Skiing

Police stepped up security at the Alpine skiing world championships in Saalbach, Austria, after reports that 11 suspected terrorists had been detained in Austria.The original police contingent was increased from 459 men to around 600, including members of a special anti-terrorist unit, and guards were placed around hotels where teams from countries involved in the gulf war are staying.The Austrian Interior Ministry said that police had detained 11 Iranians with pro-Iraqi sympathies suspected of planning a terrorist attack in Austria.

James Guyton plays basketball. But skiing? Not so much; especially since it means being out in the cold. When the Chesapeake Ski & Sports Club Inc. invites African-American teenagers to try a day on the slopes, members expect such resistance. It took some gentle prodding from counselors at the Salvation Army Boys and Girls Club of Metropolitan Baltimore before Guyton, 16, reluctantly agreed to try snowboarding - which seemed a little cooler. Wrapped up warmly in a red ski jacket and black pants borrowed from the local ski group, he stumbled his way down the bunny slope at the Whitetail Resort in Pennsylvania during the recent visit.

I was working last Saturday on a travel story in Garrett County centered around Wisp, the only Alpine ski facility in Maryland. I started the day there carrying my cameras while skiing the slopes. Later, the snow grew heavier as the sky darkened, and my fingers became increasingly numb as I looked for a setting to make night skiing pictures before heading for home. After 30 minutes I spotted a shaft of light near the end of Deer Run. People rarely came through the light, so I heavily photographed each instance to increase my odds of a good shot.

The wicked warm spell that bedeviled the region's ski areas last year has been broken. Snow guns, ably assisted by Wednesday's surprise storm, are turning the brownscape of late fall into the dazzling white of winter. "That storm gave us a big kick. We're opening Friday," said Katrina Gayman, marketing director at Pennsylvania's Whitetail Mountain Resort, 90 minutes northwest of Baltimore. "Now we're going to be sitting pretty. " That goes for Whitetail's sister resorts - Liberty and Roundtop - which expect to open some trails Saturday morning.

SPEND A LITTLE time with your family and you are quickly reminded how you and your kids see the world from different perspectives.Take, for instance, the other night when my older son and I watched the television coverage of the men's downhill ski competition at the Winter Olympic Games in Japan.I was stretched out on the Barcalounger trying to stay awake long enough to catch the weather forecast on the late news. (I have always thought that the first TV station to sound a warning -- the same beeping noise that trucks make when they back up -- just before showing the weather segment on the late news would wake up thousands of nodders and probably double its audience.

A recent Ski magazine survey of the top 64 ski resorts in North America doesn't mention the largest state's favorite slope. Does the Vail-Aspen-Snowmass crowd not know about Alyeska Resort, 40 miles south of Anchorage, Alaska?Chances are they do, but as one skier phrased it, Alaska is gourmet skiing -- a place to go if you're tired of the more popular (and cheaper to get to) slopes.If skiers knew of Alyeska before this year, a majority of Americans probably did not. Now, not only is the resort semifamous, but the tiny town where it is located, Girdwood (population: 1,350)

HAKUBA, Japan -- Down at a wooden chalet called Austria House, they brought out softball-sized apples covered in corporate logos. They brought out skis and bindings that bent like bananas. They even trotted out three-dozen Olympic athletes who wore goofy grins and carried around skis like lumber.And finally, they brought out the Herminator.This is what it's like to be the hottest ski-racer on the planet, Hermann Maier of Austria.He's a skiing phenomenon and a lounge act, caught up in the wildest, weirdest tale to hit the ski circuit in years.

New Jersey?Isn't that the place with the shore, not the slopes? Isn't that the state with a turnpike, a bunch of oil refineries and a native son named Bruce Springsteen?So how do you explain that the only sure-shot gold medalist the United States will bring to the Winter Olympics comes from that great Alpine state of . . .New Jersey?Donna Weinbrecht, a 26-year-old native of West Milford, is the reigning world champion in mogul skiing. The freestyle event, sort of the ice dancing of snow, will be making its first appearance as a medal sport in the Winter Olympics in Albertville.

Water-skiing always looked like such fun when the Doublemint twins did it. Up they popped out of the water in their matching swimsuits, holding the tow-rope with one hand and waving energetically at the crowd with the other. The whole scene looked exhilarating and fresh - precisely the adjectives Wrigley's marketing team hoped would come to customers' minds when chewing Doublemint gum: "Why, chewing this gum is experientially identical to water-skiing!" My recent family vacation offered water-skiing along with other extreme recreational activities, including swinging on a circus trapeze.

