Snow Skiing

Skiing is the oldest way humans learned to move through winter, and it began not as a sport but as survival. The oldest evidence of skiing is a rock carving at Rødøy on the western coast of Norway, dated to around 6000 BCE, which shows a human figure on two long skis holding a single pole. The earliest skis ever found — preserved in bogs and peat — are from Russia and Scandinavia and are between four and six thousand years old, made of birch and pine, wider than modern skis, and often covered with fur on the underside to grip the snow on the uphill. For thousands of years, the ski was a tool of the hunter, the traveler, and the soldier, and the people who used it best were the people who lived where the snow was deepest and the winter was longest.

The sport of skiing began in Norway in the middle of the nineteenth century, and the man who turned it from a means of travel into a discipline of skill was Sondre Norheim, a farmer from the Telemark region. Norheim did not invent the ski — no one did — but in the 1860s he invented the binding that held the heel free and the turn that bears his region's name: the Telemark turn, in which the skier drops one knee and brings the inside ski behind, a graceful and difficult way to change direction on a steep slope. Norheim's skis were the first skis built for turning rather than for going straight, and the Telemark turn is the ancestor of every technique that came after it. The first skiing competition was held in Christiania (Oslo) in 1866, and the first ski club was founded in Trysil in 1861, and from Norway the sport spread across the snow-belt of the world.

The technique that taught the world to ski was not Norwegian but Austrian, and it was the work of Hannes Schneider, a ski instructor from the Arlberg region who in the 1910s and 1920s developed the Arlberg method: a system of progressive instruction that began with the snowplow, moved to the stem turn, and ended at the parallel turn. Schneider's method was the first ski technique that could be taught to beginners, and it is the direct ancestor of the way every ski school in the world still teaches. Schneider also starred in the first ski films, and when the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938, Schneider, who had refused to join the party, was imprisoned and then exiled to the United States, where he founded the ski school at Mount Cranmore in New Hampshire and taught Americans to ski. The Arlberg technique, carried by Schneider and by the Austrian and Swiss instructors who followed him, is the reason the world skis the way it does.

The machine that made skiing a mass sport was the chairlift, and the chairlift was an American invention. The first chairlift was built at Sun Valley, Idaho, in 1936, modeled on the banana-loading conveyors of Central American fruit plantations, and it was the first lift that carried skiers up the mountain sitting down. Before the chairlift, skiers climbed — on seal-skin, on foot, or on the slow rope tows of the era — and the climb was the limit on how many runs a skier could make in a day. The chairlift removed the climb, and the postwar years brought the rope tow, the T-bar, the gondola, and the high-speed detachable quad, each of which moved more skiers up the mountain faster, and each of which turned the ski hill into the ski resort. The sport that had been the pursuit of a few became the winter pastime of the middle class, and the decades after the Second World War were the decades in which skiing became what it is: a sport, a holiday, and an industry.

The equipment that made modern skiing possible is the metal ski, the plastic boot, and the safety binding, and all three arrived in the years after the war. The wooden ski that Norheim and Schneider used was replaced by the metal ski in the 1950s (Howard Head's aluminum sandwich ski, the first that did not vibrate at speed) and by the fiberglass ski in the 1960s, and the leather boot that laced to the knee was replaced by the plastic boot in 1965 (the Lange boot, which gave the skier the lateral stiffness the new skis demanded). The safety binding, which releases the boot from the ski in a fall, was the invention that made the sport survivable, and the modern binding — with its DIN setting, its forward pressure, and its brakes — is the reason a twisted knee is no longer the certain end of a ski holiday. The shaped ski, which arrived in the 1990s and which is wider at the tip and tail than at the waist, made the carved turn easier than the skidded turn, and it is the reason a beginner today can ski in a week what took a season a generation ago.

For the empty nester, skiing is the rare sport that is as much a place as a discipline. The mountain is the gym, the view is the reward, and the lift line is the social hour. The sport rewards patience and balance rather than strength and speed, and the skier who learns to let the ski do the work — to tip the ski and let it arc, rather than to muscle it and push it — is the skier who skis all day and still has legs at the end. The mountain does not care how old you are, and the run that is too steep today is the run that is just right next year. Skiing is the sport that keeps the winter from being the season you wait out, and it is the sport that teaches you, late in life, that the best way down a mountain is the slow, round, patient turn.