PSIA-AASI

5.24.2010

The PSIA-AASI 50th Anniversary Project Blog: Passion in the Archives

Lakewood, Colo. (PSIA-AASI) - Last week, I drove up to Colorado looking for history. Diving into the immense archives, bookshelves, newspaper clippings, Super-8 and 16mm films, videos, DVDs, and heavy binders at PSIA-AASI’s offices in Lakewood, Colorado. Eating hot ribs at Efrain’s in Boulder. Listening to the trees sag under a wet mid-May snowstorm that snapped lilacs in the night.

Which all seemed appropriate, going back into the story of winter in America the way I was. Going back to that moment in 1961, in Whitefish, Montana, where PSIA was officially formed and American skiing issued its own Declaration of Independence.

It was at that moment that PSIA’s original board of directors – including Curt Chase, Max Dercum, Jimmy Johnson, Bill Lash, Doug Pfieffer, Don Rhinehart and Paul Valar – agreed to set the national standards for the promotion and certification of ski instruction in the United States. And in so doing, signaled that decades after the Austrian, Italian, Norwegian, Swiss, French, and German influences that first brought skiing to America had been assimilated, it had become apparent that the amalgamation of so many skills had created a brand new style of skiing: The American Ski Technique.

The infusion of so many cultures resulted in a mountain-based melting pot of alpine expatriation that mirrored the creation of America itself. On snow, that melting pot of styles boiled down to a clarity of methods and movement. Which is what the “Founding Fathers” of the PSIA set out to establish – a new standard of instruction that could be successfully applied from Alaska to Vermont, and would work whether you were skiing powder, moguls, or ice.

What they got was so flexible it also allowed for the easy assimilation of snowboard, nordic, and adaptive techniques. It encompassed terrain parks and tow ropes, and is just as relevant to beginners on boardwalk-buffed snow as it is in the backcountry, atop the wildest, windblown peaks.

Which made me wonder, looking at all those archival black and white photos in SKIING and the Salt Lake Tribune, if those early visionaries could have had any idea just how encompassing and complete their vision would become. Or, when I found the photo from the ‘70s of nearly 40 ski school directors from across the country – including Don Welch, my father’s good friend from Vail, or Pepi Stiegler, whom I worked for in Jackson Hole – how many American skiers and snowboarders would see the history of PSIA-AASI, and realize that they were really reading a story about themselves.

For more on the PSIA-AASI 50-50 Celebration, click here.

- by Peter Kray