RiseofUphillSkiing

skiing taking off at resorts around the state, Vermont is riding a skimo wave.

By Abagael Giles

Additional reporting by Lisa Lynn

THE ORIGINAL SKI MOUNTAINEER: Hubert Schriebl

Decades before bands of skiers could be seen skinning up Stratton Mountain there were just one or two avid Austrians who would often wake before dawn, strap skins to their skis and head for the summit. Hubert Schriebl was one of them. “The equipment wasn’t so good back then,” he says with a laugh. “You’d get snow wedging up under your skins. The skis were heavy and it was work to go up.”

Schriebl grew up skiing and climbing Austria’s high Alpine peaks. He became a certified Austrian Ski and Mountain Guide and a member of the Austrian Alpine Club. While still in his 20s he joined five expeditions that helped to survey and map the Everest region in the Himalaya. He still holds the highaltitude surveying record, registered at 6,710 meters (22,015 feet).

“In true mountaineering you don’t race up the mountain because you don’t want to get to the top before everyone and have to wait for them while all sweaty and get cold,” he says.

At home in the Austrian Alps, Schriebl guided and he taught skiing in Lech in between his expeditions. In 1964, Schriebl was the lead guide for the Dutch Himalayan expedition that made the first ascent on Nepal’s Manaslu II, ascending to the summit at 24,000 ft.

In 1964, he came to Vermont’s Stratton Mountain Resort at the invitation of a fellow Austrian mountaineer, Emo Heinrich, who was Stratton’s first ski school director. “Emo and I would go for a tour or skin up the mountain and often we were the only ones out there – we were the crazy Austrians. Nobody else was doing this back then,” he says with a chuckle.

Gradually, Schriebl began to be joined by others and became an icon at the resort. “When I turned 70, I began to count my climbs to the top, cutting a notch in the railing at Hubert Haus after each one,” Schriebl says, referring to the lodge that was named for him on his 65th birthday.

The year he turned 70, Schriebl notched 100 climbs. A group of friends he would often skin with pitched in and bought him a pair of lightweight Black Diamond touring skis, the same ones he uses now, with Fritschi bindings. He is 87 now.

In the 17 years since, he’s made nearly 700 notches. “Almost as many as Hank Aaron’s home runs,” he says with a chuckle.

“I see a lot of Olympic sports where I just shake my head—they seem sort of silly,” he says. “But skimo as an Olympic sport? That sounds like a good idea.”

Shortly after sunset, skiers gather in the growing dark in a parking lot at Bolton Valley Resort. Pulling packs and skis from their cars, they make small talk as they strap skins to their skis, shaking their hands and feet to ward off the cold. Somewhere, someone is playing the Grateful Dead from a small portable speaker. Headlamps bob.

Some folks are clad head-to-toe in tight, bright Lycra racing suits, their alpine touring boots clicking into skinny, feather-light skis. A few women are wearing purple and pink tutus. One guy is wearing a pair of beat-up jeans and leather boots. His skis have three-pin telemark bindings.

For those just getting into the sport, Bolton Valley’s rental center offers complete set-ups of touring ski gear by Dynafit or Burton splitboards as well as lessons and backcountry tours.

Eventually, the crew of about 50 skiers and splitboarders, lines up. A race organizer calls out the start and the ragtag crew moves as one up the gentle slope under the Wilderness lift. A few tutu-sporting folks on fat DPS touring skis straggle behind the rest.

The goal? To reach the summit as quickly as possible, remove your skins, tighten your boots, adjust your bindings, and ski down to the bottom. And then do it again. While it’s a race, it’s also about endurance; you can do anywhere from one to four laps or more.

This is the scene on any given Tuesday evening at the Green Mountain Skimo Citizen Race Series at Bolton Valley Resort, put on by the Catamount Trail Association.

An Uphill Culture

At ski areas around New England, uphill events like these – be they true ‘skimo’ races or just social uphill skins, are growing.

