SKIING HERITAGE: A Ski History Quarterly

From the First Issue 2002 —Volume 14 number 1

The Strange Long History of the Short Ski For a century, short skis have been mysteriously appearing, then, just as mysteriously, vanishing, only to reappear. by Morten Lund

Exactly forty-one years ago, Ski editor-in-chief Marty Luray asked me to contact an outrageous fellow named Clif Taylor up in Vermont who was making extravagant claims for the magical powers of very short skis. I had just worked my way up to a 210-cm ski, the seven-foot benchmark of the alpha male, which meant that I was now expert. What? Ski on 80-cm skis? Thirty-two inches? Not likely. But an assignment was an assignment and I was just getting started as a freelancer. (What neither Marty nor I knew was that Skiing, Ski’s big competitor, had also assigned the story: Clif got around.) “Taylor is a fanatic,” Lowell Thomas told me beforehand. Lowell was a lifelong skier as well as the premier U.S. radio news broadcaster, but he was in his sixties and his skiing was slowing down. So he was trying Taylor’s 32-inch skis, but he warned me to be ready for an onslaught. Lowell was right. My meeting Clif constituted a close encounter of the fourth kind with a nonstop, charismatic salesman. Here is my impression from The Pied Piper of Hogback in the October 1961 issue of Ski: “Clif Taylor…wears 32-inch skis plus a rugged honest expression that, in the case of some dyed-in-the-wool Yankees, belies a craft, tenacity and imagination that can achieve theatrically dramatic goals when sufficiently inspired. And Clif Taylor is inspired, no doubt of that…Taylor sells hard, and he sells soft, and he sells almost without cessation. His forte is coining slogans on the run, e.g. ‘Everybody is a Natural-Born Skier,’ and ‘Find Your Challenge in the Hill, Not the Skis,’ and ‘The Shorter the Ski, the Quicker the Fun.’ ” Clif Taylor Triumphant Taylor was on a roll in 1961. He had just given up his job as an ad space salesman for the Brattleboro Reformer and was aiming to go on the road in the spring to begin selling Shortee Skis to the stores. His nonstop proselytizing had just gotten him his first notice in a national magazine, a one-column photo of the Shortee Ski and caption box in the February 13, 1961 issue of Newsweek. No other ski brand had ever had its own photo with large caption in Newsweek. To top it off, Clif was about to publish the manifesto of the short ski revolution, Instant Skiing on Short Short Skis. Historically speaking, it would be the first full-length book on short skis—advocating, among other matters, the complete elimination of the stem turn from the ski teaching curriculum in favor of “direct parallel.” During the coming 1961-62 season, he would line up dozens of ski areas willing to teach beginners on the 32-inch ski. He would sell his skis to more than forty ski shops. He would have a three-page story published in Look on Shortee Skis showing, among other things, Clif on Shortees beating another instructor on long skis down the hill. At the time, Look had seven million readers. All this, and yet—not enough. Within a decade, Clif Taylor’s career as the avenging angel of the short ski would be pretty much down the tubes and direct parallel was ending not with a bang but with a whimper. The unforeseen implosion of direct parallel intrigued me. In the 1970s, in the course of writing a series of ski history articles for Ski, I did a bit of research on short skis and found a historical pattern that forecast the demise of GLM: short skis never completely disappear but then they never quite succeed in securing a permanent niche, either. Currently, there is greater use than ever before of short skis five to six feet long (150 cm to 180 cm). That appears to be an irreversible change. But then there are ambitious initiatives using “short short” skis three to four-and-a-half feet long (90 cm to 140 cm) called “snow blades,” or “skiboards,” as novice skis in teaching. Only time will prove if these short short skis can shake a bad case of “here today, gone tomorrow” that has afflicted all short skis since the early 1900s. The Earliest Short Ski Instruction The earliest instance of a serious short ski movement dates back to just before 1900, the era when the illustrious Austrian pioneer of the stem technique, Mathias Zdarsky, manufactured short skis. He was the first man in history to teach large ski classes (mostly at his home in Lilienfeld, 60 miles from Vienna). He abandoned seven-foot Norwegian skis in favor of his own five-footer (150 cm) for himself and his pupils. His pupils numbered in the thousands, but his five-footer disappeared after he stopped teaching. The disappearance was mostly the doing of Zdarsky’s successor as the leader of alpine technique innovation, Hannes Schneider of St. Anton, essentially the man whose decisions directed all Austrian and German ski schools in the 1920s and 1930s. Zdarsky’s stem was the basis of Schneider’s system but Schneider’s decision was: the Zdarsky stem, yes; the Zdarsky