Duffy Counsell skis behind rider Jeff Dahl in Leadville Ski Joring 2014. Credit: Steve Sunday
COWBOYS AND SKI BUMS Inside the wild west world of skijor BY KAYLEE HARTER
Y
ou click into your skis and tighten the buckles on your boots as snug as you can get them. But you’re not at the top of a mountain. A track, lined with eager spectators, stretches out in front of you complete with gates, jumps and hanging hand rings. As a horse is led into the start area, you clutch a baton in your right hand that will be used to snag the rings. The horse looks over at you with its big eyes, nostrils flaring as you’re tossed a rope that’s attached to the horse’s saddle. “The starter’s yelling, ‘Skier, slack! Slack! Bring up the slack!’ Because otherwise, if that horse takes off, you got a bunch of slack, it’ll yank your arm out,” says Duffy Counsell. BOULDER WEEKLY
This is skijoring, a competitive sport in which a horse and its rider barrel through a 900-foot course at speeds near 40 mph with a skier in tow. Counsell has been involved in the sport for the past 15 years. “That’s what’s the most nerve wracking — waiting for your turn,” he says. Then, the horse rips down the track at full speed. In just 15-20 seconds, your turn is over. A dropped baton or missed ring is a two-second penalty. Miss a gate or a jump, and that’s a fivesecond addition to your time. “There’s [runs where] I’ve been behind the horse that I’m hanging on for dear life just hoping I can stay alive,” Counsell says. “And then there’s runs where like, ‘Hey, I just hit the sweet spot, I’m cruising at the same speed as the horse now and I can ski anything I
want. This is awesome.’ But it doesn’t happen that way often.” Counsell is also the event organizer for Leadville Ski Joring, which he estimates draws upwards 10,000 people to Cloud City over the course of the weekend. Leadville is the birthplace of the obstacle course-style skijoring we know today, but now the competition is just one of more than three dozen events that will overtake mountain towns across the Mountain West from Ridgway, Colorado, to Big Sky, Montana, this winter — and some skijor enthusiasts hope the sport will grace the Olympic stage in the next the decade. Competitors and spectators alike dress the part, wearing everything from wooly chaps, coyote coats and fringe jackets to ’80s ski gear and super hero costumes in a meeting of western ranching culture and hippie ski bums that’s hard to find anywhere else. Events are as big of a party as they are a competition, with competitors overtak-
WINTER SCENE 2023–2024
ing local bars at night and spectators tailgating throughout the day. “These two cultures coming together is just — how can it not be fun?” says Loren Zhimanskova, chairman of the board of Skijor USA.
ROOTS
Though Leadville’s event kicked off in 1949, the sport’s roots date back much farther and span across the globe. Skijoring literally means “ski driving.” While it’s hard to say exactly when it began, petroglyphs in Asia show evidence of people being pulled on skis behind animals thousands of years ago — as long as people have been strapping planks to their feet — according Zhimanskova, who’s basically a human encyclopedia of all things skijor. “People in mountainous areas with snow needed to traverse expanses, and instead of doing it under their own energy, they harnessed animals or figured out how to have the animals pull them,” she says. DECEMBER 14, 2023
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