BY JOHN W. LUNDIN

In 1939, competitors had to hike for three hours up Baldy to reach the start of the downhill course for the prestigious Harriman Cup. In 1940, competitors were able to ride to the top of Baldy on a series of three chairlifts that had been installed for the 1940 ski season.

The 1940 Harriman Cup featured the first downhill in America on a course that met F.I.S. qualifications that was served by a ski lift.

Averell Harriman was a proponent of skiing on Bald Mountain, and the success of the1939 Harriman Cup downhill convinced him it should be opened for general skiing. For the1940 season, Harriman had the chairlifts installed to the top of Baldy on the River Run side and new runs cut, significantly expanding Sun Valley’s skiing.

Nelson Bennett and Otto Lang ski Sun Valley. COURTESY: The Community Library

During the summer of 1939, a crew of ski racers from Washington, Idaho, Utah, Oregon, Colorado, Nevada and Dartmouth College joined ski school instructors in creating the new runs. They worked on Warm Springs, living in tents near the steilhang. They thinned trees above the open traverse and steilhang and cut a new section on the upper part of the trail leading toward the ski lift on the top of the mountain. Crews also cut new ski runs on other parts of the mountain.

Alf Engen directed a C.C.C. crew that cleared a trail down Warm Springs that was “maybe 90 feet wide.” The 250-man C.C.C. camp was located out Warm Springs Road on what is now Lower Board Ranch. In his oral history, Engen said they used two-man handsaws—no power tools--and the course was cut from the bottom to the top.

The crews left stumps on the run as it was hard to get the C.C.C. boys to cut down low.

Friedl Pfeifer helped mark the trees to remove--he had a good eye for a downhill course. Fred Joswig, who worked for Alf Engen, said in his oral history, that Engen laid out the ski trails, designing the proper twists and turns and contributed “more to Bald Mountain’s development than anyone I know.”

This diagram shows the 1939 diagram detailing where Sun Valley’s early ski lifts were to go. COURTESY: The Community Library

Engen’s crew smoothed the surface of the trail from the steilhang down to the finish, cleaning out the stumps so you could almost ski down on the grass, as it “closely resembled a four-lane highway for skiers.” Another crew built a horse trail to the summit.

The first of the three chairlifts installed on the River Run side of the mountain started at the bottom of Riverside Run, elevation 5,947 feet, and was 3,792 feet long. Its loading area was east of the Big Wood River, so skiers rode over the river on chairs. The second lift began at 6,554 feet, was 3,776 feet long and went up to the Roundhouse station.

The third lift began at the Roundhouse station at 7,876 feet elevation, was 3,976 feet long and ended at Bald Mountain summit, elevation 9,200 feet. The trip up Baldy took 22 minutes on chairs that had brackets on which skiers could rest their skis.

The lifts could carry 426 skiers per hour going 2.5 miles at 6 miles per hour. The chairlifts greatly expanded the skiable area on Baldy which, according to VanGordon Sauter in his book “The Sun Valley Story,” “opened the crown jewel of Sun Valley’s winter resort activity and arguably the best ski mountain in the world.”

This summer Sun Valley Resort constructed a net tower that will hold safety netting on Lower Hemingway and Greyhawk for the 2025 World Cup Finals. COURTESY: Sun Valley

“Baldy is insistent, with a constant, steep pitch that produces burn from top to bottom,” he wrote. “Interminable to some, exhilarating to others, it is a mountain that has hosted the world’s skiing royalty.”

Dick Durrance’s downhill course down Warm Springs was used for the second time in 1940 after it was widened and more trees removed. The 1940 Harriman Cup will always be known as the time Durrance schussed the steilhang at great risk, winning the downhill and causing a sensation that was discussed all over the country.

An article in the Sun Valley Ski Club Annual Report said: From the easy starting point...almost everybody went practically straight to the top of the steilhang, but one approached the steilhang with very great speed if one had not checked on the traverse. Very few who did not check could hold their turns on the hang and many severe crackups resulted.

Hannes Schroll, Alf Engen, Max Muller of Switzerland, Richard Werle and many others came to grief on the steilhang. But Durrance, with iron nerves and the inspiration of genius, flew into the steilhang with absolute full speed on a 40-foot jump, turned down the slope, shouting to himself, “Too fast! Too fast!” Obviously unable to check or turn, he bounded down the slope in about three jumps, his skis leaving only intermittent tracks, and tried to grind around the corner into the woods running 70 miles an hour.

