Technology

1961 boot paved the way for avalement.

Photo above: The Elite, advertised in Skiing Magazine, November 1967. Skier is Guy Périllat. In that era, factories could not use the names of “amateur” athletes.

In the mid 1960s, when French racers began winning everything in sight using the new “avalement” technique described by Georges Joubert, (see page 18) journalists assumed that the breakthrough technique was enabled by a new generation of fiberglass skis introduced around 1961—notably the Dynamic VR7, the copycat Dynastar RG5 and the Rossignol Strato. Those skis, the gurus opined, stored energy in their tails, launching racers out of each turn toward the next.

They were partly right, but the French team had another advantage, little noticed at the time. In 1961, bootmaker Le Trappeur introduced the Elite race boot. It elevated the skier’s heel for what we would now call a steeper ramp angle, and the upper shaft had more forward lean than any race boot previously available. It was considerably stiffer, too.

Eight years before high-back spoilers, the Elite put skiers in an aggressive knees-flexed position that encouraged application of strong fore-aft leverage. This enabled a skier to selectively pressure shovel, center and tail in a way not easily achieved before. A racer could retract instantly to absorb a roll and then efficiently press the tip of the ski down the backside to pump a little more speed.

The Elite came about when Le Trappeur licensed Henke’s Martin buckle patent, becoming the exclusive maker of buckle boots in France. To support the buckles, company owner and boot designer Marcel Carrier created double-thick reinforcing of the leather outer “shell.” This made for a very stiff structure, supported by a steel shank in the sole connected to reinforcements on either side of the heel. To provide better lateral power, Carrier made the cuff a couple of centimeters higher and added a fifth buckle. Five-buckle boots already existed. Carrier’s innovation was to angle the fourth buckle downward to fix the skier’s heel in its pocket.

The boot was immediately adopted by the French team. So equipped, Charles Bozon and Guy Périllat took gold and silver in the 1962 slalom world championships at Chamonix. Marielle Goitschel took slalom silver and combined gold. Other bootmakers took notice. According to Sven Coomer, who was there, Hans Heierling met with Carrier and bought a license to reproduce the Elite. So did Aldo Vaccari from Nordica, who went home and built the first buckle boot from Italy.

Heierling was the exclusive supplier to the U.S. Ski Team, because Jack Beattie (coach Bob’s brother) was the American importer. When Buddy Werner, Jean Saubert, Billy Kidd, Jimmie Heuga and the rest arrived at Innsbruck in 1964, they skied in Heierling’s version of the Elite. The original Le Trappeur Elite powered five French medals: gold and silver for the Goitschel sisters in both slalom and GS, and downhill silver for Leo Lacroix.

Soon, more factories in Austria and Italy sold unlicensed imitations. In 1965, Canadian coach Dave Jacobs told Bob Lange to cant his new plastic race boot forward and lock the cuff—in other words, make it ski like the Elite.

From 1962 onward, Jean-Claude Killy used the Elite throughout his amateur career. The boot evolved over the course of the decade. By 1968, it had an injection-molded sole (a Nordica innovation) and a waterproof polyurethane laminate on the outside. The final version was the Elite Pro Blue of 1969-70. Killy stuck with the Elite until he signed with Lange in 1971. A year later, as he geared up for his championship pro-racing career, he was back in all-plastic Le Trappeurs. 

Seth Masia is president of ISHA and editor of Skiing History. 

 

 

Archaeology and DNA evidence support the theory that skiing arose east of the Baltic, at the end of the last Ice Age.

Translated by Seth Masia

Photo above: The author proposes that skiing began between the Baltic and the Urals, in the gray oval containing all the archaeological sites that have yielded “fossil” skis. Skiing tribes then migrated north and west into Scandinavia, and eastward, up the Ob and Yenisei river valleys to the Altai region and beyond. Millennia later, the migration reversed, as Asian tribes moved west across the steppes and along the Arctic coast.

Where and when was skiing invented? In 1888, Fridtjof Nansen theorized that it was invented in prehistoric times in southern Siberia, in the region between Lake Baikal and the Altai Mountains. From there, he wrote, it spread with migrating tribes to the rest of Siberia and Europe. But archaeological sites in European Russia and recent DNA evidence suggest strongly that skiing began in the Baltic region, at the close of the last Ice Age.

While writing his book On Skis Across Greenland, Nansen asked his friend Andreas M. Hansen, a curator of the University Library in Christiania (today Oslo), to research the origin of the words for “ski” used by the peoples of northern Eurasia. This was probably the first linguistic study specific to skis. Nansen found Hansen’s report very curious. One surprise was to find the Finnish word suksi in much of Siberia.

In the middle of the 19th century, the Finnish linguist Matias Aleksanteri Castrén advanced the concept of a large Ural-Altaic language family, including the Finnish languages and languages spoken by the Tungus and Manchus, plus the Turks and Mongols. He located its birthplace in the Altai region. This concept could explain why the Samoyeds, who came from southern Siberia, spoke languages related to Finnish. The Ural-Altaic theory is now abandoned, but that was the dominant view in the 1880s and may have influenced the Hansen/Nansen linguistic theory.

Hansen reported that variations of the root word suk appear in the languages of the Baltic Finns and the Evenki peoples of Eastern Siberia and China, all the way to the Pacific. In Chapter Three of On Skis Across Greenland, Nansen wrote that both groups—along with the Samoyed tribes—originally were close neighbors in the Baikal-Altai region and migrated from there to the east, north and west. They traveled on skis and sleds. Nansen supposed that Scandinavian people learned to ski from Finns and Saami migrating from the east.

The Swedish historian and linguist Karl Wiklund (1868-1934) emphatically questioned the validity of Hansen’s study. The Norwegian linguistics professor Arnold Dalen, in 1996, did not reject Nansen’s hypothesis outright but found it most likely unverifiable. These reservations have not deterred wide repetition [of the Hansen/Nansen theory], and down the years the concept of a “Siberian cradle” is today set in stone.

(Translator’s note: In 1888, Hansen was a respected and influential geologist, but only an amateur philologist. His doctoral dissertation in geology focused on ancient shorelines and demonstrated that sea level rise and fall since the last Ice Age was a useful marker for determining the age of archaeological sites. He accurately placed the end of the last glaciation at between 11,000 and 9,000 years ago; and his ideas about the role of crustal “drift” were prescient. Nansen adopted Hansen’s geological ideas in his own studies of Greenland and Arctic geology. Hansen would go on to notoriety as an advocate of a racial theory of the Norwegian population that anticipated “Master Race” ideology.)

Origin of the Saami and Finns

According to Finnish anthropologist Markku Niskanen, Nansen’s contemporaries believed, on weak evidence, that Finnish-speaking Europeans, and especially Saami, were of Asian origin. Genetic studies have shown this to be wrong. Studies by geneticists Kristiina Tambets and Antonio Torroni show that the Saami come from the merger of two populations originating in Western and Eastern Europe. Specifically, the Saami are cousins of the Basques, merged with genes from the Proto-Finns of Eastern Europe. All Finns belong to European genotypes.

As Ice Age glaciers began to retreat during the warm Bølling–Allerød interstadial, about 15,000 to 13,000 years ago, tribes migrated north. One population left the ice-free Franco-Cantabrian region in the southwest [today’s Aquitaine and Basque country]. Another moved northwest from what is now Ukraine. The two groups met on the southern shore of the Gulf of Finland and around 10,000 years ago created the Kunda culture.

The Meaning of Migration

This is the starting point for Nansen’s error. He was correct to think that the word suksi had traveled between Siberia and Europe, but he was wrong about the direction it took. Archaeological and genetic evidence, consolidated in work by Russian expert Yakov A. Sher, now strongly suggests that the direction of migrations, from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age, was mainly from west to east, before reversing. Andrey Filchenko, of Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan, mentions the presence in the Sayan region of ethnic groups of Finno-Ugrian origin, who came from northwestern Siberia and the Urals. They are known to historians as the Samoyed of the Sayan. The presence in southern Siberia of other Europoid populations prior to our era is otherwise firmly established.

