BY JOHN W. LUNDIN

In early October 2024, the Sun Valley Resort received final approval to host the Audi F.I.S. Ski World Cup Finals March 22-27, 2025.

Twenty-five men and 25 women from 30 countries will compete in all four Alpine skiing disciplines--slalom, giant slalom, downhill and super-G. Approval came after Sun Valley’s Challenger course on Warm Springs was inspected by outside engineers and determined to meet applicable F.I.S. guidelines for all four disciplines.

Sun Valley’s downhill course promises to be one of the most demanding downhill courses in North America. And it improves upon the classic Harriman Cup downhill course designed in 1938 by the Dick Durrance, that famous ski racer from Dartmouth. Durrance’s course was used for Harriman Cup tournaments from 1939 until the late 1940s. Sun Valley’s new course will recapture the excitement of those classic Harriman Cup downhill races during the early days of the Resort.

In their day, Harriman Cup Tournaments were the country’s most prestigious and competitive events, attracting the best skiers in the world. The 1943 American Ski Annual said: “just as it is the dream of every tennis player to compete once at Wimbledon, it is every skier’s hope to participate in the famous Harriman Cup Races at Sun Valley.”

The Sun Valley Ski Club’s 1956 Annual Report agreed: “Every American sport has its moment of supreme glory--that particular event in which the entire panorama seems to be compressed into one sharply defined focal point. Baseball has its World Series, golf its National Open and horse racing its Kentucky Derby. For skiing, it is the Harriman Cup...”

The top parts of Durrance’s course and the World Cup course are similar. Both start near the top of Warm Springs, go along a ridge (now called International) and dive into Warm Springs Bowl on a steep slope. That slope, called the Steilhang in 1939, was said to be “as steep as a ski jumping hill and two hundred yards long.” From there both head toward the bottom of Warm Springs. The 1939 course went all the way down to Warm Springs Creek.

The 2025 course leaves Warm Springs, goes into Upper Greyhawk, then onto a newly constructed traverse called the Sluice from Upper Greyhawk to Hemingway. The course goes down Hemingway, then cuts back toto the finish on Lower Greyhawk on a connection called the Redd.

Baldy Was Not Served by A Chairlift When Sun Valley Opened

When Sun Valley opened in December 1936, built by Union Pacific under the guidance of its Board Chairman Averell Harriman, chairlifts were installed on Proctor Mountain—then the expert ski area--and Dollar Mountain--the beginner area.

Alpine skiing was in its infancy in North America, and Bald Mountain was considered too steep and challenging for most skiers at the time. However, skiing on Bald Mountain had been anticipated from the beginning. Count Felix Schaffgotsch, who picked the Ketchum area for Harriman’s resort, and Charles Proctor and John E.P. Morgan, whom Harriman hired to design ski runs and locate areas for chairlifts. believed Bald Mountain would eventually become Sun Valley’s primary lift-served ski hill.

From the beginning, experts skied Bald Mountain by climbing to the top using skins on their skis. Ski School director Friedl Pfeifer took Harriman and his daughter Kathleen to the top of Bald Mountain in 1939. They climbed up Cold Springs using kick turns. Katherine said it took three hours to get to the top and five minutes to ski down but was a good way to get fit.

“We climbed on sealskins in the beginning, which were much stiffer than the plush ones made out of cloth. You’d get to the top of Baldy and take those darned things off your skis and they’d be frozen stiff, and you’d wrap them around your waist and ski down, hoping you got down before they melted and you were wet solid to your knees.”

A snow tank carried expert skiers up Baldy’s slopes to access its wide-open terrain and runs through the trees in the winters of 1938 and 1939.

Snow tanks designed by the U.S. Forest Service for Mt. Hood’s Timberline, took skiers to backcountry skiing areas in 1938 and 1939, including Bald Mountain. They could carry 25 or 30 people and negotiate grades up to 40 percent at uphill speeds of four to eight miles an hour and downhill speeds of 20 miles per hour.

Harriman Cup Was Country’s Most Competitive and Prestigious Ski Race

Dick Durrance, who won the first two Harriman Cup tournaments in 1937 and 1938 as a Dartmouth College student, said Harriman was determined that Sun Valley would match anything Europe had to offer, and he set out to attract the biggest names in the sport.

Harriman knew one way to bring Sun Valley into the public consciousness was to get it onto the sports pages, and no expense was spared when it came to promotion. The best skiers in the world came to compete, their expenses paid by Sun Valley to ensure an internationally recognized, first-class competition.

The 1937 Harriman Cup Tournament was the first major international Alpine ski competition in the United States, with the Harriman Cup going to the winner of the combined downhill and slalom events. For the first time, the tournament would be an open competition, with ski instructors meeting amateurs.

