The History of
Skiing
Have you ever wondered where
skiing came from? Well, I have and so I
just thought I would find out. So this
is what I could find, hope you like it.
The first evidence people have discovered of skiing
is some rock carvings
discovered around the Arctic rim, many of them showing ski-shod hunters in hot
pursuit of game. They date clear back to the Stone Age, which is
the same time-frame as the Egyptian pyramid-building. Some ancient ski artifacts were pulled from
Scandinavian peat bogs that pollen-dated back as long ago as 4500 years, back
to around the age of the stone carvings.
Stone-age skiing, obviously, wasn’t to have a blast sliding down hills,
but rather a means of travel.
The first
written account of skiing appears at 1000 A.D. in the Viking "Sagas"
where several kings are described as being superb skiers.
In 1206, during
the Norwegian civil war, two scouts on skis carried the infant heir to the
throne 35 miles to safety in the middle of winter. This historic event is celebrated
today by the "Birchleg Race" over the same route and so called
because the scouts wrapped their legs in birch bark to keep them warm and dry. Another traditional ski race takes place every
year in Sweden. The Vasaloppet Cross Country race (53 miles) honors Gustav
Vasa's ski trip in 1523 when he raised an army and beat the Danes who were then
in control of the country. Lots of countries in the 18th and 19th
centuries used skis in their armies for winter warfare. A pair of skis consisted of one long runner
and one shorter one called an andor. The long ski was used to glide; the
shorter one to brake and climb. Skins could be applied to the latter. By 1840 local cross-country ski races (with
skis of equal length) were beginning to be held in Norway among military
personnel. Soon, civilians were allowed to enter and the popularity of the ski
contests spread rapidly among the peasants in the rural countryside. The races
were nordic in concept--over rolling terrain and down short steeper slopes
where jumping was necessary.
Telemark skiing
was just getting off the ground and the binding set up they had didn’t give
them the control they needed, so a new binding with a better toe & heel
strap had to be invented. The Telemark binding added a heel strap. Now there
had been heel straps before, but the Telemark heel strap, made of tough, woven,
elastic birch-root tendrils, ran around the boot heel and connected to the toe
strap, holding the ski firmly enough to the foot so the skier could maneuver
the ski or take to the air without danger of losing the ski. The binding was invented by Norheim about
1850 and led to the flowering of the world=s first "freestyle" contestsCclimbing, running, making turns for the heck of
it and flying off natural bumps on unprepared snow.
Jumping
eventually became a separate event and Norheim was especially good at these
competitions. But Norheim was
accomplished at something else more important than jumping. This was first
brought to the world=s attention in 1868 when Norheim was 43. He and
two companions skied over the countryside for three days running to get from
Telemark to the capital city, then called Christiania. There they took part in
the second annual Centralforeningen (Central Ski Association) open ski
competition whose object was to demonstrate skill at descending a particular
slope in the city. The Telemarkers stunned city skiers by demonstrating quick,
precise steering and braking. No one in the city had ever seen such a dynamic
technique before. The Telemarkers used two separate and distinct turns. One
turn described a sweeping arc (it was later named the Telemark) and the other
turn made it possible to stop short with an abrupt little uphill swing (it was
later named the Christiania). A city newspaper enthused that "Sondre
Norheim could come down like lightning and suddenly stop in a second... A new
era has risen in skiing." And it was true, skiing was never the same
again. To make turning even easier,
Norheim reengineered the ski itself, making the waist narrower than the tip and
tail. This "sidecut" pattern helped the ski flex into the shape of a
turn as soon as the skier tipped it on edge. This new waisted shape came to be
called the Telemark ski, and it became the standard for ski design over the
next century. The turns from Telemark
spread quickly throughout.
