Skiing’s Weirdest Inventions

If there’s a sport that inspires more inventions than skiing, we have yet to see it.

The number of gadgets for just carrying the stuff alone is staggering. Why are skiers so prone to garage tinkering? It may be a combination of glass-half-full hopes of success—get rich, ski everyday!—or a result of having too much time (and weed) on hand during the long, cold winter. 

Ski gear is heavy and awkward. Which is probably why there are so many inventions for carrying it all.

First, not because we’re snobby but because we’re curious, we must address the astonishing number of skiers who do not know how to carry their gear. At any given ski area on any given day, you’ll see Texas suitcases, scissor-carries, gear-hugs, and drag methods, all of which make us grateful that helmets are now ubiquitous. 

These folks must be the inventors of the straps, backpacks, slings, even a little rolling cart that you wedge your tails in and push in front of you, right? Because avid skiers know that when picking up, say, surfing, you watch the people who know how to carry a board and then mimic what they do. In skiing, however, there must be so many people who don’t know that it’s impossible to discern who does. And to be fair, ski boots are not the ideal footwear for walking around with sharp and pointy objects.

Now let’s move on to bindings. Our favorite retro fad was a kind of contraption called the Nava system in the 1980s that affixed skis to your feet via flexible arms wrapped around your shins—no hard boot required. (Unbelievably, we just spotted these at Arapahoe Basin, Colo., where dead gear apparently goes to be resurrected.) 

Nava System bindings. What could possibly go wrong? 

As the late 1990s and 2000s rolled around, when telemarking was at the top of the caste system, there was the dizzying array of inserts and converters to transform alpine bindings to touring bindings for those of us in the lesser class. Essentially, you would stick a very heavy accessory onto your already heavy setup, and then ski uphill in your heavy race boots—a work-around that our hip flexors will never, ever forget. Shockingly, this only solidified telemarkers’ disdain, and may have added fuel to the fire of the impending bumper sticker war that began with early AT gear. (“Randonee is French for can’t tele.”)

The Knee binding is still available for sale. We know some people who swear by them!

Then there was the Knee binding, which touted torsional release in the heel to save your ACL. Great idea…until you find yourself in terrain you actually want to ski. Those bindings may have prevented ACL tears, but they promoted every other kind of tear from pre-releasing whenever they were skied with a force greater than skating through the liftline. 

Now to the good stuff—the skis themselves. Let’s start with the Scorpion, which was invented in the ’70s to ski pow. A rockered skinny ski with the tail cut off, the Scorpion has, despite all odds and tib-fib fractures, become a cult oddity, thanks to the annual Scorpion Nationals in Sun Valley, Idaho. (YouTube it. It’s amazing.)

Wayne Wong still rips, 50 years later.

Oooo, and remember Wayne Wong, the legendary hotdogger with a headband and signature moves like the Wongbanger? He developed the Anton, a ski with a spring leaf suspension system on top designed to “act like virtual powder” in every condition. Guess who made that ski for him? That’s right, Wagner Custom. The new iteration of this is a contraption called the Shredshox, which Wagner does not make, thank you very much. 

Yes, Wagner Custom built these in the summer when the factory was quiet.

Last but not least, there are all those niche alternatives, which are not, biologically speaking, in the same genus: snowblades, snowbikes, tandem skis, monoskis, tele monoskis, and bootskis. Which, when you come to think of it, aren’t actually that weird, considering that strapping boards to your feet to slide downhill was a pretty crazy idea to begin with.

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