Out in Nature

We're happier to see nature than nature is to see us. Some species have learned to coexist in either cute or menacing ways, but most wild animals will flee at our approach.

Wild animals work full time, finding things to eat and avoiding being eaten. Winter puts great strain on the ones who don't den up and sleep it away. I keep this in mind when considering whether to go for a bushwhack in the woods behind my house. No matter how much you try to communicate telepathically or speak in soothing tones to the deer, they're already running away before you get within 50 yards of them. In a hard winter, a few sprints can make the difference between between survival and death.

Around established ski trail networks, the deer herd has generally adapted to the more continuous presence of humans. In Wolfeboro, the herd even seems to have different levels of response on the urban forest end of the system in Sewall Woods, compared to the less built up surroundings of the Abenaki trails. But on a day off I am reluctant to drive all the way to town when I have so many other things to attend to around home. And my fuel budget is as precarious as every other aspect of of my finances. I budget for commuting and a few utilitarian errands, and depend quite a bit on the savings I gain from using a bike to commute in the seasons when the roads are clear and the daylight is sufficient to give me a moderate chance of being seen and avoided by the motoring majority.

Because yesterday was a lot like springtime, I felt okay about bothering the deer on my little trudge around the mountainside. The herd spends the late winter quite close to my house. There are evergreens for protection from the weather, and beech and oak trees for food. They scuffle up the fallen nuts and acorns, and bed down in the leaf litter. But they do range around, especially in a winter like this, when thin snow cover lets them get around easily.

I spotted the first flags of a small band retreating. They looked good: furry and fairly fat for the time of year. They bounded far enough to put some trees and terrain features between us.

I angled up through the old cut just off my back property line. The sapling hell is aging now, thinning itself. Half of the saplings I push against break off and fall because they died and rotted. It's still a dense thicket. I imagine it crawling with ticks when the weather warms up. But for now I can thread it on skis to make my way unobserved to the upper slopes.

With a temperature above 50 degrees (F), I could climb at a very steep angle. The stream was running, but not too full. The sticky snow allowed me to cross on a small log with a fringe of snow stuck to the top of it. I had no plans for an ambitious assault, just an hour of activity.

When I reached the clear cut near the illegal bear bait station, the sun was bright and the sky was a pure deep blue, accentuated by my polarized sunglasses. I decided to push further along the lower edge of the cut, rather than climb along the right margin. When the ground dropped away after a hundred yards or so, I let stayed on a level and slightly rising course across the major upward swaths of the cut, through bands of saplings that they had left behind, a legacy from much earlier logging.

I kept seeing the deer herd as they kept their distance from me. They looked alert  but not panicked. Tracks of their hooves showed their passage all over the area since the last snow. Interspersed were the tracks of coyotes. There was no sign that any deer had ended up as a meal. There were lots of smaller tracks as well, mostly melted out so badly that I could only guess by other circumstances what had made them. Lots of squirrels. At the base of an old beech, a big pile of porcupine poop.

I like skiing uphill as much as downhill. It's a different kind of challenge, finding a route that matches the terrain, vegetation, and snow type. Look closely at this picture to pick out my ascent line across the far side of the gully:

In mountain travel, the fastest route is not always the shortest route.

The snow obscures the ugliness of the logging operation that gouged the ground and left nasty snags of slash and debris. For some reason, the snow we have is firm enough to fill in quite a bit, despite its lack of depth. The thin cover allows for some practical jokes and slapstick comedy as various rocks and stumps poke through or sit just below the surface. I got hooked several times. It was not a day to aim steeply downhill and let 'em run. Even so, I was able to fit in a few enjoyable maneuvers here and there as I made my way back.

Clouds were already moving in from the west as I headed down. Some sort of storm is shaping up for the next couple of days. Precipitation includes rain and snow, proportions to be determined. If this is like most winters, March will come in like winter is trying to make up for lost time. In New England we get a lot of the fifth season: None of the Above. Winter will be over, and a raw, wet grayness will prevail for a couple of months until the bugs get good and thick.

Spring Preloaded

I hate it when spring skiing arrives in January. It's not really spring, it's just spring-like.

Real spring skiing is a compound of physical and emotional factors. Almost none of them are present in January.

In a winter that brings fairly consistent cold weather, a little January thaw is a nice respite. But when the average conditions are more like March throughout the winter the pieces don't come together for winter or spring. A cold winter will promote a deepening snow pack that then degrades gradually through the warming end of winter and early spring. At the same time, your own physiology as an outdoor explorer will have developed fitness and adapted to cold, so that you come into March feeling a deep sense of mastery.

New England is probably not the best place to look for this. What seemed so far north to me when I had experienced less of it seems more and more southerly the longer I study it. Most of us live south of the 45th Parallel. I can drive to it in a couple of hours, but I spend virtually all of my time below it. That means that we New Englanders live closer to the Equator than the North Pole. A good deal of Maine sticks up above the 45th, but it's the more sparsely settled part of the state. But somehow we got the reputation for being "snow country."

