Explore Cross-Country

Ski Repair

2012-01-19T13:29:00.002-05:00

Delamination is a common problem. Skiers are always coming in with one end or the other of their ski bases flapping loose.

Today's victim needed a six-inch section of the tip re-fastened. How to clamp the radius of the repaired tip?

Use the other tip. I waxed the surface of the ski so the glue would not adhere to it. Then with light but firm pressure I clamped the sandwich together. We'll see how that goes.

Last year we had a repair on which we tried to see how many clamps we could use.

It was another tip repair, but we either did not think to use the other ski as a mold or we couldn't. In that case we used a lot of small blocks to secure sections of the curve.

For adhesive we use Gorilla Glue. It's easier to work with than epoxy and has a shorter curing time. Instead of mixing a batch that might be too big or too small we just squeeze out what we need. Not much adheres well to plastic, even epoxy, so we might as well work with something that's fairly easy to get along with.

Tedium

2012-01-07T22:06:00.001-05:00

Sundays are so tedious they've started to slop over into Saturday.

Sundays have their own time warp. On a Sunday afternoon, a flurry of activity that would eat up an hour or two on another day will prove to have expended about 10 minutes at best when you check the clock after it ends. This extended boredom has started to attack Saturday as well.

The ground is bare. Hardly any cross-country ski areas have any open trails. The next storm is shaping up to be warm and wet, not deep and white. We lost Christmas week. Now we're fixing to lose Martin Luther King weekend. Our big winter earning periods are getting hammered.

Aside from a bit of maintenance on rental skates and one or two out-of-season bike repairs, we have little to do but brainstorm new directions for this business or new businesses in case this one is too damaged to survive.

If I had known that winter was going to die out in my lifetime, I would not have wasted time learning to ski. I enjoyed cross-country and backcountry skiing skiing immensely, but I would have put the time into bicycle-related skills and boating. I might not even have moved to New Hampshire, although I have enjoyed mountain hiking and rock climbing. For all that I get to do THAT I might as well have stayed on the immediate coast and stuck to maritime pursuits.

Chaos being chaos, you can't change one variable without affecting a whole slew of other ones. Parallel universes are fun to imagine sometimes, but I happen to be aware of only this one. So I chart my course from this point on.

One thing's for sure: this is a great year not to be at Jackson Ski Touring. While that's true of any year, it is particularly true in a year like this, that far exceeds even the disastrous season of 2005-'06. It was a major financial burden to maintain the inventory and staff that Jackson required on the off chance that we might get snow. Fortunately, that bad winter afflicted enough of the country to make the ski industry lenient about credit terms. Even so, the scars have lasted long enough to be considered permanent. This hideous winter only gouges deeper at the same injuries. The devastation of the ski business is once again widespread enough to keep our creditors from sending the leg-breakers after us, but that indulgence is little help when the changing climate seems well on the way to destroying our whole sport.

Cross-country skiing was a beautiful experience. I can't say that any of the memories make me feel like I'm back there doing it, but I can appreciate how much fun it was while it lasted. No single activity can equal it for full-body and full-mind exercise. Because of that, nothing can replace it and its skills cannot be applied to anything else. Parts can be applied to many things, but, without skiing to reinforce them, they will have to be maintained piecemeal.

In 2005-'06, bitter, paranoid and angry after the cowardly treachery of persons still unidentified in Jackson, I enjoyed the winter without skiing. I rode my bike while I watched the addicted skiers curdle with frustration. I felt as if nature itself had jumped in on my side. Now, as cross-country skiing seems to be lurching toward extinction, the fact that I don't get to do it simply merges with the way all cross-country skiers are having it stripped from their lives.

From a business standpoint it's a bitch that we're stuck with all the ski gear in our inventory. There's an investment we will never recoup if snow has really gone the way of the passenger pigeon and the dodo bird. If winter really is just another casualty of human folly, all business related to it will suffer.

I can build and repair bicycles. I can get used to having slow, quiet winters in which to prepare for busy, active summers, at least for as long as I am able to be active at all. I decided in 2005 that I could live without skiing. I still skied as much as I could, because it's fun and good for you, but I knew I could let it go when the time came. Has the time come? We shall see. It seems to have come for me, anyway, given the needs of the business and the rest of my life. Whatever I do with myself after whatever happens to the business where I currently work, I will not invest anything in the future of cross-country skiing. I don't think it has one. Not until the collapse of industrial society allows the climate to rebalance itself in however many hundreds or thousands of years that will take.

Mind you I will be content to let the winter make a fool of me by delivering commercial quantities of snow to save us. I still advise against investing heavily in cross-country skiing, though. I'm afraid it's really finished, for the most part.

Hotbox Backlash

2012-01-02T11:51:00.000-05:00

Last week the SkiPost e-newsletter had this item about the practice of saturating ski bases with wax by the slow-bake method known as hot boxing or heat boxing. The term heat boxing has emerged recently to differentiate the ski prep technique from the pot smoking technique also called hot boxing, in which smoker or smokers indulge their habit in a purposely confined space.

How to Hot Box?

[A reader wrote]"You referred to proper & improper hot boxing. I have a hot box of my own construction but I have never seen any real guidelines for how to best use it. I keep the temperature at 120 - 130 degrees (Fahrenheit) for about 6 hours. It has a fan that continually circulates the air. How does this sound?"

[Ski Post answered]First of all most ski manufacturers do not suggest skier hot box their skis. [emphasis mine]

While an iron exerts heat to the base, the hot box exerts heat to the entire ski. It can do nothing to improve a ski, over normal waxing done properly and with patience, but can weaken the epoxy and alter a ski camber if the heat gets out of control.

That being said many people and ski shops hot box.

To do it with the least risk
1) The base needs to be open and not sealed so it can accept the wax easily. (Stone grinding to achieve a fresh open base is another issue)
2) The max temp at any point in the box should not exceed 55C (130F). Some boxes have great fluctuations in their temps throughout the box.
3) A wax with a melting point at 55C needs to be used. Not many waxes are actually molten at this low temp. They may be soft but they are not molten. Start suggests Service Wax LF for its unique double molten points one just below 57 and one at and one at 120C.
4) Melt wax onto base.
5) Leave in hot box for as short a period as possible. Less than 2 hours should be sufficient. The base is only a couple of mm thick and will absorb wax quickly or not at all.
6) Realize this is speaking from the standpoint of the ski manufactures.
7) This is not speaking on behalf of the Hot box and Hot bag manufactures who would argue differently.

I hope this helps.

Andy

We try to respond to new information to improve the service we offer at our shop. So far, our research has not turned up any service providers who have cut their heat box times significantly. Many recommend warming the skis for as much as 12 hours. Most agree on the temperature range, averaging 50-55C and never exceeding 60C. According to SkiPost, one should never heat skis as high as 60C, let alone leave them there for 50 minutes to an hour, as some service centers advertise.

Many heat box providers do acknowledge that extended heating can affect some skis.

I was initially skeptical of the heat box compared to ironing. Even when I accepted the idea of heat boxing, it was more as a time-saver and basically harmless rather than outright superior to ironing as some proponents were saying. I still feel that way about prepping new skis. Much of the time spent prepping new skis would have been spent ironing in and scraping off numerous applications of wax just to achieve maximum saturation of the base material.

As with most technical arguments in skiing, there's a lot of opinion and very little real science. Experts apply some general principles based on one or two variables rather than all possible variables and then issue blanket statements. For instance, SkiPost cites the fact that the base material is only a couple of millimeters thick to support the statement that less than two hours of heating should be enough for complete wax absorption. There's no consideration of base density, which can vary with the quality level of the ski, and no supporting experimentation to test whether the wax penetration really is complete. Toko did provide data on wax absorption based on actually shaving down the base material to see how far the wax had gone at different times and temperatures. Another tester claimed to have weighed the skis to determine how much wax had been added by a box versus an iron.

In the end, the statement that ski manufacturers do not recommend hot boxing may come from the legal department rather than anyone in the company who actually skis or develops equipment. If the manufacturer gets behind a procedure that might damage some skis they could face possible aggressive warranty claims. I don't see how it would turn into a very expensive problem for the ski company, since the cases would never involve a big enough damage award to interest much of a lawyer, but why not nip it in the bud? It only takes a short verbal statement to protect the ski company from ANY such claims. So there it is.

All this fog leaves the individual skier and the small shop to decide for themselves about the relative risks and merits of letting your skis get baked. I still lean toward the "mostly harmless" theory.

Commercial Expertise

2012-01-01T12:26:00.000-05:00

"You had some purple ski goggles with a picture of Lindsey Vonn on them. Did they get sold?" the customer asked.

The goggles had sold. The customer left the counter to browse around other displays.

It's only a matter of luck that I know who Lindsey Vonn is. I barely do. I just happen to recognize the name from some downhill ski coverage I caught somewhere along the line. It made me notice the difference between the expertise of real experience as opposed to commercial expertise: knowing the trends and buzz words your customers are likely to use before they come in and use them on you.

In my ideal life I would spend a lot of time actually skiing. At one time the ideal and the real coincided enough to give me a solid amount of experience I could use to help less experienced skiers make good choices selecting skis for groomed or off-trail use. This kind of expertise is almost useless in a commercial setting. This is the point the management of Jackson Ski Touring was trying to make when they kept trying to get me to spend a lot less time trying to educate customers and a lot more time separating them more quickly from their money and shoveling them out of the lodge. A boring expert, no matter how helpful, is a lot less attractive than a cheerful, fashion-conscious servant who knows exactly what the customer is talking about at any level and has a quick solution for a price, ready to deploy.

Mind you, in the heyday of the servant class their cheerful demeanor hid all manner of scheming. That almost did not matter to the ruling class as long as no one gave them any attitude. The commercial expert needs a touch more showmanship than a mere servant, but the facade is still more important than actual stick time with the product being sold.

Here in Wolfe City the clientele is a bit less high strung and the management is as woefully unfashionable as I am. We're all stupid enough to believe that actually skiing counts for a lot and that the truth often trumps the misleading presentations of the industry that feeds off of the activity. No doubt that explains a lot about our financial circumstances. The poor bastards hired someone to whom principle matters. You know THAT always leads to the poor house.

At this point no one is skiing much. One wonders whether we're seeing the quick end to the cross-country ski era in the United States. If we don't get some winter soon we might be better off making funky furniture out of the rack full of weird, colored sticks in the showroom and devoting ourselves to bicycling year-round. That's actually a diverse enough industry to support many points of view and it doesn't depend on a very narrow and increasingly rare range of conditions to survive.

Jennifer Caldwell

2011-12-30T11:32:00.000-05:00

Jennifer Caldwell finished a long, courageous battle with cancer on December 27. A link to her obituary is here:

http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/brattleboro/obituary.aspx?page=lifestory&pid=155232233&iadid=search-www.legacy.com-www.reformer.com

Her funeral is tomorrow at St. Katharine Drexel church in Alton. NH. It's hard to believe she's gone. It's also hard to decide what to wear. Traditional funeral garb is black, but if anyone was about being alive it was Jennifer. Bright colors would seem as apt a tribute to someone who lived fully every moment she could.

Jennifer married Wolfeboro native Howie Bean in 1988. They had a daughter, Anya, in 1989. I seem to recall that she and Howie paddled to a winning time in the Smith River Canoe Race in May that year and Anya was born in July.

I moved to the Wolfeboro area in May 1988. As I found a place in the biking and skiing community I started to hear about Howie and Jennifer. They could often be seen training on the trails, roads and lakes, skiing in winter and running, roller skiing, biking and canoeing in the other seasons. Their ferocious training exploits were legendary. Both were on the US Cross Country Ski team and had numerous victories and podium finishes. Jennifer was the daughter of the man credited with almost single-handedly launching the cross-country ski boom in this country. Even with such a strong competitive focus they could still respect the challenge of a long bike commute. I appreciate that.

Jen brought the determination of a champion into her battle with cancer. We were all fortunate that her tenacity and a few medical advancements coincided to grant us more years with her than we thought we might get when she was first diagnosed. It still was too short.

While she was known as an athlete of the highest caliber, she was more than that and managed to be a nice person at the same time. I barely knew her and have that impression. Looking at the massive amount of love and support that surrounded her from people who knew her better you can tell that it was not superficial.

Another great XIMS product

2011-12-19T14:52:00.001-05:00

The new apron from XIMS is made of stiff, coated fabric that would make a sturdy expedition pack or bomb-proof tent floor. Since most of us who have worked too long as shop drones have only homelessness to look forward to once we're too old to be of the slightest use in outdoor retail, the introduction of this product is quite timely. Baby Boomers are aging rapidly and many of us failed to score good pension benefits. Since Social Security and Medicare are unnecessary burdens on the taxpayers and it's too late for us to make huge gains in private investment, population reduction will at last be accomplished through hypothermia, malnutrition, violence and disease.

I suppose those of us with fond memories of camping trips and perhaps some leftover equipment might fare a little better in the fiscally conservative, Live and Let Die future. If we can poach some small game or arrange to scavenge in the trash cans of our financial superiors the life could provide a certain gritty comfort.

Along with the health insurance companies we wish ourselves a quick and relatively painless final illness when the time comes.

When snow is bad

2011-11-23T07:39:00.001-05:00

The October snowstorm clearly overloaded the forest before it was ready. The resulting damage disrupted human life for weeks afterward as many people waited for electric power to be restored.

The snow that falls now is just as useless, piling up on unfrozen ground to insulate it from freezing deeply to support the snow we hope to get when winter actually arrives.

When I came to New Hampshire in 1987, the locals I met felt that winter arriving on Thanksgiving was normal. Since I had come to enjoy winter, I was ready to give all of December to snow season. But in 1987, the weather had been cold for at least a few weeks. The ground was frozen. The snow might as well fall, because everything certainly looked and felt like winter.

With the shift in climate, the ground sometimes does not freeze deeply all winter. If we get these early, heavy snowstorms they keep the earth warm enough to harbor flowing water and eat away the snow cover from beneath. What looks like an early ski season is just a treacherous plod. The snow sticks to everything. Later, when the sun arcs higher in March, the warmth from above meets the warmth from below to eat away the snow pack.

We make the best of it because we have no choice.

Really early season

2011-11-01T15:12:00.000-04:00

Eight inches of snow fell here in Effingham on Saturday night, October 29. On Sunday morning the sun hit the wet, clumpy mess. It didn't look like it would be any fun at all. I tried to ignore it and hoped it would go away, except for the three-ton berm I shoveled out of the mouth of the driveway where the plow had blocked it. I knew I had to get rid of that before it set up during the cold night to come.

Monday's sun melted some more of the ground cover, but an amazing amount remained. We didn't get anything like the dumping some towns got, with more than 20 inches in some places. I'm just as glad, since the ground has not frozen and the leaves are still on about half the trees.

This morning the coverage was holding up too well to ignore any longer. I wasn't going to get a bike ride. I might as well seize the novelty and go out on skis. I used my trusty Trak Edge traditional-length skis with a partial edge. They were Trak's clone of the Karhu Kodiak from the early 1990s. For boots and bindings I have Asolo Snowpine 75 mm boots and Rottefella Super Tele bindings.

The surface was still slightly crunchy when I set out. In places it was actually almost fast. These were actually some of the better ungroomed conditions I've been on in the past couple of years. A lot of our snow storms have been warm and sticky even in the real season. The timing of freeze and thaw has not been very convenient for me even when the weather has gotten cold enough to freeze wet glop solid. So I had a surprisingly good time. It wasn't time to lay down a bunch of turns through the trees, but it was a sporty shuffle in places.

The skis I used have served me well for this sort of skiing, whether I go for a half-hour or most of a day. The industry has promoted a different approach, but I've seen glimmers that the simple, durable touring ski is not dead. Madshus has one or two models. I haven't poked around to see what else might be out there. And 75 mm staged a bit of a comeback a few years ago after almost drowning in the tide of system bindings pushed by Rottefella and its allies, and by Salomon. In its thick-soled back country version it provides the best control of a heavier ski with the simplest, most durable binding. It would feel like trudging toil on a good groomed trail, but the ski setup for a good groomed trail would feel like a flimsy toy in rough, ungroomed conditions.

That being said, there's no guarantee that 75 mm will be around next year or the year after that. If someone figures out how to get people to dump money into Nordic the way they do into Alpine, the race will be on to get all the cheap-ass bark-eaters to update all their gear. But I guess that's true of any industrialized activity.

In the past decade I have seen a lot of furrowed brows out on the trails as people try to work with the mutating winter conditions in the northeast United States. Even in the mythic old days winter could take some odd twists in this region. Now it's downright wacky. It makes a mess of any regular training system. Now it's even reaching out to cramp the end of bike commuting more than the typical heavy flurries or sleet might have done. It pays to be creative and versatile. Unfortunately not everyone can bend their routines to accommodate the whims of weather. That's what keeps various kinds of indoor fitness center in business. I just don't have that kind of discipline or sociability.

Wendy doesn't work here

2011-02-17T22:47:00.004-05:00

I don't get the instawax thing. I asked for an instawax the very first day I owned skis because I'd read in a book that a skier should ask the shop for a free base wax.. It was the last time, too. What did I know? Only what I read in a book.

Instawax customers need Wendy:

A Poke in the Weeds

2011-01-27T09:59:00.003-05:00

Sticking to my schedule of exercising once every two weeks, I went out on the new snow to see if conditions had gotten sportier up on the back mountain.

Extensive logging over several recent years has destroyed the mature hardwood glades. At first the skidder roads and patch cuts offered open terrain when the snow was deep enough to cover the slash and boulders. New growth sprang up quickly, so that golden age of open skiing ended after a couple of seasons.

