Modern Living: Skiing

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It is a brilliantly blue, bitterly cold winter afternoon, and Joe Downhill is 73rd in line for the chair lift. He shuffles his $200 fiber glass skis and $90 foam-injected Rieker boots, pokes forward a few inches with his $35 aluminum poles, and shivers in his $95 quilted parka, while his $10 all-day lift ticket flutters in the chill breeze and his stomach rumbles from that rotten $2.50 lunchtime ratburger.

If he glances toward some nearby slope, the suffering Mr. Downhill may observe a strange-looking character in knickers and a light sweater striding cheerfully across the snow on a pair of flimsy-looking skis clamped to his feet with a scrap of aluminum or something. His boots look like G.I. brogans, and he seems to be having a great time. The knickered apparition is indulging in the fastest-growing winter sport in the world. It is variously called cross-country skiing (the competitive version) or ski touring (the recreational type), and this season is the biggest the sport has ever known. "In downhill skiing," says Airlines Pilot Dick Gronning of Minneapolis, "you're tied to a lift line. Here you just hike out into the farm lands, and you feel a real independence. It's really gorgeous."

Family Sport. Ski tourers come in all sizes, sexes and ages. Steve Rieschl, who teaches skiing at Vail, says: "They're the same people who canoe, sail, backpack and camp. It's really a self-propelled sport." A novice tourer at Vail over Christmas was Wellington Koo, 84, formerly China's ambassador to the U.S. (1915-20 and 1946-56), who grew so enthusiastic over his first lesson that he summoned seven members of his family to join him on the slopes the next day. At Snowmass (Aspen), West Los Angeles Housewife Helen Mandel—so unathletic that she doesn't even use her family's swimming pool—took her first touring lesson over the holidays, and now glows: "What freedom! It's as easy as walking. It makes me feel I can go almost anywhere." Her down-hilling family is thinking of converting too. Says her daughter: "If you stop on the slopes, 50,000 people run into you and another 50,000 yell at you."

Ski touring represents a return to the way people skied before skiing got fancy. Scandinavians have been wild about cross-country for centuries, and even in such strongholds of downhill skiing as Switzerland and Italy, the sport has caught on remarkably in the past few years. Enthusiasts break their own trails through any convenient field or forest, skirting icy ponds, clambering over fences. Even for novices, a ten-mile trek is routine. Ski touring is much easier to learn than the alpine version: a beginner can pick up all he needs to know in a day or so, while downhill skill comes only after two or three weeks of intensive coaching, if then.

Cross-countrymen avoid plunging down the steep, icy slopes beloved by downhillers; their narrow skis do not provide as much control as alpine models. Milder inclines are no problem, however, and climbing is easier because of special waxes.