It’s no exaggeration to say that Nose Dive on Mt. Mansfield made Stowe what it is. Not just the ski area—or resort, as that’s what it’s called these days—but the skiing community and the energy that sustains it.
For a few decades in the middle of the last century Nose Dive was among the best known and respected ski descents in North America. Top American and international skiers—women and men—were crowned national and international champions at downhills and slaloms on the trail, from American Olympians Buddy Werner and Andrea Mead Lawrence to international stars Stein Erickson, Toni Sailer, and Jean Claude Killy. Lesser but no less important reputations were also made there. The Nose Dive was a standard by which all were measured. To have skied it was to have passed a test.
Nose Dive is modern Stowe’s first trail. Its original version—a sinewy track through the forest compared to the boulevard it is today—was completed in the spring of 1935. For four never-tobe-repeated seasons in the late 1930s the only way to ski down it was to climb up the mountain. It was an exhilarating and demanding feat, a prize unique in skiing at the time: a long, almost 2,000-vertical-foot flog on more than 7-foot-long, heavy wooden skis and lace-up leather boots, followed by an equally long, tricky descent on uneven, ungroomed snow.
It was a several-hours endeavor, usually a one-run day, although some were rumored to have accomplished two—or even three. The favored route started on state Route 108 and followed a path in the woods along the north bank of the Ranch Valley Brook. Skiers might have stopped for a drink at the cabin at Ranch Camp, where the early trail builders lived, before pushing on to the Bruce Trail. The first purpose-cut ski trail in Vermont, the Bruce snakes up through hardwoods before entering spruce thickets higher on the south-facing skirt of Mt. Mansfield. At its summit, then as today, it breaks into a rare clearing on the mountain’s thickly treed flanks, a little plateau at the threeway intersection with the Toll Road and Nose Dive.
The Toll Road was well established by the 1930s, built in the mid 1800s for horsedrawn carriages and improved in 1922 to make way for automobiles. It offered warm-season access to The Mt. Mansfield Hotel that once stood on the summit ridge. But in winter the road would have been covered in snow. From there to the north unfolds the most dramatic alpine view in Vermont: The dark cliffs and snowed-in bowls and chutes that form Mt. Mansfield and Smugglers Notch.
Arriving at this juncture, skiers could continue on a thin track up the Nose and ski the Upper Nose Dive. More likely they would have looked for a small sign on a tree, “The Nose Dive,” indicating an opening in the forest. The trail began as a slight, steep strip of snow down into a steep northeast-facing glade, dropping out of sight into a vast, forested valley. Once into it you were on your own, a tight, twisting, gladed ski adventure into the wilderness.
“The best skiing in the East,” The Boston Globe declared of Stowe in 1937 after locals added a rope tow at the Toll House. Indeed.
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The story of Nose Dive is the story of American skiing itself. How the sport took hold here in the last century and sparked exploration, development, and business. The run helped launch careers, growth, and innovation in the sport. Its evolution mirrors the evolution of the sport, from a moderately inexpensive wilderness experience for enthusiasts on rudimentary equipment to a glamour sport drawing the masses, open to anyone with the money and enough athletic skill to learn and excel—on all sorts of modern snow-sliding equipment.
More than anything Nose Dive launched Stowe skiing in the modern era and some say sealed its reputation forever. “The Nose Dive is a big part of the reason Stowe earned the reputation as the Ski Capital of the East,” Mike Leach, the historian for the Mt. Mansfield Ski Club, explained. Skiing began in Vermont in the late 1800s, and by the 1920s skiers had begun exploring the flanks of Vermont’s highest mountain. Skiing was taking hold in the European Alps at the time and there was a growing sense among Vermont business and political leaders that the sport could lift the state’s depressed farming and extraction-based economy.
Among them was lumber baron and Stowe businessman Craig O. Burt who was instrumental in launching Stowe’s earliest winter ski carnivals and encouraging the use of thousands of his acres around Mt. Mansfield for ski trails. On Mt. Mansfield, the Toll Road offered the easiest access, and its first ski descent was in 1914. But until Nose Dive was cut, skiing on Mansfield was largely limited to the Ranch Valley, much of which Burt owned.
