×

Skiing and chuckling all the way

SARANAC LAKE – It all started when Joe Pete Wilson was a kid. His parents worked and lived in Lake Placid, where he was born, but they bought a farm in Keene when he was still a young’un.

There was a sugarbush at the farm, and there was no way to use skis when collecting the heavy buckets of sap. That meant slow movement on snowshoes.

But really, Joe Pete wasn’t built for slowness.

Many of you may know Joe Pete Wilson. His family has been one of the mainstays of Lake Placid and Keene for over a century. Throughout his life he has moved in and out of the area many times. The 80-year-old now finds himself living at Saranac Village at Will Rogers in Saranac Lake.

“You grow up in a place, and then it grows up on you,” Wilson said. “I love it here.”

He has run an inn, taught skiing and raced in bobsled, snowshoe and biathlon contests all over the world. He is a member of the Lake Placid Hall of Fame as well as the St. Lawrence University Athletic Hall of Fame. He is the type of person who doesn’t sit still well, although he can be thoughtful and often takes a slow, deliberate approach.

After graduating in 1953 from Lake Placid High School, Wilson went to Vermont Academy to ski. He then attended St. Lawrence, skiing for the university until he graduated in 1958.

Once done with college, he enlisted in the Army, where, he admits, his job was to ski every day. He was assigned to the U.S. biathlon training team in Fort Richardson, Alaska.

“My entire time in the Army includes saluting about five times. My uniform was a cross-country suit or training shorts. We trained 365 days a year,” Wilson chuckled.

Wilson chuckles a lot.

The training wasn’t for naught. He went on to compete for the U.S. national cross-country ski team in the 30-kilometer race at the 1960 Olympics in Squaw Valley, California, where he finished 43rd.

“I was very fortunate. Coaches and family helped me,” Wilson said. “Skiing wasn’t as it is today. People had to go get jobs.

“The Olympic tryouts were in December of ’59, and I was able to get an assistant coaching job at St. Lawrence. That’s one of the things that set me up to make the Olympic team.”

After the Olympics, Wilson toured the world for two years with the national team and competed in a number of cross-country and biathlon races in Europe, helping to establish a U.S. presence in nordic sports.

After racing and coaching in Europe, Wilson stepped away from professional skiing to return home and work at the family business. His dad’s farm had morphed into an inn with stables, dining and plenty of patrons. Wilson used the stables to lead horseback riding excursions for guests, but he continued to think mainly about sliding on the snow. As is the routine of his life, something again brought him back to skiing.

In 1963, the state of New York owned a lot of land at Mount Van Hoevenberg. The bobsled track was already there, and the Department of Environmental Conservation was interested in developing cross-country skiing amenities at the site as well.

Since competitive nordic sports were relatively new to the U.S., the DEC tapped one of the few Americans who had raced and coached on the cross-country courses of Europe. Luckily, that expert lived in Keene, just a few miles from Van Ho.

Joe Pete, in addition to working at the family inn, got to work evaluating and laying out the ski trails at Van Hoevenberg that were eventually used in the 1980 Olympics. The trails are still popular today, with amateur and professional skiers visiting them from around the world.

Natalie Leduc of Saranac Lake, who for many years taught young people how to ski, has known Wilson his whole life.

“When I was teaching skiing, there were not a lot of adults skiing,” she said. “There were many, many kids, but they weren’t skiing with their families.”

Leduc thinks the trails at Van Hoevenberg made a huge difference in building local interest in skiing.

“I think the people who really became supportive were the older people,” she said.

But Wilson isn’t just a ski nut.

He admits he loves being outside and has always been an endurance athlete at heart. Harking back to his youth collecting maple sap, Wilson again strapped on snowshoes and became the snowshoe world champion in 1964 when the championship was held as part of Saranac Lake’s Winter Carnival.

Never one to sit still for too long, Wilson soon moved to Vermont and took a job working at Burke Mountain. His skill in laying out trails was again put to use, both at Burke and later at the Von Trapp Family Lodge. He personally added miles of trails to the Vermont landscape in the late 1960s and early ’70s.

While working at Burke, Wilson said he was contacted by Bill Lederer, who wanted to learn to ski. Lederer was a pretty famous author who had already written several well-received books.

Wilson and Lederer were each extremely busy, but Lederer convinced Wilson to use some of his lunch hour each day to put ski lessons down on paper. These lunchtime notes turned into a book that the two co-authored called “Complete Cross-Country Skiing and Ski Touring.”

Wilson once again caught the bug to move on and accepted the position of head coach of the U.S. biathlon team. He had more than enough experience and had literally written the book on skiing. He was a natural pick for the position and led the team through warmup events leading up to the 1980 Olympics.

Wilson didn’t particularly enjoy coaching, though, because he was pulled in so many directions. Before there was support staff, the coach had to teach the athletes while at the same time acting as travel agent, press secretary and countless other responsibilities.

“Coaching is a non-gratifying, terrible job,” Wilson said with a chuckle. “I was divided, my time was divided. I had to arrange transportation, food and lodging. I had to coach 40 guys. And half of them were 24 years old and knew everything! They thought they knew far more than I did, and they were right!”

For the Lake Placid Olympics, Wilson took the reins of Van Hoevenberg and became the venue manager. He said that despite transportation issues, the games went well and continue to be of enormous value to Lake Placid.

“The Olympics continued to promote Lake Placid as a premier recreational location,” Wilson said. “A few people had their nose bent out of shape because of the crowds, but to me that was a minor thing to contend with.

“I would be there at 5 o’clock in the morning and sometimes not leave until 11 or 12 at night. (But) for me, I got a paid vacation.”

After the Olympics, Wilson took on a larger role at the old family inn. He developed ski and horse trails, brought the elite sport of polo to the Adirondacks and continued to be involved in the world of skiing in various ways.

Despite moving to Florida for a number of years, skiing never left Wilson’s mind. Even though he can’t get out to ski anymore, he is still involved with the sport on an almost daily basis. He is working on developing a Nordic Ski Hall of Fame, which he hopes to locate in Lake Placid.

“Of the 350 or so people who are in the Ski Hall of Fame, only 10 percent are competitors in nordic events,” he said. He feels that Lake Placid is the most natural place to house the new venture.

Spending a lot of his life on skis and snowshoes, Wilson noticed that there wasn’t really anything available if you wanted a cross between the two devices. So Joe Pete invented one.

What he wanted was the slow but stable movement of the snowshoes he used as a kid combined with the quickness and agility of backcountry skis. Wilson joined forces with an old friend to design what he calls a “snowshoe ski.” They called in a few favors and got Fischer to manufacture a prototype.

The ski itself is a wide, deep-cut cross-country ski that combines the stability of snowshoes and the gliding and turning ability of backcountry skis.

If Joe Pete Wilson had a sugarbush that he could use the snowshoe ski in, he would. And he would chuckle the day away.

NEWSLETTER

Today's breaking news and more in your inbox

I'm interested in (please check all that apply)
Are you a paying subscriber to the newspaper? *

Starting at $4.75/week.

Subscribe Today