"You make it too hard to buy"

 When our shop was first approached to be the seasonal retail provider at Jackson Ski Touring, the executive director made a big point to tell us that we needed to bring the expertise to serve their distinguished clientele. He'd already built up our morale by telling us that we were no better than the foundation's third choice anyway, but the outfits they really wanted didn't want to play.

Coincidentally, our ski reps were advising us that we needed to boost cross-country skiing's image as more technical than people think. Get more detailed in ski fitting. Demonstrate that cross-country skis weren't something that you could get from a vending machine. This was driven partly by the fact that ski construction, especially for performance, fitness, and racing models was getting more technical, and partly just because the cross-country side of the industry was tired of getting sneered at by the much younger but massively more popular downhill segment.

Reps held in-store training clinics. Peltonen held a clinic at Great Glen Trails to go over the nuances of their line and compare it to the other industry leaders at the time. Their tech guy, Jussi, was delightfully blunt about some of the weird sidecuts being marketed to American rubes. Remember Fischer Skate Cut? Ha ha ha. Not even Fischer wants to remember Skate Cut. Skate Cut begat the Cruiser sidecut that they foisted onto tourists for a shamefully long time. It was utter bullshit, but marked part of that period's emphasis on making cross-country seem enticingly technical instead of just like walking with a shuffle.

Into this environment we stepped, with not only our own years of experience in touring, racing, and Telemark skiing, but newly trained in the meticulous process of fitting racing skis.

Racing skis are any skis intended for high intensity use on groomed surfaces. Most of them do not go to racers, because Nordic ski racing is an exhausting neurosis. I mean, you can do a race or two just to see how you do, but you aren't a real racer until you have a "quiver" and a wax kit the size of a suitcase. And you have to train obsessively.

Normal, balanced individuals who don't want to finish a grueling 50K plastered with frozen snot and vomit while sweating through a single layer of Lycra at -5 degrees F can enjoy hours of vigorous fun on their "racing" skis. They still benefit from relatively precise fitting, because the mechanisms of the motion are the same. The equipment has to work with them the same way as for the gaunt sufferer who double-poles an entire 30K classic race because it's the fastest way to both the finish line and early cardiac problems in your 40s.

So...squeezed between the contempt of the Jackson hierarchy and the exhortation of the reps to tech up our presentations, we started encouraging and answering customer questions, extending the sales process, but sending out skiers not only with gear that would serve them well, but with a little more understanding about what the skis, boots, bindings, and poles were doing for them that might not have been obvious.

There was a lot of sloppy misinformation going around, especially about the relatively new area of skating. Skating had been up and coming since the later 1980s, but advanced rapidly in the late 1990s, leading to a surge in retailers similar to -- but much smaller than -- the mountain bike boom that had just preceded it. Lots of profiteers were making things up as they went along, thinking they'd figured it out just by looking from a distance.

The Jackson brass, for all of their talk about wanting to see expertise from us, didn't mean care and concern in fitting skis to customers. They wanted to see high-volume efficiency at separating customers from cash, because they got a percentage of our gross on top of our base rent. Not only that, some of their luminaries got their feelings hurt when the Podunk idiots they'd hired to be their retail flunkies took them to technical school about the equipment. I was told that I made it too hard for people to buy. My answer was that I tried to make it impossible for people to buy stuff that wasn't going to meet their needs and desires. I wasn't just going to foster a misconception to pry money out of someone who would then perpetuate misinformation about the equipment and the sport.

Jackson managed to convey an image of being both welcoming and elitist at the same time. The two exist side by side in Big Nordic because the elites are very elitist, but they do welcome the dubs, because the dubs are more numerous. The dubs actually pay the bills. My sin was in trying to turn as many dubs as possible into more knowledgeable participants. I wasn't hired to help them. I was hired to process them. Take the money and move 'em along. I had come to realize that ski shops serve an important educational function, representing the sport in general, not just their own competitive interests. A shop might be the first point of contact between an interested beginner and anyone they perceive as knowing what they're talking about. I was not going to sell them something wrong, just for a quick sale.

"Wrong" is debatable, of course. Any customer's profile might be met by a range of options. I felt that telling the customer this and pulling them into the selection process would help them later, even if they had chosen an option that I had considered less optimal.