I arrived in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, on a gauzy, gray afternoon ripe with imminent snow. The skiers heading back from the slopes in their bright-colored gear looked especially vivid in the narrow, dusky streets. The slopes were shrouded in a low cloud cover, and the day drew to a close with no sign of the mountains I had come to tackle in this, my third year of skiing. The first was spent in Vermont, the second in Park City, Utah. Now the time had come to tackle the majors -- the Alps.I had considered Zermatt the pinnacle of Continental skiing chic.

A 19-year-old man shot multiple times after being approached by a group of assailants police said were dressed in "dark clothing and ski masks" died in the hospital Sunday evening. Police identified the victim Monday as Charles Fuller of the 600 Block of Potomac Street. Officers responded at 6:53 p.m. Sunday to reports of a shooting at E. Baltimore Street and Decker Avenue. Fuller was found by officers lying in front of a residence in the 3000 block of E. Baltimore Street and had been shot in the hip and the back, police said.

Howard County police charged a Columbia man Monday with assaulting a student on the campus of Long Reach High School in Columbia on March 21. Donnell Maurice Vannison, 40, of the 8500 block of Tamebird Court, faces second-degree assault and disorderly conduct charges. He was released Monday after a court appearance and is scheduled for trial on June 6. Vannison, wearing a ski mask, entered the school property at about 2:20 p.m., police said. He approached a 16-year-old male student and struck him with a blow that grazed the boy's face.

Liberty Mountain Resort has $1 million in new snowmaking equipment ready to roar, but the ski area one hour northwest of Baltimore can't buy a flake this season. The lifts are quiet at nearby Whitetail Resort, which has a Santa video on its website pleading for winter weather, and at Roundtop Mountain Resort, where crews are laboring to lay down a thin layer of white on Fanny Hill and Lafayette's Leap. Even Wisp Resort in colder Western Maryland is operating only four of its 32 runs.

As a student at West Virginia University, Sheldon Hyman decided to test out the ski slopes for the first time in his life. It cost him only $2. With pocket change, Hyman rented all the equipment he needed - boots, skis and poles - from a van nearby the slope outside of Morgantown, W.Va. that offered skiers three or four trails to venture down. Nearly a half-century later, skiing isn't the same cheap hobby it used to be for Hyman, but he's just as passionate about it. Hyman, 70, annually travels to the West Coast to test the top slopes in the country alongside his friends in the Baltimore Ski Club.

Liberty Mountain Resort (Carroll Valley, Pa.) Distance from Baltimore: 60 miles Drop: 600 feet Trails: 16 Lifts: 9 Website: http://skiliberty.com Notes: The southern most skiing area in Pennsylvania, the Liberty Mountain Resort is the closest to the Baltimore region. The mountains open in December depending on weather conditions, with individual passes starting at $43. Ski Roundtop (Lewisberry, Pa.)

Selling a ski resort near Deep Creek Lake is one of several options that its owners are considering to resolve financial difficulties related to another business. Karen Myers, one of the three partners of Wisp Resort in Garrett County, said in a brief interview Thursday that the partners were having trouble negotiating the repayment of a $28.5 million loan with BB&T Corp. The loan was tied to the construction of an 18-hole golf course and a community near Deep Creek Lake, which is experiencing lackluster sales of home sites, Myers said.

It started as travel. Then it became sport. Now it's possible to experience skiing as pure travel again -- on special shoes gliding over a white landscape from here to there.know about the early days from cave paintings of Norwegian skiing hunters and from an actual 4,000-year-old ski dug up out of a peat bog near Hoting, Sweden. Skis made it possible for ancient, snowbound Northerners to gather food and firewood, to trade village to village and simply to visit from house to house.In the mid-1800s, emigrating Scandinavians brought their long, wooden "snow shoes" and their elegant telemark turn with them to the New World, to the wintry climes of the Upper Midwest and to the gold camps in the mountains of the Rockies and California.

SAUZE D'OULX, Italy -- At some point, Toby Dawson wants to find his parents, the ones who left him on the streets of South Korea so long ago. People over there have been helping with the search, and several leads have come up, but the 27-year-old put his quest aside for a more pressing matter. Skiing in the 2006 Turin Games. "It's very emotional," he said. "I didn't want to know until after these Olympics." Yesterday, Dawson took care of the task at hand, winning bronze in a men's moguls competition full of sparkling performances and intriguing story lines.

Barry Virum Bowen, a retired University of Baltimore professor of political science, died May 30 from complications of a stroke at Gilchrist Hospice Care. The Lutherville resident was 80. The son of newspaper parents, Dr. Bowen was born and raised in Milwaukee, where he graduated from high school. After graduating from the Naval Academy in 1955, he served in the Navy as a flight instructor for three years. He earned a master's degree from the University of Hawaii and his doctorate from George Washington University.