It was 1968 and our family had spent Christmas week at the recently demolished Grey Rocks Resort near Mt. Tremblaunt, Quebec north of Montreal, Canada learning how to ski. I’m not quite sure what made Pop think of this activity for the five of us to do a a family activity but it would become the thing that bonded us for life and the thing that was ours and ours alone that we shared together. My mom, brother and sister kept at it for a year or two but they didn’t catch ski fever the way Pop and I did. For the rest of my teen years my Pop and I would spend many a day and night alone together skiing at Bristol Mountain. During high school Pop was in senior management at Eastman Kodak and could get off work early and he allowed me to cut out of classes early and he’d meet me in the front traffic circle of my school at like 2:00 pm with our gear loaded and down the road we went to ski at Bristol the rest of the afternoon, into the evening until last chairlift at 10:00 pm then drive home and do it two to three times a week through out the season.
My passion for everything skiing was ignited by Pop and he always supported my insatiable addiction for the sport and gear. I always had the latest top of the line gear. Rossignol skis at first then K2’s, Lange, Nordica and Hanson boots and Salomon and Look-Nevada bindings after starting out with cable bindings, wooden skis and leather boots. As the technology of ski racing evolved I stayed up with the latest gear with jobs at Muxworthy’s Ski Haus, The Ski Loft and Snow Country all in the Rochester, NY market and joined the ski club at Cardinal Mooney HS. I tried out for and landed a spot on the Swain Demo Team as a mogul and ballet specialist during the height of Skiing’s “Hot Dog” era in the early 1970’s and my new hero Wayne Wong et al…and their high flying trapeese show on ice. It was then that I forged a lontime association with K2 Skis out of Vashon Island, WA
The Demo Team was coached by famed instructor and hot dog pioneer Robyn Smith of Swain. I simultainiously began training at the newly formed Olympic Training Center at Whiteface Mountain outside Lake Placid, NY where my family maintained a chalet for skiing, backpacking and fly fishing. I trained in classic ski racing formats of slalom, giant slalom and downhill under Rudi Gertzheimer (sp?) and Mark Davis (?) for most of my high school winter weekends. I never could spend enough time with any of the training regimes to excel at any particular discipline and wound up mediocre to good in all of them but master of none. I was thin and rememeber being blown all over Whiteface Mountain’s Lower Cloudspin training downhill run on top of bone crushing hardpacked ice due to it’s prevailing wind frontage. The upper mountain would get 65 mph gusts at times literally lifting my skis and legs out from under my 125 lb frame and off into the pine bough offcourse wilderness to a mounting list of broken bones and dislocated joints and the timeclock of amuatuer athletics of the day getting further and further away from me that by the time I was 17 I was far behind my age group of peers who’d made a fulltime commitment by attending Burke Moutain Academy under Warren Wetherall’s coaching which was the finest in the Northeast then onto Middlebury or Dartmouth’s ski teams to get noticed by the US Ski Team. 
The 1980 Winter Olympics were to be held at my home mountain of Whiteface Mountain in a few short years and I had early enlisted in the USAF Intelligence School so continuing training for something I’d have no chance of participating in gave way to bass guitars, cars, girls and I became a declared pro ski racer and signed with K2, Lange Boots and Solamon Bindings while still working at Muxworthy’s Ski Haus as a part time salesman while assisting in the shop tech duties. I traveled extensively and skiied all of the Northeasts’s legenday moutains such s Mt. Tremblant, Killington, Stowe, Waterville Valley, Gore, Greek Peak, Holiday Valley, Okemo with my Pop and his friend Dr. Jacques Lasner who became my private coach. “Zork” as we called him had the smooth old school style of say Stein Erickson or Tony Sailer having gone to medical school and skiing in the French Alps during the pre WWII 1930’s at Chaminoix and Mount Blanc.
He would just say follow me and do as I do as he took off down a hairball black diamond run with his feet locked together and his skis as one thin surfboard as he hopped and skipped his way over moguls, rocks, through glades and all over the moutain with a grace and ease that amazed me. No more graceful skiier every lived as Dr. Lasner. He’s laugh at me at the bottom of the run and offer me a snort off his silver pocket flask of Old Fitzgerald Whiskey before Pop would come noodling down in his stiff as a board, stem christie style that could be seen all the way from the top. Pop was a tough old bastard on his black Head Standards, Raichle Red Hot boots. 
Dr. Lasner was skiing on the trendy new Olin Skis with Spademan plate bindings I recall I was skiing K2 Comp IV’s (205cm) Winter Heat bump skis (185cm) and Bermuda Shorts (160cm) for extreme moguls and ballett with Lange Phantom Boots (being too light to flex the Banshee model) with Salomon 444 and 505 Pro bindings. I experimented with Hexel honeycomb aluminum skiis, Lange Skis, Marker Simplex and M4 Bindings, Dynamic VR17 classic race skis, Nordica Meteor and Hansen Wax fitted boots, Competition spring Spademan bindings (disaster due to flattening out of ski flex due ro rigid plate). Some of the gear I used pictured below:
Stephen G. Barr, Group Publisher
Unsafe At Any Age 
https://longskistruck.com/products/vintage-dynamic-vr17-antique-snow-skis-for-sale
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