In the late
1800s, Norway=s first export in the sport came, their skis. The
demand for skis was rising steadily in Norway from 1880 on, inspiring new
production methods. Like the first laminated ski, with an ash sole and pine
top, that was in 1881. Hand-crafted skis were first exported to Sweden in 1882,
but hand making skis took to long to make so the first ski factories opened in
Norway in 1886, to make the popular Telemark-pattern ski. The next export was
the skiers themselves. Norwegian students, teachers, engineers and businessmen
fanned out over Europe at the turn of the century, thanks to the fast-spreading
railroad network in Europe. They brought their skis with them and everywhere
they skied, they made converts to the sport.
At the same time
in Norway came the founding of the first Norwegian ski clubs and, of course,
competition in nordic cross country and jumping were held between them; then
came competition against other Europeans by individual Norwegians and, finally,
teams of Norwegians. The men from Norway inevitably came out ahead, advancing
the claim that, on the character of its citizens alone, Norway deserved
independence. That claim got another boost from the exploits of the Norwegian
hero Fridtjof Nansen, who rose to world renown leading high-risk expeditions on
Telemark skis. In 1888, Nansen became
the first man to cross the mid-Greenland ice cap, on skis and sledges. His book, On Skis Over Greenland, came out in
1890 in both English and Danish editions and was translated into German the
next year. It became a worldwide propaganda vehicle for skiing. Again, in
1895-96, the explorer=s reputation burgeoned when Nansen and a
companion survived an 18-month journey over the polar ice by ski, sledge and
kayak, making their way back to civilization in a modern saga unparalleled to
this day. As a follow-up, in 1911 Roald Amundsen skied all the way to the South
Pole, the first man to get there, outpacing Britain=s rival the Scott expedition witch slogging away
on foot, or on skis but using them badly, and falling so far behind schedule
that, ultimately, although Scott reached the pole, he and his men perished on
the return. Amundsen, unscathed, was left to receive the applause of the world.
Telemark skiing
thus had, at the turn-of-the-century, a well-earned reputation for developing a
strong, adventurous and free-spirited character, veritably a charismatic sport.
The rise of
Telemark skiing forms an interesting contrast with contemporary "longboard"
skiing, which was really the first form of alpine skiing.
Hundreds of
thousands of Swedes, Finns and Norwegians set sail in the last half of the
1800s to better their lot in the New World. Most of the migrants ended up on
Midwestern farms, like Sondre Norheim. But
some became miners in California, Colorado, Utah and even in the Australian
outback. Everywhere they went, they made
their own skis, as usual. And they
founded some of the world=s oldest ski clubs.
Enterprising men
became mail couriers, the Fed Ex of their time, supplying the mining camps
their only communication with the outside world in the winter. The most famous
was John "Snowshoe" Thompson, born in Jon Tostensen Rue in Telemark.
He carried mail on skis from Nevada 80 miles over the Sierra Nevada Mountains
to Hangtown, California. Other miners invented, in the mid-1800s, the world=s first downhill speed races. They were run for
gold and glory, one mining camp against the other, in an atmosphere of
boasting, drinking and gambling. Longboard racers took off on skis twelve feet
long, several men at once (depending on the width of the slope) and ran
straight down at speeds that were clocked up to 87 miles an hour. This velocity
was not reached again on skis for a century thereafter. Longboard competition
was spectacular if only for the falls, and proliferated with the rising
fortunes of Western mining. In the end, it shriveled along with the mines.
Longboarding had little later influence on skiing and was all but forgotten
until rediscovered much later by Western journalists. It had been a sport
notoriously lacking in self-discipline, modesty and beauty of movement. These virtues were conspicuous in Telemark
skiing, which inspired a whole library of praise for Telemark skiing as it made
a conquest of the Continent. But it was
Continental skiing with a difference. In
Norway, the sport had been practiced mostly by mountain farmers, originally,
and in consequence considered a sport of the people. Norwegians prided
themselves in keeping the sport accessible, affordable and simple. And while
Norwegians may have sold skis to the world, they disdained to profit from
selling the sport itself, deeming skiing a matter of soul. There was a ski
school as early as 1881 in Norway, but ski instruction as a profession was a
very small matter and precious few Norwegians taught the sport abroad. This
idealistic sport of the Norwegians, stressing endurance on the snow and
fearless flight through the air was wrenched around by British skiers on the
Continent to focus on the experience of ski descent on the snow, a form much
more appealing to many more people. From this came alpine skiingCmainly because skiing developed on the Continent
quite differently from the way skiing developed in Norway.
