It was late on Christmas morning in 1963 that I was riding up old No. 2 T-bar at Sugarloaf with little Kathy French, the daughter of Dick and Bev French, who together managed Harvey Boynton’s Ski Shop next to the base lodge.

It was a crisp December day, and we were treated to a few inches of fresh powder on the trails. As we chatted, I asked Kathy, “Did you get everything you wanted for Christmas?” Her response still resonates after all these years. “I got everything I wanted and some things I didn’t even know I wanted!”

For us skiers and boarders, the experience that awaits us daily on the slopes of Maine is not only everything we’ve always wanted. It’s more than we could even have imagined in our wildest dreams, as we maneuvered our bear-trapped, long-thonged wooden 210’s over sparsely covered trails topped with hardpack, after waiting a half-hour to ride up on a slow T-bar, clad in wet wool that barely protected us from the cold.

If we ever needed absolute and irrefutable evidence that “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus,” it’s abundantly clear to us every time we head for the mountains.

First, Santa figured out that there was a better way to get us to the top of the mountain than hanging on to a wet, heavy rope tow or slipping off an ice-covered T-bar. Why not transport skiers in the air, he thought, seated in a fast-moving comfortable chair? Or even inside an enclosed gondola or bubble chair? Eventually he figured out a way to make the uphill trip move even faster and easier by detaching the chairs for unloading and loading and reattaching them for the rest of the trip.

Then, thought Santa, if we’re going to get more people up the mountain, more rapidly and comfortably, let’s see if we can guarantee that they’ll have perfect conditions on all the trails.

Rather than depending on Mother Nature for snow, let’s see if we can manufacture it ourselves. One of Santa’s elves, my old friend Joe Tropeano, who owned a golf course irrigation company, along with ski area pioneer Walt Schoenknect who owned Mohawk Mountain in Connecticut, figured out a way to to make snow with compressed air and water forced through a nozzle — or something very close to it.

Once he’d perfected the technology to produce man-made snow and the ability to start covering the slopes as soon as freezing temperatures arrived and to refresh the surfaces throughout the season, Santa turned his attention to developing the machinery to groom the trails so that every morning skiers would have perfect corduroy, free of blemishes and moguls, so they could take easy, ego-building runs.

Then, recognizing that some skiers and boarders wanted greater challenges, he convinced area operators to open up off-piste and glade skiing, and to leave some trails mogul-filled for those of us who still like to test our skills on natural terrain.

Having answered our prayers about lifts and trails, Santa surprised us all when he decided that snowboards were another great way to enjoy the delight of sliding down the side of a mountain. For those of us who ski, we’ll be forever indebted to him for the day in his shop at the North Pole when he came up with the idea of adapting the parabolic shape of the board to the ski.

Genius! This innovation produced shorter, easier-to-maneuver skis, which followed his earlier experiments in release binding technology that eliminates about as close as is humanly possible the risk of severe injury. The day he left a helmet under the tree for me at our house has allowed me to survive a couple of tree-related encounters that could have proven to be disastrous.

Finally, only Santa Claus could have come up with the idea for Gore-Tex, and a whole new approach to keeping us warm and comfortable in lightweight, waterproof, fashionable apparel.

Thank you, Santa, and Merry, Merry Christmas to you all.

See you on the slopes!

John Christie is a former ski racer and ski area manager and owner, a ski historian and member of the Maine Ski Hall of Fame. He and his son, Josh, write ski columns on alternating weeks. John can be contacted at:

jchristie@fairpoint.net

 

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