For the past week, The Mountain Culture, has profiled skier and mountaineer, Bill Briggs, a legend by any standard for his contribution to the evolution of American steep skiing. Writer Jeff Burke took a closer look at the first man to ski the Grand Teton, and the life he has spent on and off the mountains.

FIVE: the Legacy

Galvanized by a new confidence, Briggs began handpicking the high Teton peaks for ski descents. The idea and aesthetic was to bring the margin of error down close and play inside, shouldering up to the edge all the while. He took this risk management with him to ski some of the most striking and challenging peaks in the Tetons, including Mount Moran’s Skillet Glacier, the Northeast Snowfields of Mount Owen, and of course, the Grand Teton.
What is so significant about Briggs’ descents is that he not only overcame a severe impairment through a demonstration of exceptional athleticism, but that he calculated the descents rationally and followed through with it, looking beyond what was perceived as possible, and turning improbability into something real. What’s just as cool is that Briggs, still to this day, is fired up about ski mountaineering. If not doing it, then thinking about it, talking about it.
“Skiing the Grand,” Briggs adds, “the twists and turns and complications of that experience were fabulous. They all were.”
Briggs’ life in music is also strong. He can still be seen every Sunday night playing with the Stagecoach band in Wilson, Wyoming, going on its 38th year, as well as organizing the musical “Hootenany,” a Monday night tradition in Jackson Hole that Briggs has fronted for the last 14 years.
During interviews, he’s been pressed with all kinds of questions that become departure points for endless stories, Scientology stories, questions too involved for this venue. He offers up just enough to keep interviewers asking more.
“When the doctors said you’d be in a wheelchair later in life, didn’t that weigh heavy on your head?”
“Not particularly,” he says.
“Really?”
“You want the whole story on that?” he asks.
“Yeah, please.”
“It gets wild.”
“All right.”
“It’s World War I. I’m in the army in France…”

In 2003 Briggs joined Junior Bounous, considered to be the greatest off-piste skier of the 50’s and 60’s, in the Intermountain Ski Hall of Fame in Park City, Utah, alongside Stein Eriksen and Axel Andresen. He still teaches skiing.

Jeff Burke lives in Jackson, Wyoming, where he works as a freelance writer, Editor-at-Large for Backcountry magazine, and moonlights as a Jackson Hole Ski Patroller.

For the next week, The Mountain Culture, will profile skier and mountaineer, Bill Briggs, a legend by any standard for his contribution to the evolution of American steep skiing. Writer Jeff Burke takes a closer look at the first man to ski the Grand Teton, and the life he has spent on and off the mountains.

FOUR: Transcendence

Briggs walks with a syncopated cadence to compensate for the fused junction of bones. His hip joint, or lack thereof, has always been intriguing bar chatter. Aspiring ski mountaineers don’t often tire of the subject. “How the hell do you ski—ski the Grand—with a fused hip?” is a common question, often through an embarrassed smile.

In the late 50s, Briggs’ hip became more troublesome and brought about old feelings of depression. He left the mountains for New York City, to pursue his music. It was there that Briggs became interested in Scientology and the teachings of L. Ron Hubbard.

“The first sessions I had were in New York. I found I could speak to a group of people, which I couldn’t do before. I had taken courses in public speaking but could never get by it. Here I could have three points and get them across. It was a fantastic game.”

In 1961, Briggs had his hip fused. As the subject of a doctors’ symposium, he learned how they decided that fusing the hip would be the right course of action for him. One doctor, with a fused hip himself, performed a standing broad jump into the seat of a chair sitting a few feet away. Briggs underwent surgery to have his femur directly attached to the right hip socket at an angle favorable to skiing.

“I thought it was fabulous,” he says. “Sitting and standing were not really comfortable but walking and skiing are pretty much where it needs to be.”

After the hip surgery his pursuit of Scientology grew to become an ally against his depression and inspired a return to the mountains.

“I got back into skiing and could do practically everything, but in 1966-68 I had done the lower grades in Scientology. They have to do with communications, problems, upsets. The top grades had to do with ability, regaining ability. The outcome is regaining a physical ability, and at that point I started looking at skiing peaks,” he recollects.
Jeff Burke lives in Jackson, Wyoming, where he works as a freelance writer, Editor-at-Large for Backcountry magazine, and moonlights as a Jackson Hole Ski Patroller.

