Morten Lund

Morten Lund has been one of this country's outstanding ski journalists at the national level for over 47 years. He was born of Norwegian parents in Plattsburgh, New York in where his father, an engineer who had immigrated the year before was running a paper mill. His father had been a ranking Norwegian Nordic competitor who had jumped in Holmenkollen several times and had a rack full of trophy cups hanging on the wall at home, He took Morten, then age six, to meet with some of his former jumping mates at the first American Olympics at Lake Placid in 1932.

The family moved to Augusta, Maine in 1934 and made use of the then heavy snowfall during the winters to go out as a family, mother, father and three sons during Morten’s high school years when a five or six mile trek uphill and down was not unusual. He skied off his first rope tow before leaving school for a year courtesy of Uncle Sam as the jargon was in those days, half of it spent on Guam where the snow was scarce outside the Navy beer coolers. Returning to get a degree In government at Bowdoin in 1946, he managed to ski several of the larger Eastern resorts before graduating in the class of 1950, including one memorable outing at Mt. Cranmore when he skied behind and assiduously copied the style of one Hannes Schneider.

The reason he was at Mt. Cranmore is that its founder, Harvey Dow Gibson was a Bowdoin man and inviteed the college glee club up once every winter to sing and ski for free. He went to Harvard Law for a year and decided that skiing was more fun, so left to join the staff of the Lacaonia (NH) Citizen, where in the town race at Belknap Recreation Center he was beaten by a nine year old named Penny Pitou from nearby Gilford.

He was hired by Sports Illustrated in 1954, covering the Squaw Valley 1960 Olympics cross country since no one else on the staff had ever skied cross country and followed that by co-writing articles with Willie Schaefller and Mikki Hutter to introduce the reverse or wedeln technique to a wide audience. In 1962 he went to Ski to write more about skiing less about other sports.

As contributing editor for Ski from 1962 to 1987, he was instrumental in introducing learning on short skis to the ski public, authoring the first magazine piece done on Clif Taylor's short ski teaching in the October, 1962 issue of Ski. In the winter of 1966, he helped Ski organize a successful trial of the short ski teaching approach at Killington and wrote the first report, published in Ski’s February, 1966, issue as The Graduated Length Method, the first use of the term, and of GLM, the abbreviation.

GLM was adopted by a number of leading ski schools and eventually, in modified form, by the Professional Ski Instructors of America, which introduced the five-foot ski as a learning ski, an important step in making skiing more accessible back in the days before grooming and snowmaking. Thousands of who would never have learned to ski did learn via GLM.

In 1965, he collaborated with Minot Dole on Adventures In Skiing, which remains the only biography on Dole. In 1969, he wrote Ski's piece on Robert Redford, previewing The Downhill Racer, the first feature on a ranking Hollywood film star by a ski journalist. In 1973, he wrote three of Ski’s four-part series on the relation of ski development to the environment; including one on the position of the Forest Service, interviewing John McGuire, head of the U.S. Forest Service, the highest-ranking federal official interviewed by a ski journalist to that time.

In 1974, he wrote a coffee table book, The Skier's World, for Random House encompassing resorts, equipment, history and trends. In 1968, he wrote The Skier's Bible, published by Doubleday, the first book to summarize all the learning methods then available as well as a broad range of information for skiers. In 1970, he wrote Ski GLM for Dial Press, explaining the range of short ski methods available to skiers. In 1972, he wrote The Pleasures of Cross Country Skiing in advance of the wave of popularity of touring in this country

In 1975, he wrote Eight Classic Skis for Ski, the first in-depth historical article on equipment in a ski periodical. This led to a series of articles on ski history, including Meet The First Skiing President, on Theodore Roosevelt's skiing, with Jakob Vaage, Norway's national ski historian. This led to his presenting President Gerald Ford with a pair of replicas of Theodore Roosevelt's skis and wrote the ski media’s first long article on skiing president in office, President Ford, Skier, published in the September, 1976, issue of Ski.

In March, 1976, he wrote the 40-year timeline for the 20-page Bicentennial section on ski history published by Ski . He also inaugurated TheWay It Was, the first ski history column regularly published in a ski magazine, a series which ran for three seasons and included The Birth of the Buckle, Train Throngs of the Thirties, Our First Alpine Team, Getting Up: A History of Ski Lifts. In 1976, Lund, collaborated with Tim Galway to introduce a new learning concept with a two-part article in Ski , called Inner Skiing. He passed his PSIA ski instructor exam in 1977. For three years he organized Inner Skiing seminars for the public at various resorts in the United States, developing a practical mental approach for ski learning, leading to use of imagery and body awareness as major teaching tools.

In 1982, he collected the material for and edited The Ski Book, published by Random House, the first anthology of fine ski writing, from Conan Doyle to Ernest Hemingway. Through his years at Ski, he functioned as the magazine’s most prolific profile writer, authoring articles on, among others, Penny Pitou, Warren Miller, Roget Staub, Jean Claude Killy, Frank Snyder, Friedl Pfeifer, Bill Janss, Hjalmar Hvam, Otto Lang, Willy Schaeffler, Dick Bass, Dick Barrymore, Buddy Werner, Stein Eriksen, and Alec Cushing.

In 1988, he joined Snow Country as a founding writer, beginning with its first issue in 1994. That same year, he became editor of Skiing Heritage the first U.S. nationwide ski history journal, published under the auspices of the International Skiing History Association. Expanding Skiing Heritage to a substantial 44-page journal after teaching himself the intricacies of desktop publishing, Lund authored or edited in the journal the first full-length biographies of Gretchen Fraser, John Jay, Barney McLean, Charlie Lord and Otto Schniebs, seeing his work as part of an ongoing effort to provide skiing with a rich and full historical record, comparable to that of other sports.

In the pages of Ski, Snow Country and Skiing Heritage to date, he has written more than 400 features, columns and sketches as well as fourteen books on the sport. His ingenuity, curiosity and imagination, his coverage of productive innovations, and the sheer volume of his work, read by hundreds of thousands, has contributed to the public appreciation and the popularity of skiing over the past two generations.

In his years as a journalist, he profiled leading ski personalities of his time including the first U.S. racer to win major European races, Buddy Werner, the Norwegian stylist Stein Eriksen, Robert Redford, star of The Downhill Racer, Squaw Valley founder Alec Cushing, U.S. team coach Willi Schaeffler, former U.S. president Gerry Ford. He wrote the full length biography for Friedl Pfeifer, Nice Goin’ , dealing with among other things, Pfeifer’s founding of the leading U.S. ski school in Aspen. during the 1950s and 1960s.

With this as a start, he soon became the outstanding journalist of skiing history, having had a running start by writing The Way It Was, a regular historical column for Ski for seven years as editor for ten years of Skiing Heritage the first national ski history journal in the U.S., Published by the International Skiing History Association, a quarterly. The journal allied itself with the major ski museums in the United States as it became a factor in the sharp rise of interest in ski history in general in the United States and Canada and adding a growing credible historical record of the sport, He is still writing major pieces for Skiing Heritage as Founding Editor.