Grass Skiing Was an '80s Thing and People Are Amazed

Picture this: short shorts, loud windbreakers, and people skiing down a bright green hill in the middle of summer. A viral video from 1984 is blowing minds across the internet, and everyone's asking the same question: why didn't grass skiing become a thing?

The footage comes from Warren Miller's documentary "Ski Country" and shows athletes gliding down grassy slopes on skis fitted with nearly 200 small rollers. They leap over tree trunks, perform mid-air splits, and look like they're having the time of their lives.

"Wait, HOW IS THIS NOT A THING?" one person wrote on social media. The January 2026 post sparked thousands of reactions from people who'd never heard of the sport.

Grass skiing was invented in 1963 by Josef Kaiser in Germany as a way for skiers to practice during warmer months. It arrived in the United States in 1966 at Bryce Mountain Resort in Virginia and enjoyed a small following for about two decades.

Each pair of grass skis contains around 1,500 individual pieces and 192 rolls designed specifically for carving down hills. But that specialized design also became the sport's downfall in America.

The skis can't snow-plow or hockey-stop like regular skis. Your only options for stopping are falling down or hoping you run out of momentum at the bottom of the hill. Snow, as many commenters pointed out, is far more forgiving than dirt when you wipe out.

"Guessing the broken arms, legs, backs, and necks convinced people it was not a great idea," one person wrote. Others wondered where you'd even find the perfect grassy hillside needed for the sport.

By the mid-1980s, grass skiing had largely disappeared from American culture. The equipment was expensive, the learning curve was steep, and the risk of injury was high.

Sunny's Take

The sport hasn't completely vanished though. Grass skiing competitions are still held in Europe today, and the International Ski and Snowboard Federation maintains detailed information about the activity on their website. Sometimes the best ideas from the past are worth remembering, even if they involve a little more risk than we're comfortable with today.

That viral video serves as a time capsule of an era when people were willing to strap on experimental equipment and launch themselves down hills just to see what would happen.

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