You think snowblades look weird?
Well, I'm here to tell you that it can get weirder. Much weirder.
In a recent Reddit post, an employee at Big Sky Resort, Montana, shared an image of skis with the bindings mounted on the tail.
The skis were left at the mountain, leaving the poster to assume they were likely only used as a joke.
I back that hypothesis. These things would not ski well—in fact, they would ski terribly.
To anyone who's ridden a pair of snowblades, you know where I'm coming from. On snowblades—which have something resembling a tail, mind you—it's incredibly easy to slip into the backseat and fall right on your butt.
With these horrors, there's no tail at all. The only way to feasibly ski them would be to lean as far as you can in the front seat and, well, pray.
There's another clue that suggests the wacky skis were involved in a bit. Their topsheets are adorned with a poor (intentionally so, it seems) attempt to recreate the Vishnu logo.
Vishnu is a brand popular amongst park and street-focused skiers. As the brand reached a level of hype typically reserved for exclusive streetwear brands, it, as you might expect, became the subject of memes, like the silly topsheets you just looked at.
One commenter on the post delivered a final revelation: note the multiple drill holes on the skis. "Serious answer from a former shop tech," they wrote. "These skis were used by rookie shop employees to practice mounting bindings. That’s why they’ve been drilled so many times. That’s why it’s a modern demo binding on ancient skinny skis."
This all leaves a slew of unanswered questions, though. Who rode the skis? Where did they take them? Are their ACLs still intact?
Once again, I can only speculate. But there's one thing I feel confident about: injuries notwithstanding; whoever took these for a spin had a grand time.
Yes, they probably ate loads of ****, but that's the point when you're riding a pair of skis purpose-built to ride terribly. Sometimes, a hilariously dramatic lack of performance can take an otherwise routine ski day up a notch. Snowblades are incredibly popular for a reason.
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