“Ski mountaineering is as old as skiing and it’s always been big in Europe,” says Hubert Schriebl, age 87. A certified Austrian mountain guide and renowned photographer, Schriebl came to Stratton in 1964 and soon he and then ski school director Emo Heinrich would “ski tour.” “Back then, we were the only ones really doing it,” says Schriebl. “We’d often head out after dark. On one full-moon night, we skinned and skied three mountains – Stratton, Magic, and Bromley – in one night. I hear more and more people are doing that and adding Okemo too,” he notes.

“Now, going up the mountain, it’s part of the culture here at Stratton. I see so many people skinning up with suuuper light boots and suuuper light skis,” Schriebl says, drawing out his Austrian accent. “Me? I still have my 12-year-old Black Diamonds and a very old pair of boots I bought in Innsbuck, years ago.“

This season, Stratton Mountain Resort started its own ski mountaineering series and its rental shops now include alpine touring gear and skis such as Rossignol’s Escaper 80 touring skis. “There’s a real culture of going uphill here,” says Robb Greer, the Director of Retail, Rental, and Guest Experience at Stratton Mountain Resort. “There are some days I’ll see more people skinning up than in the lift line.”

The ski resort is also known for several off-season uphill endurance events, including “29029 Everesting,” which challenges hikers to do 17 laps up the mountain (taking the gondola down), achieving the vertical gain in feet of Mt. Everest. Olympic medalist and World Cup cross-country ski racer Jessie Diggins makes it a practice of running up Stratton Mountain in the summer for training. .

“However, our new skimo race series isn’t about winning: we wanted this race to be fun,” says Brittni Coe Petry, who oversees events at Stratton. “We have prizes for ‘middle of the pack’ and it really doesn’t matter if you wear Lycra and are first or make it a social lap with friends.”

Greer, who lived in Montana and other western states before coming to Stratton, helped institute the weekday races after seeing similar events take off at other ski resorts. “We used to have beer-racing alpine race leagues at Bridger Bowl, Montana, then they started skimo races. Now, the skimo events draw even more people than the alpine races,” he says. “I love to skin; it’s healthy, it gets me outside and you can do it even when the snow conditions are not optimal,” he says.

Stratton, like many mountains, doesn’t charge for uphill access but does designate uphill routes and requires an uphill pass.

The Newest Olympic Sport

Modern skimo racing with its Lycra suits, low-tech bindings and ultralight skis, has its origins in Europe. In the Alps, racers compete in multi-day epic tests of mountaineering skill, ascending and traversing massive mountains in avalanche terrain and foul weather.

Perhaps because of the influence of certain historic races, like the Patrouille des Glaciers, a ski mountaineering race organized by the Swiss Armed Forces, true skimo races are designed to be a test of skill and physical ability in the mountains. Skimo—or ski mountaineering— racing involves moving as fast as possible uphill and across varied terrain on randonnee skis using climbing skins.

Technically, a skimo race has to follow rules set forth by the International Ski Mountaineering Federation. The Bolton and Stratton series, like many races in New England, are best categorized as “uphill travel” races, rather than sanctioned skimo competitions. They are open to anyone who wants to participate and on any type of equipment.

THE DENIM GHOST: Milan Kubala

Seven years ago, Milan Kubala was about as far from donning a Spandex suit to run up a mountain on his skis as a person could be: he skied in his jeans and was proud of it.

A former professional tennis player and member of the Czech Republic national team, he moved to Vermont in 2004. Once here, he started a habit of skinning up Mount Mansfield before work on a pair of narrow fish-scale skis with metal edges, three-pin bindings and leather boots. “I’d go up and ski with my dog in my jeans,” he said. He’s been doing it for more than 15 years now.

Today, he’s a major advocate for the skimo community. He is the manager of the USA Skimo National Team and serves on the board and as the Athlete Advisory Committee chair.

A life-long athlete, Kubala became fascinated by the possibility of covering long distances by ski. He has skied the roughly 20 miles from Bolton Valley to Smugglers’ Notch in a day and completed other long tours in the state. “For me, skimo is about connecting to what skiing used to be in the old days—a really physically demanding sport,” he says. “We have some amazing possibilities here with the Catamount Trail.”

When he first started showing up to the Green Mountain Skimo Race Series in 2016, Kubala earned the nickname “The Denim Ghost” because he’d show up in jeans and then disappear so far off the front the other racers could barely see him. He also competed in the NE Rando series, which he won in three of the four years he competed.

