Statues of my youth.

A toughstone to my father, my brother, to a place and time I would love to return to but I cannot. I am here at the place but the time is in the rear view mirror.

The statue of Snowshoe Thompson at Boreal Ski Resort, just off Highway 80 is one of those statue/memories.

Whenever I drive by I try to spy it. I know this statue from my youth. A dude with a beard, long skis, and a long pole held out as if he was up high on the high wire.

Bur this time I did not continue on east towards Truckee but took the exit to answer the question: who was this skier worthy of a statue?

Snowshoe Thompson was born John Tostensen in Telemark, Norway on April 30, 1827. He immigrated to the United States when he was ten years old.

His family moved around the Midwest and eventually John and his brother wound up in Placerville, Ca formerly the mining camp of Hangtown.

From 1856 to 1876 he delivered mail from Genoa, Nevada and Placerville, California. This nickname “Snowshoe” was a misnomer because he used ten foot wooden skis and a long single pole, a method he learned in his native Norway. The journey would take him three to four days.

He made these trips in all kinds of weather giving real meaning to the Postal Service mantra, “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds”.

Thompson was of a different time when frontier men became legends and where made of toughness and fortitude. They was no room for giving up, there was a job to do and Thompson always came through. These were the days of wooden skis and iron men!

Thompson died on May 15, 1876 and is buried next to his wife in the cemetery in Genoa, Nevada.

Thompson’s legacy as the Father of California Skiing is memorialized in the statue at the Boreal Ski Resort (featured sketch) and in a similar statue at Mormon Station State Historic Park in Genoa, Nevada.