Spring skiing in the beginning of a drought

 

 The only picture comes from one of my outdoor cameras as I set out.

Yesterday I went out into the big clear cut on the mountainside behind my house. Logging at different times has made access tricky, especially on skis, because saplings have choked the hillside close above my property line. In old growth -- or what passes for old growth around here -- a skier can pick a line to suit the snow texture. Some snow holds a better climbing angle. Add a dense thicket to the contours, and a skier has to thread the tangle as well as managing traction.

To complicate my routefinding, I have to cross a stream. In recent years it has flowed all year, because so many trees have been removed on the slopes of its watershed. Without vegetation taking up water, more of it flows into the channel. Even when it was more distinctly seasonal, the channel was well defined and rocky.

In my early years here, I could traverse up along the bank of the stream to where it dwindled to a damp indentation, but the landowner on that side has built a larger house and is there more often. They've never minded explorers, and haven't posted their land, but I always hate to be seen. I look for crossings that would be harder to observe. I don't mind respectful exploration of my own little patch, but it always gives me a bit of a jolt when I see the very rare signs of it. And if I see disrespectful incursion I don't take it well at all.

My preferred crossing has required threading one sapling hell that dates to the late 1990s. As the stand thins itself, I can break off dead saplings to enhance gaps. It's not bad for ascent, but too tight for a fast, flowing descent. Above the saplings is a big area of mature hemlock and other conifers. The snow cover is always thinner under the dense boughs of the evergreens, but they also shade out any undergrowth. The slope is mostly not steep. Various crossings work, usually with one wide step across the stream. Approaching the stream it often looks like the snow lies across it unbroken. Then you get to the edge and see the deep little cut where the water flows.

Aside from the few little storms we've gotten in the past month and a half, we're in a near drought. The lack of snow cover is going to have a seriously bad effect on ground water when everything thaws out. While a late big snowstorm often does less for skiing than you might think, snow is always better than rain for replenishing groundwater. March and the beginning of April can deliver some heavy snows, even after an otherwise lackluster winter. Or it could be like last year, and the whole thing just ends in brown dryness.

Yesterday, approaching the stream not far into the hemlock zone, it looked like the snow covered the stream completely. Based on long experience, I didn't believe it, so I bypassed the first crossing to go further up to where the far bank was a bit less tricky to climb. Looking back, though, I saw that the snow did indeed completely cover the watercourse. Since keeping the skis dry is always a good idea, I went for the sealed crossing and tackled the bushwhack on the other side as a better option than dealing with even the meager flow at a higher crossing.

I don't mind doing some ridiculous bushwhacking on skis. It's one major reason that I ski alone. No one else should be expected to put up with my taste for inconvenience, and hardly anyone wants or needs to learn how to do it. It still beats snowshoeing, though. Skis are long, but skinny. I can squeeze through spaces on skis that would be much more awkward with snowshoes.

I should have taken pictures, but I wanted to keep moving. The logger who stripped the acreage I was going into has been engaged in a long process with the town to try to subdivide two house lots and fill a wetland to get access to them off of a dirt road at the far end of the parcel. I wanted to see if I could get to the back side of those lots, just to check out how they relate to the rest of the piece. I've been bushwhacking around up there for 32 years. It looks some different without the trees.

The snow is not deep, but it's very dense. That's why it covered the stream. The fact that the stream is barely flowing allowed the snow to hold. Out on the mountainside, snow texture varied with exposure to the sun. For a south-facing slope it was still surprisingly well covered. But the surface varied from deep mush to slick crust. The snow was undermined in places, and they weren't always obvious. In fact, they were seldom obvious. Going up this just meant that I had to watch my traction and set edges carefully. Heading down, it meant that the skis could slow and stop abruptly when they suddenly dropped into unsupported snow. This was in addition to the stumps of various sizes, and granite reefs barely concealed until I planted a ski on them.

Heading out I traversed to my left and climbed gradually. This gained me more elevation than I needed, but I'd forgotten my topo map, so I didn't realize that I was above the maintained portion of the dirt road until I got home and checked. All I knew while I was out there was that I ran out of time before encountering the road or any survey markers. The terrain is marked by several deep furrows, steep, but not deep ravines that go all the way to the base of the mountain. I left the clearcut and entered old growth again as I made my way across these. In that area I made my turn to head back down.

With deeper snow I might have taken a few turn runs on the way back, but not on the unreliable surface yesterday. Under the old trees,the snow was still frozen. It was no place for smooth carving, and not worth the trouble of jump turns. I angled back out on a contour to hold elevation until I got back to the open slopes.

The return trip took an hour of careful maneuvering. A few places allowed for a couple or three turns, but the obstacles included the kind of little sapling stub that can impale you if you slam any part of yourself into it, whether it's your butt or your face. Not only do I have no health insurance, I have no one to come looking for me, and no desire to go into a facility where sick people gather. I'm way into not getting injured.