While it isn't quite sapling and bramble hell entirely, the nearest clearings offer more challenge than reward with the type and depth of snow we have now. Really cold temperatures brought a dry snow that doesn't compact. A couple of moist phases created easily breakable crust layers that inhibit turning. There is no base of dense snow, so surface obstacles are concealed but not blunted.

Because the snow does not pack down to provide a solid kicking surface, I had to climb at a very low angle. It took me half an hour to trudge up to the hemlock glades next to the oldest logged area. The turning wasn't great on the way down, but the afternoon was sunny. It's always nice to get out.

Verbal Skiing

2011-01-24T17:58:00.002-05:00

The needs of the shop in Wolfe City are so complex that I don't get to ski.

The owners of the shop, whose back yards abut the trails, haughtily suggest I get up earlier. I've done that a few times, but many factors can combine to reduce my ski time to a 20-minute insult. Likewise have I tried night skiing over the years, but the weather can easily turn that into an invitation to a broken femur. The warm winters that have cursed us of late create a treacherous, icy surface when the temperature drops below freezing again at sundown.

The trails get groomed once a day. Then the groomer often hops out for first tracks on the fresh corduroy. The leisure class shreds it up all day. If the shop grunts get thrown a bone we go forth with a feeling of pressure and guilt, a sense of haste,as if we were undeserving. That's on the days we get a green light at all. Lately the shop has been manned by one or two of us, even if three or four people are there, because of the deteriorated faculties of one or two who might be tormenting themselves and us by continuing to try to put in a day or half-day of work.

Because I studied ski technique and collected descriptions of it from many teachers, I can remember and explain what it feels like. I can stand and engage the muscles I remember using. For a moment I can take the trip mentally.

No one in Wolfe City needs me to be any more than a washed-up has been. Even in Jackson, the aristocracy would have preferred that the shop staff be deferential and attentive servants, not fellow skiers. As long as we could, the shop staff instead took full advantage of the convenient trails. We all took serious pleasure in blowing past our "betters" at every opportunity.

The shop in Jackson was simpler to run. We looked out for each other. Whatever else happened that day, whoever wanted to ski would get to. No one would be relegated to a dash in the dusk on rapidly freezing remnants if it could be avoided.

Mind you, I can't think of anything that would make me miss Jackson or ever want to return there. The treachery, the ill winds, the whining patricians may not have outnumbered the really cool people, but their stench and influence permeated the place. They created a climate of distrust that sours my stomach when I think of it even now.

It's a curious contrast, this nauseating distaste and the memories of good lessons from great people. I would feel awkward around anyone I knew from those years, because I can't be sure what deals any of them have made to function in the world of snobbery and double dealing that is the management's standard operating procedure. Even so, I highly value insights from people like Peter the Great, and even tips I picked up from the Human Hand Grenade. HHG was a volatile little bastard, but he cared about technique.

I pass the time until bike commuting season returns, eating lightly and talking about skiing when the job requires it. Other than that I try not to think about it at all. Otherwise I would want what I can't have, and that's just stupid.

Catching up with a friend

2010-12-14T12:00:00.002-05:00

A guy I used to ski with a lot came by the shop the other day to visit. He also used to live right around the corner. Somehow, even before he moved, we did less and less together as his employment changed and our schedules didn't match. We're always glad to see each other. We just don't manage to do more than chat in passing.

He was born in this area. He grew up skiing the way people do around here. He skied cross-country and downhill. Like most people, he found the downhill more interesting until he destroyed his knee in a silly fall at Sunday River.

Funny how the drastic injuries seem to come from unspectacular crashes. He was actually trying to get up from a minor fall, but his ski tail was trapped in such a way that he blew his knee apart just by trying to rise.

When I met him he was developing his Telemark skills so he could ski freely in the woods on his heavy touring gear. He had the advantage of a lifetime of downhill skiing, so he learned rapidly. We started on almost the same level as free-heel downhillers, but his overall ski experience and well-practiced disregard for personal safety have propelled him farther than I care to go.

As Telemark skiing started to evolve in the late 1990s, I went through only a couple of stages of mutation with it. I never found a plastic boot I liked, and I never got a super fat ski. My friend has stayed nearer the edge of that advancing front. During his visit he said something about "reverse camber skis." I looked blankly at him.

"We used to call it a bent ski," he said. "It makes a longer ski ski like a short one, but still gives you the float of a big ski in soft snow.

It sounds like sort of a variable wheelbase, as if you could change your bike from a short, tight criterium bike to a comfy open-road tourer. In soft snow, the "bent" ski floats on its whole length. Set on edge, the pre-bent section initiates a turn instantly. On hard pack the contact area is actually shorter. As a downhill tool it sounds very functional.

"I wouldn't have anything narrower than 95[millimeters] under the foot," he said.

A ski that wide automatically implies a big boot.

Downhill skiing and ice climbing seem to call for quite a bit of pricey gear for a limited activity. That's why I have let my ancient ice tools gather dust, and I ski on old stuff.

The Telemark turn is completely irrelevant on wide, downhill-only skis. It feels nice to assume the position, but the skis are going to come around no matter what. The shape and flex of the boots may make some of them more comfortable than a hinged AT setup for approaches, but I think we passed the exit for "light weight" more than a decade ago.

When I shifted my focus from pointless athletic endeavors to pointless attempts to make art and music I made the final turn away from endless gear and trip cravings. Really, from my 20s I only wanted to live in a place where I could keep myself in halfway decent shape with locally-available activities while I concentrated on my pointless attempts to create. They didn't even seem pointless for the first couple of decades. That only sank in fairly recently. Certainly the sustained distractions that disrupted my happy plan did not help me develop those creative endeavors. So here we are.

Forget everything you knew about brushing

2010-12-13T16:19:00.003-05:00

According to the latest issue of The Master Skier, all those groovy metal brushes we've been accumulating are mostly useless. Just keep the copper and one medium steel and use the rest to strip loose hair off of the cat. Take the nylon brush you tossed in a drawer back out and return it to a place of honor.

The article assumes you will be using fluoro waxes, powders and liquids. The powders and liquids do not penetrate the base material, so metal brushes will merely strip away your excessive investment in speed. Nylon will stroke those tender substances gently into the surface of the ski, reducing (but not eliminating) the costly sloughing of fabulously expensive magic pixie dust.

For those of us on Planet Budget, skiing almost entirely on hydrocarbon waxes (yawn), metal brushes are still great. If you want to spend all afternoon trying to get a nicely cleaned base structure with a nylon brush attacking Swix CH6, be my guest. In fact, the block fluoros, like Swix HF, also penetrate the base and will benefit from the kind of soft, super-fine steel brush you can't buy anymore.

The blue nylon brush is still the brush of choice for final polishing in any wax regime. The fluoro-addicts approve. We shop grunts have never abandoned the blue nylon for a nice streak-free shine.

I've picked up some good tips from the Master Skier over the years. I also invariably come away deeply grateful that I never succumbed to the deep neurosis necessary to take up Nordic racing. You most emphatically do NOT have to turn yourself and your skis into a set of science experiments to have a rockin' good time going fast enough. Conversely, if you want to do really well at Nordic racing you WILL have to take on the science experiments.

You will need several sets of skis. Skis are disposable items to the real racer. The real racer will get base material milled away by the stone grinder to renew the structure and strip away the layer clogged with fluoro residue and heat-sealed from hot ironing after inadequate shaving of micro-hairs. The real racer will have several sets of skis in both classic and skate, to be ready for all conditions. Your race skis need to have the right flex, which is built in, as well as the right structure and wax, which are applied, but not always easy to change.

I haven't noticed anyone talking about the need for several sets of poles of slightly different length for different snow conditions, but maybe that's this year's secret weapon, to be revealed next fall in time to stimulate pole sales for the manufacturers.

"If you don't understand what I'm saying, I'm not talking to you," the saying goes. The articles about arcane training methods, nutritional supplements and massive investments in equipment and chemicals are aimed at the skier who is that obsessed. On the plus side, the magazine is free, so a recreational skier can peruse it for useful tidbits. Who knows? You might develop an obsession and become another good customer for the high end ski market.

Because recreational Nordic touring has lost most of its participants to snowshoeing, the cross-country ski industry needs to make more and more money off fewer and fewer people. Some in the bike industry feel the same way: develop the high end, get people in a higher income bracket hooked on buying continuously-obsolete, ultra-sophisticated equipment, and let the dirty-footed masses go somewhere else. Even though such an approach invariably leads to diminishing returns, it keeps getting tried.

I suggest a different approach to racing: Make everyone wax identically. Y'all can argue about it for as long as you want beforehand, but in the end you have to settle on a wax and use it. If one skier missed the wax, relax: everyone missed the wax. The winner will be whoever did the best they could with the conditions that day.

That'll never happen. But maybe we can introduce it as a novelty race and see if anyone else enjoys the logic of it.

Ski season approaches

2010-11-07T19:18:00.003-05:00

As part of our preparation for ski rental season I cleaned up the high performance rental boots and freshened up their size markings.

Customer Methodology 101

2010-02-25T11:11:00.002-05:00

1: Call first thing in the morning to extract a promise that a certain job can be done by closing time.
2: Don't bring in the object in question until lunch time or later.

Advanced play:

3: Don't pick up the item for a week or more.

4: Bitch about the price.

Rock Ski Winter

2010-02-15T15:56:00.003-05:00

After two years of deep, heavy snow, the pattern shifted to leave us essentially in a drought.

A storm scheduled for tomorrow may put us back in full operation at the same time it seriously interferes with the cellist's travel arrangements for a work-related trip she's had planned for many months. The snow would help us salvage some of the Massachusetts vacation week business. We're not looking at a Baltimore-Washington amount of snow, but the projected four to eight inches would cover the dirt, ice and windblown debris we've been grooming for four weeks.

I enjoy the challenge of skiing the absurd. I like figuring out the timing and weight shifts I need to negotiate a field of obstacles. It's not my preferred format, but it adds interest to bad conditions. For routine conditioning I would rather lay down a steady rhythm on a well-covered trail. But a little skedaddle around shriveling remnants not quite covering an assortment of reefs and shoals is fun the way miniature golf is fun.

When a winter acts like this, you get into skiing shape and want to use something better than rock skis if your rock skis are really obsolete, shabby or improperly sized. Even with the nasty conditions on our local trail network, sections have good enough cover to let you rip right along. People start looking for a better quality rock ski. It's like wanting a sporty beater bike for abusive conditions or high theft risk areas.

Seeing as it's February, I won't mind getting back into something more like skiing. The groundhog told us we were in for the long haul. After an early taste of bike season, March could put us back into ski season for most of its 31 days. Or we could continue on crumbs and crusts tossed from the banquets dumped on other parts of the country with less appetite for them than we have.

The Knights of Old had Squires

2010-01-23T19:54:00.003-05:00

In days of yore, the chivalrous heroes who dashed around on quests and crusades, rescued suitably wealthy damsels and duked it out for the local earl had little sidekicks who took care of the nuts and bolts, so to speak, of arms and armor. These breastplate-polishers and horse-waterers dealt with the mundane details of the chivalry business. I can only imagine what they said to the knights while performing these vital but unheralded tasks.

"What do you do with this f#%^%$%^ing sword?! Chop f$%^&^%$ing rocks with it? Do you lie in the salty surf in this armor? It wouldn't hurt you to OIL something once in a while!"

In the present day, the knight has been replaced by the athlete. Take cross-country skiers, for instance. Most of the racers pay lip service to the concept of thorough, frequent and meticulous waxing, but the majority of them have used a lot more quickie smear-on crap than they might admit.

These knights need squires. Racers on a well-supported team might get products and services for periods of time, but every one of them has to fall back on their own resources eventually.

Big bike races rely on squads of mechanics who keep the machinery running. Cross-country ski teams rely on wax technicians. Freelance racers have to polish their own bases or live with the consequences. A lucky few manage to get someone else to bring the love.

A couple of days ago my associate in Nordic technical matters undertook the full prep on our own noble knight's two sets of skating skis. Sir Smears-a-lot had been resorting to the wishful-thinking paste a bit frequently of late. He IS a busy man. So squire G put the racing sticks in the lovin' oven for a rebirth of speed. A few hours in the sauna with the base prep wax was followed by an overnight rest. After that Big G laid in a coat of moly-fluoro base wax followed by some XIMS HF6.

Our skating champion paced and fretted for hours as he waited for Big G to finish the meticulous process. It did involve a lot of ironing and scraping. It was worth it, though. The knight came back bursting with enthusiasm. Now squire G has a permanent assignment as Minister of Speed.

Snow, Lies and Ski Reports

2010-01-05T11:11:00.002-05:00

Promoters of skiing look for any way they can make conditions sound inviting. At its worst, this means sheer ice referred to as packed powder because that's what it was three weeks ago and big, brown patches of bare ground called "thin cover." But the psychology never stops.

Nordic skiing has always tried to wear the white hat. Reliance on natural snow and small budgets forces a measure of honesty. Cross-country ski centers find creative ways to interpret how many kilometers of trail they have, and refer to a portable toilet as a restroom, but we don't get paid enough to defend claims inflated far beyond that. And of course we describe our snow conditions as charitably as possible.

To keep enthusiasm alive, some operators resort to such entertaining fiction as the Inaccuweather 15-day and hourly forecasts. I suppose some veterans of such a weather-dependent industry as Nordic skiing might believe that a forecast further than three days out has any value at all, but not many. Especially not one who spends summers sailing the New England coast. But when it's time to spin the ski report, out comes the 15-day fable.

"Snow is mentioned on ten of the next 15 days in the forecast," this expert might say. Let's not say that the probability is 10 or 20 percent and the snow is merely showers or flurries.

I understand how the fervent desire to believe in something like a good, snowy winter, eternal life or the human race living in peaceful, prosperous harmony can cancel out rational intelligence. The rational leader looks for ways to sustain belief in wavering followers. Their lives will be better if they believe. The collection plates will be more full. The truth is as fuzzy as a snow cloud on the horizon. Think of the possibilities, not the likelihood.

It's funny how flakes in the air can add up to so little on the ground. We had two or three days of snow, sometimes falling thickly, and netted perhaps six inches of very compressible fluff. To the north and east, parts of Maine and the adjacent Canadian provinces got the real stuff, measurable in feet.

Snowshoe hiking has largely replaced cross-country skiing for the average tourist. With somewhat shallow snow, those who still ski have the advantage. There's no point to plodding around with something like a couple of cafeteria trays on your feet when you don't need to float over knee- or thigh-deep snow. Meanwhile, we sliders can slither on the compressed snow, provided the surface beneath was fairly smooth.

As for the future, I readily admit I do not know. But it is winter and we could get snow.

A Freebie that's Actually Worth It

2009-12-06T13:24:00.003-05:00

I have hated the "free hot wax with purchase of new skis" for many years. In its original form I still do. One quickie ironed-in layer is a waste of everyone's time.

We've entered a new era. At Nordic Skier we now offer school ski team racers who purchase new skis a free hotbox treatment.

Hotboxing takes the place of the time-consuming multi-layer prep jobs we used to sell. A hotbox more effectively heats the ski over a period of hours to soak the prep wax deeper into the base. The procedure actually takes MORE of my time than a singler ironed-on layer, but I feel like it doesn't WASTE my time, so it doesn't bother me at all.

The issue with me was never the time. It was the illusion that we had actually done something and the impression we created that glide waxing was some trivial thing that could be thrown in. Too often, that token splash of wax was all that ski ever saw for the rest of its life.

Even if the recipient of a free hotbox treatment never does any more to the bases, at least we know that a respectable amount of wax went in on that first day. Anyone who does not develop good waxing habits is being wantonly wasteful of their investment in gear. To encourage skiers to take up better waxing habits, the hotboxed ski will reward them with better glide. You absolutely cannot say the same for the one that got the token rub with an iron and a block of whatever was handy.

School team members who already purchased their skis somewhere else can still bring them to Nordic Skier for a $5 discount on any of the hotbox treatments the shop offers.

Binding Placement

2009-10-15T11:53:00.004-04:00

For a few years, Salomon and other authorities have been recommending mounting their bindings on high performance skis a centimeter behind the balance line regardless of whether it's on a skating or classical ski.

Folk wisdom had held that skate skis should be mounted neutral or tip light. Classical skis should be mounted neutral or with a slight tip drop.

As usual, it turns out to be more folked-up than you thought.

If you look around for advice on placement you get a range from dead on the balance to 1.5 centimeters back. You'd think that 1.5 cm back would make the tips thud to the snow, but that placement still makes them light at the tip.

It turns out that the weight of the binding plate has always overcome the inherent balance of the ski. The only way to make any ski tip heavy would be to mount the binding far enough back to overbalance the weight distribution of the binding itself. This generally shows up around two centimeters. We've been skiing tip light all along.

Experts advise moving the binding back to improve gliding performance. The amount is negligible, but supposedly quite noticeable. At the most, it probably won't do any harm to fudge a half or a whole centimeter back.

The only advantage to the NNN NIS plate is that neurotic or phenomenally sensitive skiers can tweak the binding forward or back to suit snow conditions and their mood. The overwhelming disadvantage, of course, is that the plate requires an NNN binding.

How about a universal plate to return binding choice to the marketplace? That way we can return to the freedom to mix and match brands instead of getting trapped in yet another monopolistic product line.

