Pro Guiding Service - Forward To The Past

About 150 years ago he ended 4,000 years of ski tradition, started the era of modern skiing, and became the sport's greatest innovator. In the mid 1850s, he redefined skiing not just as a means of travel or a weapon of war, but as a sport. In the 1860s, he developed ski techniques and technology that are with us today. In the late 1860s and early 70s, he ushered in the age of competitive skiing. Through it all, he established a lifestyle around skiing that had never been seen before and has not since disappeared. And for all this, Sondre Norheim, the Norwegian from the hamlet of Morgedal, Telemark, has not received his posthumous dues.

True, Norheim is recognized as the innovator who took bindings from a simple leather strap (which had skis being worn like clogs) to a stiffer fixture with a heel strap that, for the first time, allowed lateral pressure to be applied to skis. He's recognized as the inventor of sidecut and of the concept that a "waisted" ski turns itself more willingly. And he is believed to have developed (or at least greatly refined) the telemark turn--a contribution that has the free-heel community honoring him as "The Father of Telemark Skiing."

But the contributions he is recognized for are only half the story. His forgotten contributions are just as significant and substantiate that Norheim was so far ahead of his time that we have only now gone forward to past (or perhaps back to the future) far enough to catch up to his ideas, techniques, attitudes, and loves.

Consider, for starters, Norheim's skis. Before him, skis were typically over three meters long. Undoubtedly the traditionalists of the age maintained that skis of sequoia proportion were the only tools for real men, but Norheim bucked traditions, settling in on skis that were 2.4 meters long. The studs of our day (in both the racing and free-riding domains) have been gradually shaving centimeters off the skis they use, but Norheim hacked feet off his boards. His accomplishments did the talking--he completed descents no one of the day repeated.

While the new bindings he had developed for these shorter skis did allow him to swing the boards and jump over rock bands without the skis falling off, they were, nonetheless, made of twisted strands of wet birch root that stiffened upon drying--not exactly the stuff that allowed him to muscle turns. The limitations of these bindings contributed towards Norheim's least-intuitive but most-recognized technological accomplishment: designing skis sidecut. Norheim realized that a waisted ski set on edge and ridden, would carve its own line. Which means we should recognize that the slight Norwegian was the official originator of the craze the industry has made its most-recent darling--carving.

Interestingly, after the telemark turn was forced underground by the parallel tsunami during the early 1900s, either you cross-country skied relatively gentle terrain on super-skinny nordic sticks, or attacked the steeps on wider alpine gear. When telemarking resurfaced for its second wind in the 1970s, skinny telemarking skis became the norm. A "fat" telemarking ski from the late 1970s would have had tip, waist, tail measurements of about 62-53-55mm. By the late 1980s, fat all-terrain tele boards, like the Kazama Couloir, sported dimensions of about 78-59-70mm. Only by the mid 1990s did benchmark boards like the Tua Montets measure around 85-65-75mm. Norheim, meanwhile, used skis whose dimensions were 84-69-76mm, meaning it took the telemark industry 130 years just to catch up to norms he established.

Yet another realm where he established new norms was in his quest to take skis to new frontiers. In Norheim's time, the usual form of "slalam," as the Norwegians called the burgeoning interest in recreational skiing, was to travel across open country, over stone fences, down hillocks, and in and out of thickets of brush. Norheim was known for his love of what was called "the reckless track," which involved descents of steep slopes, jumps over rocks, runs in and out of trees...all executed at reckless speeds. In his day, he was the undisputed master of this discipline.

An account from the book, Telemarking: Norway's Gift to the World, by Havlor Kleppen, describes Norheim's descent of the Kastedal Bluffs near Morgedal as his most reckless track. As he and friend, Talleiv, were returning home from felling trees, they stopped atop the precipitous bluffs overlooking a lake in the valley floor. To quote the book:

"Shall we ski down here?" said Sondre.

"If you dare to go first, then I'll follow," answered Talleiv.

Sondre pushed his axe down inside his jacket collar, adjusted his ski bindings...

"Mind you don't cut yourself," said Talleiv.

"Mind you don't shoot yourself," replied Sondre--for Talleiv was carrying his gun--and started off down the hill.

The account describes the madcap descent through narrow gullies, Talleiv's tumbling fall, Sondre's clean descent, and the locals' belief that "N'er again will daring skiers conquer Kastedal's steep slopes."

Put this all together and you have in Norheim a man who was pushing the thresholds of what was considered "extreme" 110 years before the term became so overused. You have a man who was out free riding before the grandparents of the current crop of new schoolers were even a twinkle in their great grandparents' eyes.

Furthermore, you have a man who set the standard of what the skiing lifestyle is about. Norheim, who married at age 29 and eventually had six children, didn't make earning a living his strength. He left much of his work half done. Neighbors thought of him as a fool who thought of little save skiing and fun for the kids. Norheim eventually got hold of a little tenant farm with fertile soil and his wife sold her knittings, but Norheim was the original ski bum who was so smitten by the sport that he squandered all of his spare crowns on his passion.

Although he barely had money to feed his family, he made attendance at a rising number of ski competitions in the late 1860s a top priority. The competitions at places like Christiania (Oslo), Iverslokken, and Kvitseid were combination events requiring racers to complete courses with uphill, flat, downhill, and jumping components. A combination of the recorded time and style points (from the jumps and downhills) determined the winner. Norheim regularly descended steeps in the course (for style points) no other competitor would touch. And in the Kvitseid competition of 1868, the newspaper reported that his longest jump measured 50 alen (110 feet). Not bad for a 43-year-old farmer attached to wood skis by bindings of twisted birch bark.

From the start, Norheim dominated the competition and established himself as the sport's first champion. Also, because his technology and techniques were novel, he was the celebrity of that small circle. He willingly shared his ideas about bindings and skis, and soon everyone was arriving at competitions with the same gear. He was also called upon to demonstrate his techniques and before long others were using his turns.

One turn that he was the very first to demonstrate in 1867 at a major competition in Christiania was a parallel swerve of the skis that made it possible to stop quickly or to turn on icy slopes. In the early 1900s when a commission was established to document the sport's history, they labelled Norheim's parallel turn the Christiania Turn. Even in that day, some were outraged that a turn that had nothing to do with Christiania would receive such a name.

The outrage was well placed. The Christiania Turn was the stepping stone to today's parallel turn. As equipment evolved and skiers from the Alps discovered that locked heels and parallel techniques (alpine skiing) surpassed the nordic system on the steeps, the telemark was forgotten. Meanwhile, because of a misleading name, the true founder of the parallel turn was also forgotten.

Like the free-heelers who have followed their roots back and who now recognize the farmer from Morgedal, Telemark as the father of their sport, alpine skiers who follow their roots to their true seed will find the same figure behind it all--Sondre Norheim.

He developed the two major turns we are still using, brought skiing into the realm of sport rather than transportation, and set the wheels of ski and binding development in motion. He was the first of many things--the first aficionado of carving, first celebrity, first ski bum, first free-rider. He deserves the title the Norwegians give him: The Father of Modern Skiing. Even by today's standards, to be any more modern, Norheim would only need green hair and a portfolio of endorsement deals.

Sondre Norheim emigrated to the U.S. in 1884 and died in 1897 at the age of 72. He is buried at Denbigh, North Dakota.