Skis too long? Fold' em!

Ever since skis have existed, they've had their advantages and their downsides. One of their key advantage was to allow a skier to stand over soft snow without sinking in.

The downside of this was their length that made them hard to steer and clumsy to carry. We stay with the last idea: Ease of transportation.

For years, inventors have been toying with a folding ski that could be thrown inside a rucksack and allow someone to climb steep mountains without having one long pair of boards hindering their progression and destabilizing them in some precarious sections of the climb.

I know of the Swiss makers Attenhoffer in 1925 and Shraner in 1934 that proposed designs that didn't pass muster with the market. More recently MTN Approach was another execution of the stubborn idea that received limited attention.

This was until Elan, the father of modern carving skis, came up with yet another version of the ski that literally folds in half from the middle. Sounds good to me, but I like to see things before I quite believe them, so I've looked everywhere for a video of this folding contraption, but they still must be filming it!

Short of this kind of video-proof, I heard that Elan sponsored Davo Karničar, a famous mountaineer, to ski down Everest on its new two-piece, Ibex model. Apparently, he made it to the base camp without folding!