Thirsty, thirsty skis: the waxer's dilemma

 Nobody likes to wax their skis. Because of this, we see a lot of thirsty skis. The bases might be dry and oxidized because the skier applied nothing to them for a long time, or glazed and clogged with the residue of many applications of smear-on products.

Smear-on products are great for extruded or high-density bases that you find on most basic touring skis. Keep using them. But on a sintered base, like you would find on any skating ski, surface treatments like that don't protect the base against abrasion and the intrusion of dirt. Also, residues from those products can get into the base material and inhibit the absorption of melted wax, while at the same time not excluding dirt. What used to be slippery on the outermost surface becomes a liability once it is ground into that porous base material.

So here's the dilemma: if a ski comes in totally parched, it should have a mid-temperature or warm wax applied to soak into the base. But a softer, easier melting wax that soaks in easily will not protect against abrasion if the skier is about to go out in colder conditions. The appropriate wax for colder conditions takes a higher temperature to melt. It is designed to cool more on the surface of the ski, hardening it against sharp snow crystals and shards of snow crunched up by the grooming machine. The customer paid for a single wax.

The quick and easy short answer is to put on the right wax for the conditions, and let the owner of the skis worry about their future. However, I always think about the life of the gear as separate from the life of the owner. Also, if the owner seems like they could learn better habits, I want to help them on their way. And I have less sympathy for downhill skis. I'm not hostile, just not that interested. Among our downhill waxing clients, most of them don't seem to care either. They'll get the skis waxed at the beginning of the season and shove off until next winter.

I'm not your wax lackey. In the past couple of years, particularly this one, I've welcomed a few wax jobs as a way to pass a tedious afternoon in the absence of other business or more pleasurable pursuits, but I definitely don't live to serve. But I've also had to acknowledge that the investment in a good waxing station at home is beyond most consumers. Putting on an extra coat of wax under the radar is better than drifting around with a clipboard, hoping that I look like I'm working on some technical innovation. And it helps out a pair of skis in need.

"You make it too hard to buy"

 When our shop was first approached to be the seasonal retail provider at Jackson Ski Touring, the executive director made a big point to tell us that we needed to bring the expertise to serve their distinguished clientele. He'd already built up our morale by telling us that we were no better than the foundation's third choice anyway, but the outfits they really wanted didn't want to play.

Coincidentally, our ski reps were advising us that we needed to boost cross-country skiing's image as more technical than people think. Get more detailed in ski fitting. Demonstrate that cross-country skis weren't something that you could get from a vending machine. This was driven partly by the fact that ski construction, especially for performance, fitness, and racing models was getting more technical, and partly just because the cross-country side of the industry was tired of getting sneered at by the much younger but massively more popular downhill segment.

Reps held in-store training clinics. Peltonen held a clinic at Great Glen Trails to go over the nuances of their line and compare it to the other industry leaders at the time. Their tech guy, Jussi, was delightfully blunt about some of the weird sidecuts being marketed to American rubes. Remember Fischer Skate Cut? Ha ha ha. Not even Fischer wants to remember Skate Cut. Skate Cut begat the Cruiser sidecut that they foisted onto tourists for a shamefully long time. It was utter bullshit, but marked part of that period's emphasis on making cross-country seem enticingly technical instead of just like walking with a shuffle.

Into this environment we stepped, with not only our own years of experience in touring, racing, and Telemark skiing, but newly trained in the meticulous process of fitting racing skis.

Racing skis are any skis intended for high intensity use on groomed surfaces. Most of them do not go to racers, because Nordic ski racing is an exhausting neurosis. I mean, you can do a race or two just to see how you do, but you aren't a real racer until you have a "quiver" and a wax kit the size of a suitcase. And you have to train obsessively.

Normal, balanced individuals who don't want to finish a grueling 50K plastered with frozen snot and vomit while sweating through a single layer of Lycra at -5 degrees F can enjoy hours of vigorous fun on their "racing" skis. They still benefit from relatively precise fitting, because the mechanisms of the motion are the same. The equipment has to work with them the same way as for the gaunt sufferer who double-poles an entire 30K classic race because it's the fastest way to both the finish line and early cardiac problems in your 40s.