"They won't know the difference" is a common defense by the quick-sale crowd who feels no long-term responsibility to the activity in general. I always answer that they will notice the difference, even if they can't identify it. By trying to instill a little knowledge along with the sale, I hope to plant the germ of some analytical thought, so that the customer doesn't just say "skating sucks," or "cross-country skiing sucks," and drop it completely. Instead they might say, "hey, now I get what that nerd in the ski shop was trying to tell me," and they come back for the better option. At the very least they don't just quit.

Skis are sold in a gray area

 I was taught some careful fitting criteria for performance skis. Around the turn of the century, skate lengths had stabilized after the wild experiments of the late 1980s into the mid 1990s. Classic lengths had shrunk a bit along the way, but for performance skis still needed to be at or above 110 percent of height.

The relationship to height in performance classic is more to stride length and weight shift than just height per se. In a casual shuffle or a back-country plod, stride length isn't a factor. But if you want to move along smartly on a groomed or at least well-packed trail, you'll want a ski that tracks smoothly as you swing your legs through a longer arc. You want enough ski up front to support your weight shift down the axis of the track as you accelerate.

Skate skis use length in their own way. You might wish from one day to the next that your skating skis were shorter or longer, depending on the firmness of the snow and the steepness of the terrain. As the ill-fated Fischer Revolution taught us in the early 1990s, there's definitely such a thing as too short. However, not long before that, early skate-specific models had demonstrated that they can be too long, as well.

If you're six feet, four inches tall or taller, you'll do fine on a skate ski that's 200 centimeters. In the early years of skate-specific gear, you could get skis that long or longer.

Average trail width was a big factor in trimming ski lengths. Since skate skiing was only done on firmly groomed trails, a skier didn't need the flotation provided by the traditional skis of old. That fact, plus the narrow trails at most touring centers, led to the 147cm, "one size fits all" skating ski. It was never intended as a racing ski, only a convenient way to allow many skiers to fit the new technique into trails that had not yet been widened to facilitate it.

Racing skate ski lengths dropped down for a few seasons as manufacturers and skiers alike felt around for the right balance of length and stiffness. By early in the 21st Century, skate ski lengths had settled pretty close to where they are today. For adults, lengths range from 172-ish up to 190-ish.

According to guidance around the turn of the century from the Peltonen ski company, a venerable Finnish manufacturer, skating skis should fit between 106 and 110 percent of height to provide the optimum balance of maneuverability, propelling edge, and glide length. Taller skiers would end up getting stuck with skis that didn't hit that window, but they were already accustomed to fitting into our world of low doorframes and short beds.

Along with length came flex. The mid section of a skating ski pops in a similar way to a classical ski, but for a different purpose. A properly fitted skating ski never flattens out completely. That center section does not need to touch the snow and stop for a moment, the way a classical kick zone does. Instead, the skate camber absorbs energy as you put your weight on it and returns energy as you unweight it to shift to the other ski. The gap also interrupts the glide zone, which helps to expel free water in warm, moist conditions.

When a ski is properly fitted to weight, the skier can get a comfortable amount of glide zone onto the snow, with the pressure well distributed along it. Too stiff a ski means the glide zones are effectively farther from the foot, farther from where the weight is applied to the ski, and the rebound when you unweight will punch up. The action on and off of the ski might feel unstable and erratic. Too soft a ski can mean that the whole base contacts the snow. The pressure points in the glide zone will sit close to the foot, while tip and tail have too little pressure on them because the ski is being mooshed down in the middle.

The weight relationship is nowhere near as exacting as in performance classical, but there are limits. The same goes for height. You might do fine with skis that fall a centimeter or two outside of optimal, but go just one more and you feel like you're a mile out. Also, on softer snow you might really like the longer end of the fit range, while on hard, fast conditions you would prefer the shorter end. Too short in those conditions can be grippingly squirrelly.

The ski shop is a gray area. The person selling you skis wants to sell you skis. The better ones will start out with the goal of selling you skis that are perfectly dialed in, but once they look at the rack they will try to make a case for whatever they have on hand.

