Brian Lindner has delved into the history of the Mount Mansfield Ski Patrol, which he has been a member of for more than 50 years. Photo courtesy of Brian Lindner On a March day in 2015, ski patrollers near the summit of Mt Mansfield received an urgent call: A skier two-thirds of the way down th e mountain had suffered a heart attack. The man had been standing, talking with a friend, when he collapsed. A Sugarbush ski patroller, who happened to be skiing at Stowe that day, witnessed the man fall. When he got to him, the man had no pulse and wasn’t breathing. The ski patroller administered CPR and phoned for help. Within four minutes, two Mount Mansfield ski patrollers had not only reached the scene, but had defibrillated the man.  Brian Lindner remembers the scene vividly because he was part of the second wave of ski patrollers who responded to the scene that day. It turned out that Lindner knew the stricken skier, though he didn’t recognize him at the time. The man survived and later told Lindner: “If I’d dropped in the airport or a mall, help would not have gotten there that fast. I’d probably be dead. Just thank God I collapsed at a ski area.” The story speaks to how far ski patrols have come in America since the first one was founded 90 years ago. That first patrol was the Mount Mansfield Ski Patrol, the same one that Lindner has served on for more than 50 years.  Brian Lindner is by nature a digger. When he takes an interest in something historical, he wants to learn all he can about it. In addition to being the leading expert on the history of the Mount Mansfield Ski Patrol, he’s also an authority on aviation history in Vermont.   In his ski research, Lindner discovered a pair of firsthand accounts of an incident in 1933 that triggered the formation of the Mount Mansfield Ski Patrol. The two men wrote up their recollections decades later, and neither mentioned the other by name, just stating that another man was there, which leads Lindner to infer that they had had a falling out in the intervening years. One evening in 1933, Craig Burt and Frank Griffin were eating dinner at Ranch Camp. Burt was a lumberman and Ranch Camp was the logging cabin he owned near the base of Mount Mansfield. Burt had recently opened his rustic camp to the growing number of people, like Griffin, who wanted to ski down the mountain’s sole trail, the Toll Road, which had been cut from base to summit in 1850. There were no lifts or rope tows; hiking up was part of the experience. As a result, a full day’s skiing might only be two runs.  The amenities available at Ranch Camp were basic. It was simply a large room with bunks arrayed along the walls and a woodstove in the center, but it offered skiers a bed for the night and a hot meal. The specialty was baked beans. Mount Mansfield Ski Patrol Director George Wesson works beside an Army surplus switchboard in the patrol room near the top of Stowe’s original single-chair lift. In the background, an old dynamite box is being used for storage. Photo courtesy of the Brian Lindner Collection On the evening in question, a man stumbled into the cabin, exhausted and upset. He’d been skiing with a friend when the other man had crashed and apparently broken his leg. (Lindner believes it was probably a broken ankle. Skiers in the era wore ankle-high leather boots, akin to hiking boots, which were attached to skis with “bear trap” bindings that had no release mechanism. When skiers fell, their skis stayed with them and frequently caused ankle injuries.) Whatever bone the injured skier had broken, the situation was serious. He’d already been lying in the snow for a long time before his friend reached Ranch Camp and by then the sun had already set. Bruce and Griffin knew they had to get the man down off the mountain. Easier said than done. “Everybody’s looking around like, ‘Well, how the hell are we going to do this?!’ ” Lindner explains. Ranch Camp lacked any kind of mountain rescue equipment. Burt and Griffin were going to have to improvise. Needing a way to get the man down the mountain, they found of large sheet of corrugated metal—the kind used for roofing—and bent back one of the short ends. They punched holes through the corners of the curved edge and ran rope through the holes. Voila, a makeshift toboggan.  With kerosene lanterns to light their way, they headed out to find the injured skier. By the time they reached him, he seemed half frozen to death. Having not brought anything to serve as a splint, the rescuers arranged the man on the sled with his head facing downhill and his injured leg hanging off the end. They made their way down the mountain and took the man by car to a clinic in Morrisville, arriving around midnight.  Ski patroller Betty Ware photographed at a toboggan cache in the mid-1940s. Women first joined the Mount Mansfield Ski Patrol during the 1930s, but it wasn’t until 1976 that they were allowed to drive the toboggans. Photo courtesy of the Brian Lindner Collection The incident highlighted an idea that seems glaringly obvious today: If people were going to gather to ski, some of them were occasionally going to get hurt, so skiers needed to organize a way to respond to those injuries.  The solution was coming, but it would take a year to arrive. That fall, the prospect of skiing in Stowe got a significant boost from a well-positioned booster. When President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration launched the Civil Conservation Corps (CCC) to undertake public works projects in the nation’s forests and parks, Vermont’s State Forester Perry Merrill saw an opportunity. Believing that attracting skiers to Vermont would help the state’s economy, he pursued federal officials to authorize the cutting of a new ski trail in Stowe by CCC workers. Work began on the Bruce Trail in November 1933.  The following January (1934), a group of skiing enthusiasts banded together to form the Mount Mansfield Ski Club. As part of its articles of incorporation, the club founded the Mount Mansfield Ski Patrol, the first organization of its kind in America.  