Elevation helps. None of our peaks have altitude, but they do have height above sea level, and above their surroundings. Mount Washington famously sticks up far enough to intercept some exciting weather, and lies in the path of common storm tracks. Other peaks a bit lower still exhibit some mountain weather. But, just as most of us live below the waistline of our hemisphere, so do most of us spend our time -- even ski time -- well below the peaks of our worn-down old mountains. Somehow we manage to cop a fair amount of snow in some winters. It shapes our feelings, positive and negative.

The changing climate doesn't help the New Englander hoping for a consistent winter. Cold tends to arrive less often now, and be less deep. This is not necessarily unwelcome, considering how deep and sustained cold can be, and how much that inhibits outdoor activities. Back when wool and fur were about as good as it got, people had a more practical attitude about going out. You did what you had to do, but the idea of going out and playing extensively in it arrived with the invention of winter tourism, around the early 20th Century. People would seek some diversions, but life in general in a rural area -- which most of the current play areas of New England were -- was strenuous enough to use up a lot of the energy that people of today might have to spare. A mild winter was easier on everyone who lived closer to a natural level of survival. You burn less fuel for warmth, and face less immediate hazard from cold-related injuries. It's just easier to live.

Because cross-country skiing has ancient practical roots, it feels -- to me -- closer to a natural winter activity. A couple of my best winters of skiing were between 1992 and 1994, when we had lots of snow and cold, and I had very little money. I would ski out into the woods around my house to gather wood to supplement my rapidly dwindling supply to heat what was a small house at the time. I got pretty good at skiing back to the house with a small dead pine tree balanced on my shoulder, or a bundle of smaller saplings under my arm. The snow base depth was at least a couple of feet. In the spring, the stumps I had cut right at the snow line stuck up to show how deep it had been. Those were years in which the sense of mastery and the relief at longer, warmer days were both well built by the hard work of the deep winter.

In other years with less desperate finances I made more recreational forays, still building that sense of strength and skill to get along with winter rather than fight it or hide from it.

A determined athletic person will do whatever works with the conditions as they come along. But any activity more geared to warmer conditions is just a tease when those conditions come along out of season. You know this isn't really the time. I used to ride my bike without much hesitation when thaws would ruin the skiing and, coincidentally, cleared the road sufficiently. Increasingly over time I began to notice how those rides failed to build lasting fitness for riding, while doing almost nothing to maintain the kind of fitness I needed for winter activities.

Spring skiing is a slow process of subtraction. It's done on decaying snow. If there isn't much snow to begin with, it doesn't last long in decay. The best skiing on warmer days is done on snow that arrived cold and hung around for a while. That never happens when every storm acts like one of the last before April. But January and February can never provide the bounty of dazzling sunlight that late March automatically receives. You have to keep some measure of your winter guard up as you use what you can of days that are still short.

Fat Bike Victory (?)

On Jan. 8, the Wolfeboro Select Board signed the policy governing fat bike use on the town portion of the cross-country ski trails. It allows fat bikes on a limited portion of the trails that are on town land, which is itself less than half of the total trail distance maintained and groomed by the Wolfeboro Cross Country Ski Association. It permits the use for one year, while the Wolfeboro Singletrack Alliance builds its own network of bike trails on the town property, which they have already been doing. The policy will be reviewed annually in the likely event that trail construction by WSA takes them longer than they expect.

For all that mountain biking has become solely the province of well-funded consumers, the riders who do it in what we have customarily viewed as bike season have been admirably industrious at hacking out their own trails on several parcels of land, governed by various use agreements. Some of the trails are really well engineered, while most of them are of the more ephemeral rake-and-ride variety. However they get there and stay there, the bike group has at least put in the effort to make landowner contact and construct their own facilities.

Winter presented them with a significant extra challenge. Snow bikes are totally dependent on packed surfaces. The minority who could and would afford to invest in an additional expensive bike almost exclusively for use during the two or three months in which we might get snow found themselves with few pre-packed options. Their covetous gaze fell upon the cross-country ski trails. To the riders, this looked like a selfish private preserve fenced off unfairly from their harmless, goofy fun.

The ski association and the bike riders agree that the riders will be served best by making their own trails to their own specifications, and grooming them to their own standards. And the riders would not have been denied if they had simply gone straight to the town in the first place and asked for permission to start enhancing their existing trails and adding new ones.

All of the ire and anxiety inflicted on the cross-country skiers was completely unnecessary, driven by the covetous incursion of a rogue handful of fat bikers. Such a demonstration would not have been needed if the riders had simply put together a proposal and gone to the recreation department directly.  It was just an act of youthful arrogance by some, merged with the midlife crisis of others, to act out in juvenile rebelliousness that stands in curious contrast to their posturing now about "economic benefits" and other mature-sounding rational arguments. They could have respected the cross-country ski association and made a separate, totally justifiable bid to have their wants accommodated at the town recreation facility on public land.

Proponents of fat biking in general make the comparison -- almost entirely incorrectly -- between the rise of fat biking on groomed Nordic trails, and the rise of snowboarding at downhill areas in the 1990s.

