Rather bizarrely, in 2021, the Slovenian ski makers Elan proudly announced that they had produced “the world’s first fully functional, folding, all-mountain ski”, they were wrong. Folding skis have been around for at least 100 years. The German’s scoured the countries ski slopes for folding skis in the 1930s for use by their paratroopers. Airplane doors back then were not very big and didn’t allow for skis to fit through – so they got folded. The Germans also made their own folding skis during World War Two.

We have another pair of folding skis kindly donated by Allan Forsyth, here’s what he had to say about them.

“These were requisitioned by the German Army in World War Two when ski resorts were stripped of anything that could be used in mountain warfare. After 1945 a group of RAF officers formed a company to bring the ‘liberated’ equipment to sell in the UK, speculating that skiing would become popular in the UK after the War….. many were run of the mill planks, others were high quality, hand-made skis with steel edges and cable-bindings.”

The pair we have here in the collection didn’t arrive on the first lift, they were found in Germany some years later by our old Royal Marine pal, Pat Chapman. Having once been folding skis they have been retrofitted with metal edges and non-folding bindings. We’ve put the folding and non-folding binding side by side in the picture above.