So...squeezed between the contempt of the Jackson hierarchy and the exhortation of the reps to tech up our presentations, we started encouraging and answering customer questions, extending the sales process, but sending out skiers not only with gear that would serve them well, but with a little more understanding about what the skis, boots, bindings, and poles were doing for them that might not have been obvious.

There was a lot of sloppy misinformation going around, especially about the relatively new area of skating. Skating had been up and coming since the later 1980s, but advanced rapidly in the late 1990s, leading to a surge in retailers similar to -- but much smaller than -- the mountain bike boom that had just preceded it. Lots of profiteers were making things up as they went along, thinking they'd figured it out just by looking from a distance.

The Jackson brass, for all of their talk about wanting to see expertise from us, didn't mean care and concern in fitting skis to customers. They wanted to see high-volume efficiency at separating customers from cash, because they got a percentage of our gross on top of our base rent. Not only that, some of their luminaries got their feelings hurt when the Podunk idiots they'd hired to be their retail flunkies took them to technical school about the equipment. I was told that I made it too hard for people to buy. My answer was that I tried to make it impossible for people to buy stuff that wasn't going to meet their needs and desires. I wasn't just going to foster a misconception to pry money out of someone who would then perpetuate misinformation about the equipment and the sport.

Jackson managed to convey an image of being both welcoming and elitist at the same time. The two exist side by side in Big Nordic because the elites are very elitist, but they do welcome the dubs, because the dubs are more numerous. The dubs actually pay the bills. My sin was in trying to turn as many dubs as possible into more knowledgeable participants. I wasn't hired to help them. I was hired to process them. Take the money and move 'em along. I had come to realize that ski shops serve an important educational function, representing the sport in general, not just their own competitive interests. A shop might be the first point of contact between an interested beginner and anyone they perceive as knowing what they're talking about. I was not going to sell them something wrong, just for a quick sale.

"Wrong" is debatable, of course. Any customer's profile might be met by a range of options. I felt that telling the customer this and pulling them into the selection process would help them later, even if they had chosen an option that I had considered less optimal.

"They won't know the difference" is a common defense by the quick-sale crowd who feels no long-term responsibility to the activity in general. I always answer that they will notice the difference, even if they can't identify it. By trying to instill a little knowledge along with the sale, I hope to plant the germ of some analytical thought, so that the customer doesn't just say "skating sucks," or "cross-country skiing sucks," and drop it completely. Instead they might say, "hey, now I get what that nerd in the ski shop was trying to tell me," and they come back for the better option. At the very least they don't just quit.

Skis are sold in a gray area

 I was taught some careful fitting criteria for performance skis. Around the turn of the century, skate lengths had stabilized after the wild experiments of the late 1980s into the mid 1990s. Classic lengths had shrunk a bit along the way, but for performance skis still needed to be at or above 110 percent of height.

The relationship to height in performance classic is more to stride length and weight shift than just height per se. In a casual shuffle or a back-country plod, stride length isn't a factor. But if you want to move along smartly on a groomed or at least well-packed trail, you'll want a ski that tracks smoothly as you swing your legs through a longer arc. You want enough ski up front to support your weight shift down the axis of the track as you accelerate.

Skate skis use length in their own way. You might wish from one day to the next that your skating skis were shorter or longer, depending on the firmness of the snow and the steepness of the terrain. As the ill-fated Fischer Revolution taught us in the early 1990s, there's definitely such a thing as too short. However, not long before that, early skate-specific models had demonstrated that they can be too long, as well.

If you're six feet, four inches tall or taller, you'll do fine on a skate ski that's 200 centimeters. In the early years of skate-specific gear, you could get skis that long or longer.

Average trail width was a big factor in trimming ski lengths. Since skate skiing was only done on firmly groomed trails, a skier didn't need the flotation provided by the traditional skis of old. That fact, plus the narrow trails at most touring centers, led to the 147cm, "one size fits all" skating ski. It was never intended as a racing ski, only a convenient way to allow many skiers to fit the new technique into trails that had not yet been widened to facilitate it.

