Rental Wrap-up

 The season appears to be winding down. Here it is, March 6, and the temperature is headed for the 50s by mid afternoon, The day began with drizzle and showers, which have given way to parting clouds and sunshine.

Average temperatures turn out to be higher than you might expect based on New England legend. Normal daytime highs go above freezing by the end of February in this part of New Hampshire. By March they're climbing through the 40s. We get cold snaps, and normally subfreezing nights, but the strong sun is joined by thawing temperatures at best.

Up north and up high, as well as micro-climates nearer by, will hold more snow, but of course climate change shifts all of those expectations. On our little touring center we are quite likely done for the year.

I mentioned at the beginning of winter that the Covid boom appeared to have ended. We have continued to get inquiries, but looking at our rental categories I note that the touring sector remained fairly strong, but skating ski and snowshoe rentals were way off last year's totals. It's not just because the shallower snow didn't really call for snowshoes, and the snow on the trails seemed to be a little soft for skating a lot of the time. Most renters don't know that. We weren't even getting asked.

As employment numbers have improved, people have less free time. They might still be interested, but lack the opportunity.

Interest in one form or another of locomotion on snow depends on exposure. Skate interest hasn't vanished. Renters might have bypassed us because they assumed that we didn't have usable conditions. Still, I'm surprised to see the steadily rising curve of interest in skate skiing level off so sharply even among the people who did show up here. Maybe their interest was dulled by hearing from a friend who rented the equipment and tried to master the technique with no instruction whatsoever. It can be exhausting if you don't absorb a couple of basic concepts. The experimenter comes away feeling like skating itself is too strenuous to pursue when it is actually no more fatiguing than classical on a nicely groomed surface. Do it wrong, though, and you will flounder miserably. Do it half right and you will still work way harder than you have to, and blame the technique in general rather than your own technique in particular.

You need to be fit to be fast, but you don't need to be fast to have fun. You can skate around at a touring pace without investing hours and hours in training. Or not. 

So now we're in that unclaimed territory in which we don't know whether to cram the ski rental stuff into its corner for the bike season or leave it out to take advantage of any late storm. Bike calls are picking up, and ski interest seems to be ending obligingly. Once the cover bakes off of critical links in our trail system, we can't groom it all anyway.

Beware of the Flying Starfish

 A beginner cross-country skier expressed concern about trying to control skinny skating skis on a downhill, especially if they were only on one ski, as he had seen some faster skiers doing.

Don't equate stability with control. This goes along with assuming that a wide ski will be better than a narrow one, but can appear as a separate problem to keep a beginner or intermediate skier from progressing.

I haven't been to a lift-served ski area since the late 1990s, but I'd be surprised if the Flying Starfish has become extinct. Flying starfish are skiers who only learned to control speed by making a wedge (pizza). When the wedge straightens out, accidentally or on purpose, the skier ends up in a wide stance that feels very stable laterally, but strands them with their center of mass hung between the skis. Their arms are usually held out from their sides at a downward angle. They manage to change direction somehow, but not in quick, linked turns.

The cross-country Flying Starfish comes in two basic forms. The touring starfish is just a version of the alpine starfish. It originates in the same insecurity, made worse by the detached heel of a Nordic binding, and the less substantial feeling of the gear overall. Whether you've been on alpine skis or not, cross-country skis seem like a really stupid invention when they start to accelerate under the influence of gravity and you don't know how to make them behave. Everyone tries to make that wedge, but that often leads to the wide stance as the skier bombs out of control, usually to end in a crater.

The ski-skater's Flying Starfish is also born of inexperience. The skating starfish is usually doing a V-1, which has a dominant and a non-dominant side, so both poles hit the snow at the same time as the right or left ski, depending on the individual's timing and whether they are right or left handed. To many skiers, a V-1 is skating. It's a visually obvious technique that's easy to grasp, but harder to understand and truly master. The starfish V-1 is also the common technique of sklassical skiers who like to mix techniques on their touring gear. It's the mythical "combi." 

The skating starfish holds the arms high, especially if the skier has gotten actual skating gear, with longer poles designed for the skate technique. Rather than keeping the hands close to the body (and face), the starfish holds the arms wide in imitation of the wide stance of the legs. It can even happen to experienced skiers when they are tired.

On a climb, particularly a long climb, most mere mortals will use a V-1 or even a diagonal V skate, which does require placing the skis in a wider V, and making sure that the poles stay clear of them. That's the entry by which a tired skier can fall into the starfish position by continuing to plod after the grade eases. If you remember to tighten everything back up, it is actually more efficient and speeds whatever recovery you're going to get.

