Physics Of Skiing Essay

Haylea Roark

Physics of Skiing You have just gotten to the top of the mountain for the black diamond slope at the Eldora Mountain Resort in Colorado. You have been working up to this moment all day. The icy wind is chapping your face and the hill is not getting any less steep so you take a deep breath and launch yourself off with your poles. You are avoiding less advanced skiers and you are too concentrated on not crashing into a tree to think about all the physics that is at play while you swoosh down the slopes. When you first tip over the crest of the hill you are moving rather slowly but as you get further down the hill your velocity begins to increase. This is because as you are going down the hill you are converting your gravitation

We have to be able to turn in order to navigate around other skiers, turns in the slopes, and maybe even trees depending on the slope. Turning, or carving as some skiers call it, can be very tricky and involves quite a bit of physics. As you are skiing down a hill your momentum is continuously increasing. Your speed would get to fast to control if you didn’t regularly make turns. This is why you usually see skiers going down the slopes in an “S” shaped pattern. In order to have the most concentrated friction during a turn, you need to have the ski on its edge. Having the ski on its edge reduces surface area so you don’t slow down as much in a curve, but there is still enough friction to keep you gripped to the snow and change the direction of your momentum. While turning you want to create a shape similar to the quarter section of a circle. This quarter of a circle is the perfect amount of carving because of centripetal motion. You are accelerating in the direction of your turn and towards the center of the circle you are making. Because of these accelerations it makes it much easier to keep your balance so that you do not lose speed while making your turn. Making the quarter of a circle is the ideal shape for a turn; however, it is impossible to reach that ideal shape while actually skiing because the skis cannot bend in a perfect circular shape without skidding and creating unnecessary friction or breaking. So skiers strive to get as close to that shape as possible without skidding, but only very few professional skiers can master