The Depression was, ironically, a key spark in the creation of Nose Dive and other Stowe ski slopes. The Civilian Conservation Corps formed in 1933 as a federal volunteer public works relief program during the Depression, and a Vermonter and budding ski enthusiast by the name of Perry Merrill was put in charge of Vermont’s CCC. Immediately, he set CCC crews to work on building ski trails in Stowe. Merrill put an out-of-work engineer and surveyor—and an avid skier who had explored on skis around Mt. Mansfield—in charge of the crew in the Ranch Valley. Assisting Charlie Lord was another local skier, the surveyor, state highway engineer, and mapmaker Abner Coleman.
The CCC crews lived at Ranch Camp, a logging cabin Burt had fixed up as a rustic ski lodge. In the winter of 1933-34 the CCC men began by connecting Ranch Camp to the Toll Road. Named for a lumberjack that had worked the area for several years, the Bruce Trail was finished and first skied in February 1934. The Bruce was a stepping stone. The aim was always the other side—the entire area where the ski area has been developed—where trails did not yet exist.
A few years before his death, Charlie Lord described to Waterbury ski writer David Goodman how he and Abner Coleman hiked up to where the Bruce ends and Nose Dive would soon begin.
Goodman recounted: “As they peered down toward Smugglers Notch, Coleman exclaimed, ‘God, that’d be a nice place to ski, wouldn’t it?’ Lord nodded his agreement, and the two plunged down the mountain. ‘We spent many trips up and down the mountain laying out the Nose Dive,’ Lord remembered. ‘We probably changed it a half-dozen times. The original trail was a lot narrower and a lot rougher.’”
With local resident Albert Gottlieb in charge of the CCC crew, work began on Nose Dive in 1934 almost immediately after the crews finished the Bruce. Completed in the spring of 1935, Lord himself is recorded as the first person to ski the Nose Dive.
By then well-to-do skiers from New York were finding their way to Vermont and poking around Stowe for lodging, ski guides, and adventures. Among them was the New Yorker Roland Palmedo, an investment banker with an entrepreneurial spirit and a hunger to find and create the best skiing.
When the Mt. Mansfield Ski Club held its first ski race on The Bruce in 1934—the club formed in 1933—it took on Palmedo’s New York Amateur Ski Club. The club effort was led by Burt himself and its stated mission, set down in the bylaws, was a paean to the sport: “to provide, maintain, and improve skiing facilities in the Mt. Mansfield region of Vermont; to assist members in obtaining the most enjoyment from these facilities; to further the technical skill of members; to promote ski competitions; and, generally, to cultivate an interest in skiing.”
The club wasted no time. Racing was the pinnacle of the sport back then, and nothing demonstrates this more than the club hosting its first race on the Bruce on Feb. 11, 1934, just days after the trail’s completion. It was an inter-club challenge: Vermont’s Mount Mansfield Ski Club against Palmedo’s New York friends from the Amateur Ski Club of New York, which Palmedo himself had formed a few years before and was another driving force behind Vermont skiing (credited with the launch of Mad River Glen).
The race went from the summit of the Bruce to its base. Jack Allen of Burlington won in 10 minutes and 48 seconds. Lord was second, Burt Jr. third. A few weeks later the club held another, bigger race on the Bruce. Dartmouth skier and internationally ranked Dick Durrance won the day by more than a minute.
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Once Nose Dive was finished, racing moved there. In rapid succession, Nose Dive hosted a series of the most influential races in North America, drawing much press and public attention and further driving skiing’s expansion on Mt Mansfield.
The February 1937 Eastern Championships, in which Jack Durrance beat his older brother, Dick, drew such a huge crowd that “it took till midnight to untangle the traffic jam at the mountain,” Stowe Mountain Resort historian Brian Lindner recalled. Thousands threaded up the Mountain Road to the dead end at Smugglers Notch. Parking was limited, and the weekend of the men’s races in March led to what Lindner said in his written history of the mountain as “probably one of the three worst traffic jams in Vermont history. It took weeks before the last car was freed.”
In March and April of the next year, 1938, Nose Dive hosted its first national championship. In attendance were European greats of the era who were the standard by which the world’s best racers were measured.
The race marked the emergence of Americans in the ski racing world. Dick Durrance captured second place, behind a German ace but ahead of the best Swiss, Austrian, German, and Norwegian competitors.
