hen Jann learned to ski at Squaw Valley, CA, during family trips with his parents—who met at a ski shop in New York while signing up for a trip to Hunter Mountain in the early 1940s—it was love at first slide. His dad was a passion-ate skier and skiing was decidedly cool, especially in the ’50s and early ’60s at Squaw Valley. “I just fell in love with every part of skiing, right away,” Jann says. “I have such fond memories of leaving with my dad at 4:00 in the morning, stopping for breakfast pancakes outside San Rafael by 5:30, putting chains on my dad’s old car. Then we’d be on the hill by 9 and spend the entire day skiing. The whole skiing trip was just a grand adventure and I loved every second of it.” High school took Jann from the Bay Area to Los Angeles and away from his beloved Sierra, but he quickly identified himself as one of the few skiers in school and struck up loose friendships with the other snow sliders. Trips to Mammoth with his dad and to Bear Valley and Snow Summit on school-sponsored ski weeks kept his edges from rusting. “There were only a few other guys at school that really skied and we didn’t get to ski that much,” Jann recalls. “It was such a fringe thing at that time, but when we got on the hill we always had fun, skiing all day and goofing around.” College at UC Berkeley and the thriving youth culture brought Jann back to the Bay Area and skiing faded even further into the background as a love story interrupted. From the time Rolling Stone began in 1967 through the next decade or so, it was all rock ’n’ roll and Rolling Stone, all the time. In the first issue, Jann wrote, “You’re probably wondering what we’re trying to do. It’s hard to say: sort of a magazine and sort of a newspaper. The name of it is Rolling Stone which comes from an old saying, “A rolling stone gathers no moss.” By the mid-to-late ’70s, Jann was a wealthy man and bud-ding political power player with a thriving magazine and a gaggle of rich and famous friends. “That’s when my doctor told me I was an absolute nervous wreck and really needed to do something about it,” Jann says. “I needed to get away from the stress and find a release. So I went to a ranch-spa place in Arizona for a few weeks. Resting and hiking a lot helped and I began to get back in good shape. That’s when it occurred to me how much I missed skiing.” He departed for Aspen. His old friend and creative spar-ring partner Hunter S. Thompson had set up shop in a nearby canyon and at that time Highland Bowl was the peak of radi-cal in the American ski world. Aspen was also one hell of a party town. “I went to Aspen the first time to see Hunter,” W Jann explains, “but Hunter was not a help for my skiing. I’d be at his place and we’d stay up all night and I wouldn’t get on the hill until 2 p.m. in the afternoon…so that was fun, but completely useless skiing-wise.” Aspen would eventually become like a second home to Jann from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, catapulting him back into the skiing life. Like an addict falling off the wagon or a wild animal let out of its cage, his inner ski bum raged. Helicopter skiing in British Columbia? Absolutely. A quick trip from New York to Aspen for a few turns and some fresh snow? Wheels up. Snowbird? Yup. Jackson Hole? You bet. Priorities were changed, meetings re-scheduled. Skiing was a focus once again and woe be it to those who got in Jann-the-ski-bum’s way or slowed him down on the mountain. Hell, at one point he even met with Powder magazine cofounder Jake Moe about possibly buying the ski magazine. “That’s why I bought a jet,” Jann says with a chuckle, “I wanted to go to Aspen and ski as much as possible and getting there from New York any other way took too much time.” T he first time I went skiing with Jann, he took a friend of his, who also happened to be a friend and ski client of mine, on a spur-of-the-moment trip from Sun Valley to the Yellowstone Club. I showed up ready to ski on Baldy when the friend smiled and said, “We’re going to Montana this morn-ing. Would you like to come with us?” Forty-five minutes later we were blasting off in Jann’s G5 and sipping champagne. By lunchtime we’d been shredding the Yellowstone Club’s untracked ridgelines and chutes for a couple of hours. Eve-ning found the three of us thoroughly skied out, drinking margaritas in the hot tub and talking about John Lennon’s musical genius. The main impression I got from spending that first day with Jann was twofold. First, he certainly knows how to live, have fun and enjoy life. Second, holy shit does he love to ski. When he hired me later that season for a day on Baldy, I found out about his predilection for high speeds. As an ex-ski-racer who fell in love with going fast early on and grew up listening to his parents’ rock ’n’ roll music, Jann was a dream client and we hit it off immediately. Yes, he tipped well, but mostly he was just really fun to ski with—easily one of the most ski-stoked people I’d ever met. He uses code names for certain runs, nibbling on pot cookies, hugging and high fiving friends and basically having the time of his life, every day. The joy of ski-ing, personified by a man Caroline Kennedy once called “the Jimmy Buffet of skiing.” Jann Wenner 039
The Ski Journal Volume 12, Issue 3: Page 39
