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and perhaps growing weary of New York, Boston, and Maine society, Dudley decided to return to Europe where the parties had more dignity and the sports more adventure.
    Having driven through the Alps during the war, Dudley was familiar with the premier climbing and skiing areas of Europe: Zermatt, Chamonix, the Arlberg, and Davos. There, he hired renowned mountain guides to help him become proficient in his new sports. Solidly built and strongly muscled, he always showed resolute determination and good humor as he struggled to master the ropes, crampons, and ice axe maneuvers of climbing. But on skis, as he had on deck, he found that he had a natural sense of balance and coordination which allowed him to excel. As with sailing, he found he loved the thrill and speed of racing and entered many regional competitions. At the sharp pop of the gun, he would throw his weight down the slope, his strong legs hugging the heavy wooden skis close together, almost casually transferring his weight back and forth along the carved edges, the tips clattering along the icy course as he sped to the bottom of the steep runs. Because he competed against much younger men who had been reared on the racecourses, he never won an event, but he always crossed the finish line. He also loved the physical challenge and exhaustion of ski touring, and while exploring and conquering largely untouched peaks on his skis and skins, he achieved over thirty difficult summits and traverses, chief among them a ski traverse of the Mont Blanc massif.
    Over twenty years before the famed Telepherique de l’Aiguille du Midi was built, enabling tourists, climbers, and skiers to ride up the side of the massive mountain, Dudley and his party climbed over 9,000 feet from Chamonix village to the Vallot hut on their skis. From there he performed an early and still rare ski traverse of Mont Blanc to the Mer de Glace. He also climbed rock faces on the Brevant and reached scores of summits in the western Pyrenees, the Alps—including Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn—and in the Bregaglia group of the Engadine along the Swiss–Italian border.
    While skiing in the Tyrol above St. Anton in the Arlberg district of Austria in the spring of 1934, Wolfe watched as an attractive woman with a heroically female body—curvaceous, strong, and statuesque—slalomed down the slopes, effortlessly mastering the icy course. At the bottom, he watched as she tore off her ski hat, releasing a thick crop of short, dark curls, and smiled broadly at her companion. Inquiring, he was told her name was Alice Damrosch.
    Alice Blaine Damrosch was born on May 18, 1892, the eldest daughter of the famed conductor of the New York Symphony, Walter Johannes Damrosch, and the granddaughter of James Gillespie Blaine, secretary of state under presidents Garfield and Harrison. The Damrosch dynasty, as one writer called it, included several generations of European musical heritage, and after Walter Damrosch and his brother Frank immigrated to America in 1871, they began building a musical tradition in their new country. Walter had four daughters, who grew up in a house where there was always a guest musician visiting, his cello leaning against the door frame or his sheet music on the piano.
    Alice’s first marriage in 1914 to Hall Pleasants Pennington, whom the New York Times described as a man who “gardens,” ended almost before it began. The ceremony was on Lake Champlain in upstate New York, after which the newlyweds canoed off in a flurry of rose petals as musicians played on the shore. But that was evidently the end of the romance; early the next morning, Alice canoed alone back to where her family was staying on the lake and spent the rest of her honeymoon with them.
    Alice went through romances quickly. No man, it seemed, quite lived up to her family’s artistic or intellectual standards. A man had to be someone and do something, and while her beaus entertained her in the short run, none seemed to