Harriman had some of Europe’s best skiers working as instructors and he wanted to showcase them. The tournament attracted the greatest collection of downhill ski racers ever assembled in North America at that time with two champions being crowned: The open and amateur. Ski instructors were eligible only for the open title. Amateurs were eligible for both.

In 1937 and 1938, the Harriman Cup downhill race took place on an unnamed peak in the Boulder Mountains eight miles north of Ketchum, near the present day Sawtooth National Recreation Area headquarters. That peak was later named Durrance Mountain after Dick won the first.

Neither Proctor nor Dollar Mountain had the vertical needed to qualify as a Europe-style downhill race, and Bald Mountain had not been developed. A credentialed squad of top-flight skiers spent the week prior to the race preparing the course by digging out rocks and roots, setting course stakes and positioning rescue toboggans and first aid on the mountain.

Dog teams hauled rescue sleds and first-aid supplies up the hill on toboggans, and ropes were put up to keep spectators off the course at the finish. Charles Proctor said the downhill course was “the longest and toughest downhill race course in the world.”

“They set the course on a ridge there that comes from a major range...Just a start and a finish, no control gates, no course preparation. Nothing had been cleared, no trails—it was a wide-open mountain,” wrote Durance in his book “Man on the Medal.” “There were some patches of trees here and there, but they were insignificant. They didn’t interfere with your skiing or your line.”

    Dick Durrance Designs a Downhill Course for the 1939 Harriman Cup

Dick Durrance worked at Sun Valley in the summers of 1937 and 1938. In summer 1938, he helped evaluate the skiing potential of Bald Mountain. Durrance, Harriman and Union Pacific staff traveled by truck up Cold Springs. They picked out the location for the future Roundhouse Restaurant on “Little Baldy,” and examined the north side of the mountain.

The north-facing slope on the Warm Springs side of the mountain was steep and heavily forested and kept its snow cover longer than the south-facing slopes elsewhere on Baldy. Durrance saw a great deal of good skiing on a north face, all the potential for becoming the future of Sun Valley skiing, “at least for the better skiers.”

He suggested that a race trail be cut for the Harriman Cup down the Warm Springs side of the mountain.

“I’d already done a lot of the surveying by myself. I’d climbed the hills across from Mount Baldy, sagebrush hills two or three thousand feet high and had taken photographs of the whole Warm Springs side from there. Then I’d walked over the terrain to find out where there were gullies and cliffs and where you might put a race trail.”

Durrance designed a tough race course on Warm Springs, starting at the top of the mountain, going down a ridge, now called International, and diving into a steep hill called the steilhang (German for steep pitch).

“I incorporated it into the race course with a very steep ridge that ran down to it.”

The steilhang dropped into Warm Springs canyon, then the course meandered through the dense woods to finish at Warm Springs Creek. The course dropped 3,000 feet in a little over two miles. Skiers had  options and could be inventive about the course they took. The only control gates were on the top of the steilhang to make sure racers could not bypass it.

Harriman arranged for the U.S. Forest Service and Civilian Conservation Corps (C.C.C.) to cut trees on Baldy, as they had done elsewhere during the 1930s. In January 1939, the Forest Service released the famous ski jumper Alf Engen for three months so he could work at Sun Valley.

General Manager Pat Rogers told Harriman that Count Schaffgotsch, Engen, Durrance and Pfeifer spent an entire day marking a considerable number of trees to be removed: “We have 11 men working there now and figure it will take about 10 days to remove the marked trees. We will rush this work through and, after its completion, it will be the finest ski course in the world.”

Durrance’s course down Warm Springs was first used for the 1939 Harriman Cup downhill. It was not the fast, open course it later became, but “was more like a Giant Slalom with 24-inch fir trees as control gates,” Durrance said. The run was open for skiing the winter of 1939, with snow tanks transporting skiers to the top of Baldy. The Warm Springs course was greatly improved the following summer by C.C.C. crews led by Alf Engen, who made it wider in places and cut out the scattered trees in the middle of the trail.

In 1939, Sun Valley hosted the third annual Sun Valley Harriman Cup Invitational Open and the National Four-Way Championships where entrants competed in downhill, slalom, cross-country and jumping. The Harriman Cup was awarded for the best skier in the downhill and slalom.

The race attracted the foremost skiers of a half dozen nations. The Warm Springs course, said by Ski School Director Friedl Pfeifer to be one of the five most difficult downhill courses in the world, was in excellent shape after a week of daily packing by Sun Valley’s instructors.

