I was hoping to get out on the snowshoes this winter.

The white, quiet winter woods have a special appeal, and though I could easily hike along the open roads of the woodlot or along the Androscoggin riverbank, it’s not the same. The bare and stone-frozen earth trips you up and steals your attention from the surrounding wonders of nature.

Nevertheless, it’s a Winter Olympics year, and a vicarious experience in the snow-covered Italian mountains is better than nothing.

As we glow in the accomplishments and attempts of athletes with Maine connections – Seth Wescott, Kirsten Clark and Bode Miller – I thought about the special role the Twin Cities have in winter sports.

The Winter Olympic games owe a lot more than you might imagine to Auburn, its diminutive Lost Valley Ski Area and the inventive genius of the late Otto Wallingford. While most fields and woods lack snow cover this week, ski slopes around the world can count on quality snow whenever and wherever they need it, thanks to something Wallingford started about 40 years ago on that 240-foot-high hill near Young’s Corner.

It was 1962 when Wallingford blew the first snow from his own ingenious machinery. He went on to tweak his system with the first air dryer, and fashioned the first pole guns by mounting hoses 20 feet above the trail to simulate natural snowfall. We now call them tower guns, and they are essential components of snowmaking around the globe.

What came out of those early guns was more like ice bullets than snow, but that led Wallingford to a further refinement that makes possible the white-carpet grooming we now take for granted.

Wallingford invented the Powder Maker, which used a giant roller with openings like a chain-link fence. When dragged at an angle, it would pulverize hard pack into soft, carveable snow.

That hill in Auburn with Maine’s first man-made snow helped produce some Olympic greats.

Julie Parisien, who grew up in Auburn and was a member of the 1992 Olympic ski team, has talked fondly of her early training at Lost Valley. In the 1991 U.S. championships, Parisien won gold in Super G and silver in downhill, and she continues to work closely with Maine children to instill values she learned in winter sports.

Before Lost Valley, there was Pettengill Park in Auburn, with its towering ski jump where John Bower began soaring to greatness. Bower first jumped into record books with a perfect 400 when he won slalom, downhill, cross-country and jumping in a high school championship in 1959. A few years later, Auburn and Maine couldn’t have been prouder of its native son when Bower became the first American to win the Holmenkollen King’s Cup in Norway in 1968. It was then the world’s most coveted combined Nordic event.

As a U.S. Nordic Team member, he competed in two Olympics (1964 in Innsbruck, Austria, and 1968 in Grenoble, France) and won four National Nordic Combined titles. Bower later coached Middlebury College and the U.S. Nordic team.

Pettengill Park also was the site of the Nordic skiing trails that would lead Tom Upham to Olympic competition in Grenoble in 1968.

For some of us who never reached Olympic status, we still remember sliding on Pettengill’s hill and skating in the 1950s under the lights to music from the loudspeaker of the warming shack. If it was a snowy day or night, high school boys grabbed shovels and, in line across the ice, made quick work of clearing it.

There were many other neighborhood skating rinks in the Twin Cities through the years. Now, fear and threat of lawsuits keep a lot of people from volunteering that kind of community resource.

Torino 2006 has brought us full circle in some ways. John Bower went on to manage winter sports venues in Park City, Utah, and he was involved in the last winter Olympics there. His son, Ricky Bower, is a name known to snowboarders worldwide. Ricky has won halfpipe world championships and was featured in a film documentary called “Pipe Dreams.” Now, Ricky is in Italy as a coach of the U.S. snowboarders in the Torino Olympics.

It’s a small world, and we live in one of the best parts of it.

Dave Sargent is a freelance writer and an Auburn native. You can contact him at [email protected].