On a descent, beginner and intermediate skiers may revert to the basics, trying to rely on the snowplow to keep speed in check. Note: the best way to control speed is not to get it in the first place. If a descent looks intimidating, move to the wedge early. You can stand still in the wedge at the top of the slope and then let up very gradually until the skis start to move, or you can let the skis run just a little and try to put the brakes on smoothly, but what often happens then is that you either stop and start in a jerky progression, or you lose control of the wedge, the skis straighten, and you're the Dive Bombing Starfish.

On touring center trails, especially when the loose snow on the surface has been ground up and combed out by a grooming machine, skiers descending in a wedge will scrape all of the loose snow out of the middle, creating a dandy bobsled run for anyone who comes along after them. Learning to ski on one ski at a time will get you down that luge course with a modicum of control. If you happen to get there while the granular snow is still well distributed over the whole width of the trail, being on one ski at a time will save that snow for skiers who come along later. They may never know to be grateful, but you will have made the world a better place. Take satisfaction in that.

Descending on one ski at a time doesn't have to be much faster than plowing down in a wedge. You simply continue the rhythm of skiing on the flats, but you set each ski at an angle across the slope, and don't stay on it for long. If the ski you're on starts to go in a direction you don't like, your other ski is available to set on a new course. If you were on both skis, you'd have to shift your weight to one ski anyway to free up the other one. It's better to get used to being on one ski at a time, most of the time. You can even be in the wedge stance, though not a really wide one, and just weight one ski at a time to set up a turning rhythm that also controls speed.

Winter's fragile skin

 If cross-country ski trail grooming was a competitive sport, our groomer Steve would own a permanent spot on the podium. But rather than a sport, grooming is an art.

In a winter like this one... and last one... and too many others in this era of winter's demise, grooming has been a delicate art. Our small touring center can't marshal an army of shovelers to move snow from where it might lie to where we need it. And it can only be pushed in by the grooming machine if it lies nearby and there's a clear path for it. But as long as there's a couple of inches of cover on a continuous loop, Steve can produce a usable trail. There are good groomers who don't ski, but Steve's art is elevated because he knows what he would like to see as a skier.

Last weekend we received eight or nine inches of light powder on top of bare dirt or yards and yards of solid ice. That packed down to two or three inches, not even enough to set a classic track. It was enough to open almost the entire 30K network, though. Renters flocked. Since the weekend, a couple of little clipper systems have brought a couple of inches at a time, which Steve has blended into the existing surface to produce a trail so nice that people are calling in to thank him. The weather has been cold enough, despite strengthening sun, to keep the system operating.

It all goes to hell on Saturday. The temperature is hopping up to the mid 30s, with sizzling sunshine. Sunday gets warmer and wetter, ushering in a week where the word "snow" does appear in many of each day's descriptions, but only as part of a mix, in temperatures well above freezing.

Right now I know that the little gladed knoll behind my house is covered with silky hero snow. I know this because I laid down a beautiful series of turns on it when I poked around out there on Tuesday. My town is a bit further north than the touring center, so I also got a little more snow out of the little clipper systems that have bustled through. The back yard looks inviting, but I have to go to work to earn money to buy cat food. The powder will be obliterated by the time my next days off come around.

Old winter has a fragile skin. Even in the accommodating powder on Tuesday I had to work around the fallen limbs and barely-covered rocks. I know the surface well, because it is literally my back yard. Further up, where the trees had been cleared and low growth has had a couple of seasons to get thicker, routefinding is trickier, with few opportunities to link turns on the descent. The little bits of powder aren't enough to fill in most of that, but I did find a few little pockets preserved by the strategic shade of trees, or a helpful fold in the contours.

Anyone living where the storms have been dumping will laugh at the idea that winter's hide is thin and delicate. It certainly varies from place to place and season to season -- or even week to week. 

March is considered a spring month by meteorologists. Although the daylight is less than 12 hours for more than half of the month in the northern hemisphere, the weather pattern definitely leans away from the cold and darkness of the real depths of winter. We do get big storms, but especially in recent years the snow they bring has been so heavy and sticky that it's often unusable. With a well-treated ski you might get around without forming big snowballs on your feet, but the grooming machine can't work with it unless the temperature goes down and stays down long enough to freeze-dry what's on the ground. And that has been increasingly rare.