Looking Forward to Next Year

2009-03-30T11:28:00.002-04:00

I'm in no hurry, but when next ski season finally gets here I look forward to exploring the great trail improvements that went in at Wolfeboro Cross-Country while I was working out of town for the past nine winters.

Wolfeboro Cross Country works hard to maintain a fun, family-oriented trail network with something for everybody. Much of their 30 kilometer system is well-suited to the beginner and intermediate skier, but provides an easy route for someone trying to develop more skills. Unlike some areas that only offer windswept open fields or one basic valley-floor option for skiers who don't want to tackle long, steep climbs and possibly gripping descents, the Wolfeboro facility has a little bit of everything, and easy access to a quaint town with multiple options for lodging, dining and grocery shopping.

Wolfeboro is also conveniently close to the Seacoast and the central and southern regions of New Hampshire, not to mention Maine and Massachusetts. It is located between the corridors of Route 16 and Interstate 93, which makes it handy to get to, but not hectic and overbuilt like a tired roadside attraction. It's a place to unwind and re-energize without taking a long trip from home.

Tired of big, corporate ski areas that don't take care of cross-country skiers? Tired of elitist, race-oriented Nordic areas that only use the tourist and day skier as a source of cash to support their competitive egos? Come to Wolfeboro and just have fun.

The Last Day

2009-03-28T20:19:00.003-04:00

Today the trails closed at Jackson Ski Touring for the 2008-'09 season. I will no longer qualify for or need the season pass badge.

Shutting it down

2009-03-26T20:33:00.002-04:00

As the snow retreats to the higher elevations and the broken bikes call from the south, it's time to button up the seasonal outpost at Jackson Ski Touring for the last time.

Unless Saturday morning dishes up unexpectedly delightful conditions my last outing on Jackson trails will have been a grind in sticky snow on skating skis. The next-to-last outing, however, was another matter. Caught the good frozen stuff for the dead opposite of sticky on a nice blast out the Ellis. I got lucky on a couple of those before the weather tilted more firmly toward the thaw.

Break it down, pack it up, put it behind you. Don't look back at it for few months, or maybe ever. Watch the spaces, not the trees. All images and impressions must be suspect except for the pure honesty of the skiing itself.

Speaking of Yellow Klister

2009-03-16T11:57:00.003-04:00

After two days of great skating I needed a change of pace. George was just coming slowly back from his bout with the Jack Plague. That meant both of us went out on klistered classic skis on Sunday.

George launched earlier in the day, as the temperature crossed from the upper 20s to the mid 30s. He used Swix Silver Universal and some KR40 Violet klister to meet the granular early snow changing to the first moist patches where the strong sun worked on it.

By the time I went out, the temperature in the open was leaping past 40. Out on the Ellis, shaded areas might easily remain dry and firm. To meet that possibility I mixed some of the Silver Uni with KR70 Swamp klister. They don't call it swamp klister, they call it "Aqua."

George returned all smiles. His wax had worked well for his convalescent outing.

I had an excellent time on the Swamp 'n' Silver. In the growing slushy areas, nothing would glide extremely well. Other than that, though, the kick was bomb-proof, so I could propel a strong glide. Untrustworthy kick actually makes you slower. As usually happens, I steadily overtook everyone on the trail in front of me just with careful technique. No one's going to make a video of me, but I get around. It's fun to build the trip one stride at a time.

With good kick you have a solid launching pad for each glide.

Back at the shop, I didn't want to de-klister my skis when the forecast indicates I might want exactly that wax job again. To keep the skis safely away from anything that might get snared by the klister, I put some grid-wall hooks all the way up on grids on either side of one of the backshop windows. George and I laid our skis on this rack, safely above any clutter or traffic.

Nordic Tar and Feathers

2009-03-09T11:34:00.001-04:00

When cross-country skiers run someone out of town, they cover them with yellow klister and beech leaves and carry them out on a pair of beat-up old touring skis.

Couldn't Resist

2009-03-09T11:27:00.002-04:00

Customized this Fischer banner during a quiet moment the other day.

More Great Backshop Work from Elsewhere

2009-03-09T11:17:00.004-04:00

These skis came in for waxing. No mention of the hack job someone did installing the bindings. This is the sort of thing that happens with NNN's pointlessly adjustable steering plate. Because the shop grunt drilled wrong and did not have the wit to re-drill, he had to glue the rear section down with Gorilla Glue and hope it stays long enough for the customer to go far, far away and forget where he bought them.

The skis had no stickers, but they had ski straps with the logo of a shop called Skinny Skis, in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The customers brought two pairs for waxing, one with Salomon Pilot step-in bindings. Both sets had matching ski straps. But they could have gotten the skis themselves from anywhere and bought the straps as a souvenir on a trip to Jackson Hole.

The Days You Wait For

2009-03-03T22:22:00.003-05:00

Slipped away this afternoon, spanning mid-day, really, to wander up the back mountain and rip a few runs through the logging cuts and glades.

It's not as secluded as it used to be. People who had a cabin up and to the right are building a castle now. It's completely off-grid and supposedly still just for seasonal and occasional use, but it's huge and not as high up the mountain. The original cabin sat in a hollow near a stream. This monster sits on a ridge. It's screened by trees, more or less, but that just makes it easier to stumble on. I don't know how workers are getting there with all this snow, but I hear them every time I go out. Today was no exception.

I'd stayed to my right going up, in the cover of woods beside a recent cut. This took me near the top of some hemlock glades I hadn't visited in a while. That's when I heard the radio and realized I'd strayed close to the Tyvek cliff. The house blends in amazingly well. Suddenly you notice not only that it's there, but that it's gigantic. I cut left and dropped into a nice line. Once I had the curve of the hill between me and the building I angled up and left.

Playing the contours I traversed toward a drainage with more conifer glades. I didn't plan to reach it, but got there before I knew it. Rather than get drawn into the longer runs (and longer climbs back out) I turned back toward Lower Bobcat Rocks, where we'd seen some scat at the end of last winter. The sun hit the pinkish granite alluringly. It looked like a good place to bask.

The slope, the spaces and the snow encouraged long, angling runs back toward the rocks. The rocks themselves didn't offer a place to perch. No matter. I would drop a little through the trees, stop and look around, drop a little further. The sky turned a high-altitude navy blue through my polarized sunglasses if I tilted my head just right.

The older cuts are growing up in saplings now. In a narrow stance I could cut through at a steady speed. Any attempt to turn harder or stop short would have ended in a foolish heap. The snow was sticky in the sun, too. Once you get moving in snow like that you want to keep moving. So after every halt to enjoy the peace and sunshine I had to kick start the next section.

You do your time the rest of the winter to get to March. I do my time on the groomies to be in shape for the better getaways to places untracked. This was just a taste, but high grade. Sunny days in March are the brightest we see all year, with light from above and below. Premium stuff.

OMG, what?

2009-03-03T22:20:00.002-05:00

The truth always turns out to be just one notch weirder than anything you could make up.

Jackson Ski Touring!

The Shop Grunt's Lament

2009-02-19T22:26:00.004-05:00

As I walked out on Main Street in Jackson
As I walked out in Jackson one day
I spied a poor shop grunt all dressed in old Gore Tex
with a weird sense of humor and hair turning gray.

I saw by his outfit he'd been a tree hugger
with wide skis and big boots and poor classic form.
He'd tried to fit in, but sadly had blundered --
for years his reception had been less than warm.

He said to me, "Stranger, if you'd work in Jackson
keep quiet until you are told what to think.
Because if you boldly express your opinion
you'll blow it and your reputation will stink.

"I gave it a shot but I spoke out too quickly.
My brash overconfidence caused me to fail.
I had to say something and laid on too thickly,
so now I'm being run out of town on a rail."

The Jackson Ski Touring Foundation Retail Challenge

2009-02-16T20:29:00.019-05:00

Northeastern Nordic skiing powerhouse Jackson Ski Touring is looking for a new retailer to provide products and services inside the touring center. This is extremely challenging because of Jackson's unique business structure and customer demographics.

Jackson Ski Touring is a bit like a religious institution. It isn't simply a large-scale commercial Nordic touring operation. It has some direct roots that extend as far back as the beginning of New England skiing, which is to say as far back as skiing in the United States. Yet it also has tributary streams that spring from each freshening of skiing interest.

The real nuts and bolts operation that exists today descends fairly directly from the founding in 1972 of the non-profit organization that oversees it. But some of the people involved at the time go way back. Just as the founding of the first organized Christian churches came decades (maybe centuries) after the death of the individual for whom the faith was named, so did the founding of JSTF merely pull together a number of threads in the skiing faith. And those original saints and martyrs, or their descendants, still live around there. This is hardly obvious to someone who might be a competent skier and technically capable, but who was raised an agnostic skier, without heroes, devils, or much supporting mythology.

The founders and their families represent just one group in the complex clientele. The customer population sorts out along many lines: skiing ability, financial status, resident, non-resident, seasonal resident, visiting tourist, visiting racer, visiting sport skier, and many more. Most local enthusiasts have favorite shops already, where they can shop before November and after April, when the touring center retail location cannot operate.

For the Jackson touring center shop, the bulk of the revenue comes from visiting skiers. These are mostly beginners and intermediates. Some are buying their first gear. Others are upgrading. Most Nordic ski customers tend to hold onto their equipment for a long time. Thirty years is not out of the question. Ten or fifteen years is common.

A small portion of income comes from sales of top-end performance gear. High performance skiers tend to like a lot of technical wizardry around their purchases, so they are easily discouraged from buying at any shop where they have the faintest notion that the person helping them is beneath them. Upgrading intermediates, however, are often happy to have a simpler summary of technical points, even if they're moving up to their first really expensive ski. They want to know how it works, often in detail, but they don't drop a lot of insider tidbits like code numbers for specific Fischer ski cores and flexes. They don't really care of you pull out the super-zoot ski flex tester and convince them the ski is tailored to them to the nearest gram.

Whoever works the floor in the Jackson touring center retail shop needs to be ready to deal with this entire range of customers as well as ringing up hundreds of sales of hats, lip balm, gloves and hand and toe warmers.

Because the retail provider is an outside contractor, whoever ends up managing the outpost will find him (or her) self squarely between the Foundation management, his own shop management, and those among the locals who like to try to call the shots whether they're in the chain of command or not. In various ways these secret shoppers can insert themselves into JSTF's decision making process in ways that may not be readily visible to the field commander. You soon find out that a lot of decisions are made well above your security clearance level.

Jackson faces the daunting task of finding a shop that reflects the image they are trying to project, of the most formidable cross-country ski center in the northeast United States. They've negotiated with some large names in outdoor retail. But a place like L.L. Bean, for instance, is going to want to put its stamp on the operation in a big way. This threatens to eclipse the independent greatness and heritage of Jackson Ski Touring itself.

Jackson might prefer to use a retailer with strong roots in the Mount Washington Valley, because the Valley has its own reputation in American skiing. Unfortunately, the most popular Nordic shop in Mount Washington Valley is barely in the valley at all. It sits at the bottom of the Mount Washington Auto Road, at the Great Glen Trails Outdoor Center. It is staffed by a crew of likable locals headlined by Nate and Eli, two really nice dudes who are also really great skiers. They've been with Great Glen from the beginning, as I understand it. Did I mention they're really nice dudes? However, they don't own their shop

For Great Glen to open a branch at Jackson Ski Touring would put both places at risk of losing their independent identities. Sure as fate, the word would start to get around that Great Glen was part of Jackson or Jackson had been taken over by Great Glen. Along with all the other things that are hard to explain about JSTF and how it all works, this would have to be added. No one really NEEDS to know, but curious people would WANT to know. The confusion could create unnecessary turbulence for both parties. Whose name goes on top? Who pays what to whom? And who gets custody of Nate and Eli?

Other contenders, like Reliable Racing or Gorham Bike and Ski, would have to see considerable advantage to themselves to be willing to undertake the hassle of setting up a shop that has to completely disappear no later than the second week of April, only to be painstakingly rebuilt the following November. Mount Washington Valley-based staff would be ideal, but how do you assure their allegiance to the home office and keep their quality control at a level that reflects well on the home office's image?

Valley-based staff for Jackson Ski Touring's retail shop would be able to take advantage of their local connections. They'd have a short commute, helping them arrive punctually and refreshed. On the down side, all outdoor sports are somewhat competitive, and Nordic skiing actually includes racing, so your local talent might have a few detractors as well as friends. Anyone who hires them inherits the bad with the good. In a little fish bowl like The Valley, some people have long memories and not a lot of forgiveness. So your retailer from away might accidentally hire someone who interviewed well but who had serious issues with some key people in the customer base or Jackson management.

On the subject of unforgivable transgressions, let's also mention in passing that a perfectly well-meaning boob might fatally wound a shop's chances with a few tactless remarks in the wrong place. These things can happen, believe it or not. It's less likely with likable local dudes like Nate and Eli, but that package comes with its own difficulties as detailed earlier. Any outside concern might blunder during the early period of growing pains. Open lines of communication not only between the two businesses, JSTF and retail but also up and down the chains of command in both businesses will be vital to creating a truly productive working relationship for them.

I've been aware of their dilemma since 2004, and acutely aware of it since the fall of 2005. I've even been sympathetic to it, but as long as no one was going to approach me to discuss it, I wasn't going to bring it up. I observed various potential candidates, such as the short-lived Hurricane Mountain Multisport shop. I figured them for a shoo-in, but it never happened. If JSTF had been smart about it they would have thrown that guy the bone, even if one of the local deep pockets had to bankroll him for a while and coach him on management and customer relations.

A local deep pocket could try to buy Nate and Eli away from Great Glen, but they would have to arrange summer employment, either by setting up Nate and Eli in their own shop or just by putting them on some sort of summer retainer. Buying the boys away from Great Glen would probably start some sort of ugliness between regional power players, so that's probably not a good option.

One solution could be for Great Glen to move the headquarters of its retail operations to the valley floor and run both the Great Glen Trails shop and a theoretical Jackson Ski Touring shop as satellites. That sounds expensive and complicated for Great Glen, with debatable gains. The only business they would gain that they don't already have is the transient trade at Jackson. Would that offset the expense required to obtain it? With three retail outlets under the Great Glen banner, it would be like three separate doors to one giant shop. We're starting to get into some big business economics now. This might be the seed of a regional or national venture. In for a million, in for a billion, I always say.

As you can see, someone faces a considerable challenge in sorting through all this. No retail provider is perfect. The powerful ones pose a threat to Jackson's own brand in the marketplace. Any lesser shop runs the risk of looking too dinky or like an upstart to the people who are really in the know up there. As always in business, are the risks worth the gains? A really big outfit like Bean or REI risks a much smaller percentage of their capital to extend a small feeler into what is actually quite a tight retail space. A smaller shop stands much more exposed financially for what could be proportionally greater gains, but also greater wounds in case of a bad snow year or other setbacks.

Whatever happens, Jackson will go on. Ultimately, for the people who really love it, Jackson is about the skiing, not the shopping. They do the skiing better than anyone in the region. Maintaining that alone is an exhausting job. The rest of the stuff has to be there because that's part of the Big Touring Center experience. Jackson Ski Touring started in the back room of a shop and now has a shop in the back room. Putting together the right blend of businesses and a level of services that not only looks impressive but actually works economically is not a simple task.

We wait to see what the next solution looks like.

Jackson Ski Touring was like Nordic Graduate School

2009-02-08T19:13:00.005-05:00

In 2000, when I first arrived at the Jackson Ski Touring complex, I knew a lot more about dodging trees and skiing with various kinds of load on my shoulders than I did about the laboratory-perfect skating and striding a facility of that caliber allows.

Faced with the need to serve a varied and as-yet-unknown clientele, I knew I would have to get up to speed in a hurry. I had enough familiarity with a broad range of Nordic technique and technology to get started. The touring center itself provided the depth.

Thrown in at the deep end with a variety of stressors, I also had a number of resources to draw on. These included a ready supply of gear and a trail network that ran right by the door. Convenience like that is hard to beat. In addition, the facility had some highly knowledgeable and accessible people on the staff or among the regular clientele.

The popular term for my learning style is "autodidact." This is a nice way of saying "stubborn jerk who doesn't do well in structured learning situations." I speak only for myself, not for the respectable body of admirable autodidacts out there. Given the wealth of experience and knowledge trailside at Jackson I was able to glean knowledge and perform my experiments in a continuous thread throughout each ski season.

In every case I try to share what I have learned unstintingly with anyone who hasn't encountered it yet. I don't care if they admire me for knowing it. I don't care if they even know my name. I just want them to know what I know so they know it themselves and can take advantage of it. So from that standpoint, Jackson was a banquet of experience translated into shared knowledge.

It was always about the skiing. Exposed on the sales floor it was also like improvisational theater. Under the spotlights, before a live audience, play your heart out. Many customers thanked me or members of my staff for the full, complete and honest presentation. We matched up a lot of skiers with carefully chosen gear. A number of them continue to seek us out. Sometimes this involved staying well after closing time. Our schedule hardly rivals the grueling days of the center's executive director or the brute labors of the patrol, especially in lean snow years that require a lot of shoveling, but in terms of hours awake and time spent thinking about how to make it work the job very soon expanded to consume a lot of life outside of official business hours.

In the spirit of cooperative enterprise, retail staff would often have to answer questions about the facility when Foundation staff were either overwhelmed by other customers or momentarily absent. It's like working in Walt Disney World: everyone has to know the layout of the park and the location of the nearest restrooms or snack bars. We did this without being asked.

Mind you I only lasted one summer at Disney World. I prefer my rides less structured and predictable.

