FasterSkier: The Legends We Are Living Out
The individualistic and energy intensive mode of moving through winter’s harsh environment on skis requires a medium suggestive of walking its lonesome valley, and the ancient timelessness of doing so. It’s perhaps less glamorous than climbing nearly 3000 vertical feet up a cliff face with no rope, but also easier to connect with; less documentary, and more rhapsody.
With Winter’s Children: A Celebration of Nordic Skiing, Ryan Rodgers has accomplished just that. His work is a well-researched, extensively reported history that gets at the Norwegian ideal, sought throughout, of idraet – ski-sport, the mixing of ancient technique with spiritual renewal. Rodgers takes the epic tales of American skiing, and allows its practitioners to work together with his prose to form a journey with all the ebbs, flows, wanderings and epiphanies of a long ski in the woods. In doing so, he lifts the stories of this sport, done at the edges of frozen existence, out of the ether and into something material.