Ed. note: Written by Kevin Donohue. Kevin is a senior at Dartmouth College, and the unofficial historian of all things Dartmouth Outing Club.

Skiing is in Dartmouth’s blood. For well over a hundred years, Dartmouth College students have been gliding up and down the snowy hills of Hanover and all over New Hampshire. For its relatively tiny size, the College has produced almost 150 Olympians and greatly contributed to the development of skiing as a sport in North America. A key figure in Dartmouth’s close association with skiing stands 4,802 feet tall at the southwestern edge of the White Mountains: Mt. Moosilauke, the spiritual home of the Dartmouth Outing Club.

Dartmouth’s ties to Moosilauke run deep: from before the College acquired the first tract of land on the mountain in 1920, students and alumni have flocked to the mountain to hike to its summit, to sleep in the rustic Moosilauke Ravine Lodge or a cabin on its flanks, and—naturally—to ski. By 1927, the excitement around Alpine events in Hanover compelled the ambitious young skiers to venture northward to the steep slopes of Mt. Moosilauke. The Moosilauke Down-Mountain Race, held on March 8, 1927, was the first ever of its kind in the East. After hiking the mountain (as this was before the advent of any ski lifts), the 17 contestants then skied 4 ½ miles down the winding Carriage Road. Charley Proctor ’28, future Olympian and later the first to run the headwall of Tuckerman Ravine, placed first with a time of 21 minutes.

The race was a hit, and quickly became an annual event. In 1928, during the Olympics in St. Moritz, Arnold Lund proposed that slalom be scored on time alone, without consideration to style—the Moosilauke Down-Mountain that year became the first slalom run on what would later be the official FIS rules. By 1931, skiers were perfecting their runs down the (now 2.8 mile) course, lowering their times and mastering the trail, a benchmark for the rapidly developing downhill racing scene at that time. It was at the 1931 race (the first open to non-collegiate skiers) where John McCrillis ’19 filmed the event, producing a striking work that was the first American film of a downhill race.

McCrillis then went on to show the movie at the December 1932 meeting of the directors of the National Ski Association. As a result of the film, the NSA decided to officially recognize slalom and downhill racing, and by January, due to petitioning by the Outing Club, they approved the nation’s first National Downhill Championship on the Carriage Road on Mt. Moosilauke. On March 13, 1933, 80 contestants entered the race, with over 100 undergrads from the Outing Club attending to all the logistical details. First and second place went to, unsurprisingly, two sons of Darmouth: Henry S. “Bem” Woods ‘36, with a time of 8:00.8 with no falls, with Harry Hillman Jr., son of Dartmouth’s track coach, as runner-up. Hillman skied the course much faster than Woods, but on the last turn, barely 100 feet from the finish line, lost a ski, hobbled across on the remaining one, and finished a fifth of second behind Woods.

The event ended with a huge bonfire at the bottom of the run, complete with hot soup—the race had been a major success. However, despite the achievement, the Carriage Road course was quickly to be overshadowed by the recently opened Taft Trail on Mt. Cannon. After 1933, no major event was held on Mt. Moosilauke again—but the Dartmouth Outing Club had marked a lasting first in the history of skiing in North America.