Because going
slow and steady on steep pitches using Telemark and Christiania turns required
considerable skill, Mathias Zdarsky of Austria invented the stem which was a
snow plow. The stem made skiing in a
slow, controlled manner a possibility for beginnersCa fine introduction to skiing for a city-bound
clientele with limited practice time.
But control
turned out to be only half of alpine skiing.
The other half turned out to be speed.
The change of focus from ski mountaineering to fast ski descent was the
initiative of the British. No sooner had
they mastered the stem, Telemark, and the Christiania than the British invented
the Continent=s first alpine races, then as now called
"downhill" and "slalom." This began the transition from ski
mountaineering into alpine skiing.
The first alpine
race invented was the downhill. The bud of this robust event was a British club
race, The Roberts of Kandahar Challenge Cup, run in 1911 at Montana,
Switzerland. Contestants skied an
unmarked course against the clock down the Plaine Morte Glacier over rough snow
and enough natural hazards to prevent contestants from simply running straight
like the longboarders. "The Kandahar" was thereafter (and still is)
held annually at Mürren, Switzerland. Emphasis
on the importance of the descent prevailed in British racing and in everyday
skiing as well. In effect, the sport of
alpine racing was invented by the British, and alpine skiing along with it.
The second bud
of alpine racing was invented by British ski mountaineer Arnold Lunn in January,
1922, on the grounds of the Palace Hotel in Mürren where he persuaded some
friends to race through a series of paired short wands stuck in the snow. The
race was against the stopwatch and without regard to form, in contrast to
contemporary Swiss controlled course contests where form counted. Lunn=s slalom cleverly played speed off against
control. The delightful tension between these opposites made the race so
intriguing it spread quickly. With slalom gaining popularity, it became
possible to run alpine combined races, scoring slalom and downhill together, as
jumping and cross country had been scored jointly for nordic combined titles.
In 1924, Lunn helped found Mürren=s Kandahar Ski Club to promote alpine combined
racing.
Austrians
universally glorified the innovation of Arlberg skiing and elevated its hero,
Johann Schneider, to the status of most important figure in alpine skiing
history. He immediately decided to found
his own ski school. He set up a system
(based on Zdarsky=s turn): the snowplow stem, the stem turn and the
stem christie, in ascending order of difficulty. The Schneider system replaced
the tradition of ski guides, each teaching his own grab-bag of turns and
operating from scattered hotels throughout the town. Schneider hired teachers
to instruct at a location in the middle of town and trained them to teach a
fixed sequence based on the stem turn, so that pupils returning after having
had lessons could take up at the exact same level they had left offCno matter which teacher headed the class.
Schneider=s school had a half dozen of the best alpine
racers in the world on its teaching staffClike Friedl Pfeifer and Rudi Matt who at one time
or another defeated every racer in Europe.
In 1920, Schneider
collaborated with Arnold Fanck, a pioneer adventure film maker from Freiberg,
Germany to make, Das Wunder des Schneeschuhs, ("The Wonders of
Skis"). It was the world=s first ski film and it was an out-and-out
instructional video, but with an exotic subject. Fanck capitalized on the huge success of this
first film by starring Schneider in a half dozen subsequent ski films having
dramatic plots, beginning with "Fox Chase in the Engadine". The Fanck films gave European film-goers their
first action hero, "Hannes" SchneiderChis film name which he used in real life ever
after. By the time Schneider starred in
his final film, the romantic comedy ski chase, Das Weische Rausche, "White
Ecstasy," released in 1930, Schneider=s technique and teaching format had become the
worldwide standard. Schneider=s school at St. Anton remained by far the world=s largest as Schneider=s fame rippled across Europe to America, Japan
and Australia.