During the 1950s, it was common first aid practice to give patients cigarettes, which were believed to calm the nerves. Photo courtesy of the Brian Lindner Collection (Some people credit another group, the Schenectady Winter Sports Club, for being the first to have “boots on the ground,” Lindner notes. The club offered first aid to injured skiers in March 1934. However, it wasn’t a “patrol” that actually patrolled. Injured skiers had to make their own way to a first aid station set up in a train car near the base of Gore Mountain in New York.)   The Mount Mansfield Ski Patrol started as an all-volunteer organization, but it would have standards. By the start of the 1934-35 ski season, organizers required all ski patrollers to have Red Cross First Aid Certification.  The work was challenging. In the early years, Lindner says, most injuries were probably reported at the base of the mountain and patrollers would have to hike up with gear, including a toboggan, if they needed to perform a rescue. This issue was partially alleviated when Al Gottlieb, supervising forester for the CCC camps in Waterbury and Stowe and later director of the Mount Mansfield Ski Patrol, arranged for CCC workers to build toboggans and little wooden huts to cover them. The mountain eventually sported about 50 of these toboggan caches, which also held some basic first aid gear.    Mount Mansfield Ski Patrol member Willis Barrows talks on one of the EE-8 Army surplus field phones that were installed at caches around the mountain in Stowe. Barrows wears a surplus 10th Mountain Division first aide fanny pack; above him is a toboggan, which was also surplus from the division. Photo courtesy of the Brian Lindner Collection The ski patrol faced a serious test in 1938. That year, organizers of the national skiing championship decided at the last minute to move their competition to Mount Mansfield; it was the only place with enough snow to hold the races. With the country’s best skiers on hand, Stowe would be in the spotlight. But with no radios or telephones to rely on, members of the Mount Mansfield Ski Patrol, led by Charles Minot Dole, devised a system of signal flags to communicate about injuries along the two-mile course. Dole also organized where patrollers would be stationed and first aid gear would be staged.   The system worked so well that when Roger Langley, president of the National Ski Association, spotted Dole standing across the slope from him, he walked over and asked Dole to help him create a national ski patrol, based on the Mount Mansfield Ski Patrol model. Dole accepted. Thus was born the National Ski Patrol. Dole served as the national organization’s director until 1950. National Ski Patrol members still serve nearly every ski area in the United States. So, in a sense, the National Ski Patrol owes its creation to a series of events that began with that incident of the skier with the broken ankle. Some people have said that Dole himself was the skier who Burt and Griffin rescued on that night in 1933. It makes a great story, tying Dole to both ends of the story’s arc. And Dole did, in fact, break his ankle in a fall on the Toll Road. But, Lindner says, Dole’s painful fall actually came a couple of years later. As the popularity of alpine skiing grew, so too did the pressure on the Mount Mansfield Ski Patrol. In 1940, the ski area installed the first chairlift in Vermont. Spanning more than 6,000 feet, the single-chair lift was also the longest in the world. It proved to be a major draw. Mount Mansfield Ski Patrol director Erwin Lindner, seen here skiing the Nose Dive trail in 1946, was a 10th Mountain Division veteran and Stowe’s second paid ski patroller. He was also the father of longtime ski patroller Brian Lindner, who has documented the history of Stowe’s ski patrol. Photo courtesy of the Brian Lindner Collection “This is where Perry Merrill, Commissioner of Forestry in Vermont, comes back into the picture,” Lindner says. “He’s looking at Mansfield and thinking ‘We’re carrying thousands of people up on state land, turning them loose on the summit to ski down, and you know some of them are going to get hurt.”  So Merrill approached the leadership of the Mount Mansfield Company, which ran the ski area, and asked how they were going to create a more robust ski patrol. Company executives replied that they were short on funds, having spent so much to build the new lift. Merrill told the company to go ahead and hire its first paid patroller—since the ski area was on state land, the state would cover the cost. The company recruited Fritz Kramer, an Austrian ski champion. The job came with free housing and a great view. Kramer lived atop the mountain in a stone warming hut that had been built by the CCC, and would ski down to the base periodically for supplies and a shower. After World War II, veterans of the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division helped fill the patrol’s ranks. The 10th Mountain Division had been the brainchild of Dole, who lobbied the U.S. Army to create an infantry division capable of fighting in mountains, and in cold snowy weather. Skiing skills were a prerequisite, so Dole helped recruit many avid skiers to join the unit.  After the war, the Mount Mansfield Ski Patrol purchased Army surplus field telephones and strung miles of wire all over the mountain. It was now possible for patrollers to communicate from base to summit, and even to most of the toboggan caches.  The Mount Mansfield Ski Patrol has of course continued to evolve as technology has improved.  Today, ski patrollers communicate mostly by radio. When an emergency call comes in, the dispatcher at the summit can communicate simultaneously with all patrollers on duty to determine who is closest to a skier in need. Where it used to take hours, help now arrives in minutes. And that can make all the difference. Read the story on VTDigger here: Then Again: In Vermont, the oldest ski patrol in the country. ...read more read less