The definite reversal of the direction of migration took place at the start of the Iron Age, when Asian nomadic hordes began to ravage the great Eurasian steppe that runs from Mongolia to the Carpathian Basin. The arrival of their avant-garde in Europe is dated by French archaeologist Michel Kazanski to the victory of the Huns over the Goths in the year 375. By this time, skiing had already existed in Europe for about 8,000 years.

(Translator’s note: Genomic research published in 2018 by Thisius Laminidis et. al. suggests that a Siberian migration entered the Saami/Finnish gene pool “at least 3,500 years ago.” By that time the Saami had been skiing for five millenia.)

The Cradle of Skiing Is European

The arguments in favor of this thesis are archaeological, geographic and cultural.

The oldest skis we know of come from west of the Urals: from the Vis peatbog near Lake Sindor, 800 miles northeast of Moscow, and even farther west, from the Nizhneje Veretje site, 200 miles north of Moscow (the skis found here have been little studied but are of comparable age—about 9,250 years old). Archaeological finds, including sled runners, show that these two prehistoric settlements belonged to a larger group. According to Russian archaeologist Grigory Burov, who led the Vis digs, the culture “was probably linked to Baltic cultures (Suomusjärvi, Kunda) and to sites located between the Baltic and northeast Europe (Veretje).”

In addition, it’s very likely that skiing was practiced in southern Finland around 10,000 years ago. I asked Finnish archaeologist Hannu Takala and Grigory Burov for advice on this. Their response is quite clear: Takala wrote, “It is certain that the first settlers who came to Finland at least had wooden sleds since we have the Heinola sled [10,000 years old]. They probably knew about skis, although we have not yet discovered any, but finds from Russia show this possibility.”

And Burov responded: “We can assume that skis were known and used by the people of Ristola, Finland. The Heinola sled runners are similar to those at the Vis site. This similarity can prove that relations existed between Finland and northern European Russia, and that in Finland they used Vis and Veretje skis.”

The geography of the eastern Baltic offered good conditions for the invention of skiing. According to Polish archaeologist Zofia Sulgostowska, in the Preboreal (11,500 to 10,000 years ago), the Kunda and neighboring cultures lived on low plains dotted with ponds, lakes and gentle streams, offering in winter immense flat surfaces. The southeast Baltic was home to pine and birch forests. These conditions were very favorable to the systematic use of canoes in summer and sleds in winter.

From there skiing would have spread to similar terrain in neighboring Finland, Karelia and part of Lapland. Most of Finland is covered with lakes. Similarly, on the other side of the Urals, the land of the Khantys contains vast marshes, with many lakes and rivers.

Cultural conditions were also conducive to innovation. Archeology shows that the Mesolithics were particularly mobile, adventurous and inventive. The peculiar landscape of the eastern Baltic could only push them to develop new means of travel. The manufacturing sequence of the canoe, to the sled, to harnessing dogs, to skiing was easily within reach.

We can hypothesize on the date of the invention of skiing by first relying on the manufacturing process. We have seen that the skis and sled runner of Vis were carved from tree trunks, in the same way as dug-out canoes. Skis manufactured using this process were necessarily heavier and more fragile than skis made by bending planks. They certainly knew how to bend wood sticks with heat. We can suppose that they still used the carved-log process because the transition from sledge runner to ski was very new at this time.

The Start of Skiing in Siberia

East of the Urals, the oldest evidence we have are sled runners, which we know were in use by 7,000 years ago. Ski expeditions up the ice-covered waterways to Lake Baikal are plausible at that point. The Russian archaeologist G.M. Vasilevich concludes that the Tungus probably lived south of Lake Baikal in the Mesolithic, and it’s reasonable to conclude that Finno-Ugrians from the northwest brought skiing here first, along with their word suksi. As we’ve seen, the word suksi has been preserved in the Tungus-Manchu languages, specifically among the Evenki, who transmitted it to eastern Siberia.

The oldest Siberian stone engravings of skiers are believed to be around 7,000 years old, but stone engravings cannot be carbon dated so their ages are notoriously difficult to estimate.

The four-hole ski-binding system tells us a little more. Skis with foot-plate and mortise, invented by the Saami in the Bronze Age, are carbon-dated to 3,400 years ago with the Høting (Sweden) ski. That design has never been found in Siberia, except in the Arctic trading post Mangazaya [founded 1600 AD].

After thousands of years of skiing in Siberia, one might expect to find more actual skis, or parts of skis. Apart from the unusual case of the Mangazaya skis, there are none. Not having been preserved in peat bogs as in Scandinavia, they have rotted or ended up as firewood. 

This article is condensed from the final chapters of the ISHA Award-winning book Les Peuples du Ski: 10,000 ans d’histoire, by Maurice Woehrlé; Books on Demand, 2020. Engineer and skier Maurice Woehrlé ran Rossignol’s race-ski development for four decades, beginning with the Strato.

Top: Early trail prep was achieved by snowshoeing first, then skiers next. Elizabeth Paepcke follows that format in 1956 in Colorado’s Ashcroft Valley. (Aspen Historical Society, Durrance Collection)

For any sport, the condition of the playing surface is vital to success. For that reason, ski-touring centers strive to provide guests with well-designed trails groomed to perfection. Over the last half-century, setting and maintaining cross-country tracks has progressed from an arduous process requiring many workers to an efficient, machine-reliant method that uses just one person to operate the levers, buttons and switches.

Before the 1960s, trail preparation required significant effort. Trails could be created simply by snowshoeing, then skiing over the route. But prepping for major events or competitions required trail crews to shovel, rake, pack—and then set parallel ski tracks. It took a lot of time and effort. Consider the early staging of the annual 50-km Holmenkollen race in Oslo, which first started in 1888. Two 25-km laps translated into roughly 15 miles of snow that needed to be shoveled, packed and prepped.

Leading up to the 1960 Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley, two young American Nordic coaches, Al Merrill and Chummy Broomhall, started experimenting with a new grooming method. Both New Englanders with farming backgrounds and a Yankee knack for problem solving, they were familiar with the fine-toothed rotary tillers used to grade soil, leaving it soft and workable. Attaching a rototiller behind a Tucker snowcat, they realized, did the same for snow. Just one person operating a tiller could roll out
kilometer after kilometer of smooth, snow-carpeted trails.

Although the gyro-groomer, as it came to be known, was a major advance, other work was still required; skiers had to follow the groomer to stamp in a ski track. At Squaw Valley that job was done by the race forerunners and post-runners—skiers who had just missed the Olympic team cut.

But help was not far off. Enter Sven Johansson, who raced for the United States at the Squaw Valley Games, then took the job of US biathlon head coach. Starting in 1961, the team was stationed in Fort Richardson, Alaska, which regularly received snowfall that filled in the ski tracks. Partly out of desperation, Johansson devised a remarkably easy and effective solution to track setting: a 28-inch by 36-inch wooden box with two runners on the bottom that simulated skis. When pulled behind a snowcat, with a cinder block or two added for weight, the sled created parallel ski tracks for the afternoon’s training session—likely one of the first mechanical track setters.

Thanks to this breakthrough, the days of strenuous and time-consuming snow shoveling, snowshoe packing and stamping in ski tracks were on their way out.

Johansson sent me a hand-drawn copy of the track-sled building plans. (We had become good friends during a three-week Olympic training camp in Idaho, where I was a coach.) At the time, I was working with the Lyndon Outing Club in Vermont, and we built a prototype sled to set tracks for a race in December 1963. Afterward, a group of high school and college coaches swarmed around the sled, asking for plans, which I later mailed out.

