SHOOSKI

We were on the mountain last Sat. and after seeing dozens of people climbing to the summit and enjoying the snow, we decided to try our luck climbing on Tuesday the 20th. The new snow that had fallen the night before was perfect and we made good time on our prototype skis in great weather until half way up the mountain the clouds blew in. We tried to avoid the wind by climbing up one of the lava flows, but it didn't help much. When we climbed out to the ridge the gusts were too strong to stand up in and visibility was down to 10 yards. We had to yell at each other to be heard. We quickly ripped off our skins and turned downhill. We should have left the skins on - the skis were too fast. So being the great skiers we are, we carefully choose our path and skillfully tumbled down to the base of the mountain. Now the wind was gone leaving only gently falling snow and we had an uninterrupted, fantastic glide of 2 1/2 miles all the way to the parking lot at Marble Mountain. We actually had to stop several times to catch our breath. What a hoot! We'll try again later this week. Hope we make it.

Sorry, this was supposed to be a message to Knappster99, so it's a repeat. Howdy, this is Mark and Pat, the ones who made those skis. What a pleasant surprise. We were out skiing again on Sunday and bumped into a lot of nice people, one was a man who works at REI's corporate offices and he chatted with us about our skis. During the conversation he said that we and our skis were mentioned on this website. WOW-cool! Thanks for all the input. We like those silvretta bindings, but ours take any normal boot (or cross-trainer if you're silly enough to try it!) Are you Dan the musician we met on the mountain? Come on out and play on a pair of our skis one day, we just started building the production version, they won't look homemade. Thanks for mentioning our skis and us. Hope to ski with you soon!

Just want to say thanks for your input. Again, the reference to the silvretta bindings was very useful. Just to clear a few things up, we started building these skis just for fun and we got a little carried away and they turned out to outperform our expectations. We've had many people ask us to get some production models going so we're trying real hard to do that. The price is not $400, but my goal is to try to put a package deal together that should be less than $400. They are very short and wide with large side cut so you can go on very tight and technical terrain. We're hoping to get a few made up in the next few weeks so we can go out with friends for testing and feedback. Hey Blake, you seem pretty knowledgeable, when we get these skis done come out and play on them, we could use your input. The worse case senario is we could meet up and have a great day out in the snow. Can't be all bad, can it? All you need is ski poles, your favorite snow boots, be in condition and an interest in just having fun. That's what we do 3 times a week.

Howdy folks, this is Mark and Pat, the ones who made those skis. What a pleasant surprise. We were out skiing again on Sunday and bumped into a lot of nice people, one was a man who works at REI's corporate offices and he chatted with us about our skis. During the conversation he said that we and our skis were mentioned on this website. WOW - cool! Thanks for all the input. We like those silvretta bindings, but ours take any normal boot (or cross-trainer if you're silly enough to try it!). Are you Dan the musician we met on the mountain? Come on out and play on a pair of our skis one day, we just started building the production version, they won't look homemade. Thanks for mentioning our skis and us. Hope to ski with you soon!