Steamboat Springs – Everything Bill Gilbert is wearing belongs on a wall in a museum. The rifle, the skis, even the fur-trapper garb seems more at home in a glass display case in some Western museum. Maybe over a mantel in a ranch-style home.
But on this Saturday, Gilbert and 13 others have donned leather-fringed jackets and leggings, clicked into antique skis and slung vintage black powder rifles over their shoulders for one of the most unusual events in all of skiing: the muzzleloading biathlon.
A 33-year staple in Steamboat’s 94-year-old Winter Carnival, the muzzleloading biathlon is more gun than ski, more history than race. The historically authentic pairing of black powder weaponry and just-as- old skis harkens back to Norwegian military patrols and, more recently, Western pioneers hunting game in winter. Yet – maybe it’s the modern perspective of skiing as purely recreational – there’s something unlikely about toting hand-held cannons while schussing.
“I like to say the two are diabolically opposed,” said Gilbert, a 63-year-old from the Yampa Valley who conceived the famously noisy event while lamenting the long winter’s toll on his shooting skills over a few rounds at a local watering hole in 1974.
Roughly half the 14 ski-shod shooters at Saturday’s event sported the leather-fringed coats, wool knickers and bear trap-binding wooden skis used by hardened fur trappers more than 150 years ago. But all carried heavy, antiquated rifles on their backs while skiing around a short track at the base of Steamboat’s storied Howelsen Hill.
After each lap, the black powder-packing skiers would stop before a row of targets, a slew of tools dangling from leather straps around their necks.
They would pour powder from a hollowed horn down their barrels. They would root through leather pouches and pack a lead ball and wadding into the barrel. They would cock a flintlock – making sure to warn the shooter next to them of potentially searing flames about to shoot sideways out their “touchhole” – and carefully aim at tiny pieces of hardtack 20 yards away.
The blasts bounced up and down the Yampa Valley, the only gunshots ever allowed in the town limits.
It was hardly the caliber of athleticism seen in the Olympic-level biathlon. But the lead balls blasting out of these rifles are more than double the caliber of the high-tech rifles used in Olympic biathlons. Lycra versus leather. High tech versus no-tech. Yes, the muzzleloading biathlon is pretty much the polar opposite of the almost eponymous event that goes down every four years in the Olympics.
“I’ll tell you, it’s a little weird to get slapped in the back of the head with a gun when you’re skiing,” said Steamboat’s Paul Yonekawa, the race’s director and a longtime black powder fan whose 18-year-old son, Yoshi, joined him in this year’s competition. “It definitely makes you ski in control.”
First-time muzzleloading biathlete – but a longtime plain-old muzzleloader – Scott Larson took the veteran Yon- ekawa’s advice to heart.
“You know I was just thinking I’d never skied with a gun before,” said the 37-year-old as he slung a .54 caliber cannon – a beautiful replica of a rifle dating to the late 1800s – over his back and tested his ski stride. “Yeah, I think I’ll be skiing slower, for sure.”
Pride in preserving history
Speed is not the goal at the muzzleloading biathlon, which a couple of years ago adopted an “international” title when a pair of Britons joined the cacophonous comp.
“To go really fast, I need someone pointing one of these at me,” said smirking Gary Hertzog, a 62-year-old who spends months handcrafting black powder rifles that become the trophies of his friends.
Today, Hertzog is carrying a replica of a colonial-era muzzleloader dating to the 1770s. More than speed, more than accuracy, more than the garb, this event is about preserving history. It’s a gathering that breathes life into a fading era no one remembers firsthand.
“For all the money we have tied up in our equipment, which is a good bit, we have more in books,” Gilbert said.
“Whole new appreciation”
These mountain men grow uncharacteristically solemn when talking about the Civil War. They recount war strategies of battles waged almost 150 years ago. They hunt and they shoot.
But their real passion is preserving a piece of history that lives only through their efforts. Their goal isn’t about gold medals or even hitting all 12 slabs of hardtack. It’s about delivering a long- forgotten craft and its role in global history to the next generation.
“Well, my first day ever skiing with a gun. It won’t be my last,” Larson said. “I definitely have a whole new appreciation for those old Scandinavian and 10th Mountain (Division) guys now.”
Staff writer Jason Blevins can be reached at 303-954-1374 or jblevins@denverpost.com.
