Yosemite Winter Club Tries to Build on its Stylish Past

by Carl T. Hall
San Francisco Chronicle - December 5, 2003

Lodge culture seems to be revving up again in Yosemite Valley.

Seventy-five years after its founding by the legendary Dr. Don Tresidder, the Yosemite Winter Club, which for decades brought wintertime sport and conviviality to the Yosemite region, is making a comeback as a new generation takes command.

The club long ago dwindled to little more than a mailing list and fond memories.

Now, a handful of mostly youthful volunteers is trying to bring back something of those times, giving new life to the Winter Club despite some difficulties finding even the legal help they need to file for nonprofit status.

So far, the effort has produced a Web site (www.yosemitewinterclub.com), several special events and a roster of about a thousand or so members spread all over California and the West. An annual "Snowball" is held at the Ahwahnee.

It costs $15 per adult a year to sign up, $10 for children. That gets you a membership card, periodic mailings and discounts at the local ice-skating rink and Badger Pass ski area.

It's still a thin shadow of the Good Old Days.

Yosemite Winter Club founder Dr. Don Tresidder and his wife, Mary.

Tresidder, who died in 1948 after 24 years running the old Yosemite Park and Curry Co., organized the Winter Club "to promote friendly interest and competition in winter sports" and "to advertise and exploit the great beauties and advantages" of winter in the High Sierra.

Other than ice skating on Mirror Lake, snowshoe races in the Old Village, and a toboggan run at Camp Curry, there was little organized wintertime activity in the valley in the '20s and '30s, before the club got going, according to a 1968 club history.

The Winter Club became the center of life in the off-season, sponsoring a full calendar of social events and athletic contests in and around Yosemite National Park.

Not coincidentally, the club also helped keep the Curry Co. cash registers going. Organizers say the Winter Club served a valuable commercial role, handling promotions and social activities the company and its federal allies were prohibited from doing directly.

With top Park Service officials serving in honorary lead roles, the club enjoyed the full support of park management. That helped the club cook up many schemes over the years to attract more visitors to Yosemite. They sponsored races and a successful ski team at Badger Pass, organized a hockey team and ice-skating events for local youngsters, published a newsletter.

There were also costumed ice carnivals and figure skating, as well as skijoring behind horses. The ice-skating rink and toboggan course were enlarged. There were speed-skating events, top-level downhill and cross- country ski races, annual "Snow Day" festivals with a King and Queen.

After Tresidder's era, the old company bosses came and went, and so did the Winter Club's financial backers. And so the Winter Club went into an extended period of dormancy, a relic, mostly, of times when people took their sweater choices seriously, and winter sports were, if you can recall the term, a decidedly bourgeois affair.

By the '70s, the idea of dressing up for dinner started to seem like a pointless hassle to a lot of the locals, and club activities dwindled. In recent years, Johnny Clark, a Yosemite native who had a hand in almost everything that went on in the area, tried to revive the tradition, but things fell apart when he died in June 2002.

That's when a new crowd, led by Elexis Mayer, 24, the group's president and Tom Ronay, 31, the vice president, decided it was their turn to get things rolling again.

"People used to get all dolled up," Ronay said. "They'd come up to ski and go out together after -- drinking cocktails and talking about their skiing. It was a time to get everybody together. We're trying to capture some of the old style -- and it's an opportunity for people to have a nice dinner for not a lot of money."

The current gang of Winter Club leaders has energy to burn."The Winter Club helped put Yosemite on the map for winter activities," Mayer said. "We're bringing it back to the roots, trying to show we appreciate the era when the Winter Club was initiated."

Mayer wore a fabulous dress, a strapless black silvery metallic number, when she worked the door at last winter's "Snowball." Dancing was in the Winter Club Room, after a sit-down dinner with a silent auction, some music, a couple of speeches and lots of joke telling. The cost was $50 a head.

The next Snowball is set for Saturday, March 13. The sponsors hope to squeeze about 140 people into the Ahwahnee solarium for dinner this year, to be followed the next day by the traditional "Ancient Jocks Race" at Badger Pass, featuring silly prizes and buffoonery for skiers over the age of 30, which qualifies for "ancient" these days.

A season kickoff party and fund-raiser is set for Dec. 13 at the Badger Pass Ski Lodge, followed Jan. 9 with a dinner dance at the Curry Village Pavilion. The club also sponsors an annual youth ski race, called the Silver Ski, to be held sometime in late February at Badger, in which skiers of all ages can participate, although only those age 18 and under are eligible to compete for fastest male and female, who get their names engraved on a famous silver trophy upstairs in the Badger Pass Lodge's own Winter Club Room.

The first Snowball of the new era was a bit low-key, but the fire was going, the wine bottles were popping, and everyone chatted, chatted, chatted. The local cops did a booming business afterward, giving pop quizzes -- "Name three reasons why you shouldn't exceed the speed limit in Yosemite Valley" -- to any patrons without the means to stay at the Ahwahnee but foolish enough to try to drive anywhere else.

There was not much dancing, either. But the kids mixed it up smartly with a few of the old geezers still on the mailing list or who showed up with the youngsters. All did their best to honor the ancient regime.