Open at 9 am. The temperature at 6:30 am is -8. The high forecast for the day is 14º.
Skiing is great. So good the ski reports are becoming redundant. Hilary and Jamie, after skiing the Middle Blue Jay, said it was a 10+++. But we have a lot going on around here….
So here is a little blurb about one of our season pass holders, one of the cast of characters that hangs out here at Wild Wings, Jud Hartmann.
The photo above is our friend Jud Hartmann. Jud skis here 4 to 5 days a week, training for the weekend ski races in northern New England. In 1977 Jud and his wife Gretchen started Grafton Outdoor Center, a Nordic ski center in Grafton, Vermont. They ran Grafton Outdoor Center until 1987. During this time Jud was also carving sculptures and opened his first gallery in Grafton Vermont.
Jud is a very talented sculptor and is hands on through the whole bronze process. He is also a devoted historian and story teller of the subjects he chooses to sculpt, though he might tell you they choose him! You can see some of his storytelling on his YouTube channel. Here’s a great one.
The photo above is the sculpture that welcomes you to Jud’s gallery and practically everyone who enters Blue Hill as it is a sort of land mark there. Jud’s quote that goes with this sculpture, called He Who is Without Equal, is especially interesting. Perhaps Jud shares this Native American lacrosse mindset in fitness and achievement in his favorite sport: cross country skiing.
His endurance, strength, speed and grace were legendary. He could run down and slay a deer. His years as a renowned warrior and hunter required of him lightening quick reflexes and senses that were honed to an astonishing degree. Only the aboriginal hunter and warrior, whose very life depended on these qualities for survival in the great forests that were his natural home, could bring these attributes to the playing field, to the game that was a gift to the Iroquois from the Creator Himself.
In the mid-17th c., at the height of Iroquois power, amidst the giants who played the game then (with a level of skill that would have left modern players in awe) he was the greatest player of his day. He was known as “Iah-onhka – senha Eneken Tehote” that is, “he who is without equal.”
We are honored here at Wild Wings to have a print by Jud. This print is the one and only print from a wood carving Jud has done and there is a story behind this print. Catch him booting up in the warning room and you may get the story.
Jud’s true love is Bronze sculptures and are best enjoyed in his studio in Blue Hill, Maine. The second best way is to click here to visit his web site.
This sculpture, Susquehannock, is the one that greets you when you first open the door to his Blue Hill gallery. It’s four feet tall and up on a pedestal so looks you right in the eye as you enter.
Jud loves to give out skiing tips on the trail. And he can be booked for a ski lesson. And as much as Jud loves to talk about skiing, his true love is the history behind his sculptures. If you are lucky enough to go to Blue Hill to see his work, or you catch him out and about, any of his stories are a gift.
The following is a quote from Jud’s website that inspired him to sculpt Susquehannock.
“…60 of those Susquehannock came to us . . . such great and well-proportioned men are seldome seene, for they seemed like giants to the English . . . these are the strangest people of all those countries both in language and attire; for their language it may well beseeme their proportions, sounding from them as a voyce in a vault. Their attire is the skinnes of beares and woolves, some have cassocks made of beares heades and skinnes . . . The half sleeves coming to the elbows were the heads of beares and the arms through the open mouth . . . one had a head of a Woolf hanging from a chain for a jewell . . . with a club suitable to his greatness sufficient to beat out one’s brains. Five of their chiefe wereowances came aboard us . . . (of) the greatest of them his hayre, the one side was long and the other shorn close with a ridge over his crowne like a cocks combe . . . The calfe of whose leg was 3/4 of a yard around and all the rest of his limbes so answerable to that proportion that he seemed the goodliest man we ever beheld!”
From the voyages of Captain John Smith (of Jamestown, Va)
1607 – 1609
1 comment
Jud asked if I would add the story that goes with his cross country skiing wood carving print Tracy mentioned in the post. Here is what he wrote: “This is the only print I have done- a woodblock engraving- inspired by the experience of completing for the first time the Vermont Ski Marathon in 1977. It was the longest XC ski race in this country at 65 km (per recent remeasuring of the original course from Breadloaf to Brandon, Vermont). I was 29 years old that day when I started the race and looked just like the old guy in the print when I finished the race. As tough as that was, the next year it was even harder as the temperature during the race bottomed out at -30 degrees Fahrenheit! Many who started the race were pulled off due to frostbite and never finished. I was one of those who was grabbed by a race official with a red cross armband at the last feeding station and might not have finished but for another skier coming up (visibly frostbiten) the guy holding me had to let go to grab him. “Don’t go anywhere,” he shouted and with that command I took off and finished the race.”