Did you know that in its first few winters, tiny Red River Ski Area had a ski school with a European pedigree that resorts many times its size would have envied? The men who gave it that pedigree came from Garmisch, the German Alpine resort that hosted the 1936 Winter Olympics. One of them, Sigi Klein, talked the other, the legendary ski jumper Erich Windisch, into leaving Colorado to teach in New Mexico.
Click to see more photos of Red River skiing — the early rope tow, Drew Judycki, Powder Puff, and Ilse Woerndle on the slopes
Red River Ski Area was born because Oklahoma businessman Stokes E. Bolton and his wife, Billie, visited the Santa Fe Ski Area and decided that Red River, then a summer resort town, needed a winter attraction. With surplus steel from oil derricks for lift towers, the area opened in December 1959. Bolton hired Buzz Bainbridge, who had been managing the Santa Fe Ski Area, and lured German-born Toni Woerndle away from Aspen to head the first Red River Ski School. Bolton soon sold the area to J. B. Veale, who took over in 1962, but the recruiting of European talent did not stop.
Sigi Klein, who hailed from Garmisch, became a ski school director at Red River in those early years, and he learned quickly how raw the new venture was. He later recalled one Christmas in the early 1960s when there was no snow and no snowmaking on the beginner hill the locals called the Bump. With nothing to teach on, the ski school was playing flag football on Main Street. It is a wonderful picture of a ski town in the making: world-class instructors, a brand-new chairlift, and a game of football where the ski lessons were supposed to be.
Klein used his Garmisch connections to strengthen that school. According to the ski area's own history, he convinced Erich Windisch, also from Garmisch, to leave Arapahoe Basin in Colorado and come to Red River. Windisch was no ordinary instructor. He had started skiing in Germany at age three, spent five years on the German national team in ski jumping and Nordic combined, and won nine divisional and national championships. In 1949, jumping with his hands at his sides because of a dislocated shoulder, he pioneered a new arms-alongside-the-body technique, won the Bavarian championship with it, and changed ski jumping for a generation; his style stayed the elite standard until the V-style arrived in 1985. His best jump traveled 337 feet at Oberstdorf in 1950, and he was named to the German Olympic team for the 1952 Oslo Games before another shoulder dislocation kept him out of competition. Before crossing the Atlantic in 1957 to become co-director of the ski school at Arapahoe Basin, he had directed a ski school on the Zugspitze near Garmisch.
That is the kind of teacher Klein brought to Red River's new ski school. The ski area's history says it plainly: with standouts like Klein and Windisch being lured to the new resort, the tiny ski area was gaining a reputation in the industry, even as it created thousands of new winter sports enthusiasts. Windisch would go on to teach in Colorado for decades and enter the Colorado Ski Museum Hall of Fame in 1994, but his Red River chapter still says something true about this town. From the very beginning, Red River aimed higher than its size, and the people who built its ski school had already stood on some of the most storied slopes in the world.