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.