five-footer, no. There was a second introduction of short skis at the time that involved Schneider even more closely. In World War I, Austrian mountain troops, instructed by Schneider, used a standard six-foot ski. But when he returned to his ski school after the war, Schneider continued to require pupils to use a seven-footer. The pattern was set. Even while the 20th century was still young, there had been two instances already of short-ski initiatives that just disappeared, poof! The First Short Short Ski Appears In the 1930s, a growing number of alpine skiers began exploring the high Alps, inventing the first short short alpine ski in the process. It was the firngleiter (firn means “corn or old glacier snow” in German and gleiter means “glider”). Firngleiters triggered a ski school program using short skis, ten years ahead of Clif Taylor’s short ski program. The firngleiter was a stubby home-made ski two to three feet long (50 cm to 90 cm) and six inches wide. It was (still is) used to ski narrow, snowfilled couloirs and corn snow on the glaciers. In 1982 I saw the firngleiter demonstrated while following Emo Heinrich, head of the Stratton Ski School in Vermont, and a friend down the Stubai glacier. Quoting from my piece, Austria’s Artful Firngleiters in Ski, March 1983: “There was an easy way down, naturally, but we went looking for the hard way, traversing the side of a bowl until we found a steep couloir filled with armpit-deep, rotted snow. My long skis were sucked in and could hardly be turned. Heinrich and Spahn planed through on their little stubbies, furrowing their way gleefully down the whole length of the couloir, little sloppy slides of snow pushing down with them. When they slowed, the slides would catch up and climb their thighs as if they were skiing through white water.” Firngleiter skiing was a barrel of fun. No wonder it caught on. That brings us back to the mystery-history of the short ski and the part played by firngleiters. In the 1940s, by default, the Kitzbühel school, the most prestigious in the Tyrol after Schneider’s, became the center of a 1940s European short ski movement. It caused quite a stir. An Austrian Short Ski Maker The movement was abetted by Kitzbühel’s reputable resident ski maker, Michael Ober, who manufactured strictly traditional skis. At the beginning of the 1940s, firngleiters were considered a home workshop project not worthy of an artisan’s skill. Somewhat hesitantly, then, in 1946 the well-known ski journalist Walter Flaig asked Ober if he would turn out a few firngleiters for some friends who did not want to make their own firngleiters but did want to ski the couloirs in the spring. Ober was a cabinet-maker as well as a ski-maker. Skis were a sideline. But immediately after World War II, demand was slack, so Ober took the order. He even made up a few extras to see if they would sell. They did. The small batch sold out long before winter was over. Ober had in fact become the very first short short ski manufacturer. (Zdarsky has the title of the first manufacturer of short skis of any kind.) Turning out teeny-weeny couloir skis was a bit declassé compared with turning out a pair of long, beautiful seven-footers but Ober was filling a need—nothing revolutionary in that. Then a guide, Hans Neper, bought a pair and liked them so well he used them the whole winter long. This amused some citizens and enraged others. And it intrigued still another group, some older residents who were finding their skiing going downhill, so to speak, but wanted to stay in the sport. If a prestigious mountain guide could ski on firngleiters all winter, could they not do the same? Making “Long Firngleiters” In 1947, several older Kitzbühelers buttonholed Ober. How hard could it be to make a few long firngleiters? Ober said, well, not so hard. He doubled the size of his regular firngleiter and turned out a few four-foot three-inch (130- cm) skis. Then he tripled the size of firngleiters to turn out a few five-foot-eleven-inch (175 cm) models. His small stock of these kurzski (kurz is “short” in German) rapidly sold out. Ober knew he had a product. By 1949, as Ski contributor Peter Scully noted,“Ober turned a deaf ear to the scoffing and the joking which surrounded the short ski and manufactured fifty pair—all of which he sold before the season was two-thirds over.” By 1954, Ober was selling 300 pair of kurzski a year even though they were the butt of jokes in the town: as Scully noted, “Although intermediates and beginners took readily to the short ski, professionals and veterans scorned them and disparaged their use both for themselves and others. They seemed to take the ‘to be beautiful, one must suffer’ attitude, and regarded it as fitting and proper that an initiate should go through an extended period of pain and personal entanglement before being able to enjoy the sport.” Short Skis Go To School In a historic moment in the short ski saga, older skiers began to petition the Kitzbühel ski school director, Karl Koller, to let them take classes on