Racing skate ski lengths dropped down for a few seasons as manufacturers and skiers alike felt around for the right balance of length and stiffness. By early in the 21st Century, skate ski lengths had settled pretty close to where they are today. For adults, lengths range from 172-ish up to 190-ish.

According to guidance around the turn of the century from the Peltonen ski company, a venerable Finnish manufacturer, skating skis should fit between 106 and 110 percent of height to provide the optimum balance of maneuverability, propelling edge, and glide length. Taller skiers would end up getting stuck with skis that didn't hit that window, but they were already accustomed to fitting into our world of low doorframes and short beds.

Along with length came flex. The mid section of a skating ski pops in a similar way to a classical ski, but for a different purpose. A properly fitted skating ski never flattens out completely. That center section does not need to touch the snow and stop for a moment, the way a classical kick zone does. Instead, the skate camber absorbs energy as you put your weight on it and returns energy as you unweight it to shift to the other ski. The gap also interrupts the glide zone, which helps to expel free water in warm, moist conditions.

When a ski is properly fitted to weight, the skier can get a comfortable amount of glide zone onto the snow, with the pressure well distributed along it. Too stiff a ski means the glide zones are effectively farther from the foot, farther from where the weight is applied to the ski, and the rebound when you unweight will punch up. The action on and off of the ski might feel unstable and erratic. Too soft a ski can mean that the whole base contacts the snow. The pressure points in the glide zone will sit close to the foot, while tip and tail have too little pressure on them because the ski is being mooshed down in the middle.

The weight relationship is nowhere near as exacting as in performance classical, but there are limits. The same goes for height. You might do fine with skis that fall a centimeter or two outside of optimal, but go just one more and you feel like you're a mile out. Also, on softer snow you might really like the longer end of the fit range, while on hard, fast conditions you would prefer the shorter end. Too short in those conditions can be grippingly squirrelly.

The ski shop is a gray area. The person selling you skis wants to sell you skis. The better ones will start out with the goal of selling you skis that are perfectly dialed in, but once they look at the rack they will try to make a case for whatever they have on hand.

Twice now I have listened to the other salesman here fudge the numbers to sell a ski set to women looking for skate setups. In the first case, I had opened the sale and went to check on whether we could order her a dialed-in fit. The other salesman stepped in and did a fudge fit that will be usable, but could be a little bouncy and a hair short. He's also 6'2", so maybe misery loves company when it comes to never getting a 106- to 110-percent fit.

In the second case, the ski strikes me as way above range flexwise, although the height might be pretty good. There was a ski of identical length with a softer midflex number, that he didn't choose. I don't know whether price was the factor there or if the woman is a lot heavier than she looks. Weirdly, the weight range on the softer ski was listed as higher than on the stiffer ski, but the midflex (tested at the Fischer factory) was softer than the low end of the general range for the ski.

Scanning the almighty internet for guidance on what the real racers and race oriented shops are doing, I found a lot of conflicting information. Caldwell Sports seemed like a good honest broker. Their fitting criteria breezed over height and focused on weight. But racers tend to be conveniently height-weight proportionate. A certain weight more or less corresponds to a general height, so that height doesn't need separate and detailed scrutiny. Caldwell addressed it by referring to average builds among male and female skiers in different general weight ranges. So height is hidden in there, but they have that gray area in which to fudge a fit.

In an era when ski companies are telling us that we should be able to move our bindings up to three centimeters either way to get the perfect ride, they can't turn around and tell us that ski length overall doesn't matter. They still do, but don't just nod along. Try to part the fog a little to see where you are in their gray area.

Support Ukraine: buy some skis

 Assuming that Russian intelligence does not read my obscure drivel, I feel safe in making this observation: purchasing Fischer skis supports Ukraine in its ongoing war repelling the Russian invasion.

War since 1945 has been carefully compartmentalized, to the point where its artificial brutality becomes grossly obvious. The war in Ukraine is a great example of this. Drones and missiles rain down on population centers. Thousands die. In the meantime, somewhere in a less war-torn part of the embattled nation, an enormous factory churns out skis, hockey sticks, and other toys for the rest of the world to buy. 