Twice now I have listened to the other salesman here fudge the numbers to sell a ski set to women looking for skate setups. In the first case, I had opened the sale and went to check on whether we could order her a dialed-in fit. The other salesman stepped in and did a fudge fit that will be usable, but could be a little bouncy and a hair short. He's also 6'2", so maybe misery loves company when it comes to never getting a 106- to 110-percent fit.

In the second case, the ski strikes me as way above range flexwise, although the height might be pretty good. There was a ski of identical length with a softer midflex number, that he didn't choose. I don't know whether price was the factor there or if the woman is a lot heavier than she looks. Weirdly, the weight range on the softer ski was listed as higher than on the stiffer ski, but the midflex (tested at the Fischer factory) was softer than the low end of the general range for the ski.

Scanning the almighty internet for guidance on what the real racers and race oriented shops are doing, I found a lot of conflicting information. Caldwell Sports seemed like a good honest broker. Their fitting criteria breezed over height and focused on weight. But racers tend to be conveniently height-weight proportionate. A certain weight more or less corresponds to a general height, so that height doesn't need separate and detailed scrutiny. Caldwell addressed it by referring to average builds among male and female skiers in different general weight ranges. So height is hidden in there, but they have that gray area in which to fudge a fit.

In an era when ski companies are telling us that we should be able to move our bindings up to three centimeters either way to get the perfect ride, they can't turn around and tell us that ski length overall doesn't matter. They still do, but don't just nod along. Try to part the fog a little to see where you are in their gray area.

Support Ukraine: buy some skis

 Assuming that Russian intelligence does not read my obscure drivel, I feel safe in making this observation: purchasing Fischer skis supports Ukraine in its ongoing war repelling the Russian invasion.

War since 1945 has been carefully compartmentalized, to the point where its artificial brutality becomes grossly obvious. The war in Ukraine is a great example of this. Drones and missiles rain down on population centers. Thousands die. In the meantime, somewhere in a less war-torn part of the embattled nation, an enormous factory churns out skis, hockey sticks, and other toys for the rest of the world to buy. 

Fischer has had a factory in Ukraine for years. Decades. Back in 2020, they had a devastating fire there, which drove their production out to other European nations, and to China. They had already been hit by the Covid-19 pandemic. Then came the Russian invasion. Somehow, nearly all of the Fischer skis we got this year have "made in Ukraine" labeling.

I don't know that Fischer particularly supports Ukrainian independence. As a big, multi-national corporation, they'll make a deal with whoever is in charge to keep the flow of consumer goods going. The snow doesn't know what flag flies over it. Business can be completely cynical, and it usually is. But for now, anything that brings money into Ukraine helps its economy as it funds its life-or-death defense against imperialist Russia.

Sliding versus plodding

 As our cross-country ski season shrivels under the attack of a rainstorm and some surges of warmth, the faithful still slide on what's left of continuous trail that we can groom. Out in the wild, skiers will continue to stride on whatever cover they can find, because sliding is easier than plodding.

Skiing began as transportation. In the areas where it sprang up, it answered the need for support in deeper snow, but also offered greater speed with less effort than walking, even when cover was thin. This is all still true. This is why we keep the touring center trails as smooth as possible, and guard the cover so fiercely. Walkers might be able to walk with little difficulty, but skiers could exploit the little bit of snow to flow smoothly. That's much harder when stompers have postholed it to oblivion.

Postholers remain a problem as the more masochistic among them continue to plod even when the snow gets deeper. They also give the fat bikers fits, I hear.

One winter in the early 1990s provided such meager snow that I only found skiing on the floodplain of a small river that flows through my neighborhood. Part of the floodplain was covered with smooth ice from an early winter flood and hard freeze. The ice supported the thin snowcover like a refrigerated ice rink. Away from the iced area, some animal trails were so smoothly tramped down that ribbons of snow snaked through the grasses, shrubs, and small trees. The animals had flattened the soil and mashed down the grasses. The snow lay on top of this. And the floodplain was a great habitat to explore anyway.

That floodplain is no longer accessible because a "shooting preserve" bought the acreage and posted it.

Not all snow is created equal. It doesn't all age well. This winter's snow had such similar weight and density that it tends to soften too much, too quickly, to provide a lot of spring skiing right nearby. The cover lasts longer when some of it arrived in deep, dense storms. We didn't get any of those.

