Scottish Ski & Board 2024/25 e-mag

Scottish SKi & Board 2024/5 | The Scotsman Publications

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In the early days of skiing in Scotland, there were no chairlifts, no ski tows, no snowcats and certainly no helicopters. If you wanted to slide down something, you first needed to climb up it. For some, that simply meant shouldering heavy wooden skis and slogging uphill. Others, however, took their cue from the Scandinavians and started attaching seal skins to the bottom of their skis, allowing much less effortful travel across steep, snowy terrain.

The recently digitised archive of the Scottish Ski Club Journal offers a fantastic insight into this bygone age, and the SSC has very kindly allowed us to reproduce some of the advertisements that have appeared in its pages over the years. You’ll find these on pages 6-7, including one from 1930 produced by the long-since defunct Sportsman’s Emporium in Glasgow, offering “best quality” sealskins at 30 shillings a pair.

These days ski tourers use synthetic climbing skins to get where they want to go (good news for seals) but the basic principles are the same. That said, some of the super-steep terrain tackled by today’s backcountry adventurers would have given the skiers of 100 years ago cause to reach for the smelling salts. Between them, Blair Aitken, Jamie Johnston, Katie Henderson and Scott Muir must have skied every snow-holding nook and cranny of the Cairngorms, and their forthcoming book, Skiing and Snowboarding in the Cairngorms National Park, promises to be the definitive guide to backcountry snow-sliding in this wonderful part of the world. You can read all about the project on pages 4-5.

Elsewhere in this year’s edition of Scottish Ski & Board you’ll find our guide to the best ski and snowboard kit for the new season, travel stories from Austria and Sweden and, of course, the skinny on all five of Scotland’s ski areas. Have a great winter!