Fischer has had a factory in Ukraine for years. Decades. Back in 2020, they had a devastating fire there, which drove their production out to other European nations, and to China. They had already been hit by the Covid-19 pandemic. Then came the Russian invasion. Somehow, nearly all of the Fischer skis we got this year have "made in Ukraine" labeling.

I don't know that Fischer particularly supports Ukrainian independence. As a big, multi-national corporation, they'll make a deal with whoever is in charge to keep the flow of consumer goods going. The snow doesn't know what flag flies over it. Business can be completely cynical, and it usually is. But for now, anything that brings money into Ukraine helps its economy as it funds its life-or-death defense against imperialist Russia.

Sliding versus plodding

 As our cross-country ski season shrivels under the attack of a rainstorm and some surges of warmth, the faithful still slide on what's left of continuous trail that we can groom. Out in the wild, skiers will continue to stride on whatever cover they can find, because sliding is easier than plodding.

Skiing began as transportation. In the areas where it sprang up, it answered the need for support in deeper snow, but also offered greater speed with less effort than walking, even when cover was thin. This is all still true. This is why we keep the touring center trails as smooth as possible, and guard the cover so fiercely. Walkers might be able to walk with little difficulty, but skiers could exploit the little bit of snow to flow smoothly. That's much harder when stompers have postholed it to oblivion.

Postholers remain a problem as the more masochistic among them continue to plod even when the snow gets deeper. They also give the fat bikers fits, I hear.

One winter in the early 1990s provided such meager snow that I only found skiing on the floodplain of a small river that flows through my neighborhood. Part of the floodplain was covered with smooth ice from an early winter flood and hard freeze. The ice supported the thin snowcover like a refrigerated ice rink. Away from the iced area, some animal trails were so smoothly tramped down that ribbons of snow snaked through the grasses, shrubs, and small trees. The animals had flattened the soil and mashed down the grasses. The snow lay on top of this. And the floodplain was a great habitat to explore anyway.

That floodplain is no longer accessible because a "shooting preserve" bought the acreage and posted it.

Not all snow is created equal. It doesn't all age well. This winter's snow had such similar weight and density that it tends to soften too much, too quickly, to provide a lot of spring skiing right nearby. The cover lasts longer when some of it arrived in deep, dense storms. We didn't get any of those.

The lake ice was thick this year for the first time in a while. On days when the overnight temperature was below freezing, but the ice surface thaws by late afternoon, it offers great skate skiing, although the flat surface can get a little tedious. It's still fun to slide around before the complete change of seasons puts us back on the ground, in our plain old shoes or riding a bike.

Where no skier has gone before, lately

 Untracked powder stretched before me. It's my own back yard, but a fresh snowfall makes it a new world. No one was going to break trail for me.

The storm had come on a Saturday night. It arrived later and left more quickly than the forecast had predicted, but left the maximum amount we'd been told we might expect. I'd cleared the the least amount necessary on Sunday morning to get out of the driveway and head to work. On Monday morning I had time to shovel away what was left around the house. It was light by New England standards, but heavier than airy fluff.

When I finally headed out, I made a wide sweep through pine woods, climbing very gradually, transitioning into hardwood forest as I went up. About 800 feet in from the road edge, the contour steepens all along this end of the small mountain range that forms the center of this end of town.

The town itself has no real center. It has little concentrations at various road junctions. The old town hall is about a mile from the Maine border, probably five miles in a straight line from the western corner of the town. Town House Road bisects the town, with the Green Mountain range filling the northern half, and a mixture of lower hills and glacial plain making up the southern half. It is mostly forested. A lot of it is wetland. It would be difficult to develop a lot of it because it's sensitive recharge area for the largest stratified drift aquifer in the state, and not well connected to transportation routes for heavy commercial loads. It's great.

When I moved here. the forest behind my house was relatively old growth pine and hardwood. From 1989 to 1998  I could bushwhack from my door to the other end of the range, about seven miles each way, and not see much sign of humans. Not recent ones, anyway. There were rock walls and some big stumps indicating that the forest had been cleared and regrown.