It was a timber trail about two miles long, but different from most, for although the average width of the trail itself was probably 50 feet, the undergrowth and small trees for another 50 feet on each side had been cleared out, offering a choice of either swinging down in linked turns or cutting it straight through the open timber with only an occasional check in open spots. The top portion was most difficult due to considerable side hilling and being very rough and crooked.

Eight control gates in this stretch added to the strain on legs but also to the safety. Next came what the German boys called a “steilhang,” or steep pitch, about 300 feet long, 100 wide, and quite reminiscent of the Leavenworth, Wash., jumping apron except that an abrupt turn enforced by heavy timber commenced right where the “dip” should have been. From there, the course was a dream of sweeping turns, interrupted just ahead of the finish line by a sharp right curve on the outside of the hill and below a temptingly smooth schuss.

The course was far more interesting than the old course on Boulder Mountain, requiring considerably more skiing but still a fair test. Control flags slowed skiers down on the steilhang, a steep slope where considerable turning was required.

The rest of the course was left wide open and was certainly skied wide open, as the best men were cutting through the trees on almost every corner in the lower half and running it practically without a check.

The girl’s start was just above the steilhang.

The steilhang presented problems for many skiers in 1939. Austrian Tony Matt, Friedl Pfeifer and Dick Durrance were the smoothest at this point. Hannes Schroll, an Austrian teaching skiing at Yosemite, Alf Engen and others who did not check their speed “came to grief,” and there were many “severe crackups.”

Schroll caught an edge and went down in a series of somersaults in full layout position. Norway’s Reidar Andersen fell near the start, dislocating a shoulder and missing a pair of control gates in the spill. Toni Matt won the downhill, getting his first big American win on “a difficult 2.3-mile course that left a heavy toll on hurt and disqualified amateurs.”

Austrian Peter Radacher. a SunValley ski instructor, took second and Switzerland’s Walter Prager, the Dartmouth College ski coach, was third. Austrian Siegfried Engle, a ski instructor at Yosemite, was fourth, and Friedl Pfeifer fifth. Dick Durrance, “who did not have time to practice, was out of the running for the first time. Still, he finished sixth--the highest true amateur.

Swiss skiers Erna Steuriand and Nina Zogg finished one and two on a course only half as long but just as trying. The women, like the men, finished after bad spills that brought bloody noses and gashed faces.

Friedl Pfeifer won the slalom. Said ski Instructor Otto Lang: “Pfeifer’s first run in the slalom was of such superiority, elegance and ease that he can rightly be called the ‘Nijinski on skis,’ whereas his second run was a masterpiece of cool-headed judgment.”

Radacher finished second and Durrance third—again the highest finishing true amateur followed by Engl and Robert Blatt. Alf Engen won the jumping event on Ruud Mountain, followed by Gordon Wren of Steamboat Springs. “Little” Pete Radacher won the Four Event Combined Championship, recognized as the best all-around skier in America.

Walter Prager was second. Durrance won the Amateur Four-Way competition, and was third in the Open Four-Way competition. Engen was fourth.

Radacher also won the 1939 Harriman Cup. Pfeifer was second, Siegfried Engl was third; Durrance, fourth; Prager, fifth, and Toni Matt, 6th.

Filmmaker Warren Miller recounted Durrance’s 1939 downhill race: About halfway down the Warm Springs course, Friedl Pfeifer cut seven turns on a steep hill that were narrow and twisting, requiring racers to make abrupt turns to miss the trees which served as control gates.

Racers tried to straighten the course as much as possible to keep their speed by skiing close to the trees. Durrance, looking for a faster line through the turns, figured if one tree was cut down, he could straighten out all seven turns and gain significant time.

The day before the race, Durrance and a friend climbed up Warm Springs and sawed down the tree that opened Dick’s secret shortcut. To hide their handiwork, they cut down a smaller tree and propped it up where the tree had been removed. The day of the race, they learned Durrance’s race order, his friend hid in the trees and, when Durrance’s turn came, he removed the tree so Durrance could take his short cut.

He replaced the tree after Durrance got through. But, while Durrance got through the trees in control, he was skiing so fast that he missed the last turn at the bottom of the course and skied into Warm Springs Creek, missing the finish line. He climbed out of the water and fell across the line and was later fined $2 by the Forest Service for chopping down a tree without a permit.

In Durrance’s oral history, he confirmed the story but said it was legal under the rules, as you could choose your own course in those days, and he was always looking for shortcuts.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Learn about some of the exciting Harriman Cup races over the years in Saturday’s Eye on Sun Valley.

More about the history of Sun Valley and Wood River Valley can be found in John W. Lundin’s books, Skiing Sun Valley: A History From Union Pacific To The Holdings, and Sun Valley, Ketchum and The Wood River Valley. His website is https://www.johnwlundin.com/.