An enthusiastic skier since his childhood in Canada, Berry moved to Reno with his wife and family in 1928 to see the West. He found work as a linotype operator at the Nevada State Journal.

First Tow
"My second day out here in December I traveled to Truckee and the ski area at Hilltop," Berry recalled. "I rented a pair of skis made of pine that had a single strap you stuck your booted foot through.

"Beyond the lodge stood the lower terminal of an amazing contraption known locally as a 'pullback.' It was, at the moment, the only ski tow in America."

The tow had a continuous wire rope hung on sheaves at top and bottom and was driven by an electric engine. To ride it, you looped onto a hook set in the moving cable and slid upward on the snow. You hung on to the pole handles and let yourself be towed slowly to the upper end. Tobogganers could loop their rope over a hook and be towed up, sitting down.

The rope tow cost a nickel, but Berry didn't care because his first ride was a momentous occasion; he'd never skied down a slope he had not first climbed.

First Jump
"On the right of the slope they had a ski jump. You could tell almost immediately that the jumpers were pretty clannish. However, my first trip I sailed off it 50 feet, and I immediately became one of the boys."

Two years later, Hilltop became renowned for winter sports when it built a bigger, high-trestle ski jump. Other ski areas quickly sprouted nearby.

Auburn Ski Club
In 1929 the newly formed Auburn Ski Club mailed away to Chicago for ski equipment. At the time there was not one store, firm, or mail order house in California that sold skis. The Club headed to the mountains, and built a warming hut and ski jumping hill at a spot three miles above the town of Towle on Highway 40.

Winter sports were beginning to also attract attention on the north shore of Lake Tahoe near Tahoe City.

Tahoe Tavern
By 1928 the Tahoe Tavern began offering winter fun to its guests who arrived by way of the "Snow Ball Special" train from Truckee. Tahoe Tavern's garage was turned into an ice rink, and a toboggan site was established on a site above today's Tahoe City Golf Course.

Activities were soon moved to a more sheltered hill at today's Granlibakken. There, with George Bliss supervising, a double toboggan slide was built.

"Snowplay and skiing was a major part of our lives," remembered the late Bill Bechdolt, a Tahoe City resident. Bill's family moved to Tahoe City in 1906, and, both Bill and his brother, Carl, became competitive ski jumpers.

"You have to remember that in 1928, when I was six years old, there were only 12 families in Tahoe City," Bill recalled. "There was no school in the winter time. Our school closed in December and opened in March. So all winter you had a lot of time. We learned to Nordic ski. All the kids played around on skis. That's how you got anywhere. It was a lot of fun."

Olympic Hill 1
At about the same time, a group of Norwegian skiers were touring the West, giving ski jumping exhibitions and, thus, sparking interest in the sport. Besides the famed jumper Alf Engen, the group included national jumping champion Lars Haugen. The jumpers so impressed Tahoe Tavern directors that they hired Haugen to design a ski jump hill at a site at Granlibakken already dubbed," Olympic Hill."

It took Haugen almost two years and $10,000 to complete it, but for the next decade the site would reign as one of the most popular West Coast winter sites.

The organization of the Lake Tahoe Ski Club in 1929 firmly established skiing in the area. By 1930 the greatest winter sports season in the history of the West and California was taking place.

Ski resorts at Yosemite, Sequoia National Park, and Big Pines Park were built and promoted. With better and better transportation to the mountains by way of overnight, Southern Pacific train service, and with the realignment and snow removal on Highway 40, more ski clubs formed, allowing more access for people visiting the mountains. It cued the rising of the curtain of Tahoe's and the West's winter sports stage.

Skiing and the Lake Tahoe mystique developed enough for Frederick Kenyon Brow in 1928 to write in the Saturday Evening Post: "In all this eager devotion to skiing, there is nothing harmful, nothing that points a warning. On the contrary, it is for individual good. It gives health and tone to the system, it clears and freshens the mind by bright exercise and competition in the clear open air, and it drives the cobwebs from wearied brains. And thus it is that this era of enthusiastic devotion to skiing in the West is good."