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You remember monoskis? Remember those funny looking guys monoskiing on pistes? Sometimes it is good to go back in time and think about the glorious days of skiing in the 1980s. Today I saw few photos of monoskiing and the skiing clothing in the 80s. Man, it was so funny.. I started to surf the Internet looking for stories of skiing in the 80s. Then I figured out that this would actually be 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 1980s. 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 children skiing like crazy and wearing funny clothes.

I grew up in northern Finland, in Lapland. I went to ski at a nearby Finnish ski resort with other rednecks 2-4 times a week. I am not sure which year it was when we discovered the monoski, but my guess would be either 1985 or 1986. We used to ski courses and moguls but every now and then we went monoskiing in the backcountry, which those days wasn’t popular at all. We saw some dudes riding monoskis and we thought “I wanna have one of those”! We went to the ski rental shop, and because we were local kids and knew everybody we got to use monoskis for free if they were available.

Riding powder with a monoski

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 practised on the pistes, but we realized that the monoski works best off the piste, especially in deep powder. So we headed to backcountry.

It felt great, just great. Difficult in the beginning, but we pretty quickly we learned how to ride the monoski 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 often in the mid 1980s. I believe the golden time of monoskiing was between 1985 and 1988. After that it just faded away, died.

Monoskiing is making a comeback?

Did you go monoskiing? Was it great? It would be nice 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 as if they had just come there by a time machine. Those guys were wearing neon-colored overalls with lots of yellow, green, red and blue. Just like in the picture above! I used to have a completely green overall, a very cold one to ski in. My God, I just wonder how I survived with it because in the middle of winter the temperature can drop very low in Lapland. It can go down to -45 Celcius degrees. We used to go skiing even though it was -25 or even -30C. I can definitely say it was freezing.

It is a pity that I don’t have any photos from those days back in the 1980s. It would be great to embed them in this article. Still, I would like to share few pictures with you just to remind you of those golden years of monoskiing. We are starting our ski season here in Finland (finally!), and I think I need to find a monoski somewhere. I want to ride one 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 us. It would be great to hear how you liked it. Just drop a comment, it would be nice to read about your monoskiing experiences!