For the next week, The Mountain Culture, will profile skier and mountaineer, Bill Briggs, a legend by any standard for his contribution to the evolution of American steep skiing. Writer Jeff Burke takes a closer look at the first man to ski the Grand Teton, and the life he has spent on and off the mountains.

THREE: Turning Point

His experience with the Dartmouth Outing Club eventually led Briggs west. In February of 1952, Briggs and Peter Robinson, the son of a Dartmouth professor, took a trip to Sun Valley, Idaho. On the way back they stopped in Jackson where they skied Snow King Resort. That summer they returned to climb and Briggs has been in Jackson most summers since.

Winter wasn’t quite as sewn up as summer for Briggs. Between 1953-56, he worked for his father at a Ford dealership in Maine—an experience that he described as loathsome. Determined to become his own man, Briggs got a job running the ski school at Sugarloaf, Maine in the winter of ’57. Then for the following three years, Briggs was enlisted to start up and run the ski school at Suicide Six in Woodstock, Vermont. But it was in California that Briggs got an invitation to work the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort.

“I got hired by the owner, Paul McCollister, while skiing together in Tahoe,” he says.
This was before Pepi Stiegler, the former Olympian and the area’s original ski school director, had a say in the matter. Pepi generally handpicked his Austrian counterparts for instructors, but Briggs proved his worth as an educator before the mountain opened for the public in a series of clinics with Stiegler and the other instructors. The instructors would each teach a different skill, and when it was his turn Briggs taught parallel turning.

“He had me lead this class. Here were all these really good Austrian racers, really good skiers. We got into it and had a great clinic. So the next day on short-swing turns, Pepi said I did such a good job, all the upper level clinics were done by me.”

Briggs and Stiegler had gotten off to a good start, and in the preseason, they worked together, each impressed with the other’s work. Things were going well. But it wasn’t long lived.

“Early on, one of the Austrians had taken over one of my clients. Things didn’t go well, and he left her on the slope with tears frozen to her goggles,” he goes on. “So I thought something should be done. I wrote a letter and ended up having to recite it to the entire ski school staff, which happened to be mostly Austrians. It came down to ‘Either he goes, or we go!’”

“I was way ahead of the game anyway,” he says, “Since Woodstock and those years with Junior Bounous at Sugarbowl.”

The next season, Briggs went to Snow King and created the Great American Ski School, based on what he and Bounous had worked on for several years at Sugarbowl, exhaustively discussing and debating technique, then testing their hypotheses on the hill. He’s been at the King ever since.

Jeff Burke lives in Jackson, Wyoming, where he works as a freelance writer, Editor-at-Large for Backcountry magazine, and moonlights as a Jackson Hole Ski Patroller.

For the next week, The Mountain Culture, will profile skier and mountaineer, Bill Briggs, a legend by any standard for his contribution to the evolution of American steep skiing. Writer Jeff Burke takes a closer look at the first man to ski the Grand Teton, and the life he has spent on and off the mountains.

TWO: Beginnings

When Bill Briggs was seven years his older sister taught him to ski, and he pursued the sport feverishly. Her husband became one of Briggs’s first skiing mentors and would later inspire him to attend Dartmouth University. But before Dartmouth, Briggs attended Philips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, and that’s truly where his relationship with alpinism began. It was there he met English teacher and accomplished mountaineer Bob Bates, who became one of Briggs’s most lasting influences.

“This was a great man,” Briggs says. “I took up mountaineering simply because I wanted to be like him. If his sport could do that, then that’s what I wanted.”

While attending Dartmouth, Briggs became critical of college academics and their purpose in his life. He believed he was being groomed to become what he calls an “organization man,” set up to work in the corporate world. He had no intentions of ever working in the corporate world. Going against the grain made it difficult for Briggs to make friends and fit into the role of the Dartmouth man. His first roommate was a football quarterback. They didn’t get along at all.

“He was just glory bound,” Briggs says—a light jab at 1950’s jockdom. He summarily quips that the Dartmouth academic scene was nothing other than a mob action, wrought with lunacy. His disdain for the prescribed college experience was also compounded by a tendency towards depression that he been aware of as early as the third grade, and which remained with him for a large part of his life.
“Essentially, I figured I’d commit suicide, but found I couldn’t do it. I really couldn’t do it.” Instead he adopted this mantra—”I will do what I enjoy to do, what is rewarding for me: to ski, climb, and play music. I will focus my life on those three things.”