Meanwhile,
alpine ski racing=s acceptance into the official competition world
was delayed by at least ten years past its prime. It was a delay marked by a struggle of alpine
racing adherents against a Scandinavian ski aristocracy entrenched in the
Federation International de Ski or FIS.
The FIS ran both the world championship competition and skiing in the
Olympics.
A counterattack was nevertheless generating steam
by this time. The popularity of downhill competitions had spread in Europe, in
1928, two giants of alpine skiing got together to concoct the first
international alpine combined. Schneider=s Arlberg Ski Club and Lunn=s Kandahar Ski Club ran the first "Arlberg-Kandahar"
alpine combined, open to all comers. The
event by far outshone the St. Moritz Olympics of the same year.
Finally, the FIS
caved in to allow the first FIS alpine world championship, at Mürren in 1931. Five years later, the International Olympic
Committee relented and sanctioned a single set of alpine combined medals (three
for each sex) at Germany=s 1936 Garmisch Olympics
In the 1920s, the alpine nations of Europe began
building ski lifts. This made a way of vying for the winter tourist trade. And
racing became much more sophisticated as it became possible to practice running
tens of thousands of vertical feet a day. The Germans have the honor of being
first, having set up a drag lift earliest in the first decade of the 1900s,
joined by the Austrian drag lift at Dornbirn in 1908. The French kicked their
lift-building off by finishing a cable car for skiers and hikers at Chamonix in
1927, building a drag lift there the next year for less than expert skiers.
The Swiss constructed the first cable car
built expressly for the ski trade, at Engelberg in 1928. In 1932, Gerhard
Müller of Zurich struck a blow for economy by patenting an inexpensive rope tow
run by a motorcycle engine, and began building them. In 1933, Davos finished
the giant of its time, the Parsennbahn, a cog railway that rose 3000 vertical
feet to the top of the Parsenn.
The Austrians followed with St. Anton’s Galzig cable car in 1938 as the era of
popular walk-up skiing drew to a close, and alpine skiing parted definitively
from ski mountaineering. They were now separate and distinct sports, alpine
skiers using lifts at least several times a day and ski mountaineers using them
not at all, if they could help it.
In 1931, America’s first Arlberg teacher came
along, by chance. Sig Buchmayr of
Salzburg had begun to work in ski shops in New York City when he was invited to
join the school at Peckett's Inn. So Peckett’s had the first American resort
school offering Arlberg, a fact that led to the development of Cannon Mountain
as the East’s first big mountain resort.
By the mid-1930s, Austrian instructors were
arriving in the U.S. to teach skiing and incidentally to get out of Austria,
which was being systematically terrorized by Nazi Germany bent on Anschluss, or
annexation. German threats were a persuasive reason for leaving the Alps
altogether, yet only a modest number of Austrian instructors managed to make
the admittedly difficult decision to leave for America.
Small in number, this exile group wielded an
enormous influence, far beyond their numbers, bringing their deep expertise to
bear at a time it was badly needed to help get American alpine skiing on the right
track. Coast to coast the Austrians had an immense impact. Hundreds of
Americans worked with these Austrian ski maestros during the 1930s and, in turn
fanned out across the country, infiltrating Austrian know-how throughout the
entire body of American alpine skiing.
Americans did their part, too: Charles Proctor Jr. and John Carleton of the
1928 U.S. Winter Olympic team, laid out ski trails in New Hampshire with
manpower from President Franklin Roosevelt’s novel creation, the Civilian
Conservation Corps. Charlie Lord of Montpelier, Vermont, an early Mt. Mansfield
skier, without benefit of European travel, was hired by the CCC, to cut trails
on Mt. Mansfield above Stowe. A bit
later, in 1938, Sel Hannah began cutting trails on Cannon Mt. and soon was
designing other eastern trail systems.
The larger influence, though, was that of the
Austrians.
