The real obstacle to winter mountaineering is the appalling weariness of wading up to the club-huts on foot. The snow in the sheltered lower valleys is often deep and powdery; and the climber on foot will have to force his way through pine forests where the snow lies in great drifts between the trees, and over moraines where treacherous drifts conceal pitfalls between the loose stones. All this is changed by the introduction of ski. The ski distributes the weight of the climber over a long, even surface; and in the softest snow he will not sink in more than a few inches. Better still, they revolutionise the descent, converting a weary plug through snow-drifts into a succession of swift and glorious runs. The ski-runner takes his ski to the foot of the last rock ridges, and then proceeds on foot, rejoining his ski, and covering on the descent five thousand feet in far less time than the foot-climber would take over five hundred. Skis, as everybody knows, were invented as a means of crossing snowy country inaccessible on foot. They are sometimes alluded to as snowshoes, but differ radically from snowshoes in one important respect. Both ski and the Canadian snowshoe distribute their wearer’s weight, and enable him to cross drifts where he would sink in hopelessly if he were on foot, but there the resemblance ends. For, whereas snowshoes cannot slide on snow, and whereas a man on snowshoes cannot descend a hill as fast as a man on foot could run down hill, skis glide rapidly and easily on snow, and a ski-runner can descend at a rate which may be anything up to sixty miles an hour. Ski-ing is of Scandinavian origin, and the greatest exponents of the art are the Norwegians. Norwegians have used ski from time immemorial in certain districts, such as Telemarken, as a means of communication between snow-bound villages. It should, perhaps, be added that ski-jumping does not consist, as some people imagine, in casual leaps across chasms or over intervening hillocks. The ski-runner does not glide along the level at the speed of an express train, lightly skimming any obstacles in his path. On the level, the best performer does not go more than six or seven miles an hour, and the great jumps one hears of are made downhill. The ski-runner swoops down on to a specially prepared platform, leaps into the air, and alights on a very steep slope below. The longest jump on record is some hundred and fifty feet, measured from the edge of the take-off to the alighting point. In this case, the ski-runner must have fallen through nearly seventy vertical feet.