Vermonter Ava Einig, age “just about 9,” is 4½ feet tall. The Olympic-caliber Harris Hill in her birthplace of Brattleboro is 65 times as high, unparalleled in New England and one of only six of its size in the nation.
So how does someone of Einig's ground-level stature learn such a skyscraping sport?
The fourth-grader suggests a leap of faith.
“I practiced jumping off my mom's cedar chest onto a gymnastics mat,” she says.
Then her father, former Junior Olympian turned Harris Hill chief of competition Todd Einig, proposed a summer trip to his old training site at Lake Placid, N.Y., home of the 1932 and 1980 Winter Games.
When the elder Einig began competing three decades ago, he lived for winter and its icy launch ramps and snow-covered landing hills. But as his daughter discovered this month, Lake Placid has circumvented the seasons by creating porcelain-track starting gates and plastic-covered slopes.
“If kids can try small jumps, hopefully you'll have some who decide this is a thing they can do,” says USA Nordic Team Director Clint Jones, who wore a T-shirt and shorts as he sprayed a practice hill with a garden hose for added slipperiness.
Nearby, West Fairlee 12-year-old Eli Mansur donned skis, boots, a body suit and helmet. A year ago, Mansur hadn't heard of the sport. Then Upper Valley Olympic jumpers Jeff Hastings and Walter Malmquist visited Mansur's school, spurring the seventh-grader to train in the winter - and now summer.
“I've never skied on AstroTurf,” Mansur says.
Fellow Vermonters have jumped for nearly a century, ever since Brattleboro outdoorsman Fred Harris - a contemporary of the airplane-inventing Wright brothers - first strapped wooden slats to his feet and catapulted off a snow-covered ramp.
“Broke my skis all to pieces,” Harris penned in his diary at the turn of the 20th century.
A pioneering “extreme skier,” Harris is credited with making the earliest slalom descents of Mount Washington in New Hampshire and Whiteface in New York.
Harris founded the Dartmouth Outing Club - the first organization of its kind in the country - in 1909, then created the Brattleboro Outing Club in 1922, the same year he built the namesake ski jump in his hometown.
Harris Hill, in turn, has hosted nine national championships, starting in 1924 with the first finals held in the East and continuing up to the U.S. qualifiers for the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville, France.
But with succeeding generations wandering elsewhere with the arrival of the Interstate and the internet, participation has dipped to the point that only one Brattleboro jumper - Spencer Knickerbocker, a 26-year-old Marlboro College senior - now joins his national peers at Harris Hill's annual competition each February.
To change that, fellow local Todd Einig has launched a junior training program that teaches boys and girls in the winter and points them to “grasshopper camps” at Lake Placid in the summer.
The Olympic Jumping Complex, tucked in the Adirondacks an hour from the Lake Champlain Bridge connecting Addison, Vt., and Crown Point, N.Y., features 20, 48, 90 and 120 meter slopes.
“It's such a gradual progression,” says Gabby Armstrong, a Lake Placid competitor and coach. “We're trying to make you comfortable and confident on each hill.”
Students, for their part, begin as early as kindergarten.
“If you try to start when you're older,” Jones says, “you're going to be thinking too much.”
Mansur's sister, Isla, relates. The 9-year-old lives just down the road from Tara Geraghty-Moats, a 25-year-old West Fairlee athlete who last month won a Nordic combined national championship title in Park City, Utah.
But for the fourth-grader, such inspiration is overshadowed by the intimidation of a Lake Placid launch ramp bigger than the one her brother fashioned in their backyard.
“I think I'm just going to go down the landing hill,” Isla Mansur said.
Todd Einig understands the apprehension.
“You're up there and have a view of everything,” he says. “That brings a little bit of scariness.”
Training, as a result, is as much mental as physical. Watch a youngster eye the smallest hill with trepidation and you realize the fears and figments in anyone's mind are often the biggest obstacle. To advance, coaches advise trying and, if you fall, standing up and trying again.
“You have to get to the stage where you totally commit,” Jones says. “When you get the courage, it can be a huge personal step and confidence builder.”
Twelve-year-old Caleb Zuckerman of Norwich is proof personified.
“My first year, I just did the landing hill,” says the seventh-grader, who's flying off Lake Placid's Olympic-size jump this summer at speeds approaching 60 mph.
Eli Mansur, for his part, has mastered the nearby 20-meter training hill.
“I really like the thrill of flying in the air,” he says. “My goal is to do the best I can - and keep getting better.”