’Bolt Upright

[Editor's note: This year's race has been rescheduled for March 13.]

Growing up in Adams, Massachusetts, in the 1970s and ’80s, Blair Mahar was certainly aware of the Thunderbolt. But it wasn’t until he returned to his hometown after graduating from college and skied it with a friend in 1995 that it truly got under his skin. “I was an Alpine skier, and I had a buddy who was a Telemark skier, and we decided to ski the Thunderbolt one day,” says the forty-year-old Mahar. “I’m a history buff, and there was a really neat story there.”

Neat story, indeed. A few years later, Mahar, a biology teacher and soccer coach at Hoosac Valley High School, decided to make a short documentary about the Thunderbolt (aka the “’bolt”), as a fun history project for himself and a few of his students. Soon, the modest, fifteen-minute movie project grew into a more ambitious, seventy-two-minute documentary—thanks in part to a $7,000 grant from the Fund of Adams. The film, Purple Mountain Majesty: A History of the Thunderbolt Ski Run, ended up winning first place amateur documentary at the 2000 Northeast Film and Video Festival and became an instant cult classic among those with any interest in the Thunderbolt.  

“We released the movie in 1999,” says Mahar, “and in the back of my head I had this idea to have a race up here, maybe for the seventy-fifth anniversary, but I kind of put it on the back burner. In 2008, we knew we were two years away, and so we enlisted some like-minded people. We’ve been meeting ever since.”

“And now,” he says, hardly able to believe it himself, or find time to catch his breath, “we’re a few months away.”

Mahar’s film tells the story of a band of local Adams boys learning to ski on the Thunderbolt back in the 1930s; eventually taking on some of the greatest skiers in the world; winning titles against some of the most elite college ski teams in the country; suffering defeat at the hands of an even more elite ski team sent over by the Nazis; and then earning a second chance to face the Nazis, this time in a battle in the Italian Alps at the end of World War II.

Perhaps the epilogue to all this—not included in the 1999 film, of course—is the resurrection of a race in 2010 to help celebrate the Thunderbolt’s rich history and give new life to the legendary ski trail that continues to challenge and intrigue all who come in contact with it. The race, scheduled for March 13, has already capped at one hundred and twenty participants, eager and ready to step up to the mountain, as it were, to once again take on the Thunderbolt at this year’s 75th Anniversary Thunderbolt Ski Race.

The original Thunderbolt was, in fact, a roller coaster located at Revere Beach, Massachusetts, just five miles north of Boston. The stomach-lurching, two-thousand-foot drops on the challenging, narrow Thunderbolt ski trail were thought to resemble the thrills that the original Thunderbolt roller coaster offered up: sharp bends and steep drops, which would become better known as the Steps, Needle’s Eye, the Big Bend, and the Big Schuss. Its negatives became its positives: too narrow, too steep, too dangerous, and too tiring to climb to its summit, located at an elevation of 3,941 feet—all challenges that most red-blooded American boys who grew up in Adams couldn’t possibly resist.

Maurice “Greeny” Guertin and Rudolph “Rudy” Konieczny were two such boys who watched the trees being cleared by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps in 1934, initially thinking that these guys were nuts. No one was going to be able ski down something like this. But after three months of hard labor and three hundred pounds of dynamite to help speed things along, Guertin and Konieczny made their way to the top after that first winter snow to find out just how nuts. They weren’t the only ones intrigued. That first winter of 1935, five ski clubs and approximately 3,500 spectators gathered to watch the first official race held there: the Massachusetts State Downhill Championship, won by a dashing Dartmouth College freshman named Dick Durrance with a thrilling time of two minutes and forty-eight seconds. For those kids watching that first competition, racing the Thunderbolt was officially on.

While Mahar and others would hike the Thunderbolt occasionally when they, too, were kids growing up in Adams, Mahar says he never imagined that anyone could still ski it. “In the mid-eighties, it was in rough condition,” he recalls. “Even in the nineties, it was a pretty sketchy run.”

Not anymore. On an unusually mild, breezy, November day, Rich Adamczyk is clearing the trail, stopping occasionally to admire how far the Thunderbolt has come since then. “I’ve never seen it look this good in the past seventeen years,” he says, taking it all in. Now, at age twenty-nine, Adamcyzk is just one of a legion of volunteers who make up the Thunderbolt Ski Runners, a once small group that has since grown to include one hundred and fourteen active members. The club’s current name combines the two names of the original ski clubs from the 1930s: the Adams Ski Runners and the Thunderbolt Ski Club.

Adamczyk, who first skied the Thunderbolt with his father at the age of twelve (returning later as a teenager to snowboard down it with friends), has entered the Alpine division for this year’s race—the one-and-only category back in the day. As well as being a participant at the 75th Anniversary Thunderbolt Ski Race, Adamczyk is one of the key board members instrumental in making the upcoming race a reality.

