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Steamboat Springs — There was a time, 50 years ago, when a young man or woman would resort to toiling in a strawberry patch in order to obtain a prized pair of wooden skis. Just ask Bill Davenport.

Davenport worked pulling weeds by hand in a berry patch one summer in the mid 1950s near Albany, N.Y. His plan was to earn enough money to buy his first pair of serious racing skis and take them back to prep school in Maine.

“They were Kastle World Cup skis. I took them up to school and on the first ride, I fell and broke the tips off the skis,” Davenport recalled. “I was 15, and I was crying. My coach sold me an old pair of Dynamics for $15, and I never lost a prep (school) race that season,” until the championship meet.

Davenport and his wife, Tildy, were in North Routt County visiting family last week and couldn’t resist stopping by the 10th Annual Wooden Ski Rendezvous at Columbine Cabins.

Leslie Lovejoy organizes this not-to-be-missed event every year for Friends of the Routt Backcountry, which is affiliated with the Colorado Mountain Club, which merged with the Backcountry Snowsports Alliance just a year ago. If that adds up to one too many organizations for your brain to handle, just think of them as the “Cult of the Wooden Ski.”

It’s a gathering of people who come to Columbine annually to take part in a ski race that likely will never become a part of the Winter Olympics. The Boil ’em Up Race requires competitors to stop in the middle of the event and extract a camping stove from their backpack.

The racers are not permitted to continue toward the finish line until they have lit the stove and used it to melt snow and boil it sufficiently to brew a cup of tea. I know a guy named Spillane who might be quick enough to win a silver medal in that event. But he was somewhere else Saturday.

Davenport didn’t race Saturday, either, but he was a topnotch junior competitor back in the 50s.

When he had saved up $75 from working in the berry patch, he took his fistful of bills down to Beaver Street in Albany, N.Y., and walked through the front door of Mo Engelbright’s. Mo’s was a specialty shop where a fella could buy bowling pins or a set of fine wooden European racing skis such as the pair of Kastles Davenport had his heart set on. Although the prized skis soon were broken, they never have been forgotten.

Bob Moore, of Morrison, also shared a few stories Saturday about learning to ski outside Trenton, N.J.

“I learned to ski down railroad embankments on barrel staves,” Moore said. And he wasn’t kidding.

“When I was in ninth grade, I went on a ski trip to Bromley in Vermont. I was 14 then, I’m 77 now,” Moore said. “I do an awful lot of backcountry Telemark skiing. The first time I came to this event I was on my regular tele skis, and I felt like an outcast.”

The former state director for the Bureau of Land Management in Colorado, Moore is a passionate advocate for quiet winter recreation.

When he made plans to again take part in the Wooden Ski Rendezvous this year, Moore vowed to show up with the proper equipment. No, not barrel staves.

Last week, he got a tip from a friend that there was a like-new pair of Asnes hickory cross-country skis in a secondhand shop in Idaho Springs. Made in Norway, they have lignostone (compressed beechwood) edges and are mounted with Rottefella bindings. They even came with a pair of vintage poles for $75.

Moore’s new boards were the envy of every wooden ski nerd in Columbine during the weekend.