During WWII. The Navy sent my father to MIT and Cal Tech, and he spent every leave skiing.
Then the war ended. He made out rather well.
Here is his account of skiing Tuckerman's on wooden skis, leather
boots, as a first year skier:
"A few days after the lift failed my normal skiing in the spring of '44
came to an end. The leave ran out and I went back to school. In the
course of the season I had met several experienced Eastern skiers and
about the middle of June one of them invited me to spend a weekend on
Mt. Washington and ski Tuckerman's. I accepted without knowing what I
was into.
We drove up to New Hampshire on Saturday afternoon and parked where
the snow started. It was a several mile hike into an Outing Club
shelter where we spent the night. It had been a late season on Mt.
Washington and skiing at Tuckerman's had not really been good until
May. By mid June the snow was deep and great for skiing.
Sunday we got up at daybreak had a quick breakfast and headed up the
trail (Shearborne Trail?). We had really lucked out─it was a
cloudless, warm spring day. The original plan was to just ski the
headwall but we reach the base by
8:00. Since the weather was so good
and we were so early, we soon decided to climb to the top of the
mountain.
The first climb is up the headwall. A path had been cut on the right
side going between two outcroppings of rock. It was really a series
of steps cut in the snow─up a remarkably steep pitch. You carried
your skis across your back and used both poles to help keep your
balance. If you fell there was no way to prevent a slide hundreds of
feet to the bottom. We all made it but in my case it was just luck.
It was the sort of situation where you don't look up or down, just
keep climbing.
Once out of the ravine we put our skis back on and started the main
climb. The top of Mt. Washington is a volcanic cone [sic] and the
climbing was easy. One long uphill traverse after another. As we got
higher the rest of the Presidential Range came in view. The air was
clear and warm, the sky blue─as perfect a day as you could picture.
There was little wind and you climbed in your shirt and used lots of
suntan lotion. As I remember it took until
12:30 to reach the top.
We were given coffee by the men in the weather station and shown
around. They had few visitors and made us most welcome.
We ate lunch at the top and started down about
2:00. The snow was too
soft for me to really enjoy myself, but in such a setting I couldn't
complain. It took about a half hour to get close to the top of the
headwall. I wasn't at all ready for what happened.
Suddenly we were standing at the top of a cliff of snow. It look
straight down but I knew it wasn't. The rim stretched about a mile in
either direction, and the wall was uniformly steep. This is normal
for a cirque. I have never been so frightened in my life. The
descriptions of people looking like ants applied to those at the
bottom.
There was no easy way down─I might have stood in one spot for ½ an
hour looking for one but it was all steep. I finally decided that a
controlled sideslip might get me to a pitch I could ski on so I got
parallel to the hill and released the edge pressure a little. It was
like stepping off a waterfall. I instantly started moving downhill
much faster than I wanted to. When I tried to slow down the snow
around me started moving and I kept going just as fast. My last
resort was to lie against the hill which resulted in continued descent
of my patch of snow with me reclining in the middle. This lasted half
way down the headwall where we got to a pitch I could handle and I was
able to get back on my feet and ski down to the floor of the bowl.
When I left Stowe I felt that I was a fairly good skier. Tuckerman's
showed me how much I had to learn.