The lake ice was thick this year for the first time in a while. On days when the overnight temperature was below freezing, but the ice surface thaws by late afternoon, it offers great skate skiing, although the flat surface can get a little tedious. It's still fun to slide around before the complete change of seasons puts us back on the ground, in our plain old shoes or riding a bike.

Where no skier has gone before, lately

 Untracked powder stretched before me. It's my own back yard, but a fresh snowfall makes it a new world. No one was going to break trail for me.

The storm had come on a Saturday night. It arrived later and left more quickly than the forecast had predicted, but left the maximum amount we'd been told we might expect. I'd cleared the the least amount necessary on Sunday morning to get out of the driveway and head to work. On Monday morning I had time to shovel away what was left around the house. It was light by New England standards, but heavier than airy fluff.

When I finally headed out, I made a wide sweep through pine woods, climbing very gradually, transitioning into hardwood forest as I went up. About 800 feet in from the road edge, the contour steepens all along this end of the small mountain range that forms the center of this end of town.

The town itself has no real center. It has little concentrations at various road junctions. The old town hall is about a mile from the Maine border, probably five miles in a straight line from the western corner of the town. Town House Road bisects the town, with the Green Mountain range filling the northern half, and a mixture of lower hills and glacial plain making up the southern half. It is mostly forested. A lot of it is wetland. It would be difficult to develop a lot of it because it's sensitive recharge area for the largest stratified drift aquifer in the state, and not well connected to transportation routes for heavy commercial loads. It's great.

When I moved here. the forest behind my house was relatively old growth pine and hardwood. From 1989 to 1998  I could bushwhack from my door to the other end of the range, about seven miles each way, and not see much sign of humans. Not recent ones, anyway. There were rock walls and some big stumps indicating that the forest had been cleared and regrown.

In 1998, an epic ice storm brought down the tops of many trees and dumped them into the formerly skiable spaces. The damage was widespread across thousands of square miles of the northeast USA and up into Canada. Around here, the damage was worst at about 800 feet above sea level and higher. While trees right down near my house at about 460 feet iced up and broke, the trees further up in what had been nice glades looked like they had been hit with a giant weed whacker.

A few years later, landowners on the big tracts above me started harvesting some timber. The clearings create unofficial ski trails, but they don't get maintained. New growth chokes them within a few years. By then, a lot of 1998 debris had cooked down, so a skier could climb and descend through the strips of older growth that the loggers had left.

New people have moved in. One built next to me at the back of the lot, pinching off what had been a leisurely line of ascent if I wanted to angle over toward a drainage with some steep lines through mostly pine and hemlock. On the other side, people who had a cabin in a hollow decided to put up a chateau on a plateau, bringing the threat of observation to what had been another set of great glades. They don't post their land, and seemed amenable to stealthy recreation (leave no trace), but I still feel awkward being seen.

Several years ago now, a landowner died who had kept his almost 200 acres undeveloped. His widow sold it to a strip-it-and-flip-it operation that mowed it almost completely, scraped off two lots on one of its pieces of road frontage, and left the scarred remains like a battlefield. I could ski up through it, but I really missed the comforting concealment of the old forest. And it's choked with briars and sweet fern now. The strips of older growth that they left were already bushy. Now they're almost impossible to connect. So my world keeps shrinking. But then so do my time and energy, it seems.

Last April, a heavy spring snowstorm really devastated the forest all over the area. A local logger rated it more damaging than 1998. Roads were blocked, power lines taken down, and lots and lots of trees bent and broke under the weight. That debris creates another giant obstacle course to negotiate.

Yesterday I only had an hour to poke around. The snow was like standing knee deep in baking soda. It didn't hold a steep climbing angle, but it held the skis firmly against gravity when I turned to descend. I grunted my way around and up to maybe 600 feet or a little higher before turning to trudge back down.

Because all of our snow this season has had very little moisture, there is no firm base. The last storm had a little more density, but still not a lot of structural strength. Supposedly it's a myth that the Inuit have 100 words for snow (or some similar amazing number), but I'll bet that they do have their own technical terms for all of the variations that different temperature and humidity can create.

The deer simulate ski lines as they follow each other through the glades. They also use my ski tracks if I get there first. Sometimes we see each other.