Jack Reddish, a Sun Valley ski instructor, was a fierce competitor when it came to the Harriman Cup. COURTESY: The Community Library

Unable to hold on the hard-packed, icy snow at the bottom of the hang, Durrance skidded in his turn up near the woodpile on the far side of the gully and actually went over a small pine tree. He kept his nerve and his skis pointed downhill and by a supreme effort threw himself forward up onto his feet again without in any way slacking his speed. From there on, eyes popping and feet wide apart, he cut every corner as closely as it could be cut to the finish, which he approached with such terrific speed that he flew off the course on the last turn and wiped out a few spectators.

Scrambling to his feet quickly, he lost only about 15 seconds and finished with a time of 2:56:1...it had not been thought possible to run under three minutes.

In his book “Man on the Medal,” Durrance said he was determined to go fast until he got to the top of the steilhang, then decide whether to check: “And, when I got there, I just said to hell with it, I’ll go straight into it. The moment I hit, I realized I was sinking in a foot deep, and there wasn’t going to be any turning--there wouldn’t be a turn at all. I was heading straight down.

“At that point I do remember the fear of God sweeping over me, and I started talking to myself: Whoa, this is too fast. I was cussing in German and English. This is bad, I’m in trouble. But there was no choice, I had to take it straight.”

At the bottom, he had too much speed to make a 90-degree turn into the finish flat.

“I slid over into the crowd that were roped off...and I know I crashed into a whole mess of people and stuff and really got stuck there.”

He missed the finish line, went through a roped-off area, taking out a hot dog stand and ending up with the spectators. His skis did not come off, he got up and raced back to the finish line, taking about 15 seconds, but still won the race.

The Hailey Times of March 28, 1940, said Durrance shot down the steilhang “like a cannonball and flew into the air as he hit a bump,” taking it “at express-train speed.” He turned at the bottom with one ski in the air. “A slip there might have ended the story of Dick Durrance. How he did it no one knows, but he did it.”

The New York Times reported Dick (Little Man) Durrance sped down the steep mountainside “apparently without regard for life and limb...Veteran followers of the sport said that never in the history of skiing in America or abroad has a man performed so riskily and yet maintained such control.”

Durrance was first in the downhill, becoming National Downhill Champion, and second in the slalom, losing to Sun Valley Ski School Director Freidl Pfeifer, putting them in a tie for the Harriman Cup. However, race rules said first place went to the winner of the downhill so Durrance won the combined title and the Harriman Cup while Pfeifer retained his National Slalom title.

At the 1940 Harriman Cup banquet, Averell Harriman said, “Never ski like that again, Dick, never ski like that.” This was Durrance’s third Harriman Cup victory and he was given permanent possession of the trophy. Christian Pravda is the only other three-time winner of the Harriman Cup, having won it in 1953, 1956 and 1959.

In 1941, in a “novel” experiment in the history of the Harriman Cup races, the downhill was held on the River Run side of the mountain, following the chairlift line from the top of Baldy, instead of using the traditional Warm Springs course. This received a divided response from the racers but was popular with spectators whose best vantage point was around the Roundhouse station where they could see skiers negotiating the traverse heading into Canyon, known as “the place for thrills and spills.”

Warm Springs is a difficult course demanding utmost technical ability and high-speed turn control. It is also a longer course, more tiring and exhausting. The Ridge-Canyon-Riverside run is a 100 percent speed course with hardly a turn in it.

From the top of Baldy the course follows the towers of the chairlift with slight deviations, practically pointing down towards the valley in a beeline. The most difficult is the steilhang, now called Rock Garden, above the Roundhouse station and the crucial traverse.

The racers entered this traverse with full speed and the problem presented was not to check too much, not to tire the legs out and to keep low and as close as possible to the trees on the left-hand side when rounding the curve at the Roundhouse station to schuss the Canyon. The Canyon was taken straight without the slightest suggestion of a turn by the majority of the field, meaning the contestants drop approximately 3,200 feet in two miles or a little less.

The final two-tenths of a mile of the course has been eliminated because of snow conditions, and it’s all “fast business.” Sigi Engl won the downhill, racing with his trousers bound tightly with string to diminish air resistance, followed by Friedl Pfeifer. Dick Durrance finished tenth--10 seconds slower than Engl.

The women’s downhill started just above the steilhang and competition was stiff. One of the girls spilled going into the Canyon Run proper Thursday morning and it took her 28 seconds to “slither” to the bottom of the run. It took the top-flight racers about 20 seconds to ski it. That’s how steep it was.

Gretchen Fraser won after taking Canyon “in the rather unorthodox but obviously profitable Durrance manner--a wide snowplow at full speed.” Nancy Reynolds, skiing for Sun Valley, was second.

