Why did we do Telemark turns?

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another winter that isn't?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rental Wrap-up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beware of the Flying Starfish

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Winter's fragile skin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good for nothing weather (cross post from Citizen Rider)

 Wow! It's porn outside!

 Rain drummed on the roof. I heard the ice on the steep part shift as it moved closer to the edge. The temperature was 50 degrees (F), as it had been all night and for much of the previous day. The splashes in the driveway burst up almost on top of each other. What had been an almost unbroken layer of ice and compacted snow had turned to mud, except where it hadn't. As the temperature falls today, the remaining ice will set back up for the weekend. Within an hour, the sun had started to come out, but the air was still warm, and water flowed steadily from the roof.

This is Presidents' Day Weekend, the opening weekend of Massachusetts school vacation week. This is traditionally the biggest moneymaking period for New England ski areas if they didn't have a big Christmas week. Cross-country ski areas can't count on a big Christmas week the way downhill areas that have spent many thousands of dollar on snowmaking can. Our overhead is much lower, but we're at the mercy of the weather. In the past couple of decades, that weather has been increasingly merciless.

It all freezes up again this afternoon, but the damage is done. The trail system has been cut in too many places. The sections with usable snow are cut off by either bare ground or plates of ice that the tiller on the grooming machine can't reconstitute.

The fat bikers always pipe up about now to try to tell us that they are the answer. I will wearily dismantle that claim again as necessary. For instance: we might rent 30 or 40 sets of skis on a busy day. There is no way we could keep a fleet of 30 or 40 fat bikes. And our ski rental fleet is much larger than 30-40 sets. We have more than twice that many. The estimate of 30-40 pairs is a bit conservative. On a really crazy day we'll clear the rack and re-rent stuff wet to latecomers who are remarkably willing to put on boots that literally just came off of some stranger's sweaty feet.

The trail system can absorb far more skiers than bikers, as well. Skiers are much better equipped to slither past each other in a congested area, compared to rigid bicycles with 31-inch handlebars. So even if we flung the gates open wide and invited the bulbous crowd to cavort, it could look like the stampede scene from some movie about a cattle drive of longhorns.

Then there's cost: fat bikers who own their own will have shelled out somewhere in the neighborhood of $1,000 to $2,000 for their mounts, assuming that about half of them picked up a used one from some other rider who realized that it was more of an encumbrance than an asset and cut their losses. You can pay a lot more. In contrast, a new ski touring outfit costs about $400. Used stuff is almost as hard to find as new stuff with the ongoing pandemic disruptions, but if you do find something it could be quite cheap. And skis just lean quietly in a corner when you're not getting to use them. They take up little more room than a furled umbrella.

Snowshoeing remains an option, but the popular perception of snowshoeing is weird. A snowshoe is just a boat to float you on the snow. The size is calculated to keep you from slogging in your bare boots, anywhere from knee deep to waist deep. The addition of traction devices to the bottom is more recent, to make traversing hard frozen sections safer and more convenient. But once "snowshoeing" became a discrete activity performed for its own sake, rather than as part of the general category of winter hiking, people started using them on shallow snow and firm frozen trails that most of us with experience in winter hiking would see as just good footing without the encumbrance of snowshoes. Lots of rock and ice, and irregular ground, takes a toll on snowshoes. They're designed to be supported by a fairly uniform resistance from the snow beneath them.

In the "anything for a buck" mentality of winter rental, upper management will still say, "well, you can snowshoe," but anyone experienced already knows better. You will be better served to use Microspikes or a similar device. We don't rent those. Maybe we should.

Just on the basis of canceled reservations, we've lost hundreds of dollars. That may not seem like much in a world that considers an operation with 500 employees to be a "small business." but in the realm of really small businesses like ours, it's somebody's paycheck for a week. Along with that go retail sales we might have made from the group when they visited the shop to get their rentals or drop them off, and losses to other businesses in town if most of the prospective visitors decide not to come here at all. And we lose the walk-ins and same-day last minute reservation calls we typically get on a Saturday or Sunday morning. There aren't enough fat bikers in the world to equal that head count.

Indoor trainers laugh indulgently. They may not even look out a window from November to March. The super cool computerized systems feed them the virtual experience at whatever level they can afford to simulate. But indoor training depends on fantasy life. If you're like me, and have no fantasy life anymore, indoor training is just torment. All that ever propelled me through periods of indoor training were bright daydreams of the myriad ways I was going to use that fitness on pleasurable challenges.

