STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK
Hans Thum makes graceful, elegant turns down Bald Mountain, his skis matched closely together as a handful of skiers in his Mountain Masters group follow him.
He stands tall with a little forward lean as he makes perfectly shaped turns.
“Our clients are interested in looking good. They want to look elegant,” said Thum, who exudes an Old World charm from the twinkle in his eye to his soft Austrian accent. “This type of skiing involves a lot of demonstration skiing, synchronization skiing, with no sliding. I tell them: Stay exactly in my track. Or, I say: You be my shadow and then in no time you will feel comfortable about this.”
When Sun Valley SnowSports School decided to renew an emphasis on elegant skiing this past year, they turned to Thum whose own penchant for elegant skiing can be traced to his Austrian roots.
“Hans is the best of the best. He knows the sport and has a passion for the sport,” said Tony Parkhill, director of Sun Valley’s SnowSports School. “He’s an elegant skier and a wonderful gentleman who understands the sport better than most and can work with a huge range of people from beginners to experts. Everybody should take a lesson from him.”
“He’s a genuine guy –thoughtful, kind, disciplined and just happy,” added fellow ski instructor Bonnie Wetmore. “He skis beautifully, his feet together down the fall line. And he lines his students up so closely behind him that they really get it.”
Born in Sun Valley’s sister city of Kitzbuhel, Austria, Thum started skiing when he was 3. He hiked up the mountain in his leather boots and his wooden skis to get his turns since he lived in a war zone—there no tourists, no chairlifts in those days”
After serving one year in the Army during World War II, he became apprenticed to a master craftsman who taught him the art of painting traditional Austrian fresco murals called “lueftelmalerei.” He traveled throughout Austria painting elaborate scenes of mountains and people on the walls of churches, pensions and inns.
“In Austria and Bavaria all the houses and pensions are decorated. It’s tradition. Even now I love art, I love making art and the lueftelmalerei is very rich, very beautiful,” he said.
“In Austria you go to school for eight years and then you look for trade in iron work or carpentry. I was so lucky, as it was not that easy at the time to get an apprenticeship. I went to Vienna where I learned about paint and chemistry. I learned to make cheap plywood look like expensive oak or maple wood. I learned to make wood look like marble columns.”
In winter, when he couldn’t paint, Thum worked as a ski instructor, joining the Austrian Ski School in 1957 when he was 18.
He came to the United States in 1966 to teach skiing at Vermont’s Sugarbush Resort.
“We were still using wooden skis then and there was no grooming then. But it made no difference because we didn’t know any better,” he recalled.
A year later he found his way west, one of dozens of Austrian ski instructors recruited by Sigi Engl to work for the Sun Valley Ski School.
“All the early ski resorts went after Austrian ski instructors—not German, not French—because the skiing community there was well known. It had a good reputation,” he recounted. “Sigi always hired people from there because he was a native of Kitzbuhel—he raced in the famous Hahnenkamm downhill race.
“Usually, the Austrian ski instructors would stay a few years. I planned on one season as experience for my resume. But there was so much snow that year—it was like last year when we got record breaking snow. And right away I got good clients. Then I stayed for the summer and never left,” said Thum, who is among the last of the Austrian ski instructors at Sun Valley.
Sigi Engl was a good guy who took care of his instructors, but he was demanding, Thum recounted.
“He knew almost all the private guests personally and he would take you aside and say, ‘I expect you to take care of so and so.’ The reputation of the ski school was important to him.”
Thum found a large community of Austrians from Kitzbuhel in Sun Valley to get together with.
“And Alice Schernthanner, who married one of the instructors, learned fast how to feed us—dumplings and goulash--what our hearts wanted,” he said.
Ketchum didn’t have much then—Slavey’s was about all there was, Thum recalled.
“Everything happened in Sun Valley because that’s where most of our guests, including the Hollywood celebrities, stayed. The guests stayed in the lodge and condos, we were locked up in the dorms and everybody met at the Ram or Boiler Room for beer and parties. In those days, we skied with the same group Monday through Saturday and always the class got together. There was no karaoke then but we did do the hokey pokey, which is said to have been invented here.”
In addition to teaching skiing, Thum worked with fellow ski instructor Florian Haemmerle, a Bavarian painter employed by Sun Valley Company, painting murals on the exterior walls of the Sun Valley Inn and the Sun Valley Opera house.
He also painted murals on the Edelweiss condominiums and at private homes with such addresses as Saddle Road and Fairway Road.
“A lot of trees have grown up in front of some of my paintings or people have added on to their homes so you don’t see them so much anymore,” he said.
Thum cut the trees on Upper Greyhawk, a run on the Warm Springs side of Baldy, piling the trees up in the center of the run so they could be hauled off the mountain for firewood.
“Every time I ski down Greyhawk, I tell my class I cut that run,” he said proudly.
Thum also had a stint oiling trucks on 240 miles of the Alaska pipeline’s northernmost section—a job offered him by a ski client.
His client used to pick him up by helicopter on Sun Valley’s Fairway Road, flying him to Seattle Ridge or the Lookout Restaurant to start the ski day.
“He didn’t want to take three slow lifts up the mountain,” Thum recalled.
In the early days ski instructors and their clients skied Turkey Bowl in groups, he said, noting that Sun Valley hopes to add Turkey Bowl to its inbound terrain during the upcoming 2018-19 winter season.
“We skied all the way down to the highway and a bus picked us up and took us back to River Run. But only on perfect days where we had spring corn snow. It was always a beautiful journey.”
This would have been Thum’s 50th year working for Sun Valley except that he missed one season when he took his son Hannes—the 9—to Austria for six months, enrolling him in a school in St. Anton.
“The language you learn so much better with school mates. It’s the same way with skiing. You learn when you have teammates, like in the Mountain Masters program.”
With the trains no longer bringing skiers to Sun Valley for a week’s worth of lessons, Thum shows up at the mountain each day, says, “Goodbye. See you tomorrow,” and heads home to the same house he brought in Twins Creeks in 1969 when Elkhorn still sported dirt roads.
“I don’t miss the get-togethers with other ski instructors and clients, anymore,” he said. “At my age, I go home, shovel and I’m done for the day.”
But he hasn’t lost his enthusiasm for Bald Mountain with its long steep runs.
“Back in Austria, we would ski a bit, stop and get something to eat, ski a bit and more stop,” he said. “Here we ski without a break. We go back up and back down. Go, go, go. The skiing is so different here and Baldy so unique because the mountain goes so continuously down.”