I can be pretty blunt when sharing my opinions. Try as I might to be informative and entertaining, I have to face the fact that I also just piss some people off. Thrown on stage in a setting like Jackson, where the business structure can be confusing even to those somewhat familiar with it, let alone visitors from away, when I stepped on someone's toes it had a disconcerting way of echoing across miles and miles of New England, sometimes even rattling windows lightly as far away as LL Bean headquarters. I never did get used to that. Who really could? Even stranger, I often would not hear a sound until months later when I was knocked off my feet by a shock wave.

None of that has a single thing to do with skiing. When I found I could not control it, I ignored it, concentrating on what I could do instead. I remember a friend in college, a graduate student in French, telling me hair raising tales of departmental intrigue, politics and hostility. People get caught up in the importance of their own little universe and start playing all kinds of games with each other's heads. One grad student in that program committed suicide. Things that start out centered on something that's supposed to be light hearted can turn surprisingly poisonous.

Any season could have been the last. Because of that I always tried to value the experience of skiing there and experience it as often as possible. It's simple on the snow. Just ski.

Great Trails. Difficult People.

2009-02-07T21:41:00.013-05:00

I had to seriously revise this post. Some idiot thought it was about parking. Still, I like the raw frustration in it. And hey: no one has objected directly to me about it, just talked to someone else. Par for the course.

Working with the Jackson Ski Touring Foundation is like getting on the Tilt-A-Whirl: it seems like it should be fun, but long before the ride is over you're ready to puke and just want it to end.

All Nordic areas, particularly in the eastern USA, labor under various handicaps.

Corporately-owed areas like Bretton Woods and other networks attached to alpine areas often find themselves treated like useless appendages or even hemorrhoids by their corporate owners. Nordic never turns impressive dollars compared to lift-served sports, golf and land rape.

Small private areas hope they can find the right size for their niche to allow them to survive the stresses any small business faces, compounded by the similarity between operating a touring center and operating a small farm. You need the weather to cooperate so you can produce the crop. Then you need people hungry for it to show up and consume it before it shrivels.

In Jackson's case, the particular handicap is the management of the non-profit corporation by a board of directors, and the relationship the touring center has with the town from which it takes its name. They're big, with the appetite of any large organism, but held together by tenuous agreements and a never-ending battle against encroaching development as well as the usual whims of weather and fitness fads.

As a 501(c)3 non-profit corporation, the Foundation can only derive income from limited sources. In order to preserve its delicate balance with local business owners, it also has to be careful about how it introduces competitors into the local economy. Yet, as a big-time cross-country ski area it wants to be able to offer a high level of skier services to the vacationers and day trippers it ceaselessly trolls for with its marketing campaigns and relentless attempts to get inserted into the news hole of various print media.

Because a private service provider like the retail concessionaire has to be a separate entity, the Foundation has to coexist with an entirely independent business under its roof. We're all in the fun business. We all want to keep the sport of Nordic skiing alive and well, if not growing. But the diverse and secretive board, filtering its wishes through the persona of the executive director, has a great deal of difficulty managing this symbiosis.

As the retailer there for the past nine years, the shop I work for has operated under the critical observation of many sets of eyes. Because the board seems to relish its anonymity, they do not share with us who might be active on it from year to year. Only individual members of it might mention their status to qualify for a discount. In fact, I can find no readily accessible published list of the board. There's no easy link from their website, nor is it published in a sidebar in the newsletters piled on the front counter, as other non-profits frequently do.

If the foundation and its board dealt openly and cooperatively with their retail contractor, the touring center could be a great place to work. Instead, their management displayed a competitive and condescending attitude toward us from the outset. Whoever tries to fulfill the retail role will face the same critical scrutiny as they try to run their business in an enclosure reminiscent of a pony ride at a spoiled little girl's birthday party. In spite of this I personally did not start out with a negative attitude toward them. I'd heard stories over the years, but I was going to wait and see. Others in my organization either lost their patience early or never had any to begin with.

Jackson Ski Touring does a lot of things well. Unfortunately, this gives some in the organization and among its supporters the misconception that they can do no wrong. Only others can do wrong. These wrongs will usually not be pointed out in a constructive fashion.

A large number of extremely cool people ski at the facility. It's just the small number of whiners, snobs and stuffed shirts who make a poisonous atmosphere in which to work. Of course there are always difficult people among the transient visitors during any season as well, but that just goes with running an amusement park. Welcome to the Happiest Place on Earth! (smiley face). It's the local sneaks and snakes who create the insurmountable difficulty of unrealistic expectations.

This was my gut reaction to the news that The Board had finally decided to sever our retail arrangement. People can take it in a bad way as an affront and an attack or they can step back and analyze what they might be doing to inspire such feelings. Whether they intended it or not, some of their tactics amounted to psychological warfare. In the best psychological manipulation, the manipulator preserves deniability and the victim can never be sure what's intentional. That's what makes it effective. But it could also just be a lack of social and business skills on the part of the people originating it, in this case known and unknown players in Jackson.

Waxing Analytical

2009-02-06T22:11:00.002-05:00

One major reason cross-country skiing has been in decline since the late 1980s is that it involves five or six different forms of three different substances that do two different jobs, all called "wax."

All Nordic skis require, or at least benefit from, applications of one or more of these substances. The entire study of techniques related to selecting the right ones and applying them is referred to generically as "waxing."

Snowshoeing, anyone? All you do is strap those on and go.

Those who love Nordic skiing love it in their own way, with all the complexities, not to say flaws, their chosen form brings with it. Some people learn a little about the world of waxing. A few learn to tell them all apart and can use each one appropriately. A smaller number than that gets really deep into the tweaky aspects of it, spending up to $180 an ounce on some waxes.

Outdoor recreation industries all make the same mistake when presented with a boom. They act as if the good times will roll forever. The inevitable decline always takes them by surprise. It happened to bicycling twice, coming out of the 1970s road bike boom and again when the 1990s mountain bike boom crashed. It happened to backpacking in the 1980s, too, when all the major manufacturers of quality gear became clothing companies that had gear lines on the side.

Nordic skiing faces an additional handicap by depending on natural snow. First you have to get it. Then you have to be able to wax for it. When all skis needed grip wax, skiers learned a whole lot in a hurry about how different one batch of white stuff might be from another, and how it changed further from day to day. This led to the invention of the "fish scale" or "no-wax" ski. All well and good, but if there's no snow those skis look like a waste of money. Learning to care for them and operate them is a waste of time.

All booms end. They usually leave behind a number of new participants who become loyal and dedicated to the activity in question, but the small number of survivors going forward can never support the kind of commerce the fashionable frenzy did.

In non-boom times, activities attract a small, steady number of recruits. As numbers fluctuate from year to year, any survivors among the businesses that formed around the boom lean eagerly forward, waiting for the frenzy to begin again. To amuse the regulars and entice curious outsiders, companies fiddle with the equipment. Rather than creating silly-looking ski shapes or fragile, complicated bindings, how about coming up with catchy, distinctive, memorable and DIFFERENT names for all the things currently called WAX?

Pilot vs 666

2009-02-01T06:21:00.002-05:00

Friday we tested skating skis equipped with the two competing systems, Salomon Pilot and Rottefella NNN. It was not the NNN triumph our Fischer rep had hoped to achieve.

We put the boots on at least four people. Only one thought they had potential to become comfortable on his foot. He also liked the ride on the skis with NNN, but has not skated extensively on any technique-specific equipment. Anything would feel more precise than pushing himself around on 200+ cm classic skis with low-topped, soft racing classic boots.

In the rigid-soled boots, on that strange, flared binding plate, I felt isolated from the ski and the snow. The boot didn't hurt as much as I thought it might. It would have hurt if I'd skied a long time, but we wanted to compare the two systems back-to-back to get the sharpest impression.

NNN suffers from the inherent handicap of any single-bar binding for skating. The boot is rigid and the binding has those wings on it to make up for the tenuous connection provided by only a single bar. If they have to stick to a single bar, perhaps they could place it farther back under the foot to limit lift and maintain sole contact to increase lateral control. It would not have to be more than a couple of centimeters to achieve this effect. On the down side, the strain on that bar would be considerably greater than on anything currently in use. But hey: that's what engineers are for. Figure it out. Helpful hint to start you off: the boot sole would have to be a bit springy to enhance the spring of the binding itself. This flex would also increase the comfort of the boot.

To the laboratory! Quickly!

Skiing the Salomon felt as supple and sweet as ever. Until the Rotten Fellas get a better act together I know where I'll be. Unless I'm somewhere else entirely.

Comparing Skating Boots

2009-01-28T15:25:00.005-05:00

The Fischer rep dropped off pairs of skate skis with Pilot bindings and NNN for us to compare. Because we don't sell No!No!No! boots, he had to leave us those to try as well.

In my experience, Fischer has been incredibly consistent with their boots. Every pair I have ever tried on has been hideously uncomfortable. That record remains unblemished.

I haven't had a chance to ski on this equipment yet. I anticipate distracting levels of pain from my feet while I'm skiing the 666 stuff.
The Fischer/Rottefella alliance is just one more move in the Nordic game of world domination. It's made worse by the new NIS (SIN spelled upside down) plate that only accepts 666 bindings.

The heavy, rigid, uncompromising boot on my foot gave me an idea. It wasn't comfortable to stand in. It wasn't comfortable to walk in. But maybe, just maybe...

Yes!

It felt very solid and commanding when I goose-stepped in it. Kicking those space-age jackboots high like a fascist thug felt just right.

By contrast, my Salomon boots made gentle, knowing love to my feet. They felt as soft as slippers, but held me in a firm embrace. For skiing motions they felt reassuringly supportive. When I tried to goose-step they made me look like a wobbling idiot. Rather anti-fascist.

Vive la France. I'm sticking with the Resistance.

The Magic Land of Winter

2009-01-28T11:13:00.003-05:00

Yesterday I blasted myself out of the sludge of fatigue and distraction to go for an hour up the mountain out back.

After a long time neglecting this convenient resource I am always surprised at how much it has to offer. I used to drive four hours to get to stuff like this. Now I ignore it right outside my back door.

The snow was three feet deeper at its height last year than it is now. That peak hit late in February or early in March. We had quite a bit of thawing between storms last year, so it was amazing that the storms brought snow every time and that it held up as well as it did.

There's just enough snow to cover the worst reefs out there. The powder has settled. The weather has been solidly cold for weeks.

On the climb I came across a tree carved with two names and a date.

Who were these people?

I like skiing alone because it gives me an excuse to go as slowly and cautiously as I like. The dense powder held my skis back on surprisingly steep slopes so I was able to sweep majestically through the trees on the way down.

The slope faces south. It makes a great place to bask as winter matures under strengthening sun. Late in the winter it loses snow quickly. For now, it's a great option because it is warm and well-lighted late into the afternoon.

Now snow falls in what is supposed to be a big storm. At some point the possibility becomes a certainty, so a couple of feet of freshies seems more likely than not. We'll see if the winter continues to build the way it did last year.

Hotbox or Hot Air?

2009-01-21T15:42:00.000-05:00

Reading the explanation on one ski shop's website advocating hotboxing of skis to enhance wax penetration, I can't help wondering if this is yet another lucky rabbit's foot to help people feel faster.

According to a Peltonen tech rep at a ski tech seminar several years ago at Great Glen Trails in New Hampshire, under the best of circumstances wax only penetrates about two THOUSANDTHS of an inch into sintered base material. Maybe three, but what's an extra thousandth of an inch among friends?

The hotbox promo goes like this: heat your ski to 55C (131F) for 6-8 hours with a warm wax on there, then do a coat or two of something rated for a skiing temperature of 10-21F and it's equivalent to 25 waxings! The unit cost for this service is much less than if you had the friendly wax grunt actually do 25 waxings. It is slightly less than we charge for a new ski prep using iron, scraper and brushes.

Why not just blow some Swix CH10 or BP99 on your own skis and then lean them up by your furnace for a couple of days?

Racing is such a neurotic activity. How many of the processes related to it have sprung up just because someone with a pack a day habit and a shop apron figured out how to exploit that? A confident racer is a happy racer. A happy racer is a fast racer. At least you want any anger and aggression to be directed up and away from the racer's equipment and support staff. Assure them they're on The Good Stuff and then tell them what that other racer just said about them. Arrgh! I'm a stone ground, hotboxed killin' machine!

Hard waxes for cold conditions melt at higher temperatures than soft waxes for warmer ones. Thus they do not penetrate as easily into the base. But their job is to condition the running surface of the ski to withstand the drag and abrasion of icy conditions in wicked low temperatures. As such they're more of a surface treatment than the softer waxes, which need to saturate the base material more to assure that free water is excluded. Those soft ones melt readily under a moderate iron temperature. You may realize some gain by stuffing your skis in a hot crevice for a few hours, but is it worth what the tech wizards need to charge you to pay for their time and the loan they took out to pay for the box?

Nordic Skiing Caught in a Bind

2009-01-20T10:40:00.003-05:00

Once skiing became recreation instead of Scandinavian transportation, it became a relationship between professionals and the leisure classes in the the countries to which it spread. As such, the ski industry was basically a shady enterprise designed to separate wealthy fools from their money so the professionals could pay for their own skiing lifestyle.

When skiing was re-democratized in its purely downhill form in the 1960s as family fun, the relationship between industry and customers was already established. The middle- and working-class skiers just represented another pool of chumps to exploit.

Industry ski bums envision spending a great deal of time on the snow. For a time it was true. For the most part, we professionals do get to spend a lot more time skiing than most of the customers ever will. Even the leisure classes spread their time among many gratifications. Only those dedicated to competition spend more time on snow than the lucky grunts living their hand-to-mouth existence for the sake of skiing.

Unfortunately for the ski bums, once large amounts of money come into play, the industries harvesting those dollars need more foot soldiers. The machine provides less time to ski while demanding more real business acumen and ruthlessness.

Cross-country skiing threw a twist into the ski industry business model by opening the sport to many new participants of even lesser means and by opening thousands of square miles of terrain to the floppy-shod masses looking for a place to shuffle. No longer did one need to work as an indentured servant to the corporate ski industry to get cheap skiing. You just had to master the deceptively simple equipment.

And so cross-country skiing nearly died. Touring centers worked on better and better grooming. Manufacturers worked on equipment that was easier to master. The public worked on clogged arteries and butts big enough to show drive-in movies on. The alpine ski industry embraced snowboards. Alpine skiers accepted $50, $60 and $70 dollar lift tickets. Anything was better than trudging around in funny little shoes on funny little skis up and over boring terrain while gasping for oxygen.

Even the Telemark revival movement of the early 1980s has gravitated back to fat, heavy boards and monster boots after initially trying to showcase the possibilities of only moderately heavy Nordic touring gear.

The crux of the biscuit is the binding.

The Nordic boom traveled in flexible shoes with duck-bill toes clamped to long skis by snap-down toe pieces. These evolved in a variety of widths, most commonly 75 millimeters across the toe, with 50 millimeter models used on skinny racing skis. The boot soles twisted under hard turning forces, leading to things like the wedge heel plate that fit into a v-groove in the boot heel, and a variety of wicked teeth and spikes on flat heel plates, as well as more drastic devices to secure the heel when the foot was flat on the ski.

By the mid 1980s many companies were trying to eliminate the duck-billed boot entirely and replace it with much more modern-looking contraptions. Out of that bizarre world of mutants emerged Rottefella's first New Nordic Norm binding, with a steering plate behind the toe piece and a rubber flexor to provide springiness, and Salomon's Profil system, which improved greatly on what Rottefella began.

Salomon used a flexor and a big, single steering ridge that ran the full length of the boot sole. The system used a fixed-length jig, so there could be no mistake in drilling the holes for mounting. Rottefella insists to this day on maintaining an adjustable-length plate which makes things more complicated to no advantage for the skier.

Now as the 21st Century no longer seems shiny and new, Salomon has moved on to more complicated attachment systems and Rottefella continues to put out annoyingly fragile bindings in a variety of pretty colors from a large number of licensed vendors. Imagine being buried in an avalanche of cheesy children's toys. They're cute, but you're still being crushed to death.

Snowshoeing is booming. Nordic is technologizing itself to death the way mountain biking did. For the dedicated addict, many of the new devices are really neat and desirable. For the average poor slob who gets to ski four or five times in a good year, eternally reliable 75-millimeter mediocrity would probably have been fine.

For the addicts to get their high-grade goodies, lots of other people have to buy up the rest of the production run. Otherwise the equipment manufacturers can't afford to stay in business to service the addicts' needs. This relies on a steady supply of incoming participants or old participants upgrading their equipment. Newbies will accept simplified explanations for the most part, but upgrading intermediates want things explained in more depth. Here's where it gets difficult. A shop employee has to explain the fine points of the new gear without overloading the mental circuitry of the customer.

To jazz up high-performance Nordic, some shops try to offer stone-ground bases and special hot boxes to cook the wax into the base material. Will this usher in a new age of Nordic participation? It's doubtful. The up-front cost for facilities like this requires a large clientele to pay it off. These shops have to use the Internet to farm customers from all over the country to try to recoup the investment. Meanwhile, you still have to get on the skis and exert yourself to make them go. How much was that lift ticket again? Doesn't sound so bad, now. Later we'll go snowshoein'.

Two days ago I was out on my classic skis in a heavy snowstorm, sliding past everyone, including a little convoy of the touring center's regulars. Back in the building, one of them asked me what I had used for wax. On the glide zones I was using stuff a full grade colder than the range we were in, because I'd put it on two days earlier and hadn't had time to change. For kick I had Start Terva Green we don't even carry anymore because the only Start wax anyone wanted to buy was Start Green glide wax. Do I hotbox my skis? No. Have they ever been stone ground? No. Would I do either one? I don't know. Probably not. Wax often. Wax carefully. Always handle your own skis.

