SkiMo is the short name for an international ski race format that has an 80 year history and legions of adherents... in a few minor regions in Western Europe. The sport displays the skill sets learned in ski mountaineering, and provides an arena where athletes can compete in the wildest places imaginable, ascending and descending thousands of metres on skis, and covering in mere hours winter terrain that skiers normally take days to traverse.
Olympic aspirations, ski tourism, and the exploding popularity of alpine touring technique broke this sport from its old-world moorings and it is now spreading around the globe. The International Ski Mountaineering Federation oversees a complete World Cup and World Championship competition calendar, and there are currently major ski mountaineering competitions in Asia, the Middle East, North, and South America.
Here in Canada, we’re only just getting started. It’s been 8 years since we sent two men to the World SkiMo Championships on a whim. Now our country has a nascent race circuit, a national team, and a growing cadre of recreational and weekend racers. This is proper competition for lifestyle skiers, where duffers can toe up at the start line right next to internationally ranked athletes. It’s about time you gave it a try.

David Dornian’s skiing has followed a graceful learning curve over more than three decades, from underperforming as a mediocre, mid-level mogul competitor in the ‘70s, to the present day, where he assembles ramshackle mountain sport bureaucracies on a volunteer basis for the Alpine Club of Canada. After humble beginnings riding lifts in his blue jeans, at the Happy Valley amusement park outside Calgary, with his high school phys. ed. class, David’s alpine career has grown into a lifestyle, evolving through college road trips, a short stint as a Nordic instructor, and into whole-wheat diets of telemarking and winter tipi living. There were flirtations in the ‘80s with snow cats and family lift-pass vacation packages, then a rough self-education in the Rockies’ backcountry early in the ‘90s. Since that time, David has organized or managed more than 30 ski mountaineering and ice climbing programs in Western Canada, the US, and internationally.