UPDATE: More articles and better images have been added.
Originally published in November of 2014: Winter time means snow and ice for many folks. For people with jeeps, it means time to break out the skis, tow-rope and jeeps for some jeep-joring. Just mount yourself on some skis, tie the rope to the jeep, give a driver thumbs up and you’ll be jeep-joring behind a jeep like several generations before you. After all, how dangerous could it be?? **disclaimer: if you decide to do this and get hurt, this was not my idea. I’m only reporting it ….
Ski-Joring has been around for hundreds of years, though whether it started in Asia or in Europe is less clear.
When did jeep-joring begin? There’s evidence it was occurring as early as the winter of 1946-1947, in Ontario. These three articles suggest that the sport continued for at least seven years. The Violet Grafton image below made the rounds in a large number of papers.
Most of the Violet Grafton images were long and narrow, but this one was cropped differently:
January 29, 1948, issue of the Chicago Tribune. Violet Grafton from Greenwich, Connecticut, is pictured.
We kind of did that in the early 80s, but without the skis and tow rope. We just hung onto the rear bar and used our boots. We called it “bumper hopping”. A friend of a friend used to do it behind transit buses.
A friend of mine did this behind cars in Alaska in the early 1980s. One of his buddies (a teen at the time) was killed doing it around that time. I believe he swerved out behind the tow vehicle into a parked car.