The next several days are going to be quite warm, pushing 60F one day (15.5C). That will melt off the cover. The forecast holds no precipitation, though.

"I thought skis were shorter now."

 Coming out of the 1980s, people complained that cross-country skis were too long, so in the early 1990s the industry came up with compact touring skis: a simplified, weight-based fitting system.

"Now skiers, fitted by body weight instead of height to shorter, wider skis, will get to use much shorter skis than before, that will be easier to maneuver."

And the renting public said, "Oh yeah? Hold my beer, chips, Twinkies, soda, doughnuts, and super-sized burgers, and watch this."

With the surge of interest brought by the pandemic, we're seeing a lot more renters than in previous years, but the trend toward stockier short people had already been developing.

I don't care about anyone's weight except as it relates to ski size. You do you, it's all good, etc. The challenge -- not to call it a problem -- is that fitting cross-country skis is not as simple as it seems. Why were they ever the length they were, and how can they be shorter now?

Skipping most of the technicalities, a cross-country ski of any length needs to be able to grip the snow momentarily on every stride, and then slide relatively freely, so the skier can shuffle along. The shorter the moment of grip, the better the potential glide, but only if the skier can stick the grip zone of the ski at the right time. So touring skis are already made pretty soft, to assure grip at the expense of glide.

The industry, clinging to old design parameters and concepts of glide, built grip zones into the compact skis designed to support wider and heavier weight ranges, to preserve that notion of free-floating forward motion. But most tourists, especially novices on rental equipment, don't need or want a fast ski. There are exceptions, of course. If someone hopes to have a little more excitement and less plodding, they'll need to pay more attention to precise fitting.

Ski length matters. If it didn't, no one would have bothered to invent compact skis. So if your weight puts you solidly in the bracket for a long compact ski, even though you are not tall, you could end up on something near traditional length. To counteract this, the industry would need to offer multiple flexes in each length, as they do with top-end racing skis, where competitors demand precise fitting. Since they don't, whoever fits your rentals has to decide whether to match your height or your weight more closely. Since secure grip and easy maneuverability are especially important to beginner skiers, a short but heavy skier is likely to get skis that don't pop right up and fly.

Anything propelled by the human engine has to be fitted to the specific operator. This is true of skis, bikes, kayaks, you name it. You can approximate it to a large extent, but the more a person tries to use a piece of equipment the more they will notice how far the approximation missed the mark. Skis are especially tricky because of that grip and glide balance.

2-inch winter

One thing I noticed when I moved here to New Hampshire in the late 1980s was that a little bit of snow really hangs around. The low sun angle from November into February keeps it from sizzling away thin cover the way it does further south. That, combined with trees and the shadows of the mountains themselves work together to help snow accumulate a little at a time. All you need is fairly consistent cold, dry weather between snowstorms. Warm wetness will destroy everything, as we saw when the early December delivery of three feet or more in places was obliterated by a hot downpour on Christmas.

Following the Christmas debacle, we settled into a series of small storms and long dry spells, with very little wet precipitation. The storm before last brought heavy sleet, which has a lot of body and helps fortify any additional snow that follows. It also creates a shear layer to increase the avalanche hazard on steep and open slopes, but at lower angles and elevations, on slopes stabilized by well-grown trees, the crusty and granular layer merely presents interesting footing.

For those of us who just poke around in the woods and don't make it out to the gnarlier and more video-worthy venues, the snow has added up a couple of inches at a time to a fairly usable depth. Given the sleet layer, I wouldn't let things rip on my long, skinny traditional skis, but on something wider that will turn in the powder and float above the crust you might find some sporty diversion in obscure glades and recent clearcuts.

Temperature swings are a problem. Last night we had a solid four inches of delightful powder. Today's high temperature surpassed 40 degrees (F) (4.4C) with some direct sun. We're knocking on the door of March here, although one day of February is like seven days in any other month. The sun is up higher, for longer. There's a reason that meteorologists consider March part of spring, and you really notice it once you start trying to use snow rather than just curse and shovel it. Even so, with the right conditions a modest depth of 2+2+2+2+2 with maybe a three and a five tucked in there somewhere can last quite a while where it hasn't been groomed.

The 2-inch winter has not been kind to groomed cross-country areas. In New Hampshire, the X-C areas are spread out far enough to have micro climates all their own, as well as getting hit -- or not -- by banding snows from storms that skim over a wide area and hose down a limited one. Wherever the ski area, grooming does wear away the snow, on top of whatever is naturally lost to thawing. Skier traffic shaves it down, and tilling cuts into what's left. Once the snow is too thin for the tiller to scrape up anything without hitting the dirt under it, you're left to depend on natural softening -- also reducing the snow day by day -- until there's nothing.

