What’s Next?
January 7th, 2009Posted in Skiing Everywhere
As I was riding up a lift today at Grand Targhee (yeah, another Targhee powder day!), I was ruminating to my son Alec about all the changes I’d seen in the sport of skiing over the past few decades. I started skiing in the early 1960’s and remember that most people then were happy to just learn the sport and ski groomed runs. The best skiers gravitated toward racing for their adrenalin fix, although some people were experimenting with doing flips off of small kickers. As more Western resorts appeared and more skiers gained the skills, powder skiing grew in popularity and desirability. Helicopter skiing was invented and snow cat skiing too. On groomed heavily skied slopes mogul fields became playgrounds and freestyle skiing was born. Bigger kickers were soon built and skiers created amazing aerial competitions. More grounded skiers created ski ballet. Soon, powder skiers were skiing steeper and steeper slopes, often down narrow couloirs and over cliffs and “extreme” skiing grabbed the spotlight. The cliff jumps got bigger and bigger and cliff jumping eventually became a sub genre of skiing. Not wanting the new sport of snowboarding to have its partisans have all the fun in half-pipes and man made snow obstacles, skiers began using these too, and soon most resorts began creating terrain parks for both snowboarders and skiers. It wasn’t long before the tricks people had learned to do in the terrain parks began to be used by skiers dropping off cliffs as part of big mountain high speed wild snow runs. And that pretty much brings us to 2009.
What will be the next new and exciting thing skiers will do on skis? I haven’t a clue. I don’t think the sport has peaked, so I’m real curious.
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