The Ski Journal • Volume 17, Issue 1 • TEXAS TURNS AT MT. AGGIE

George Jessup is the man who brought skiing to Texas. And he tells that story as a mix of a tall tale and a by-the-bootstraps lesson in perseverance.

Jessup grew up in Southern California and taught himself to ski at Mammoth Mountain in the 1960s. After a post-college stint on the Mammoth ski patrol and graduate work at the University of Southern California (where he convinced the school to let him teach a course in skiing), Jessup landed a job at Texas A&M University in College Station, some 90 miles northwest of Houston and hundreds of miles from any ski area. Still, some habits die hard.

“The first thing I said was I wanted to teach skiing,” Jessup says. “[The administrators] said, ‘You can’t teach skiing this far south.’ I said, ‘Watch me!’”

With the nearest ski resort, New Mexico’s Ski Apache, over a 10-hour drive away, Jessup taught his first year as a dry-land ski class with an end-of-term bus trip to Colorado. But in 1972, workers began resurfacing Kyle Field, Texas A&M’s famed football stadium, and Jessup saw an opportunity.

“I just went out on the football field and I said, ‘Can I have the 50-yard line?’” he says. “They agreed, so I drove my Porsche out to the field and hooked up a tow cable to the TAMU symbol and ripped it out. I towed it over to Spence Park, a grassy slope right in the middle of campus.”

Jessup’s actions had precedent: Artificial turf as a ski surface was unveiled in Paris in 1927 to capture the growing market of Parisians inspired by the Alps.

“I put it out there in July and the department head came and said, ‘What’s that AstroTurf out there?’ And I said, ‘That’s Mt. Aggie!’” Jessup says. “When they asked who gave me permission, I said, ‘You’re about to!’”

Though highly visible, the first incarnation of Mt. Aggie was slow on skis; students were lucky to get two or three turns more easily on the low-angle carpet. Jessup experimented. Sawing off the skis immediately behind the binding let students practice turns on the artificial surface. More effective for students but far less desirable for school officials was the hopper car of plastic beads that Jessup bought from a Dow Chemical executive whose son was taking the ski class; shovelfuls of beads let skiers to travel farther and faster, but when they traveled as far as the president’s office, Jessup was ordered to ditch them.

By the sheer force of Jessup’s will, the hill became a university fixture and has been included on the campus map since 1973.

Jessup formed a ski club to run the hill and rent gear. In those early days, the university, which was over 90 percent male, had no fraternities or sororities, and the ski club was the only social organization with both male and female members on campus.

Over the years, the administration would relocate Mt. Aggie whenever more-pressing-seeming projects came up, whether it was a parking lot or practice field. In 1998, Mt. Aggie moved to its current location, rising some 35 feet above the adjacent tennis courts. Its surface is snow-white ski turf, a purpose-made artificial surface that must be hosed down before use. And since fall semester classes take place in the relative cool of 80-degree mornings, students usually get hosed down too. Beginners might get two to three turns in; more experienced skiers can squeeze in six in the 10 seconds it takes to get to the bottom.

Now 81 years old and 10 years retired, Jessup skis and teaches in Park City, UT, and still ends most of his sentences with an exclamation point.

“Mt. Aggie is still there,” Jessup says. “It’s going to be there as long as people remember it.”

And, as Jessup would point out, once you’re on the map, even as a small strip of white in a sprawling Southern college campus of 72,000 students, there’s no going back.

The Ski Journal - Volume 17, Issue 1

TEXAS TURNS AT MT. AGGIE

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