Sun Valley closed in 1942 for World War II, serving as a Naval Rehabilitation Hospital during the war, and did not reopen until December 1946. After the war, the Harriman Cup downhill course alternated between Warm Springs and River Run until 1950 when what became the standard course was developed on River Run. That included Exhibition, a steep mogul run that challenged most racers.

In 1947, the downhill course for the Harriman Cup and the Olympic Tryouts for the 1948 Games was on Warm Springs, where the course was reportedly “fast and treacherous.” Jack Reddish, a young Navy veteran skiing for the Alta Ski Club, led the field with what was reputed to be some of the finest skiing ever seen in a Harriman race.

Reddish won the Olympic tryout downhill race on the Warm Springs course, finishing in 2:35.2, beating the course record set by Dick Durrance in 1940 by 20 seconds, who traveled between 60 and 65 miles an hour down a trail, not an open slope.

Amazingly, 17 of the 38 racers smashed the 7-year-old Warm Springs standard. Even Durrance was surprised, since in his time there were no control nor direction flags as there were in this “thrill-packed test,” said the New York Times.

Reddish’s feat demonstrated the advances that skiing has made in this country. He bounded out at the most feared point, the ever-dangerous steilhang—a 3,100-foot pitch of more than 40 degrees about one-half mile after the start--and took the fall line high, not even bothering to throw in a quick check.

For the 1948 Harriman Cup Race and National Downhill, Slalom and Combined Championships, Ski School Director Otto Lang set a downhill course on Warm Springs that required two turns on the steilhang—reportedly, two of the most pleasant and exciting high-speed turns ever to test a racer’s skill. This was the last Harriman Cup downhill to be run on Warm Springs.

In 1949 Ski School Director John Litchfield set a different downhill course for the Harriman Cup to better challenge the racers, moving it back to the River Run side. Litchfield’s course was 2.3 miles long with 3,000 feet of vertical drop, and was “one of the toughest and most exacting on this continent...a real test by any standard.”

Litchfield said the Warm Springs course was suitable in its time, but the 1948 Olympics changed things. Sun Valley’s answer was the Olympic course that went down Ridge, Rock Garden (where Litchfield placed control gates), into Roundhouse Slope and then down a schuss onto Olympic.

Racers were sent onto the “Meadows,” a bumpy, open slope that took them to the steilhang, an “ugly-looking pitch, longer and steeper than its counterpart on Warm Springs” and through gullies into the bottom funnel of Olympic where the Ski Patrol had engineered a fantastic series of bumps, designed to throw the least unbalanced runner on his ear. It was impossible to recover between them; you simply had to ride them out.

The finish, after a long right turn, was a short distance down River Run.

In 1950 the F.I.S. World Ski Championships were held in this country for the first time. The Nordic World Championships were held at Lake Placid, N.Y., in January and the men’s and women’s Slalom and Downhill World Championships were held at Aspen, Colo., in February. The events brought the world’s best skiers to this country to compete.

Most of the racers came to Sun Valley for two major races after Aspen: The Harriman Cup March 4-5 and the National Downhill and Slalom Championships March 25-26.

“Never has the Harriman Cup field seen so many superb International skiers—11 nations represented in all,” wrote Lang in the Sun Valley Ski Club Annual. “The courses were magnificent and they were raced by the brilliant field in a flawless manner. Both slalom and downhill were witnessed by more spectators than had ever before crowded in to watch a race at Sun Valley.”

Given the rare treat, Lang designed a downhill course giving every competitor the opportunity to display his formidable prowess in competition. The Warm Springs course, once a severe test and highly respected racing trail, had become somewhat obsolete in its present shape. It was fearfully fast but didn’t offer any challenges from a technical point of view, as most racers took it plumb straight.

Olympic was “a superior run in many ways,” Lang said, but it had a flat spot after the Roundhouse slope which was frowned upon by the international racing community. Lang wanted a new downhill course to offer “a supreme test of speed, stamina and technical chicaneries.”

He incorporated Exhibition into the downhill course, to “provide the piece de resistance,” which also offered excellent spectator opportunities. The course was foot-packed by the Ski Patrol, instructors and employees.

Exhibition presented a major challenge, said ski racer Dick Dorworth. The precipitous run, which bristled like a hedgehog with jagged bumps, got its name because skiers coming down it could exhibit their skill and daring to riders on the chair.

“Exhibition’s unrelenting steepness over a distance makes it America’s most formidable mogul run today,” Dorworth said. “You may gasp at the idea of someone schussing straight down it, but world champion Emile Allais did so, and America’s daredevil Mad Dog Buek once did it 10 times in succession, cartwheeling in spectacular crashes more often than not.”