In 1935, Hannes Schroll from Salzburg, arrived to head the school at Badger
Pass in Yosemite Park, California. Otto Lang, the first instructor to leave for
America from Schneider’s school, came first to Peckett’s, then founded the
Northwest’s first official Arlberg ski schools—at Mt. Rainier, Mt. Baker and
Mt. Hood.
In 1938, the long-threatened Anschluss came
down on Austria as Nazi troops marched into Vienna. To the shock of the ski
world, the Nazis promptly imprisoned Hannes Schneider. Schneider told friends
he’d been done in through the influence of Leni Riefenstahl, the co-star who
feuded with him during White Ecstasy and thereafter befriended Germany’s Adolf
Hitler who let her direct several films glorifying the Nazis.
Schneider’s fate prompted several more St.
Anton instructors to get out: the town’s best young racer, Toni Matt, fled to
Mt. Cranmore; Friedl Pfeifer fled to Sun Valley—there he replaced Hans Hauser
as ski school director and designed the trails and lifts on Sun Valley’s Mt.
Baldy, the first large lift system in the U.S. Luggi Foeger, Schneider’s lieutenant at St.
Anton, eventually took over at Badger Pass while Schroll moved on to Sugar
Bowl.
In February 1939, after strong pressure had
been applied by Harvey Dow Gibson, a man with the means to twist arms, Hannes
Schneider was freed by the Nazis and allowed to emigrate to the U.S. where he
took over Mt. Cranmore while Rybizka moved to Mt. Tremblant in the Laurentians.
And with that, the center of gravity of the ski world had shifted to America.
Dick Durrance, who had gone to grade school
in Austria to become America’s only world class male racer was financed by New
York steel heir and avant garde publisher James Laughlin to buy out a group of
Salt Lake City businessmen at Alta, Utah, in 1941. There he founded another important American
high-altitude resort.
Generally, the Austrian émigrés were the
gurus of the growing American sport, as well as key resort founders, mountain
managers, ski school directors, race coaches and trail designers in the growth
of alpine skiing.
Americans were ripe for this new and
exhilarating sport. The U.S. work week was contracting as "the
weekend" made its debut. The CCC had cut ski trails from Maine to the Rockies
and the Sierras. Ski areas had begun to draw the American young to the slopes
where healthy, virtuous, and economical skiing awaited.
The first recorded lift in America was a drag
tow at Truckee, California, in 1910, but it did not inspire imitators
elsewhere. In 1933, Alec Foster built the Northeast’s first rope tow at
Shawbridge in the Laurentians outside Montreal, and lift skiing really took
off. The tow idea was copied quickly the next winter of 1934, by David Dodd,
run off the back wheel of a jacked-up car, in Woodstock, Vermont: rope tows
were simple—any competent mechanic could put one up.
Six ropes went in at Woodstock within two
years, along with dozens elsewhere in the Northeast. There were upward of a
hundred ropes on the continent within five years. North America was outpacing
Europe in the number of tows. By 1940, rope tows were drawing thousands of
Americans into skiing every season.
The next step up in technology was the
overhead cable lift. The first overhead cable in the world was the
single-passenger J-bar built in 1934 at Davos, Switzerland, by Ernest Constamm.
The first in America was the J-bar built the next year, 1935, at Oak Hill in
Hanover, New Hampshire. In 1936, Constamm converted his Davos lift to a
two-passenger T-bar, then moved to Denver and installed dozens of T-bars around
the U.S. to make it the workhorse lift of the generation.
In 1938 America’s
second funicular, the Skimobile, was installed on Mt. Cranmore at North Conway,
New Hampshire. That same year at Cannon
Mountain, Franconia, New Hampshire the first Aerial Tramway in the United
States is installed. In 1958 at the Wildcat New Hampshire ski area the
first U.S. Gondola was installed.
Finally,
what became the most effective uphill transport of all was invented in the
U.S., the chairlift, designed by Union Pacific engineer Jim Curran for the 1936
opening of Sun Valley. It took a while for the chair to catch on; however, by
the mid-1960s, chairs were being installed at a clip of fifty to seventy a
season.
