It Started With A Yodel

Xander Guldman stands at the top of the Silver Belt Gully, waiting for his turn to drop. He stares down at the fresh kickers over cliffs and rollers, visualizing his cork 3 Japan. The 26-year-old Tahoe, CA, local has been competing in freeride competitions for over 15 years, but this moment is special. It’s year two of the most recent iteration of the Silver Belt Classic, a peer-judged freeride competition down Sugar Bowl’s most famous run. But Guldman, who grew up skiing at the California resort, is only the latest in a line of athletes who looked at the Silver Belt twisting its way from the top of Mount Lincoln and pictured the future of skiing.

This cutting-edge freeride competition didn’t spawn from Guldman’s mind. Instead it began in the little village of Bischofshofen, Austria, where Hannes Schroll (born in 1909) learned to ski. His father made his first pair of skis out of short barrel staves and Schroll quickly became a master of the discipline, winning all his local races in the Salzburger Alps.

In 1934, Schroll won the Downhill Ski Championship at the Marmolada, the steepest course in the Italian Dolomites. Having mastered what locals called the race course from hell, Schroll earned the nickname “The Red Devil from Tyrol.” In 1935, Austrian Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg sent Schroll to represent his home country in the first US Alpine combined event. A 2009 issue of the Skiing Heritage Journal described the charismatic Austrian Alpine ski racer as he boarded a ship called the Saturnia from Trieste, Italy, with “25 dollars to his name, holes in his pants, four skis on his back, and not able to speak a word of English.” But Schroll was determined to make a name for himself in the New World as a skier.

Schroll’s first stop was the inaugural US National Downhill and Slalom combined race in 1935 at Mount Rainier, WA. He won the downhill over the legendary Dick Durrance by 67 seconds, all while yodeling at the top of his lungs. Donald Tressider, the park supervisor of Yosemite, watched Schroll race that day and invited the Austrian to Badger Pass, CA, to lead the newly-minted Yosemite Ski School. It wasn’t his own results as a ski racer that would cement his name in California skiing history, instead, it would be a race of his own creation: the Silver Belt Classic.

After a few years of leading the Yosemite Ski School, Schroll was eager to create a new, bigger ski area in the style of his native Salzburger Alps. On July 4, 1939, he went to Donner Summit with a few friends from the Bay Area. Bill Klein, a fellow Austrian who had scoped Sugar Bowl a few years before, took Schroll to the base of Mount Lincoln. Schroll was enchanted. “There we put the golf course, and I can see lifts running here, and we’ll have cows grazing in the summer!” he exclaimed to Klein.

Klein and Schroll wrangled a group of investors, including Walt Disney, who Schroll had taught to ski at Badger Pass, and bought the land that would become Sugar Bowl for $6,500. The homeowners in the Sugar Bowl village would serve as board members for the resort.

Sugar Bowl Ski Area opened in 1939, and Schroll knew he needed an event if he wanted to attract the best skiers in the world. And what better way to honor his heritage than by holding a giant slalom race? Inspired by the deep spring snowpack, he decided to host the race in April 1940. But Schroll wasn’t just interested in a typical Alpine race—he wanted a spectacle. Eyeing up Mount Lincoln, the resort’s high point at 8,383 feet, he spied a 1,300-foot gully that careened from the summit, snaking between cliffs and trees. He called it the Silver Belt and decided to stick gates down the face.

Subscribe for access to this article plus the entire archive of The Ski Journal content—and receive a discount on all products. Subscribe Now