “there was no question that we wanted to be Americans.” He recalled how his mother, Maria, after their family had found their footing in the States, would spend six weeks in Austria each summer and return to the US feeling like she could breathe again. As a German speaker, von Trapp has felt at home in Salzburg but, like his naturalized siblings, considers himself rooted in the hills of northern Vermont. He and his son help run the Trapp Family Lodge in Stowe. Its slogan: “A little bit of Austria . . . a lot of Vermont.”

While in college at Dartmouth, von Trapp would bring his Norwegian roommate up to Stowe on weekends. They would ski at the Mt. Mansfield Ski Club until the lines got long, then switch to cross-country skis and tour the meadows in the afternoons. Von Trapp thought there was the potential for the public to enjoy cross-country skiing, so he bought some skis and poles and stored them in the garage that winter ready to loan out. There were no takers.

Not yet put off, and looking to help the Trapp Family Lodge boost occupancy, he called his friend and asked him to advertise for a ski instructor in the Oslo Aftenposten. Three hundred Norwegians responded. The charismatic standout, Per Sorlie, was brought over to help create what is America’s first full-service ski touring center with instruction, rentals, and groomed trails.

“He set the tracks by going out and skiing, in the morning waxed all the skis, he gave the lessons, and went into the bar at night and chatted with the guests and convinced them to give it a try,” says Sam von Trapp. One by one, he converted each patron with a beer in their hand. Today, the lodge has around one thousand season pass holders, and Sam, who taught skiing at resorts around the world for many years, acts as on-snow ambassador. He shows people how to clip the things to their feet and find their way around the trails—most recently his own children. The first time he got his own son on skis he was one and a half, and it was with Sorlie’s grandson, visiting from Norway.

Johannes ribs Sam about his work as “on-snow ambassador”—“I used to do that but I didn’t have the title!” he says—and the term is fitting. Like the famous Norwegian gold medalist Stein Eriksen, who held director and ambassador roles at ski schools across the US, Sam is there to translate Nordic skiing to newcomers. A trained alpine instructor, he also variously understands the Austrian school of technique founded and exported by Austrian Stefan Kruckenhauser (himself taught by the “pope of ski instruction,” Hannes Schneider), the Australian model, and the US school of thought, which emphasizes a wider stance and greater adaptation to the skier’s body type.

“A little bit of Austria . . . a lot of Vermont.”

I learned the American way of skiing, and in the decade and a half I have been living abroad, my accent has slid into something slushier. I’ve downhilled and telemarked and skated over the buried tracks of those first eccentrics in woolen pants, and I’ve always felt at home on the mountain. Recently, though, every “chalet motel” and every Austrian inn has seemed a portent of homesickness, a sign of how far-flung things can get. We’ve begun to plot the way back south, but that kind of move won’t be easy either. I keep thinking of the family walking out of the rental shop with their ski poles looped around their skis in a “Texas tote,” clicking along in their rental boots as they walk backward down a staircase, feeling encumbered and out of place. I suppose that is how families work. Finding themselves in a new place, adapting, starting something that gets passed down and could reshape the very horizon.

Ski history often begins with a guy whose trunk is packed full of random gear, because it is always a story of making do. Pick a place on the map, and if there is snow there, I guarantee someone has thought about stringing a haul rope up the hill and tying their boots to some planks. An Austrian here, a Norwegian there, a station wagon of skis and boots and poles, and slowly a culture is strung together.