I don't see Nordic racing becoming a big money category in the United States before the next North American ice age. There are too many more reliable ways to get your exercise and your competitive ya-yas. And you're not likely to talk anyone but a racer or a dedicated and well-funded poser into getting regular stone grinds. You are chewing base material off each time you get them ground. It makes your Nordic addiction that much more expensive, and, therefore, hard to sustain.

Some Improvements, Some Boring Consistencies

2009-01-19T21:07:00.004-05:00

The trail network at Jackson Ski Touring is in great shape this year. The improvements on the homologated race course have added fun and exciting options to trails that were fun already. The grooming staff is doing a first-rate job. The executive director continues to show drive and energy that has kept the place going for more than three decades now.

When this director is gone, the operation may not survive. For all of his annoying quirks, it takes a personality as big as his to drag together all the other players and their egos to get anything to happen at all. He has sacrificed much, even with what he has gained from his position here. It would be nearly impossible to groom a successor when what exists today owes so much to the character of the dominant creator of it. He and it have grown together in indigenous symbiosis. It's not like a normal job. It has a life of its own, made up of the lives woven together throughout its history.

Last year, Big Time Nordic was a bit of a bad joke. The incompetent grooming staff made a mockery of the advertising. One guy was a one-pass wonder who produced sloppy tracks and a lot of death cookies. The other one just had a screw loose. It's hard to get good help. But this year a veteran artist of the Pisten Bully has returned full time, and the trainee under his guidance is actually learning, and learning fast. The winter is colder, so the snow is better than last year, even though there's less of it, so far.

In good years and bad, the inmates of The Village amuse themselves with various intrigues the day skier or vacationer from away would probably never notice. They grow tiresome to those not inclined to play such games, but they have their endless secret life having nothing whatever to do with skiing. But then business has nothing to do with skiing. Even the ski business has only a tangential relationship to the sport it exploits, particularly at the high corporate level. Nordic divisions of downhill-oriented companies are minuscule appendages dangling precariously from large octopi.

A six-foot, five-inch chuckling alpine blowhard put it in a nutshell today when he picked up a Nordic racing ski from the rack.

"Don't they make these in adult sizes?" he asked his weasel-like companion. Still laughing at the pencil-necked pipsqueaks conversing in the lodge, they ambled out the front door.

Nordic is just a joke and an afterthought in the world of skiing. That world owes its existence to Nordic skiing, but the majority of gravity-propelled, grease-fed heroes of the lift-served area will never know it.

Within the little world of American cross-country skiing, those who fancy themselves major players treat it like a game of world domination. Standing in the center of it they can squint and imagine that it extends beyond the farthest horizon. It is clearly worth all the stress they dump on anyone who does not express it in the way those self-anointed powers see fit.

That has become extremely tiresome.

Tough Drive to Work

2009-01-16T12:18:00.005-05:00

The XIMS thermometer does not lie. Next to the passenger door of the car I was driving this morning, the temperature was about ten degrees below zero. It warmed to somewhat below minus four by the time I arrived. My fingertips were frozen. My feet were painfully cold. Frost was forming on the inside of the windshield and side windows. Cold air blew out of the dashboard vents, even though the engine temperature gauge showed it had warmed to the normal mid-range.

I've been warmer on Cannon Mountain ski lifts on a windy day. The drive to work was a lot longer than most lift rides.

Here at the touring center the temperature has crawled up to about +7F. That's probably as good as we're going to get.

It's a cliche, but

2009-01-14T12:43:00.002-05:00

Cross-country skiing is as much fun as sex, and most people look as bad doing it.

Like sex, cross-country skiing causes a lot of bodily secretions to flow. They just mostly come out of different openings. So cross-country skiers perform their exertions coated with glistening moisture. They grunt. They sweat. They breathe hard. Afterward they're suffused with a glow of satisfaction, or perhaps frustrated by an inadequate performance. Usually you feel better than when you started.

You'll see occasional beautiful people and professionally competent-looking performers. You have to wonder if it feels as good to those show ponies, or if it's just a job. Some of them do seem to know arcane secrets of ecstasy beyond the powers of the average grunt. Is it worth it? What if it isn't really any better, just strenuously kinkier? You never know until you try. But you increase the odds of hurting yourself when you try to get to those advanced levels. You could drown in the hot tub or fall from the trapeze or asphyxiate because you didn't get the scarf untied fast enough-- I mean you could hit a tree on the way down a steep trail you weren't ready for, or pull a muscle.

Go for it. Have fun. I, for one, won't be watching too closely.

Note the resemblance to a truck running board

2009-01-05T11:53:00.003-05:00

These skis probably came from the same factory.

NNN on a Fischer Tongue Depressor

2009-01-05T11:49:00.003-05:00

Fire up the chipper...

NNN Doing What NNN Does

2009-01-03T06:11:00.003-05:00

Yet another broken plate on an NNN binding. Note also the annoying flared wings on the plate, added in recent years to increase lateral control by compensating for several design elements that decrease it. Those wings also keep the skis from fitting securely on many backshop fixtures used to support the ski during such routine processes as cleaning and waxing.

Several kilometers from the shop the other day I met a man and a woman making their way along the trail toward the touring center. The woman slid along as best she could while carrying one of her husband's skis in her hand. The man scooted himself down the track as best he could with a ski on one foot and a bare boot on the other.

Thinking this was just a typical iced-up NNN binding that wouldn't let him re-enter after he'd stepped off his skis for some errand or other, I stopped to see if I could help him get back on two planks. They showed me that it wasn't so simple.

The sole of his new Alpina boot had pulled completely off. It was still engaged in the binding. I gave them some cord I had, so they could try lashing the boot together enough to make slithering a little easier. On my way back to base about 20 minutes later, I passed them. Because of the configuration of the failed Alpina boot, they had been unable to secure a lashing that would hold his foot for even the most rudimentary shuffle.

NNN sole separation is a legendary problem. If it isn't, it should be. Since NNN-BC was the first back-country system binding, the many sole failures I saw with that helped convince me that system bindings have no place on a real back-country excursion. I know Vegard Ulvang used the first version of Salomon's BC system to ski across Greenland, but that was really just a long but straightforward tour.

Number One Reason Why Ski Tails Delaminate

2009-01-03T06:09:00.002-05:00

Solidly in Stage 5

2009-01-02T21:17:00.003-05:00

The fatigue that develops when serving the vacationing public for a protracted period comes on in distinct stages. I passed stage 4 yesterday morning, aided by a late night on New Year's Eve. This was after resolving to ignore celebration and get to bed before midnight. After a sociable dinner with friends and the drive home it was only ten minutes before midnight when I hit the pillow. This after a 9-hour workday with an hour of driving at either end. I'd been up since just after 5 a.m., and the alarm was set to wake me at the same time on January 1.

The Stages:

Stage 1: tired but hyper efficient. This generally lasts a day or less. Soon degenerates into going through the motions, doing the absolute minimum necessary to get the latest goon out of your face.

Stage 2: increasing impatience with idiots and their bullshit.

Stage 3: Temporal detachment: You don't know what day it is and it doesn't matter anyway. You've been at work forever and will be there for all eternity.

Stage 4: Short term memory loss.Whole sections of your day, particularly driving, will disappear from your mind as you do them. Combines nicely with Stage 3 to create a drifty feeling drugs only wish they could match. In Stage 4 you could kill an idiot and go back to eating your lunch as if nothing had happened. You would be able to deny it while hooked to a polygraph without showing the slightest distress. Not only wouldn't you remember doing it, you wouldn't be sorry when you found out you had.

Stage 5: Staring. In Stage 5 you'll find yourself enjoying the diamond-like fire of morning sunlight hitting the scratches in the glass counter top. You'll stare into it until the sun moves far enough to cast a shadow over it or the next dripping vulgarian lurches into the counter and drops a puddle of mucus on it while firing questions at you. After dispensing with the idiot in ways you will never remember, you will shift your gaze to the far windows of the lodge. This helps you in two ways: you get snow blindness and avoid eye contact with customers.

Caffeine or a good night's sleep will fool you into thinking you're back up to full strength. You'll start to act like you're in stage one until you lurch off the rails because you're going way too fast for your condition.

Two days to go. They're liable to be the busiest yet. When they're over, someone will have to tell me how I did.

Holiday Week

2008-12-30T21:14:00.003-05:00

Strangely enough, cover has survived on the trails at certain Nordic areas. Surprisingly large numbers of tourists come to frolic and gambol on it. I have a theory about this.

Despite the shaky economy and poor prognosis, people want to believe things will get better. Since ski conditions are good, they're taking this Happy New Year spirit into the winter holidays. Things may go south after the inauguration. People may expect too much too soon and be disappointed. But for now, they're willing to play.

Winter Officially Begins

2008-12-23T06:43:00.002-05:00

We live in what's called the "temperate zone" because it sounds nicer than "fickle bitch zone."

After three snowstorms in a week, bringing about two feet of instant coverage, the temperature is supposed to rebound from its current low of 2 degrees to 38 on Christmas Eve, with yet another snowstorm turning mostly to rain. That means dashing through the slush with a roaring snow blower, hurling glop off the driveway before it can set up into horrible ridged concrete with the next temperature plunge.

On the ski trails, the seesaw temperatures will turn the surface from sticky to sloppy to raspy frosted glass and back to sticky. Some form of precipitation could fall on four of the next five days and five of the next six. Even days listing snow show highs above 32, for that hellish watery brew that turns into something different with each skier that passes over it.

Thanks, Father Christmas. What unspeakable act were you performing with Mother Nature to produce this offspring?

Don't tell me.

On the plus side, we have a deep base, unless the next page of the extended forecast shows a jump to the 60s and a deluge. That's happened before.

It's a long way to March.

Conflicting Wisdoms

2008-12-21T10:28:00.002-05:00

I was putting grip wax on my classical skis this morning when Peter the Great walked in.

"You're putting it on long," he said. "Real long," he added, as he looked again.

"It's for the new snow," I said. The big storm has begun, with up to 20 inches expected by the end overnight.

"You don't need to wax long for new snow," said Peter. "Just change your technique. If the snow is sticking and clumping, drive your foot forward to scrape it off on each stride."

"What about the unconsolidated snow shearing from itself?"

"Consolidate it yourself. Stomp harder on the track."

I'd learned about waxing long from Grand Master Thom at one of his clinics. I didn't make it up myself or get it from a random stranger. Waxing long has worked for me. But Peter's method sounds like it would work as well.

"I can't stand when people complain about their wax," Peter said. "Just ski through it. Try things."

Make it work.

Strange but true

2008-12-11T13:55:00.002-05:00

It IS true

2008-12-11T13:42:00.002-05:00

"I was hardly doing anything."

2008-12-11T13:39:00.002-05:00

Gazing out the window at what I see so much

2008-12-11T13:36:00.004-05:00

More joys of retail

2008-12-11T13:34:00.003-05:00

Racers. You gotta love 'em.

2008-12-11T13:31:00.002-05:00

The most popular trail

2008-12-11T13:30:00.002-05:00

This happens too often

2008-12-11T13:28:00.003-05:00

How about a quick squirt of Bactine on your third degree burns while you're at it?

This really hapened

2008-12-11T13:27:00.001-05:00

Top-notch staff

2008-12-11T13:26:00.002-05:00

Big Time Nordic hires only the best, if they can catch them down on their luck.

Some of our clientele

2008-12-11T13:23:00.002-05:00

It's a nightmare!

2008-12-11T13:21:00.002-05:00

What's the wax of the day? What?! Noooooo!

Snowshoeing is a sport

2008-12-11T13:18:00.003-05:00

Snowshoeing used to be something winter hikers and mountaineers did when they had to. Now it's a sport, done on groomed trails. Those two deep grooves the machine leaves in the snow are like the perfect line to follow so you don't get lost. Why is that skier all pissed off? Sorehead!

The sign says...

2008-12-11T13:16:00.001-05:00

We don't need no stinkin' pulk!

2008-12-11T13:13:00.002-05:00

Nothing says parental love like pulling your kid in a cheap, department store sled while you stab at his face with carbide pole tips.

We look out for each other here

2008-12-11T11:36:00.001-05:00

Another Slither

2008-12-06T22:38:00.002-05:00

Went out for my once-weekly exercise today. The snow cover is thin. The surface is crusty or loose granular.

My skis had great grip in the glide phase and were nice and slippery in the kick. Still, it was good to get out and abuse myself. Eventually I'll get into a regular routine again.

For almost an hour I could forget about everything but getting myself out and back again along the trail.

Annual Reminder

2008-12-04T11:16:00.004-05:00

That "free hot wax" on a brand new ski is like giving a single sip of water to someone crawling across the desert.

That quick hot wax for $5 or $10 at Happy Valley Family Ski Resort is like a quick squirt of Bactine on a third degree burn.

In a few strides you'll be dragging that raw surface across the unkind field of ice crystals as if you'd never wasted your money on the token efforts of the Helpful Wax Grunt.

Helpful Wax Grunts pride themselves on how quickly they can get wax onto, and off of, your skis. Their whole economy is based on quick turns. They thrive on YOUR helplessness and waxing phobia.

"Wax my skis once and I glide well for (less than) a day. Teach me to wax and I glide well for a lifetime."

Be a partner with your skis, or at least a good master to them. Feed and water them regularly.

Extruded touring bases with waxless grip patterns often don't benefit a great deal from hot waxing anyway. High density sintered bases used on touring skis don't absorb a lot of wax. Extruded bases with molded grip patterns don't absorb any. If you have something like a Fischer Superlight you might hot wax the glide zones, but all no-wax skis need a smear-on anti-icing compound in the grip zone. High-density and extruded bases can use it on the whole base.

Lower density sintered bases, which you get as you move up in quality on performance skis for skate or classic technique, absorb wax and need it for their health. A token shot once or twice a year won't do it. If you ski a lot, count on freshening up the glide once a week or more.

If you ski hard but have to take days or weeks off, store your skis with wax on them. Iron on a layer of something in the medium temperature range and don't scrape it off. When you get to ski, you can scrape the wax and brush it out. It may be right for the conditions. If not, do a coat of the right wax.

Glide waxing is simple. The process takes a few minutes, but you don't have to tear your hair and twist your brain about it the way you sometimes do with grip wax for classical. Relax and enjoy it. Your skis will thank you and you'll have more fun using them.

Don't let your skis get nasty

2008-12-03T13:28:00.002-05:00

A woman just brought me her skis. She claims to love them. You wouldn't know it by the bases. She feared damaging them with a wax iron, so she didn't wax them at all.

They'd been waxed at some point. Whoever had done it had left the usual slob's gobs at the tip. One subtle touch by meticulous waxers is to wax that area for protection and a nicer look, but that includes scraping and brushing it.

The running surfaces of the skis were scraped and oxidized. Oxidized bases look white. Those areas need to be smoothed with a product like Swix Fibertex, a mild abrasive pad that cuts the rough surface away. Otherwise, those areas will lose wax more quickly. In abrasive snow conditions, you lose wax too quickly as it is.

This skier plans to get a quick waxing lesson when the season really starts. For now, I'm doing a restoration wax job with multiple saturating coats to get her started.

Wax early and often, people. It's easy and it protects your investment. If you plan to pay a lackey to do it, prepare to pay what it costs to keep a servant. You'll do better to learn and equip yourself so you can do it at your convenience. It's simple and fun...when it's your own skis.

Skiing, of all things

2008-12-01T17:26:00.002-05:00

On Sunday, George and I took tag-outs. He checked out the Homologated Race Course up around the Eagle and Wave neighborhood. I went to the South Hall.

I just love the feelings of sickness, age and decrepitude that have come to mark my early-season forays for the past couple of years. I quit being relentlessly athletic about three years ago. No more obsessive weight training and dutiful use of indoor equipment to bridge the gaps between cycling and skiing, and to maintain upper body muscle in cycling season if I didn't get to paddle a kayak enough to keep it that way. I have more time for creative efforts, but the neglect has caught up with my body.

I mention this just to set the scene.

My car dealt handily with the snowy drive up Green Hill Road. Not so smoothly did I trudge onto the groomed wet snow on some waxless semi-compact skis with my old touring boots.

I switched to Race Classic Salomon boots several years ago as I took up higher-performance skis. My touring boots felt too stiff and heavy on skinny, responsive skis. I started to notice things about boot and binding flexibility that had not mattered to me before. This will happen to anyone who skis long enough. You may not be able to identify what you're feeling, but you'll know there's something, and it will affect your ability to get the most out of your skis.

On Sunday I only noticed that my old boots chewed the crap out of the back of one heel. I needed a newer sock to help me fill the volume around my somewhat narrow heel. Even though I used The Wonderknot, my heel could still shift a little.

I also nursed the secret hope that my sore shoulder would decide it had only been waiting for the beneficial motion of poling to heal itself. I noticed no immediate benefit, but there seems to be some residual effect today. Maybe it will help. The pain seems to stem from muscle tension. Nothing is more relaxing than a good Nordic ski workout.

I need that relaxation in the strange little world I inhabit in the winter.

Opposite Transition

2008-11-01T19:43:00.002-04:00

After loading in the Jackson infrastructure and setting up most of the shop, George, Ralph and I drove home. There's no snow yet, it was too near sunset to do anything with the stub of the afternoon and we all had plans for the evening.

