What I Learned on The Ramp
Year after year, my obsession with deconstructing the classic pedal turn (as executed by its original inventors, Patrick Vallencant and Anselme Baud) has ended in failure.
There is something inspiring to be found in chasing a forever-elusive ski technique—it reinforces just how innovative and elegant those vintage French masters truly were. But it's also been incredibly frustrating.
This spring, just like every spring, my thoughts turned once again to that enigmatic pedal-hop, and I spent quite a bit of time in Mammoth and the Sierra backcountry trying to puzzle it out. Again.
And... once again the end result was failure.
There were moments where I thought I was making progress; breakthroughs, even. But each day, on snow, the best of my "insights" led only to broken turns, pulled muscles, and an ever-increasing sense of defeat.
But then some interesting things happened.
Firstly, and outrageously, my son—my 18-year-old son!—pulled off a very credible pedal turn on False White mountain's north face. I caught the whole thing on 4k video, 60 immaculate frames per second.
The video of course taught me nothing.
And all attempts to interrogate my son yielded only shrugs and nonchalant advice like, "I don't know--you just do it."
But if he could do it...maybe I could, too.
And then I got access to the Cinematheque de Montagne film database by writing a pleading email and asking Claude to translate it into French. Which meant I suddenly had access to films like "El Gringo Eskiador" and "La Pente" — the holy grail of steep skiing featuring perhaps the most extraordinary ski descent ever captured on film.
Oh are those films treasure-troves of information!
And finally, via the good old Mount Baldy Ski Patrol, God Bless 'em, I found links to two demonstration videos by Vivian Bruchez, including an indoor demo of a turn based on the original pedal hop, conducted indoors, on a home-made, rubber-coated 45-degree ramp.
I could build that, I thought, hungrily eying that masterpiece of plywood and geometry. I could build that, and create my own steep-skiing laboratory.
And so I did.
Given that it is currently August and ski technique interest is likely at its nadir, I will refrain from giving an exhaustive list of everything I learned, but I think I've discovered why my best efforts to replicate the turn kept failing.
I've got to get on snow to validate things (I've been fooled a few too many times before to claim success prematurely), but I can tell you, on the ramp, I absolutely worked out a functional pedal turn, and identified the key mechanical challenges.
You can build one of these yourselves (if you've got room), but let me point out some key difficulties: first, a 4' x 4' ramp does not give you enough vertical space to truly replicate Vallencant's turn. Vallencant was absolutely a master at using gravity rather than force to execute his pivots; on the compressed vertical space of my ramp, it simply wasn't possible to perfectly duplicate his turn.
Moreover, thanks to that limited vertical space, and the fact that my 47-degree ramp transitioned rather abruptly to dead-bang horizontal ground, there was a constant threat of auguring my ski tips directly into the Earth. So be careful if you try this!
In hindsight it would have made sense to focus on replicating Vivian's Ramp Turn (which we know is functional in this context), but I was stubbornly focused on Vallencant/Baud, perhaps more so than was prudent.
Okay. If you've read this far, you probably want more than just a teaser, plus there's always the chance I'll get run over by a bus or something before I can validate everything on snow and make some instructional videos. So, here are some key learnings:
Vallencant's center of mass is shockingly quiet throughout the turn. There is zero x-axis movement, very little y-axis (vertical) gain, and very little z-axis (outward) movement. Crucially, he rotates everything—including his uphill foot/ski—around his center of mass, rather than the reverse.
That's the Ramp's signature lesson. I was trying to do the opposite—rotate my center of mass up and around my uphill foot, which forces you into all sorts of bad geometric compromises. In an extreme context, it's an understandable impulse. It feels necessary... but it just doesn't work.
All right, that's all I'm willing to give for now. If these ideas validate on snow, I will go full frickin' Andy-crazy this coming winter spilling all the beans and bringing this exquisite turn back to life. Until then, we'll all just have to be patient and keep our fingers crossed.
— August 21, 2025
Andy Lewicky is the author and creator of SierraDescents