Skiing Notes from Ira Riklis

Ira Riklis continues to tell us about skiing, Vail, and life:

“Once I explain the background of my first experience with skiing, you will see that it is truly amazing that I stayed with it. A close friend of my father had taken up skiing and was enthralled. Considering that he and my parents all hailed from Israel, a desert environment, all this playing in the snow must have seemed surreal. In any event, when I was around nine or ten years old, my parents packed up there three children and drove up to Hunter Mountain for a day of skiing. I had never skied before so this was to be a new experience.”

“In order to understand the story, one needs to understand the evolution of ski clothing and equipment. Skiing was originally an offshoot of hiking. If one wished to traverse a mountain in the winter, simply walking could be quite difficult. Snowshoes are believed to be somewhere between 4,000 and 6,000 years old. Skis arrived not too long afterwards as a smoother and faster way of getting around. Essentially the purpose of the ski was to facilitate travel over snow, or what we would call today cross country skiing. Therefore the boots were really hiking boots that would be strapped onto a pair of rudimentary skis.

“The bindings,” Ira Riklis continued, “once they developed beyond straps, were a pivoting toe piece combined with a cable that secures in front of the skiers boot and around the boot heel. In this way the skier could lift the heel off the ski, with the toe secured, in order to “walk” or glide.”

“When I started skiing, the boot was still the adapted hiking boot worn with two pairs of thick socks and with an inner and outer lacing system. In order to get traction, one had to tie these two sets of laces super tight; needless to say, this was very painful. The skis were generally two feet taller than the skier and the Nordic binding had been slightly adapted with guides in the rear of the boot to hold the heel of the boot to the skis. The closing mechanism was approximately two to three feet in front of the toe of the boot.”

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