When it comes to skiing, ignorance of Canada’s influence on the sport’s modern development is overdue for correction. Although you’d scarcely know it from US ski periodicals and histories, the multitude of ski schools, uphill lifts, and lodges now scattered across North America are descendants of a thriving community and ski industry that existed in Quebec’s Laurentian Mountains during the first half of the twentieth century.
Quebec’s legacy includes the world’s first ski movies, filmed there in 1902. The Edison Manufacturing Co. made Skiing in Montreal and Skiing Scene in Quebec a dozen years or so after the company produced an apparatus for filming and projecting motion pictures (a genuine first for the United States). Americans view the Dartmouth Outing Club and Dartmouth Winter Carnival creator Fred Harris as trailblazers of US alpine skiing, but Harris got his idea for the Dartmouth Carnival after attending Montreal’s annual Winter Carnival in 1908. Five years later, McGill skiers invited Dartmouth skiers to the village of Shawbridge (today Prévost), Quebec, for North America’s first intercollegiate ski competition. My own Red Birds Ski Club, founded in Montreal in 1928, is North America’s oldest downhill club, and a Red Bird, George Jost, was the first North American to win a significant international alpine race in Europe.
weekend getaway
The logistical challenge of transporting people from town to the mountain turned out to be a no-brainer. As in Europe, the means was already there: trains. The Canadian Pacific Railway scheduled the first weekend service for skiers from Montreal to the Laurentians in the winter of 1927. Thousands of skiers bearing wooden skis piled onto trains headed north. Not until 1931 did the first US ski train run out of Boston, carrying skiers who’d likely travelled earlier on the Laurentian line.
Compared with driving or flying to reach a ski resort, the coal- and steam-driven train ride was an exotic voyage of camaraderie, booze, and seduction. No canned music emanated from hidden speakers; instead, revellers supplied their own rhythms, singing, “She’ll be skiing down the mountain when she skis” to the tune of “She’ll Be Coming ‘Round the Mountain” and rounds of “Bonhomme, bonhomme, sais-tu jouer? ”
Arriving at a Laurentian village, skiers were greeted by horse-drawn sleighs waiting to transport them to second homes in the hills and on the shores of a hundred frozen lakes. As a child, I can recall boarding a sleigh and crawling into the heavy warm folds of a bear’s hide. “Allez,” cried the driver, the horses pawed the snowy ground, and the sleigh creaked into motion. Outside of Ste- Agathe, we glided onto Lac des Sables, the harness bells ringing with a faster tempo as the horses picked up the pace. Peering out from a childish aperture I’d fashioned in the bearskin blanket, I could glimpse an indigo arch of twinkling stars filling the clear northern sky.
more thrills
Early alpine skiers had to climb the mountain before they could enjoy the experience of speeding downhill. Hunched over their skis, they made wearisome, plodding steps that left a pattern in the snow resembling a giant herring’s skeleton. The climb was slow and arduous, limiting even the hardiest to three or four descents a day. Skiers wanted more thrills per hour.
In Europe, the problem had been solved by using summertime cog railways and funiculars to transport skiers to mountaintops. In North America, where no such infrastructure existed, the cheapest solution was to pull people uphill on a continuously running rope. It happened first in the Laurentians. In 1931 at Shawbridge, ski jumper Alex Foster of Montreal cobbled together a Rube Goldberg-style contraption: 730 metres of rope on pulleys attached to telephone poles and wound around the tireless wheel of a four-cylinder Dodge sedan mounted on cement blocks. Foster cranked the engine, the wheel spun, the rope moved, and the skier grabbed hold with mittened hands.
Comments