Brains
“Skiing” brings to mind varied images for each person that hears the word. Some think of crisp corduroy and the feeling of carving high speed turns on a fresh morning groomer. Others envision steep powder fields, waiting to be carved into symmetrical sinusoidal waves as turns are linked down the face. Over the past few decades, though, more skiers have begun to think of their local neighborhood at the sound of the word, visualizing stair sets, rails, and the idiosyncrasies of urban architecture as mountain features waiting to be ridden. Street skiing, derived from skateboarding and snowboarding culture, has opened up new lines and new geographies that previously went unridden: but how exactly did it evolve?
Like many of the counterculture trends in outdoor sports, much of the push into skiing urban features can be traced back to boardsports like snowboarding and skateboarding. Skateboarding’s influence led to the creation of snowboarding parks (now known as terrain parks), incorporating jumps and rails into the snow to push the progression of sports and emulate the technical aspects of street skating. As skiing moved away from ski-racing’s regimented origins and looked for more freedom and creativity, skiers began to hit these same features, pushing the limits of the directional skis at the time.
As with most progression, the transition from niche pursuit to mass appeal does not happen overnight. Instead, urban skiing has grown at the intersection of inspiring photos and videos, equipment innovation, and accessibility. The first published photo of a skier riding a rail came from Albany, New York in 1998, when a photo of Jason Levinthal sliding down a rail on skis was printed in Freeze Magazine. It would be two more years before the first street skiing shot landed a cover in the same magazine, when Skogen Sprang slid a rail outside Mammoth’s lodge.
In the interim, ski design caught up to rider progression. Jason Levinthal manufactured the first twin-tipped skis under Line Skis, and quickly afterwards Salomon followed suit with its famous 1080 skis. This progression of equipment enabled skiers to land and ride switch, opening up new tricks and lines both in urban settings and downhill. With equipment no longer being a limiting factor, urban skiing progressed from intermittent magazine shots to viral video parts, the most notable being JP Auclair’s street section in the movie All.I.Can. This section is credited with inspiring a generation of skiers to craft more innovative lines in places that would otherwise go overlooked.
From the streets of Quebec to Duluth, Minnesota, to Helsinki, urban skiing has put unexpected cities on the map and allowed riders from a broader spectrum of places to push their skills and become involved in the sport. Some skiers, such as Calvin Barrett and Pete Koukov of the film crew “Strictly,” cite the affordability of street skiing as one of the draws. While high level productions use wenches and other technology to push the limits, at its core, urban skiing only requires skis, steel, and a bit of ingenuity.
As the years have gone on and street skiing has gained more popularity, edits have captured the curiosity that pervades this sub-genre of skiing. From JP Auclair’s seminal video part to the backyard Youtube clip your local crew put out last season, street skiing can help skiers get back to the core of why they started skiing in the first place: to find new feelings while sliding on snow (or in this case, steel). So the next time you find yourself stuck at work, hours, days, or weeks from your next ski session, queue up Tom Wallisch’s “Imagination,” look outside, and dream about the possibilities.
