PARK CITY — My enduring memory of Stein Eriksen, the legendary ski champion who died Sunday at the age of 88, is of him carving turns shaped like 88s through uncut powder snow, using aspen trees as if they were slalom poles, on a mountainside that looked straight down onto Park City’s Main Street.
Then he’d turn around and do it again, and again, and again.
He had all the energy of a teenager. He was 54.
No skier gets it all, but Stein came close. Looks (he was, after all, Norwegian), great athletic genes (his father, Marius, won an Olympic medal as a gymnast and his mother, Birgit, started the first women’s alpine ski club in Norway), talent (he was the first person to do a full layout somersault on skis), glory (he won Olympic gold and silver medals in 1952 and three world championship gold medals in 1954), guts (as a teenager he defied the occupying Nazis and skied bootleg races in the mountains outside Oslo during World War II), smarts (he invented the reverse shoulder turn that revolutionized ski racing, not to mention that trademark somersault), and charisma (no less than eight American resorts hired him to be their ambassador of skiing).
But it wasn’t having the whole package that made Stein Stein — it was how much he enjoyed it.
“To think, my whole life, all I’ve done is play around in the snow!” he said during a conversation we had at his Park City home when he was 74.
Everywhere he went, he exuded enthusiasm. That was his real gift to skiing and to people. His infectious glee. It was what caused Boyne Mountain in Michigan to give him $10,000 to be its director of skiing — in 1952! It was why Sun Valley in Idaho then came calling, and Heavenly Valley in California, and Sugarbush in Vermont and Snowmass and Aspen in Colorado. Stein had more places after him than Peyton Manning.
Utah won the skiing equivalent of the lottery in 1969 when businessman Edgar Stern, who had just purchased Park City Resort, talked skiing’s first international superstar into moving from Aspen to become Park City’s director of skiing.
Stern and Stein, as it happened, were neighbors in Aspen, where Stern had developed a residential community called Starwood. When Stern bought the six-year-old resort in Park City he asked his neighbor if he would join him in his new venture by moving with him to Utah. All it took was a handshake over the fence.
Overnight, Utah’s stock in the ski world skyrocketed. The makeover of the Wasatch Back had begun. Everybody followed Stein. By 1974, the U.S. Ski Team relocated to Park City and skier days more than tripled.
Growing pains caused Stern to sell Park City Resort to Nick Badami in 1975, but he held on to 1,700 acres of an untouched mountain he still owned to the south and east.
Today, that acreage is Deer Valley, perennially voted North America’s No. 1 ski resort.
Eriksen followed his friend Stern to Deer Valley. In the winters of 1979-80 and 1980-81, as lifts were being built and runs cut, it was his “job” to show off the virgin terrain. A small log cabin was erected near where Deer Valley’s Silver Lake village now stands. On a regular basis, eight to 10 invited guests — members of the media, celebrities, politicians, prospective investors and others inside and outside the ski industry — were invited to come to the cabin, lunch on Steak Diane and ski with Stein.
For 132 days over those two winters, Stein showed off Deer Valley and Deer Valley showed off Stein.
“I remember very well the people who came for those tours,” said Stein during a reminiscence with Stern in 2006. “They’d go home and say they’d died and gone to heaven. Those 132 days really got us on the map.”
I count it as a fond memory that I got to be there for one of those 132 days — the day I watched an ageless Stein Eriksen float through the powder around the aspen trees. Then hop back on the snow cat so he could do it again.
Email: benson@deseretnews.com