“Without skis,” wrote Fridtjof Nansen, “we would never have returned alive.” The year was 1889 and Nansen had just returned from the first crossing of the Greenland ice cap, much of it on skis, “without which, this expedi- tion would have been an absolute impossibility”. Nansen's achievement elevated the ski to a vital component of polar exploration. Those who learnt from Nansen's experience, as Roald Amundsen did in his race to the South Pole, are as great a testimony to the value of ski travel as are the graves of Captain Scott and his companions, who chose not to rely on skis in their own attempt to reach the pole and paid for that choice with their lives.

Two Planks and a Passion marks a natural progression for Ronald Huntford, best known for his seminal works on polar adventurers such as Nansen, Amundsen and Scott. In this latest work Huntford has set himself the mighty task of covering the role of the ski in history, a mode of transport more ancient than the wheel, tracing it from the present back to its origins 20,000 years ago.

Huntford's own passion for skiing is immediately apparent in his fast-paced and well illustrated narrative, as he familiarises readers with the basics of snow travel, from ancient snow shoes, “rings of withy ... strung with cords made from the sinews of animals” to bags wrapped around the feet of horses that prevented them from sinking in the drifts as they tramped over the mountains of Armenia in 400BC.

While the fashioning of skis, boots and bindings has changed, Huntford emphasises that the essence of skiing - its physical requirements and the pleasure it affords - has remained largely intact from the earliest mesolithic voyagers to the terrace poseurs of Aspen and Davos.

Although he credits the Norwegians with the spread of skiing across Europe, and Frid-tjof's wife in particular with the establishment of equality for women in the sport, the society of skiing today, for better and for worse, owes much to the arrival of the English, in the late 1800s, in resorts such as Chamonix and St Moritz.

They brought with them their “awkward, self-conscious insularity”. In spite of “an invincible prejudice against all things foreign”, they helped to transform the art of skiing from a means of survival in the ice-bound corners of the Earth to what it is for most of us today: a pleasure undertaken for its own sake. Like fishing, sailing and riding, skiing has settled in our collective consciousness somewhere between a sport and a religion.

Huntford's book makes a suitable companion to John Fry's The Story of Modern Skiing and The History of Skiing by Raymond Flowers. What elevates Huntford is his comprehensive approach - and his ability to deliver otherwise mind-numbing topics such as comparisons between Telemark, Selburn and Riesengebirge ski systems in a style that makes them accessible and enjoyable, even to the most armchair bound of “schussers”.

Two Planks and a Passion: The Dramatic History of Skiing by Roland Huntford
Continuum, £25; 424pp Buy the book here

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