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.

Oops, what happened to 2024?

 Somehow, January through March of 2024 managed to slip past unrecorded. We had almost no natural cross-country ski conditions. Mostly, I hiked. For a couple of weeks, we had usable cover on our snowmaking loop. That melted out by late March. Then we had a devastating heavy snowstorm in early April, that choked the trails with fallen trees and branches.

The snowmaking loop was a precious resource. It's tedious, going around the same scant kilometer over and over, but it's still a lot better than using an indoor machine. For a few days we even had enough cover to venture beyond it, but that went away. In the brief time that we had the snowmaking loop, we had some ferocious winds that covered our fragile track with twigs and pine cones. I don't mean just a few. I mean a dense minefield of grabby hazards underfoot.

Last year was the first year for snowmaking at Wolfeboro Cross-Country. The crew responsible for operating the system also covers the local rope tow hill under a different jurisdiction. Of course cross-country was the lower priority. And then, so they told us, humidity conditions weren't favorable, even when the air was cold. The net result was that we had no trails to offer the public during any of the high-earning periods of the season. This winter was supposed to be better, but they've spent every brief cold spell so far on snow for the rope tow hill. Maybe things will get better...

Snow cover so far in this early phase of winter 2024-'25 is inadequate to open trails in Wolfeboro, but I had enough to ski around the woods at my house today. Nothing in the world feels like cross-country skiing. We'll see what the rest of winter brings after tonight's rain.

Ski Machines

Two or three people within a week or two have mentioned on the sales floor that they are unfamiliar with skiing, but have used the Nordic Track indoor exercise machine. More than 30 years ago, American Olympic skier Bill Koch endorsed it as a great trainer for the preseason. The company itself no longer makes them at all. They make treadmills, ellipticals, exercise bikes, and rowers, but no cross-country ski simulator.

I still have one, folded up in the crawl space. Dutifully, I put in many hours on it to prepare each year for the coming of real ski conditions outdoors. Mind you, I never put in even an entire hour in one session, because the Nordic Track is without question the most tedious exercise simulator ever devised. I used to say that it was all of the work and none of the reward, which is true. Worse than that, though, the way it uses the muscles and shifts the effort from one side to the other is so different from actual skiing that the muscle memory will probably actually inhibit a beginning skier's progress if they really want to learn to stride on a medium to high performance ski.

One customer sounded like he was trying to teach himself, sliding around on his new skis, trying to make it feel like the Nordic Track. Note: if your skiing feels like the Nordic Track, you're doing it wrong. The machine is confined and constrained. Real skis in the real world are free, and sometimes unruly.

Cross-country skiing didn't start out as exercise, it started out as a way to get from place to place. Exercise was incidental. Skiers would put forth as much effort as necessary. If you're chasing game, or being chased by someone you pissed off, maybe you'd get the ol' heart rate up there in the red zone, but as a practical matter, skiers use terrain to their advantage as much as possible. What goes up gets to come down. On snowshoes, you'd be plodding either way. On skis you get to glide.

On the Nordic Track you do not get to glide. That crucial difference is the subtle impediment to actual skiing based on what your body memorized in your dutiful plod on the machine. You can set the resistance so that the flywheel spins, but then you aren't working as hard, burning calories and breaking down muscle so that it will rebuild itself stronger. If you design a program or even make the minor effort to mix things up, you might vary the resistance from one session to the next, or within the course of a single session. Even so, the glide phase of a low resistance session isn't anything like a real glide phase when you have to balance on a sliding ski.

A fully developed classical stride has distinct segments that occur in seamless succession. Dig around in the archives for more detail on getting the most out of your classical technique. 

Well this is some crap

 After a brief cameo by the legendary polar power of old, winter has reverted to its mediocre slouch. No one was happy to see the frigid blast arrive, since it chased all but the most foolhardy intrepid indoors for the two days of its reign. Before the frigid interlude, we'd gotten a couple of storms that put enough cover on the Wolfeboro trail system to open virtually all of it. But even that was a mixed blessing.

Three storms arrived between January 19 and January 25. The first two brought mostly snow: five or six inches in the first one, and about 14 in the second one. Those covered the trails, but the ground was not frozen. Streams were still fat with rainwater, and all normal wet areas were at their wettest. The groomer had to maneuver around the mud traps. And then the third storm brought a few inches of snow, ending as rain and freezing rain.

Often, a little bit of freezing rain can put a protective shell over the snow beneath, so that plain rain at the end of a storm runs off without soaking in. This time, however, the freezing rain and plain rain overlapped enough to create a thick crust that set up during the series of sub-freezing nights that followed that third storm. The big groomer could till the trail surface, but that compresses and wears away the snow. Snow loss continues from skier traffic and days above freezing. The sun isn't very strong yet, but it is getting stronger. When the average temperature is trending above freezing already, the sun doesn't need to be blazing to make bare spots get bigger as the dark ground absorbs heat.

Off of the groomed trails, the crust hinders all travel. Snowshoes snag on the surface as they break through to varying depths with every stride. In many areas, the snow beneath the crust is powdery or loose granular, but just a stride away it might but frozen solidly a couple of inches deeper. On skis, the crust breaks, but the snow beneath provides no grip. I haven't been able to try it on a skin ski yet, because we have no demos of those, but you couldn't find a grip wax that could deal with the range of textures, and a scale base gets nowhere on the surface of the crust or in the unconsolidated snow beneath it.

Well-traveled trails may be packed down to a firm -- or at least consolidated -- surface for hiking. I haven't had a chance to examine any of them. The trade routes are usually as firm as concrete by this time in an average season.

The weather for the coming week offers us a half-inch tonight and a half-inch on Thursday night, well mixed with rain. Every daytime high goes well above freezing. Our trail system is still holding up, but the little caution areas become less little and more numerous.

We have to hope that we retain enough continuous skiing to entice a few Massachusetts vacationers to spend some time on our trails during the notorious school vacation week that begins with Presidents Day Weekend. After that, no matter how good the conditions might be, interest drops right off as a winter weary general population looks toward spring. Winter doesn't have to have been particularly harsh or long for most people to be tired of it by the beginning of March. This includes casual recreational skiers.

As spring warmth arrives, the off-trail snow might transform briefly into something usable before it shrivels away to nothing. And as usual, the higher terrain of the White Mountains will have more snow and present more opportunities to anyone who can manage to get there while it lasts.