A similar scenario was unfolding in southern Vermont. John Caldwell, a former Olympic skier and a coach at the Putney School, had recruited a skilled carpenter to help him invent a comparable track-setting sled. Just as in Lyndonville, at the end of each race, coaches gathered around the new contraption, asking questions and taking measurements. Mechanical track-setters began cropping up at other schools and colleges, and at Eastern-sanctioned races.

Around this time, Ski-Doo snowmobiles became popular, and these machines turned out to be perfect for pulling a track setter. A typical Nordic setup in the mid-1960s consisted of a Ski-Doo pulling a homemade box sled with a clothesline. It got the job done, but it was still a far cry from what we use today.

Soon, modifications improved the design of track-setting equipment. Wooden sleds

were outfitted with metal blades to cut ski tracks in frozen show, and then polycarbonate bottoms were added to the sleds to reduce friction. Side runners could raise the frame in places where tracks were not wanted or for road crossings. Metal sleds replaced the wooden ones.

As commercial versions of the devices became available, the whole cross-country scene took on a new look and feel. Ski-touring areas could now offer wide, smooth trails with perfectly straight, machine-set tracks, and their guests loved these beautifully prepared surfaces.

In Scandinavia and the rest of Europe, the evolution of trail preparation seems to have progressed much more slowly. According to Caldwell, the Norwegians were still shoveling snow to prepare the tracks at the 1966 FIS Nordic World Championships in Oslo. He recalls skiing behind a large snow machine at the 1968 Olympics in France—eight years after the more efficient methods of trail preparation had been used at the Squaw Valley Winter Games. But eventually, the Europeans caught up. In 1971, for example, Harry Brown imported an all-metal heavy frame sled from Sweden that produced good tracks in hard-packed and frozen snow.

Want to see what enables a modern ski-touring center to weave its trail magic? Next time you are at Craftsbury Outdoor Center, the Trapp Family Lodge or any other major cross-country operation, take a look through the window of the maintenance shop. You will probably see a wide-track Pisten Bully with a hydraulically controlled snowplow up front and a multi-purpose groomer/grader/track setter behind. This rig can lay down kilometer after kilometer of corduroy, with twin tracks for classic skiers.

Picture the modern-day trail worker who drives the machine. Replacing dozens of workers on snowshoes, he or she simply hops into the cab, turns on the heater, and switches on the stereo. A press on the ignition switch, and the 250-horsepower engine roars to life. Hit the horn twice, slip into first gear, and roll out into the winter to begin an hour or two of grooming. 

Rick Eliot is a former collegiate racer and coach who lives in Massachusetts. Thanks to John Caldwell for his help with this article.

 

 

courtesy Pisten Bully

courtesy Pisten bully

A typical track-setting rig in the mid-1960s consisted of a Ski-Doo pulling a homemade box with a clothesline.

Modern groomers are high-tech, multi-use masters that can pack, smooth and create tracks in one pass. Groomers can now customize trail prep, for instances by varying the number of tracks and the width between tracks.

Top: Improved grooming provides classic tracks and skate-ski options on the same trail. Left: A snowmobile pulling a roller remains a low-cost constant at many cross-country centers.

When there isn’t enough snow outside, skiers have headed inside for nearly a century.

With trainloads of a mixture of sawdust, soda crystals and mica used to mimic snow, the first indoor ski center in Europe opened in 1927 in Berlin and helped launch the early era of indoor skiing (photo top of page).

Though Ski Dubai is frequently considered the cradle of indoor skiing, by the time of its opening in 2005 the concept was some eight decades old. Legions of people were already skiing indoors in dozens of countries—in some cases on bigger slopes already open in Europe and Japan. These facilities just hadn’t captured the public imagination quite as much as did the engineering miracles of indoor snow in the Dubai desert.

Fast forward to 2021, and we’ve recently passed the 150 mark for indoor-snow centers worldwide. True, there was a blip when the global economic crash of 2008 stopped some of the most ambitious projects of the time—including a 1.2 mile indoor slope proposed for the Middle East. But the past decade has seen more centers built than during the “boom” years of the 1990s. In fact, in the last few years centers have opened in Africa (Ski Egypt), South America (Snowland) and, finally, North America (Big Snow in New Jersey). Big Snow’s opening means that you can now ski indoors on a snowy surface every day of the year on every continent except Antarctica (where, let’s face it, you can ski outdoors every day of the year anyway).

For some that sounds like skiing nirvana: snowy slopes on tap whenever you need them, 365 days a year. For others, it’s a dystopian vision of the future of our sport: not skiing under blue bird skies surrounded by majestic peaks, but rather sliding down modest fall lines under a man-made dome. Or projected forward: Does the ultimate result of climate change and a warming world mean very little natural snowfall and therefore very few functional ski slopes?

It’s just a touch ironic that the massive refrigerators required to produce snow indoors and keep it cold use up a lot of energy, potentially contributing to climate change. But fortunately, that irony is not lost on the companies that build indoor centers. They incorporate energy efficiency to minimize running costs and in some cases cover their vast ski-center roofs with solar panels to generate the power needed to run the facilities. So is the future a utopian world of self-powered eternal indoor-snow centers? Perhaps worldwide statistics already reveal the future. In 2000, there were around 40 glacier ski areas in the European Alps where you could ski in summer and about 50 indoor snow centers. Two decades later, the count of glacier ski areas has dropped by more than half while the number of indoor-snow centers has tripled.

Europe 1920s

The idea of skiing indoors was first conceived in Europe in the mid-1920s. A Brit, Laurence Ayscough, patented something that kind of resembled snow—a mixture of sawdust, soda crystals and mica. This was then spread on top of straw on a sloping surface indoors.

The mixture’s first recorded use was within the Berlin Automobil Halle in Germany where a ski slope 720 feet long (220m) and 66 feet wide (20m) was opened in 1927. Trainloads of Ayscough’s snow mixture were required and government scientists had to approve its safety. The event was a success, and six months later a more permanent facility, the Schneepalast (Snow Palace), complete with an indoor ski jump, was unveiled at the disused Northwest Railway Station in Vienna, Austria.

Norwegian ski jumper Dagfinn Carlsen built the 41,000-square-foot facility, and there was plenty of publicity—though news reports focused on an assassination attempt on Vienna’s mayor after the event. Enthusiasm waned though, as people noted the chemical mixture wasn’t actually very slippery and quickly turned an unappealing yellow. The Snow Palace closed within seven months (see Skiing History, March-April 2019). However, a smaller facility, complete with a mini-ski jump, operated in Paris throughout the 1930s. Its snow had a different chemical mix to Ayscough’s concoction and was spread thinly on a coconut-matting covered slope.

US 1930s, Japan 1950s

The first known attempt to bring something like real snow indoors was not for a public ski facility but for a big show: The Great Indoor Winter Sports Carnival staged at New York’s Madison Square Garden in December 1936.

Complete with ski jumpers, dog sledders, ski stars from Europe and North America and even clowns on ice, the Carnival’s logistics were startling. An 85-foot high (26m) ski-jump tower had to be built by a team of 100 workers in a matter of days. Madison Square Garden’s thermostat was turned down to 26 degrees, then enough ice was pulverized to cover the 30,000-square-foot area with a snow-like surface. The show ran for four days and nights and attracted 80,000 spectators. Boston and London hosted their own Winter Carnivals in 1937 and 1938, with similar attendance success.

A related concept for indoor snow creation, but this time intended for more long-term use, appeared in Japan two decades later. Businessmen in the small city of Sayama, about an hour outside of Tokyo, hit on a way of extending the season. This time ice was trucked in from the mountains, again crushed to a “snow-like” material and spread on a 1,065-foot (320m) indoor slope. The Sayama indoor ski center opened in 1959 and is the oldest snow slope under a roof still operating. The snow surface is now made by snowmaking machines rather than hauled in by truck.