At that Green Mountain Skimo series, Kubala met Waterbury-based triathlete and trainer John Spinney. The two started training together—and racing in their jeans. “We decided to show up in jeans to race at SkimoEast’s annual race at Mont Tremblant in 2017,” said Kubala. “We sewed some Dynafit patches to the back pockets. The sport is much more established in Canada and we really stuck out amid all of the speedsuits. We still didn’t really have skimo gear,” said Kubala. Kubala took second and the team ended up in the top 10, earning the attention of the regional Dynafit rep, a relationship that paved the way for sponsorship.

Kubala, 49, has been dedicated to promoting the sport and excited to see it in the Olympics. In 2020, he competed in the World Winter Games in Innsbruck for Team USA where he was ninth in the Master’s vertical race and 17th in the individual event. This spring he’s headed to the Worlds in Slovakia. Building an athlete base in the U.S. has been one of his goals. He now teaches “Uphill 1.0 to 3.0” at Bolton Valley Resort and also with Sunrise Mountain Guides. However, Kubala says, “I’d like to show people that you don’t have to have the lightest gear and be dressed in Lycra from head to toe to get out and do this,” he says. “Plus, there are real applications for backcountry touring and it’s a crazy workout.” —A.G

Skimo racing in its purest form involves challenging racers to navigate mountainous terrain as fast as they can using skis and crampons.

A relatively small number of serious competitors (likely fewer than a thousand people across the United States) participate in sanctioned skimo races to earn points on the national and world circuits. In Vermont, most sanctioned races draw 30 to 40 competitors and have for the last ten years.

A former NCAA alpine racing coach, Jonathan Sheffetz has been racing skimo in Vermont since 2005 when he first entered Jay Peak’s Skimo Challenge. Once one of the state’s longest-running events, it was a grueling nine-mile race with 5,250 feet of climbing through moguls and off-piste terrain around the ski area.

By day, Sheffetz is an economic consultant who holds a Masters in Public Policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School and lives in Amherst, Mass. About ten years ago, he founded NE Rando Series, an annual five-race series across three New England States. He has also served as treasurer of the U.S. Ski Mountaineering Association and is passionate about the burgeoning Olympic sport. In 2017, the United States Ski

THE RECORD SETTER:

“Aaron Rice” is a name that’s often at the top of the results lists of the Green Mountain Skimo Citizen Race Series at Bolton Valley Resort. If that name is familiar, it might be because of Tyler Wilkinson-Ray’s film “2.5 Million,” which chronicled how in 2016 Rice broke Greg Hill’s record for the most uphill vertical skied in a year.

To put that in perspective, the vertical rise of Superstar, the trail at Killington where the women’s World Cup slalom races have been held is 1,171 feet. To reach two million vert, you’d have to skin up that trail more than four times a day, every day, for 365 days

At the time, Rice, then 28, was living in Utah, working in Little Cottonwood Canyon and traveling to remote parts the world such as the peaks of Patagonia in southern Argentina and Chile to log his vertical, often 5,000 to 12,000 feet a day.

Rice grew up in Massachusetts and it wasn’t until he came to University of Vermont as a freshman that he became interested in mountaineering. “I’d get up at dawn and go skin up, do some laps and be back for class by 9:30 a.m.,” he remembers. He also took courses in avalanche safety and joined the UVM Outing Club.

After breaking the record, Rice came back to Vermont for a job, a steady income and a home of his own, in Waterbury Center, near Stowe and Bolton Valley Resort.

He’s often up before dawn, skinning up one of the mountains nearby and joining in the skimo fun at the Green Mountain series. —L.L.

Mountaineering Association was formed. In July 2021, the International Olympic Committee approved adding ski mountaineering to the 2026 Olympics in Cortina, Italy.

Sanctioned skimo races involve bootpacking and skinning up a mountain course across varied terrain and then skiing down. Sprint races have an ascent/descent of roughly 100 meters. An individual race typically has a minimum of three ascents and descents for men and women, and two for juniors. The longest ascent accounts for less than 50% of the total elevation gain with a minimum elevation gain of 1,300 meters (4,500 feet). Race times vary depending on the event, but top racers usually finish in 1.5 to 2 hours. The individual race also includes at least one section on foot (skis on pack).