The River Run downhill course was 1.8 miles long, with a vertical drop of 3,000 feet. It started on top of Baldy, followed the upper section of the lift line, then went straight over the hump to the Roundhouse corner, which required two exacting high-speed turns in the narrow passage.

Skiers then went under the chair at the Roundhouse onto a traverse leading to Exhibition, where four control gates guided racers into the prescribed line down the treacherous Exhibition slope. At the bottom of Exhibition, the course joined River Run. The women’s downhill course started above Rock Garden and went down Canyon, finishing on River Run.

One of the greatest highlights of the Harriman Cup races run over the years came in 1950 when Austrian’s Hans Nogler--the “Clown Prince of Skis”--won the event, beating the great international stars of the day, including Zeno Colo, Jean Pazzi, Georges Schneiger, Olle Dalman, Francois Baud, Toni Matt and Christian Pravda.

When Zeno Colo cut a magnificent schuss down exhibition for the fastest time, the crowd went wild. Nogler shaded the Italian avalanche to snatch the downhill crown and on the following day ran two superb slaloms to capture the combined and win the 1950 Harriman Cup. He later became an instructor at Sun Valley.

Eighteen-year-old Andrea Mead became the youngest racer ever to win the women’s Harriman Cup that year with “a spectacular, calculated and well-nigh perfect run” in the downhill and “an outstanding display of first-rate skiing and competitive spirit” in the slalom. “She had no peer that day in sheer determination, fairly burning up the course with her locks flying in the wind like a possessed creature.”

After 1950 In 1951, in a break of tradition, Sun Valley hosted the Olympic Tryouts in Downhill and Slalom for the 1952 Games in Oslo, Norway, a year before the Games, instead of the same year. The physical requirements of skiing are such that it is necessary to select the squads a full year ahead of time, said officials.

This led to one of the most exciting weeks in Sun Valley’s history. All during the week the nation’s foremost skiers had been working out on Baldy’s famed terrain, threading their way down slalom courses and executing practice runs for the Downhill. The tenseness that pervaded the contestants was beyond description, for a place on the Olympic Team is the dream of every American racer. The eyes of the entire skiing community were focused upon Sun Valley and upon the 40 men and 20 women readying themselves for the big test.

Five days of snowfall before the Downhill made for exceptionally rough going in the practice sessions. The snow led to injuries to two of the West’s brightest lights--Seattle’s Jack Nagel, who the week before captured the National Combined Championship at Whitefish, Mont., and Ketchum’s Jimmy Griffith, generally regarded as one of the greatest downhill racers of all time. The sidelining of these two favorites was keenly felt by the local fans.

The men’s downhill started at Baldy’s summit and went down Roundhouse slope and Exhibition. The 1.6-mile course dropped 3,000 vertical feet with 11 control gates, including six on Exhibition, permitting a line that was “fast and fluid but commensurate to the racers’ over-all ability.”

Jack Reddish “cut a perfect line down through the gates and roared into the flats at close to 50 miles per hour,” winning the downhill, followed by Dick Buek who like Reddish had “the best understanding of Exhibition’s exacting requirements.”

The highlight was Darrell Robison from the University of Utah, who finished seventh after he almost lost his pants on Rock Garden. Dick Dorworth said Robison finished the downhill despite breaking the belt on his pants coming off Exhibition and finishing the toughest downhill in America in his underwear with his pants piled around his boot tops.

The crowd loved it. How high he might have placed had he worn a belt is a matter of conjecture, although many observers maintained that his near calamity may actually have saved him a second or two since it served to keep him hunched forward over his skis.

The 1951 Harriman Cup came one week after the Olympic Tryouts at Sun Valley, with the downhill course held on the River Run side. Rudy Matt set the men’s two-mile downhill course on River Run with a 3,000-foot vertical drop.

In 1952, the downhill was again held on River Run, where men skied down Exhibition on a course set by Barney McClean to challenge the best of them. The bottom two-thirds of Exhibition was “one long, whistling schuss,” according to Sun Valley publicist Dorice Taylor.

The women raced down Canyon. Ernie McCullough, from Mont Tremblant, Canada, skiing for the Sun Valley Ski Club, had the greatest run of his career as he won the downhill by six seconds, the largest spread since the war.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second of three articles looking at the Harriman Cup—Sun Valley’s prestigious downhill race in the years leading up to the 2025 World Cup Finals at Sun Valley. The first ran in Eye on Sun Valley on Friday, Nov. 22. The exciting conclusion will run Saturday, Nov. 30.

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/.