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- Downhill on hoks
- Fieldwork on Hoks
- Kids on skishoes - Balla Hoks
- Kom skis
- Schools on Hoks
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- Skishoeing - Hoks
- Tiaks - the single pole
- Touring on Hoks
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- Traditional Skiers of the Altai Mountains
She titled the email – Subject: KOM, Swiss Army knife for NE nordic BC Her message with the videos read Thank you, thank you for designing a ski that lets a mortal skier play and cope with variable and worsening New England low angle ski touring conditions. I have sold most of my old telemark gear and haven’t unrolled my skins in years. I’m inclined to buy a second pair for fear you’ll stop making the Kom… climate change has not been kind to ski bases in the NE! Here’s what the Koms and Excursions give me in thin cover on...
One of my favorite things about Hoks is how they disappear when I take them out in the snow. Disappear? Let me explain. The Hoks are easy to ski on, so do not require a lot of attention during a good winter wander. Many types of skiing demand almost constant attention. Ski technique can require precision and focus to get your skis working right and behaving properly. A lot of the more recent gear innovations work well in a narrow set of circumstances but require quite a bit of adjustments and fiddling along the way. Modern backcountry gear completely separates...
In mid January, my daughter and her husband to be came up for the Hoks Festival at Sitzmark, and on a free day after the festival they joined Lisa and I for a day of touring in the Kettle Range. The weather was cool and snowy the whole day, and the snow finally had a supportable base, often lacking in the early to mid winter skiing in the Kettles. We did a lot of bushwhacking and found some powder on the way down…. All in all a great day in our local mountains.
2018 Altai Ski Festival January 20th 2018 is the 3rd annual Altai Skis Hoks and ski festival at Sitzmark Ski Area in NE Washington, Okanogan Highlands. Nils’ Map of the Highlands Area with some skier points of interest The Okanogan Highlands are a high mountainous area in the far north central part of Washington State. The Highlands are remote and very rural, and in the winter, cold and snowy. Sitzmark, one of the smallest ski areas in the state, has one chair and one rope tow. Views are expansive, north into Canada (less then 20 miles north), west...
NEW YORK TIMES ARTICLE ON ALTAI SKIERS This article by Kade Krichko just came out (April 19th 2017) and is a fairly good discussion on what is going on these days in the Chinese Altai Mountains. I added a few pictures below from my trips to the Altai from the last 10 years.
Skiing for Ethnoarchaeology in Mongolia In the summer of 2012, I initiated the Dukha Ethnoarchaeological Project. Ethnoarchaeology is the study of living people for the purpose of developing tools to aid in the interpretation of the archaeological record. I am an archaeologist at the University of Wyoming. I normally excavate sites of the first inhabitants of the New World, human occupations that are more than 10,000 years old. In those sites, we find hundreds or thousands of chipped stone artifacts and animal bones. Frustrated with my inability to make sense of spatial patterns in the archaeological record, I was...
Skishoeing.com is the companion site to our Altai Skis.com site. We thought it would be good to have a informational site dedicated to using skishoes in the many ways people do. You will find some posts on field work being done on Hoks, kids using them (the Hokstars!), schools, and some user posts as well. We also will add instructional information over time, using skishoes in different terrain and conditions, as well as the pros and cons on different bindings, and, of course, using the Tiaks (single poles). There will be lots of images (see the Gallery page) as well as...
Rich Landers, longtime outdoor writer for the Spokesman Review in Spokane, WA joined us at the first Altai Skis Hok Festival at Sitzmark Ski Hill in the Okanogan Highlands of NE WA. Rich is a longtime nordic and backcountry skier and was curious about skishoeing. He picked it up quickly and wrote this great article on the sport in general. Just recently another appeared in the Seattle Times, you can see it here Rich Lander’s Spokesman review article on Skishoeing It looks like We will have a Sitzmark Festival again this year. Our date right now is January 28th...
Hok skiing on the North Country National Scenic Trail I first heard of Hok skis several years ago from North Country Trail Association (NCTA) volunteers Jim & Jeri Rakness. They kept insisting that I really needed to try them out. At first, I couldn’t imagine what it was they were describing and, to be honest, I was a little skeptical. This is because I was quite happy snowshoeing, a favorite winter activity of mine. I’m lucky enough to snowshoe both for family fun and for my work for the NCTA. We usually scout and flag new sections of the...
My wife Lisa and I initiated a 3 year non-invasive moose population study in the Northern Range of Yellowstone National Park and adjacent Custer-Gallatin National Forest in 2013. The goal of the study was to use non-invasively collected DNA to estimate population size and parameters of the northern Yellowstone moose.
Skishoes are playful by nature – letting you go where you want and explore where you will. Perfect for kids, they are easy to use, easy to adjust as kids grow, simple to put on and take off, and let kids take on any little hill they come across – repeatedly if they want. They are the, “go outside and play” ski….
