WINTER SPORTS 131 



use permits when satisfactory sites on privately owned land cannot be found. 

 This is particularly true in the West where much of the higher land sur- 

 rounding communities actively interested in this form of winter sports is on 

 the national forests. In the East, there are generally plenty of natural sites 

 for ski jumps on privately held land. Nowhere has the Forest Service, itself, 

 undertaken to develop spectacular ski jumping or to promote tournaments. 

 Tournaments are all right, but they should be conducted with private 

 money. The equipment costs too much; it is used too short a time each year; 

 and the personnel and maintenance cost runs too high to justify the Service 

 setting up winter-sports hippodromes on its mountain sides. 



To keep things simple, and as safe as possible; to give people a chance to 

 slide and leap and exercise, themselves, rather than simply to stamp, hover 

 around fires, and watch experts do so — that is the aim and policy. But 

 people in general in this day of the motor do not like to walk uphill, and the 

 sport of dashing down the mountain need not always now be paid for by 

 the toil of trudging up. All the richer resorts have ski tows, and on many 

 forests, from New Hampshire to Oregon, the not-so-rich are developing and 

 installing ski tows of their own. 



A ski tow, in effect, is a low-slung cable coil turned by a motor. An engine 

 out of the oldest of cars can keep a simple ski tow going, barring break- 

 downs. The skiers take hold of the lower sag of the cable, and up the moun- 

 tain side they go. Some of the ski tow outfits installed by little local sports 

 clubs on the national forests are as much an expression of native genius 

 and inventiveness as' were the first car trailers. They do not cost much; 

 they give a great deal of pleasure — both in their construction and in their 

 use. But it must be admitted that none of them is beautiful, or harmonious 

 with the forest atmosphere. 



The revolving cable loop propelled by a discarded automobile engine 

 soon becomes, in richer resorts country, an apparatus refined with chair 

 lifts. It will be interesting to see how long it takes to bring in overstuffed 

 leather chairs. The present policy of the Forest Service is to permit local 

 clubs to install simple tow rigs, and some few permits have been issued to 

 special-use commercial operators who agree to erect their equipment in 

 inconspicuous locations. As an ingenious and effective supplement for fixed 



