The Man Who Flew Looking for a Mountain

Right — the ski valley up that canyon. Let me tell you about the man who made it, because his life reads like somebody made it up.

He was born in Frankfurt in nineteen thirteen, and his name was Ernst Hermann Bloch. Jewish family. He grew up in Switzerland, which is where he learned to ski, and he was good — good enough that he made it into serious competition, good enough that he was in the reckoning for the German Olympic ice hockey team for the nineteen thirty-six games.

He was left off it. The reason was that he was Jewish. Nineteen thirty-six, Berlin — you know exactly what those games were.

He got out of Europe in nineteen thirty-eight, which was cutting it as fine as a man can cut it, and came to America.

And then the war came, and the United States Army took a young German-speaking Jewish refugee who knew Germany, knew Switzerland, and knew exactly what he was dealing with — and put him into military intelligence.

So here is what this man ended up doing. He interrogated captured Nazis. The senior ones. Hermann Göring — Hitler's number two, the head of the Luftwaffe. Albert Speer, the architect and armaments minister.

Sit with that for a second. A Jewish kid from Frankfurt who had been thrown off a sports team for his race, sitting across a table from Hermann Göring, asking the questions.

His code name in that work was Ernie Blake. And when the war was over, he kept it. He did not go back to being Ernst Bloch. He took the name the war had given him and he wore it for the rest of his life.

Now, most men who had been through all that would have wanted a quiet job.

What Ernie Blake wanted was a mountain.

He had never stopped skiing, and he had it in his head that somewhere in the American Southwest there was a mountain good enough to build a real ski area on — the kind of steep, serious terrain he had grown up with in the Alps. Everybody told him the Southwest was the wrong place to look. It is the desert. There is no snow in the desert.

So he got a small plane, and he flew. For a couple of years, off and on, he flew over the Sangre de Cristo range looking down at ridgelines and snowfields and drainages, hunting for the shape he had in his mind.

And in a canyon up above Taos, at a dead mining camp called Twining where a copper operation had gone bust fifty years earlier, he found it.

In nineteen fifty-five he and his wife Rhoda started building. First lift went in the following year — a J-bar, which is about as basic as a ski lift gets. They lived in a trailer. The road up that canyon was terrible. Nobody in New Mexico was asking for a ski resort.

And it worked. It became one of the great ski mountains in America, with a reputation for steepness that frightened people from all over the country, and an excellent ski school — because Blake understood that if you build a mountain that hard, you had better be able to teach.

He ran it until he died in nineteen eighty-nine, and his family ran it for a long while after.

A man is barred from the Olympics for being Jewish, escapes Germany by a year, interrogates Göring, keeps the codename, flies a light aircraft over New Mexico for two years hunting a hillside, and builds a world-class ski resort on a failed copper mine.

Eighteen miles up that road on your right. That is where it is.