Sometimes it is good to go back in time and think about the glorious days of skiing in 1980’s. Today I saw few photos of monoskiing and the skiing clothing in the 80’s. Man, it was so funny.. I started to surf in the Internet looking for stories of skiing in the 80’s. Then I figured out that this is actually a pretty good topic for few articles. So, here we go..

I was born in 1974 and I started skiing when I was about six years old. I cannot remember that well, but anyhow it was in the early 1980’s. I was very keen on skiing and I went skiing every single weekend, year after year. It was a skiing boom on those days. Alpine skiing became very popular in Europe and United States. I was one of those kids skiing like crazy and wearing funny clothes.

I grew up in northern Finland, in Lapland. I went skiing in Finland on local hills with other rednecks 2-4 times a week. I am not sure what the year when we discovered a monoski was, but I guess it was 1985 or 1986. We used to ski courses and moguls, but every now and then we went skiing backcountries, which on those days was not popular at all. We saw some dudes riding monoskis and we thought “I wanna have one of those”! We went to ski rentals, and because we were local kids and we knew everybody, we got monoskis for free if they were available.

I remember stepping into a monoski the first time. I realized that my feet are “locked” together and I cannot ski like with regular skis. I needed to steer the monoski in a new way. As we were kids and eager to learn new things, we quickly figured out how to ride a monoski. We went practicing on pistes, but we realized that the monoski works best on off-pistes, especially in deep powder. So we headed to backcountries.

It felt great, just great. It was difficult but we learned to ski the monoski pretty fast in forests. It was a great feeling because monoski was a completely new thing, a new gun. It was a lot of fun, and therefore we went monoskiing very many times during few years. I believe the golden time of monoskiing was between 1985 and 1988. After that it just faded away, died.

Did you go monoskiing? Was it great? It would be great to try it again, after so many years. A year ago in Chamonix I saw two guys riding a monoski in Le Brevent ski area. It was funny because they were wearing similar overalls as we did 20 years ago. At least they looked like they just came there by time machine. Those guys were wearing neon-colored overalls with lots of yellow, green, red and blue. I used to have a fully green overall, very cold one. My God, I just wonder how I survived with it because the temperature drops very low in Lapland in the middle of winter. It can go down to -45 celcius degrees. We used to go skiing even though it was -25 or even -30 celcius degrees. I can say it was freezing.

It is a pity I do not have any photos from those days back in 1980’s. It would be great to embed them in this article. Anyhow, I would like to share few pictures with you just to remind you of those golden years of monoskiing. We are finally starting our ski season here in Finland (finally!), and I think I need to find a monoski somewhere. I want to ride it again, after more than 20 years break!

Check out these links for more about monoskiing:

http://www.monogenesis.com/monoskiing.html
http://www.monoski.net/images/action/pic28.jpg
http://www.essor.us/images/Img3.jpg
http://www.chronicski.biz/images/home/chronic-home_r4_c3.jpg
http://www.monoski.net/

Have you ever done monoskiing? How was it? Please, share your experiences with me. It would be great to hear how did you like it. Just drop a comment, it would be great to read about your monoskiing experiences!