Ski Machines

Two or three people within a week or two have mentioned on the sales floor that they are unfamiliar with skiing, but have used the Nordic Track indoor exercise machine. More than 30 years ago, American Olympic skier Bill Koch endorsed it as a great trainer for the preseason. The company itself no longer makes them at all. They make treadmills, ellipticals, exercise bikes, and rowers, but no cross-country ski simulator.

I still have one, folded up in the crawl space. Dutifully, I put in many hours on it to prepare each year for the coming of real ski conditions outdoors. Mind you, I never put in even an entire hour in one session, because the Nordic Track is without question the most tedious exercise simulator ever devised. I used to say that it was all of the work and none of the reward, which is true. Worse than that, though, the way it uses the muscles and shifts the effort from one side to the other is so different from actual skiing that the muscle memory will probably actually inhibit a beginning skier's progress if they really want to learn to stride on a medium to high performance ski.

One customer sounded like he was trying to teach himself, sliding around on his new skis, trying to make it feel like the Nordic Track. Note: if your skiing feels like the Nordic Track, you're doing it wrong. The machine is confined and constrained. Real skis in the real world are free, and sometimes unruly.

Cross-country skiing didn't start out as exercise, it started out as a way to get from place to place. Exercise was incidental. Skiers would put forth as much effort as necessary. If you're chasing game, or being chased by someone you pissed off, maybe you'd get the ol' heart rate up there in the red zone, but as a practical matter, skiers use terrain to their advantage as much as possible. What goes up gets to come down. On snowshoes, you'd be plodding either way. On skis you get to glide.

On the Nordic Track you do not get to glide. That crucial difference is the subtle impediment to actual skiing based on what your body memorized in your dutiful plod on the machine. You can set the resistance so that the flywheel spins, but then you aren't working as hard, burning calories and breaking down muscle so that it will rebuild itself stronger. If you design a program or even make the minor effort to mix things up, you might vary the resistance from one session to the next, or within the course of a single session. Even so, the glide phase of a low resistance session isn't anything like a real glide phase when you have to balance on a sliding ski.

A fully developed classical stride has distinct segments that occur in seamless succession. Dig around in the archives for more detail on getting the most out of your classical technique. 

Well this is some crap

 After a brief cameo by the legendary polar power of old, winter has reverted to its mediocre slouch. No one was happy to see the frigid blast arrive, since it chased all but the most foolhardy intrepid indoors for the two days of its reign. Before the frigid interlude, we'd gotten a couple of storms that put enough cover on the Wolfeboro trail system to open virtually all of it. But even that was a mixed blessing.

Three storms arrived between January 19 and January 25. The first two brought mostly snow: five or six inches in the first one, and about 14 in the second one. Those covered the trails, but the ground was not frozen. Streams were still fat with rainwater, and all normal wet areas were at their wettest. The groomer had to maneuver around the mud traps. And then the third storm brought a few inches of snow, ending as rain and freezing rain.

Often, a little bit of freezing rain can put a protective shell over the snow beneath, so that plain rain at the end of a storm runs off without soaking in. This time, however, the freezing rain and plain rain overlapped enough to create a thick crust that set up during the series of sub-freezing nights that followed that third storm. The big groomer could till the trail surface, but that compresses and wears away the snow. Snow loss continues from skier traffic and days above freezing. The sun isn't very strong yet, but it is getting stronger. When the average temperature is trending above freezing already, the sun doesn't need to be blazing to make bare spots get bigger as the dark ground absorbs heat.

Off of the groomed trails, the crust hinders all travel. Snowshoes snag on the surface as they break through to varying depths with every stride. In many areas, the snow beneath the crust is powdery or loose granular, but just a stride away it might but frozen solidly a couple of inches deeper. On skis, the crust breaks, but the snow beneath provides no grip. I haven't been able to try it on a skin ski yet, because we have no demos of those, but you couldn't find a grip wax that could deal with the range of textures, and a scale base gets nowhere on the surface of the crust or in the unconsolidated snow beneath it.

Well-traveled trails may be packed down to a firm -- or at least consolidated -- surface for hiking. I haven't had a chance to examine any of them. The trade routes are usually as firm as concrete by this time in an average season.

The weather for the coming week offers us a half-inch tonight and a half-inch on Thursday night, well mixed with rain. Every daytime high goes well above freezing. Our trail system is still holding up, but the little caution areas become less little and more numerous.

We have to hope that we retain enough continuous skiing to entice a few Massachusetts vacationers to spend some time on our trails during the notorious school vacation week that begins with Presidents Day Weekend. After that, no matter how good the conditions might be, interest drops right off as a winter weary general population looks toward spring. Winter doesn't have to have been particularly harsh or long for most people to be tired of it by the beginning of March. This includes casual recreational skiers.

As spring warmth arrives, the off-trail snow might transform briefly into something usable before it shrivels away to nothing. And as usual, the higher terrain of the White Mountains will have more snow and present more opportunities to anyone who can manage to get there while it lasts.

Why did we do Telemark turns?

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another winter that isn't?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.