This ski season stretches into the impenetrable gloom of the future. I can't look forward to anything because all forms of pleasure associated with the situation remain uncertain. I can hope, that is all.

Transition

2008-04-14T15:54:00.002-04:00

After loading out the last of the Jackson items on Sunday, George, Jim and I went to the North Hall Trail to check out some off-trail possibilities I had scanned on a skate foray around the Hall-Ellis loop several weeks ago.

In spite of the huge amount of snow that fell this winter, the spring weather has chewed down a bunch of it, even in the lower reaches of Pinkham Notch. We haven't had too many outright balmy days yet, but it's been above freezing and the sun is up about 13 hours now.

We climbed at a very comfortable pace. Jim was the youngest of our group, but had no trouble going at a conversational speed.

We could guess that the snow would be heavy and slow. On the trail that had been groomed all winter only the top layer was soft. But when I launched a prospecting arc toward the edge of one of the glades, my skis sank in and stopped.

The big clear cut I'd had my eye on had thawed completely bare. Where snow remained on its lower apron, slash and stumps underneath it had created pockets that melted out to treacherous pit traps. We looked over toward another, north-facing cut, partially obscured by the snow squalls that blew through, but decided not to bushwhack over. It would probably not offer really good enough skiing in those conditions to be worth the effort. We could tell from the snowpack we'd tramped through that it would be hard for a good skier to set turns, and nearly impossible for a novice. George has a mix of alpine and groomed cross-country experience, but had never gone out on ungroomed snow with free-heel gear. We made our way back to the trail to head down to the lower glades. They would be as good as anything that day, and they were on our route back to the car.

Hall Trail's steeper sections offered some leisurely turning. I haven't been getting that much turn practice lately, because I spend so much time at the touring center. On days off I get sucked into domestic necessities, so I don't even get up to the playground behind my house that much.

Although we both agreed it would probably be more work than pleasure, Jim and I had to leap into the glade when we got there. I launched first. In the heavy snow I managed a couple of turns before I planted a rear ski diverging slightly and got pried open instantly. That was good for half a somersault. Then I had to try to push myself up out of the slush.

Jim proceeded to rip about ten turns and stop about a third of the way down this swath. The total drop was probably little more than 50 yards. I managed to take one more digger before I got my stance together to slide into a parking space next to him. George waved off and stuck to the trail.

As Jim and I traversed over to rejoin the trail, I enjoyed the feeling of thawing beads of slush oozing out of my ear holes.

Back on the trail we continued our leisurely glide back to the parking lot.

With wider, single-cambered skis the turning would have gone better, but the touring would have been a plod with skins instead of scales. It was a nice little hike.

From here on out, the snow gets softer and softer, thawing its way up to the higher ravines. Anything exposed to too much sun withers while you watch. So we pick up other equipment to enjoy the opportunities just coming into season. Anyone who happens to live near trails that were packed solidly will be able to use their decomposing surface for a while longer. But the wild snow in the woods no longer invites much exploration.

They say you shouldn't ski alone

2008-04-02T20:47:00.003-04:00

A lot of us ski alone. If the choice is skiing alone or not skiing, guess what is going to happen. But sometimes you get a reminder that the warning has merit.

Today, in blustery winds, Peter the Great was hit in the face by a falling tree. It knocked off his glasses, broke his nose, lacerated his face and knocked him to the ground so quickly he actually said he didn't know what hit him.

This did not stop him from skiing the seven or eight kilometers back to the lodge. He looked kind of rough, but was as cheery as ever.

The tree was about six or eight inches in diameter, according to his pantomimed gesture. He said it landed in the crook of his outstretched arm and on his chest after it scraped down his face.

He had just peeled himself up from the bloody snow when another skier came along. This man happened to be a doctor, who helped Peter fashion a compress to control the bleeding and then accompanied him back to the lodge.

Back at the lodge he got a better patch job from the doctor, using the ski patrol's first aid kit, before he headed out to get a suture or two. Maybe he'll get his nose taped, like tough guys in the movies.

If it had hit the top or back of his head we wouldn't be joking around like this. But we'll all be out there alone again within 12 hours. If I hadn't had a zoning board meeting tonight, I would have skied out to his bloodstain and drawn a chalk body outline for a joke when the groomer comes by.

Stupid meeting.

Welcome to Big Time Nordic

2008-03-31T09:32:00.003-04:00

Big time Nordic areas around North America are competing with each other to have the most awesome facilities, top-credentialed instructors and big-name retail stores to provide products and services that look stunning in a brochure or on a website.

What does this mean to you, the average skier?

Not much.

The people serving you will still mostly despise you. They're just professional enough to keep their contempt well hidden most of the time. They're only human, after all. You may crack one of them once in a while.

All this awesome isn't for the customers. It's so the masters of these little kingdoms can brag to each other about their awesomeness. It's so the inner circle can preen and strut about the great things they have for themselves, that they make the average visitor pay for.

Face it. On the average fat touring ski you don't need their awesome grooming. And the ski school director may be an ex Olympian, but the instructor actually teaching you could be only a page or two ahead of you in the textbook. Anyone more highly skilled than that would simply hate you more.

It's not so bad on the lesson area. The staff and the regulars expect duffers and dubs flopping all over the place there. Get off into the extended trails and dark alleys of the network and you will see the more sinister side. No one is going to jump you, rough you up and steal your stuff, but you'll get a more honest opinion about things like herringboning right up the classic track or stomping down a hill carrying your skis.

Humans are competitive people. Individual sports often attract people with poor social skills who have been frustrated trying to fit in or express dominance in more conventional social settings and competitive activities. Don't be surprised if they take it out on you. Add to this a large number of participants who feel entitled because of their wealth and upbringing and you have another category who will do their best to treat the average Joe Fat Ski like he isn't there.

Smaller Nordic areas tend to be less full of themselves and to host fewer irritable jackasses. The exception might be a place like Great Glen Trails, with its dinky 30 kilometers of grooming, because they give themselves a high awesome ranking based on their location by Mount Washington. Honestly, sometimes you'd think they designed and built the mountain itself instead of just exploiting it for massive financial gain through their various entrepreneurial enterprises there.

Hard-core cross-country skiers carry a lot of emotional baggage because they often don't know whether they will get to use their agonizingly honed skills. The winter could be bad or go bad, leaving them with no arena in which to demonstrate their superiority. If the winter is bad they're as grouchy as someone who hasn't gotten laid recently. If the winter is good, the swelling egos some of them pull around like giant parade balloons can fill a room with the distorted image of their self-perceived greatness.

Mixed in among these twisted egotists are the quiet, competent, generally versatile outdoor athletes, many of whom don't compete at all. They mix up the activities depending on conditions, cycling and paddling in the warm months, hiking and climbing when the snow won't cooperate with their Nordic hopes. The ones who do race are generally helpful and encouraging rather than sarcastic and disparaging. They beat you, you beat them, it's all in fun. No one is just dabbling around, but winning or losing is not the end of the world to them. How refreshing.

If you were to spend the entire season, or even several years in a row in the lodge of some of these self-important touring centers you might find the corrosive, toxic aspects of the atmosphere gave you sores in one area, scars in another and a hard shell somewhere else. The trick is to remain open to the nice people while warding off the jabs and acid from the nasty ones. Even so, nasty people often gain control of things and get to decide what everyone else gets.

The average day skier will probably sense none of this. You have to follow the soap opera to know the characters and their actions. You learn their twitches and tics, their annoying mannerisms and their favorite jokes favorite jokes favorite jokes favorite jokes...

And one day the producers write your character out of the script.

It's supposed to be just about having fun. So have fun! And remember not to take anything too seriously, even if some self-styled experts and authorities do.

Nordic Confidential

2008-03-28T19:51:00.002-04:00

The season draws to a close, but new inspiration for drawings arrives along with time to put together the first couple of volumes of Nordic Confidential.

Learn what really goes on behind the scenes at the touring center! In case you cared!

Some previously classified material has recently come off the secret list.

This is going to be fun, but not for everyone. So stuff that turtleneck and get ready to strut like you're "all that," because we're off to the snobbiest touring center east of the Mississippi.

You must be impressed. No, really, you must. Someone will be very surprised if you aren't.

Fortunately, this blog is invisible to the arrogant. But Nordic Confidential may drift across a few radar screens and provoke some much-needed merriment.

Jackson Ski Touring!

Researching Fat

2008-03-25T12:11:00.002-04:00

Looking for something about medieval Nordic footwear, I found information on primitive skis. You think you've seen short and fat now? How about something 161 centimeters long and more than 200 millimeters wide? Add an animal-fur base for grip and a single staff-like pole and you're good to go, Nordic style.

None of this is a secret, of course, but it's easy to forget in the rush of new and improved. A fat ski of today doesn't really correspond to a fat ski of ancient times. But they share some influences in search of control and maneuverability.

Ancient skis show variation akin to true native kayaks. They vary by region depending on the conditions. Even in the modern evolution of the downhill-only ski, terrain and snow type drove the change as well as narrowing the skis' overall capability to increase one aspect of it.

The modern skinny stick would have little place in the ancient world, where humans were more forced to take nature as they found it and devise tools to adapt to conditions they could not massively alter.

At this moment, conditions out in the woods around here are setting up to allow some bushwhack skating. Too bad so much of the Pine River floodplain is no longer accessible. That has some wonderful flat and mildly rolling terrain to enjoy when the snow is like this. You don't want to develop too much speed down a hill on your skate skis when you could hit a weak spot and crash through into a ski-snapping pit trap. Steep terrain with tree cover can be difficult because the trees impede a wider V for climbing and require quicker turns than most of us can produce on a stiff, narrow racing ski. But flatter open glades can be a blast. This is all best enjoyed with a softening layer of what we call cream cheese, a moist inch of compliant turning snow on top of the frozen base. If you're lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time you can check it out.

Precious and Few

2008-03-24T20:19:00.002-04:00

Skiing on a good day at Jackson Ski Touring I sense that these may be my last outings on groomed Nordic trails for a long time, perhaps a very long time.

The time slots in Wolfeboro fall before or after work. I find it hard to get fully organized and launched in the mornings in time to get a workout of significant length. Often I will find the trails have not been completely groomed yet. Sometimes the timing of fresh snow or other factors means I find them not groomed at all. And after work they have often been thoroughly trampled by a day of traffic. They may also be freezing into completely unenjoyable ruts. So to return there would mean no more skiing on the five normal work days and the 12-day marathons we have to run on vacation weeks when we have good skiing. If we don't have good skiing, there's no point having the time, because we have no skiing.

Given only two days on which I might go to a groomed area, I would notice the degradation of my skill and fitness. Not wanting to have this deterioration highlighted, I would tend to look elsewhere for things to do outdoors. Also, I would have the choice of driving to where I work on a day I don't work, or driving even farther to an area where I might get to ski for a reduced rate with the proper credentials. These I would have to arrange in advance.

I would get no more easy snow. So I contemplate the end of certain arrangements with some regret. However, principle comes before pleasure. I will not make a compromise I don't feel I can truly support, just for the grudging access to someone's trail network.

Things being as they are and shaping up as they appear to be headed, I cherish any opportunity to sample even the small scraps of fine trail I allow myself as a relatively conscientious worker. Gone are the days when my coworker and I would launch long forays on the more challenging trails. Gone is that coworker, in fact. For all the flaws in that arrangement, we had an unspoken understanding that if he was going to leave me to cover everything while he indulged himself, he would have to reciprocate. It is no doubt better business to ski shorter and work longer. So it is now, with the current plucky crew of two. We rein it in for the sake of better service and listen to the happy folk tell us how great the farther reaches are on any given day. They might as well be across an ocean as far as I'm concerned.

With two days (or less) a week on which to live the life I had thought I would live all the time when I set out into young adulthood several decades ago, I have to decide whether to expend them on something as self-indulgent and unproductive as Nordic skiing. With diminished capability from skiing far less, the time and money to travel to a ski area would seem like an even more unforgivable waste of resources.

With good wild snow conditions, a person can ski a lot on wider boards at slower speeds in the methodical plod of the exploring skier. Refined classical technique is pointless on heavier touring gear. It's a different discipline with its own skill set, more a fusion of hiking and downhill skiing than a gliding flight on featherlight gear.

With the kind of snow we've been getting for almost a decade now, wild snow is a difficult beast to ride. This year, with deep, dense cover, the lower mountains will offer some premium exploring during the spring thaw. But without the fitness base provided by regular groomed-trail skiing, a skier would face the extra handicap of somewhat rusty skills when trying to engulf this lavish buffet of wild delicacies.

I can't say for certain what the future holds. One must simply be prepared to lose what one loves, because that is what happens in the world. Some things can't be fought for, because the fight would destroy them as certainly as the force tearing them away already will. Character is displayed in the lack of fight, not in the self-centered rush to try to cling to what is being taken away. No whining, no knuckling under. Power lies in the ability to let go, especially of something that will be missed.

The Assurance Experience Brings

2008-03-24T17:55:00.004-04:00

When we started in at Jackson Ski Touring a number of years ago, we were all intimidated because they made such a deal about being The Big Time. We were convinced that they were indeed all that, and that our own little cow town operation was just a clown college by comparison.

After eight seasons I can tell you that Jackson Ski Touring is just a clown college with a bigger budget, better advertising and a fantastic case of narcissistic myopia. Those are big words, and I understand some may find such complicated language offensive, but that was just one of the lessons learned in Jackson. We encountered a lot of pride in social position, power, wealth and upbringing, but surprising insecurity when it came to vocabulary. Who would have guessed?

The skiing is very good there. With their sole focus on Nordic the product can be the best available anywhere. On the other hand, Nordic being Nordic, resources are always tight. God help you if you show up on a big race weekend and you're not a racer. You're lucky if much of anything other than the race course is groomed, even in the best snow year in decades. What is groomed for you common people may still not be groomed very well. So on that day, Big Time means a big time Nordic race, which is somewhere well below a regional renaissance fair on the scale of real Big Time. The rest of you who believed the advertising of plush trails and steaming cocoa will find the trails rough and something else brown and steaming awaiting you.

A little humility would go a long way. Good luck there.

To be fair, a top-notch Nordic network requires a fair amount of real estate. Privately owned areas tend to have for-profit corporations holding the purse strings and share their acreage with downhill skiing and other attractions, all of which get to feed at the trough well before the cross-country skiers do. Blame yourselves for that, cross-country skiers, because your frugality, not to say maddening cheapness, is legendary. This also pinches the pockets of a white-hat non-profit association trying to hold together an unruly coalition of private land holders and government agencies like the US Forest Circus. So it ain't easy catering to your cheap asses.

This brings up another point. Downhill skiing into the 1960s carried an aura of jet set affluence. Even when ski areas particularly in the United States turned themselves into family attractions, the simple cost of gear and lift tickets made it something not everyone could afford to do.

In the 1970s when cross-country skiing suddenly surged in popularity, part of what propelled it was its low cost. Here was skiing for everyone, for the working class, for anyone with the gumption to snap into the skis and learn, and a few dollars for gear. It was a passport to unlimited winter fun on pennies a day.

All that is true. This makes the amount of northeastern preppy snobbery that oozes around some of these touring centers so surprising and annoying. A whole lot of people need to get over themselves. Many of them are the ones in perfect turtlenecks and V-necked sweaters who grudgingly come down from the Olympian heights of their favorite downhill-ski mountains to mingle with the rabble in the sunny end of winter. But they're around to some degree any time. And trust me, you want to smack 'em.

I also get to deal with certain members of the Jackson staff who will come in dripping with sarcastic comments about their boss one day and stab me in the back to gain his favor on another. I start to think I'm in the government of some superpower during the Cold War rather than selling toys to fun-loving recreational athletes.

Many time-honored traditions of the ski area, Nordic or downhill, can't survive in the modern economy. Take the Wax Grunt, for instance. Traditionally, people who never wax their own skis could show up at a ski area, hand their planks to the Wax Grunt, who would lather them up for a couple of bucks and send the happy skier out the door. The skier was oblivious to the fact that one quick and crappy wax job every year or two really does nothing for their bases. The Wax Grunt would go back to whatever other grunt duties occupied him until the next needy skier pulled in with some crusty, abused bases and an inaccurate notion of their proper care and feeding.

Wax Grunt economics are based on quick turnaround. Good waxing takes longer than someone slapping crap on a cold wet base in ten minutes can really devote. The instawax is dying a slow death. I wish I could speed it on its way to oblivion. I'm doing my best to jab lances into its scarred white blubber.

Ah yes...blubber. Don't get me started about the excess avoirdupois lugged around by certain luminaries of the sport well past their prime. To be fair yet again, because I have trouble being any other way, many top-notch bicycle mechanics have such lousy personal habits that they probably couldn't survive a long, hard bike ride. Many technical experts and coaches learned so much about good performance because they themselves were never able to produce one. In studying their own failures they became adept at advising those with the real talent on their way to the top echelons in whatever activity they pursued. The thing about teachers being those who can't perform has some merit.

We're all burnt out at the end of a long season. I would say it had been a strenuous one, but since many on the staff at Jackson Ski Touring think the retail crew is a bunch pampered slackers, I will lay no claim to have worked hard. In fact, one weird thing about this long, incredibly snowy season is that customer volume has not been that huge. I look forward to seeing regional and national industry figures to find out if the volume was dispersed over a large number of available outlets or if everyone noted the same curious shrinkage.

Hard to say right now what next year holds. I am truly ready for anything up to and slightly beyond the bounds of reason. Not to say I would comply with unreasonable demands, just that not much would surprise me from the administration of clown college.