In 1998, an epic ice storm brought down the tops of many trees and dumped them into the formerly skiable spaces. The damage was widespread across thousands of square miles of the northeast USA and up into Canada. Around here, the damage was worst at about 800 feet above sea level and higher. While trees right down near my house at about 460 feet iced up and broke, the trees further up in what had been nice glades looked like they had been hit with a giant weed whacker.

A few years later, landowners on the big tracts above me started harvesting some timber. The clearings create unofficial ski trails, but they don't get maintained. New growth chokes them within a few years. By then, a lot of 1998 debris had cooked down, so a skier could climb and descend through the strips of older growth that the loggers had left.

New people have moved in. One built next to me at the back of the lot, pinching off what had been a leisurely line of ascent if I wanted to angle over toward a drainage with some steep lines through mostly pine and hemlock. On the other side, people who had a cabin in a hollow decided to put up a chateau on a plateau, bringing the threat of observation to what had been another set of great glades. They don't post their land, and seemed amenable to stealthy recreation (leave no trace), but I still feel awkward being seen.

Several years ago now, a landowner died who had kept his almost 200 acres undeveloped. His widow sold it to a strip-it-and-flip-it operation that mowed it almost completely, scraped off two lots on one of its pieces of road frontage, and left the scarred remains like a battlefield. I could ski up through it, but I really missed the comforting concealment of the old forest. And it's choked with briars and sweet fern now. The strips of older growth that they left were already bushy. Now they're almost impossible to connect. So my world keeps shrinking. But then so do my time and energy, it seems.

Last April, a heavy spring snowstorm really devastated the forest all over the area. A local logger rated it more damaging than 1998. Roads were blocked, power lines taken down, and lots and lots of trees bent and broke under the weight. That debris creates another giant obstacle course to negotiate.

Yesterday I only had an hour to poke around. The snow was like standing knee deep in baking soda. It didn't hold a steep climbing angle, but it held the skis firmly against gravity when I turned to descend. I grunted my way around and up to maybe 600 feet or a little higher before turning to trudge back down.

Because all of our snow this season has had very little moisture, there is no firm base. The last storm had a little more density, but still not a lot of structural strength. Supposedly it's a myth that the Inuit have 100 words for snow (or some similar amazing number), but I'll bet that they do have their own technical terms for all of the variations that different temperature and humidity can create.

The deer simulate ski lines as they follow each other through the glades. They also use my ski tracks if I get there first. Sometimes we see each other.

February is as winter as it gets. The upcoming week, beginning with Presidents Day weekend, is the sweet spot for likely winter conditions combined with noticeably increasing daylight. The days are still short enough to feel like winter, but offer a little more leeway for judgment errors and longer marches. And speaking of March, that bright and cheery month is the reward for putting up with the darkness, deep cold, and general drudgery of mundane necessities in winter. The chickadees are already singing their territorial song.

"I'm not hurting anything"

 Trail damage has been a continual problem for Nordic touring centers for years. In the end of the 1980s and early 1990s, the interlopers on our system in Wolfeboro were usually snowmobilers and ATVers, or local kids postholing in to their log forts where they might hang out, smoke, or drink. Sometimes they would make campfires. Most of the motorized destruction took place on the section of the trails that is mostly on town land. Most of the posthole stompers were in Sewall Woods, before it was named that.

Because Wolfeboro Cross-Country Ski Association maintained landowner contact, the association took responsibility for keeping the terms of the permission to just cross-country skiing and snowshoeing on the trails that the association cut and maintained. To offer the best product to skiers, the association kept up with advances in trail grooming technology. This benefited the local skiers as well as attracting skiers from the surrounding area and tourists from all of the usual places. As the grooming went from good to great to highly superior, the ski area became a reliable resource for skiers of all abilities, including the UNH ski team. Recently, the Harvard XC team stopped off to put in a day of training in Wolfeboro on their way to a longer weekend of it in Jackson. They had high praise for Wolfeboro's trail conditions.

Once what had been the Lakeview Nordic Trails became the Lakes Region Conservation Trust's Sewall Woods Preserve, the portion of the network on that convenient patch of woods was safe from the threat of development. But that sharply increased the level of year-round use and created a sense of entitlement among users who had no idea that they owe the very existence of the place to the decades of responsible work by the Wolfeboro Cross-Country Ski Association.

