A few years ago Sun Valley’s Bobbie Burns received an unexpected phone call. Scott Sports of Switzerland was checking in to ask if Burns was interested in collaborating with Scott to re-make and re-introduce to the market The Ski, Burns’ revolutionary freeskiing ski that had been out of production for more than two decades. Burns said “yes” and The Ski came back to action. Burns himself at the age of 80 had never been out of action and enjoying life with a smile. That Scott has reintroduced The Ski is entirely appropriate, as the Late Ed Scott, who started the company, and Burns are icons of both Sun Valley and the larger world of skiing.
Bobbie Burns’ impact on the history of freeskiing, the evolution of making skis and the skiing culture of Sun Valley is enormous. Born in Idaho, raised in Ogden and Salt Lake City, Burns did not grow up skiing. His younger years were spent mastering tap dancing, ballet, gymnastics and platform diving, skills he put to unorthodox use when he began skiing in his early 20s and moved to Sun Valley. That was in the mid 1950s. Since then Burns has skied all over the world and Sun Valley is still his favorite place to ski. Burns enjoyed skiing bumps and discovered he seemed to have a higher balance point than skiers of more traditional techniques and could absorb bumps better by holding his hands and arms above his head rather than in front of his torso. He has said of his skiing in those years, “I was an accident waiting for a place. The only thing I had was a lot of guts, balance, and the ability to have fun.”
Accent on having fun.
By the mid 1960s he was revolutionizing the techniques of bump skiing, the concept of freeskiing and the possibilities of steel thighs, noodle knees, balance and showmanship in skiing. With his long, blonde hair, unorthodox technique, unbelievable athleticism and huge smile Burns changed the world of performance skiing, in some ways simply because he was having more fun than everyone else. He has described his skiing style as “…different because I had large cojones but no ability.” All mogul skiers, from that time to the very best of today’s freestylers, are beholden to him.
Dick Barrymore saw Bobbie skiing bumps in Sun Valley and remembered, “The sight changed my life as a filmmaker. Burns’ style was not like any I had seen before….Burns attacked a field of moguls like Errol Flynn attacking a band of pirates. When he skied bumps, he sat down in a permanent toilet-seat position, with his arms high over his head holding 60 inch long ski poles….Bob Burns was, in 1969, the first hot dogger.”
Modern freestyle skiing would be very different if not unimaginable without Bobbie Burns, but it can be argued that his greatest contribution to skiing was not in way he made the ski turn but, rather, in making The Ski.
Like all ski aficionados (also known as ‘addicts’ and ‘bums’) Burns had to make a living and he took whatever jobs kept him on skis, including tuning skis. In the mid-‘60s Chuck Ferries, one of America’s great ski racers had retired from racing and was coaching the U.S. Women’s Ski Team and invited Burns to help him, more for his knowledge of skis and people than for his expertise in racing. Burns has said, “Racing was never for me. What possible fun is it to run gates? You have to slow down to do it!” They formed a working relationship such that in 1968 when Ferries retired from coaching and a job with Head Skis and went to work for K2 Skis he convinced Burns to come with him to make skis. Burns says, “I didn’t know shit about skis,” but, then, there had been a time when he knew nothing about skiing.
He moved to Seattle, signed up to get a graduate degree in chemical engineering at UW and began to learn how to make skis for K2. He and Ferries studied the construction of the best European skis of the time, particularly the Dynamic VR7, and began making skis for American racers, including Marilyn and Bob Cochran, Mike Lafferty and Spider Sabich. The first skis, according to Burns, “…were the worst ever skied upon. Everybody hated them, except Marilyn.” They must have learned quickly, because in 1969 Marilyn Cochran became the first American to win a world cup title (in giant slalom), and Lafferty, Sabich and Bob Cochran (among several others) went on to successful ski racing careers on skis made by Bobbie Burns.
But Burns wanted to make skis for himself and the way he liked to ski, not for racing. He explained, perhaps having as much fun with the world as he was having on skis: “I came up with The Ski when I was driving back to Sun Valley, Idaho. I saw all the sagebrush along the highways, and I started thinking I’d build a ski out of it. If you’ve ever tried to stomp or pull sagebrush out of the ground—in those days skis broke easily—you know you can never break the stuff. I also wanted to make it soft so I could ski bumps really fast, and I wanted to put artwork on the top and do blocks of color. That was way back in the ’70s.”
In 1974 Burns returned to Sun Valley and began making The Ski, the first ski, according to Burns, ever made in the Wood River Valley. The rest, as they say, is history. The Ski revolutionized free skiing for the masses in much the same way as Bobbie Burns revolutionized free skiing for elite athletes of performance skiing. The Ski was soft lengthwise and stiff torsionally with simple blocks of color for artwork unlike anything seen in skiing before. In the mid-80s Burns sold his company. Since then he has continued to make skis for select customers, designed clothes, taught skiing, worked as a consultant, raised his children and, of course, skied. And then Scott Sports asked Bobbie if he was interested in re-creating The Ski. He was and Burns says, “It was kind of like being born again. I really believe The Ski by Scott is a rebirth, and everything has gotten better.”
That is, you can’t have too much fun. Just ask Bobbie Burns.