Riding a chair lift last month, I saw them on a skier below. Ten days later, I saw them again, this time at an area 2,000 miles away.

CADS…  Constant – force Articulated Dynamic Struts … the odd looking, butt-to-boots device designed to keep skiers with knee and other lower body strength and stamina issues on the slopes and skiing without pain. Twenty years ago, it was not unusual to see people wearing CADS. Two of my friends wouldn’t slide downhill without them. That was then. In recent years I hadn’t seen anyone on the slopes wearing them.

What happened?

No marketing. No advertising. No distributors, according to Walter Dandy who first imagined CADS in the 1980s while nursing a case of sore thighs riding up a chairlift at Heavenly Valley after a long run in heavy Sierra snow, he had the concept and the vision. In Tony Nespor, he found the engineer he needed to refine the parts for manufacture.

The idea was a simple one: ‘artificial strength’, a way to use upper body weight to stabilize the ski on the snow, like a suspension system in an automobile.  And that strength needs to be constant. The answer turned out to be a rubber spring that kept up the pressure steady on the skis. It meant less muscle fatigue, less knee strain, and less lower back strain. .

The pully-like devise looked strange: a rubber spring at the skier’s boot is attached to a string that runs up the back of the skiers legs where it is attached to a harness and waist belt.  At the end of a run, it is detached for the lift ride back up the hill. At the top it is then re-attached, which that can take as little at 11 seconds once the skier gets used to the process.

Sure CADS felt strange when first used. But as prominent ski writer Nicholas Howe wrote in Skiing Magazine, “The only strange part comes when the afternoon ends, and my legs feel as if it were still morning.”

Dandy had a prototype of “my contraption” ready to go in the spring of 1987. He approached K-2 but the ski manufacturer indicated it had no money to develop the devise. He then secured interest from George Gillette at Vail and then funding assistance from the ambassador Paul Nitze, an investment banker and  former chairman of the Aspen Ski Company. The first sale was to the Dave Gorsuch ski shop at Vail where CADS were introduced to the public.

The early feedback was very solid. “95% of the early people who tried CADS, bought them.” said Dandy.

Ed Blumstein was one of those. The Philadelphia attorney who vacationed at Vail was one of the early users. ” They made me a more comfortable skier.  CADS extended my skiing life 15 years.”

The early deal was that buyers would receive a box.  Boots and pants would be sent back to Dandy so the device could fitted then returned. There was a money back guarantee if the purchaser didn’t like the product.

Said Dandy: “Only a couple ever came back.”

By the mid-1990s, CADS were catching on not only at Vail and Beaver Creek but also with Izzy Slutsky and Karl Plattner at Hunter Mountain and nearby Windham in New York. Said Plattner at the time: “The two best things ever to happen to skiing were snowmaking and CADS.”

There was other positive feedback too. CADS were accepted early on by orthopedists at the noted Steadman-Hawkins Sports Medicine Foundation in Vail who endorsed the devise. Prominent ski journalists across the country wrote glowing articles. The 1964 Olympic slalom medalist Jimmy Heuga who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis skied on CADS when he could no longer walk unassisted.

So why with all the positive vibes when they were introduced are CADS not commonly seen on the slopes today?

They are still available to purchase. Today they cost $695 by mail with some assembly required.

‘We sell a handful a year.” says Handy, who still does demonstrations at his home in Vail.

And right now, that seems to be the future too. There is no distributor working the market and CADS hasn’t advertised in 25 years. Seeing the device at work on a slope these days, like I did recently, qualifies as a rare sighting. Handy estimates that there are a maximum of 1,000 people using them today.

What’s next for CADS?

Says Handy: “Maybe I should get in touch with Taylor Swift