Ungroomed snow lasts longer, as long as the traffic isn't too heavy. A popular hiking trail will get packed down to something like porcelain, possibly pocked with postholes in places. But open woods that allow for bushwhacking, or unpopular trails that haven't been trampled will age better. It's a good time to practice those archaic map and compass skills, or other backwoods techniques of dead reckoning. On familiar terrain you can do it all by landmarks.

The massive clear cut on the mountainside behind my house has taken some of the fun out of going there, because you can see so far. I also feel very exposed and visible out there now. And it attracts motorheads. I don't really want to run into anyone when I'm out, but my least favorite is someone on a machine. That's why I don't ski on snow machine trails. If I stumble on a snow machine trail when I'm bushwhacking, I do my best either to cross it and vanish or find a way to go parallel if I happen to want to go in the direction that it does. The open logged area does offer some steep ski lines that used to be much more challenging when I had to dodge trees, but the rough ground still needs a lot of snow to fill it in enough to do more than pick your way cautiously. I wouldn't even go look on a sticky, sunny day with meager base depth.

March can bring some big snows, but the warmer, wetter consistency and stronger sun can make late-arriving large additions to shallow snow more of a hindrance than a gift. Sometimes a March storm can bring deep powder. You still need to pay attention to the temperature. One year I went out the morning after a March storm brought at least a foot of powder, and shredded a few glades until about noon. I got to the bottom of a run and noticed that spring had arrived in the last five minutes. I traversed out through the powder now turned to wet cement, and merged with the trail to get back down to my car.

"You'd think three feet of snow would do it."

 A customer discussing the current trail conditions began by saying, "I figured we were all set." He went on to say, "You'd think three feet of snow would do it."

You would only think that if you either hadn't been living in New England for very long, or hadn't been paying close attention for many years.

I moved here as an eager addict of winter mountain exploration. Summers were nice, but the real interest lay in the months governed by snow and ice. Having only lived in New England for three years of my childhood, in the mid 1960s, I had the usual outsider's impression that the place was close kin to the Arctic. The New England ski industry does its best to foster that illusion. Centuries of legend dating back to a period known as the Little Ice Age shaped the myth of New England. There was some truth to them for a couple of centuries, but various natural and man-made influences on climate have really undermined it in the past couple of decades.

Anyone who was here in New Hampshire in January, 1995, should remember what it was like to see an entire early winter's worth of snowpack vanish not only from the foothills and valleys but from the high peaks as well. Several days and nights of unseasonable warm temperatures, accompanied by heavy rain, turned the calendar back to November. Since that time we have seen similar, slightly less dramatic examples of the truth about New England's vulnerability to its actual latitude. Most of the region sits below the 45th Parallel, which marks the halfway point between the equator and the North Pole. Central New Hampshire sits at the same latitude as the south of France. The south of France is warmed by the Mediterranean, and sits close to the Atlantic coast of Europe, so it receives warming influences from both of those water bodies. If you look at North America, parts of the west coast that sit north of New England's latitude have a much warmer climate because of the influence of the Pacific Ocean. Even during the Pleistocene glaciation -- the Ice Age -- the western part of  North America was ice-free all the way up to Alaska. Weather be weird.

As a lover of snow, I went through agonies in my early years here, waiting for the snow each winter, and watching the whims of weather take it away, or at least put it through temperature swings that turned it from passably soft to terrifyingly frozen in less than 24 hours. Hard-core skiers with the budget to do so will simply leave. They go to where powder is the norm. This conjures up all sorts of ethical questions regarding where your money comes from, and what are the environmental effects of unnecessary travel. Po' folks like me stay here and do what we can with what nature provides or inflicts. 

The pandemic brought an influx of people who might only know the place in summer mode. Many of them appear to bring with them the myth that the place will freeze solid and remain so until the glaciers retreat in late March or April. When was that true? The cliche about New England weather -- if you don't like it, wait a minute -- applies completely to the vagaries of winter. It's even more true with the changing climate bringing extremes like three feet of powder, followed in less than ten days by a deluge of warm rain that obliterates it entirely.

I do remember, just within my 33 years here, that the lakes used to freeze pretty reliably, but as early as the mid-1990s we saw years when the big lakes nearby -- Winnipesaukee and Sebago -- were open patches of startling blue in the white landscape of a winter cold enough to bring snow, but not cold enough to freeze deeper water bodies. Snowmobilers perfected their skimming techniques to the point where no one really watched anymore. They were just like winter jet skis churning up the bay in what had formerly seemed like an impossible feat.

On our groomed network, the groomer has managed to scrape up about three kilometers on what we call the Super Loop, a trail section with a very smooth and well-drained surface improved for summer use by sedate path bikes. Even there the frozen accumulation of snow and sleet is not deep enough to set a classic track. It's just combed out flat. The rest of the trail system is less refined, requiring deeper snow for the machine to get around. And the ungroomed wilds are full of obstacles, suitable only for hiking rather than skiing. We need to give it time and hope that winter delivers better conditions before it finally gives way to the raw, wet season we call springtime.

Welcome to New England.