STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

Juli Webb realized a dream come true this year, leading Sun Valley Resort’s annual Christmas Eve Torchlight Parade 60 years after she first started teaching skiing at America’s first destination ski resort.

But she’s not done yet, even as the 2024-25 ski season draws to a close. She’s writing a book about the Sun Valley ski school in the off season.

There are few better suited to capsulizing the history of the ski school than Webb. She started teaching at Sun Valley when the legendary Austrian ski school director Sigi Engl held command.

Juli Webb met her husband, who placed the snow marker at Webb Nursery, when he lived at the Lookout Restaurant, able to offer her some nifty moonlight skiing.

And she helped blaze the way for women to assume supervisory roles in the ski school and ski patrol.

Webb was introduced to skiing in the 1950s when she was 13 by her father, who had learned to relish the sport during ski vacations he and Juli’s mother took to Switzerland while living in their native England.

A wing commander in the Royal Air Force, he was stationed in Victoria, B.C., where Juli was born, when he was assigned to train young pilots. He became smitten with the beauty of the Pacific Northwest while training young pilots and moved his family to Washington where he thought his children would have better opportunities than growing up in the United Kingdom.

As soon as the children saw people skiing at Snoqualmie Pass, where their father would eventually manage the lodge, they could not be denied.

Juli Webb took part in a ski fashion show in 2023 when the International Ski Hall of Fame ceremony was held in Sun Valley.

“We joined the Seattle Mountaineers. I got as far as qualifying for junior nationals,” said Webb, who competed in her first ski race at 16 and tried out for the U.S. Olympic team at 18.

Webb had scarcely learned to snowplow when the family boarded the train that took them from Seattle down through Portland and over to Shoshone bound for Sun Valley.

“We boarded the yellow buses at Shoshone, and I kept saying, ‘Where are the mountains?’ My Dad said, ‘They’ll be there.’ We pulled into Sun Valley passing by the area where Hemingway School is and stopping near where the Y is. And it was magical--blue sky and dry powder snow. At Snoqualmie the snow sticks to your skis. Here, it blows off the skis.”

There were no grooming machines then like there are now so the Webbs would join a long line of patrollers and ski instructors at 10:30 in the morning and boot pack the snow in exchange for a lift ticket.

Juli Webb cherishes the time she spent with Carol Holding at Torchlight Parades over the years.

“For those coming on the train for the Learn to Ski Weeks, which lasted into the ‘80s, it was like a big weeklong party where the Ram Restaurant was Party Central after ski lessons were over and everyone lounged around the pool to get a suntan,” Webb recounted. “A lot of the singles who came to party ended up marrying those they met in class.”

Webb followed her two siblings to Sun Valley where her two brothers became ski patrollers and her sister, a ski instructor. She was 19 and one of just five female ski instructors when Engl hired her.

In those days, Webb said, ski boots were made of leather and there were no edges on skis. There were no children’s ski clothes and no Chapstick available for sale at Dollar Lodge, which was a one-room wooden shack.

Jimmy Stewart walked over every morning, and you could hear him before he arrived. Art Linkletter was always looking for the darndest things kids said.

Juli Webb tried out in the U.S. Olympic Trials at White Pass in 1963.

Female instructors were relegated to teaching on the flats where the Dollar Mountain parking lot is today. There was no need to park cars as everyone arrived by bus. When the ladies succeeded in teaching someone to stop on their skis, they handed them over to the guys.

“Averell Harriman commented in the ‘30s that men and women wanted male instructors so we couldn’t even teach private lessons,” Webb said.

But Webb couldn’t resist pushing the envelope. Eager to take part in the annual Christmas Eve torchlight parade down Dollar Mountain, she was told, “Oh no, girls are not allowed. There’s a lot of guys drinking Schnapps—it’s no good.”

But she wouldn’t take no for an answer. She enlisted the help of a few male instructors, who encircled her hiding her from the more traditional Austrian ski instructors, and she stuffed her pigtails in her hat.

Sigi Engl heard her talking at the top, but it was too late. She carried a propane torch down the mountain, and that act opened the door not only for other women to participate in the parade but also to earn equal pay and give private lessons.

“Sigi was a perfect gentleman—so nice to all of us. He always supported us. I wanted to be the first woman to qualify for the Pro Am team, and he said, ‘Go for it.’ And in the 1960s, he and I started the Ambassadors’ program, in which we handed out brochures to arriving skiers at River Run, then skied College greeting people and answering questions. Today, it’s known as the Yellow Jackets, or Guest Services.”

Webb has spent much of her 60 years teaching on Dollar Mountain where she was appointed children’s supervisor in 1974.

“I love seeing people make their first turn on this hill. And not just children--my mother-in-law from Wisconsin learned to ski at 70—she was determined to ski with her grandchildren.”

In the early days, Webb said, Dollar Mountain had a tubing hill, which gave kids a break from skiing. Bill Janss added the Quarter Dollar lift, and the Magic Carpet was a great addition, she said.

“When we had the rope tow, there were more kids on the ground than upright,” she said.

“I like Dollar because it accommodates the public and family so well. You can see all the way to the bottom. Stephan Kruckenhauser, considered the father of Austrian skiing, told us, ‘I’d give my right arm to have this mountain—separate from the big mountain—to learn so stress and fear is gone. This is a magic mountain.’ ”

Webb claims she even had a hand in the building of the luxurious Carol’s Dollar Mountain Lodge in 2004.

“I’d been after Earl Holding for years to build a new lodge. One day I spotted Earl and Carol dining on the patio and asked him again. And Carol turned to him and said, ‘Earl, you’ve been saying you’re going to do that for years. If you don’t build a new lodge, I’m going to divorce you.’ ”

Over the years, Webb said she’s seen some wild things. That includes a skier from Last Vegas who didn’t want to ride chairlifts so he’d have a helicopter take him to the top.

She recalls riding the old chairlift that went from the Roundhouse up Ridge with 4-year-olds in 1967 when the kids started yelling, “Teacher, look!” as a plane flew under the chairs.

People say it had to be Dick Buek (an Olympic daredevil and Sun Valley ski instructor), but it couldn’t have been because he was dead by then.”

Another time, Webb said she was at the top of the Mayday lift above the Seattle Ridge area when a plane zoomed in looking as if it were going to land.

“It was just a pilot and skier checking out Baldy, but they were within 200 feet from the ground,” she said.

Webb says she doesn’t think she and others of her generation would still be skiing today if not for the shorter shaped skis, which provide balance and stability that the old longer skis did not.

“It’s a night and day difference,” said Webb, who skis on Stockli skis, a ski popular in Sun Valley that is manufactured in Switzerland. “And the clothing is so much better, too.”

She has never tired of teaching skiing: “Look at Dollar--that’s where I get to work. It’s so beautiful. And Sun Valley has never lost its magic—everywhere you look is a postcard view.”

Webb ‘s efforts have not gone unnoticed. She was inducted into the Northwest Ski Museum and Hall of Fame in the winter of 2023-24. And equally gratifying was the opportunity to lead this season’s torchlight parade.

“I wanted to lead it in honor of Carol Holding. Who would’ve known she’d pass three days before?” she said. “Carol always loved to be at the parade with little bags of gingerbread cookies to take home to the kids.”

Webb said there were barely a hundred ski instructors when she started. This year 200 took part in the Torchlight Parade and between 300 and 350 instructors were available during the Christmas Holidays.

“There were nearly 60 females in the parade this year, including my daughter—Davina Webb-Walker. How sweet is that?!”