Australia, Europe and Japan, 1980s

The modern era of indoor skiing began in the mid-1980s when young Australian ski fanatic Alfio Bucceri created what he christened Permasnow.

In 1984, at the age of 28, Bucceri went skiing for the first time in Australia, was hooked and wanted to create the same experience in his home city, tropical Brisbane, 930 miles from the nearest snow. “I loved eating jelly as a child, and the Permasnow idea came from the thought of making small particles of jelly then freezing them. I studied ice rink technology and found that jelly crystals would freeze on frozen pipes at plus temperatures. Finally, I found the right safe chemical to use [a water-absorbent polymer] from an Australian manufacturer, engaged Queensland University to help and Permasnow was invented,” Bucceri recalls. “Funnily enough, the Japanese call it ‘Jelly Snow.’” Early trials were successful, but it was the Permasnow slope created for the Swiss Pavilion at the 1988 World Expo in Brisbane that attracted global publicity.

The first indoor-snow centers using Permasnow, at Mt. Thebarton in Adelaide and Casablanca in Belgium, opened that same year. Japanese rights were sold to the Matsushita Company, which created more than 20 centers in the 1990s under the Snova name, with some still operating today. Bucceri sold Permasnow in 1991 but remains in the all-weather snow business and developed a non-chemical, all-water snowmaking system that is used worldwide.

1990s, Real Indoor Snow

The success of the early indoor-snow centers led several pioneers to work on what, back then, was the holy grail of the concept: pure snow indoors, without chemical additives.

To create true snow indoors is much more difficult than outdoor snowmaking. Dealing with high humidity, constant refrigeration and maintaining the snow when hundreds of people are skiing the same patch over and over are just a few of the many challenges involved.

Several claim to have been the first to achieve it, one of them being Cor Mollin, a former alpine ski racer who started in the indoor skiing trade when he ran the Casablanca ski center in Belgium. He wanted to create Europe’s first indoor-snow slope and had made a four-day trip to the Brisbane World Expo to see Permasnow in action. He decided to license the product.

Back in Belgium, Casablanca was not a success. “The system didn’t work at all. As we had no refrigerated building, the jelly-snow wasn’t slippery and we almost went bankrupt,” Mollin recalls. “I then did research myself, and after a year of trial and error I built my first real snow machine. From that moment on we were successful in the snow business.” He went on to set up his own indoor snow slope, Snow Valley in Peer, Belgium, which remains in operation today and is one of the largest indoor ski halls in Europe.

The 1990s saw Japan and European nations dominate center construction, with ever-larger real-snow facilities in countries like Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK, all of which traditionally feed the destination ski resorts of the Alps.

Japan developed smaller Snova facilities, with the notable exception of the vast SSAWS (Spring Summer Autumn Winter Snow) indoor center near Tokyo, by far the largest yet seen, with a slope 1,640-feet long (500m) and 328-feet wide (100m). Unfortunately, it opened in 1993 as Japan’s bubble economy burst and it never turned a profit. It eventually closed in 2002, with the site later turned into Japan’s first Ikea store.

By 2000, around 50 centers had been built, and the next decade saw a similar number added. The longest slopes yet opened are in Amnéville, France and Bottrop, Germany. Both claim the world record at about 2,100 feet (640m) long.

China has been the dominant force in snow-dome construction over the past decade as the country builds towards the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics and strives to meet President Xi Jinping’s publicized goal to persuade 300 million people to give snow sports a go.

However, most of the country’s 1.4 billion population don’t live in cold or mountainous areas, so indoor snow is the answer. More than 30 centers have been built, including several of the world’s largest slopes. Some even have indoor trail maps.

Should We Embrace Indoor Skiing?

Indoor snow centers are here to stay. When properly managed and located near a population hub, they’ve proved to be viable. Yet many skiers can’t imagine skiing on a short, moderate slope inside a
giant freezer.

Perhaps they’re missing the point. Indoor-snow centers don’t attempt to replace the mountain experience. Instead, their goal is to entice people around the world to conveniently try a sport they don’t know if they’ll like. No harm in that. 

 

 

 

Big Snow. Big Money

New Jersey’s Big Snow epitomizes one key factor in almost all indoor-snow-center developments: They cost an awful lot to build, usually into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Far more centers have been conceived than ever opened. That said, of the 150+ that have now been built over the last 35 years, more than 100 are currently still operational. In that same time period, there have been few high-profile failures like Japan’s SSAWS center.

Big Snow is part of a huge mall complex in New Jersey created by the Mills Corporation, at the time an international leader in mall construction. Mills set to work on its multi-billion-dollar New Jersey project, then named Xanadu, at the turn of the century. Mills was also completing major malls on other continents at the time, including in Madrid, home to another Xanadu indoor-snow center which still operates today.

Big Snow was mostly completed around 2008, just before the global economic crash. Construction stopped, and it remained empty for 11 years before the complex finally began to open at the end of 2019.

Other developers hope that now that there finally is a facility in North America, many more will follow. The giant Triple Five Group that runs the mall where Big Snow is located has plans for a duplicate complex in Florida and the proposed green-energy powered Fairfax Peak in North Virginia.— PT

 

Ski racers take extreme measures to get—and keep—a winning boot. 

Ingemar Stenmark spent almost his entire World Cup career in Caber’s blue Alfa boot (top of page). He ran his first World Cup race, at age 17, in 1973. The Alfa was introduced in 1974, and Stenmark won his first slalom championship in 1975. Caber killed production of the Alfa in 1979, but when he ran his last World Cup race in March 1989, Stenmark still wore a banged-up pair of Alfas. Cindy Nelson, another Caber devotee, held onto her Alfas past her own retirement in 1985.

That kind of loyalty isn’t exceptional. Dozens of racers swore by the original Nordica Grand Prix, introduced in 1972 and gone from the market by 1976. But over the next decade, Nordica was forced to run off a few dozen pair each year to keep its contracted racers happy. Into the 1990s, guys like Felix McGrath were still scrounging around for original-stock examples of the GP. “When you get a pair of boots right, you don’t want to give it up,” he says. “There was something about that plastic that I preferred.” McGrath could nurse a pair of GP shells through two seasons, and he learned to grind and shape each new-old shell to fit. Eventually, in 1999, Nordica revived the GP design elements to produce the Dobermann—a boot still in production today.

Boot loyalty isn’t just a matter of athlete conservatism. Racers, and their boot-fitters, work hard to perfect performance and fit, a process that can take weeks or months of trial-by-error. Once victory is achieved in a customized boot, no racer wants to repeat the laborious process starting with a different model.

The objective of all the work: Get the boot shell to fit as closely as possible, often by squeezing feet into boots one or two sizes too small, with flex, cant and forward lean precisely calibrated. No cushy liners allowed to accommodate the bony protrusions of a particular foot, because a soft liner allows the foot to move inside the shell.

Racers haven’t always had the luxury of marriage to a well-loved boot. Leather boots didn’t last long, so racers suffered the agony of de feet every season when breaking in a new pair. Achieving a race-ready fit was torture. For instance, it was common to stand in a tub of hot water to soften the leather, then walk around while the leather dried into a new shape. But this made the tender foot into the final mold. Penny Pitou, double-silver medalist at the 1960 Squaw Olympics, says customizing involved “your foot doing all of the work. It took your foot to figure it out, and the pain was excruciating.”

Later in her career, after Pitou had established herself as an international star, Austrian boot companies took foot measurements for custom-fitting boots they hoped she would wear. Eventually, Koflach came out with a Penny Pitou model, which Pitou believes was the first boot specifically designed for women. Earlier in her career, with no women’s boots available, she at one point acquired boots so large from a male racer that she had to stuff paper in them to prevent her feet from floating loosely in the extra space. She wasn’t alone. Her teammate Joan Hannah also used paper-stuffed boots, borrowed from ski-racing brother Sel.