“We’re feeling pretty confident,” he says, no doubt trying to imagine what the current mid-November scene will look like come February 20, when snow, hopefully, will have blanketed the course and spectators will once again dot its hillside. “We’ve been planning it for two years now. We’ve talked it over and over again. The course is in real good shape—every year it’s gotten better. Last year was good, [the] year before that was good. This year is awesome.”

Last winter, the abundant snow was a big reason why the stonemason by day skied the Thunderbolt forty-plus times, mostly with his dog and friends, waking up early in the morning to get one, sometimes two runs in before work, just as Konieczny and Guertin used to do before putting in long days at the local mill.

Guertin and Konieczny first skied on homemade equipment: bicycle inner tubes wrapped around their ankles and nailed to skis. But when that early gang of skiers formed clubs, local furniture store A.C. Simmons sold twenty-dollar Groswold skis to Konieczny and his friends. For mill-workers earning less than eleven dollars a week, this was no small investment, but Simmons would let the boys purchase the skis with one dollar down, permitting them to pay the rest over the course of the winter.

In 1936, Amherst’s Jarvis Schauffler, who would later ski in the Olympic Games, became the Massachusetts State Downhill Champion on the Thunderbolt, setting a new course record of 2:26. And then, following an off year in 1937 due to lack of snow at Greylock, Rudy Konieczny, long considered the most gifted skier in Adams, quit his job for the winter to prepare for the 1938 Eastern Amateur Downhill Championships. Such single-minded dedication didn’t go unnoticed by the local press. Suddenly the unknown Adams boy was a race favorite. If that wasn’t intimidating enough, a team of eight elite European skiers, the German Universities Skiing Team of Munich, arrived on the scene dressed in sweaters with Nazi swastikas displayed prominently across their broad chests, and assistants in tow hired to carry their ski equipment to the top of the hill during their practice runs.  

And sure enough, it was Fritz Dehmel, not Konieczny, who won the race with a new record time of 2:25. Konieczny, who wasn’t helped by having to nurse an ankle he’d injured during a practice run leading up to the event, fell hard on the icy conditions, losing valuable time and finishing sixteenth out of thirty-one competitors. Not bad, all things considered, but devastating nevertheless to the large contingent of local fans gathered at the bottom of the hill (part of a crowd of seven thousand, the largest ever to watch a Thunderbolt race) who had come to watch one of their own knock off the top Germans.

Josh Chittenden, also twenty-nine, first came across the Thunderbolt during his senior year of high school when Mahar, who was making his documentary, was looking to film some local snowboarders racing down the Thunderbolt. Chittenden spent seven days up there, happily carving turns for the camera. Chittenden says he’s since converted to mountaineering, a type of backcountry skiing that requires a new set of equipment: skis fitted with slip-on skins (as well as softer, more flexible ski boots) offering enough traction to walk up a mountain like the Thunderbolt, and which then, of course, slip off to Alpine ski right down it.

Chittenden says he was lucky if he got in a couple of good days of snowboarding the Thunderbolt during any given season while growing up. “There wasn’t much clearing,” he recalls. “But as I’ve gotten older, we’ve been skiing [it] more since then. The last five years, we skin up the mountain and ski down it.”

Chittenden brags that he managed twenty-eight days on the Thunderbolt last winter. No small number when you consider it usually takes two to two-and-a-half hours to climb to the top and just ten to twenty minutes to ski down. “It’s a pretty long trail [1.6 miles] and pretty demanding,” Chittenden says. “It’s very narrow in spots and you have to use caution. And it’s not groomed at all.”

That lack of trail-grooming is a problem as true today as it was for those early skiers, who would often sidestep up the trail to pack the snow down, making the downhill ski slightly less treacherous. That this made the trek to the top even more time-consuming didn’t seem to deter anyone. “My grandfather tells stories about how he used to go skiing with the old-timers,” Chittenden says. “And he would often complete three runs [in a day]. Making three runs today is pretty unheard of.”

Despite it being a bit bumpy and rough going, Chittenden says the trail is now the clearest it’s been in probably forty years—the last time anyone thought to organize a race on it. “Back then,” says Chittenden, “the trail was still wider; I’ve seen old photos. But our goal is to bring it back to its original state. That requires some more work, but it’s in great shape as of right now.”

At this year’s race, Chittenden plans to ski in the Alpine division, one of four racing categories, the others being Telemark, snowboard, and vintage—skiing with a complete set of pre-1950s equipment, including old boots, bindings, and poles. “I’m a pretty competitive person,” Chittenden confesses. “I’ve mountain-bike raced. I slalom-ski race. I’d like to say I’m doing it just for fun, but I race for one reason … to win. And the film gave me an awakening. We’re always making reference to Rudy or Greeny and what they would have done.”