In November 1981
at Breckenridge, Colorado, the first modern detachable quad was installed it
was called the Dopplemeyer quad. Now there
were detachable prototypes as far back as 1952 at Snow Summit, California, in
1955 at Wengen, Switzerland, in 1969 at Utica, New York and in 1972 at Mt. Ste.
Anne, Quebec, but this was the first one that was modern. The gondola had always been detachable, but
now that same technology had been applied to the chair lift. The detachable has the double effect of doing
away with both waiting line and "fear of loading," being hit hard
from behind by a fast-moving chair on a high-capacity lift.
The
rest of the big resorts followed suit in putting in high-speed detachables. The
speed of detachables and fixed-grip high-speed chairs is giving most skiers
more skiing than they can handle. Lunches have become longer. Sipping, shopping
and napping begin earlier. Skiing on this side of the Atlantic has acquired
some of the more leisurely pace of European resorts.
Early on, fast overhead cable lifts posed a challenge: to take advantage of
these lifts’ ability to provide thousands of vertical feet of skiing in a day
meant the skier had to know something about technique beyond falling down to
stop, commonly the best-honed maneuver in the repertoire of many, if not most,
American skiers in the 1930s.
Fortunately,
Arlberg schools stood ready to offer sane skiing to all comers, having been
enthroned at ski areas like Moosilauke, Jackson, Cannon, Gunstock, Cranmore and
Hanover in New Hampshire; Mansfield and Woodstock in Vermont, North Creek and
Bear Mt. in New York; Sun Valley in Idaho and Badger Pass and Sugar Bowl in
California. Business was good: fifty to ninety percent of the skiers signed up
for class (versus ten percent today).
In
addition, with all that terrain to ski there needed to be some sort of police
and medical help. So in 1938 the first U.S. Ski Patrol was
established at Stowe under Minot Dole as chairman of the national committee.
By 1940, Alpine skiing was solidly entrenched
coast-to-coast, partly through hard work and partly through random factors—the
Nazis, the CCC, and the dense railroad network. Then, in December 1941,
everything stopped. World War II came to the U.S. with the Japanese attack on
Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.
Most U.S. ski areas closed. The one bright spot was that the work of the
National Ski Patrol Director Minot Dole had persuaded the Army to establish an
alpine corps: the First Battalion, 87th Infantry, activated in June 1941, at
Fort Lewis, Washington, became the core of the 10th Mountain Division.
After the war, several thousand 10th Mountain
survivors, Army-minted Arlbergers, went into skiing—a vigorous cadre of
inventors, developers, teachers and entrepreneurs. Friedl Pfeifer founded the
ski resort at Aspen and later Peter Seibert founded its closest rival, Vail,
the two giant resorts of the era. In all, some 62 resorts were either founded
by, directed by or had ski schools run by 10th Mountain veterans; two thousand
of them had gone into the ranks of ski instructors.
It was time. A 1940s skier was forced to
endure a set of fragile and obdurate equipment. First came a ski made of wood
that warped and splintered. Ski bottoms were coarse and needed wax every few
runs; bamboo poles broke frequently. Lace-up leather boots stretched
frustratingly.
Bindings had to be laboriously fastened on by hand-operated buckles, and would
release only if unlatched or forced. The mis-named "safety strap"
required to tether a breakaway ski to the boot often caused the ski to windmill
in a sliding fall, slashing mercilessly at the skier’s legs. If the strap
broke, a loose ski became a lethal missile, drawing warning shouts of
"Ski! Ski! Ski! across the slope.
Then, to dress for skiing called for bundling
in what amounted to converted hunting and hiking clothes, wool long-johns,
sweaters and scarves topped by a windbreaker or canvas parka over wool hiking
pants. Lunching meant eating in a room permeated by the strong smell of wet
wool mixed with a potent aroma of ski wax.