In the early 1960s, when Billy Kidd was rising through the ski-racing ranks, he used the hot-water method. Most top US racers at the time were given Heierlings (because coach Bob Beattie’s brother was the importer). Kidd filled each new pair with hot water to soften the leather, then laced his feet into the warm boots to allow the

cooling leather to conform to the idiosyncratic shape of his feet—in what was a DIY version of future flow or injected boot liners. And he had to do it often. The leather broke down in a matter of six to eight weeks.

Across the pond, Jean-Claude Killy had plenty of help breaking in his leather Le Trappeur Elite boots. His friend, mentor and ski technician Michel Arpin suffered in new boots for a few days until the boots were “ripe.” Then Killy got a few races in while Arpin repeated the process with the next pair.

Plastic boots arrived at the advent of the World Cup circuit—actually, a year before, when the Canadian team showed up at the 1966 Portillo World Championships with a few pairs of Langes. From the start, the boots needed work to get the flex and forward lean right. Langes improved edging power immensely (they were part of Nancy Greene’s success), but didn’t conform well to any human foot, so they hurt like hell. The term “Lange bang” was born. Painful as the boots could be, skiers won five medals in Langes at the 1968 Olympics.

Kidd won his gold medal in combined at the 1970 World Championships with Lange boots, customized by master fitter Denny Hanson (later that year Denny and brother Chris left Lange to launch their own boot company). Denny fashioned metal plates for the backs of Kidd’s boots to add stiffness for slalom. He removed the plates for more flexibility for downhill.

Boot-fitting as an art form hit its stride with the introduction of plastic. Bootfitters could reshape shells by grinding and heating. Tools were invented to punch out tight spots. The durability of plastic meant that once the work was done, and the boots made to ski well, a racer could treasure that pair for years.

But plastic had its drawbacks, and not all plastics were created equal. When brothers Phil and Steve Mahre took center stage on the US racing scene in the late 1970s, Lange’s XL-R model was their boot of choice. Lange subsequently came out with a new and supposedly improved Z model, but “it was a different plastic, more brittle—a completely different feel,” says Phil. He stuck with his old XL-Rs. Good move. He went on to earn three overall World Cup titles.

Lange, of course, wanted to promote its newest technology but also wanted to keep its top athlete happy. The solution: Keep Phil in his XL-Rs but swap out the logos to make them look like Zs. (Both models were orange, so the deception was easily executed.) Phil took one extra measure to customize his fit: He replaced the Lange tongues with unanchored Garmont tongues, allowing them to float freely within the boot, held in place only by the snugness of the fit.

Loyalty to a boot can outlast any other relationship. Over 13 World Cup seasons, Franz Klammer used three different Austrian ski brands­—but kept the same customized Dynafit boots. And World Cup and World Champion Tamara McKinney stuck with heavily modified Nordica GT boots—a model discontinued a year before she ran her first World Cup race. McKinney had unusually small feet and slim ankles. The GT cuff was easily detachable and lent itself to tailoring for her pipestem lower legs. When an injury ended her career in 1990, she’d been married to the same boot for more than half her life.  

 

 

In the early ’80s, skiers finally learned to stay dry and warm.

Photo above: In the 1980s, Patagonia's fleece top helped launch the technical skiwear category.

Those of us who began skiing before 1980 remember bundling up in layers of nylon, wool and down. In dry weather we were warm. In wet weather we shivered and headed for the lodge, then waited overnight for the soggy insulation to dry out. Around 1970 a lot of ski parkas were made with synthetic fiberfills, which dried more quickly—but they still soaked up cold rain and wet snow, driving us indoors.

Forty years ago, in 1981, everything changed. We got polyester fleece, which resisted moisture unless submerged, and waterproof/breathable shells to protect the fleece from wind and wet. Skiwear companies educated us to layer. It helped that high-speed detachable chairlifts, introduced that same year, cut in half the time we spent in the rain. Over the next five years, skiers discovered they could get in a dozen runs even in a Sierra blizzard.

The skiwear revolution, of course, has a backstory. In 1941, Dupont laboratories invented nonporous acrylic and polyester fibers, introduced commercially after World War II as Orlon and Dacron. As fabrics, they resisted soaking and staining, especially when treated with water-repellent chemicals. They became popular for upholstery, carpeting and clothing. In 1961 the 90-year-old Norwegian company Helly Hansen, a maker of foul weather gear for seamen, partnered with the firm Norwegian Fiber Pile to create a thick acrylic pile sweater that became popular with Swedish lumberjacks and Norwegian fishermen.

Ten years later, Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard began looking for something better than wool and down for mountaineering gear. As he wrote in his book Let My People Go Surfing: 

We decided that a staple of North Atlantic fishermen, the synthetic pile sweater, would make an ideal mountain layer, because it would insulate well without absorbing moisture.

But we needed to find some fabric to test out our idea, and it wasn’t easy to find. Finally, Malinda Chouinard, acting on a hunch, drove to the Merchandise Mart in Los Angeles. She found what she was looking for at Malden Mills, freshly emerged from bankruptcy after the collapse of the fake fur-coat market. We sewed up samples and field-tested them in alpine conditions. It had a couple of drawbacks: a bulky, lumbering fit and a bad-hair-day look, thanks to fibers that quickly pilled. But it was astonishingly warm, particularly when used with a shell. It insulated when wet, but also dried in minutes, and it reduced the number of layers a climber had to wear.

Those first thick pile sweaters were boxy, but Chouinard worked with Malden owner Aaron Feuerstein and product manager Doug Hoschek to adapt the mill’s polyester baby-bunting material into a soft fleecy insulator that Patagonia marketed, in 1981, as Synchilla. Malden sold it with great success, under the name Polarfleece, to other outdoor clothing makers, including skiwear companies. In 1986 Malden changed the fabric’s name to Polartec.

In combination with waterproof/breathable shell materials like Gore-Tex, fleece kicked off a trend called “technical skiwear.” Stretch pants were exiled to the high-fashion corner of fine-weather skiing, and technical skiwear makers celebrated their boom at “poly parties.” (see “Crazy Ski Promotions,” January-February 2021 issue.)

By the mid-90s, Malden figured out how to make polyester fiber from recycled soft-drink bottles. In 1995, Malden’s factory in Lawrence, Massachusetts, burned to the ground. Over the next two years Feuerstein rebuilt the company, but the interruption opened the fleece market to competing firms. Feuerstein lost control of the company in 2001, and after an ownership change, Malden Mills became Polartec Inc. in 2007. 

Seth Masia is president of ISHA. His last article for Skiing History was “Alpine Revolution: Three Years that Shook the Ski World,” in the January-February 2021 issue.

 

 

Lack of snow deters not the true believer.

Photo above: German sand-skiing speed record holder (nearly 60 mph) Henrik May shows his form on the sands of Namibia.

Snow is unquestionably top of the heap for sliding. Not to get all Poindexter on you, but skis slide easily thanks to a very thin layer of meltwater between the skis and the snow.

So what happens if it doesn’t snow? Or what if it’s one of those three warmer seasons that shall remain nameless? That’s where history has proven skiers will ski on just about anything, especially sand.

For decades, the mecca for sand skiing in the U.S. has been the Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve near Alamosa, Colorado, North America’s tallest dunes. Opened in 1932 as a national monument, it became a national park in 2004.

Each fall, ski bums return to Great Sand Dunes to ski or board 34-degree, 742-foot-high dunes in a tradition that, for many, begins the new ski season. One enthusiast tells OutThereColorado.com, “Sand is not as slippery as snow, so it’s like skiing in slow motion. You have to make shallow turns, but it’s definitely real skiing. That’s why we come back every year—because we’re jonesin’ to ski.”

