Last of the First Skiers

Long before downhill racing or backcountry powder runs, skiing was a way to hunt, to move, to live. In a remote corner of the Altai Mountains, I joined a group of Kazakh and Tuvan hunters still practicing the world’s oldest form of skiing—on handmade wooden planks slicked with horsehair, pulling goatskin sleds through subarctic cold. These are the last of the first skiers, gliding through a world unchanged for millennia, where man, animal, and winter remain bound in ancient choreography.

Photography by Jonas Bendiksen