What Konieczny and Guertin did, following 1938’s disappointment, was to beat their archrivals, the Dartmouth College skiers, at the Massachusetts State Downhill Championship the next year, 1939—an incredible success for the Ski Runners of Adams, given the dominance of Dartmouth’s ski teams at the time. And just to show that it was no fluke, the Ski Runners repeated the feat in 1940 and 1942. The icing on the cake: Bill Linscott, a sixteen-year-old local high school sophomore, surprised everyone by winning the individual honors in 1942 with a time of 3:17.

But this essentially ended the Thunderbolt’s time in the sun. Soon enough the war came calling. Konieczny, Guertin, and others enlisted, many signing up for the highly specialized 10th Mountain Division that gathered the best skiers and mountain climbers in the country to train in Colorado and at Mount Rainier, before embarking overseas to do battle with the Nazis in the Italian Alps. This time the boys of Adams would prevail, but not without a cost. While Guertin returned safely, Konieczny was not so fortunate. When his body was finally found in the mountains, it was said that there were many more dead Nazis lying nearby—small consolation, however, for friends and family back home.

The year Mahar’s film debuted, a group of slightly more than a hundred former Thunderbolt skiers and 10th Mountain Division veterans met at the top of Mount Greylock during a dedication ceremony for the new warming shelter built at the top of the Thunderbolt, the place where, come February, a new generation of racers will nervously huddle, awaiting their start time. Most likely, they’ll notice that the shelter is dedicated to an old friend and soldier, Rudolph “Rudy” Konieczny, still considered to be the best and most fearless skier ever to bomb down the ’bolt.

As always, the weather is the biggest question mark for the upcoming February race. Will there be enough snow? Will there be too much snow? Will it be too cold, too windy, too icy? Mahar and others have set a postponement date of March 6, if conditions make it impossible to race on February 20. Otherwise, “Everything is perfect,” says Mahar, who has received entries from those who would classify themselves as advanced, expert, or demented. Mostly locals, mostly Alpine skiers. Mahar’s suspicion, however, is that most are overestimating their ability and underestimating the trail’s difficulty. “We need to get snow early,” he adds, “a nice base up there, but that’s our Achilles’ heel: Mother Nature.”

David Childs, in charge of ski patrol on race day, is more concerned with safety. “It’s going to be interesting,” he says. “I’m not aware of anything like it, no benchmark; [it’s] hard to say if it’s more or less risky than other races. It is a backcountry race, which means no [protective] netting. I tell people it’s an intermediate trail with expert conditions, so people need their heads screwed on.”

Though skiers back in the day had wooden skis and leather boots, people “just went completely all out, held back only by your own fear and your gear,” Childs says. Now the equipment and the technique has improved—so much so that even the average skier is capable of going much faster. “My concern,” he says, “is if they make a mistake: the speeds are much higher. We’re going to try and slow the race down, slow the speed down [with gates and turns].”

In other words, it’s highly unlikely that anyone will best the Thunderbolt course record of two minutes and eight seconds set by Per Klippgen of Norway at the Eastern Downhill Championship race in 1948, the last major race held on the Thunderbolt. Following those postwar championships, others put on a first and then a second annual Rudolph Konieczny Memorial Race, but by then the Thunderbolt had started its slow, inevitable decline. Williams College would make use of the course for unofficial races into the late sixties during its annual Winter Carnival, but the introduction of ski lifts at nearby ski resorts eventually did the Thunderbolt in. Few were eager to hike two hours up a mountain for a single run, given the alternatives.

At least not until ten years ago, when some of the grandsons and granddaughters of those original Adams skiers, no doubt inspired by Mahar’s film, decided they might just prefer the exercise over long lift lines, free skiing over paid, and having a mountain all to themselves as opposed to sharing it with a crowd, and began rediscovering the Thunderbolt right in their own backyard.  

 “My junior year in high school,” says Chittenden, starting to laugh as he tells it, “we were starting to ski the Thunderbolt again. And Greeny [who has since passed away] used to hang out in the Greylock Glen all the time, just sitting up in his car, looking out over Adams. We were going up on the Thunderbolt, and a buddy of mine pulls up to Greeny, and Greeny rolls down his window and says to us, ‘That’s a dangerous trail. You boys be careful, now.’”  [JAN/FEB 2010]

Having also grown impatient with long lines, crowded slopes, and pricey lift tickets, Chris Newbound now spends his winter days cross-country skiing, preferring to get up and down the mountain by his own powers.

THE GOODS

75th Anniversary Thunderbolt Ski Race
March 13 at 9-3
Thunderbolt Ski Run
Adams, Mass.

Purple Mountain Majesty:
A History of the Thunderbolt Ski Run

The Boys of Winter: Life and Death in the U.S. Ski Troops During the Second World War
By Charles J. Sanders
University Press of Colorado