New world vertical skiing record?

Yesterday, I learned that on March 22, 2010, Oliver Kern, clocked up 199,718 feet in one day and that it took him a little over 15 hours to accomplish. That same day, he also racked up 18,209 feet within one hour, breaking the previous Guinness' world record of 14,731 feet. This record seems to ignore the one set by Chris “Superman” Kent in 1991 on Ajax in Aspen at 271,161 feet and makes that new claim quite questionable.

To accomplish that, Kern is said to have been eating spaghetti bolognese while riding the gondola and ended up skiing with a head-lamp as night fell. Hailing from Munich, Germany, the plump Oliver Kern is a well-known character. The 36-year-old founder of the internet portal Skiresort.de claims to have visited over 700 ski areas. In the past, he has boasted some weird world records, like skiing in three ski areas on two continents in one day (on two different sides of the Pacific coast) or riding more than 70 different ski lifts within the same day – this guy is always on the lookout for some high-visibility exploit.

The place where he claims to have broken the record is “Speikboden Ahrntal”, a ski area located in Italy's South Tyrol. He said he picked it because of its excellent grooming, its fast eight-passenger gondola and because it lands itself perfectly for a vertical skiing world record. The lift he mostly rode is the Speikboden Gondola; its 3,353 feet vertical rise and 9,459 feet length meters and 35.45% gradient serve a 3.4 miles run that he skied 58 times. The skier added a few more runs to bring the overall distance skied to 225 miles and the combined distance traveled between slopes and lifts to 323 miles.

Now, where does that leave Dirk Beal and me, the alleged vertical record holder for Utah? A bit dubious, because we logged 112,750 feet in 8 ½ hour in perfect conditions, which means that in 15 hours, it could only translate to 198,970 feet, a bit short of Kern's claim. The lift he rode is very similar to the one we used but the snow conditions in Utah were significantly better than in South Tyrol, so unless we get a lift operator to let us ride for some 15 hours we'll never know. Sure, there's always the helicopter; remember the absolute world record set on 29 April 1998 in British Columbia, totaling 353,599 feet in 14 ½ hour by Kent, Perret, Podivinsky and Sauder.