Racing then looked nothing like it does today. The narrow trail—barely 25 feet wide in some sections, was ungroomed, with bumps, trees mid slope, and other obstacles. The downhill race was a summit-to-valley-floor event, with few gates. Instead, the natural terrain and forest guided racers to the finish.
The downhill was literally a nose dive. In a 1992 article about famous ski trails, The New York Times would report that it “was considered one of the most difficult trails in the world.”
The start was placed near the Nose of Mt. Mansfield itself. Racers would come flying down the track still visible today above the Toll Road and make a high-speed turn left into the “Cork Screw,” which consisted of seven steep, sharp turns in the spruce forest. Then, over the course of a mile, came the Corridor, a glade named the Strainer, the Upper Schuss, Shambles Corner where the run took a hard right turn, Lower Schuss, Skid Way, and finally, Gulch, which remains to this day.
Due to the equipment and the challenging snow conditions “one thing about these races back then … you would probably do pretty well if you could make the whole run without falling,” Leach said.
Race organizers were prepared for accidents. The ski club had, in 1934, established a ski patrol, and placed toboggans along the run should racers need to be hauled off the slope. Those and other safety efforts relied on local volunteers and others from newly formed ski patrols in Massachusetts and Burlington.
The patrol effort was coordinated by New York skier Charles Minot Dole. Dole himself knew all too well the necessity of on-mountain rescue services: when he’d fallen on the Toll Road in 1936 and broken his ankle it took the Stowe patrollers hours to get him off the mountain. It wasn’t until well after dark that he was brought to the road for transport to the hospital.
With Dole on that ski outing was his friend Franklin Edson. In a tragic twist, Edson died later that same season from injuries after careening off course in a race on a wooded trail near Pittsfield, Massachusetts. “Going through the strainer,” artwork from the Mt. Mansfield Ski Club newsletter, 1950.
Dole was near the bottom of the race on Nose Dive that March in 1938 when Roger Langley, president of the National Ski Association of America, walked over to congratulate and thank him for a job well done. Langley “basically said to him ‘Hey Minnie, this organization that’s here, that we are looking at, this Mt. Mansfield Ski Patrol is amazing, and would you take on the task of organizing a national ski patrol based on what we see here at Stowe?’ ”
Dole agreed, and thus was born the National Ski Patrol on Nose Dive’s Shambles Corner in the spring of 1938. Dole would not only go on to launch and run the national patrol organization but was instrumental soon thereafter in forming and recruiting for the 10th Mountain Division, the skiing troops who helped turn the tide against the Germans in Italy in World War II.
The races that spring of 1938 also sparked the push to construct Stowe’s first top-to-bottom lift. By then rope tows and surface lifts were appearing across mountains in the United States. But ski area chairlifts had only just been invented. Sun Valley leapt ahead with the first chairlift installation in 1936.
In Europe, trains had long transported skiers in the mountains, so it’s little wonder that the European racers were the loudest grumblers about the exhausting hike to the top of Stowe’s race courses. But it wasn’t only racers who had to make that trudge; every piece of equipment—gates, ski patrol toboggans, timing equipment—had to be carried up. That took time, which explains why race starts were customarily scheduled for mid-afternoon.
As president of the Mt. Mansfield Lift Company, Palmedo would be the one to pull together investors to open the single chair, “the longest chairlift in the world” in November 1940. Local investors included Ruschp, Lord, Gale Shaw, and Munn Boardman.
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The combination of the groundbreaking new lift on the highest mountain in Vermont, the succession of storied national and international races, the proximity to New York that brought avid, wealthy skiers keen to advance the sport, and the creation and continued improvement of the summit-to-base Nose Dive trail thrust Stowe into the American spotlight. Stories about the snow and skiing here appeared in newspapers across the nation. The noted broadcaster Lowell Thomas was so enchanted he would move and deliver his reports from Stowe in the winter.
“The foremost skiers of this country, Canada and Europe, including the Olympic champions crowned at Oslo, Norway, will participate in the Nationals to be held for the third time in the past 15 years in this part of the country,” The New York Times reported in January 1952 from Stowe. “A pioneering ski center long before the sport became popular in America, Stowe continues to make improvements on a large scale. The famous Nose Dive Trail has been extended another 500 feet, almost to the summit of Mt. Mansfield. This addition, completed a few weeks ago, now allows a vertical drop of 2,500 feet … thus meeting the specifications for national title races.”