Finally, in getting up the hill, one to two-hour weekend lift lines were not
uncommon—less than 30 minutes was considered good luck.
It was a great sport with great
inconveniences. The 1940s skier had to love it or leave it, and many left. But
more came a-running in response to the new technology that came out like shiny
new Christmas presents every season.
The unprecedented post-World War II surge of
technology, in other words, was crucial to keeping skiing from stalling.
It began with bindings: In 1939, Seattle skier Hjalmar Hvam broke his second
leg in two seasons and invented the Saf-Ski from his bed of pain. It was the
first swiveling toepiece, sold under the advertising motto, Hvoom with Hvam!
Saf-Ski inspired other releasing toe pieces; the first toepiece with two swivel
points was the popular Ski Free.
In the 1950s, Mitch Cubberly and Earl Miller independently came out with fully
integrated heel-and-toe release bindings, using boot plates at the juncture of
boot and binding. But the boot still had to be latched in. The first Look
step-in came out in the late 1950s, ending centuries of awkward bending-over
preliminary to skiing. The double concept of the full release and the step-in
entry was here. But its evolution was anything but hvoom! It took another
generation before binding geniuses mastered the arcane complexities of step-in
bindings which released reliably as required. But arrive such bindings did, by
the mid-1970s.
Skis improved much more rapidly.
The first high-tech U.S. ski, the aluminum Alu-60, came out in 1947 only to be
buried under an avalanche of Heads, wood-core aluminum skis with plywood cores,
also invented in 1947 by Howard Head of Baltimore. Heads turned so readily by
comparison with wood skis that Heads were known universally as Cheaters (and
"banana skins" for being so easy to flex).
Skis became user-friendly. In 1946,
Dynamique came out with the first hard, super-smooth ski sole, the Cellulix
plastic bottom put an end to mandatory coating of ski bottoms with pungent
preparations that had to be re-applied every hour.
The process accelerated after 1954, when the first all-plastic ski arrived, the
Holley: but plastic really did not come of age until the 1960s when Rossignol
and Kneissl began making fiberglass skis universal today because they give an
easier ride than aluminum and do not take permanent bend after a collision.
Ski clothes made a quantum leap in 1949 when Aspen instructor Claus Obermeyer
brought out his version of the insulated quilted parka, allowing skiers to
shuck layers of wool and yet ski warm! Quilted parkas meant that billowing
"baggies," could now be traded in for sleek "stretchies,"
invented by the Bogner ski clothing company in 1953, without the skier’s
courting hypothermia—at least in the East. Serious ski chic had been launched.
Then came boots.
After buying the buckle patent from a Swiss inventor, Henke Boots came out in
1955 with Speedfit, the first buckle boot, ending the hard work of
unlacing/lacing for just the right tightness. But buckles alone were no solution
because the boot stretched as the buckles tightened. In 1957, Bob Lange created
the first Lange Boot out of plastic to solve the stretchy-boot problem. Buckles
in combination with plastic provided the close fit that gave skiers the precise
control over the skis taken for granted today.
The next invention that surfaced was Ed Scott’s tempered aluminum pole in 1958,
the first viable metal ski pole, ousting bamboo as the last natural primary
material used in major ski equipment.
In 1960, at Squaw Valley, the first alpine Olympics were held in America. It stands as the first Olympics in which a
gold medal wasn’t won by a person riding a pair of wooden skis.
The same year, Mitch Cubberly and Earl Miller
independently came out with ski brakes to replace the inherently risky safety
strap—the invention looked lethal: long unsheathed prongs sprang into position,
sticking out like daggers from the breakaway ski. Brakes were dubbed
"stabbers." But the prongs were sheathed, became shorter, and the reluctant
were eventually convinced. Ski brakes became universal by 1975.
The boom in technology had a huge effect: a huge grouth in skiers.
The number of ski areas in America shot from
78 in 1955 to 662 ten years later—an astounding expansion. By 1970, alpine
skiing was supporting large rural populations in the American hinterland.