The Great Dunes skier was accurate, if not precise, about the relative slickness of sand vs. snow. To get technical (stay with me here): dry sand has a dynamic coefficient of friction of about .55 compared to snow at about .03—depending on the snow and the ski wax. So sand is about 18 times more resistant to gliding than snow. But if you dampen the sand a bit (just a bit) the coefficient can go down to a range of .3 to .45, depending on the size of the sand grains and how wet the conditions are. Ancient pyramid-builders poured water on desert sand to more easily drag massive sleds. And that’s why savvy sand skiers hit the Great Dunes slopes after a rain.

At the Great Dunes, sandboards can be rented outside the park and are more popular than skis. It seems that while sand doesn’t appear to damage the base of alpine skis, it may dull edges and jam bindings. Sandboard bases, much harder than snowboard bases, are usually treated with paraffin-based wax to reduce friction, and it works like a charm on rain-soaked sand.

Sand skiing in the Colorado desert is not without risk. Great Dunes sand can reach 150 degrees F., lightning can occur at any time during the warmer months, and in high winds, those Covid masks come in handy. Eye protection, long sleeves and pants are helpful to avoid getting sandblasted.

Still, sand is better than other sliding surfaces known to lure skiers.

Members of the Facebook group Elite Skiing report sliding on volcanic ash, pine needles, scree (loose stones), shale, coal slag, carpet, soap flakes, powdered mica, and even gravel and barite mixed with used motor oil. During the heyday of the New York State Borscht Belt in the Catskills, Grossinger’s resort hotel experimented with ground-up collar buttons (see Skiing History, May/June 2020).

For millions of snow-starved Europeans, there’s one word: plastics. So-called dry slopes are part of a cottage industry tracked by Dry Slope News, established in 2018. “People have been skiing on slopes without snow for over a century, but the earliest artificial surfaces manufactured especially for skiing date from the 1950s,” says editor Patrick Thorne.

“Since the first few dry slopes appeared, close to 2,000 have been built in more than 50 countries worldwide. At the height of dry skiing’s popularity in the early 1980s, there were reports of over 300 in Great Britain alone.”

Sand Skiing Gets its Start in Africa

Some 44 countries offer sandboarding today according to Sandboard.com.

Modern sand skiing dates back to 1927 when French athlete, mountaineer, aviator, and journalist Marie Marvingt (1875-1963) combined her careers as a surgical nurse and military aviator, to create aluminum skis for an experimental medevac airplane to land on Saharan sand in Morocco and Algeria (see Skiing History, March-April 2020).

By then a decorated hero of World War I and credited as the world’s first female combat pilot, Marvingt hired a metal shop in her home town of Nancy to forge personal skis from solid aircraft-grade aluminum alloy. She determined metal sand skis were better than wood and certainly better than walking up dunes in sandals, reportedly testing them on sand for 50 miles. One year later, she started a ski school for Berbers, along the snowless Moroccan coast.

Marvingt’s legacy continues in the northern African country. Today, people who engage in guided ski touring on the snows of Mount Toubkal or take advantage of the lift service at Oukaimeden in the rugged High Atlas Mountains in southwestern Morocco, also head a few hours southeast to the edge of the Sahara Desert to sand ski or sandboard for bragging rights.

Four thousand miles farther south, in Namibia, the German-born Henrik May, 45, has been pioneering the sport of sand skiing for two decades, according to Powder magazine (July 2013). There, the Namib Desert is home to some of the largest dunes in the world, thousands of miles from the nearest snow.

May’s company, Ski Namibia (ski-namibia.com), is one of the very few dune ski-specific operations in the world and has been featured by NBC’s Today Show and the CBS reality show, The Amazing Race. He started his touring company in 2003 and since then has logged thousands of ski descents. He set a Guinness world speed record in 2010, reaching 92.12 km/h (57.24 mph) on sand. He introduced Wustenskisport, or dune skiing, to the internet with guided runs usually between 200 to 400 vertical feet after climbs of around 20 minutes.

Back in the U.S.A.

Sand skiing in the United States dates back at least to 1937 on the Cape Cod, Massachusetts, side of Nantucket Sound. According to the New York Times (Sept. 12, 1937), “Some of the dunes near Centerville are unusually long, permitting runs of 100 and 150 feet, on which a skier can attain speeds of about forty miles an hour. . . Wooden skis slide easily on the sand and gain speed, particularly when the sand is covered by short grass or pine needles.”

At any rate, those Centerville dunes are long gone, according to Patti Machado, town of Barnstable Director of Recreation in Hyannis, Massachusetts. “We do not have any dunes. I think that the beach topography may have been different back then,” she emails Skiing History.

One famed sand skiing competition was Sandblast in Prince George, British Columbia, held every August from 1971 to 2003. It attracted thousands of spectators to a dual slalom race among so-called “sandblasters” who didn’t want summer to get in the way of their favorite sport. Just north of the city by the Nechako River is a steep hill called the Cutbanks where 10 to 15-sec. races were once held on a 500-foot slope of sand and gravel. It was popular over the decades and people traveled long distances to participate, including filmmaker Warren Miller, according to FreeThoughtBlogs.com.

Amazingly, no one was ever seriously injured. But according to the TV show BC Was Awesome, hosted by Bob Kronbauer, in 2003 some yahoos descended in a three-wheeled couch. The resulting crash scared off the insurance companies, leading to a permanent ban.

Sand and Deliver

Sand skiing was also popular as a cross-country competition on Pacific Ocean beaches during that era. In 1980, Bjorn Arvnes of Norway, winner of the 1977 American Birkebeiner, won the sand XC skiing title at the Epoke Beach Classic at Redondo Beach, California. Event producers were Larry Harrison, a rep for NorTur, the U.S. importer of Epoke Skis, and Peter Graves, NorTur marketing director.

The sand skiing stunt appeared on NBC’s Real People, page one of the Los Angeles Times, and even in the National Enquirer, which wrote breathlessly that “sand skiing was sweeping the country.” Tom Kelly, who handled event promotion with Graves, tells Skiing History, “It was a hugely successful media event for the time, garnering national coverage for Epoke.”

Other favorite North American sand skiing locations are Jockey’s Ridge State Park in North Carolina, White Sands National Park in New Mexico, Idaho’s Bruneau Sand Dunes and St. Anthony Sand Dunes, California’s San Bernardino Mountains, and Sandbanks Provincial Park in Ontario.

In the end, sand has an enduring advantage over snow: It doesn’t melt. 

ISHA VP Jeff Blumenfeld’s most recent contribution to Skiing History was “The Day They Threw Cow Chips in Las Vegas” (January-February 2021).

Photo above: Walter Amstutz led the transition from free-heel to locked-heel skiing. In 1928, he pioneered a spring to control heel-lift, soon known as the “Amstutz spring.” Reduced heel-lift helped spark the parallel turn revolution. Photo courtesy Ivan Wagner, Swiss Academic Ski Club

From 1929 to 1932, steel edges and locked-down heels transformed downhill and slalom racing into the high-speed alpine sports we love today.

It’s often said that alpine skiing was born in 1892, when Matthias Zdarsky experimented with skis adapted for steeper terrain, or perhaps with Christof Iselin’s 1893 ascent, with Jacques Jenny, of the Schilt in Switzerland.

But Zdarsky, Iselin and their heirs—including Hannes Schneider—were free-heel skiers and today we would lump them in with the nordic crowd. The sport we recognize as alpine skiing began with a pair of inventions that transformed downhill and slalom racing over the course of three winters, from 1929 to 1932.

