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The Basis of All Good Skiing
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF UTAH J. WILLARD MARRIOTT LIBRARY SKI AND SNOW SPORTS ARCHIVES - ALAN ENGEN SKI HISTORY COLLECTION
BY BIANCA DUMAS
It was 1940, and the slopes of Sun Valley had become a movie set. Champion skier Alf Engen was dressed in costume as Major Scott Landis, acting as a stunt double in the film My Reputation. In the scene they were to shoot, starlet Barbara Stanwyck was supposed to jump into the Major’s arms. He would carry her while he skied downhill, making for a spectacularly romantic scene. But Stanwyck would have none of it. What was worse, her stunt double also refused to do the job, stating that it was just too dangerous. Filming ground to a halt.
Evelyn Engen came to the rescue. She had total confidence in her husband’s skiing ability, having watched him win title after title in international ski competitions. The director got the film rolling, and it was Evelyn, dressed in Stanwyck’s costume, who jumped into Alf’s arms while he skied down Ruud Mountain.
Decades later, when Alf was inducted into the Intermountain Ski Directors Association Hall of Fame, Evelyn said, “When Alf proposed to me he said, ‘I’ll take you on the ride of your life,’ and he really meant it.”
Alf and his two skiing brothers, Sverre and Corey, would star or work as stunt doubles in eight ski films, two of which were filmed in Idaho. One, called Northern Pursuit, was a war movie starring Erroll Flynn, in which Nazi spies sneak into Canada on skis. Alf and Corey worked together as stunt doubles, Alf playing the protagonist and Corey playing one of the spies. The film shows them hitting huge freestyle jumps, sometimes in tandem, as they race down the mountain, their faces concealed in the hoods of their fur coats.
Alf and Evelyn had come to Sun Valley in 1937 to help plan the ski resort. They lived in a tent that first summer while Alf led a crew that cleared timber for the Warm Springs run. Later, the couple moved into the Sun Valley Lodge. Movie stars of the day were their frequent floormates, as Sun Valley founder Averil Harriman promoted his resort to icons like Gary Cooper and Clark Gable.
That’s when Alf was tasked with developing a ski jumping hill on Ruud Mountain. His son Alan remembered, “Dad would take me out and build a takeoff at the outrun of the jumping hill, and I would watch the big boys jump and try it out on my own at the bottom.” Alan was five years old.
Alf believed that going airborne was the basis of all good skiing. “My father was the one that told me this,” he once said, “You have to get up in the air in order to be good in any sport. You can pick your sport later on, but you gotta learn how to jump.”
Alf was right. Alan became an NCAA All-American skier, a member of the United States Military CISM ski team, and a Master’s champion.
Alf played a lot of roles at Sun Valley; another one was as a promoter of ski competitions. In one written promotion, Alf encourages the athletes to compete for the Bradley Plate, given to the best skier in a Four-Way meet. “In my opinion,” he writes, “the Four-Way meet is one of the nest competitions a skier can enter, for in order to be high man, the winner must have a knowledge of skiing in every field.”
Alf knew what he was talking about. Over his career, he won sixteen U.S. National Championship titles representing all four ski disciplines—ski jumping, cross country, downhill, and slalom. He also won the single meet where these four disciplines were combined to confer the title of Ski Meister on the winner. And he won that title twice. He was inducted into the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame in 1959 and was followed in this honor by both brothers and Alan.
Alf had come from sturdy Nordic stock. His father, a fine skier and ski jumper in Norway, would load all three of his sons on his back to swim the river. Alf and his brothers skied to school, and Alf set several ski jumping records in Norway. As a competitor on the American ski jumping circuit, Alf would break the world ski jumping record over and over, sometimes more than once in a single day. He gathered over 500 trophies and titles in his career.
But in an interview filmed during his later years, Alf remarked that there was more to life than winning. “I hope they’ll say I’ve done a pretty good job and that I loved everybody,” he said. “I would be happy if they remember some of the records I made, but that’s not the most important thing. I think it’s the way that you are inside.”