skiing in the 50's

What a lovely old video! Thanks Dave, I really enjoyed watching that :)

I didn't see any pistes anywhere - didn't they have pistes in those days or was it just that they preferred ski-ing 'off-piste'?

And I loved the horse and sleigh at the end - instead of the free ski bus to get them back to their chalet!

They were amazingly good skiers, and so fit!

AllyG wrote:What a lovely old video! Thanks Dave, I really enjoyed watching that :)

I didn't see any pistes anywhere - didn't they have pistes in those days or was it just that they preferred ski-ing 'off-piste'?

And I loved the horse and sleigh at the end - instead of the free ski bus to get them back to their chalet!
Ally, even when I started skiing, there was no such thing as off piste. Every ski run rapidly developed into moguls. One consequence of that is that in Niederau, which now has a handful of pisted runs, then had 17 natural mountain runs. Many of these were through the trees, along river beds, (including a 10 ft drop over a waterfall, just after you had done a limbo under a fallen tree trunk), narrow paths through gorges.

They were amazingly good skiers, and so fit!

There are some amazing feature films from 1930-1950s shown at the St Anton ski museum, which are little more than an excuse for skilled skiers showing off. There must be some links to clips on the Net I would think.

Having an Austrian partner, I learned that people growing up as late as the 1960s were allowed out as very small children to play unsupervised, and skied in the woods on home-made skis, having walked up because they could not afford the few lifts there were. She still looks at home skiing in woodland.

Without wishing promote a competing site (it is not really in the same market), I have just finished the refurb of a website all about going back to 'real' skiing, http://www.doglotion.com, which covers extreme and freestyle, but is largely about ordinary skiiers who like to keep it real. The industrialisation of skiing has been good in many ways, but something has been lost too, unless you are into touring.

Innsbrucker, the bindings used by the skiers that video are Kandahar bindings. They were invented in 1929 by the Swiss ski racer Guido Reuge and were in almost universal use until the early 1960s when the first safety bindings were introduced.



The heel could be locked down by fixing the cable into clips mounted on the sides of the skis. They were also known as bear trap bindings as falling often had the same result as stepping on a bear trap, you broke your leg.



Most people didn't manage quite as well as those 'Ski-Cracks' from Klosters



Perhaps the most famous of the old skiing films is the Der weisse Rausch a 1931 German skiing film directed by Arnold Fanck and starring Hannes Schneider, Leni Riefenstahl, Guzzi Lantschner, and Walter Riml, it was filmed at St Anton.