Racers in Austria and Switzerland were primed for alpine competition, but lacked the tools for downhill speed. Kitzbühel held its first Hahnenkamm downhill in April 1906, won by Sebastian Monitzer at an average speed of 14 mph. Arnold Lunn launched the Kandahar Cup at Crans-Montana in 1911. After the Great War, Lunn headquartered at Mürren and in January 1924 founded the Kandahar Ski Club. This prompted Walter Amstutz and a few friends to launch the Swiss Academic Ski Club (SAS) the following month. Lunn intended the Kandahar to promote racing amongst his British guests—a rowdy assortment of public school Old Boys. Another contingent of sporting toffs infested the neighboring town of Wengen. Rivalry between the groups led the Wengen chaps, in 1925, to create their own ski-racing club. Because a railway ran partway up the Lauberhorn, the Wengen skiers disdained climbing. They called themselves the Downhill Only Ski Club (DHO).

 

 

Downhill and slalom racing were still fringe sports, pursued by a few dozen people at half a dozen meets each year. Lunn often said it was just good fun, and no one took it seriously. The equipment—hickory or ash skis without edges, and bindings with leather straps—worked well only in soft snow. Downhills were gateless route-finding exercises. Winning time on a typical two-mile downhill might be 15 or 20 minutes, for an average speed around 15 mph. Low speeds meant that falls, while common, rarely produced serious injury. Racers expected to fall, get back up, and finish. Slaloms were usually set to produce a one-minute winning time, but every gate required an exaggerated stem turn. A smooth stem christie was the mark of an expert skier.

On hard snow, edgeless hickory skis slipped and skidded uncontrollably. Skiers dreaded any traverse across an icy or crusted steilhang. In 1931 Christian Rubi, director of the Wengen ski school and a founder of the Lauberhorn race, recalled the terror of wooden edges:

“Touring skiers are on a Whitsun tour in the high mountains. They take their skis to the summit, and prepare to descend. Then comes the traverse on the hard firn, above the bergschrund. One of them slips, his edges don’t grip, he falls, slides, tries to stop in vain, slips headfirst and disappears into the coal-black night of the yawning crevasse – After half an hour, rescue is at hand. Someone dives into the cold depths on a double rope. There the victim dangles head-down from his ski bindings, face bloody. . .”

 

 

In December 1917, the mountaineer and ski jumper Rudolf Lettner had just such a scare during a solo tour on the Tennenbirge south of Salzburg. Lettner was able to self-arrest, stopping a potentially fatal slide by using the steel tip of his bamboo pole. Back at his accounting job, Lettner began doodling designs for steel edges. It took nearly a decade to figure out how to armor the skis without making them too stiff, but he filed a patent in 1926 for what we now call the segmented edge: short strips of carbon steel screwed to the edge of the ski-sole in a mortised channel.

Using steel edges, Lettner’s daughter Kathe finished second in downhill at the very first Austrian championships in 1928 (she reached the podium four more times in the next six years). Another early adopter was the 18-year-old ski instructor Toni Seelos of Seefeld, who used Lettner edges when he won a 1929 slalom at Seegrube—by five seconds.

Skiers outside of Austria heard about metal edges, but were skeptical. In 1927, Tom Fox of the DHO acquired a set of Lettners, but other Brits scoffed. Segmented edges looked fragile. Besides, 120 screws might weaken the ski. Arnold Lunn, after grumbling that some Englishman had tried unsatisfactory steel edges in the early ’20s, ran articles in the British Ski Yearbook suggesting that they made skis heavy, dragged in the snow, and inhibited turning. Beginners, he wrote, should by no means use metal edges. Over the next decade, experiments were made with continuous edges of brass and aluminum (continuous edges of steel proved far too stiff).

However, Lettner’s neighbors took notice. A handful of racers from the Innsbruck ski club saw an opportunity and on January 10-12, 1930, at Davos, they beat the pants off everyone at the second World Inter-University Winter Games. On Lettner edges, the Innsbruck boys took four of the top five places in slalom (and eight of the top 15 spots), plus the top four places in downhill. Notable were the Lantschner brothers, Gustav (Guzzi), Otto and Helmuth, who took first, second and fourth in downhill; Otto won the slalom with Helmuth fifth. On January 15, three days after the Davos triumph, Guzzi and Otto each went 65.5mph at the first Flying Kilometer, organized by Walter Amstutz at St. Moritz. They did it on jumping skis without steel edges, though they obviously hit the wax.

The Lantschners were hot but they had not previously been world-beaters. Only a year earlier, Guzzi came fourth in the 1929 Arlberg-Kandahar downhill and Otto tenth in the slalom.

It was obvious after the January 1930 races that steel edges were now essential for winning. Top “runners” scrambled for Lettner edges. The wealthy Brits of the Kandahar and DHO clubs were happy to pay a carpenter about $100 (in today’s money) to mortise their skis and sink about 120 screws.

 

 

In Wengen, Christian Rubi and Ernst Gertsch were convinced. Seeking to prove that local Swiss skiers could beat the Brits, they were busy organizing the first-ever running of the Lauberhorn, set for February 2-3. But Gertsch found time to take over the workbench at his father’s ski shop and install the new edges.

So equipped, they were able to beat the Lantschners. Rubi won the downhill, with three Brits following: Col. L.F.W. Jackson, then Bill Bracken, founder of the Mürren ski school, with Tom Fox third. Guzzi Lantschner settled for fifth, with Gertsch seventh.

The next day, Gertsch tied for the slalom win with Bracken. The next three places belonged to Innsbruck skiers, including Guzzi Lantschner in fourth, followed by Fox and Rubi. Bracken, who had grown up skiing in St. Anton, thus became the first Lauberhorn combined champion.

Over the space of three weeks, all the top alpine racers in Europe had converted to steel edges.

 

 

In the Illustrated Sportsman and Dramatic News (London), Arnold Lunn wrote “The Austrian team at the Winter University Games last year had all provided themselves with steel-edged skis, and they scored a run-away victory in the slalom. Again, steel edges had a great triumph in the race for the Lauberhorn Cup which was held at Wengen in the middle of February. The snow in the Devil’s Gap was the nearest thing to genuine ice that I have seen on the lower hills in winter since I was nearly killed twenty-five years ago on a cow-mountain above Adelboden. The contrast between the ease and security of the racers with steel edges and the slithering helplessness of the other competitors was most impressive.” Lunn predicted universal adoption of metal edges and recommended armor for the lower legs to prevent lacerations.

Scotsman David A.G. Pearson of the DHO reported to Ski Notes and Queries (London), “At my particular sports shop in Wengen the first supply [of edges] was sold out almost immediately, and I had to wait some days before a new stock came in. I believe that our friends at Mürren were as keen as we were.” Pearson warned that “A certain amount of skill is needed for their use. . . . If, in doing a Christiania one gets for a fraction of time on to the outside edge of the lower ski, one can hardly avoid going over like a shot rabbit . . .” This may be the first reference in print to catching an edge.

In late February, after years of lobbying, Lunn finally persuaded the FIS to sanction alpine races (some accounts say that Walter Amstutz did most of the talking on Lunn’s behalf).

 

 

Meanwhile, a parallel revolution was brewing. The switch from free-heel to locked-heel skiing began when Walter Amstutz took a close look at his bindings. Amstutz, like nearly every ski racer of his era, used a steel toe iron (Eriksen and Attenhofer Alpina were the popular brands) with leather straps over the toe and around the heel. Rotational control, not to mention what we would today call leverage control, was imprecise at best. In 1928, Amstutz introduced a steel coil spring to control heel-lift. The spring attached at one end to a leather strap above the ankle, and at the other end via a detachable clip to the top of the ski, about six inches behind the boot heel.

Arnold Lunn considered this a brilliant innovation. Beginning in 1929 nearly all top racers adopted the spring or some variant—less expensive competing versions used rubber straps. Decades later, Dick Durrance told Skiing Magazine’s Doug Pfeiffer, “The Amstutz springs were great. They held your boot to the ski. . . . we did add some strips of innertube for better tension.” By tension, Durrance meant heel hold-down.

