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FEATURE New England In the Northeast, the rare sport of ski joring provides a weird, wild and wonderful escape from the winter doldrums. By JOSH FISCHEL Photos courtesy of THE NEW ENGLAND SK I JOR ING ASSOCIATION TO tell the story of ski joring in the United States is to tell a tale of adaptation. It is at once an inimitable sport and a flexible one. The Norwegians who invented it as a means of transport in the mid-19th-century—load up your horse or reindeer with cargo, slap on your skis, and get towed along behind—would hardly recognize the version common to a niche audience of American horse enthusiasts and the skiers who love them enough to want to slalom back and forth behind their mounts at speeds approaching 50 miles per hour. Domestically, ski joring is a cowboy sport: an exhibition of 84 W INTER 2013 U N TAC K E D skill, speed and derring-do. Forget driving one nobly forward; instead, there are ramps, jumps, and detachable rings and gates to challenge any skier game enough to negotiate a course, all while dodging the ice chunks being thrown in one's general direction by four galloping hooves. Ski joring's modern-day origins are western. Camp Hale in Leadville, Colo., was born out of necessity in 1941: for training the U.S. Army's 10th Mountain Division of infantrymen for winter survival and skiing before they headed off to the front lines in World War II. In the years after the war's end, many of the former-mil-