Tahoe woman repurposes old skis into furniture
Marianne Rosenfeld makes wine holders similar to this one. Photo/LTN
By Cathie Anderson, Sacramento Bee
Up the hill at Placerville’s Snowline Hospice, employees know Marianne Rosenfeld as “The Ski Lady” because she picks up old skis that people donate to the nonprofit’s processing center and refashions them into chairs.
Rosenfeld hauls the skis farther up the mountain to South Lake Tahoe where, at some point in the future, they will have a date with her chop saw, she said. She likes to collect skis from the foothills and valley floor because she gets the right kind to make her four styles of chairs and benches.
“In Lake Tahoe, everybody skis. It’s the culture. It’s all we do, so in the minds of people up there, an old ski might be from ’98 or 2000. That’s old to us,” Rosenfeld said. “But people down here who don’t ski that much, when they say ‘old ski,’ they mean ’70s. When I come down here, I really get a lot of skis. The term ‘old’ is different for everybody.”
Rosenfeld prefers the older skis because their runners still have the straight edges rather than the curved, parabolic shape of today’s skis.