Original skins

The route back to the birthplace of skiing was a quagmire of rotten snow and horse manure, hangovers and monotonous meals, not to mention nearly five weeks without a bath. And Nils Larsen is dying to return.

Larsen, 51, the original guru of cross-country downhill skiing in Northeastern Washington, is embarking on a much shorter journey this week as he heads across America to show the program detailing his spring trip into central Asia.

The multimedia production documents nomadic descendents of the Mongols who still nail horse skins onto hand-made wooden skis to get around the winter backcountry much as they have for maybe 8,000 years.

The program tour debuts Friday night at Mountain Gear in Spokane.

The journey, however, began in March.

Larsen flew to China with Dave Waag a Hood River, Ore., photographer and editor of Off-Piste Magazine, and Naheed Henderson, a backcountry skier from Victor, Idaho.

Henderson had been on a 2003 ski expedition to climb Friendship Peak on the Mongolia-China border when her group stumbled onto a little-known niche of living ski history. Larsen was captivated by her story of men using ancient ski techniques in the Altai Mountains that range from northern China into Kasakhstan, Mongolia and Siberia.

“I wanted to video this for the record,” said Larsen, who’s skied professionally since 1980 and produced several ski videos devoted to the winter romance of backcountry free-heel skiing. “This gets to the core of my passion for skiing.”

From Beijing, the threesome traveled by land to Urumqi, capital of the sprawling Xinjiang Province in northwestern China.

“We’d worked with a Chinese outfitter service based in the Himalaya to sort out the necessary permits and smooth the lumps in the road,” Larsen said. “The 2003 group didn’t do that and they had a lot of problems – police breaking down doors and trying to take their film and stuff like that. They get real paranoid around their borders over there.”

In addition to having proper permits, plus an interpreter and government liaison officer, the threesome also bought bags full of local spirits and cigarettes for gifts and bribes.

“A liter of 140-proof, really bad stuff we call “dirty sneaker juice,” cost about 40 cents – cheap insurance,” he said. “The police we met were all really good guys, but we eventually gave it all away to them and the villagers. Things went real smooth.”

In a small van, the group drove north to where the Chinese government stopped plowing the road and hired men to pack them in 100 kilometers on six horse-drawn sleds.

“They’re beautiful hand-made things that look like big dog sleds,” Larsen said. “We had to walk up the steep parts. We stayed overnight in sort of a halfway house, a cabin, somewhat heated by wood, with a room where all 10 of us slept in one room on a big cot layered with thick felt.”

Two days later, they arrived in a remote village near Kanas Lake, which resembles Kootenay Lake, British Columbia, and the Kanas River, a tributary to the Irtysh, the only river in China that eventually empties into the Arctic Ocean. This is a winter base for ethnic Tuwas.

“They live in yurts much of the year and travel around with their goats, cattle and horses,” Larsen said. “In winter, they live lower in log cabins with dirt floors with their herds – I mean sometimes the sheep or a calf will come inside to sleep.

“These people consider themselves Mongols, and the Chinese government doesn’t seem to treat them very well.”

The Americans were gaping at the scene of cabins, most of which had dirt floors and a horse tied to the porch, and streets smothered in snow and horse manure, when they noticed a sign that indicated they had arrived.

“Ski tracks!” Larsen said. “It was so cool.”

They approached some men, who seemed somewhat standoffish until the threesome broke the ice by bringing out their modern backcountry skis.

Soon they were skiing back in time.

“I’d read a lot of research on the history of skiing, including a good book by the University of Texas Scandinavian language department looking into the prehistory of skiing,” Larsen said. Most people assume that skiing started in Scandinavia, but it turns out that skiing is a derivative of snowshoeing with the ‘sliding snowshoe’ originating in central Asia.”

No wonder, he said: “This region is about as far from any ocean as you can get on the planet, and there’s a lot of 40-below-zero temperatures during winter. The latitude is 49 degrees, which is about the same as the U.S.-Canada border, but they’re between Tibet to the south and Siberia to the north. It’s a wintery place.”

The Americans and the herdsmen wasted little time getting up a slope behind the village to show off.

The Tuwa men cheered politely as Naheed removed her synthetic climbing skins, clicked into her colorful, modern “fat skis,” 180 centimeters long and 90 millimeters wide, and made some quick telemark turns on slick-waxed bases with metal edges.