kurzski. Here were customers willing to pay. Karl was badly torn between upholding tradition and the prospect of instant money. He resisted—but, again, business had not been good. In 1951 for the first time, Koller allowed skiers on short skis into class—provided the skis reached at least to the crown of their head. The newcomers were taught side-by-side with those skiers who had to squint to see the tips of their skis. The new kurzski pupils learned fast and developed a great devotion to the school. In 1952, Koller was encouraged enough to outright advocate that older skiers in his beginner classes use skis no taller than themselves—they should go right down to Ober and get a pair. Now other manufacturers in Austria began making kurzski. The fat was in the fire. Kurzski were even exported to America via Dartmouth Skis in Hanover, New Hampshire. Even the Koller system itself was exported: in 1954, the Dodge Ridge, California ski school started a kurzski teaching program.. In 1954, Koller went all the way. He advised all beginners, young and old, to start on a short ski. Peter Scully noted that “The Kitzbühel ski school…was slow to recognize the value of the short ski, but was later quick to exploit it.” Even U.S. ski writers began to take notice—flying the Atlantic to ski Europe was becoming routine and American journalists were going abroad to get their stories from the Continent. The First Short Ski Articles In the November 1953 issue of Ski there came the first U.S. mention of short skis. Wolfgang Lert’s piece entitled Shorter Skis, Softer Boots, Safer Bindings noted that, “After listening to a lot of ski dealers and salesmen, I think there will be a trend toward somewhat shorter skis. This might be in part a reflection of the European furor over the ‘Kurzski’ which has European skiers, ski teachers and ski journalists in a dither. Derived from the stubby summer glacier ski, originally used by Alpine climbers, the Kurzski truly is a ‘shorty,’ averaging 4’9” to 5’9”. “Its greatest impetus to popularity,” Wolfgang wrote, “came when the ski school at Kitzbühel started to use it for teaching older people and beginners with short vacations or poor coordination. The short ski of course is limited in its usefulness…but it will get a beginner to the fun state of skiing in practically no time at all.” (Was this all for the good? Well, yes and no: a Kitzbühel instructor might worry that skiers progressing so fast would end up taking fewer than the usual number of lessons.) A second Ski article (unsigned) appeared in the January 1954 issue, In Equipment, It’s Short Skis, and read, in part, “From Europe come reports of the growing popularity of short skis between four foot three inches and five foot eleven inches in length…many of the people who go out on short skis would not ski at all without them. …A few days of experiment and instruction and the novice who has gained confidence, skill and a liking for the sport may graduate to normal-length skis.” In 1954 came a major piece, Short Skis for You? A five-column article by Peter Scully quoted earlier in this article was published in Ski’s December 1 issue. Scully reported that he saw “a rather stout sexagenarian” on the slope and Scully had been “amazed to discover he had taken up the sport only two years ago and at that moment was planning to pilot himself down the Streif [the Hahnenkamm downhill course]. There he went, all 200 pounds of him on skis barely five feet and a half long, taking his steep descent slowly but surely…That was my introduction to the short ski.” Kitzbühel GLM In 1954, the Kitzbühel graduated length method was in full swing. “Koller claimed,” noted Scully, “the average student could learn to ski in roughly half the time through this method and have twice as much fun doing it.…Fear, [Koller] said, was one of the greatest obstacles to a beginner’s learning to ski. Because it makes the fundamentals so easy, the short ski gives confidence enough to overcome this obstacle.” “There is solid backing for this,” Scully continued, “for when the school put all beginners on short skis, the accident rate on the nursery slopes dropped to almost nothing.” But Scully ends his piece with a jab, one that expressed the ambivalence of even a sympathetic observer. “What do I use? Why personally I would not be caught dead on a pair of short skis!” The kurzski program was still going strong five years later. “Kitzbühel is the only place in the world,” stated a 1959 article in Ski describing the kurzski program, “where thousands of skiers have skied on short skis over a period of several years, and where considerable experience has been gained in their use under various conditions… .” The article went on to say “But these findings have failed to convert the majority of skiers to shorties, in Kitzbühel or anywhere else.” No other ski school on the Continent actually followed up on the Kitzbühel experiment. And indeed, it died out there, too, slowly but surely. Let’s deconstruct all this: At Kitzbühel in 1948, a ski manufacturer