Skiing

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.

Touring also is considerably less expensive: ski stores in the Minneapolis area, for example, offer cross-country packages (skis, bindings, boots and bamboo poles) for $50 to $100, while a similar downhill package would run from $250 to $600. Lift tickets cost from $8 to $10 a day, while tourers ski over hill and dale for nothing. Alpine skiers, particularly at fiercely chic slopes like Vail or Sugarbush, often find themselves involved in clothing competitions (the latest: quilted bell-bottom ski pants in burgundy nylon for $65), while tourers stick to inexpensive knickers, battered denims and old sweaters.

Few Fractures. Safety is a no less important factor: cross-country skiers use soft, low-cut boots and bindings that do not lock the entire foot to the ski. So a spill that is serious enough to fracture a downhiller's leg usually causes a tourer nothing worse than a sprained ankle and a bruise or two. Beth Johnson, a housewife from Newkirk, Okla., quit alpine skiing after a crash that left her leg held together with three pins and a flock of staples, but now she is hooked on touring: "There are no schussboomers hitting you broadside--just a different world, with the quietness and stillness. It's great."

The sport's growing popularity has boosted sales of touring equipment. During the 1967-69 period, reports the Vermont-based Ski Touring Council, 50,000 pairs of cross-country skis were imported, mostly from Norway. The estimate for 1971 is 100,000. Mitch Field, manager of Berkeley's North Face Sports Shop, has dropped alpine equipment and now offers only cross-country gear, with sales doubling every year. New York's Paragon Sporting Goods also reports touring gear selling at nearly twice the rate of a year ago. Traditional ski resorts like Stowe's Trapp Family Lodge and Colorado's Scandinavian Lodge (in Steamboat Springs) are now offering regular instruction in cross-country technique, and both boast professionally laid-out touring trails for neophytes.

To the dedicated alpinist, cross-country skiing is an amateurish parody of the real art. "My kick is speed," says Jean Chretien, Canada's Minister of Indian Affairs. "I like to go as fast as I can from the top to the bottom and hope to be alive when I reach it. I am a skier, not a cross-country skier." But the only worry among cross-country buffs is that the rest of the world will take over their cherished sport. "Please don't tell anyone else about it" is the usual line. "We want to keep it to ourselves."

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