Denise McCluggage, journalist, author, skier and race car driver, died May 6, 2015, at age 88 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she had lived since the late 1970s.
McCluggage was born in El Dorado, Kansas, in 1927 to Robert and Velma McCluggage. After graduating from Mills College in Oakland, California, she began writing for the San Francisco Chronicle and later The New York Herald Tribune. She also worked as a staff editor for the 1950s magazine Competition Press, which later morphed into Autoweek.
McCluggage moved to New Mexico from Vermont after reading an article noting that the high number of cloudy days in Vermont equaled the high number of sunny days in New Mexico. In Vermont she lived and skied in the Mad River Valley and wrote her well-known book Centered Skiing, a concept Sugarbush used at its ski school for many years.
McCluggage is survived by one sister and several nieces and nephews.