The kick is actually two kicks

2008-03-23T20:29:00.002-04:00

More experienced skiers than I am have said that they never stop learning new things, noticing new details about their sport. So I feel safe in saying that I constantly notice things about technique as I slide along.

Maybe I knew them once, forgot and rediscovered them. No matter. It still feels fresh and fun.

Since I really developed any refinement as a classical skier only in the last eight of my 24 years skiing I'm constantly looking at different ways to slice and dice the movements.

In classic much more than in skate, things have to happen in opposite and simultaneous rhythms of balanced movement. A skier this week said that his experience as a swimmer helped because his brain was already accustomed to coordinating bilateral movements of this sort.

One difficulty in conveying technique to a beginner is that you have to tell them where to start when it all really starts at once. Even the tried and true method of skiing first without poles demands balance and an element of timing. it also requires that the skis be fitted well enough to allow grip.

Next a skier will be taught about the kicking leg and the gliding leg. That's where the description becomes inaccurate for the sake of clarity. The kicking leg is generally initially described as the one stomping down into the snow as the weight shifts to the other ski on the "gliding" foot. But the key to smooth, strong classical skiing, even up hills, is to kick the gliding foot forward as the stomping foot kicks down. So there are two kicks that have to happen simultaneously.

Kick the gliding foot forward before you shift weight, but only a moment before. It works best when you feel like you are slightly behind your gliding foot and shift forward onto it from the ground up. At the same time your opposite hand is shooting forward as if it pulled the foot. As this happens, your weight rolls forward to the ball of your stomping foot as your heel comes up because you have shifted your weight to the now-gliding ski. The pole on the stomping side has swung back as your hand swings back and reaches the end of its arc as your weight is fully committed to the gliding ski.

Once you master the basic shuffle, an instructor will give you various tips to help you remember how each portion of the motion should feel. "Pretend to kick a ball down the track." "Pretend you're sliding on a hardwood floor in our socks."

In poling, the teacher might say you should swing your hand forward as if you were tossing a horseshoe, in an underhand motion that ends with your hand fairly low compared to where you might think it should be. One also suggests bringing the hand forward as if gently tugging a recalcitrant puppy on a leash to get people to think more of bringing the hand smoothly forward than of jamming the pole tip in the snow and shoving themselves along.

The key to kick is proper weight shift. That's why so many instructional exercises force the skier toward full commitment to the forward swing of the appropriate appendage. If your weight is in the right place, you will have positive kick and can therefore throw yourself forward again with a strong glide.

That's more like it!

2008-03-22T20:31:00.003-04:00

Last night after work the trails in Wolfeboro were a hacked-up death slab covered with blown-down debris and the frozen decisions of previous skiers. It had its humorous moments, like when I hooked a piece of debris with my left ski while blowing a snot rocket at speed. But for the most part I was just getting it done to get the workout.

Conditions were challenging, but not in a fun way. All the obstacles, the sidewalk-hard formerly granular remnants of corduroy, the continuous carpet of pine needles, branches, beech leaves, bark and frozen tracks, combined with a blasting wind gusting near 50 above the treetops as factors that eroded control. Glide varied as the surface changed from raspy ice to sticky pine needles. I wasn't about to step onto anything remotely steep. The mostly flat, rolling terrain of Sewall Woods provided all the gravity thrills I wanted to handle.

I finished a short hour bathed in stinking sweat from the exertion and the stress of clawing my way around in such unrewarding conditions. It was made worse because I had heard from several people during the day how excellent it had been before the sinking sun allowed the cold to sink its talons into the formerly loosened snow.

It was better than Nordic Track, violent vomiting or having a culture swabbed from my urethra, but it wasn't a ski memory I will savor.

Today I was able to get out in Jackson during the day. The temperature remained in the mid 20s for most of the day. The wind moderated much more than the forecast predicted.

Grabbing the opportunity for some high-grade classical skiing, I applied a modified version of the officially recommended wax of the day. George had gone out earlier, in colder conditions, on the straight-up version: blue klister binder with blue hard wax over it. Even he hedged the bet into Blue Extra. I went further and pushed it to VR 45 for the top layer. I should have done two layers of 45, but it did a fine enough job anyway.

The funny thing is, every classical skier I asked was using a different kick wax and every one of them was happy with it. It was such a nice change from days we've had recently on which no one liked their kick wax. And today's offerings included universal klister, the aforementioned blue klister binder with several different hard waxes on top, straight blue klister, and some leftover KR 50 violet klister with a thin smear of KR 70 on top. That one should not have worked at all. But there it is.

At the same time, the skaters were having fun, too. And the sun was bright, the sky was blue, and so forth and so on. It made several incidents of petty bullshit that happened during the working part of the day much easier to take. Go endorphins!

Ski to exhaustion

2008-03-21T06:44:00.003-04:00

If the winters were like this all the time, first of all we would build our structures and arrange our roads to manage it better. Second, we would be more blase about whether we skied every possible chance we got.

With snow dominating the landscape we have no choice but to ski. Cycling is not a good idea yet. Most side roads and driveways are blind. Cars and bloated SUVs push their noses out into the narrowed lanes as the drivers try to see to pull out. To get into their sight line as soon as possible, a cyclist would have to go out to the middle of the road. In places, the middle is still all there is. So those of us who ski ski. Pathological runners scamper down the slushy margins of the roads and leap for the snowbank or arrogantly play chicken with the motor vehicles. Go figure.

With daylight pushed to evening and the rest of the work schedule unchanged, sleep is the loser. Close at a normal hour. Ski an hour. Drive home an hour. Include prep time before skiing and cleaning up after. Next thing you know it's racing toward midnight and the alarm clock goes off when it always does. But who knows when we'll see this much snow, or even a reasonable amount of it, again? And it's the only game in town.

On a day off, there sits the snow, gleaming in waves up and up toward the forest edge that hides the known attractions farther up the slope. Can't ignore that. It's a perishable feast. You have to eat too much now, because you won't have any later.

One morning we'll wake up and realize May has arrived, or at least late April. What? How did that happen? In the time warp of endless winter the weeks pass looking strangely similar until suddenly they don't look the same at all. Rush rush into the next season, still glancing back at the one that vanished, more unbelievable in retrospect.

Right now, it's still here.

Planning a stomp in the slushy snirt

2008-03-20T14:55:00.003-04:00

Last night's kick wax experiment was a failure. New snow in the mid 30s just stinks. Forays at end of day leave no time for major revisions if the first theory fails.

Since almost no one has showed up today, I should be safe going out to skate. It won't be like arriving late at the buffet after everyone else has eaten the best stuff and leaned in the rest of it, leaving it to congeal as the flies gather.

The cellist says this is how musicians playing a gig always find the buffet.

Funny, that. In the stereotype of rock stars, they despoil the buffet and leave the dregs for the roadies. But most musicians are treated like any other servant, expected to produce on demand and stay out of the way the rest of the time.

The Skinny on Short and Fat

2008-03-18T13:42:00.002-04:00

Hoping to have cream cheese for brunch, we set out after 11. Instead we found a lot of freezer-burned, gristly cheap steak.

I'd put my music teacher on Pavos, a discontinued model of Karhu compact BC ski. Supposedly, short skis are easier to maneuver, but this is often not the case. With her height and yard of leg, the short skis were too squirrelly. The short forward section did not support her weight shifts as she traveled across changing snow. The skis accelerated or slowed down, tossing her back or forward. A longer ski gives a skier somewhere to go when that happens. On a short ski, the skier's weight goes beyond the end of it quickly. It can be harder to lurch back into position and grab the controls.

We switched. She got on the 200 cm Traks and I snapped into the 175 cm Pavos. They were squirrelly even for me until I adjusted my technique.

On a short ski the skier needs to maintain a close stance in the Telemark position. Depending on the length of your upper and lower leg, you may not be able to sink down deeply without offsetting the skis too much. The tip of the rear one can fall completely behind the other ski, and certainly behind the boot of the leading foot. In this way a skier on short skis is much more likely to cross one ski behind the other. In ungroomed snow, all kinds of little lumps and blobs can lead a rear ski astray.

The tight stance and quick, shallow dip comes from a racing technique of the 1990s referred to as the "squirt Tele." Even on the long, narrow skis of the time, an aggressive, fast drop would compress a fairly stiff, shallowly sidecut ski into its tightest radius for the instant needed to come around a gate. On shorter, shapelier skis, you can't stay down in the lowrider position for long anyway. You end up firing off squirtlike Teles by default.

To get a short ski to feel somewhat like its longer ancestor, it needs a very fat shovel to provide the flotation and resistance the long forebody did. Then the ski has to taper to a narrower waist to make it flex as readily as a long, soft ski did. It still won't stride or run straight as well as the long ski did, but most people seem willing to give up that feature for tight-radius turning. But the actual Telemark turn becomes more of an affectation on skis that will turn more comfortably in a more upright parallel stance. The squirt Tele led to many infractions on the race course because the skier was not in the Telemark position when passing the gate. The Tele moment had passed in the brief moment of compression going in. The skier was already changing leads by the gate.

Just as skis and technique mutated originally when they moved to the Alps from Scandinavia's generally more rolling terrain, so did skis evolve again when the Telemark crowd wanted alpine levels of performance from freeheel gear. This has slopped over into the BC arena by two channels: the compact touring ski and the short, shaped downhill ski. Early entries like the Trak Bushwhacker and the Karhu Catamount have given way to a whole galaxy of shorter, wider models that might or might not ski like you hope they will.

You have to shop around or nurse old gear if you want to use more traditionally shaped skis in terrain that favors their versatility.

Yo-yoing on a Short String

2008-03-18T09:37:00.005-04:00

Snowshoe scouting the terrain park

Mine! All mine! Sort of...

From an earlier year, this shot shows some of the pitch and variety

How are back-country skiers different from passengers on a cruise ship?

The skiers want to get the runs.

In the small, wooded mountains neglected by hard-core gravity addicts, glades and small clearings offer line after line of short runs, and longer courses of slalom between the trees.

Suit the tool to the task. A single-cambered ski with climbing skins works in a place offering long runs in return for the work of climbing. But an area with lots of short runs will have you putting the skins on and taking them off over and over.

Spring snow often means thawed hardpack. Around here, an exploring skier may move through several seasons in the course of a day. Not much will grip the frozen hardpack, but as it softens a patterned non-wax grip zone will provide traction without requiring sticky klister or the process of gluing or buckling skins and removing them again. The waxless ski goes slower down the hill, but allows you to climb and drop at will. Climb angle on some waxless skis, like many models from Trak and Karhu, rivaled skins in some conditions.

Climb strategically. I like to climb through thicker tree and shrub cover that would be hard to descend through so I don't mess up the snow for turning in the more open areas. However, use the climb to scout lines for descent if you can.

It's funny how your perspective changes as soon as you put on skis. Walking on snowshoes through the terrain park in the logged areas behind the house it all looked wide open. When I went back on skis I noticed all the little sapling whips sticking up through the snow. Plenty of open lines remained, as well as strips and patches of the old beech glade that had not been cut, but some of those sunbaked open slopes looked a lot trickier on 200 cm touring skis.

I still like to use traditional skis for a lot of exploring so I don't lose the techniques needed to maneuver them in tight and steep areas. Someone with less regard for personal safety, on sportier skis, could certainly blast through there faster, but if we're going somewhere and the terrain levels out, who's going to be plodding and bitching? Not the guy on the long, skinny skis.

While I was out yesterday, a small, winged insect flew up my nose. This is the bug equivalent of first tracks.

"Yay! First nasal membrane of '08!"

Skiing Late

2008-03-17T10:24:00.002-04:00

Skiing at the end of the day after everyone else is like drinking the dregs in all the abandoned glasses after a party.

"Hm. Interesting."

"Not bad."

"Eww! Backwash!"

"Achk! Ptoo! There was a cigarette butt in that one!"

Skating is more annoying than classical. I proved that yesterday when I went out on klister after several afternoon-evenings skating on the gouged-up remnants. Skating, I would seethe with resentment the whole time. Endorphin peace wouldn't set in until after I finished. A classic case of "it feels good when I stop."

Skaters can't help damaging the trail surface. You can't skate light-footedly. The lightest touch still leaves a diagonal slice. If the trail surface is soft, as with freshly tilled granules of last night's crust before they set firmly, or the slushy depths of midday and afternoon, even the most courteous skater will leave angled trenches. And courtesy does not seem to be the mark of the skater. They routinely trash the classical track beside even the widest skate lane, and cavalierly leave their slashes in the corduroy as if Zorro's name was Vorro.

Although last night's klister performed no better than adequately, I felt less stress in the classical tracks. The marks of other skiers didn't slap me in the face with how many of them had used the trail before me. I could preserve some sense of personal expression, rather than being forced to paint by numbers in the pattern laid down by every other skater from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Classical takes much more art than skating, which is why skating is so much more popular. When I feel like hammering like a brutal meathead, I skate. I even enjoy it. There's a little meathead in each of us, some just more than others.

The art of the skate is in the choice of tempo, and the use of glide. Constantly gliding, the skater directs this motion and sustains momentum by pole timing and cadence. I resent the earlier skaters most because I can't lay down my own interpretation for followers to see how well I maintained glide and how much terrain I could flash in a narrow V2. And I hate dragging my feet up out of their trenches, or tripping over the ridges as they harden. If enough skaters have used a section, you have to do as they did because the hacks in the trail prevent anything else.

As the temperature dropped last night, the klister stuck better to the firming track and I glided farther straight ahead down it. The susurrance of skis on soft slush gave way to the rasp and then the clatter of sliding on parallel luge runs floored with ice. It did not all freeze at once, however, so I had to shift my balance for slower and faster sections. As each day pushes further into the evening hours, keeping the trail soft enough to skate over and obliterate the marks of the earlier Vorros I will mix techniques for the conditioning benefits each provides. But as long as I have to go out during the evening freeze I will prefer classical.

Winter Loosens its Grip

2008-03-17T09:51:00.005-04:00

A sense of relief pervades March as the sun grows stronger and temperatures warm from the depths of winter. This year those depths were seldom deeper than March's worst, but the days were shorter. Harsh conditions lurk like a beast in the gloom. They could pounce at any time during the cold darkness.

Everyone seems to have a sense of accomplishment this time of year. The lovers of winter enjoy the best part of it, with settled snowpack and ample daylight. The lovers of only March have the part of snow season they want. The only unhappy people are the ones who shouldn't live in a northern climate anyway.

March can still serve up subzero nights and bitter days. It also commonly delivers big snowstorms. We just missed one that formed too far offshore. By the satellite view, it would have been a blockbuster. Shake the jet stream a little differently and one of those could romp right over us, as happened with the blizzard of 1993. That was described as "monumental" by one meteorologist at the time. Its cloud shield covered most of the eastern seaboard of the United States at one point. But it was just one of two or three big storms that March.

An event like that could be disastrous with the snowpack we already have. The blizzard of '93 dumped almost four feet of snow here. In addition to roofs that might fail, all that extra water would join the spring flood that can't be too far in the future.

The mountains will still pick up snow. This time of year, the highest ranges might get feet of snow from a system that brings rain and glop to lower elevations.

On the groomed Nordic trails, patrollers and groomers work around sinkholes forming as the earth warms and water flows below the snow. Early snow and a mild winter kept the ground from freezing deeply. Many of these sunken areas formed during the January thaw. The groomers have simply been blading snow into them. Now the annual shift to warmth moves faster than human mechanical devices can act to reverse the effect.

Elsewhere on the groomies, the base is solid down to the ground. The surface changes in the normal spring pattern, hard as a sidewalk at dawn, plush cream cheese for an hour or two and then slush and applesauce until sunset stiffens all the gouges and digs into a treacherous obstacle course for skiers going out too late. There's a subject all its own.

Van Winkles Awaken

2008-03-13T14:56:00.002-04:00

My new term for people who act like they came out of a two or three decade coma and headed straight for the ski area on their archaic gear is "van Winkles."

Someone on a forum referred to "van Winkling" the upcoming election. I knew exactly what she meant. I've been tempted to van Winkle the entire political process from now until my death. Anyway, I love the term for someone so out of touch that they appear to have slept the years away.

Of course van Winkles are full of questions. Stuff more than a decade old looks like the latest to them. They're trying to get their heads around bindings that are about to be swept aside by a new system. Don't go back to sleep yet, my friends!

Astounding amounts of old ski equipment attached to skiers in out of date clothing from several eras seems to have emerged from basements, garages, attics and crawl spaces to bask in the baking glory of late winter sunshine. Perhaps these blinking, tousle-headed lost souls in cross-buttoned pajamas presage a new Nordic boom. Their gear certainly dates from the last one. But it isn't worn out as if it had been used hard and continuously since 1982. Much of it looks pristine, as if it had sat, boots in their box, skis in the corner, while the owner lay inert. It signals to me a resurgent interest in self-propelled sport. Maybe that crowd will attract a bigger crowd, as more people gather to see what's going on and to sample the fun.

It would be too much to expect the commercial custodians of the technical and educational side of the sport not to blow it as badly this time as they did the last time. On the plus side, the vast expansion of media and information outlets kills fads in less than half the time it used to take. From this Nordic skiing will probably extract a few new adherents, just as cycling managed to garner a few actual continuing cyclists from the carnage and debacle of the mountain bike boom.

DST a boon to the half-day skier

2008-03-13T14:45:00.002-04:00

Late afternoon sunshine favors the kind of people who will never show up at the ticket counter before 2 p.m.