produces a short ski in several lengths at the request of skiers—not the ski school. Despite the school’s initial reluctance, the economics of the situation more or less dictate that the school take skiers with short skis despite a cloud of disparagement by experts. In the next few winters, the school begins to get with the program and comes up with the obvious rationale: it works. But then the resistance of the hierarchy takes over and the movement dies. Strangely enough, just this sort of cycle was about to repeat across the Atlantic—but in a slightly later time frame. Parenthetically: given that two short ski movements had sprung up spontaneously on opposite sides of the Atlantic in the 1950s, there had to be underlying reasons. First, of course, the sport was increasingly going alpine and skiing steeper slopes held a much greater challenge than simple touring on gently rolling terrain. Secondly, the Norwegian seven-foot ski that had been designed for cross country remained the standard for reasons of tradition. These difficulties created enormous frustration for less-than-expert skiers. A few of these frustrated beginners and intermediates in Europe and the U.S. found a blessed shortcut. Back to the march of history: the first serious American short ski movement took root in the same decade—the 1930s—as the kurzski. In Europe, the root had been in ski mountaineering; in America, it lay in figure skating. Birth of the Goon Ski It all began in New Hampshire with a figure skater from Boston, Jimmy Madden, who was also an enthusiastic skier. Madden was a former U.S. Olympic team figure skater and 1934 U.S. pairs champ. In the winter of 1938, he gave a skating exhibition at North Conway. Unhappily, he hurt a foot during the performance. He still wanted to go skiing the next day but to ease the strain on his weakened foot, he decided to try kids’ skis. Once on the mountain, Madden found that these little skis turned so easily he could execute his figure skating routines on them, all but the the going-backward part when the tail of the skis would dig in. But he was not discouraged. He was so delighted at being able to do “ figure skiing,” he designed the first modern double-ended ski. Then he persuaded Boston’s pioneer ski shop owner Asa Osborn to have the skis made by Thor Groswold in Denver. Madden used his new “ski skates” to create the first ski ballet routines in America. Of course Madden’s antics looked so goofy to normal skiers that the double-enders were soon known as “goon skis.” The Boston Evening Transcript published (in its December 29, 1939 edition) an interview with Madden, along with a cartoon of goon skiers doing tricks on their way down the hill. The Transcript reported that Madden “intends to master even the most difficult rink maneuvers on his hickory runners.” Madden trained a troupe of trick skiers and took them to places like Sun Valley—history’s first freestyle tour. Skiers asking where they could get goon skis he referred to Derby-Ball, the woodworking firm in Waterbury, Vermont willing to make them. In the next few years, Derby-Ball sold several thousand goon skis. Goon skiers became the snowboarders of the 1940s, doing unseemly tricks on those strange pointy skis of theirs all over New England. Ski journalist Peter Miller recalls that, in the mid-1940s at Mt. Cranmore, he had seen “my uncle Cally, up on the mountain in a group of men—I think there were six or seven of them—holding hands and wearing goon skis and doing a skiing crack-the-whip.” Goon skiing presaged the ballet freestyle skiing of the next generation. Suzy Chaffee says she learned to ski to music on goon skis at age ten, a head start to being the star in freestyle ski ballet Suzy became in the 1970s . Teaching On Goon Skis But it was more than a matter of tricks. Madden was not a trained instructor but did teach kids to ski, starting them off on goon skis, producing a pack of goon ski brats. (At Cranmore, Hannes Schneider had taken over the school in 1939; he was unimpressed by goon skis, naturally.) But Madden did attract two influential disciples. The first was a remarkable fellow named Hal March, Jr., a freelance writer, businessman and pioneer Vermont skier from Brattleboro, a town that had been a center of New England skiing—site of its first big jump—for three decades. March took to goon skis immediately. A Brattleboro Reformer columnist who signed himself The Whittler, March published frequently and persuasively on the virtues of goon skiing and started informal goon ski get-togethers at Hogback, the area nearest town. When Derby-Hall stopped producing goon skis, thrifty Yankees who wanted to join the short-ski brigade began doing what they had done for years to provide their kids with skis—cut a foot or so off the tail of old skis. March supported this enthusiastically. He converted so many to “bobtail skis” that, by the mid-1950s, a merry group of some sixty lawyers, bankers, housewives and secretaries, mostly from the Brattleboro Outing Club, were getting together regularly on