How did Minnesota become the birthplace of ski jumping in America?

Listen and subscribe to our podcast: Apple Podcasts | Spotify

It feels like being a kite in the air.

That’s how Minneapolis ski jumping coach Peter Geye describes the sensation of flying 400 feet through the air off a towering 70-meter jump like the one his team uses at Bush Lake.

“It’s at once thrilling and cerebral, dreamlike and the epitome of reality,” said Geye, who has been ski jumping since he was 7.

The jump in Bloomington rises so improbably high above the hill that it often makes people driving past do a double take.

As a teen, Jeff Syme used to watch ski jumpers at Bush Lake. Recently, a historic photo of the old jump at Theodore Wirth Regional Park made him wonder about the sport. He asked Curious Minnesota, the Strib’s reader-powered reporting project: “What’s the history of ski jumping in Minnesota?”

That history, it turns out, goes back to the sport’s very beginnings. Minnesota is considered the birthplace of ski jumping in America, thanks to immigrants from Norway. The nation’s first ski jumping competitions were held in St. Paul and Red Wing in the 1880s.

“The state of Minnesota has incredibly deep roots in the sport,” said Geye.

His Minneapolis Ski Club and the St. Paul Ski Club, which teaches kids as young as 2 to jump in Maplewood, have both been around for more than a century. The state has fostered many Olympic jumpers through the years.

For a time, the sport was far more popular than cross-country skiing. Crowds would gather by the thousands at competitions to watch jumpers soar above them.

As Norwegian immigrants settled in Minnesota in the late 1800s, they brought the burgeoning new sports of cross-country ski racing and jumping with them. They founded ski jumping clubs and built scaffolding into Minnesota’s natural hills and bluffs. St. Paul’s club calls itself the nation’s oldest and dates back to 1885.

In Red Wing, an immigrant department store owner named Christian Boxrud formed a group called the Aurora Ski Club with fellow enthusiasts, according to an account in the Red Wing Republican Eagle.

Eager to recruit the athlete, Boxrud found jobs for Hemmestvedt and his brother Torjus making and selling skis and furniture at Red Wing Furniture Company. Both settled in Red Wing with their families and joined the Aurora Ski Club.

Newspapers began calling Mikkel the “Sky Crasher from Red Wing.” The brothers dazzled crowds as the sport became established in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan.

Landings were often far from smooth in those early contests. An 1891 Stillwater competition got off to a chaotic start, the Saint Paul Globe reported.

”The first few runners landed in every direction and skis and men occupied all positions imaginable, both on the ground and in the air,” the paper wrote. “Occasionally, one would strike the ground as if every bone in his body was shattered, but the men would invariably pick themselves up, shake off the snow and climb the hill again in preparation for another go.”

The Hemmestvedts took the top two prizes for “longest and roughest jump” that day, with Mikkel flying 87 feet and Torjus 86.

When the Winter Olympics debuted in 1924, ski jumping was one of the events. The sport continued to rise in popularity in America, and some traveling circuses added ski jumping acts.

Red Wing hosted the National Ski Jumping Tournament in 1928, an event that was “like the Super Bowl of the sport,” former Aurora Ski Club member Jerry Borgen told the Minnesota Star Tribune in 2014.

City boosters came up with a novel advertising campaign. They nailed red Copenhagen chew tobacco boxes — called “snus” by Scandinavians — to posts, trees and fences in the area. Signs encouraged crowds to “Follow the Snus Box Trail” to the tournament, according to the Red Wing Republican Eagle. The event was a success, and Red Wing hosted again in 1936.

Towns and cities across Minnesota built jumps, and there were once at least 30 across the state, according to an online archive. Today, four remain — in Bloomington, Maplewood, Cloquet and Coleraine. Ski jumping became less of a draw when downhill skiing became an option, starting at Lutsen in 1948 and at Buck Hill in 1954.

Still, when 1980 Olympian Jim Grahek was growing up in Ely, high schools had ski jumping teams. Back in 1976, he became state champion flying from the jump in Cloquet’s Pine Valley Recreation Area.

These days, Minnesota is no longer at the center of the sport. Many of the clubs in the region — including ones in Duluth, Ely and in Ironwood, Mich.— have closed.

Today, the country’s main training centers for ski jumping are in Steamboat Springs, Colo.; Park City, Utah; and Lake Placid, N.Y., said Geye, the Minneapolis coach. The national USA Ski Jumping organization is headquartered in Park City.

In recent decades, the sport has become safer at all levels, Geye said, with changes to rules, equipment and jump design so that athletes don’t fly so high in the air. It’s also become more open since 2014, when women ski jumpers competed in the Olympics for the first time.

The Minnesota clubs that remain still draw kids seeking a thrill. Minneapolis hosts $50 “Learn to Fly” classes for beginners as young as 5, starting them out on small jumps. Their team hosts an annual FlyFest tournament, while St. Paul has meets on Fridays during the winter. (Unseasonable warmth in 2024 led both to cancel most events, but they have hope for 2025.)

Those deep roots still have an impact, even if the sport’s hold has lessened here, Geye said.

“Jumpers from the Midwest are cut of a different cloth, and there’s a reason there’s such a long tradition of excellence,” Geye said. “That tradition is still active in our Midwestern ski jumping communities. Families that have been around for two or three or four generations? There’s not much that can replace that.”

If you’d like to submit a Curious Minnesota question, fill out the form below:

Read more Curious Minnesota stories:

Why did Scandinavian immigrants choose Minnesota?

How were the bluffs of southeast Minnesota formed?

Why is Minnesota such a hotbed of professional wrestling?

How do small animals survive Minnesota’s brutal winters?