Story images courtesy of Peter Steltzner

Rabbits were pouring through the roof. Dozens of babies, like hailstones of hairless pitbulls. Sometimes an adult would fall through, too, making a great whumph as it landed on the wood shavings below. The rabbit population in Peter Steltzner’s Montreuil workshop, in eastern Paris, was out of control.

It had started with one rabbit, a gift for Steltzner’s daughter from a well-intentioned friend, presented in a Chanel perfume bag. The rabbit began to eat everything in sight: cables, the speaker, the furniture. To minimize damage, Steltzner put the rabbit in the eaves, but then he was worried it might be lonely, so he got it a mate. Unchecked, the pair began a rabbit dynasty in the roof insulation akin to “Watership Down,” a dynasty which would one day rain its young onto the head of the carpenter as he worked. Their population quickly numbered in the hundreds and their weight was breaking the ceiling. But this deluge of rabbits gave Steltzner a name for his new venture of hand-crafting wooden skis: Rabbit on the Roof.

It’s snowing when I visit Steltzner’s current workshop in Les Praz de Chamonix, in the French Alps. It takes me 40 minutes, trudging through slush and ice, to reach his shop from the town center. A snow-covered vardo and pine-covered mountains, dusted in white like sugared icing on a cake, frame the workshop like a scene from a fairytale.

Steltzner and his partner, Anati Graetz, moved into this former sawmill 16 years ago. Not only was the rent half of what they’d paid in Paris, but rats had joined the rabbit population there—one mammal too far. In 2015, an unexplained fire burned the sawmill to the ground, along with a year’s worth of handcrafted skis and all of their possessions. The town rallied around the couple to help them rebuild, but they’re still paying off debts 11 years later.

Steltzner started out in fashion photography, but found it “too cutthroat” with “not enough dust.”

Steltzner grew up in Sausalito, California, a quaint, touristy town that was once a fishing village just across the bay from San Francisco. At age 12, he joined a community ski club that ran trips to Lake Tahoe, a 3-½ hour drive away (that’s “close for the States,” Steltzner says). With the invincibility of youth, he and his classmates immediately began launching themselves down the steepest and most difficult slopes. When he became too old for the ski club, he’d drive to the mountains himself, just for the day, a 7-hour round trip.

A year abroad at university, in Aix-en-Provence, helped Steltzner earn a degree in French—with side studies in ceramics. Back home in California, he met and fell in love with a French woman, now his ex-wife, with whom he has two children, and they moved to Paris. There, Steltzner began working in fashion photography, but found it “too cutthroat” with “not enough dust.” So he set up a carpentry studio and began making mosaic furniture covered with pieces of broken tiles.

Paris is a good 6-hour drive from the Alps, and for many years, Steltzner’s feet didn’t touch snow. When he began skiing again, he turned to “freeride”—skiing ungroomed terrain, often outside the resorts. It helped him to feel closer to nature, he says. If he could make furniture, he thought, why couldn’t he make his own freeride skis?

His training process: trial and error. He’d learned woodworking techniques from other carpenters, but Steltzner didn’t know anyone else making wooden skis. After studying hipster ski magazines for design information and dimensions, he started experimenting with different types of wood: ebony, palm wood, walnut, cherry, and oak. The core of his skis is usually made from ash, but his clients typically choose (with plenty of advice from Steltzner) the finishing wood—the layer that forms the top and marks a ski’s distinctive design. He makes only 45 to 60 pairs per year, each pair tailored to the buyer.

“I take their build into account. A petite woman won’t use the same skis as a tall, broad man,” Steltzner says. “But I also factor in the conditions they’ll be skiing in—will it be majority powder [fresh, deep snow], or ski touring [hiking up mountains with skis on, then skiing down again], or will they be staying on-piste [groomed trails]?”

Steltzner finds that a wooden ski core, which breathes, moves, and responds to temperature changes and varying water levels in the snow, is particularly good for freeriding, because freeriders encounter such a broad range of snow conditions.

This is traditional ski-making, but at the same time, it’s very modern in the sense that I use composite materials,” says Steltzner.

He begins work on a pair of skis by choosing the best part of a log for the ski’s core, cutting the log down to size, straightening it, and planing it to create the flex patterns for each different ski. Next, he prepares the finishing woods, which are so thinly sliced they can be as little as 2mm thick. Then he cuts out the base material, which is made from a medium-density particle board, on jigs. The base is fixed to the edges with a string of little clamps, which gives the ski its final form. When the various elements are in place, Steltzner presses and glues them up in a membrane press, using resin mixed with a catalyst to bind the layers together. Finally, he sands and polishes the skis, applies a finishing coat of oil, grinds the bases to flatten them, and files the edges until they’re sharp. Mounting the bindings (the mechanism the boot clips into) gets outsourced to trusted local ski shops.

“This is traditional ski-making, but at the same time, it’s very modern in the sense that I use composite materials,” says Steltzner. “It’s also mechanical, because you have to think about what the skis are actually going to be doing, like when making a bow or an instrument.”

Each pair of skis Steltzner makes is unique. His prices start at €1,800 per pair (about $2,122 USD), and increase depending on the extra details the customer wants. (Those extras include engraving with designs that reflect the skier’s personality or relationship with the sport.) Looking around the workshop, I see skis emblazoned with musical notes for a cellist, and edelweiss for an alpine local. There’s a pair marked with “Papu” in homage to the future owner’s grandfather. Sometimes no embellishment is needed because the wood creates its own natural patterns, with whorls like eyes watching their user.

“Finishing wood is beautiful,” says Steltzner. “Sometimes it looks topographical, like a mountain map, sometimes it looks like water.”

Nothing goes to waste. When a woodworker and antique dealer supplied Steltzner with heaps of lumber that had been ravaged by woodworm, he created pockmarked skis, using the scars as an intentional design element. Steltzner also gives most of the wood shavings to local mushroom farmers, using the rest for compost.

In an odd coincidence, that antique dealer with the woodwormed lumber also owned hundreds of carved wooden rabbits. Steltzner took them all, and although many ‘perished’ in the aforementioned fire, the survivors peek out from between skis all over the workshop—a replacement for the flesh-and-blood Leporidae army that once invaded his Paris studio.

“I gave all the rabbits away when we left Paris,” says Steltzner. “There were hundreds of them, and they were so calm and trusting, I could just pick them up. We knew lots of families with kids in the area, so they all had happy endings.”