WHITEFISH, Mont. (AP) -- Back in the days of fur climbing skins on 8-foot hickories, back when a ski lift consisted of lifting one foot in front of the other, skiers weren't skiers unless they were yumpers, and yumpers weren't yumpers unless they could yodel.
Whitefish writer Jean Arthur has spun together the yarns of the yodeling yumpers, weaving in words and pictures the historic fabric of the ski industry.In the early days of skiing the West, she writes, there was no ski industry at all -- except the industry required to slog up miles of powdery mountain. On the way down, few made turns; rather, they soared above treetops, launching in dangerous arcs from long, smooth jumps curving from the face of the mountains.
Many jumped, Arthur said, only because they didn't know how to turn.
The Europeans who put ski jumping in the headlines of the 1920s often were Norwegians who worked summers as woodsmen or miners, but had time to kill in the winter months. Their 12-foot "skeys," or "skees," or, later, skis, sometimes were simply called "Norwegians."
The jumpers, or yumpers, as they pronounced it, were considered a somewhat crazy bunch, Arthur said, and crowds of more than 2,000 often would hike more than two miles up a mountain to watch them tempt fate.
"Ski jumping was skiing. Downhill skiing was for sissies." So said Otto Lang, an Austrian made famous by his 1936 book, "Downhill Skiing." By the time he went to print, apparently, it was OK to be a sissy.
Lang is one of many characters in Arthur's second book of downhill history, "Timberline, and a Century of Skiing on Mount Hood," published last year. Her first book, "Hellroaring: Fifty Years on the Big Mountain," won praise and awards as a chronicle of skiing's history across the West.
"Most of the big-name yumpers came through Mount Hood," Arthur said, "and quite a few came through Montana and the Big Mountain. They were a pretty rugged bunch who liked a good time."
The ski jumpers, she wrote, came with heavy Norwegian accents and even heavier handmade hickories, defying gravity, as well as a few other laws. Prohibition, it seems, had little to recommend it for the mad yumpers.
In the words of Norwegian jumper John Elvrum, they were "often of the hard-drinking crowd. They were often rowdy and behaved like a bunch of ruffians."
In some ways, not much has changed, Arthur said. "Can you imagine the outcry if the Big Mountain mowed down the Beirstube?" she asked.
The bad-boy reputation of the early days was, no doubt, part of the appeal that enticed thousands to wade through miles of cold and wet to watch the yumpers fly. Reports of daredevil jumping at the first Winter Olympics in 1924 in Chamonix, France, further fueled the public interest.
And during the Depression, with nothing better to do, out-of-work immigrant loggers and miners continued trudging into the woods every day. But with no work, they played instead.
Throughout the 1930s, American ingenuity met European yumping, and before long skiing was within reach of nearly everyone. One of the most important inventions was the releasable binding, Arthur writes, which was imagined by Hjalmar Hvam as he lay in a hospital bed, recuperating from a third broken leg.
It was 1937, and Hvam had snapped his leg while cornice jumping on Mount Hood. For the man who uttered, "To live and not ski is a sad life," the Portland, Ore., hospital bed must have seemed especially confining that winter.
And so he asked his nurse for paper and pencil, Arthur said, sketching the first draft of the safety release binding. Within two years, he had stamped patent No. 2236874 on the new Hvam golden cam toe binding releases, and was advertising under the slogan, "Hvooming with Hvam."
Hot on the heels of his invention came the first tow rope, converted from a Model-T (economical, but very tricky, said one early skier -- "There were lots of near strangulations by scarf or hair."). Finally, in 1936, came the chairlift.
The first chairlift, Arthur writes, went up at Sun Valley in Idaho. The notion for the single-seater came from engineer Jim Curran, who adapted the idea from the banana-bunch loaders of South America. Some say ski clothing manufacturers have kept alive those origins, squinting against the bright yellows and greens of today's sartorial statements.
These and other inventions made skiing possible for those who did not count themselves among the group dubbed "crazy Norwegians." Soon, Arthur writes, America entered "a proper era of skiing when instructors wore wool suits and neckties, often Austrian boiled wool jackets with leather lapels."
This Camelot of the slopes, however, hit bottom with the onset of World War II. Gas shortages and a more serious national mood stalled many Western lifts, and it wasn't until the mid-1940s that skiing was back on track.
Many U.S. soldiers returning home had been taught skiing while in Europe, especially the veterans of the 10th Mountain Division. On returning to America, now able to turn as well as jump, they ushered in racing as a replacement for yumping as headline fodder.
"The evolution of skiing is the evolution of the West," Arthur said. "You can't write about ski history without writing about immigrants and the Depression and the war and timber and mining and the great push to develop the West."
That development took off in earnest following the war, she said, and ski lifts began popping up across the Rockies, Cascades and Sierra Nevada. The Big Mountain near Whitefish played host to the National Championships in 1949, helping to further popularize skiing in the West.
But some say the biggest boost skiing ever enjoyed was a wee bit of fabric known the world over as Bogner Stretch Ski Pants.
"The gals skied because they knew they looked good in Bogners, and the guys went because they knew it, too," Arthur said. "Never underestimate the power of stretch pants."
Bogners were soon competing for the market with other ski pants, and Hollywood was not far behind. By the 1970s, skiing broke the billion-dollar mark in America, and the hickories were long-since relegated to their crisscrossed spot above the mantle. Skiing turned into a freestyle lifestyle, and the rich and famous landed in places like Aspen and Vail to see and be seen. For many, skiing took a second chair to fashion, and fashion included trophy homes on mountain real estate.
Where skiers once hiked three miles to make a few turns, they now glide in for double at the ski-up latte bar.
"Can you imagine how far skiing has come?" Arthur asks. "We have snowboards and snowbikes and tubing hills and they didn't even have bindings that released."
And today, when the $7 billion American ski industry has little to do with the industry and hard work of climbing mountains, few can yodel, Arthur laments, let alone yump.