He was called the blind miner. At least that’s what Joe Arave, associate department chair of Parks, Recreation, and Tourism says. Arave is digging among his books and files looking for a misplaced bit of history while a man squinting at the glare of the snow looks up out of the photo below. The blind miner holds up two long skis in front of a hovel.
“Nobody really knows much about him,” Arave said.
What is known is this: The blind miner, along with other miners with moonshine in their guts and pistols in their pockets, brought skiing to Utah, and their strange hearts beat within the Marriott Library.
Among the many research volumes and literary tombs are pictures of dirty, broken men among the white, snowy mountains. Their lives are preserved like fossilized bone in the stories and pictures of the Ski Archives stored in the library.
It was mostly large men speaking in a belly-rumbling Norse tongue who shaped the hills and cultivated skiing, leading it from a simple means of getting around to the sport it is today.
But the history of Utah skiing can be said to begin when people started to care about it and began digging it out of skiers’ closets.
The archives began in 1989 with Sue Raemer and Greg Thompson.
“It was a great group of people to work with,” Arave said. “A lot of those people, they put in a lot of time and effort just to document the history of winter sport in the area.”
A grad student at the time, Arave said his job was to “go out and just collect as many oral histories as I could. Obviously it was necessary to do “on hill’ research.”
Once the researchers swept as much history from the mountainside as they could, they turned their attention to honoring those people who contributed to the sport of skiing.
“We set the criteria to be fairly constrictive so we don’t have 50 people on the stage,” Arave said.
These men and women will be honored on stage at the Ski Affair, an annual fundraiser, which takes place Oct. 16. Entrepreneurs, forest rangers, competitors, Olympians, coaches and many others have been honored this way.
If one were searching for a concise way to describe skiing in Utah, you could do so with two words8212;Alf Engen. He was named Utah’s Athlete of the Century in 1999. No matter the chapter you turn to, a photo of Engen grinning like a truant school kid will turn up. When ski jumping brought skiing into the competitive arena during the early 1900s, Engen was there playing tug-of-war with the record books against the rest of the world. He was there helping scout out resorts, coaching Olympic teams, fathering powder-skiing techniques, doubling for Hollywood actors, helping in avalanche rescue, inspecting winter combat equipment in WWII and helping in the early efforts to bring the Olympic games to Salt Lake City. His face appeared on a Wheaties ad, which sadly cost him a place in the 1936 Olympics. Engen was in some of the first ski movies, including “Ski Meister,” made by his brother, Sverre.
“There’s clips in that film that’ll practically bring tears to your eyes,” Arave said. “At the bottom of a turn, he disappears. The snow just goes right over top of his head, completely disappears, and comes up out of the turn. It’s just…it’s just awesome stuff.”
In some cultures you can die twice. The first death is the one we’re all familiar with. The second death comes when all record and memory of you passes. This is the more permanent of the two. Winter after winter melts off the mountains and historians try their best to document it. Historians themselves can be surprised at the velocity.
“I can’t believe it’s been 19 years since I started on the archives. I don’t know what happened,” Arave said.