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.

Why did we do Telemark turns?

 

Advancements in ski design made the Telemark turn a pointless affectation by the middle of the first decade of the 21st Century.With Telemark designs basically reinventing Alpine skis, free-heel skiers could rely on parallel turns and spend their whole session without ever doing a tele turn. Nevertheless, it persisted for a few more years, with more and more downhill-only adaptations to boots and bindings. A few people still do it, apparently. But the original purpose of the "Telemark revival" that began in the latter half of the 1980s had been completely obliterated.

Telemark turns used to give cross-country skiers downhill maneuverability on what passed for wide skis at the time. When I got into cross-country skiing in 1984, the set I bought was a whopping 56 millimeters wide at the shovel -- really more of a trowel at that width -- and was described as suitable for backcountry skiing. Since my interest was winter mountain exploration, I hoped to gain skills on ungroomed snow.

Traditional cross-country ski fitting could be crazy long. I started on 205cm skis with the low-topped "bowling shoes" that were common at the time. My Telemark efforts on those were hindered by the flexibility of the shoes and the cumbersome ski length as well as my complete inexperience in any form of skiing in my youth. But everyone was experimenting to some degree. Early backcountry "experts" recommended getting a ski longer than your in-track fit, to support the weight of your heavier load when venturing away from genteel touring centers with amenities nearby. If you have to rely on yourself, perhaps for multiple days, you need a few extra pounds of gear. However, the long ski trend quickly led to the shorter ski trend.

The refined standard for backcountry skiing on traditional length skis said to knock 5-15cm off your in-track length. It's still in the traditional fit range of 10-20 percent over your height, so you can stride if conditions allow it, but the skis grip better for more secure climbing, and are easier to turn because they're that little bit shorter. And the other part of the equation was heavier, taller boots. Asolo and Merrell, among others, offered a range of models in traditional leather that eventually included plastic cuffs on the heaviest models used by skiers most interested in finding downhill opportunities. This was before all-plastic boots appeared.

Telemark racers were limited to a maximum ski width of 70mm. Wow! Fat boards! For a few years, that was about the widest Nordic ski you could get. Then in the 1990s, Rossignol came out with the Black Widow, an unabashedly illegal ski intended strictly for fun. I don't remember the width, but it was before parabolic skis hit the downhill world. Eighty-four or 88mm maybe. Race rules were relaxed, and other companies hurried to add their own wider skis. But lengths were still in the traditional range, shrinking a little at a time as plastic boots arrived and grew more and more height and buckles.

Even before the ski width rebellion, all of the companies servicing the Telemark market had single-cambered models. The Karhu Supreme was only about 68mm at the shovel, but had a wonderfully soft flex for softer snow. Rossi had the TRS for icy conditions, and the Haute Route for softer snow. Both models were sized long, and still at or under 70mm wide.

On the ski field, Telemark skiers originally took pride in their difference, enticing jaded alpine skiers to try it out not because it was a superior tool for the steeps, but because it made the whole mountain more challenging again. But once the novelty wore off, skiers only interested in going downhill wanted to be able to show off more, with less practice. Touring capability was completely discarded in favor of turning. At that point it was inevitable that alpine touring gear would take over the backcountry niche, because it was adequate to plod uphill, and far superior for descent.

I still go out on my equipment from the 1990s, because it still does its job. Compact skis came in at that time, offering ski tourists more maneuverability in a simplified fitting system, but compact skis don't stride very well. I have a set of compacts, but I like to use the 200cm, 60mm touring skis most of the time, unless I go where the 175cm, 73mm compacts fit the slope angle, snow density, and tree spacing better. But they're also bright orange, and I hate to be visible out there. The long skis happen to be black. You might think that white would be the best color to blend in, but there's usually plenty of black, gray, and brown in the scene. Not much bright orange.

Of course as I age I have to think about whether I will injure myself doing something that I used to be good at. But that includes taking a shower, shoveling the snow off the deck, or taking out the garbage. You gotta keep moving or you'll rust in place.

Another winter that isn't?

 Each year seems to bring a new record for warmest and least snowy winter. The lack of snow could represent a drought or a warm shift that turns heavy precipitation into rain instead of something we can groom and use.

Weather patterns vary across the country, meaning that some areas are buried in snow, while others forget what it looks like. Often, the area that gets left out is northern New England, because of how the storm centers track up the St. Lawrence Valley and pull warm air in from the Atlantic. But even within that relatively small area, a storm might dump on the western part and skip the eastern, or hit the coast and leave all inland areas with nothing. And northernmost Maine might get some of that St. Lawrence Valley bounty, while the more accessible recreation areas to the south have to find some hopeful way to talk about the fact they they didn't.

If we don't get the big earning periods, it's hard to keep going. Christmas Week is always questionable south of the White Mountains, so we set our sights on Martin Luther King Weekend. That looks like a washout this year, so we're squinting between our fingers at February, with its school vacation weeks. The only one that matters is Massachusetts, because Massachusetts people come up here, while New Hampshire vacationers go south. Since I got into the cross-country ski business in 1989, Massachusetts vacation week has been a bust several times. As the winter weakens overall, that late in February is too close to March.

March used to be a winter month. The spring equinox is on the 20th, putting the first two-thirds of the month into winter. But that's the astronomical start of spring. Meteorologists consider March to be a spring month. As much as we used to laugh at the beginning of spring as we looked at the stubborn accumulation of winter hanging on into April, and late storms sometimes bringing feet of snow in March, its allegiance to the warmer half of the year is becoming obvious. What late snow we might get is dense, sticky, ungroomable cement.

If the entire world suddenly threw itself into climate change mitigation right now, the cross-country ski business still would probably die out. We can't live from polar vortex to polar vortex with multiple years of nearly nothing in between. The few cross-country areas that make snow are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to have a kilometer or two. Your sprawling trail network means nothing if nature does not provide. If we have to make it ourselves, skiers will be churning around on what's basically a big skating rink. And snowmaking depends on cold enough weather to produce a large amount of snow in a short time, to distribute over the course.

In a bad winter, timing matters. We've had winters that offered a couple of days skiing followed by several days with unusable conditions. If your available time happened to match our available skiing, you could rack up a decent record before we had to give up on it in early March. With manufactured snow, an area might be able to till up a skiable surface well into the month, depending on how quickly the weather warmed, and whether the course was exposed to a lot of direct sun.

We've learned the hard way that no depth of natural snow is guaranteed to stand up to whatever the climate throws at it next. In 2020, 37 inches of snow from one epic storm in mid December disappeared about ten days later, during a couple of days of warmth and rain. It was not replaced.

The death of winter is bad for the economy and the natural world. Cross-country skiing is only a minor casualty, although it is still a loss. We will continue to try to get something out of every winter as it comes to us, including this one if it shifts to more helpful conditions.