Mountains in green and white.

A SHORT item in the obituary columns the other day must have raised puzzled frowns on the foreheads of some New England skiers: it said that Perry H. Merrill had died at the age of 99. The skiers knew they knew that name, but from where?

Perry Merrill had been, in his younger days, Vermont State Forester-not a position whose holders' names are usually household words. But the ski trail named after him on Stowe's Mt. Mansfield has been the scene of triumphs and follies for countless skiers in the thirty years since it was cut, making it an appropriate memorial for a man who played a central role in the way Alpine sports developed in northern Vermont.

As in the Alps themselves, hiking and climbing came first, skiing afterward. The great English mountaineer Edward Whymper had, with the help of local guides, conquered the Matterhorn in the 1860s, and English walking parties had been tramping over the lower slopes of the Alps at least as far back as Wordsworth's youth; but it was not until the very end of the nineteenth century that Henry Lunn, in his capacity as high-class tour operator, decided to get year-round use out of his hotel arrangements by popularizing the sport of skiing, until then largely confined to its native Norway and Sweden. (Henry's son Arnold later etched the Lunn name in Swiss history by inventing the slalom.) Similarly in Vermont, the first recorded hike on Mt. Mansfield took place in 1818, the first recorded ski run not till nearly a hundred years later, in/902. And the first major lift up the mountain, the Mt. Mansfield Single Chair, was established so much later (in 1940) that one can still meet people like the man I shared a cable-car ride with recently, who had been skiing there five years before the Mansfield Single was put in. "Wow!" said a teenaged boy in the car. "It must have been great then!"

"Better now," said the man. "In those days I could only ski two runs a day. I've already skied eight runs this morning." (And this was at 10 A.M.)

For those who want to do it the hard way, nothing is stopping them. Some people still fasten skins to the bottoms of their skis for traction and set off up Stowe's Toll Road. (This road, originally cut to take horse-drawn vehicles up the mountain and now used for automobiles in the summer, is a popular novice ski trail in the winter.) But more common--at Stowe as at Cortina d'Ampezzo or Gstaad--is for ski mountaineers to ride the lift as high as it goes, and then walk up higher still and around the back of the mountain--covering, in fact, the same torrain that many of them hiked the previous summer.

Some off-piste skiers use the Telemark style, in which the skier's heels are free, as in cross-country skiing, and he turns in a series of swooping genuflections. Articles have appeared in various publications recently extolling the virtues of this Telemark turn, and giving the impression that it is somehow philosophically different from the parallel Christie of the modern downhill skier. Not so. While back-country skiers in the Rockies may favor Telemark skis, equally off-the-beaten-path skiers in the Alps favor mountaineering skis, whose rear bindings can be freed for uphill or flat stretches, and then fastened for Christies or jump turns on the downhill stretches. As for the origins of the turns, the Telemark was indeed, as all these articles mention, invented (or perfected) by Sondre Norheim, who lived in the Telemark region of Norway. But, as Peter Lunn (son of Arnold) points out in his wonderful Guinness Book of Skiing, Norheim also invented the parallel Christie, although it was named after Christiania (as Oslo was then called), a couple of mountain ridges away from Telemark. (I take a sort of proprietary interest in Norheim, since my great-grandfather Saave Brekke and his brothers were Norheim's friends and ski makers.)

In summer, no skis, whether Telemark or downhill, are needed, except on the glaciers at places like Zermatt and Chamonix, where there is skiing roughly 11 months of the year. But many of the ski lifts still run, offering the unathletic a round-trip excursion and also, as Taki has mentioned in these pages, letting the more strenuous walk up and then ride back down, saving their knees. Alas, this is more true of the Alps than of Vermont, where the hiking-trail system started by Perry Merrill in the 1920s and '30s tends to be on the back of the mountains. But as Mt. Mansfield hikers pause at the summit, munching our cheese and crackers and waiting for the mud from the Laura Cowles trail to dry on our boots, we might raise a glass to Perry Merrill and all the others who helped us get here.

Miss Bridges is NR's managing editor.