Briggs got a new roommate, a Jewish climber and skier named Mike Marx, who also loved music. When the two met up with another black student Chad Day, they set out to learn to play music together. Briggs said it was the “outcasts” getting together. That was the beginning, and the place to play was the Dartmouth Outing Club. Briggs hadn’t found an education in the classrooms at Dartmouth, but had found a family, purpose and a life of his own in the Outing Club.

“It was inspiring,” he says of the club. “That was the Dartmouth Education.” Academically, there was nothing there. But the Outing Club and music were there, and that’s what I really appreciated.”

Jeff Burke lives in Jackson, Wyoming, where he works as a freelance writer, Editor-at-Large for Backcountry magazine, and moonlights as a Jackson Hole Ski Patroller.

For the next week, The Mountain Culture, will profile skier and mountaineer, Bill Briggs, a legend by any standard for his contribution to the evolution of American steep skiing. Writer Jeff Burke takes a closer look at the first man to ski the Grand Teton, and the life he has spent on and off the mountains.

ONE: The Protagonist

“Ski mountaineering,” Bill Briggs says. “Putting a route up the mountain, and putting a route down the mountain for others to do, is a super experience.”
Now in his seventies Briggs’ eyes still light up as he speaks about the working relationship between skiing and mountaineering that he helped to develop in North America over the past half century, with many first ski descents in the Wyoming’s Tetons, most notably the Grand Teton in 1971. Known as a central protagonist in the evolution of American steep skiing, many pivotal moments have led Briggs to an unconventional life in the mountains.
He was born in Augusta, Maine, on December 21, 1931. He was like any other baby—minus a right hip joint. Just before his second birthday, doctors hammered out a new hip socket in his pelvis—a departure point for myriad stories and experiences of Briggs’ life, most of which detail an open eschewing of conformity and expected behavior.

“In 1940, I was advised the hip would not last,” he says. “At age 40, I should expect to be in a wheelchair. Doctors said, ‘If you want to do anything athletic, do it now, because you’re going to be a deskbound person.’”

This is fairly funny stuff, coming from a 77-year-old who spent years working as a mountain guide, and still to this day heads up the Great American Ski School at Snow King Resort in Jackson, Wyoming. He also leads his band every week at the Stagecoach bar in Wilson, Wyoming, a position that has spanned decades.

Over the next four days we’ll feature snapshots of a man who has crafted a life of his own on snow, rock and stage.

Jeff Burke lives in Jackson, Wyoming, where he works as a freelance writer, Editor-at-Large for Backcountry magazine, and moonlights as a Jackson Hole Ski Patroller.

February – Hokkaido Powder

February. Usually a month of epic powder in the Alps, but it can just as easily go the other way, which it did. Fortunately, I had an assignment and a plane ticket from Geneva to Sapporo. The north island of Japan, Hokkaido, is known as a powder skiing Mecca. Featured in dozens of ski porn films, the Japan segments are always the deepest and often the most exotic. Sushi, hot springs, and neck-deep pow. What else can go right?

My travel partner, girlfriend, and Rossi tele-teamer Susanna Magruder and I loaded our well-worn fleet of Da Kine wheelie bags – seriously, where would we be without them? – making the train, plane, and automo-bus hop to Tokyo, then Sapporo. Landing in Hokkaido’s capital city was like transporting yourself to a city the size of Boston with a meter of snow on the ground. Except in Sapporo, they know how to deal with it. And do all winter long. The entire city has a sub-street labyrinth of walkways, almost like an underground mall that people use during the winter, explaining how the countless women in miniskirts and spiked-heel boots could negotiate the city.
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Teton Freedom Riders hosted the premier of The Collective’s new mountain bike film, Seasons, earlier this week to a relatively large crowd of local bikers. Impressive camera work, jaw-dropping freestyle footage, and a handful of the world’s best two-wheeling pros makes this film a must-watch in the weeks before biking season starts officially rolling. The only thing missing from this movie is a DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME warning. Seasons is available for purchase on The Collective’s homepage.