First off, alpine skiers and snowboarders are both lift-dependent sliders on snow. Throw fat bikes onto a downhill ski area, and then you might have a comparison. By the way, alpine skiers were none too fond of Telemark skiers back then, either. The rhythm of free-heel skiing, within the limits of the gear at the time, made our paths a bit more meandering that your locked-down, fully mechanized alpine skier would follow. We didn't gouge things up the way the one-plankers did, but we still got in the way of modern progress. Telemarkers cured the problem by turning their gear into what was essentially alpine skis and boots. Snowboarders cured their problem by simply becoming too numerous to ignore. Needing the money, downhill areas caved in and sold out. The snowboarders do have a negative effect on the snow surface, but downhill areas are such a mosh pit anyway that lift riders have learned not to care. It's just a theme park.

Proponents of the fat bike revolution tell the cross-country skiers that we will be fine, just as alpine skiers were fine. It's a nice way of saying that our time is up and we have to watch ourselves being replaced by this new thing that is really different from our thing, that requires all of the concessions from the skiers and none from the bike riders, until skiing finally dies out. This is the wave of the future. Resistance is useless.

It's a bit like deciding whether to go ahead and welcome the Panzer battalions, or let the invaders machine gun and shell a bunch of you first.

The promoters of fat biking around here are all people who can afford to sit and chat for hours in places where beer costs $6 a glass. Fat biking takes on the character of gentrification. Get all these cheap-ass poor and old people out of the way so that the people with the most toys can win. They talk about "attracting a younger demographic with more disposable income," by prioritizing mountain biking in all seasons.

Here's the thing about a younger demographic with disposable income: they get older. You look at the users of the cross-country ski trails, and a lot of them are really old. The exercise helps them stay fit, and they are able to enjoy some form of it from childhood all the way to their 60s, 70s, and 80s -- sometimes longer. How many people will be able to spend whatever is left of their disposable income on technical mountain biking when they're in their 60s and beyond? Who will replace them as they age out? And how will you get their useless carcasses out of your way to make room for the next bringers of disposable income?

In the 1980s and '90s, cross-country skiing and mountain biking weren't about the money, they were about accessible and affordable fun. Mountain biking is now neither. The riders who have evolved with it are insulated by their money and their obsession. Cross-country skiing has also become more artificial in the need for grooming and snow farming brought on by the wide variations in winter conditions. The outdoor generalist can still get by with a mix of relatively affordable equipment, but frugal people are terrible for the go-go economy.

As consumer culture flames out in its final frenzy, it threatens all that is simple and affordable. Human powered transportation and recreation would have provided tremendous benefits for those of us with lesser means, if we had acknowledged as a species how limited our means actually are. But we're still drunk with the excesses of more than a century of expanding resource exploitation, reinforced and amplified by our collective fantasy life playing out on screens large and small. What is the true cost of all that disposable income?

What's a metal edge for?

Is a metal edge for skating?

No.

For skating, you can assume the position and go through the motions on any ski, but it works best on skis designed for the purpose. They're narrow, somewhat shorter than a performance classic ski, and as light as possible. A metal edge makes the ski heavier, and distributes the weight toward the ends of the ski, making them more tiring to use in two ways.  They're also more prone to ice up when conditions favor it. If conditions are so hard that you want a metal edge, you probably don't want to be scampering around on really lightweight gear anyway. Firm conditions are not ice. Might it be nice to have a sharp and hard edge that you could activate when you need it? Yes. No one has come up with one yet. For now we settle for white knuckles and hard sintered base material.

Do you need a metal edge to make your ski turn?

No. Sort of. Here in New England, downhill skiers are used to being able to see -- and hear -- their skis almost all the time. Skis for this environment should almost have a serrated edge a lot of the time, let alone a metal one.

Do you need a metal edge to stop?

No. Sort of. See above.

The shape and flex of a ski are the two most important factors in how easily it will turn. A metal edge only comes into play when the trail surface is very hard. Even then, it's not a magical device that will give you instant control. Keep your speed down in hard and fast conditions. In deep snow, especially heavy snow like we get in New England a lot of the time, a metal edge does nothing for you. All of your control comes from the shape and flex of the ski. Does it bend easily to initiate a turn? Does it have enough sidecut to assume a nice curve when you tilt it toward its edge?

Sometimes, the snow is so dense that you have to jump up out of it to set the skis in the direction that you want them to turn.  Short, fat backcountry skis with a lot of shape are designed to stay near the surface on soft snow, and to flex and carve more easily than traditional heavy touring skis. The tradeoff is that you won't be able to stride as fast if you want to traverse gentler terrain as part of your trip.

Once, on an icy snow machine trail, I discovered that the sidecut of my metal edge backcountry skis actually made it harder to put a lot of edge onto the trail surface when skiing parallel. I had more control linking quick telemark turns with my skis flatter to the surface. The metal edge was definitely an asset, and the shape of the skis was a minor drawback.

My bolder and more often injured companions just let 'em rip down that chute. Control is only an issue if you care whether you have it.