bobtail skis at Hogback, encouraged by articles published in Ski on the Kitzbühel school. Now switch the scene to Mad River Glen, Vermont, the ski area where the hero of the early American short ski saga came onstage: there Clif Taylor, a young 10th Mountain veteran, joined the Mad River ski school in1948. Clif was, above all, a playful fellow and frequently took a friend’s four-foot goon skis out for a spin without any intimation of the part they would play in his true career to come. But he was also very concerned that students get their money’s worth. In 1950, he put his first pupil on goon skis—a story he related to Peter Scully, who published it in the November 1961 issue of Ski: “The pupil I started on,” Taylor told Scully, “was a doctor in his forties who had been in the ski school for a solid week but could not handle his skis well enough to attempt going up on the big slopes. He had been confined to the practice slopes all week and his vacation was almost over. His main ambition was to go up the chairlift at least once.…I located a pair of five-foot ‘goon’ skis for the doctor…Applying the technique he had attempted to learn on his long skis, he was an immediate success.” Taylor vowed that the doctor spent the rest of the day “riding in the chairlift and skiing down the trails…only a few hours before, he would have been risking his neck to attempt it.” From then on, whenever he had a slow pupil, Taylor pulled out a pair of goon skis, When the available goon skis became old and worn, Taylor switched to children’s skis and cut-down skis. While neither bobtail nor juvenile skis made very good adult skis, Taylor knew in his heart that they worked much better for a slow novice than even the most beautiful long skis. The Great Convergence The year 1955 was the year of convergence of Clif and his congregation. Roland Palmedo, the developer of Mad River Glen, recommended Clif for a job as ad salesman at the Brattleboro Reformer. Once Clif appeared, its editor, John Hooper, one of March’s bobtail skiers, seized on Clif and introduced him to the short-ski gang. Clif was asked to teach evenings at Hogback, where some of the classes were specifically limited to skiers on bobtail skis. There couldn’t have been better arrangement for both parties. Soon, Hooper told Taylor he had something to show him. Hooper had recently outfitted himself with a set of 3 1/2-foot kid’s skis. He invited Taylor to nearby Mt. Snow. As Taylor described the outing, “Hooper was negotiating the twisting trails on Mount Snow with feet close together. Since he had never had a lesson, he couldn’t explain what technique he was skiing.” But his description was graphic enough. “I just twist my feet to the right or to the left… .” The Era of Longing for Wedel Apropos this scene was the fact that in 1955, the wondrous wedel, short connected parallel turns lately arrived from Europe, were the Holy Grail of the sport. Good skiers worked hard at getting it, not always successfully. Taylor was stunned to see Hooper doing spontaneous wedel—without having taken a single lesson. Like nearly all instructors, Clif believed that a series of standard stem turns were inevitably the step-by-step process needed to approach an ever-receding goal of parallel turns, a goal most skiers would never reach. Short skis—to Taylor at that point—were only a way to step up the pace. The thought that all those years of stem turns might not be necessary at all was more than Taylor could process at the moment. Perhaps Hooper was some sort of athletic idiot-savant, like those who can multiply two five-digit figures in the their heads, an accomplishment not possible for normal people. After several seasons communing with his classes on Hogback, Clif realized that his bobtail skiers really needed a better quality ride, and that he had a group that could double as both customers and investors. In 1959, he formed Shortee Skis, Inc., the first corporation in the world dedicated to producing short skis. He raised $5,000 (about $25,000 today) from his pupils to manufacture America’s first decent five-foot ski for adults. Clif reasoned that the major weakness of sawed-off skis was their tendency to wobble rather than track, so he designed a straight-sided five-footer tapering back to the tail without sidecut, guessing that straight sides would promote tracking. When the first batch arrived from Paris Manufacturing in Maine, the skis tracked well and everyone in his classes of Brattleboro skiers defected from their sawed-off models and switched to the much more satisfactory five-foot Shortee ski. Taylor was beginning to see a way out of selling ad space. The Direct Parallel Idea But he had one more giant step to go. One day at Hogback it was so icy no one could ski. Clif decided to cut a ski down to three feet—it worked like a charm. He could ski ice! Then it hit him: might it be possible for a novice to learn to ski parallel on three-foot skis, like John Hooper, without spending years sweating the stem? The thought was enough to curl his hair. In 