Better control of the boot heel optimized the advantage of steel edges. Toni Seelos figured out how to cinch down his leather binding-straps to hold his heel solidly to the ski-top. He practiced jumping his ski tails around close-set slalom gates, using plenty of vorlage (forward lean) to get the tails off the snow so he could swing them sideways, in parallel, and land going in the new direction. The technique eliminated the draggy stem. Gradually he refined the movement, moving the tails sideways as a unit, without a visible hop.

 

 

Amstutz’ friend Guido Reuge, a mechanical engineering graduate of ETH Zurich, went one better. With his brother Henri, in 1928 he cobbled up a new binding, the first to use a steel cable to replace leather straps. The cable tightened around the boot heel with a Bildstein lever across the back of the boot (the lever was later moved out ahead of the toe iron, where a skier could reach it easily for binding entry and exit). But the real innovation was a set of clips

 

 

screwed to the sidewalls ahead of the boot heel. With the cable routed under the clips, the boot heel was clamped to the top of the ski for downhill skiing—English speakers called this effect “pull-down.” With the cable routed above the clips, you had a free-heel binding for climbing, touring and telemark. Reuge called this the Kandahar binding. He received a patent and began selling it in 1932. The two new technologies—steel edges and locked-heels—worked perfectly in concert, enabling all forms of stemless turning.

Meanwhile, Seelos perfected his skidless parallel turn. The concept was new and unique: No practitioner of Arlberg had ever thought of it. As late as 1933, Charley Proctor wrote in The Art of Skiing that the ultimate downhill turn was the “pure Christiana,” which skidded both skis.

That year Seelos brought his new turn to the FIS World Championships and won the two-run slalom by nine seconds over stem-turning Guzzi Lantschner. (For the full story of the Seelos turn, see “Anton Seelos” by John Fry, in the January-February 2013 issue of Skiing Heritage.) Seelos instantly transformed from ski instructor to international coach, and over the next two decades taught parallel turns to Olympic and world champions from Christl Cranz and Franz Pfnur to Toni Matt, Emile Allais and Andrea Mead Lawrence.

Decades later Durrance told John Jerome: “Seelos . . . developed this knack for getting through slalom gates like an eel. In the first FIS that he ran I think he won the slalom by something like thirteen seconds. He was head and shoulders above anybody else. He was my idol when I left Germany [in 1933]. . . With nothing but your weight shift you cut a carved turn, letting the camber of the ski do the turning for you.”

 

 

“I thought I’d just start skiing slalom like Seelos and I’d beat anybody,” Durrance said. If “anybody” meant any North American, he was right. But he couldn’t beat another Seelos fan, the professional Hannes Schroll, winner of the 1934 Marmolada downhill and new ski school director at Yosemite.

Like the steel edge, the Kandahar binding became an instant must-have for alpine racing, and then for all alpine skiers. The binding was manufactured under license, or simply copied, by numerous companies around the world. Under a variety of brand names (for instance, Salomon Lift) it remained the standard alpine heel binding design into the 1960s, long after the Eriksen-style toe iron was replaced by lateral-release toes. Some of the top racers, including Durrance, used both the Kandahar and the Amstutz spring for extra pull-down.

With new technology, race times tumbled. In 1929 at Dartmouth’s Moosilauke downhill, Charley Proctor set the fast time of 11 minutes, 59 seconds on the 2.6-mile course (average speed 13mph). He had hickory edges and free-heel bindings. By 1933, with steel edges and Kandahar bindings, he had it down to 7:22 for an average 20.25mph.

In 1930 the Lauberhorn start moved up to the summit, and assumed its modern length of 4.4km (2.7 miles). Christian Rubi won that race in 4:30.00, for an average speed with steel edges of 36 mph. In 1932, with heels locked, Fritz Steuri knocked 20 seconds off that time for an average speed of 38.9 mph.

Top speeds were getting interesting, and alpine racing became a spectator sport. At the 1936 Olympics in Garmisch, 50,000 people turned out to watch the slalom. The winner was Franz Pfnur. But there was a faster skier on the course. Toni Seelos, ineligible to race because he was a professional instructor and coach, was the forerunner. He beat Pfnur by five
seconds.

Pretty soon skiers didn’t even have to unlock their heels to reach the race start. A few resort hotels had already built rack railways and Switzerland’s first cable-pulled rail car, or funi, opened in 1924 at Crans, the first cable tram in Engleberg in 1927, Kitzbühel’s Hahnenkammbahn in 1928, and Ernst Constam’s T-bar at Davos in 1934. The race was on for uphill transportation, and alpine skiing had conquered Europe. 

Sources for this article include numerous reports in Der Schneehase and in the British, Canadian and American Ski Year Books for the years 1928 through 1939. Thanks to Einar Sunde for scanning many of these articles from his own library. Dick Durrance quotes from The Man on the Medal by John Jerome and from Skiing Magazine. More details from Snow, Sun and Stars, edited by Michael Lutscher. 

Other photo credits for the print edition: Guzzi Lantschner photo from Getty Images; Toni Seelos photo source unknown.

When snow is unavailable, skiers will glide on anything: grass, pine needles, sawdust, sand dunes, volcanic ash, carpet, plastic mat, soap flakes, powdered mica and soda crystals.

In 1958, German industrialist Dr Rudolf Alberti (1907-1974) patented the concept of skiing on gravel. Alberti owned a mine in the Harz Mountains (still going today) that produced barium sulphate – a bright white dye -- and calcium fluoride. The ore contained barite, or heavy spar, a very dense mineral used today in x-ray shielding, rubber mudflaps and oil-drilling mud. American industry alone uses about 3.3 million tons of the stuff annually.

Alberti noticed that barite nodules have a very low friction co-efficient and is dust free. He built a 1,300 feet (400 metre) long ski run and covered it with a mix of river gravel and barite, about six inches (15cm) deep.

Contemporary reports record the surface proved pretty good for skiing, but that skis disintegrated due to the heat generated. Alberti ordered up a stock of skis with steel bases, and with a concrete mixer coated the gravel with used engine oil. This reportedly “dramatically increased ski speed but producing some hair-raising results and near disastrous falls.” Alberti received patents in Germany and the United States.

The slope does not appear ever to have operated as a commercial venture. But to this day Altberti’s home town St. Andreasberg has a small ski area operated by Alberti-Lifts. –Patrick Thorne

Finally perfected after 30 years, the carving ski failed to gain a popular following. In its place, we got a ski that has made resort slopes less safe.
By Jackson Hogen

For most of modern skiing’s history, the execution of a perfect turn has been an unobtainable ideal. Leather boots and wooden skis weren’t able to initiate and sustain a continuous, seamless carve. In the January 1967 issue of SKI magazine, Olympic gold medalist and Jackson Hole ski-school director Pepi Stiegler described a teaching method of getting the skis on edge so “the skis are literally carving the turn for you.” He called it the “Moment of Truth on Skis.” 

“To start the turn, the skier should have the feeling of his weight going forward on the uphill ski and twisting the skis downhill. The resulting sensation is of a drift in the direction of the turn. At some split second during this process, the skier senses a moment to apply the edges and start the skis carving.”

At the time, the invention of plastic boots and the use of metal and fiberglass in ski design had brought the grail of the carved turn within reach. Stiegler, who became the NASTAR national pacesetter, clearly saw the desirability of recreational skiers knowing how to carve a turn. 

The year before he died, the incomparable Stein Eriksen sent ski historian John Fry a package that included several photos of Stein in his iconic reverse-shoulder stance, along with a letter in which Eriksen asked Fry whether he should be considered the inventor of the carved turn. Ever the diplomat, Fry replied that he doubted an uninterrupted carve was possible on 1950s-era equipment, “but if anyone could do it, it would be you.”...