One brilliant winter morning in 1929, a young boy named David Lind flung himself down a snowy hill in rural Washington and promptly fell in love. His skis, which he had carved by hand from two hickory planks, weren’t much different from the wooden runners and root bindings used by trappers more than 4,500 years ago, but they made for an exhilarating ride. “They were 7 or 8 feet long and didn’t have much flexibility,” Lind says. They got him down the hill, but just barely in one piece.
Since that day, Lind has become one of the country’s preeminent authorities on the science of skiing. As a physicist at the University of Colorado in the 1970s and 1980s, he taught a popular course called The Physics of Snow, and in 1996 he co-authored The Physics of Skiing with his son-in-law, Scott Sanders. He was onto something: Science now governs ...
