Otto Lang

Otto Lang

Otto Lang (1908-2006) founded the first ski school at Mount Rainier (a National Park in the USA) in 1937 and directed Sun Valley’s ski school before and after World War II. Then he launched a successful career as a Hollywood filmmaker. He was born in 1908 in the small village of Zenica, Bosnia, to an Austrian father and Croatian mother. One of his best-known pupils was Gretchen Kunigk of Tacoma, who later won an Olympic gold medal for the United States in 1948 under her married name, Gretchen Fraser. “He was an unbelievable human being,” said skiing filmmaker and longtime friend Warren Miller. “He is the last of the old Austrian ski instructors; it is the absolute end of an era.” Miller also called Lang a “Renaissance man.”

Leave a Reply