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New England's first brush with alpine skiing as we think of it today came in February 1933 on New Hampshire's Cannon Mountain. Skiing in one form or another had been around in North America for quite awhile--as early as the 1790's in Alaska, and more widely in the 1870's in mill towns where Scandinavian immigrants settled. As the 1920s turned to the 1930s, however, a new form of skiing characterized by shorter skis (though seven foot skis hardly seem shorter today, they qualified then) and techniques from the Alps for turning on skis took hold. One of the early strongholds of the Arlberg technique, named for its Austrian origin, was Peckett's-on-Sugar-Hill, an inn near Franconia.

Katharine Peckett, daughter of the innkeeping family, became enthused about alpine skiing and convinced her father to open the inn in winter and engage several Austrian instructors. The new winter activity proved an instant success with a high-end group of socialites, and the open meadows around Peckett's became the ski fields where the elite learned to stem, once they had performed their daily on-ski calisthenics to the satisfaction of the Austrians. Opportunities for ski trips beyond the pasturelands were limited to a few mountain carriage roads like those on Mt. Washington, Moosiluake, and Mt. Willard. Russian expat Duke Dimitri of Leuchtenberg, one of the Peckett's instructors, took notice of this, and cast his eyes upward to the heights of nearby Cannon Mountain.

The Duke had led a full life before he arrived in Franconia. The son of a Russian nobleman, he graduated from prep school in St. Petersburg just as the Bolshevik revolution broke out. After a series of narrow escapes, first from St. Petersburg and then as a White cavalry officer, he found a home in Bavaria and in the 1930s, wintered in North America. Inspired to create more substantial ski terrain than he found in Franconia, he scouted and laid out a ski trail dropping 2,000 vertical feet from the summit of Cannon through the dense forest to Franconia Notch.

During the summer of 1932 Katharine Peckett spearheaded a drive to raise funds from Franconia and surrounding communities for the construction. Bazaars and events were held, locals contributed funds, and a crew was hired to cut the trail following the Duke's markings. Construction took place in the summer and fall of 1933 on land owned by the State of New Hampshire and by the heirs of Richard Taft, the builder of the Profile House. Taft had established that Franconia Notch grand hotel in 1852 near the site that would one day be the valley station of the Aerial Tramway. The fire that destroyed the Profile House in 1923 led to the purchase of the Franconia Notch property by the State of New Hampshire.

By mid-February 1933 enough of the Richard Taft Trail was in place to allow the first descent by Sig Buchmayr, a charismatic and acrobatic Austrian instructor at Peckett's. Stumps and rocks protruded from the snow, though, and when the first competition was held on February 19, a full one-quarter of the field did not finish what was called "a death ride" and "an obstacle course." "The first results appeared to be extra patients for the Dartmouth Hospital," wrote ski trailblazer Carl Shumway. A month later the picture appeared brighter as the snows had arrived in depth, and Alec Bright, a fervent skier interested in further development, saw the Taft as the forerunner of more trails like it that would usher in "a skiing paradise in New England."

The Taft Trail was a success from Sig's first dazzling descent, so much so that the Moosiluake carriage road, scene of America's downhills since the first was held there in 1927, was abandoned by race organizers in favor of the Taft. In March 1933, while the snowdrifts grew deeper on the Taft, events occurred that would insure that it was not the lone example of its kind. The Great Depression had wracked the nation since the stock market crash of 1929 and with unemployment widespread there was the threat of tumult in society. Newly elected President Roosevelt quickly formed new government agencies to hire the unemployed, among them the Civilian Conservation Corps, dedicated to forest and conservation projects.

Several far-seeing skiers and state development officials convinced the CCC to undertake major ski trail construction in national forests in the east, following the pattern established by the Taft. In 1933 and 1934 and the years following, many miles of ski trails were cut in New England. The most important were the four Class A racing trails--the Taft, the Wildcat, the Nose Dive in Stowe, and the Thunderbolt on Massachusetts' Mt. Greylock. Three of these major trails became the cores around which significant ski resorts-- Cannon Mountain, Mount Mansfield, and Wildcat--evolved.

In that the Taft set the pattern of major down-mountain alpine ski trails followed by the CCC, it is fair to say that the developments that culminated in the modern New England ski resort began in February 1933 with Sig Buchmayr's jaunt through the rocks and stumps of the Taft. Today's Taft Slalom at Cannon still connects with the now-abandoned lower Taft that runs through forlorn Mittersill, and ends not far from the Easton home of a ski hero of today's generation, Bode Miller.