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.