Remote regions, which before 1950 could have done without skiing, now in 1970
could no longer make ends meet without it. Whenever there was a snow drought,
sizable lodging, entertainment and recreation businesses simply dried up,
leaving thousands unemployed. The ski regions were by and large blessed with
economic prosperity because skiers had been blessed with a cornucopia of
technological advances which made the sport attractive.
And there was more to come.
By 1960, counter-rotation, also called wedel,
and godille, had taken over, the first marked change in technique since the
original Arlberg and its challenger, the French parallel method of Emile
Allais. The new technique did away with the need for long, sweeping,
slow-starting turns by dividing the skier in half. In the new technique, the
feet turned, the legs turned, and sometimes the hips but the upper body
remained facing roughly in the original direction as a counterweight. The skier
gained the ability to make short, swift turns and thus became more
maneuverable—with wonderful consequences in terms of safety, and enjoyment.
The next round of revolution came in the snow
itself. When nature refused to make it, man did.
In the bad old days before snowmaking took hold in the Northeast, a bad snow
drought could leave the New England mountains bare while the rural economy sank
to its knees, which led a speaker at an economic summit to preface his talk
with, "Well, so much for the much talked about economic alternatives to
skiing."
The first intentional snowmaking device was put together by Wayne Pierce in
Milford, Connecticut, out of a garden hose and a spray nozzle. It was first
tried in the fall of 1950 at nearby Mohawk Mountain, where it produced a
supersonic whistle that drove dogs all over the entire county berserk. That
problem overcome, the first extensive systems were installed in February 1950
at Grossinger’s in New York and Split Rock Lodge (Big Boulder) in Pennsylvania.
By the mid-1970s, snowmaking was a major factor in eastern and midwestern
skiing. For the first time, these resorts were guaranteeing snow from Christmas
to Easter. (Today, even the West’s more plentiful natural snow is increasingly
backed by snowmaking.) The snow drought problem had been largely solved, with
great economic benefit.
As important as the snow making itself, or even more so, was the supporting
cast for snow-grooming. Increasingly large and expensive snow-grooming machines
magically turned random piles and old icy moguls in to nice new smooth runs.
The trail-grooming schedule became the skier’s daily planning guide. Today an
eastern resort suffering a typical day-rain followed by night-freeze can have
decent skiing on at least a few trails the next morning, a result that works
wonders for the relationship of skiers to the resorts in general.
This reincarnation of skiing through
snowmaking and snow grooming has had the almost magical effect of tripling the
acreage accessible to the average skier without felling a single tree.
Grooming, snowmaking and high speed chairs have brought the exclusive preserve
of the experts—that third of resort terrain traditionally made up of steep
slopes—within reach of the average skiers who can now enjoy steep slopes to their
heart’s content—or at least until they run out of steam.
Looking back, one can affirm that skiing has
continually come up with new forms—freestyle, telemarking, speed skiing,
snowboarding and extreme skiing—at the same time preserving or reviving older
forms as it goes along. Cross country and backcountry skiing, the classic
Telemark mode of the 1920s, is alive and well, very close to the 1920s sport
but with the added comfort of over a hundred major, groomed layouts at skiers’
disposal in the U.S., and several times that in Europe.
My parents and I were headed out to Bend to visit him at 7am
the next morning. Even though it was the
middle of the day and I was leaving on a trip bright and early the next day I
couldn’t not go skiing when a friend asked if I wanted to go. We got a few good hours of skiing in and had
a bunch of fun dropping some cliffs in the trees. 
We slept a few hours at the trailhead and got
up bright and early to begin our hike. With
skis and boots on our backs we headed up the trail. We hiked for a little bit before we reached
the snow and were able to put our skis. As we continued up the east side of the
mountain we came into view of the main bowl, a good spot to eat a quick snack
and scope our lines. 
As we continues to skin clouds began to form on Mt Shasta;
the only tall mountain in sight. So
majestically large and in charge… 
