The Tennessee Governor Who helped Popularize one of the South’s Best Nordic Ski Spots
Editors note: A version of this article appeared in the March-April 2025 issue of Skiing History magazine.
As governor of a southern state, Lamar Alexander was nobody’s guess to help spread cross-country skiing into the Southeast in the 1980s.
Granted, southern governors in the 1970s and ‘80s (and since) have promoted downhill skiing, but Alexander took it a step further, striding off into the natural snow of Nordic. In the process, he helped popularize what is still today one of the region’s best Nordic ski sites.
A big part of that story is Roan Mountain, among the East’s highest peaks at 6,285 feet. Just a few feet shorter than Mount Washington, New Hampshire, “the Roan” towers on the Tennessee and North Carolina border more than 4,000 feet above foothills. That orographic lift delivers 130-plus inches of annual snowfall, making Roan the epitome of the surprisingly snowy Southern Appalachians. The mountain’s renowned summer rhododendron bloom is a highlight of the Appalachian Trail.
Gov Alexander
Discovering the “Southern Heights”
By the late-’70s, ski resorts in North Carolina were attracting crowds and locals started exploring peaks loftier than the downhill mountains. More annual snow falls on some of those summits than sifts down on Buffalo, New York. Roan is one of them.
In the early 1980s, that inspired local Nordic skiers based in Boone to form High South Nordic Guides, rent skis and guide ski trips. They established the southernmost Nordic ski school in the East, training with what was then EPSTI (the Eastern Professional Ski Touring Instructors), and later, Nordic PSIA (the Professional Ski Instructors of America).
Ultimately the Guides—Steve Owen, Jeep Barrett, Ken Johnson, and others—were spending so much time at Roan an idea emerged: Why not propose a base of operations below the mountain at Tennessee’s Roan Mountain State Resort Park? Heck, why not create a cross country ski resort at the park?
Newly elected Governor Lamar Alexander had just dedicated the park in summer 1980, complete with modern cabins.
Formality would be needed for the state to get involved. The park was intended to bring tourism to Appalachian East Tennessee, but prominent locals were key in urging the governor to create a Nordic program.
The Crowds Arrive
By 1982, a Nordic concession at the park was approved. Enthusiastic crowds arrived, attracting attention in regional newspapers, then national magazines. Between the Guide’s rental inventory of 400 pairs of skis, and hundreds more at other shops near Boone and Banner Elk, Roan became a Nordic hotspot.
A free-for-all ensued. A blizzard of media coverage attracted a horde of winter users, creating a dangerous gauntlet on the snow-choked summit road where pedestrians (mostly skiers) found themselves dodging careening cars, four-wheelers, even snowmobiles.
The Guides Get Help
Luckily, as an official state park concession, the Guides’ savvy principals partnered with the US Forest Service to manage winter recreation. The agency defused a dangerous situation by gating the road to keep vehicles out and prioritize foot traffic. With mortised vehicles banned, the snowy road across Roan’s crest, and miles of adjacent trails, again offered “Nordic Nirvana’ to skiers.
The Guides were permitted to use a few USFS maintenance and visitor contact structures for safety purposes like distributing summit ski maps, caching rescue gear, offering advice, and even emergency shelter when needed.
People stepped up to help. Herb Roberts, the regional supervisor of Tennessee State Parks, and superintendent of a nearby Revolutionary War park, often volunteered to lead ski tours on Roan in free time from his own park.
Roberts’ nearby park, Sycamore Shoals, not far away in Elizabethton, Tennessee, preserves the mustering ground of the “Overmountain Men,” a patriot militia that in 1780 marched across the Roan Highlands in “shoe mouth deep” September snow to win a pivotal victory against Tories at Kings Mountain, SC. The group’s lofty encampment near Roan, at nearly 5,000 feet, a site now popular with skiers, is likely the highest elevation military movement of the Revolution.
Touring the Governor
Publicity about Roan Mountain’s ski scene surged when Steve Owen got a call asking the Guides to lead Governor Lamar Alexander, his wife Honey, and a few officials, over the summits of Roan Mountain … and teach them to ski on the way. Owen knew he was in for a challenge.
Alexander credits local judge Ed Williams with the invitation. “Ed loved to ski and thought that if Honey and I came to ski, and the state park encouraged cross-country skiing, that would spark tourism.”
“I’ll never forget that epic blizzard,” says Owen. The state trooper driving the four-wheel drive SUV “did an amazing job driving through the waves of drifting snow.”
