Jean Miracle Whitaker Jean worked for more than ten years in TV news at KATC-TV3 in Lafayette, Louisiana, KHTV-39, and KNWS-51 in Houston, Texas. She was the public affairs director as well as a talk show producer at radio stations KKHT/KENR in Houston for two years
Jean grew up near snowy Cleveland, Ohio, but has been warming up on the Gulf Coast for almost 25 years. She earned a bachelor’s degree in Communication from the University of St. Thomas in Houston and also studied international affairs at the university. In addition to writing, Jean enjoys a hobby in nature photography.
Dorli Mason Even as a child growing up in Czechoslovakia, Dorli dreamed of mountains and skiing. She finally learned how to ski in Kitzbühel, Austria - and has been hooked on skiing, hiking and mountain climbing ever since.
Carrying her skis with her, she immigrated to the United States in 1952 and worked in Stowe, Vt. before marrying and having a son. She eventually joined the Austrian National Tourist Office, where, for 18 years, she was director of Ski and Sports Marketing.
Upon retirement she moved to the Pacific Northwest to be close to her son and his family and to hike and ski the environs of Seattle, WA. instead of the Alps. Besides all these outdoor activities, or babysitting for her grandchildren, Dorli writes articles on her favorite sports. She also advises the Travel Industry on behalf of the Tourist Board of the Tirol on skiing and hiking in Austria.
Patrick Thorne (Snow 24) Patrick lives in the Scottish Highlands and has offices overlooking Loch Ness.
He has worked as a ski journalist for 20 years, has had 14 travel books published as well as hundreds of articles and his contributions to atlases, CD ROMs and international guidebooks in Europe and North America. He was recently named “Travel writer of the year” in the Sports and Travel category of the North American Ski Journalists Association. Find out more at www.patrickthorne.com.
In 1991 after working on the staff of British ski publications, Patrick set up his own business Snow Hunter ltd, with the objective of finding every ski center in the world. He was surprised, ten year later, to discover he’d found 6000 in 80 countries, twice the previously acknowledged total.
In the process he’d built up the world’s largest database of winter sports resorts, with over 3 million items of information and 500,000 words of resort description. This database, along with nearly 10,000 images, maps, logos, videos and web cam images will soon be online at: www.snow24.com.
Patrick’s company now supplies many of the world’s leading online companies including AOL, BBC, Microsoft and RSN with their winter resorts content. It also researches and publishes around 500 news stories yearly from the winter sports world.
Bob Wilbanks The National Ski Club Newsletter publisher, Bob Wilbanks, began the publication in 1987 as a means for America’s ski clubs to exchange ideas, and receive news and information about running ski clubs and ski club trips.
He has been a member of a ski club for the past 22 years and on the board of directors of clubs in Texas and Colorado as well as serving on several ski industry panels and committees. His articles about ski clubs and the singles ski market have appeared in Skiing Magazine, Ski Business, Ski Area Management and the National Ski Areas Association Journal.
The National Ski Club Newsletter is a trade journal read by 4,000± annually elected officers of 2,500+ ski clubs that contain one million± members located in all 50 states. The publication is an associate member of the National Ski Areas Association.
Chryss Cada When they ask the nature of my trip on immigration forms I usually check both the “business” and “pleasure” boxes.
In fact as a travel writer, my “business” trips are usually as or more pleasurable than the trips I take on my own accord. Growing up with a mother determined to broaden my horizons far beyond the Rocky Mountain West where I was born and raised, my childhood trips didn’t really qualify as “vacations.” A “vacation” is something you come back from tanned, fattened-up and relaxed. I returned from Mom and my expeditions dirty, 10 pounds lighter and kissing the first available piece of my native soil.
In 20 years of traveling Mom and I have been interrogated in Columbia, hung out with headhunters in the jungles of the Borneo, bargained our freedom from raiders out in the Sahara desert, swum with piranhas in the Amazon and driven in Cairo during rush hour.
As a travel writer my biggest challenge is often saving room for desert at a swank mountain lodge.
Although I’ve been a freelance ski writer in my native Colorado for more than a dozen years, I’m still getting over the fact that I get paid to ski.
My travel writing appears on-line, in print and on the airwaves. As a freelance journalist I covers breaking news and regional trends for the Boston Globe. I have a nationally syndicated lifestyle column that appears in papers across the country, including The Washington Post and am working on my first novel. I’m also an adjunct professor at Colorado State University. My biggest challenge is keeping work from interfering with my mogul time. I feel incredibly lucky for the times that the two are one in the same.
John Sherwood hails from Bedford, Massachusetts - the snow belt of Boston’s western suburbs. He first experienced the joys of skiing on the 240-foot vertical slopes of Nashoba Valley in Littleton, Massachusetts. As a teenager, he enjoyed skiing at Gunstock, Waterville Valley, and Stowe. He moved to DC in 1991 but a combination of graduate school poverty and a false belief that “local skiing just can’t be any good” kept him away from the slopes for 9 long and miserable years.
John finally received his Ph.D. in history, got a real job as a Navy historian, and officially ended his skiing hiatus. To celebrate, he took his wife, a native of Slovakia who grew up skiing to school, to Stowe for a week in February 2000. Hooked again, John decided to explore local skiing during the 2000-2001 season and visited Whitetail, Seven Springs, Timberline, and Blue Mountain. He also took another trip to Stowe. When he returned from Vermont, he concluded that local skiing really is not that bad; in fact, it can be great when the conditions are right. Arguably, Timberline at the end of March 2001 had better snow conditions than Stowe in early February.
During the 2003-2004 season, John spent 25 days on the slopes. Many were enjoyed at Timberline, where he is a season pass holder. But John also enjoyed skiing at 7 Springs and venturing further afield to Killington in Vermont, Sölden and Ischgl in Austria, and St. Moritz in Switzerland. For a series of “Firsthand Reports” on West Virginia skiing, the West Virginia Division of Tourism awarded John a “Stars of the Industry” award in June 2003.
Next season, John dreams of squeezing a few more days of local skiing into his schedule. He also hopes to make a trip to Italy, Slovakia, and perhaps a trip to Utah as well. When he is not skiing, John enjoys biking to work at the Washington Navy Yard. In addition to DCSki, John writes for the SkiEurope Report, and covers skiing for The Slovak Spectator, Slovakia’s largest English language newspaper. He is also the author of three books in military history. His latest, Afterburner: Naval Aviators and the Vietnam War, will be published this May by New York University Press.
John has published 61 articles on DCSki.
