Fit to Be Tied
Lord willing, this is my 66th straight year of skiing. But this is about one special memory with the Blizzard Ski Club of Minnesota in 1964, when I was nine. It is also about my dad, a PSIA Chief Examiner who skied well into his 70s, as I am doing now.
My parents were early flatland skiers in the Twin Cities just after WWII, after he had returned from active combat in Western Europe. He had enlisted in the 10th Mountain Division but became impatient for assignment and transferred to the 71st Infantry. As a kid he competed at a respectful level in jumping, which was really the only skiing done back then in our neck of the country. He decided to join the Minneapolis jumping club after visiting Sun Valley when he was just 12 years old, in 1936, and then fell in love with downhill skiing, too.
We had many family ski trips when I was a kid – the old single chair adjacent to Ruthy’s Run at Aspen was my first experience on a chair lift, at the age of seven. This is one of many stories I have written about the Adzick Family Alpine Skiing adventures, about a spring skiing excursion to Montana.
The Blizzard Ski Club had assembled 100 kids from in and around Minneapolis to take the train to Billings and ski Red Lodge Mountain, for a full week of corn snow, clear blue skies, new friends, goggle eyes and – for my family – my mother’s 40th birthday. The freedom we kids enjoyed was a celebration of life at its very best. I skied alone, not by choice, mostly by will and reckless abandon. By mid-week, the entire flatlander club was well equipped with mountain legs, including me.
George Adzick at A-Basin 1982 in Daphne style, a Bernard Altman sweater, jeans, Nordica Astro Bananas, and 210 Blizzards.
One afternoon, from a chairlift, I spotted a group of skiers making their way down the highest and most difficult terrain on the mountain, romping from one mogul to another. My privileged view triggered a deliberate pre-teen unraveling of my inner self.
As the tiny figures below expressed their joy of dancing with gravity, they braided past one another and through the trees, leaped the knolls and carved the fall line. Random movements separated their individual styles, but they would remain in formation, as if a squadron.
These men were the finest skiers I had ever seen, an eight-year-old watching a regiment of heroes rapidly moving downhill as I slowly ascended past them. The sounds of their skis on the snow added to this wave of splendor, brilliance and grandeur. I was overwhelmed.
“Dad!”, I shouted as they skied beneath my chair. I was the only rider on what may have been halfway to a never-ending ascent. “Wait!” I yelled down as I moved uphill away from them. Our paths had crossed. “Wait!” They all stopped, in an instant.
My dad looked up. I was in agony. Would he wait for me to join him? Would they all wait? Any of them? I twisted around to keep them in sight as the chair moved further away. Then, the unspeakable. The squadron of men I so desperately wanted to join, to romp with and braid with, to show my stuff, to keep up with, in a blink turned in unison down the fall line in real time. It was a portrait of magnificence, the rare beauty of elite christie in unison, for my eyes only.
They didn’t wait, and I had but one choice to take command of my destiny, to experience inclusion in this squadron of alpine masters, so I did it.
I worked my way to the edge of the moving chair and jumped 40 feet off. I hit the ground hard, luckily everything intact, and quickly pulled myself together to catch them. I pointed my skis down the mountain and thought of nothing but the coming glory of my gallantry.
I caught up to them and stopped with a hockey stop swagger. They stood motionless, seething, not a variation of expression on any face. And while by week’s end I would become a fixture in Blizzard Ski Club folklore, I was until then a shocking image, a paradox on skis, an undeniable liability.
They were fit to be tied.
George Adzick
Blizzard Ski Club
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Wow! You reminded me that my father had done some ski jumping up near Duluth, probably in late 40s or early 50s.
“God protects the young and the stupid”.
Been there, got saved by that more than once in my stupid years!
Ah…..Blizzard ski club in the 60’s. I skied with Blizzard in 1965-66 as a 15 year old but didn’t continue the following year, when I elected to purchase a Buck Hill Season pass for the price of $25! Those were the days
Where are you from? Edina…St. Louis Park?
Hi George.
Remember Pine Bend ski area?
Bob Boyd here.
Suicide Run!… big jump and dangerous rope tow powered by an old truck on top. Had to be on your toes… next door neighbor in EP was an investor, they’d get over there both days of the weekend all winter. I’d jump in their station wagon on Sundays from time to time. What I mostly remember of Rine Bend other that Suicide Hill, was that it always seemed to be sunny there!
Great story – really enjoyed it! Reminds me of the stories Warren Miller used to write for Ski magazine back in the day.
that was a GREAT DAY George!
What a beautiful article! It brings back so many memories of that day and many others with all those GREAT mentors of mine!
Thanks for the memories!