The ski trails were carved into the mountain during the 1950s primarily by its first ski school director/general manager, Walter Foeger, an Austrian and former racer who had previously trained the Spanish Olympic ski team. He arrived in 1956. He developed a method of teaching parallel skiing that avoided first having to teach the student snowplow/stem turns. Instead, students were taught to change direction by means of a slight hop keeping the tips of the skis on the snow, and displacing the back of the skis sideways. He called his ski teaching method "Natur Teknik" (natural technique). The Jay Peak ski school offered a "learn to ski in a week" guarantee. The method was adopted by a number of other ski areas.