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LITTLE SKIING HISTORY Skiing was originally winter transportation. For those who lived in snowy climates, the invention of skis may have seemed as important as did the discovery of the wheel and axle elsewhere. The earliest skis discovered are thousands of years old. Skis were invented in the Europe and Asia continent; in North America, early peoples used snowshoes for winter travel. (Curiously, when skis finally came to North America in the mid-1800s, they were at first called snowshoes or snow skates.) Both the European skis and the North American snow shoes gave more surface area underfoot to support the body's weight and keep persons using them from sinking into soft snow. With skis, however, the device could simply be slid forward while a snowshoe needed to be lifted to be moved forward. Still, each system had its merits, and both are still in use today. These early devices differed from modern alpine skis in that travelers' heels were free to rise with each stride as in a natural walking step. Such a setup is still used in modern cross-country, telemark, military, and mountaineering skis. Just as now, early skiers used a pole or poles for balance, to aid in pushing forward, and probably to create friction by dragging them in the snow to slow up. Surely these early skiers found they could slide down hills. But it appears to have been a very long time before they discovered how to turn skis. The first turns made may have seemed more natural to the skiers than the ones we alpine skiers do today, for skiers of those earlier days first moved the outside hip forward, thrusting the corresponding ski along with it. (Today many skiers still find this move more natural than its opposite, although virtually all advanced skiers first move the inside hip and ski of the new turn forward, and for good mechanical reasons.) This early turn came from the Telemark region of Norway. At another Norway area, another form of turning was soon invented in which, from a parallel ski position, the ski on the uphill side of the new turn is moved so its heel displaces uphill, called stemming, resulting in a skidded deflection against the snow that turns the skier. This turn came from the Christiania (now Oslo) area and so is called the stem christiania or stem christie. A more advanced turn can also be done without displacing the outside ski heel uphill and simply advancing the inside ski of the new turn while tipping the feet and body down the hill--the parallel christie. With modern skis we tilt our bodies a bit more down the hill, creating a higher angle of the ski's bases with the snow and minimizing or eliminating the skid, thus allowing the ski's designed geometry of shape to turn us. But skiing became a way to have fun early on, too. Witness this poem by a long-board skier from 1879 in the California gold camps (skis then were called snowshoes): The Snow-Shoe Races
illustrations from Frank Leslie's Illustrated
Newspaper
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