In addition to bare-booted stompers with their dogs (but apparently no bags available to take away the dog feces), cross-country ski areas in general have had to deal with the persistent pressure of fat bikers who bought their machines sort of assuming that they would be welcome wherever snow is packed down. Fat bike riders include many who have never cross-country skied, or who did so at a very rudimentary level, often on trails that were sketchily groomed if at all. Interestingly, some fat bike riders have also been performance skiers, but seem to forget as soon as they stick that saddle between their legs how much they appreciated pristine grooming and a nice track. We hear constantly about how you can barely see their tracks, as if that was the only problem with opening trails to machines that take up at least 31 inches of trail width all the time, and move to very different rhythms compared to skiers.

I recently posted critical things on social media and on my cycling blog regarding fat bikers poaching trail in Sewall Woods when the cover was thin and fragile. We were just trying to eke out a few kilometers for skiers who didn't like the more challenging terrain on our snowmaking loop. I referred to fat bikers as not only inconsiderately destructive, but as a needy and whiny demographic. Within a day, a fat biker had complained about that to upper management at the shop.

As luck would have it, the storm pattern shifted slightly in our favor. Snowfalls haven't been lavish, but cold temperatures meant that we got to keep what fell. The barely adequate covering got a little deeper each time. We're not running on a foot or two of durable base, but we've finally got a set track on more than 60 percent of the 30 kilometers we groom. So along comes a dog-walking stomper whose lovable mutts left brown cairns that the owner must have thought would make good auxiliary trail markers.

That fat biker messaged me a picture.

He said something about how I was bitching about a few fat bike tracks, and now...

Dude: a worse offense doesn't make the previous offense inoffensive. Both offenses are an insult to the groomer's efforts and show a profound lack of understanding of the aesthetics of performance skiing. Sure, we can maneuver around track damage. In a big race or on a big weekend there will be gouges and divots from heavy-footed skaters and various people's butt craters and face plants. At least those people were on skis, trying to do it. They weren't thumbing their noses at the signs, confident in the moral justification of their theft of services.

Yep. It's an actual crime. It can seem a bit strained when applied to a cross-country ski area that doesn't own the land, but the association built the trails, maintains them year-round, has steadily improved them over the years, and provides the grooming. It's not a free-for-all where any user can drop in and enjoy trails magically groomed by fairies. 

The "cheap" low-snow Gator grooming machine cost probably ten grand. A really nice PistenBully 100 costs anywhere from $60,000 for a used one to north of $100,000 for a new one. And then there's the 3-6 hours the groomer puts in nearly every morning from three or four a.m. until it's done. Then he's off to his day job for eight hours. Reward him with a few tire tracks or stomping footprints and a frozen dog turd. Aren't you special?

The Wolfeboro Cross-Country Ski Association may not survive its founders. They're getting older and tireder, and younger generations don't seem to have the same drive to operate organizations like it. A lot of factors contribute. When it's gone, it will be gone for good. The large expanses of land will remain, and some grooming might get done. So everyone can jump in there and throw elbows to defend their space at any given time. Just be patient. You won't have anyone to complain to, but no one will be telling you how to behave, either. Just don't bother to bring your fast skis. That will be done and gone.

Fake it until you break it

 My opportunities to ski classical on performance equipment have been very limited for a couple of years. Last season I got out a few times on our snowmaking loop. At least once ( I think it was more) I was testing various klister combinations to see if I could get that perfect catch-and-release of fast classical skiing. I never did.

On the sales floor, I will often describe and demonstrate some of the differences between a comfortable touring shuffle and a precise technical stride as I lay out the options for a customer trying to pick out their next ski set. But sliding on snow cannot be simulated on dry land. One move flows into the next. You can freeze a frame at a time, but the action on snow must proceed without breaks between one phase and the next.

