Word: skis
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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From Bintz's Bump to the Sierras, from the Tetons to the Tatras, ski lifts are rising almost wherever the ground does. Molehills are being made into mountains, and a significant segment of humanity is rushing to slide down them. This Christmas, start of the holiday week in which ski-area operators do about one-third of their business for the year, more people than ever will be heading for the hills. Michigan auto executives and plant workers will politely jostle one another for spots in the half-hour lift lines at some of that state...
...nation now has nearly 700 ski areas, double the number a decade ago. Skiing passed golf this year as the sport on which Americans lavish the most money ($1.5 billion). At least 6,000,000 Americans are skiers, and the total is climbing 15% a year. Round the world, more than 20 million people ski. The fast-growing sport has become popular in such unlikely places as Spain, Morocco, Lebanon and Albania. Skiing has also caught on in the Soviet Union; a ski jump overlooks Moscow from the Lenin Hills. For the world's resort owners, hotel operators, travel...
...Skiing also offers membership in a cozy subculture that nonskiers sometimes have difficulty understanding. Initiates speak their own language, a conglomeration of English, German, French and jargon. A rather hyperbolic example-"I was wedeling this head-wall loaded with bathtubs and decided to make a gelandy over a tree stump when I found myself in a mogul field, so I used my avalement and then tried an old-fashioned ruade, but caught an edge, slipped out of my toe piece, helicoptered down the fall line and wound up with a spiral in the tibia."* Besides, there is the legendary ambience...
Nowadays, almost anyone can learn to ski, and many people in their 40s and 50s are taking it up. New teaching methods have made it much simpler. Most important of them is the Graduated Length Method. A G.L.M. student starts out on skis as short as 2½ ft. and works up through increasingly longer ones as his skill improves. A beginner can do parallel turns after five hours of instruction, less than half the time required by older methods. At most areas where G.L.M. is taught, a skier can rent the graduated skis and buy five hours of lessons...
...which form takes a back seat, as it were, to control. Once they used to insist that a skier keep his feet as close together as possible; today many say he can have them as far apart as his hips. Advises Robert Gratton, director of the Mount Snow, Vt., ski school: "If something doesn't feel comfortable...