February is as winter as it gets. The upcoming week, beginning with Presidents Day weekend, is the sweet spot for likely winter conditions combined with noticeably increasing daylight. The days are still short enough to feel like winter, but offer a little more leeway for judgment errors and longer marches. And speaking of March, that bright and cheery month is the reward for putting up with the darkness, deep cold, and general drudgery of mundane necessities in winter. The chickadees are already singing their territorial song.

"I'm not hurting anything"

 Trail damage has been a continual problem for Nordic touring centers for years. In the end of the 1980s and early 1990s, the interlopers on our system in Wolfeboro were usually snowmobilers and ATVers, or local kids postholing in to their log forts where they might hang out, smoke, or drink. Sometimes they would make campfires. Most of the motorized destruction took place on the section of the trails that is mostly on town land. Most of the posthole stompers were in Sewall Woods, before it was named that.

Because Wolfeboro Cross-Country Ski Association maintained landowner contact, the association took responsibility for keeping the terms of the permission to just cross-country skiing and snowshoeing on the trails that the association cut and maintained. To offer the best product to skiers, the association kept up with advances in trail grooming technology. This benefited the local skiers as well as attracting skiers from the surrounding area and tourists from all of the usual places. As the grooming went from good to great to highly superior, the ski area became a reliable resource for skiers of all abilities, including the UNH ski team. Recently, the Harvard XC team stopped off to put in a day of training in Wolfeboro on their way to a longer weekend of it in Jackson. They had high praise for Wolfeboro's trail conditions.

Once what had been the Lakeview Nordic Trails became the Lakes Region Conservation Trust's Sewall Woods Preserve, the portion of the network on that convenient patch of woods was safe from the threat of development. But that sharply increased the level of year-round use and created a sense of entitlement among users who had no idea that they owe the very existence of the place to the decades of responsible work by the Wolfeboro Cross-Country Ski Association.

In addition to bare-booted stompers with their dogs (but apparently no bags available to take away the dog feces), cross-country ski areas in general have had to deal with the persistent pressure of fat bikers who bought their machines sort of assuming that they would be welcome wherever snow is packed down. Fat bike riders include many who have never cross-country skied, or who did so at a very rudimentary level, often on trails that were sketchily groomed if at all. Interestingly, some fat bike riders have also been performance skiers, but seem to forget as soon as they stick that saddle between their legs how much they appreciated pristine grooming and a nice track. We hear constantly about how you can barely see their tracks, as if that was the only problem with opening trails to machines that take up at least 31 inches of trail width all the time, and move to very different rhythms compared to skiers.

I recently posted critical things on social media and on my cycling blog regarding fat bikers poaching trail in Sewall Woods when the cover was thin and fragile. We were just trying to eke out a few kilometers for skiers who didn't like the more challenging terrain on our snowmaking loop. I referred to fat bikers as not only inconsiderately destructive, but as a needy and whiny demographic. Within a day, a fat biker had complained about that to upper management at the shop.

As luck would have it, the storm pattern shifted slightly in our favor. Snowfalls haven't been lavish, but cold temperatures meant that we got to keep what fell. The barely adequate covering got a little deeper each time. We're not running on a foot or two of durable base, but we've finally got a set track on more than 60 percent of the 30 kilometers we groom. So along comes a dog-walking stomper whose lovable mutts left brown cairns that the owner must have thought would make good auxiliary trail markers.

That fat biker messaged me a picture.

He said something about how I was bitching about a few fat bike tracks, and now...

Dude: a worse offense doesn't make the previous offense inoffensive. Both offenses are an insult to the groomer's efforts and show a profound lack of understanding of the aesthetics of performance skiing. Sure, we can maneuver around track damage. In a big race or on a big weekend there will be gouges and divots from heavy-footed skaters and various people's butt craters and face plants. At least those people were on skis, trying to do it. They weren't thumbing their noses at the signs, confident in the moral justification of their theft of services.

Yep. It's an actual crime. It can seem a bit strained when applied to a cross-country ski area that doesn't own the land, but the association built the trails, maintains them year-round, has steadily improved them over the years, and provides the grooming. It's not a free-for-all where any user can drop in and enjoy trails magically groomed by fairies. 

