Baseball has its Hall of Fame decorated with the green serpentine marble from the Rochester Quarry in Vermont. Football has a Hall of Fame. And the Basketball one is right down the way in Springfield, Massachusetts.
But here in Vermont, our versions are a little different. We have the Vermont Ski & Snowboard Museum, which does a yearly induction of Vermonters. It honors those athletes, pioneers, and special contributors to the sports we all love so very much. This year, Killington Resort’s Hanke Lunde, who started as Construction Manager and was later President under SKI Ltd., was inducted, as were three other amazing Vermonters (including Kelly Clark!) Then, the Vermont Alpine Racing Association has its Hall of Fame, awarded for dedicated service over decades this year to our own Chuck Hughes.
I was lucky enough to be at both of these ceremonies this year and got to listen to these great men talk about their experiences of sharing the sport of skiing with so many of us over the years. It was amazing to hear them speak about their experiences in the industry and postulate on how important sharing this sport with others has been in shaping who they had become as people.
As Hank Lunde finished his acceptance speech there was not a dry eye in the house. You could tell that his years in service to our sport, in making sure that every guest felt welcomed as if they were your friend or neighbor and every employee felt loved, had deeply touched him. He spoke of ski resorts as pioneers of change and that they must be educated risk-takers. One cannot sit blindly by and hold onto the past without making adaptations that will grow both the business and the sport. He spoke of our sport as centered on real and natural interaction.
Social interaction with real-life humans and interaction with nature are two things that just might be missing so much in today’s world. We are all off running somewhere, so busy that coming up to Killington and skiing for even a few short hours can make folks remember that the natural world exists outside the concrete jungle that so many of us live in.
He spoke about listening to your passion and how that passion comes from the mountain, whether it’s the excitement of the sport, the views from the mountain, or just the massive variety of the weather. It is this that keeps our souls going and growing. This spiritual connection to the mountain is fostered by spending a few hours on snow or going for a snowshoe or hike, no matter the season. We need ski areas to help us reconnect with nature after hours at our desks.
Lunde finished by saying that if you want to be successful, you have to put people first—and that is just what Chuck Hughes of Killington Mountain School does every day of his life. Family first, of course, but we have all watched Chuck spend more than his fair share of time helping build up the youth of the sport or the adults who work so hard to make it all happen. And he does it with a smile, making everyone feel like he has all the time in the world for them. I’m honored to have worked for Chuck for almost a decade and serve as a ballot clerk next to him during elections.
He loves people. And he loves skiing. So it feels like his entire essence in life is to help people love skiing. And for those who love the sport, he works tirelessly to ensure they have the training and support to make their competitive dreams a reality. Who else could pull off a World Cup race in Vermont where we hadn’t seen racing anywhere near that level in decades?
Chuck would make it happen, obviously, with a team, but also through his sheer determination and dedication to years of building up the system needed to support an event of this caliber. I’ve heard it often said that there would be no World Cup racing in Killington without Chuck.
So, as Killington readies itself for its 57th ski season, I would ask our entire community to think about what they themselves are doing to help bring more people into the sport, to help those who love skiing and riding be able to get one more day on the hill or to get one more step closer to living out their dreams of a ski bum life. To learn from the Hall of Fame inductees and work to make our sport that much better, that much stronger and more resilient, and to take just a little time to make sure to have fun, reconnect with the mountain, and simply breathe in the magic of the mountains.
Merisa is a long-time Killington Resident, Global Real Estate Advisor, and Coach PomPom. She can be reached at [email protected].