It may have been the first time the herdsmen had ever seen a woman on skis.

Then a man named Akquean gave the demonstration the Americans had traveled halfway around the world to watch.

He stepped into a very long pair of wooden skis that were about 50cm longer than those that Larsen uses and about 50mm wider under the foot but narrower at the tips. He crisscrossed a rawhide strap over his boot and tied it around behind his heel.

Instead of ski poles, he used a single long wooden staff.

“They leave their climbing skins on permanently,” Larsen said. “They’re made from the leg skin of a horse and tacked onto the ski. The closer you get to the epicenter of a sport, the farther you get from technology. They don’t have wax.”

Akquean pointed his skis straight downhill and leaned way back into a sitting position balanced by the staff dragging to the side and behind him.

“They make it look so easy,” Larsen said. “They don’t have stiff boots and bindings, so they get way back into the back seat and push out the tails of their skis to turn.

“We went out with a 14-year-old boy and he was like Bodie Miller, going like crazy, always at the edge of being out of control, but never falling.

“The men looked at our modern skis and they weren’t envious at all. They said they wouldn’t worlk well there, and we found out what they meant.”

Although they don’t have much time for recreational skiing, a few locals led several tours that left the Americans floundering on their short, fat skis.

“We were at the end of the snow season and that long winter of really cold temperatures had left the snow sugary and sandy, rotten at best,” Larsen said. “I joked that we might get in some good skiing if we could just find some really sun-baked, wind-blasted snow.”

The Tuwas seemed at ease as they traveled. They wore the thick felt underwear they apparently leave on all winter. They packed no more than they could carry in the pockets of their wool jackets and were undaunted by conditions. They often used their staffs to doodle or write words in the snow as they skied.

By spring, the locals don’t venture too far beyond where their horses can go. “Traditionally, they used their skis to go out hunting, but they have to be careful about that now since the Chinese have banned hunting in that area,” Larsen said.

The grim snow conditions gave Larsen less incentive to ski and more time to indulge in this isolated culture.

“It took three days for one man to demonstrate how they make their skis,” he said. “He did almost everything with an ax and a wood planer, starting by cutting spruce poles and shaping them, using pressure against a wood stove to bend the ski tips.”

The villagers live a simple life. “They have beautiful white teeth probably because there’s no sugar there,” Larsen said. “They eat pretty much the same thing, a lot of meat, butter and other milk products, noodles, pine nuts, some wild onions and bread, maybe a few potatoes. That’s about it.

“There’s a lot of fat in the diet, but there are no fat people.

“The Kazakhs, Mongols, Tuwas — they worship Genghis Kahn,” he added, referring to the 13th Century Mongol military leader who conquered a vast empire ranging from Northern China to the Black Sea. “They have shrines to him in their houses.”

Despite the language barrier, the Americans indulged in Tuwa culture in the universal ways, sitting with them in cabins, singing songs, merry-making — “The Mongols are serious drinkers,” Larsen said.

“When they found out it was my birthday they nearly put me away for good. Like drinkers everywhere, they’d take a shot and then offer me one and I noticed their shot was always smaller than the one they gave me.”

Also, he pointed out, “A cow’s head split in half is a delicacy served to guests of honor.”

Outside, the village had no outhouses. “The people are gone in the summer and the dogs eat it all up during winter, I guess,” Larsen said. “Sounds bad, but the grossest thing I saw over there was the Chinese outhouses.”

The people have ways of coping with few conveniences, he said.

“For one thing, I think these men can build a big fire and stand around it and smoke cigarettes at 40-below for hours and hours.

“Everyone’s real musical. They take turns playing guitars and singing songs forever. They have a lute-like instrument called the dumbra and a horse-head fiddle. We learned their word for avalanche — kushkun — and we noticed they sing songs about avalanches.”

The village is at 4,600 feet and the terrain ranges steeply up to elevations around 14,000 feet. “This is serious avalanche country and they know how to deal with it. They don’t dig pits and look at s now crystals; they understand the terrain.”

Larsen captured as much of this culture as possible on video, using a solar panel to recharge his camera batteries and storing his images on an iPod.

“It would be great to go back and capture them in the middle of their ski season instead of being there basically after it’s over,” he said.

“My greatest hope would be to go out and hunt red deer with them on skis. I wouldn’t film if it would get them in trouble, but that would be the ultimate step back in time?”