Otto Lang immediately stepped in to replace Friedl Pfeifer, taking on the role of executive ski school director. With Pfeifer focused entirely on Aspen’s development, it fell to Lang to defend Hannes Schneider and the Arlberg Technique against France’s increasingly sharp criticisms.

During the 1947–48 ski season, Lang balanced multiple roles: producing a film for Hollywood mogul Darryl Zanuck, serving as Sun Valley’s goodwill ambassador at the 1948 Winter Olympics in St. Moritz, and managing the ski school. Yet his most pressing challenge was finding a successor of equal stature to Pfeifer.

For guidance, Lang turned to his mentor Hannes Schneider in North Conway. True to his philosophy of advancing his best instructors, Schneider recommended Toni Matt, a racer and teacher of remarkable skill.

On July 4, 1948, slalom races were even held in Sun Valley, covered by Seattle Movietone News. To further encourage this revival of alpine touring, Andy Hennig, at the request of Averell Harriman, began work on Sun Valley’s first—and still most comprehensive—alpine touring guidebook. Published in 1948, the Sun Valley Ski Guide detailed the many regions around Sun Valley suitable for both alpine skiing and alpine touring. Such publications were common in the Alps, and Harriman hoped this manual might rekindle interest in the sport. However, alpine touring in Sun Valley never regained its former momentum.

By the winter of 1952, the alpine touring school met its unofficial end. Avalanches in Baldy’s Lookout Bowl claimed the life of Victor Gottschalk, while slides on Bromaghin Peak destroyed the Owl Creek cabin—tragic events that symbolized the close of a historic chapter.

Afterward, alpine touring continued only in small circles. Florian Haemmerle, with his “old gentleman’s club,” and Hennig, with his “seasoned ambitious clients,” occasionally ventured out, but without the support of the Sun Valley Company. Hennig, along with fellow instructors Fred Iselin and Willie Hemling, co‑authored another guidebook describing skiing and climbing routes in the Sawtooth, White Cloud, Lost River, and Salmon River Mountains. Without Sun Valley’s financial backing, however, the book saw only limited publication.

Meanwhile, Fred Iselin and his wife Ellie Staller spent many summers in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains, working for Austrian clothing manufacturer Josef Lanz, owner of the Idaho Rocky Mountain Ranch. In winter, Iselin directed Aspen’s ski school and went on to become one of the most published ski authors in the United States.

Meanwhile, back in Austria, Stefan Kruckenhauser—Professor of Biology and Sport at the University of Innsbruck and the dominant authority over the training, examination, and certification of Austrian ski teachers from the early 1950s through the 1970s—pioneered the first true scientific study of skiing’s evolution in response to advances in equipment. Using multiple cameras and thousands of feet of film to analyze the world’s best skiers (including Sun Valley’s Christian Provda), Kruckenhauser reached groundbreaking conclusions.

He observed that the driving force in Hannes Schneider’s stem turn was not shoulder rotation or the traditional Down‑Up‑Down motion, but rather a simple transfer of weight from one ski to the other—an edge change.

From Schneider’s Arlberg Technique to 1928, when engineer Rudolph Lettner patented the first steel edges and ski bindings became tighter, distinct changes in technique emerged. Skiers gained far greater control, allowing them to rise from the deep Arlberg crouch. By the mid‑1930s, innovations by Toni Seelos (parallel rotation turns, faster and more elegant than any stem) and Émile Allais (the side‑slipping, skis‑together Ruade) further transformed skiing.

Kruckenhauser concluded that the more upright a skier stood, the more relaxed they became, and the closer they kept their skis together, the less effort was required to turn. This insight reshaped ski techniques worldwide. The new style involved thrusting the heels in one direction while rotating the shoulders in the opposite direction as a counter‑force—a method coined “wedeln” or reverse shoulder rotation.

By the late 1950s and early 1960s, American skiers embraced wedeln with enthusiasm. Kruckenhauser’s New Official Austrian Ski System, published in the early 1950s and later in 1958 in the United States, laid the foundation for the American Ski Technique and Ski System—methods still used by most U.S. ski institutions today.

As before, Sun Valley became the proving ground, attracting the world’s best skiers to test and refine these revolutionary techniques.

As the team of Sigi Engl, Sep Froehlich, Bill Butterfield, and Konrad Staudinger (a prodigy of Professor Kruckenhauser) ensured the strong foundations of Sun Valley’s ski school, the resort itself began to falter. Its founding father, Averell Harriman, no longer cultivated Sun Valley’s global acclaim, as his energies shifted toward politics.

Following the Second World War, Harriman resigned as Union Pacific’s Chairman of the Board and accepted a position in President Harry Truman’s administration as Secretary of Commerce. Though he occasionally involved himself in Sun Valley’s affairs, it was clear that his talents—and successes—lay increasingly in diplomacy and politics.

In 1954, Harriman succeeded Republican Thomas Dewey as Governor of New York. As governor, he played a pivotal role in the development of Whiteface Mountain near Lake Placid, strengthening its skiing operations. Lake Placid had hosted the 1932 Winter Olympics (which did not yet include alpine skiing) and later the 1980 Winter Olympics, with Whiteface Mountain serving as the venue for most alpine events. To this day, Whiteface boasts the greatest vertical drop of any ski mountain in the eastern United States.

Harriman served only one term as governor, defeated in 1958 by Republican Nelson Rockefeller. He also sought the Democratic presidential nomination in both 1952 and 1956. Endorsed by former President Truman in 1956, Harriman was defeated on both occasions by Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson.

Developing his skills in an Austria shaped by the instructional genius of Professor Stefan Kruckenhauser, Anton “Tony” Sailer and his teammates reasserted Austria’s dominance in world alpine skiing—an ascendancy not seen since before the Second World War. At the 1956 Winter Games, Austrian skiers captured more than twice as many medals as any other nation.

Sailer’s gold‑medal technique closely mirrored the style of Christian Pravda of Kitzbühel and Sun Valley, marked by a more vertical stance and turns initiated through weight transfer and early edge changes.

Though Sailer never fulfilled the prophecy of joining his godfather Sigi Engl’s Sun Valley ski school as an instructor, he pursued Hollywood stardom, appearing in several ski films. Yet he remained tied to Sun Valley, visiting Engl on multiple occasions. In 1959, he dominated the Harriman Cup, sweeping the slalom, downhill, and combined events, further cementing his reputation as one of skiing’s greatest champions.

Moving into the early 1960s, American ski resorts beyond Sun Valley began flexing their developmental muscles. Across the country, ski areas made bold moves to capture a larger share of the rapidly expanding American alpine skiing market.

Aspen, Colorado, under the vision of Friedl Pfeifer, had already established itself on the global stage. In 1950, Aspen hosted the FIS World Championships, the first ever held outside of Europe—a milestone that propelled the resort into international prominence and signaled the growing influence of American skiing destinations.