The economy stank.
Gloom hung over the Salt Lake Valley, too. It was mired in the gunk of a weeklong temperature inversion on the day Collins chairlift first ran, formally giving birth to Alta Ski Area and civic dreams of creating an industry that would put Utah on the map.
Seventy years later, the economy stinks once more, an inversion's unhealthy haze blankets the valley and the state is looking again to skiing for economic sustenance.
What has changed since Alta's emergence in 1939? Utah today has a $1 billion-a-year ski industry that provides 18,000 jobs, features 13 resorts attracting more than 4 million visitors annually and has the permanent honor of being among the select places that have played host to an Olympic Games.
Not a bad legacy.
And that doesn't even touch the way skiing and snowboarding have enhanced the quality of life here. The personal rewards of carving turns, particularly in Alta powder, cannot be quantified.
"Alta has always been a temple of skiing," said Dwight Janerich, the one-time Yale Medical School professor who was lured to Little Cottonwood Canyon in the mid-1980s and bought Snowpine Lodge.
"I don't know that it's easy to explain what's so good about Alta. It's a funky place in some ways, a religious place in a lot of others. People who come here have almost a religious dedication to it."
But the drive to create Alta was a business decision.
As early as 1934, the Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce established a Wasatch Outdoor Recreational Committee "to develop the natural recreational facilities until they become second to none in this country," according to ski historian Alan Engen.
He should know. His father, famed Norwegian skier and jumper Alf, was hired by the U.S. Forest Service in 1935 to search the mountains of the West for terrain suitable for ski resorts. Alf skied into the top of Little Cottonwood Canyon, liked what he saw and advised the agency to go for it.
It did. "The Forest Service intends to provide everything that is needed and possible," wrote assistant regional forester F.C. Koziol in a December 1937 ski section in The Salt Lake Tribune . "The rangers have a new job on their hands. They have tried it and they like it."
Other federal agencies followed the Forest Service lead.
The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) cut a trail from Brighton to Alta and helped revegetate slopes stripped bare for mining. The Works Project Administration (WPA) improved the Little Cottonwood Canyon road up to Alta. It renovated an old mining company general store and post office, abandoned after the 1929 stock market crash, into a public shelter for skiers. Finished for the 1939-40 season, this shelter became Snowpine Lodge.
While the Chamber of Commerce promoted winter sports through carnivals, Salt Lake City attorney Joe Quinney led another group of businessmen who raised $10,000 to build Collins lift.
They hired Mark Strand to make the lift out of a mining tram system that had hauled ore out of Little Cottonwood. Mine timbers became lift towers. An Austrian, Fred Speyer, was retained to run the lift.
At the same time, technology made skiing more accessible to the populace, improving today's necessities -- tight-fitting bindings, goggles, poles, sunscreen, lighter coats that could shed moisture.
Articles in The Salt Lake Tribune show that Salt Lake City high schools each had ski clubs. East High's alone had 175 members, including Paul W. Smith, now 86 and a retired podiatrist. He skied at Alta in 1937, before Collins lift went in, recalling the canyon ride as rather treacherous.
"We never had snow tires or chains, so we'd get stuck and have to get out and push the car," he said. "If you didn't get back in quick, sometimes you'd be left. You had to run hard to jump into the car."
Alta's opening weekend was busy. Although Collins lift did not operate until a Sunday, Tribune ski writer Don Brooks described the scene on Saturday, when the average snow depth was 65 inches.
"Down in the valley there was smoke and fog, and up in the Alta basin there was all the sunshine and blue sky in the world. Skiers? From the road on the north side of the basin it looked like an anthill."
As Collins was fired up on Sunday, providing uphill rides for 25 cents or $1.50 per day, a slalom race on lower Rustler determined that Helen Fisher and five other women would represent Utah in a big event the next weekend in Sun Valley.
The race finished just in time, Brooks reported, noting that "at 3 p.m all was serene. The nursery slope on the north side of the basin was crowded with skiers of all ages. The Forest Service shelter was filled to capacity with parka-clad hot dog and hamburger seekers … 10 minutes later [it was] a widely different scene. Snow was whipping down in blinding gusts from Albion Pass. Rustler Hill and Collins Gulch might as well have been in a different world."
Powder was moving in.
Over the next seven decades, Alta and Utah would become legendary for that powder.
Greg Sherman, the 38-year-old, present-day general manager of Snowpine Lodge, knew all about it growing up in New York.
"Utah was always one of those things people were talking about, especially Alta," he said. "It was known for huge amounts of snowfall, one of those places as a skier you wanted to make a pilgrimage to, just to experience the size and the snow."
Nathan Rafferty has witnessed that sense of awe time and again while promoting all of the state's resorts for Ski Utah. "People always know the name Alta," he said, even if they pronounce it Awl-ta . "And everybody knows it's the best snow anywhere."
Quality snow helped entice Alfred Kessler to move to Utah after his wife died. The quality people at Alta have kept him coming back for more skiing year after year. Now 96, he said, "They're not money grabbers. You get the feeling they're not out to make money other than having enough to keep the place running."
The reputation, the loyalty, the success Alta has engendered over the years seems to validate an observation made by chamber official H. Sterling Bailey at a Dec. 1, 1938, ceremony dedicating the Forest Service shelter by the nearly completed Collins lift.
Alta, he said, "represents the greatest single development in the state to make the glory of the mountain winter available to the general public."