Stowe was increasingly mentioned among a small and early constellation of revered American ski areas. Mountain towns, headlined by Aspen and Sun Valley, were attracting a glamorous crowd. Among them was “Nose Dive Annie.” Ann Taylor moved to Vermont with her first husband and taught herself to ski at Stowe in the 30s. Athletic and persistent, she mastered the Nose Dive when it was hike-only and was first in line when the single chair started turning. Stowe locals, Palmedo among them, coined her “Nose Dive Annie.” The moniker stuck.
Taylor’s exploits, coupled with her beauty and a unique fashion sense, were emblematic of the burgeoning Stowe. A model who designed her own clothing, she was featured in a full-page black-and-white photo in Harper’s Bazaar in 1941, shot at Stowe, shouldering a pair of wooden skis with bear-trap bindings. The article noted: “Mrs. James Negley Cooke, Jr., has become so closely identified with Mt. Mansfield’s crack ski trail that everyone calls her ‘Nose Dive Annie.’ She practically lives on it.”
Taylor made the American ski team in 1939, only to be thwarted by the war, then went on to become a civilian flight instructor to Navy and Army cadets—she learned to fly at the age of 12, then brushed up as an adult to become an instructor. After the war she continued to design and make clothing that she sold in her shop in Stowe and at the Lord and Taylor department store in Manhattan, where she had modeled. Taylor moved to Colorado in the late 1940s where she and her oil-man husband would become some of the founders of Vail ski resort.
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By the early 1940s the hugely wealthy, relentless entrepreneur C.V. Starr was in the orbit. The successful insurance magnate had big ideas, but he needed a knowledgeable skier to build them out. He found that in Austrian ski instructor Sepp Ruschp. Ruschp had been brought from Europe by the Mt. Mansfield Ski Club in 1936 to teach skiing. But, like Starr, he had bigger plans.
The two took hold of the lifts and various pieces that comprised skiing at Stowe and guided the ski area’s future, adding lodging, lifts, food and base services, and ski schools under one umbrella to create the resort that would resemble what we know now.
In those early days—the 1940s through the early 1970s—the best marketing was ski races. It brought the luminaries in the sport and the crowds to watch them. Racing, Starr learned quickly from Ruschp, would be how Stowe earned and retained its place as “Ski Capital of the East.” He spared no expense putting on the best racing shows in the sport.
What’s more, Nose Dive had something unique in the East. A great downhill. From the summit of the Nose to the finish, the course was a 2,500-foot descent that was long and complex enough for the longest, fastest, most dangerous of the three alpine disciplines. Under Ruschp’s guidance Nose Dive would be continually tweaked to make it suitable and safe for the discipline.
Extended for races in 1952, the trail was significantly widened to meet international racing standards for the 1966 Alpine International Championships. The notorious Seven Turns near the summit were turned into three wide turns, and the trail assumed the character that skiers experience today.
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“One of the biggest moments of my childhood was in 1957 on Nose Dive,” recalled Stowe logger, former innkeeper, and local raconteur Jed Lipsky. “I was 10 and I was spectating the American International ski races, and all of skiing’s greats were there.”
Lipsky had started skiing at Stowe at the age of five on visits with his family who lived in the Berkshires. “My parents loved to ski and they loved Stowe.” Lipsky joined the Mt. Mansfield Ski Club and competed on Nose Dive alongside future American champions. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s he thrilled at seeing Billy Kidd, “Jean Claude Killy, the Japanese Olympian Chick (Chiharu) Igaya, Hank Kashiwa, Anderl Molterer, American Jimmy Heuga, and locals Madi-Springer Miller and Marvin Moriarty. They were all here.”
“Emotionally, ski racing history in Stowe was very important to the joy and romance of skiing in the East, and the happiest memories of my life were as a kid in Stowe in the winter, which encouraged me to move here with my own children in middle age,” said Lipsky, who eventually moved his family to Stowe from western Massachusetts in 1999.
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“Although Aspen had the world championships and Squaw Valley the 1960 Olympics, we have held, over the years, more important races with international participation than any other area in the United States,” Ruschp wrote for the race program in 1966.