I do look forward to commuting season. Driving sucks. But it's hard to maintain a lot of trainer enthusiasm just based on that. I can nip out for a few base mile rides when actual commuting season seems imminent, and be good to go. Maybe I'll get on the rollers a couple or three times for old times' sake before that.

The economics of long-term survival

"Are there any alpine shops in town?" I've lost count of how many times I've answered that question. The answer is no.

For a few years in the 1990s, the answer was yes, because a sport shop from across the lake tried to open a branch here in town, and that shop spun off another tiny, independent shop that tried to do just about everything. The big competitor found that there wasn't as much money in town as they'd thought. The small, independent guy scraped by in several different locations before shutting down in the first decade of this century.

Meanwhile, our cross-country ski shop is still here. It opened in 1972. It has never sold alpine equipment. We don't do the high-ticket sales that alpine shops do, but we don't have the overhead or the money tied up in expensive inventory.

Cross-country skiing started thousands of years ago, yet I saw one article describe it as "an off-shoot of downhill skiing." That's some ignorant, uninformed bullcrap right there. The fact is, if the economy collapsed tomorrow, people would still be able to -- and perhaps need to -- cross-country ski.

Well short of total societal and economic collapse, cross-country skiing is much more affordable for the skier and the trail provider, accepting natural snow as your standard. Going back to the natural origins of skiing, it developed in snowy areas as a way to get around in them with the least human effort, long before motorized assistance. Wherever snow remains, skiers will be able to cross country, with or without grooming equipment to make it more convenient or allow for specialized techniques like ski skating.

In areas like New England, where the snow type always varied widely, and tended more to the heavy and dense or outright frozen solid, skiing without the benefit of grooming is less reliable, which may be why the native population in this part of the world came up with the snowshoe instead. As the variations get wider and wilder in the changing climate, snowshoes provide reliable traction at the expense of glide. Cross-country skis and snowshoes are kin. They're ancestral ways to address the same problem of winter travel under your own power. With access to both, you can decide on any given day which one fits the conditions. Either way, you have many more opportunities to use the equipment than you have with a heavy, expensive set of alpine skis.

Regardless of the heavy cost of equipment, lift tickets, transportation, accommodations, and the operating of ski areas themselves, downhill skiing remains far and away the more popular form -- so much so that it is referred to as "normal skiing," "real skiing," "actual skiing," or simply "skiing." But in spite of that, an alpine shop has never managed to hang on here. The people with the real money mostly don't spend winters here. The dedicated alpiners got in the habit of shopping out of town long ago. And most skiers don't seem to update their equipment often enough to keep a shop afloat in a marginal economy like semi-rural New Hampshire.

 The alpine shops that have survived nearby are in places like the Mount Washington Valley, or the Laconia-Gilford area near the Gunstock Ski Area, or near other major downhill areas. One outlier is Ski Works in West Ossipee, which used to be near a ski area (Whittier), and managed to hang on after the ski area went belly-up in the late 1980s. It's right on Route 16, the trade route to the ski areas of the eastern part of the state, and also serves the school teams nearby. It survives on its reputation and tradition, drawing from a wide enough area without viable competition. Most of the rest of downhill ski commerce takes place near population centers that may be far removed from actual ski country.

Less expensive doesn't mean free. Cross-country ski areas today depend on motorized grooming equipment that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, as well as smaller machines for lower snow depths, that still cost tens of thousands. Machinery like that requires off-season trail construction and maintenance to keep the surface wide enough and smooth enough to provide skiing with minimal snow, and a corridor clear enough to let the big machine get through when the snow might be feet deep. But all that grew from trails that were hand cut to the width of one or two people, with a track set by the passage of actual skiers working together to make it neat.

Downhill in the American northeast evolved similarly, because the first downhillers were cross-country skiers already, but they soon realized that they needed a lot more elbow room to go bombing down the steeps in a dense New England forest. Alpine skiing as we know it began in the actual Alps, where dodging trees is not the primary challenge. Transplanting the schussing thrills to the mountains of New England took more than gravity and snow. The amount of terrain and forest alteration needed to make alpine skiing relatively carefree cost a lot more than trimming out basic, old-style cross-country trails, and it's a tiny fraction of the cost of providing dependable manufactured snow.

Snowmaking came along later, as the subtly shifting climate exacerbated New England's already variable snow conditions. Lots of small ski areas either made the change too late or didn't make it at all, and disappeared. The survivors are generally large, sprawling complexes that have to draw skiers from hundreds of miles away. Like prehistoric megafauna, eventually they will leave only their bones for explorers to contemplate. The small and nimble mammals will still roam the forest.