Men’s Ski jumping became an Olympic Sport in 1924, but not for women until 2014.
In 2017 at the World Cup ski jumping championships in Norway, Stefan Kraft set the current record at 253.5 metres.
Who knows when people first imagined flying like a bird. Or maybe the quest for flight has always been part of our DNA. Leonardo da Vinci sketched out his vision of a flying machine in the late 1400s and it would take another 400 years for the Wright Brothers to get off the ground.
Children often make their first attempts at flight by jumping from swings or dropping from tree branches, then they graduate to bicycle ramps and skateboard parks for hang time. On a ski slope, hitting a mogul to catch a moment of weightlessness is a perfectly natural thing to do.
Looking back to the early 1950s, Jozo Weider also imagined some lofty airtime and constructed a wooden ski jump at the base of Blue Mountain. Jozo’s son, George Weider, says his father pulled him out of school one day to test the jump when it was first completed.
The joy and excitement that the ski jump created was captured by Collingwood photographer Jack Saunders, who documented the Southern Georgian Bay region from the mid 1940s to the late 60s.
Many of Saunders’s photographs from that era were rescued from a dusty Collingwood warehouse and archived.
Jason Booth, another Collingwood shutterbug, made it his own labour of love to digitize many of the old negatives. The archive reveals that Saunders had his own penchant for flight. Many of his photos of the landscape are aerials – some include the plane’s wing tips in the foreground.
He also took photographs from downtown rooftops, where he found unique perspectives of Southern Georgian Bay, including vintage scenes of Collingwood, Wasaga Beach, and Blue Mountain.
On the Bay magazine will dedicate the Looking Back page to more of Jack’s work over the next several issues.
Photo: Courtesy Saunders Studio Collection. Digital Preservation: Jason Booth
