Crud Busters

"I really wanted to like them, but after about five days on them, I just realized they were not the skis for me," he says. "I decided I could do it better."

That's big talk for a carpenter or engineer, let alone a 19-year-old premed student at the University of Puget Sound who'd never built anything bigger than a skate ramp.

"I can't remember the moment when I decided, 'OK, I'm going to do this,'" Andrus says. "I ended up buying the steel for a ski press, which is about a grand, and at that point I was committed."

Using that press, Andrus and his friends made 52 pairs of skis in his garage in Tacoma, Wash. While pressing wood and plastic together, Andrus also planned the company that became Portland's ON3P. Eight years later, Andrus, 28, is operating one of only a handful of U.S. companies building skis from scratch.

At ON3P's no-frills factory in Rose City Park—there's a keg of Lagunitas Pils for after-work beers, and a backroom with a weight bench and "The Condo" tagged above the door—Andrus and his eight full-time employees will crank out about 1,400 pairs of skis this year. There are a dozen models of double-rockered fatties that can power through Oregon's powder pours and the Cascadian crud that later sets up in its place.

"The learning curve was steep," Andrus says. "What I learned in Tacoma didn't necessarily translate to full-scale production. But at this point, I'm pretty confident in our product and I think we make skis that can go up against anybody."

That's not just big talk, at least based on my Sunday of skiing at Mount Hood Meadows, on a borrowed pair of ON3P's all-mountain model, the Kartel 98, which handled a huge dump of heavy powder with buttery-smooth grace.

"We didn't consciously say, 'We're going to build a Northwest ski,' because the majority of our sales are outside the area," Andrus says. "But I'm sure subconsciously it has some influence. When we're testing, we're up here on the heavier snow. You need a ski that can punch through stuff."

To understand ON3P skis, and the whole style of hefty, wide and rockered skis, you have to start with the Spatula. For Portlanders, it's worth learning about, because unlike so many silly ski trends, the Spatula matters in Oregon, where heavy snow falls and rarely encounters a 'cat. If Steamboat Springs offers flutes of Champagne powder, Mount Hood pours from a pony keg of milkshake-thick and barely bubbly nitro stout.

I've been skiing since I was 5, from Vermont to Arizona, without ever encountering anything like a typical midwinter day in Oregon. My first day on Hood was a snowstorm with 20-feet visibility and mogul-sized piles of chopped powder that slowly moved across the mountain's face in the wind. Either I'd forgotten how to ski in the offseason, I figured, or everyone else on the slopes was insane.

ON3P's Andrus, originally from Boulder, Colo., had a similar—if more muted—reaction. And he discovered the same thing I did, which is that if you're going to ski in Oregon, "There's no question you need a rocker here; it's just too manky."

Rockered skis are shaped like the bottom of a rocking chair, floating through powder and helping the edges slide smoothly without catching. To my mind, everyone skiing in Oregon without rockered skis is crazy. That's where the Volant Spatula comes in.

Back in 2002, a pro skier named Shane McConkey wanted a new type of powder ski. Fresh powder behaves more like water than groomed snow, he reasoned, so the ski should be more like a water ski than the then-dominant parabolic skis.

Parabolic skis are a testament to the power of superior design. In 1992, skis were thin and relatively straight, with a slight inward taper over the boot. In 1993, Elan introduced a ski with a wider tip and a more pronounced taper, called the "Sidecut Extreme." Within five years, no one made anything else. The design allows novices to carve smooth turns that used to take years to learn. I'm 34, and anyone younger just calls them "skis." The only problem was powder, where skis built to carve up a groomer are a jelly-legged nightmare. And yet, in Sunday's heavy snow, the first big day of the season at Meadows, about half the skiers waiting for the lift were still on traditional-shaped skis. You might as well wear leather boots.

"I owned the Spatula in college," Andrus says. "I spent some pretty scary days on Spatulas when I probably shouldn't have been on them, because they were fun. But it was like, 'Oh my God, I'm not slowing down.'"

McConkey's extreme design solved the powder problem. From a distance, the skis looked like water skis, flared out to be wider below the boot than at the tips. Built with both the tip and tail-bend up, the lowest part of the Spatula was under the boot. They couldn't carve well, but they floated like a cloud. Rather than slice turns, you slid into them—like spreading butter. In powder, they were aces. On groomers, they were awkward. On ice, they were certain death.

When it came time to build his own ON3P skis, Andrus "wanted a ski that smeared like the Spatula when you wanted to, but was drivable, so you could actually hold a turn." His model borrowed the raised tails and tips of the Spatula, but had a flat side, so it could carve into groomed snow.

That's not unique now, of course—the same basic shape put companies like Line and Armada on the map, and it's used by everyone from Blizzard to Fischer.

But those companies aren't building skis in-house, by hand.

The ON3P factory sits around the corner from the Oregon Catholic Press and a company that makes coffee-cup jackets.

Before visiting, you are required to sign a waiver agreeing not to steal the homebrewed trade secrets—very few people are making skis on this scale anywhere in the world, and Andrus and his team have come up with a number of techniques they'd like to keep to themselves, including one trick using an old fire hose. Andrus starts and ends the visit in his office, which has a bar cart that's well-stocked but rarely used and a wall lined with sneakers. Inside, everyone on the crew wears Bluetooth headphones.

"We've always believed in building your own product," Andrus says. "That was a thing from the start—we wanted to have a ski that was ours from start to finish, not just the design process."

It takes about four hours to make a pair of ON3P skis, starting with cutting the core and ending with peeling the protective layer off the top sheet. Andrus is proudest of the all-bamboo core, which costs three times as much as a blend of woods, but which gives the skis the "damp" feeling he's looking for, and edges far thicker than the industry standard, and built to last.

The average price is about $700 a pair. This strikes me as oddly reasonable, since they're only about $100 more than a similar model from Rossignol.

"Our cost per pair is probably double what K2's is, but we have to sell them for the same price, basically," Andrus says. 

Cyclists pay $3,500 for a complete Portland-built Breadwinner bike that's fairly comparable to a $1,700 Salsa Vaya, but it turns out few people are willing to pay $1,200 for skis.

"It can be frustrating," Andrus says, "because sometimes people say, 'I can't afford your skis,' and it's like, 'OK, you can spend $500 and get a park ski made in China—worse materials, lower build quality, lower quality finish—or you can spend $100 more for a ski that's going to last twice as long, built by people who give a shit.'"

Which, sure, is great. For me, it's just nice to have sticks that can handle Hood.

WWeek 2015