Steamboat Springs – You see a guy wearing a cowboy hat racing around Mount Werner, you assume it’s Steamboat icon Billy Kidd. But that wasn’t Kidd competing in the NASTAR national finals last weekend, it was Steamboat old-timer Ray Heid.
Racing on telemark skis. At age 69.
Heid says he started wearing a cowboy hat while skiing in the early 1940s when they had Fourth of July ski jumping meets at Howelsen Hill, utilizing ice used to keep lettuce cold on railroad cars. Says he was doing it before Kidd was born.
“But I don’t want to rub that in,” Heid said good-naturedly Saturday after his second run.
The cowboy hat isn’t just for show, though. No, sir.
“I wear the cowboy hat to keep track of my THS – my Top Hat Speed,” Heid said. “When my hat starts to come off, I know I’m going too fast for an old man.”
Don’t let him fool you. Heid can fly.
“He rips,” said former U.S. downhiller AJ Kitt, who was in town as a NASTAR pacesetter.
A fourth-generation Steamboat native, Heid’s cousins include the Werners of ski racing fame: Buddy, Skeeter and Loris. Their mother, Hazie, and Heid’s mother, Ruby, were sisters. Heid and Buddy were the same age.
Heid made the 1960 Olympic ski jumping team as an alternate and served as a fore-jumper, flying farther than many of the competitors who followed him.
“I had no pressure and nothing to do but relax and have a good jump,” Heid said. “I turned in one of the best ones I’d ever had.”
Before the Olympics, Heid competed for the University of Wyoming as a four-way skier (downhill, slalom, jumping and cross country), and after the Olympics, he coached there. In 1964 he moved to New Mexico to help Mescalero Apache Indians run a small ski area now known as Ski Apache. He moved back to Steamboat in 1985.
A classic Steamboat cowboy skier equally at ease in the saddle and champagne powder, Heid traded his alpine boards for telemark skis about 18 years ago because of knee problems.
“It’s a more fluid movement because of the bend in the toe, the ankle and the knees,” Heid said. “My knees have been trashed – I’ve had them both operated on a couple times – and nine years ago they told me I had to have a total knee replacement.”
Heid loved skiing the backcountry – “The steeper and deeper, the better,” he says – but over time he found his skiing becoming more social and less fun. Then a few months ago he ran into Kidd conducting one of his race clinics on Mount Werner.
“I jumped in the gates on my tele skis just to see,” Heid said. “Next thing you know, an old passion of mine came back of running gates. It went from a passion to an obsession. I think I got in 78 races this year on my telemark skis.”
Running gates for the first time since 1982, he set a goal of qualifying for NASTAR finals, but his soft, fat, backcountry skis weren’t designed for carving up race courses.
“I went by the Ski Haus one day, I was talking to one of the employees and I said: ‘These guys I’ll be racing against are on racing skis. I need to think about looking for a pair of racing skis. Do you know anybody that has an old pair?’ The guy said: ‘Just a second, I threw a pair in the dumpster about two weeks ago.’ He went out and, sure enough, they were still in the dumpster. The edges were rusted, they were trashed, the bottoms looked like somebody had skied down Main Street without any snow on it.”
The Ski Haus guys spent three days repairing and preparing those 180-cm Volkl GS boards, slapped some tele bindings on them and Heid was good to go.
“Here I’ve had legends all my life,” Heid said, “but I’m probably going to be known as the Dumpster Diver.”
But I’ll remember him as one of the countless old-timers I’ve met over the years who exemplify how skiing really is the fountain of youth.
“The way I look at it, I’m 69 years old and I’m starting life all over again when I get in the gates,” Heid said. “My philosophy is: If you didn’t know how old you are, how old would you be? That’s what I live by.”
