Jennings: Local ski hills joining effort to be part of history

If you’ve been thinking about learning to ski or snowboard this winter, start Friday and you could be part of history. At 10 a.m., ski areas around the nation are taking a shot at the Guinness world record for the largest ski and snowboard lesson ever.

Several local hills are offering special discounts as part of a campaign organized by the Learn to Ski and Snowboard Initiative, a group charged with cultivating customers for the U.S. ski industry. The world record attempt kicks off Learn to Ski and Snowboard Month, an annual January campaign launched by the initiative in 2009.

Members of the local industry group Ski NW Rockies Resorts, which includes Mount Spokane, 49 Degrees North, Silver Mountain and Lookout Pass, are participating, along with more than 140 other resorts in 34 states.

Mount Spokane is offering 10 free group ski and snowboard lessons to the first beginners who sign up for the 10 a.m. event. Another 70 ski lessons and 30 snowboard lessons are available at about a 70 percent discount. Silver Mountain and Lookout Pass are offering $10 lessons at 10 a.m. You can save $15 off the regular price for the event 49 Degrees North.

Claiming your fraction of a world record is quite a distinction. But Guinness World Records is a far different animal today than when it debuted in 1955. Back then, it was simply an almanac of amazing feats and obscure freaks, commissioned by the famous Irish brewery as a trivia resource for pub-crawlers. Now it’s a brand owned by the Jim Pattison Group, a multi-billion dollar conglomerate based in Vancouver B.C., which owns other entities such as auto dealerships, fishing fleets, farm equipment manufacturers, television stations and the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! museums.

To help feed this ravenous corporate beast, Guinness World Records fields a team of consultants who aggressively market world record attempts to companies and organizations as a promotion and publicity tool. According to the company, media attention generated by one of its world records is valued at hundreds of thousands of dollars. Its customers can ante up tens of thousands of dollars for their Guinness certificate, depending on the promotional package they choose.

Rather than break existing records, Guinness World Records tries to convince companies to dream up new ones. Yet a Guinness world record isn’t a random contrivance. It’s a major production that takes months of planning and paperwork with official “adjudicators” who enforce guidelines for certification. Taking all that into account, should Friday’s world record meet criteria, it’ll be technically legit.

The world’s largest multi-venue ski and snowboard lesson doesn’t exist yet. But a search of the Guinness World Record website reveals that the world’s largest ski lesson involved 594 skiers at Sarn-Heinzenberg, Switzerland on Feb. 23, 2008. It was conducted on a run 1,300 meters long, supervised by enough instructors to handle 20 to 30 students each.

Should you choose to be a part of tomorrow’s world record attempt, rest assured you won’t be sharing the piste as part of a herd unleashed in the learning area at 10 a.m. Students are divided into groups small enough for an instructor to manage. Ski and snowboard lessons are taught separately.

If things go according to plan, the Learn to Ski and Snowboard Initiative will have its record and the crop of future skiers and snowboarders will be well worth the fee paid for the licensing agreement to use the Guinness trademark. Why not become one of them? You could be introduced to a lifelong passion – and not everyone can say they own a piece of a world record.