Snow Festival is the modern incarnation of what has been a 80-year effort at encouraging people to visit the Sierra for winter fun. Before all-weather superhighways and all-wheel drive vehicles, marketing the winter sports experience meant taking the action to the cities. And in sunny California, that meant, literally, taking the snow to the people.

50,000 Spectators in Berkeley
In January 1934, the Auburn Ski Club first introduced ski jumping to the San Francisco Bay area by co-hosting an event on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley. To prepare for the exhibition, 43,000 cubic feet of snow were packed into six Southern Pacific boxcars and then hauled down from the mountains. Ski jumpers from the Truckee and Auburn ski clubs and around the country entertained an estimated 50,000 spectators with tremendous leaps from a scaffold jump 85 feet high.

Among the jumpers were Roy Mikkelsen (twice the U.S. national ski jumping champ and member of the 1936 Olympic team) and Wayne Poulsen, founder of Palisades Tahoe and a great jumper in his own right.

The event was a huge success for getting city folk all fired up about skiing and winter sports. California ski clubs wanted to make the spectacular jumping exhibition an annual event so another demonstration was held the following year, also in Berkeley. Unfortunately, neither event raised much money for the ski club promoters and both ended in chaos with huge, free-for-all snowball fights among 5,000 college boys and youngsters.

The photos in this story are (c) by Mark McLaughlin. He is a weather historian who lives on the North Shore.