In late September 2021, a team of archaeologists used ice axes, shovels, brooms, and warm water heated over a Primus camp stove to extract a rare artifact from an ice patch on Digervarden mountain in Norway: a thirteen-hundred-year-old wooden ski, with birch and leather binding still attached. The ski featured a raised foot platform (more leverage for the carve), a groove cut into the base (more stability at speed), and a drilled hole in the tip (attachment for skins?). It was the companion to another ski discovered in 2014 in the ice just a few meters away, and its dimensions will sound familiar to modern ears: The new stick is one hundred eighty-seven centimeters long and one hundred seventeen millimeters at the waist. Powder, anyone?
These are far from the oldest skis reclaimed from the past. That record belongs to a ski discovered in Russia that dates to eight thousand years ago. But only three have been found with bindings, and Digervarden melted out two of them.
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