Competitive downhill racing at top speeds…

During the winters of the sixth and seventh grades, while living in Aspen Colorado, I discovered the thrill of downhill racing. I was not big enough for football or fast enough for track or tall enough for basketball, but I had a need for speed and downhill racing at sixty-plus miles per hour swept me away like an avalanche.

Back in the mid-sixties, the bustling ski town of Aspen had less than 1800 year-round residents. We had moved there from Malibu, so my father could write his novels Armageddon and Topaz. My older brother played on the High School football team. I did not care for technical shalom or giant shalom, so that left high-speed downhill racing—never a dull moment. In those days, Aspen had the finest coaches and ski instructors in the world, from Austria, Germany, France, Switzerland, and Italy.

Training began two months before the first snowfall. Pushed to the limit, our team consisted of seasoned racers and wannabes like me. In the dirt on the mountainside, we set up race courses and ran them on foot. We ran up the snowmobile trails to the top of the mountains and then run straight down, tumbling and falling, and bouncing to our feet and continuing the run. When winter came, we were the first to the top of the ski mountain, on the ski lifts at dawn with the “milk run” that supplied food to the mountaintop restaurant.

Our couch was the fastest woman on skis…

The higher ranked racers, who had raced since childhood, had a male coach. That left us stragglers with Kristl Staffner from Austria. At the time, the male-dominated racing hierarchy did not think much about female coaches. Somehow, our pack ended up the current women’s World Record holder for speed skiing. In fact, she had just recently broken the woman’s record for speed, done on a straight course, somewhat like a tilted quarter-mile drag race. She had reached 88 miles per hour, a new world’s record. A strong woman, Kristl’s husband was a local ski instructor. At the time, the fastest racer to ever coach an Aspen Junior Ski Team.

Kristl had a reputation for pushing the limit…

On a typical day, before school and on weekends, our frozen and terrified ski team would go to the top of the mountain with Kristl, and then follow her all the way to the bottom of the hill—nonstop. She had one discipline, and that was to flow with the curvatures of the mountain and avoid controlled turns (to slow down) at any costs. Kristl had a death wish, and somehow we became her unsuspecting victims. I am talking breakneck speeds, with nobody else on the trails, we continually pushed the limits of our endurance and overcame all of our primal fears. I could guesstimate, that we exceeded speeds well beyond those attained by the more seasoned racers. Not only did Kristl hate the male dominated coaching staff, she was out to prove that we were as good as, or better than the older seasoned racers.

My dreams of being an Olympic star crashed…

On one Saturday morning, we were on Buttermilk mountain for what they call ‘time trials’, were we raced against the clock to attain free skiing passes for the season. Currently I was in seventh grade, and tickets for minors in those day were two dollars a day, and beating the clock wasn’t all too hard. Except for one small problem, Kristl set an incredibly fast downhill course on Tiehack Parkway and Racer’s Edge trails—the fastest course I had ever been on, were we reached speeds averaging fifty-sixty miles per hour.

Well, each racer took off from the top a minute apart, that allowed for all of us to finish the race in about an hour. After everyone had reached the bottom, they did a head count. An hour later they found me, unconscious, way off the course and in the trees. The last thing I remember, was hitting a bump, flying through the sky, and hitting the treetops, and the lights went out. Cut and bruised, I broke my knee cap—that ended my racing season. That summer my parents split and my brother and I moved back to Malibu—and I never competed again.

Two of my buddies continued to the top…

Two of my friends growing up in Aspen became international racers, and I lived out my fantasies through their accomplishments. Pictured above is Andy Mill. We used to hang out as kids. He had quite an illustrious racing career and ended up being a sportscaster for ESPN, NBC, ABC, AND CBS—and hosted a syndicated show called “Ski with Andy Mill,” where he toured major ski areas.

As young teens, we used to ride our ten speed bikes up Maroon Creek, ten miles up a windy road, and then race down, naturally, at breakneck speeds. Andy placed sixth in the downhill in the Innsbruck Olympics of 1976 and competed world-wide as a member of the US Ski Team. He also married tennis star Chris Evert, and they had three sons and an 18-year marriage, before she moved on to Greg Norman for a short-lived marriage. Andy happily remarried—and ended up with an eight figure divorce settlement from Chris.

And there was Whitcomb Sterling, a wild child…

Everyone called him Whit—a good friend of mine while growing up in Aspen. We went way back, to the late 50’s. Our family did our first holiday ski trip to Sun Valley Idaho, our second in Aspen where we stayed at the infamous Heatherbed Lodge, owned by the Sterling family. Our families fused together like glue, each member of our family matched up with a corresponding Sterling family member—father to father, mother to mother, sister to sister, and so on. Their demanding father, Ken, was the salt of the earth, a hardworking man who also drank too much and occasionally whipped the tar out of his kids and gave his wife a few black eyes and bruises. More on Whit in a minute…

Say hello to the mother of the century, Martie…

Martha “Martie” Sterling became my alternate mother. My parents were always going out of town. Dad did research and speeches, and they enjoyed the nightlife of New York and spots around the world. Now, the Sterling family ran the lodge, and had plenty of spare rooms, and lists upon lists of chores to be done—even had a huge chalk board in their family room that charted the hundreds of odds and ends that had to be done on a daily basis. In summer when there wasn’t snow, they stabled a couple of dozen horses and rented them out, and acted as trail guides, up into the beautiful Rocky Mountains. Some of my favorite memories were from time spent with the Sterling’s. More on the Heatherbed in a future journal. Now, about Whit…

Whit and I skied no man’s land—for thrills…

As I write in my memoir, The Uris Trinity, during the second semester of the tenth grade, I had a falling out with the world. In short, I had a death wish, having suffered a very intense family ordeal, I had little or no good reason to continue a normal life. I was a rebel, who took on an adventurous persona, testing the limits of the Rocky Mountains, defying death at every step of the way. Whit, an accomplished racer, one morning after an all-night blowout teen party at my Dad’s house on the hill, decided to head a dangerous backcountry skiing expedition.

With skis strapped to our backs, four of us foolhardy daredevils took psychedelics and headed up, into the uncharted backcountry outside of Aspen, till hours later we reached the top of a glacier and skied where no man had ever skied before. One of my most memorable adventures, a true gift from God. Hours later we arrived at my Dad’s house. Our girlfriends were there and had spent the entire day cleaning up the mess that we made the night before.

Whit went on to greater things. He represented the US in international races across the globe. Being a nonconformist, he smuggled contraband in hollowed out skis, on the way back from races in South America—not because of the money, but for the thrill of doing what others considered impossible. Haven’t seen Whit in decades, have no idea where he ended up. Miss his signature smile, but more so, his uncanny determination—that is rare and noteworthy.

Photo credits: Roberts-1.com