We skiers are a resilient lot.
We have to be. The sport that feels embedded in the most elemental fibers of our being requires winter. I realize that last statement isn’t entirely true, but anyone who mistakes indoor skiing or sliding on sand or grass or nylon filaments for the real deal is in a deep state of denial. The essence of skiing is inseparable from mountains and snow, bringing powerful forces to bear on any and all who dare to brave both.
One of skiing’s baked-in ironies is that the skiing is best when you can’t get to it. The same storms that dump their abundant goodness on the mountains also visit all the roads that lead there, often rendering any attempt at access an extended exercise in impatience.
Then there are days like last Saturday, when a prophesized atmospheric river flowed across northern California like an inland tsunami. I realize there are exotic locales, like New England, where rain and snow often move in tandem, with the rain frequently arriving second, so as to obliterate whatever snow – and hope – that might have preceded it.
But in this instance, the rains came first, and they burst open with a Biblical vengeance, saturating the forlorn, dormant ground in no time. I awoke in Reno on the last day of 2022 to discover that I now was the proprietor of small lakeside community that was taking shape in my basement. Water was sluicing down walls and cascading from the corners of shelving. My liquid assets were swelling around my feet faster than tattered towels could absorb them. To take my mind off my hopeless predicament, I pondered how I could pull off a real estate boondoggle such as, “Lago di Hoginini: buy your Tuscan-styled lot now, while it’s still above water!”
Eventually, a good friend, a couple of wet vacs and a change in the weather caused the waters of Lago di Hoginini to recede to pre-flood levels. But while we were celebrating this triumph over adversity, silver-dollar-size snowflakes were accumulating faster than IHOP can make flapjacks. Plunging temperatures then froze the whole kit and kaboodle into a solid mass with the molecular weight of molybdenum.
It was a bad night to be an old tree. The weight of the frozen-stiff snow dropped aged limbs below their threshold of resilience, snapping off 20-foot long branches like dried kindling. Rose bushes that had survived pestilence and drought since FDR’s first term lost major limbs overnight. An old peach tree right outside our kitchen window from which Oscar Wilde (the cat, not the 19th-century British wit) could jump to the sill was leveled when a massive sheet of sodden snow slid off our steeply pitched metal roof with enough momentum to uproot it. Its fall caved in the back of a metal chaise longue like it was a soggy Pringle.
In a word, I was stymied. Skiing would have to wait.
The Great Chain of Being
If you were reading this Revelation – or listening to it in podcast form – in Elizabethan times, you might have believed in the Great Chain of Being worldview, that the orbits of Man and Nature are so intertwined that disruptions in one induces tumult in the other. I’m dusting off the concept here as I feel the paroxysm that Nature recently unleashed locally is perhaps a harbinger of change across the ski landscape.
How and where skis are sold, and how information about skis is presented and disseminated – once well-established conduits – are evolving with every passing season. One reason I continue to toil in these vineyards is because the specialty ski shop – home to the world’s best bootfitters – is an endangered species. If we lose the ability to accurately fit the skier, the gulf between the sport’s elite and the public – already a giant rift – will be complete. The sport we love will become an activity, like pickleball or cornhole. So, I want to support the shops that continue to make skiing more than just “accessible;” they help make it transformative.
While my tone might come off as “erudite curmudgeon,” I see my role as more cold-eyed realist than over-wrought alarmist. Just about every ski brand you’ve ever heard of – and all of the ones you haven’t, of which there are legions – is working overtime to build their direct-to-consumer channel. It would be poor corporate governance not to. So, this behavior is here to stay.
Meanwhile, the new product renewal machinery marches on. Today, shops in this region will get their first gander at the 23/24 model line-up, and on-snow demos will follow in due course. The mechanics of the sell-in cycle will hold together for at least another season. But there’s little doubt that further changes are more likely than a stable status quo.
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The Making of a Skier, Part IX: The ASTM, Carl Ettlinger and I
One of the many hats I wore as North American binding product manager for Salomon in the early 1980’s was that of delegate to the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM). I believe the first meeting of F8.14 – the sub-committee on ski safety – that I attended was in Pennsylvania. I was flying under the wings of Salomon’s seer of all standards and patents, Gilbert Delouche, and the binding product manager for the North American zone at that time (and my mentor), Joe Campisi.
I was a babe in the woods, but I soon caught on to the game under Delouche’s patience guidance. I recall a debate on the binding specification then being batted around in the technical committee chaired by Carl Ettlinger. Ettlinger wanted language that would require any release/retention setting of 10 or above to be “visually distinctive” from the rest of the scale.
In Memorium, Carl Ettlinger
Carl was a giant of a man whose outsized voice roiled every conversation like a burst dam and whose expansive vision reached across the mixed milieus of research, journalism, risk management and education. I knew him when he was at the peak of his powers, as he explained to me when I interviewed him for a “where are they now?” profile in Skiing History. He was able to conduct long-term research on injury patterns as well as analyze the particulars of the current binding market, turn around and package this knowledge into articles for Skiing and Skiing Trade News, followed up by a workshop tour that would bring enlightenment to the grassroots level. No one but Carl could have pulled this off, and Lord knows no one has had the requisite talent, energy and will power since.
But time and tide wait for no man, and Carl’s finely spun web of influence was eventually plucked apart. The loss of his pivotal positions in the press allowed him to slip from public view before we, the skiers of the world, realized we hadn’t taken the time to thank him.
We have the time to thank him now.
So thanks, Carl, for being first and foremost a teacher, for teaching is at the heart of the evangel’s mission.
Thanks for being so damn stubborn. Your insistence on improving skier safety wore through a wall of resistance as tough as Vermont marble.
Thanks for having a heart as big as that melon-sized head of yours. The fuel to your tireless mind was a caring heart that tried to embrace the world.
Thanks for all the stories once the Mount Gay flowed. Who knew we would have won the Vietnam War if only his superiors had listened? I can’t remember exactly how – he wasn’t the only one drinking Mount Gay – but I recall the light in his eyes as he relayed his twisted tales, taking us down successive rabbit-holes of digression that I lost track of at the seventh level.
That’s what I remember most vividly about my many interactions with Carl: his brain so teemed with thoughts he rushed to get them out in a verbal jailbreak that would travel around the cosmos until returning, many lost minutes later, to the subject that had inspired them. That was Carl: too many words for one sentence, too many tasks to tend to and all of it, every erg of his endless energy, devoted to a cause he never ceased to serve.
Fare thee well, Carl Ettlinger. The world misses you already for it will never see another quite like you, whose every moment seemed larger than life itself.
I raise my glass to you, old friend. Mount Gay, of course.
Jackson Hogen
June 23, 2020
Why This Buyer’s Guide?
Don’t read the 2021 Masterfit Buyer’s Guide in Partnership with Realskiers.com for its 62 ski reviews. I should know. I wrote or edited all of them.
Not that the ski reviews aren’t worth the read. But ski reviews on the web are as common as rice, while the Buyer’s Guide contains something no other publication, whether in digital, print or video format, can claim: the most respected, thorough and dependable boot reviews in the world.
This isn’t mere puffery. The Masterfit Boot Test is so well regarded by the supplier community that nearly every brand not only sends its following year’s line-up in four men’s sizes plus three for women, it also dispatches its top designers and/or product managers to a distant North American site for most of the test’s five-day duration.