“Most important in all this is the part we play in making skiing a national sport … our big races have inspired many young athletes, some of which have made great names for themselves. For example, Billy Kidd, the best slalom skier in the world today. It is a long process to attain the fame, which now is Stowe’s in the sports world.”
For Kidd, an American skiing legend who grew up on Mountain Road and now is the director of skiing at Steamboat in Colorado, it all began for him chasing Anderl Molterer down Nose Dive on a training run in 1955. Kidd, at 12 or 13 at the time, kept up with the Austrian champion for six of the seven top turns until he lost an edge and skidded to a stop at the elder skier’s feet. Right then, he told the writer Peter Oliver, is “where I got hooked on the adrenalin of racing.”
The last major races on Nose Dive were the junior nationals in March 1967. Racing in that series were Olympians Hank Kashiwa and Vermont locals Bob, Barbara, and Marilyn Cochran, who’d go on to compete in the Olympics, and Vermonter and future U.S. ski teamer Ricky Skinger.
“I am not sure why no big races were held on Nose Dive after 1967. Perhaps the trail was no longer suited to (safely) hosting modern downhills,” explained historian Leach.
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The one race that persisted is the venerated Sugar Slalom. Held annually in April, the open race that launched in 1939 has forever marked the culmination of the Eastern racing season. It has attracted racers of every age and level, including members of the U.S. Ski Team after their seasons in Europe.
Everyone shows up as much for the competition as the fun. Coming as it does near the end of Vermont’s sugaring season, the finish area is something of a maple sugaring festival, with old-salt Vermonters boiling and pouring warm syrup onto the snow for everyone to lap up.
But now, even the Sugar Slalom is gone from the Nose Dive. Traditions die hard. When the Sugar Slalom moved to Gondolier, a slope with better lift access and easier access for spectators, “you would have thought it was akin to someone proposing that … the Mountain Company hire the Guvnor and his crew to paint the hill red, white, and blue in honor of some nebulous cause,” Stowe Reporter ski columnist Kim Brown reported at the time. “Mountain Company chief Hank Lunde was besieged with angry phone calls and irate e-mails, even though he had little if anything to do with the decision to move it.”
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Nose Dive today is a bit more milquetoast than in its racing heyday. But only a bit, and only if compared to its original self. Broad and buffed by grooming equipment, with snow cover assured thanks to man-made snow, the current trail nevertheless retains some of its original character.
It’s rarely called “The Nose Dive” anymore; only by the long-timeiest and oldest of locals, just the less distinctive Nose Dive now. But the thrill remains, as does the mystique.
When New York Times ski writer Janet Nelson, in 1992, polled expert and well-traveled skiers to name America’s legendary ski trails, Nose Dive was among the seven, along with Ruthie’s at Aspen, KT-55 at Squaw Valley, Corbett’s Couloir at Jackson, Exhibition at Sun Valley, Riva Ridge at Vail, and High Rustler at Alta. Nelson noted, however, that due in part to its modifications over the years, Nose Dive was no longer strictly an expert-only run like most of those others.
“Its charms are hard to pinpoint,” says Nick Paumgarten, who’s skied Stowe for 40 years and writes about skiing for The New Yorker and other ski publications. “It has an insistent and sustained pitch but is not so steep as to go bad in icier conditions. Except for the top bit.”
“It has a back door quality,” he continued. “It’s a bit of a snow magnet back in there. Plus, the way it widens out, making room for freshies.”
Plunging into Nose Dive—yes, it’s still a plunge at the top—you are these days entering a quieter nook in the mountain. After the initial steep pitch, Slalom Glade, cut in the 30s to a skier’s left where the trail widens, adds more hide-and-seek possibilities. But even picking up speed out on the broad, popular boulevard you can feel and see what drew Lord and Coleman and why so many people recognize that it’s Stowe’s signature descent.
Credits: New England Ski Museum; Mount Mansfield Ski Club (MMSC); Al Gottlieb/Karin Gottlieb; New England Ski Museum/Henry Sheldon collection; Winston and Patti Morris family; Brian Lindner; Brian Hutchinson; Mike Leach; Stowe magazine archives. (Thank you to Mike Leach, Brian Lindner, New England Ski Museum, and the Mt. Mansfield Ski Club.)