The "cheap" low-snow Gator grooming machine cost probably ten grand. A really nice PistenBully 100 costs anywhere from $60,000 for a used one to north of $100,000 for a new one. And then there's the 3-6 hours the groomer puts in nearly every morning from three or four a.m. until it's done. Then he's off to his day job for eight hours. Reward him with a few tire tracks or stomping footprints and a frozen dog turd. Aren't you special?

The Wolfeboro Cross-Country Ski Association may not survive its founders. They're getting older and tireder, and younger generations don't seem to have the same drive to operate organizations like it. A lot of factors contribute. When it's gone, it will be gone for good. The large expanses of land will remain, and some grooming might get done. So everyone can jump in there and throw elbows to defend their space at any given time. Just be patient. You won't have anyone to complain to, but no one will be telling you how to behave, either. Just don't bother to bring your fast skis. That will be done and gone.

Fake it until you break it

 My opportunities to ski classical on performance equipment have been very limited for a couple of years. Last season I got out a few times on our snowmaking loop. At least once ( I think it was more) I was testing various klister combinations to see if I could get that perfect catch-and-release of fast classical skiing. I never did.

On the sales floor, I will often describe and demonstrate some of the differences between a comfortable touring shuffle and a precise technical stride as I lay out the options for a customer trying to pick out their next ski set. But sliding on snow cannot be simulated on dry land. One move flows into the next. You can freeze a frame at a time, but the action on snow must proceed without breaks between one phase and the next.

Walking or running might seem to flow in the same way, but you can usually stop and start again at any time. Skate skiing is easier to interrupt and resume, because each ski does not have to stop for a precise instant. If you stop at some random point and just glide, you can resume skating just by angling your skis properly and digging in. But in performance classical you need to be right on top of the kick zone of one ski at a time, and punch it down at the precise instant that it passes under you. At the same instant, your other ski is sliding through and out in front of you. Your weight has to go completely from the stopped ski to the sliding ski in that moment.

A properly fitted performance classic ski will have a camber stiff enough to allow you to glide with all of your weight on one ski, only sticking the kick zone when you unload the muscles on that side of your body, from just above the hip all the way down through the foot. It's something that you never do while walking or running. It is completely unique to performance classical skiing.

Touring on a nice soft ski demands none of this. You can drive the hip to get a little more oomph out of your stride, but you don't have to. You probably don't even want to, because it takes way more effort to drive a soft ski faster than it was meant to go.

Each style of skiing has its place. I was doing a lot of classical skiing on my exploring skis, using their secure climbing and easy turning to poke around in the woods with no particular need for a trail as such. With deep enough snow, I can take the same setup to trails and glades on the other end of the home mountain range, to link a few more turns. It's still not full-on single-camber turn hunting. None of that helps a lot when I finally get onto a well set track and try to use sportier skis.

As this season developed, conditions allowed for a little more reasonable kick waxing. But I had to reassemble all the broken pieces of the stride. You have to become aware of them individually before you can forget about them again.

To complicate matters, advancing through my late 60s, I have to deal with the losses of age. Genetics and regular conditioning can only do so much. You will lose strength, and some coordination. Joints aren't as smooth as they used to be. Adjust accordingly. My average coffee consumption is probably a little higher than optimal, but even without that an older athlete needs to pay attention to the hardworking heart. I wax a little longer.

While I was wobbling around like a puppet I also thought about how ski machines like the Nordic Trak were bad for technique. They worked the same large muscles through the same general motions, but completely lacked the nuance of kick timing, or an accurate simulation of the way you apply force through the poles. And resistance was increased through the skis themselves, and the rope system to which the hand grips were attached. This is not how skiing in the real world gets harder or easier. On snow, the resistance to the skis changes very little, usually based on hardness or softness of the snow. Exertion goes up or down as the skier moves body mass up or down, climbing, cruising on the level, or descending. You'd do as well running stairs to train for climbing on skis.

The storm pattern has favored getting and keeping snow for the past two or three storms. February and March usually bring whatever larger storms we get around here. Nothing is usual in the climate as it changes, but when the Arctic airmass shifts our way we can still get some of the weather that we used to take for granted. Cover may improve on the whole groomed system for a while.