taos, n.m. | One of the most wonderful things about skiing is the sense of seclusion, the incomparable quietude and serenity of standing atop a 12,000-foot peak surveying miles of snow-covered emptiness. Somehow the prosaic concerns of the everyday world vanish.
So when I scheduled a few days off last winter from my job as editor of a 24/6 Jewish news outlet to go to Taos Ski Valley in a remote corner of New Mexico, I was looking forward to being completely disconnected from my work life.
But one evening aprés ski, I made a rather unexpected discovery while flipping through the local coffee table book on the history of Taos. The ski area’s legendary founder, Ernie Blake, whose family still owns Taos, immigrated to America from Germany in 1938. My parochial instincts immediately perked up.
It turns out the year 1938 was no mere coincidence. Blake’s original name was Ernst Hermann Bloch, and the family left Nazi Germany on the eve of World War II because he was Jewish. His remarkable journey took him not just from the Alps to the Rockies, but from a life as an Olympics-caliber German athlete to an interrogator of Nazis in the U.S. Army to founder of a world-class ski area.
Like so many other Jewish refugee families from Europe, the Blakes assimilated in America. Though he married a Jewish woman and had a bar mitzvah, Blake didn’t talk much with his family about his Judaism, and his descendants no longer really consider themselves members of the tribe.
“We didn’t know we were Jewish, essentially; we didn’t pay any attention,” said one of Blake’s daughters, Wendy Stagg.
But if not for Blake’s religion, he may never have come to America and there would have been no Taos Ski Valley, one of the last family-run ski areas in the country.
The way I saw it, I owed my ski trip to Blake. I resolved to find out more about this Jewish man.
Born in Frankfurt in 1913 to a Swiss mother and a German father, Blake spent most of his childhood in Switzerland, where his athletic prowess bloomed on the slopes of St. Moritz and as a hockey player on the ice ponds nearby. If not for his religion, he would have been a shoo-in to be on the German ice hockey team in the 1936 Olympics, which also happened to be the first Games to include alpine skiing.
Blake actually met Hitler once, in January 1933, when Blake, then a pilot in the Swiss Air Force, went to hear Hitler give a speech in Frankfurt shortly before his appointment as German chancellor.
“We were not impressed,” Blake recalled years later in an interview with Rick Richards, author of “Ski Pioneers: Ernie Blake, his Friends and the Making of Taos Ski Valley.”
Blake’s family had never been religious, but that didn’t make any difference in Nazi Germany. In 1938, after a visit by the Gestapo to the family home, Blake’s father made the fateful decision to move the family to the United States.
The 25-year-old Blake ended up in New York, where he took a job in the winter department of Saks Fifth Avenue. On weekends he’d ride the so-called snow train to the Adirondack Mountains to teach skiing.
At the time, the ski industry in the United States was in its infancy. Skis were made of wood, and until the first rope tow was installed in Vermont in 1934, downhill skiers had to climb the mountain themselves. The first chairlift went up in 1936 at Sun Valley, Idaho.
It was in December 1940 at the top of a chairlift on Mount Mansfield in Stowe, Vt., that Blake met the woman who would become his wife: Rhoda Limburg, a Jewish World War I orphan from England who had been adopted by a Jewish New York state Supreme Court justice.
The following summer, Blake followed Rhoda to Santa Fe, where Rhoda was taking art classes. The trip afforded Blake his first glimpse of the Taos area — then little more than a sleepy town near one of New Mexico’s active Native American pueblos.
That summer, the couple decided to marry and make New Mexico their home. Rhoda, 93, still lives there. Blake died in 1989.
On their honeymoon in Sun Valley, the pair encountered a problem common to ski enthusiasts, which Rhoda said almost ended in divorce: She wasn’t a skier, and he couldn’t abide spending his honeymoon on the bunny hill. They resolved to ski apart, and the marriage held together.
With war raging in Europe, Blake joined the Army as an intelligence officer, interrogating top Nazis, including Hermann Goering, in his native German. Concerned about his Jewish-sounding name, the Army had him change it to Blake.
Blake flew to Europe on the day of the Normandy invasion and joined Gen. George Patton on the front. He was with the Patton when the U.S. Army encountered the first Nazi concentration camp in 1945. The experience, Blake’s son Mickey said, always haunted his father.
Nevertheless, Blake never felt comfortable identifying outwardly as Jewish — though it’s said that he gave generously to the local New Mexico UJA — and he kept his new name after the war.
“I feel it’s not fair to be marked, to wave a flag and allow others to make judgments before they know who and what you are,” Blake said in an interview for Richards’ book.
By 1949, Blake and his wife had settled in Santa Fe, where his ski career took off. Blake helped run both the Santa Fe ski area and Glenwood Springs ski basin in Colorado, traveling between the two in a small plane he piloted himself. It was on these trips that he spotted the remote peaks about 20 miles northeast of the town of Taos. He decided to start his own ski area there.
At first, people thought he was crazy. Aside from the logistical challenges involved — getting permits from the National Forest, carving ski runs, buying equipment, hiring staff — there was no established market for skiing in the area.
But Blake persisted, and Taos gradually took shape, from a ski hill with little more than a rope tow and a couple of steep runs to the world-class ski area it is today, with 1,300 acres spread over 110 trails serviced by 13 lifts. The area averages about 300 inches of snow per year.
Blake’s legacy is still palpable on the mountain. Four ski trails are named after the German officers who tried to assassinate Hitler in July 1944. And the mountain is still filled with Blake family members, whom you might spot working the register at the cafeteria, as Stagg does, or leading a ski lesson for kids.
“People here have very vivid memories of him,” said Sam Sokolove, executive director of the Jewish Federation of New Mexico. “He was a larger-than-life character.”