1960, he took a deep breath and designed his first three-footer, and sent the drawings to Paris, Maine. Back came the first 32-inch Shortees. To test the Hooper hypothesis, Clif selected Ann Hedges, who had moved to Brattleboro from Baltimore. She had only had one snowplow lesson. He set up a movie camera to record her first short ski lesson. He put Ann on the 32-inch Shortees and told her to go down the practice hill, twisting both feet left or right to turn. As Clif reports it, backed up by his film, “On her very first turn down the slope, she made four graceful turns—skis parallel… the first time in my 15-year teaching career that I had seen a complete beginner do parallel turns on the first try.” Ann was Clif’s Lady of Lourdes. At that point, he was transformed, really ready to confront the ski establishment in ways that it could not ignore. He revamped his own teaching; he eliminated the stem and made learning to ski into play. I watched Taylor take kids on Shortees through crack-the-whip howling with glee. I saw him take novice skiers through a day when they laughed most of the time. He would hold their hand on the first trip down the slope to get them into parallel turning. The best of them skied on their own for the rest of the lesson. At that juncture, I tried the 32-inchers myself. Having had trouble putting together the sequence for wedel in my own skiing, I spent an hour wedeling on Shortee skis to capture the feeling. I was not expert at wedel on long skis the first time back on them but I knew I soon would be. I was so grateful I didn’t mind if Clif gave me “the spiel” whenever we skied together. He liked making converts so much he would forget I was not an infidel. Then it was 1961, and Clif published Instant Skiing on Short Short Skis, proclaiming that a beginner could learn parallel skiing within a day. In the next couple of years, John Fry, then the editor of Ski, and I worked with several U.S. ski schools to see if the direct parallel could be taught successfully without Clif’s mesmerizing presence. For two seasons running, Ski sent three, four, and five-foot Shortee Skis to several ski schools to see what they could do with them. We ended up doing a test at Killington, the most interested of the ski areas. Karl Pfeiffer, head of the Killington Ski School and I supervised a direct parallel test in several ski-week classes. It worked so well, Killington agreed to install the system permanently in the ski school. I worked with Karl on what we called the Graduated Length Method in writing a 1966 article announcing GLM in Ski. (I had no idea that there had been a previous graduated length method in Kitzbühel ten years earlier.) A dozen resorts signed up for the program for 1966-67 season and more signed on later. It looked as if short short skis and direct parallel had a great future. The Resilience of the Establishment But dislodging an establishment is always very, very difficult. Within a decade, conventional forces recaptured the initiative. In 1975, Ski even published an article by Janet Nelson entitled The Unlearning of GLM, purporting to save those who learned to ski on Shortees. (Disclosure: I have friends who learned from Clif Taylor in the 1960s skiing with me today, having become lifetime skiers by virtue of having a good time their first day out.) The Professional Ski Instructors of America eviscerated the concept by installing their version of “GLM,” starting novices on the five-foot ski with, of course, the stem turns being mandatory. Resorts began dropping the GLM program. Clif Taylor began to slide off the radar. Soon, one more time, short ski instruction began to disappear. But the short short ski would not die. In the 1980s, various mutant short short skis appeared with names like Big Foot and Scorpion. Then they disappeared. Beginning in the 1990s, new forms of short skis, snow blades, and skiboards appeared—and with them a robust short short ski teaching approach supported by a ski conglomerate at a number of its resorts, using a direct parallel approach. It is too early to tell whether the past pattern of history will recur or not. But there is a new factor. Today’s “shaped ski” is state of the art. It runs considerably shorter than the previous standard for skis. Racers in the Olympics and World Cup, for instance, used a five-foot slalom ski. This has won over the expert crowd. Average skiers can use a short ski without shame—they may not make much use of the carving potential of the short shaped ski, but it is still a lot easier to turn than a longer ski, shaped or not. But it is only by using short short skis for novices that the dismal novice dropout rate will be mended. And it’s high time, given the flat growth of the skier population. Two seasons ago, the Eastern Division of PSIA had issued an instruction manual for the direct parallel approach. Something had changed. This time—is the short short ski here to stay? GO TO TOP

Three-foot snow blades are the latest version of the short ski.

Cliff Taylor as Pied Piper around 1960