Winter Crucifixion

12/15/74 

Sometime in the early to mid-70’s I was skiing on a pair of 170 cm Kneissl Short Comps with Besser bindings.  It was during the market-driven short ski craze when short skis and freestyle encouraged bad technique.  If you were a type III skier you could either ski correctly (because you had a racing background or were from the East Coast) or you could try to emulate the latest freestyle weirdness.  I’m sure that there were things in-between but I wasn’t interested in them.  I was self-taught and too dumb to not be proud of that fact.  I had never raced and wasn’t good enough to overcome or accommodate the design-imposed limitations of conventional skis.  Consequently, I was drawn to the darkside.  The Siren's call included:

Royal Flying Christy

Back Scratcher

Daffy

Space Walk

Jet Turn

Slow Dog Noodle………..bad technique.  

One night at Ski Acres I came face-to-face with the co-mingling of bad gear and bad technique and lived to tell about it. 

LOOK! But Don't Look Up.........

 

I can’t recall the exact year that this occurred but here are a few clues that may jog your memory.  Big Jim Whittaker was the guy in charge at REI, bright green was the latest and greatest color in ski fashion and “Anti-Friction” was the new phrase being bantered around the ski industry.  Lawsuits involving ski related injuries were on the rise and findings were overwhelmingly in favor of the plaintiffs.  With a mixture of acknowledged guilt and a “not-my-fault” strategy the binding companies began designing in favor of release over retention.  Since favoring release over retention by reducing friction was a relatively new concept in binding technology few of the manufacturers had gotten it right. 

I was employed as a ski mechanic at the Seattle REI store on Capitol Hill and my employee discount had allowed me to afford that set of Look Nevada bindings that I had coveted for so long.  I soon learned, however, that Look, through the use of copious quantities of Teflon, had reduced friction to the point that retention in the real world was impossible.  “Anti-friction” had taken on a whole new meaning.  They tested fine in the shop but they simply didn’t work on the hill.  They made this troublesome “click-click” sound that resulted in an immediate separation from your skis and a severe physical pummeling, the memory of which haunts me to this day.