Despite the wild ride in bad weather, Alexander never thought the group was in danger, but as a politician, he may have had second thoughts. A few years earlier President Carter made news breaking his collarbone cross-country skiing on Camp David’s tame terrain, much less tackling the Appalachian Trail in a blizzard.
Change of Plans
Owen had “to choose Plan B for the tour,” he says. Instead of skiing a gradual gated road to higher trails, the Guides’ were forced into the sheltered north facing spruce forest to ski up the expert-rated, deeply-drifted, and still very popular Appalachian Trail. The wide, wonderfully skiable, albeit uphill trail, is actually an historic road grade that once ferried guests to a late 1800s summit hotel. Skied in the other directions, heading downhill, it’s one of the South’s classic telemark runs. Part way up, Owen’s group sheltered briefly in the now nearly century-old CCC-built cabin, the Roan High Knob AT shelter.
Recalling the tour, Alexander says he kept telling telling his wife Honey, “This is hard to believe!” It was the couple’s first time on Nordic skis, and “there was five feet of snow up there,” Alexander says. “I didn’t know we could even ski in snow that deep.”
At one point, lead guide Owen was breaking trail and Alexander said, “Hey that looks like fun, you mind if I try?” Owen let him, admitting, “I thought that was pretty cool.”
Lamar and Honey had tried downhill skiing years earlier and found that “hard for a beginner.” But “skiing cross country was easier,” Alexander said, “as long as you had a teacher and guide and were in decent shape.”
The Alexander’s were in shape, and to this day, High South Nordic Guides can take pride in bringing high profile beginners safely through a real challenge. “Talk about demonstrating the value of professional instruction,” Owen says, “which was, after all, the main mission of our entire enterprise.”
The Alexanders found the experience “beautiful and exciting.” Owen recalls, “They all just seemed to be up for an adventure, and boy, we had one.”
More Publicity
Literally as Alexander was “skiing the Roan” on Friday January 23, 1983, Tennessee Senator Howard Baker, Republican leader of the Senate and Nixon-era Watergate figure, was announcing he’d leave office the following year.
The media was swarming with speculation that Alexander would run for the seat. Owen knew local reporters “were determined to find out if the governor was at Roan. Our job was to keep it top-secret!”
Alexander’s ski trip leaked. A reporter showed up and found him “ruddy-faced and relaxed” after his ski tour. The next day, the story went national. Some papers ran the news with a photo of the governor and first lady “braving a raging blizzard and howling winds” skiing the Appalachian Trail. It was a media moment made in PR heaven for the governor, and Tennessee State Parks, the South’s increasingly famous Nordic ski site.
Alexander won an unprecedented second term as Tennessee’s governor and later served as senator from 2003 to 2021.
Skiing Winds Down
By the early 1990s, Alexander had moved on and the Guides were ready to do the same. “Our run was coming to an end with the state park,” says Owen. “Our personal energies were flagging after a great decade.”
Before giving up the concession, the Guides considered installing snowmaking at the state park, now a feature of teaching terrain at some Nordic resorts. The proposal got bogged down, so “the effort just sort of evaporated, went quietly, and we did too,” says Owen.
Roan Mountain remains a nationally significant destination for the South’s cross country crowd. The role Tennessee’s “Nordic Governor” and local enthusiasts played in that process is another example that it’s skiing’s true believers who help spread snow sports, in the South or anywhere else.
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Fun history, great article!
Thanks Randy for the great article. I will never forget the grace I was shown by Steve and Jeep Barrett those years I got to spend with them on the Roan. It was a great experiment and a great experience. I still use the skis I got from them when we get a good snow around Maryville, and in the Smokies. My family loves to get a cabin at Roan Mt around Christmas, and I always take my skis with me just in case we get a good snow while there, and it has happened a few times! Thanks again for the great article! I have your book also! Herb
Permit me to thank you both, Jonathan and Herb. Glad you enjoyed what I always thought was a pretty offbeat occurrence in the history of Nordic skiing. And you Herb were part of it! I am glad the folks at the park directed me your way in may latest round of fact checking and research. It also seems obvious to me that, as a serious Tennessee State Park professional, your presence up there with so many novices skiing was a very good thing and likely a real boost to the proper management of the recreation area. Cheers to you! And to Steve Owen and Jeep Barrett and others who brought “the Roan” to wider attention. To this day, those once young now much more “senior cross country skiers” are still a visible component of the folks seen skiing on Roan Mountain.