Category Columns

Cold weather has arrived and the snow has begun to fall! Skiing can’t be too far off. And neither can RetroSki. I plan to start columns Thanksgiving week in concert with when most Eastern (and some Western) resorts will be… Continue Reading →

It’s 4:30 in the morning as I load my skis and get in the gondola. I join a group of non-skiers already in the car. I ask them where they’re from and they tell me they’re from Fairfax, Vermont. That… Continue Reading →

Spring skiing always brings back memories from past springs. Last week’s trivia question took us back to a warm day of spring skiing in the early 1970s in some huge bumps on Liftline. One of the first skiers in our… Continue Reading →

Where did you first learn to ski? Not the first place you skied, but the place where you really learned. For a majority of Retro-Skiers the answer will be some small, family-friendly area that probably no longer is in business…. Continue Reading →

My junior year in high school my parents bought me a pair of skis. As I’ve chronicled in this column before, buying me a new pair of skis was an annual event since I couldn’t seem to make it through… Continue Reading →

What ski company made the Zebra-Ski? There were many readers who knew that it was Volkl that introduced the Zebra-Ski in 1967. The first person to post the correct answer on my blog was regular RetroSki contributor Gary Tomlinson from… Continue Reading →

Have you ever suffered from chair-anoia? Chair-anoia is the fear of skiing under chairlifts because you think that people are watching you ski – no, make that judging your skiing! If you have ever experienced that fear, you were right:… Continue Reading →

“Vail Lift Lines Visible from Space” was a tongue-in-cheek fake headline put out by Black Diamond Designs that recently spread around the Internet. There was a doctored satellite photo that showed a very long line of people waiting for a… Continue Reading →

On the second day of the 1976 Innsbruck Winter Olympics, Franz Klammer made his memorable downhill run for the gold. But the real surprise that day was the silver medal won in the 30km cross country race by twenty year… Continue Reading →

I have mentioned previously that Colorado became a skier’s mecca in the 1960s. What better way to cement that status than to host a Winter Olympics! Colorado Governor John Love appointed Merrill Hastings to head a committee tasked with securing… Continue Reading →