You want to start a bar fight at your local trailhead? Mention e-bikes. Just drop the term casually, like a lit match into a pool of propane, and watch grown men in tight pants convulse in spittle-flecked fury. I’ve seen blissed-out yoga moms froth at the mouth over “those helmetless creations going the wrong way down the sidewalk and almost killing themselves!” And don’t even get the mountain bike purists started. They’ll scowl that e-MTBs are nothing but a camouflaged temptation to the dark side, two-wheeled heresy wrapped in a lithium-ion blanket.
The electrification of recreation has split the outdoor world wide open, like a glide crack on a too-soon melting glacier. Some argue it’s about accessibility, inclusion, dignity for the wheezing masses who still want to get outside without being flagellated by topography. Others gripe about trail erosion and laziness and the death of the soul, whatever that means anymore, in this age of motorized, digitized, orgy of outdoor recreation.
Me? I’m agnostic, comfortably floating in the tepid pool between orthodoxy and depravity. I’ve ridden e-mountain bikes and they’re tremendous fun. Going uphill like a world cup XC racer all hopped up on caffeine is exhilarating. When one of these buzzing machines blows past me on a climb, I don’t reach for a rock or launch into a red-faced tirade. I’m not out there to dominate anything. I’m out there to escape, from inboxes, from doomscrolling, from the metastasizing performance culture. Climbing a hill with no purpose other than to see what’s on the other side is a beautiful kind of madness. And damn, it should take some effort. Working hard is half the point.
But even that line of thought collapses under pressure. Because if we start talking about earning it, some unwashed neo-primitivist is bound to pop out of the woods naked and dripping in elk grease, mocking your carbon fiber crutches and space-age polymers. “You think you’re pure because you sweat a little more than the next guy?” he’ll taunt, before vanishing into the trees to kill a squirrel with his bare hands. And suddenly the whole ethical scaffolding of your argument comes crashing down like a meth lab in a hurricane.
We’ve always drawn lines: Us vs. them, pure vs. impure, real vs. poser. That is lazy thinking. It’s the mental chewing gum of bored nihilists looking for something to hate.
And nothing fuels the bonfire of outdoor absurdity quite like E-skimo—a name that already tells us we’re careening off the rails of decency. Everyone who has ever slogged up a hill on skis has had the dream of some motorized skins, but these Swiss folks have taken bold strides towards making it a reality.
Yes, E-skimo, “the world’s first electrical assisted e-ski mountaineering device”, the bastard child of a magic carpet and a snowmobile. A Swiss contraption birthed by ambitious engineers in a tech void who looked at ski touring and said, “Let’s ruin this too.” At best it’s a motorized climbing skin. At it’s next best it’s a mechanized belt that lurches forward beneath your ski like a caffeinated weasel on ice. You don’t glide, you literally lurch—unconvincingly—like Frankenstein’s monster mimicking Johannes Klaebo.
I’ve watched videos of the E-Skimo in use. It is unsettling. That’s why I used lurch twice in one sentence. Lurch and touring are not synergistic. The subjects look like they’re being dragged forward by their skis, flailing along in half-controlled spasms. And the name? E-skimo? Good grief. One Google search would’ve told them that’s considered by many to be a derogatory exonym for Indigenous peoples of the Arctic, hyphen be damned.
So I say: enough. If we’re already wallowing in the strange, let’s go stranger. Let’s go backwards. Back to the stripped-down elegance of Light Touring, a dusty backroom of skiing culture where the leather boots crack and the gaiters creak like ancient tomes. Where “gear innovation” peaked when Nixon was still in office. Where glide is the goal, and the joy isn’t captured on camera because there’s no one around to hold the phone.
At Assiniboine Lodge, deep in the backwoods of Canada last winter, I fell back into the cult of glide. Free heels. Waxed skis. Quiet efficiency on low-angle snow. No radness. No Instagram. Just smooth, sane, human-powered motion through a world that doesn’t care if you exist. It was beautiful. And beautifully uneventful.
The truth is, most of us don’t want to admit that what we’re doing out there is elaborate play-acting. Pretend struggle in curated danger. Of course, it can be real struggle and real danger—but you knowingly chose to participate in that dance.
This all may feel a bit harsh on the e-assisted apostles, but truthfully, this is not a condemnation. We can still chose the long route. We skin uphill into the wind to feel something. Look at this more as a celebration. Whether you ride a self propelled robo skin or shuffle along in dead man’s leather, you’re seeking the same primal twitch of vitality. That ancient whisper that says you’re still alive.
So no, the question is not whether all these e-abominations are fun. Of course they’re fun. The real question, the only one that matters, is:
What are we even doing out there in the first place?
And if you can answer that without invoking fastest times or most vertical accumulation or some other egoist delusion, then maybe, just maybe, you’re on the right path.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go find my battery charger before the next snowstorm hits. Or maybe I’ll just leave it. Let the electrons lie. Let the glide do the talking.
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