“Our races are the equivalent in the skimo world of what the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association is for alpine skiers,” says Sheffetz. Skiers register and win points to compete on the national circuit. Winning races helps you qualify for the National Championships, typically held out west, where skiers can qualify to compete in the World Championships.

Sheffetz has not only hosted the NE Rando series, he’s actively recruited, participants. When he heard that a young University of Vermont endurance athlete was looking to buy used gear and get into the sport, he contacted her, helped her find used equipment and even found her a bus ride to an upcoming race. That student, Wren Pyle has since earned herself a spot on the National Junior Team, and is hoping to make the U.S. Olympic Team.

Killington resident Ian Clarke went to the Youth World Championships in 2017. Clarke, who was also a sponsored Cannondale cyclist, started showing up at NE Rando Race Series events in alpine touring gear when he was in high school. Scheffetz noticed that the former alpine racer was beating people with much lighter ski setups than his own and helped him get a sponsorship to access race gear. Clarke loves the outdoor community he’s found in skimo racing. “Over in Europe, skimo is like what basketball is for us. Racing there, you get to the top and there are fans and spectators watching, cheering.”

So far, only one American has ever podiumed in the Ski Mountaineering World Championships. Nina Silitch of New Canaan, N.H. took silver in the sprint at the World Championships in Pelvoux, France in 2013 and gold in 2014. “It was a perfect way to combine my passion for mountaineering and alpine skiing with my background as an endurance athlete,” she says. Silitch became immersed in the sport after moving to Chamonix, France in 2001. Now 50, she is back in New Hampshire and has created a skimo series at the Dartmouth Skiway, near her home. An ultrarunner, Silitch still participates and has frequently podiumed or won the NE Rando Race series in the women’s division.

A FULL-BODY WORKOUT

Many endurance athletes like Clarke or Pyle, started skiing uphill as way to train for other sports in the winter. The Catamount Trail Association’s Greg Maino, an ultrarunner, even prefers skiing uphill to skiing downhill. “I think a lot of people from the trail running

THE OLYMPIC HOPEFUL Wren Pyle

Wren Pyle was a competitive swimmer and an ultradistance runner when she enrolled at the University of Vermont four years ago. “I’d only skied about ten times between ages 2 and 18,” she says. Four years later, she’s not only taught herself ski mountaineering, she made the 2021/22 U.S. National Junior Team.

Before arriving at UVM, Pyle had started doing ultra-distance running and cycling races. “I did a 40-mile race in Colorado’s San Juan mountains. I did okay but the European woman who won just dominated—she actually won the race by hours.

I looked her up and learned that she did skimo. Then I started looking up some of the other European ultrarunners and discovered that they also did skimo either for training,” she says.

When Pyle got to UVM, she looked for ways to train over the winter and began searching online for used skimo equipment. She watched YouTube videos and World Cup races to teach herself to ski. “Jonathan Shefftz who is the director of the NE Rando Race Series invited me to his race at Bromley, gave me a student discount, and even got a ride for me because I didn’t have a car,” she says.

She began doing as many of the NE Rando series as she could and in February of 2022, went to compete in the National Championships in Vail. There, she took home the U23 Women’s Sprint Title.

“What I like about skimo in general is that it’s a bit like a triathlon. You have three different disciplines: skinning, bootpacking, and skiing. That’s fun and challenging. You can’t rely on any one to be successful. You need to be proficient at all three,” she says.

She often trains at Jay Peak and also continues to coach swimming at UVM. “As much as I enjoy racing at a high level and competing for prize money and titles, the most important thing for me is showing kids that no matter what situation you’re in and no matter how you are marginalized, there is a place for you outdoors. You don’t need to be a rich skier from France to do a sport like skimo. A trans girl from Vermont can compete in a national event You can compete at the highest level or just go out and have fun with your family. I hope folks who see people like me competing see there is space for everyone in skimo.”—Phyl

Newbeck

community are looking at it as a way to stay in shape and be outside in the winter. It’s a great alternative to running on the road.”