Late winter brings out the skiers we see no other time. Many --perhaps most-- of these are downhillers for whom a little cross-country goes a long way. They consider themselves all-around skiers, experts at everything except perhaps jumping. They just refuse to pay a lot of dues in the cross-country season. No hunching shuffle through a January gale for these patricians. They wait for March's glare and settled snowpack to floodlight and support their bravura performance.

One was asking me about kick wax conditions now and in the next couple of days. I explained the nuances of transformed snow and cold klisters in the complex scheme.

"I have a couple more days to ski downhill before I have to go cross-country," he said. "Things may be simpler by then."

Have to go cross-country? Don't put yourself out. You're not doing us any favors slithering around our purgatory looking down your nose at all of it. Why suffer? Stay on the dang lifts.

The people who will never pay more than a half day rate for Nordic skiing get plenty for their money now that sunset has been pushed an hour later. They don't have to scamper around in the chilling afternoon to get their cut rate's worth. They can push it right to closing time and delay my own escape.

Mind you they do so at their own risk.

Animals and Nordic skiers live by the sun

2008-03-12T14:37:00.003-04:00

Since the forced move to Daylight Relocating Time, I have had to drag myself out of bed in the dark. As the night pales to dawn, I see birds and animals beginning to move around in the forest. No matter what I do, I seem to get moving when the light says I should, so I have been running later than usual every day since the time change.

At the touring center, skiers don't show up until what would have been 8 or 8:30. The ten o'clock rush comes at eleven. They're coming in for lunch around 2:30. And no one can believe it when five o'clock pops up.

We've all had decades to get used to a certain pattern of light. When the time changed after the equinox, with day length already well over twelve hours, the shift did not change the impression of time as radically as it does now.

The animals have the advantage. They don't know what time it's supposed to be.

You don't become a better skier by walking down the hills

2008-03-12T11:33:00.002-04:00

Cross-country skiing will never shake its wussy image as long as instructors tell beginners that they can always walk down a hill that intimidates them. Do you see people walking down alpine slopes? Almost never. In fact, I think it may be against their rules.

I walked down an alpine slope once, back when I was just starting to learn Telemark and broke some equipment in a crash. I had to trudge right down under the lift line through moguls the size of Volkswagens. Jeers rained down on me from the lift-riders headed up. It was the first and last time I walked down a hill carrying my skis.

In the back-country, skis may be the only thing holding you up on the snow that may be knee deep, chest deep or over your head. If you don't like the looks of a slope, traverse around until you find one you can manage. This isn't an option at a groomed Nordic area, but remember that you may have to dodge someone skiing that hill you're walking, and you owe them that right of way.

On busy weekends, even the easiest trails have more footprints than ski tracks on every hill. Even something only eight or ten feet tall will be stomped with postholes. And no one pays attention to the thing the instructor tells them just after saying it's okay to walk down hills: walk off the side of the trail where you will not interfere with people skiing it.

I know I'm just shouting into a closet here, but it feels good to say it anyway. I'll remember it the next time I'm maneuvering around someone stomping along with an armload of skis and a defiant look.

Beachier than the Beach

2008-03-10T13:34:00.002-04:00

Whatever else is happening, spring or late winter skiing days have a relaxed feel unmatched by anything else. The climate seems milder under sunny skies at 36 degrees on solid snowpack than at 50 degrees under endless late April rain. So take the healing effects of the rising sun and dropping consumer demand. This is our time.

Even temperatures below freezing lose their bite under the rising sun of March. Sure, the clouds can close over us and the wind bite hard, but its days are numbered. Lather on the sun screen and go out into the sunniest weather of the year. Leafless trees don't shade you, while the reflective snow throws light into ravines and hollows that might not see it any other time. The landscape is lit from above and below.

When the snow is gone, even longer days feel shorter and darker. The earth sucks in the graying slush. Brown, gray and tan absorb the light the snow used to give back at full value. Enjoy the bright world now.

Shin-Deep Sugar or Death Cookies

2008-03-09T19:40:00.004-04:00

All the grooming resources at Jackson Ski Touring went to the race course for the J2 championships, so the trails for the rest of us suffered from less than meticulous attention today.

I was going to skate up to look at the stadium and race course, because I would rather climb on skate skis and the connecting trail from the touring center to the race venue is a nasty wall. But George reported that the nasty wall was a frozen sheet of armor plate unscratched by tilling equipment since yesterday's deluge and freeze.

I would rather ski than watch skiing, so I opted to skip the spectating and head out the Ellis. It had been skate groomed the day before. Secretly I believed it would not be, today, but I hoped. If it was double-tracked I could puke my way up the connecting trail to the South Hall and back down again. I've been slighting the hill work this year.

Unfortunately, the A-list groomers were all devoted to the race course. The surface on the Ellis and Connector were what we politely call "variable."

Beginning right on the golf course outside the lodge, the trail was somehow formed into a series of close-set waves, like pillows laid side by side. My skis bounced over these as I threaded the leisurely pods of day tourists on my way to the covered bridge and tunnel to get over the river and under Route 16.

The Riverbank Loop was double-tracked, so skating was forbidden. I had to take the inland side, which makes me feel like a salmon leaping upstream. Most people, myself included, prefer to go out the Riverbank and come back on the inner side. But on weekends skaters are required to follow the left side out to the connector to the South Hall Trail. The current runs the opposite way.

Back on the main line the surface had been tilled to several inches depth and immediately gouged and stomped into a chaotic mess by abusive skaters and waddlers who fear the set track. It was a slow trudge out to the Connector.

The Connector wasn't bad at first. I decided to climb via the new Whifferdill and descend on the Connector. The groomer had scratched a faint pattern into the lower portion of the Whifferdill, but then apparently gave up, leaving the armored crust from the previous night's rain. It was okay for climbing. It would be deadly for descent.

At the Connector I'd had enough. Two other skaters stood at the junction and agreed with my analysis. The Connector was all trenches and death cookies, but at least it was somewhat broken up. I launched down it.

Snowplowing didn't do much. It was also very hard to link turns in the ditches and chunks. I screwed down the brakes completely going into a hairpin turn and slithered gingerly around it to find a family group, Mom, Dad and Lad, herringboning up into it from below. I stopped to point out that the trail here was as good as it was going to get, and that they would have to come down what they went up, since the Whifferdill's wider course had not been tilled at all.

As we discussed this, the first skater arrived from above and had to ditch it to avoid collision. He laughed about it, fortunately, before yelling a warning to his wife coming down behind him. To break the clot, I launched again into the remaining turns to get to where the trail levels out.

The chunks continued to jolt my skis until I reached the deep sugar again. At least going downstream I could hammer on narrow V2 options to maintain a brisk pace. The gradient going upstream is often barely noticeable until one turns back southward and effortlessly shifts up a couple of gears. But the deep granules made quick maneuvers a little trickier.

Any skiing is better than no skiing. But today could have been premium with better grooming. With more trail available, skiers could have dispersed over a wider area. Today the Ellis had a bit of the ambiance of a drying waterhole in the desert, with desperate life wiggling in a pile in the shriveling shallows.

A Little Less Silver, a Little More Swamp

2008-03-09T19:28:00.003-04:00

Unsanctioned wax experimentation continued on Saturday in wet and frozen granular trail conditions.

Swix Universal Klister (K22) covered the range, but we didn't have an open tube. So we put on a mixture of Swix Silver Universal (K21), which has the same basic range as KR50 Flexi Violet (23-38F) and KR70, affectionately known as Swamp Gunk for its range from 36 to 52 F.

George reported adequate but less than stellar performance from it. It was hardly a fast day, but we could do better. I skewed the mix a little more toward Swamp, but not enough to achieve perfection. All in all, I can't complain, but perfection IS the goal in underground wax chemistry.

The kick was positive enough to launch long strides. The slush arrested the glide somewhat, but you could find a rhythm.

Torrential rains overnight ushered in a moderately hard freeze, so all that stuff had to come off the skis before we put them away. Fortunately, we had plenty of toilet paper. It's nice to freshen up the kick zone now and again.

Like Magic

2008-03-06T13:42:00.002-05:00

In a surge of conscientiousness, I have remained faithfully at my post in the retail shop on solo days for the last 2.75 seasons. But today was too much. Beautiful sunshine, firm trails softening beneath March's tropical glare and racers beginning to gather for the weekend's competition kicked too much sand in my face for me to sit idly.

After a nice lung-hucking 40-minute sprint on skate skis I was no longer counting the minutes until quitting time. Efficiency and attitude improved.

Anticipating Spring

2008-03-04T14:38:00.004-05:00

I heard a rumor that Jackson Ski Touring might try to stay open until April 20. Sheer depth of snow might make this seem like a reasonable course of action, but meteorological reality usually proves otherwise.

By mid April, the snowpack should have degenerated to a state of deepening slushiness that would only be offset by solidly freezing nights. While the latitude and elevation of the touring center suggests this possibility, skier interest usually drops off sharply at the beginning of April. The casual trippers want to trip in other directions, and the hard-core skiers have gone into their favorite haunts off-piste. Don't go away mad, just go off-piste.

Groomed surfaces will probably offer premium conditions for approximately 20 minutes of each day. On the other hand, a settled snowpack offers a good surface for fat boards in the great wilderness of your choice for hours of fun. Slow snow is not such a problem if you match it to the right steepness of slope. Trudge up and let gravity do the work.

You see, deep snow will not turn April into March no matter how much you wish for it.

For the devoted few, April's unrelenting slush probably offers consistent kick with warm klisters or sporty non-wax skis, but I'd really rather spend a nice half or full day out dodging trees in a few spots I know. Others flock to Tuckerman Ravine to join the lemmings hurtling off the headwall. Ravine devotees who know the territory also venture off to the less accessible steep and treeless venues. Less known and more strenuous to reach, these are therefore less spackled with dubious humanity under the influence of gravity (if nothing else).

Jackson Ski Touring!

Back in action...mostly

2008-03-03T09:14:00.005-05:00

As I lay on the couch last Wednesday I realized that I had to force myself to go back to work or I would simply call in sick each day for the next month.

Might as well get paid to feel like crap. Besides, I had clearly turned the corner on this illness. It seems to be a strain of flu overlooked in the flu shot formula for this year. I've clammed out the Mucinex guy's couch dozens of times in the past week. By the way, I have not used the product. But I suddenly imagined an advertising account executive clamming in the sink and going, "Hey! I can do something with this!"

At least I've had a great answer for those chirpy bastards who ask, "How ya doin'?" when they come into the shop. With sinuses and upper chest full of congestion, I have a whole arsenal of noises with which to answer. As an additional benefit, it makes them back away.

By Friday I had resumed skiing. Loafing along in an easy classical stride I could use strategic clams and snot rockets to gain elbow room in the crushes of tourists with no concept of trail etiquette. This may sound like a breach of etiquette in itself, but most people active in the cold winter air have to deal with phlegm disposal issues. That is a minor component of trail etiquette.

Most beginner to intermediate skiers not only appear to forget most of what they learned in their basic lesson as soon as they leave the practice field, they also don't know who has the right of way in simple passing and meeting situations. They also clump at trail intersections, ski in disorderly wads occupying the entire trail and stop for gear adjustments or picnics wherever the fancy strikes them, such as on blind corners and drops or dropping blind corners. Or they might set up a lunch pit six inches to the side of the set track and then give dirty looks to people who actually use that track, whose pole tips fall a reasonable distance left and right of the ski track.

Then there are the worse violations of decorum.

Incidentally, skiers coming down hill are supposed to have the right of way over skiers climbing. Descending skiers will sometimes waive this right if they aren't fanatically into the downhill and the skier climbing is stomping up the track at a good pace. Also, on sections with poor visibility, such as curves or increasing slopes, skiers may come upon each other with little warning and make a snap maneuver to avoid collision.

Skiers should make every effort to avoid completely blocking a trail. Slower skiers should yield to faster skiers. Skiers using different techniques on a trail that allows both should do their best to accommodate each other. Skaters poaching a classic-only trail should realize that they have waived all their constitutional rights and must kiss everybody's ass until they reach a trail where they are allowed to be. They may then resume their typical savagery.

If you insist on relieving yourself right beside the trail, try this new product!

Light Carnage

2008-02-25T13:01:00.002-05:00

Massachusetts Vacation Week brought a somewhat subdued version of its maximum carnage this year. Good snow in the southern part of New Hampshire may have waylaid some of them who decided to drive less and play more. The economy can't be helping, either. When economic news is bad, even people who haven't really been hurt by it get nervous and frugal. It's mostly a good thing in the grand scheme.

Lower traffic helped me and others at the touring center battling a truly evil head cold. This illness progresses like a series of muggings. Symptoms will come on, then abate almost completely, then come back harder over the first several days. For instance, on Monday I had a tiny, pinhead-sized tickle spot in my throat. By the end of Tuesday I felt like I had snorted the contents of a vacuum cleaner bag. But that suddenly eased up during Wednesday, only to slam back Wednesday night. So it went, into the weekend. Fortunately, between the big holiday weekend and the closing weekend crowds thin considerably.

I am barely-living proof that addicted skiers will rise from their death bed to take advantage of great ski conditions. During the mid-day flush of near normalcy I went out on the classical skis to thread the traffic jams on the Ellis River Trail. And Denise, who has had the cold for going on two weeks, continues her streak of continuous days of skiing. It has to be over 100 by now.

Skiing sick and injured forces me to focus on efficiency and energy conservation. Since complete bed rest wasn't an option, active rest was. I actually felt better after skiing. The slump didn't start until near sundown, when many creatures naturally slump anyway. And the big symptoms conveniently waited until bed time. But I'm just as glad now to have a day or two in which the most strenuous thing I have to tackle is 12 days of stinky ski laundry. The clothes can crawl over to the washing machine by themselves. Too bad I can't get them to hang themselves up after they're washed.

The nice thing about being sick is that when you get over it it makes the level of mediocrity you were at before the illness feel like Olympian strength. I look forward to feeling that mediocre again soon.

The Talisman

2008-02-09T20:09:00.000-05:00

It's snowing again. By tomorrow afternoon we should be dealing with another eight inches. Another storm lines up for Wednesday.

Every winter people come up with reasons for the weather.

"I just bought new skis. Of course it isn't snowing," someone might confess ruefully in a year of mud and disappointment.

"I didn't bother to get snow tires this year. No wonder we're buried," another weather maker might say.

This year, the prime mover of the jet stream is a decorative plate that says, "Let it Snow," owned by a woman named Joan. She gets it out to decorate for Christmas every December. No one can say why it should suddenly start to work in such a big way now, but here's the story as reported to me by the director of the touring center.

Joan got out the plate in early December. Snow began. She left it out through the holiday as snow piled up. Then she put it away and a thaw hit hard. Half in jest, half in superstition, she got the plate back out. The snow resumed. It has continued almost without interruption. She has instructions to leave the plate up until after March 9 when the New England Nordic Ski Association will hold its J2 championships.

Thought you'd like to know.

Snow Advisory

2008-02-09T06:30:00.000-05:00

The snow pile next to my garage now has the same square footage as the garage itself. It isn't as tall, but it covers the same area. And that's just one snow pile,with half the winter still to go.

All this has accumulated without any real blockbuster storms. Six, eight, maybe twelve inches at a time, snow has been piling up since early December with only a couple of interruptions.

You'd think this much snow would be a pure blessing for skiers, but much of it has fallen right around, or slightly above, the freezing point, making it heinously sticky during and just after the storm. The snow isn't necessarily gloppy, but flirting back and forth over the freezing line turns it into a kick waxing nightmare.

To give you an idea of it, Swix's VR kick wax line,which was supposed to have fewer waxes with wider ranges than previous formulations, has about five waxes out of nine devoted to temperatures between 30 and 36F. Two more apply to new snow in the upper 30s.

Above the freezing point, new snow quickly melts and squashes down in the tracks, while remaining treacherously grabby where no one has been on it. Waxless skis work better than anything in conditions like this, but without some sort of chemical treatment applied to the base, people come plodding in with a wedding cake on each foot.

Nothing stays the same. The snow transforms with time and temperature. But just when we seem to have a stable surface we get another storm. Another one is due this afternoon into tomorrow. Predicted high temperature? Twenty-nine to 33F.

Learning Curves

2008-02-06T14:39:00.000-05:00

Everything I know about skiing off-trail I learned in my own back yard. More or less. I wander far over the back line, up and over, but it all starts just outside the back door.

Within the property lines, a novice skier can find pockets of moderately steep terrain in the generally easy slope from back line to road. Going beyond, the slope steepens and cover types vary. With recent logging, some is even mostly treeless, though slash and stumps make the ground anything but smooth.

My music teacher now ventures into that schoolyard. When I tell her that what she has already mastered in music is far more demanding than what I'm trying to teach her, she counters that hitting a wrong note, however embarrassing, never hurts as much as hitting a tree.

Yesterday's fresh, heavy snow provided a slow turning medium. This can make things harder, because the skis don't turn when they aren't moving, but we managed to move steadily enough to lay down some shallow arcs on the varying slopes in the nearest clearcuts. After an initial disclaimer, the musician sight-read numerous runs with greater success than I had.

Getting frisky off one of the steeper knolls, I decided to continue into the uncut tree cover of our own land. Skiing into hemlocks, I caught a tree branch in the arm. This knocked my weight back and opened up my stance. Before I could crawl back forward and grab the controls, a snow-laden hemlock bough hit me in the face, knocking my hat and glasses off as I cratered.

"Okay, don't do it that way."

Fortunately, she wasn't even looking.