BY KAREN BOSSICK
As Tammy Jensen Dix watched the nation’s best alpine skiers race down Greyhawk this week, she couldn’t help but think back on her most memorable race on Bald Mountain.
Known as the Diamond Sun, it ran along a hair-raising course that took her down Ridge through humongous bumps in Rock Garden and Canyon and then down Lower River Run, ending just before the Big Wood River where River Run Lodge now stands.
She ran it in 1963—before Sun Valley sent out a fleet of groomers every night to manicure the snow.
“I can remember it as plain as day as if it were yesterday,” said Dix. “We did the grooming ourselves, side stepping some of the moguls in Rock Garden and shoving snow onto the cat track to take some of the sharpness off its edges.”
Sigi Engl, then the ski school director, did not want to stage the race, Dix said, perhaps, because he had won it last and didn’t want anyone to break his time.
But she and Dick Dorworth, who had just set a world speed record, skiing 107 miles per hour in Portillo, Chile, campaigned for it. And Sun Valley’s publicist Dorice Taylor championed it, using the pictures she got that day to show skiers taking the train from Los Angeles to Sun Valley that conditions were great despite it being a low snow year.
And so on a bitterly cold but sunny January morning in 1963, Dix, Dorworth, Ron Funk and Betty Bell assembled at the starting gate near the Ski Patrol shack, their numbers whittled after others chickened out.
“It was supposed to have been closed to other skiers. But, as I went down ahead of the race, trying to figure out a way to get through Rock Garden, another skier came through and forced me into some rocks that left huge gouges in my skis,” Dix recalled. “Fortunately Freddy Pieren, a Swiss guy who went on to work for Head Skis, brought his tool kit up and repaired them on the hill.”
As the race loomed, Sun Valley Company shut down the lifts. And the racers were off on what Dix described as “hard, hard snow.”
Standing 5-foot-6 on her 215-cm. skis, Dix went straight down Ridge, following in the historic ski tracks of Gretchen Fraser, Les Outz and other Diamond Sun racers who had gone before.
She threw in a bit of a side slip when she got to Rock Garden and went airborne over the cat track at the bottom.
“I had planned to make four turns through the moguls on Canyon but I was flying through the air,” said Dix, who was clocked going 75 miles per hour through Canyon. “The sidelines were full of people watching—I hadn’t expected that. The hardest thing was trying to keep my ski tips down—they wanted to come up as I went over the moguls.”
Dix had planned on making a couple turns on River Run, as well. But she ended up tucking it and going straight.
Dorworth won the race, skiing the 2.5 mile course in 2 minutes and 21 seconds.
Funk spun around at the bottom and crashed.
Dix posted the fastest woman’s time—2 minutes and 35 seconds.
“It scared me to death to watch her,” said Dix’s husband Joe Jensen. “I think about the Diamond Sun and what they did there and think, ‘No way.’ ”
That was the last year the race was held—Ski School Director Sigi Engl said it was too dangerous to continue.
“That was advantageous for us, as no one was ever able to break our record,” said Dorworth. “It was the fastest standard race ever done—that is, where you start at one gate and ski to a gate at the bottom and it’s up to you how you ski in between. I was skiing Canyon just yesterday, marveling at how I skied it without turning.”
Dix, whose son Tor Jensen is a ski coach with the Sun Valley Ski Education Foundation, got a late start on her way to the Diamond Sun.
Growing up in Spokane, she relished playing polo along with her father, brother and sister. But her father decided his daughters shouldn’t be involved in a contact sport. So she took up skiing on Mount Spokane as a high school sophomore and began racing the next year in 1956.
“I guess my father didn’t think of skiing as a contact sport!” she said.
Two years later—in 1958—she started racing as “a tagalong” on what is now the World Cup circuit in Europe.
In her first European race in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, the 18-year-old watched as all the team skiers ran the slalom down a ski jump hill into a stadium.
“I was at the top of the course, scared to death. I didn’t know anyone, I couldn’t speak German. I heard the announcer say, ‘Tommy Dix USAhhh.’ I started going down and thousands of people were cheering—I’d never been in a race where people cheered. And right at the bottom I hooked one of my skis on a gate and fell.
“The only opening I could see was through the finish gate so I crawled to the finish, dragging my skis which were attached to my leather boots. It was only a hundred feet, maybe less. But I thought it was forever. I’ll never forget it as it was so embarrassing.”
Spectators took note. Hannes Marker told her, “You need new bindings. Anton Kastle told her, “You need new skis.” And then the crowd converged on her asking for her autograph, right alongside more famous skiers like Buddy Werner.
Armed with new skis and Marker bindings, Dix began traveling with the French team.
“They took me under their wing because the U.S. Ski Team ignored me,” she recalled.
Jensen won the Giant Slalom at the U.S. National Alpine Championships in 1964 on a mile-long course at Crested Butte, the same year that Billy Kidd won the Men’s Giant Slalom Championships. The New York Times called her “an attractive blonde from Spokane” in the article it ran on the race.
“I won in terrible weather—a blinding snowstorm that cut visibility to almost nothing. I ski better in terrible weather having come from the Pacific Northwest,” she said.
The following year Dix was crowned Canadian Giant Slalom Champion.
She won Sun Valley’s Harriman Cup in 1960 and served as a first alternate to the U.S. Olympic Alpine Ski Team in 1964. She went on to race on the U.S. Ski Team through 1966, quitting after she got married.
“One of my most memorable races was in Zermatt, Switzerland. The Swiss Army stomped the mountain, grooming it real nicely, but as I came across the finish line I hit a photographer and broke his femur. I ended up covered by snow and him, and he was screaming. I thought I was dead. I ripped my only ski pants so all I had left to race in was knickers with black and yellow stripped socks. I looked like a bumble bee.”
The U.S. Ski Team provided Dix with a nice sweater made by Dmitri, which made college letter sweaters. And they gave her what she described as “an ugly jacket.” They paid entry fees for races but little else.
Consequently, Dix often had to hitchhike to races, once catching a ride from Denver to Stowe, Vt., with Olympian Marvin Moriarity. She also worked for Ned Bell as a waitress in Sun Valley’s Challenger Inn, dressed in a dirndl, to make ends meet.
“It was a really fun time. We just knew everybody by their front name and what they did. Ed Scott, who invented the ski poles, was ‘Scotty Ski Poles.’ Then there was ‘Tony Tram,’ ‘Joanie Cashier,’ ‘Beverly X-Ray’...”
The Jensens came to Sun Valley this past week to visit longtime friends Ross and Ileana Wood after watching their 15-year-old granddaughter Anja Jensen compete for Sun Valley at the Junior Nationals at Soldier Hollow.
Watching racers on Bald Mountain, it wasn’t long before Dix wished she could join them racing down Greyhawk in the Giant Slalom and Super G.
2018 JUNIOR NATIONAL ALPINE CHAMPIONSHIPS
River Radamus, who dazzled in this past week’s 2018 U.S. Alpine Championships, continued his winning ways on Wednesday, winning the Men’s Super G at the Junior National Alpine Championships held on Baldy.
Radamus posted a time of 1:07.39 on a course very similar to the national course. Louis Muhlein-Schulte of Austria took second with a time of 1:08.92 and Jacob Dilling took third with a time of 1:08.96.
AJ Hurt, meanwhile, won her fourth medal in a week, as she won the Women’s Super G with a time of 1:11.69. Canadian Roni Remme took second and third with a times of 1:12.17 and Alix Wilkinson took third.
The Women’s Giant Slalom will take place today with runs at 9 a.m. and noon. And the Men’s runs will start at 10:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m.