Dr. Kevin Duniho, a.k.a., Dr. Skimo, is a former collegiate Nordic racer, lifelong alpine skier and passionate skimo racer. He and teammate Milan Kubala (see “The Denim Ghost,” on previous page) skied Colorado’s Grand Traverse, a 40-mile race in the Rockies between Crested Butte and Aspen at elevations of up to 13,000 feet. He’s also a physical therapist who specializes in treating skiers.

Duniho logs more than 100 days per year on skis. He’s also completed a 26-mile ski from Timberline at Bolton Valley, up and over to Trapp Family Lodge, up Mt. Mansfield and down through Smugglers’ Notch. “At 9,000 feet of vertical, it’s actually more climbing than the Grand Traverse,” says Duniho. “That’s the great thing about Vermont. You can go for miles on challenging terrain with lightweight skis without ever encountering avalanche terrain.”

According to Duniho, who has treated Vermont athletes such as Skimo World Championship competitor Ian Clarke and Aaron Rice (who logged a record 2.5 million vertical feet in one year), uphill skiing is just about the best workout an outdoor athlete could ever get. “It works a couple of muscles that a lot of other sports don’t hit as intensively,” says Duniho.

“Almost all of us athletes have constantly atrophying gluteous maximuses and abdominal muscles. This sport is by far the best thing I’ve ever done that targets those two muscles specifically,” says Duniho. Like running and cycling, uphill skiing works your hamstrings and quadriceps. On the way up, skiers tend to engage slow-twitch muscles and get an aerobic workout. Then, when they descend, they get an anaerobic workout and work fast twitch muscles. “Everybody I’ve talked to in the fitness world has so much stoke about how good of a workout uphill skiing is. It works everything and it’s complete, from head to toe.”

Duniho contrasts it with Nordic skiing. “Elite Nordic skiers have been found to have some of the highest VO2 maxes in the sports world,” says Duniho, referring to an athlete’s ability to retain oxygen. “I’d argue that skimo racers possibly have even higher VO2 maxes. Our races are more intense and longer and we go up steeper hills.”

Duniho sees a lot of endurance runners entering skimo races. “It’s a great workout for runners who put in a majority of their miles on the flats. Runners classically have underdeveloped gluteus maximuses,” he said. They also tend to have overdeveloped hip flexors. The tension between the two can cause injury and pain. “Uphill skiing is great at correcting that.”

IT’S ALL IN THE TRANSITION

In Vermont, bootpacks are rare and most transitions involve removing the sticky mohair or synthetic skins skiers use to ascend. Proper technique involves first dropping your poles on the ground, then bending down to tighten your boots and put them in ski mode, switching your bindings to ski mode, then ripping your skins off of the bottoms of your skis and stuffing them in your Lycra onesie for the descent. The best racers do all this in about 20 seconds, an impressive feat to anyone who’s ever waited around at the top of a run for a friend to remove their skins and get into ski mode on a backcountry ski tour.

The most competitive skimo races are won and lost in the minutiae of transitions. These are the periods between sections of a race where a skier has to switch their gear from uphill touring mode and ski downhill or get ready to hike or navigate a snowfield with crampons and an ice axe.

This is much easier said than done, as was evidenced at a clinic at Bolton Valley. At first, skiers were falling over sideways trying to rip their skins off, while the instructors did so in one clean motion, a combined hop and rip. However, by the end of the day, most participants were removing their skins from their skis without taking their skis off their feet. This was a victory.

“Imagine you’re on a 20-mile tour,” clinic leader John Spinney told participants. “My partners and I will sometimes have a 10-point rule we use. We each get ten times to stop and fiddle with something, whether your pack, your skis, your bindings. When you can transition without stopping, you save energy, you get time back to take a photo, you get to eat, you get to stay warm and more than that, you get laps in.”

Vermont’s skimo community is an interesting crowd. The sport draws competitive endurance athletes, backcountry powder junkies and everyone in between. As Spinney says, “Uphill skiing is not easy. And when you’re really pushing yourself, it can hurt. But you’re also getting out there in the mountains in the middle of winter. It takes a certain type of person to like that.” u