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Billy Kidd, Olympic medalist and Hall of Famer, presented the 2001
Steamboat Spring/steamboat grand Western Ski Heritage award to
Chris Miller at the FWSA Annual Meeting in Reno. Chris a member of
Cascade Ski Club for over ten years has served on its Board of
Directors in several positions. Chris has worked as a ski
instructor and ski host at Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood. He
enjoy alpine and cross-country skiing, and has combined the two by
participating as an avid Telemark skier. Currently he is Webmaster
for NWSCC, and has assisted with initiating a FWSA website
competition.
Chris has put literally hundreds of hours documenting the
history of the Cascade Ski Club, project which evolved into
documentation, preservation, and display of Oregon’s early ski
history. He has organized and reproduced many sets of records – en
enormous and painstaking archiving effort-and discovered hitherto
unknown document and even film footage of early ski jumping in
Oregon. His work is on display and will be viewed by visitor of
Cascade Lodge, and in the Mount Hood Museum when it opens.
As an example of Chris’s “just in the nick of time”
preservation efforts, he organized and prepared the Howard Henson
and Hjalmar Hvam documents at the Oregon History Center (OHC).
Both photo albums and scrapbooks were originally displayed in
books that were non-archive quality and were literally destroying
the materials. It was estimated that many photos were have been
destroyed within ten years. Much of the material was misidentified
and misfiled. Not until this project was the OHC fully aware that
these objects were the sole, primary source documents concerning
the beginning of skiing in Oregon, and the inventor of the first
releasable binding.
Chris found unpublished relevant material about Timberline
Lodge, America’s first government built alpine ski lodge,
including opening ceremony papers, press material, unpublished
photographs, and personal accounts. He documented an unknown ski
jumping film of Cascade Jump Hill on Mt. Hood. Previously, the
historical society did not know the location of the events
depicted in their film archive. Chris was able to confirm the
location, events, and competitors. This is the only known film of
any ski jumping event on Mt. Hood.
Cascade Ski Club supported founder Hjalmar P. Hvam as one of
the country’s top ski competitors in the 1930’s and inventor of
the first releasable ski safety binding. Hvam is enshrined in
Oregon sports Hall of Fame, the U.S. Ski Hall of Fame, the
Northwest Ski Hall of Fame, and the U.S. Ski Business Hall of
Fame. Mr. Hvam began building his fame as a ski competitor in
1932, when he won the first U.S. Nordic combined championship
competition at Lake Tahoe, California; he took first in jumping
and cross-country regain to win the combined title. This event was
awarded to the embryonic California Ski Association, partly as
recognition its efforts to win the 1932 Winter Olympics.
Hvam is almost the forgotten man of skiing history. Future
history projects will go beyond preserving his artifacts to
publicizing his great contribution to skiing throughout America.
Where would skiing be today without Hvam’s revolutionary
releasable ski binding?
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