Walking or running might seem to flow in the same way, but you can usually stop and start again at any time. Skate skiing is easier to interrupt and resume, because each ski does not have to stop for a precise instant. If you stop at some random point and just glide, you can resume skating just by angling your skis properly and digging in. But in performance classical you need to be right on top of the kick zone of one ski at a time, and punch it down at the precise instant that it passes under you. At the same instant, your other ski is sliding through and out in front of you. Your weight has to go completely from the stopped ski to the sliding ski in that moment.

A properly fitted performance classic ski will have a camber stiff enough to allow you to glide with all of your weight on one ski, only sticking the kick zone when you unload the muscles on that side of your body, from just above the hip all the way down through the foot. It's something that you never do while walking or running. It is completely unique to performance classical skiing.

Touring on a nice soft ski demands none of this. You can drive the hip to get a little more oomph out of your stride, but you don't have to. You probably don't even want to, because it takes way more effort to drive a soft ski faster than it was meant to go.

Each style of skiing has its place. I was doing a lot of classical skiing on my exploring skis, using their secure climbing and easy turning to poke around in the woods with no particular need for a trail as such. With deep enough snow, I can take the same setup to trails and glades on the other end of the home mountain range, to link a few more turns. It's still not full-on single-camber turn hunting. None of that helps a lot when I finally get onto a well set track and try to use sportier skis.

As this season developed, conditions allowed for a little more reasonable kick waxing. But I had to reassemble all the broken pieces of the stride. You have to become aware of them individually before you can forget about them again.

To complicate matters, advancing through my late 60s, I have to deal with the losses of age. Genetics and regular conditioning can only do so much. You will lose strength, and some coordination. Joints aren't as smooth as they used to be. Adjust accordingly. My average coffee consumption is probably a little higher than optimal, but even without that an older athlete needs to pay attention to the hardworking heart. I wax a little longer.

While I was wobbling around like a puppet I also thought about how ski machines like the Nordic Trak were bad for technique. They worked the same large muscles through the same general motions, but completely lacked the nuance of kick timing, or an accurate simulation of the way you apply force through the poles. And resistance was increased through the skis themselves, and the rope system to which the hand grips were attached. This is not how skiing in the real world gets harder or easier. On snow, the resistance to the skis changes very little, usually based on hardness or softness of the snow. Exertion goes up or down as the skier moves body mass up or down, climbing, cruising on the level, or descending. You'd do as well running stairs to train for climbing on skis.

The storm pattern has favored getting and keeping snow for the past two or three storms. February and March usually bring whatever larger storms we get around here. Nothing is usual in the climate as it changes, but when the Arctic airmass shifts our way we can still get some of the weather that we used to take for granted. Cover may improve on the whole groomed system for a while.

Oops, what happened to 2024?

 Somehow, January through March of 2024 managed to slip past unrecorded. We had almost no natural cross-country ski conditions. Mostly, I hiked. For a couple of weeks, we had usable cover on our snowmaking loop. That melted out by late March. Then we had a devastating heavy snowstorm in early April, that choked the trails with fallen trees and branches.

The snowmaking loop was a precious resource. It's tedious, going around the same scant kilometer over and over, but it's still a lot better than using an indoor machine. For a few days we even had enough cover to venture beyond it, but that went away. In the brief time that we had the snowmaking loop, we had some ferocious winds that covered our fragile track with twigs and pine cones. I don't mean just a few. I mean a dense minefield of grabby hazards underfoot.

Last year was the first year for snowmaking at Wolfeboro Cross-Country. The crew responsible for operating the system also covers the local rope tow hill under a different jurisdiction. Of course cross-country was the lower priority. And then, so they told us, humidity conditions weren't favorable, even when the air was cold. The net result was that we had no trails to offer the public during any of the high-earning periods of the season. This winter was supposed to be better, but they've spent every brief cold spell so far on snow for the rope tow hill. Maybe things will get better...

Snow cover so far in this early phase of winter 2024-'25 is inadequate to open trails in Wolfeboro, but I had enough to ski around the woods at my house today. Nothing in the world feels like cross-country skiing. We'll see what the rest of winter brings after tonight's rain.

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.

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.

The Boom is Bust

 Last winter, our shop and ski area saw interest at levels we hadn't seen since the 1980s and '90s. And even in the 1990s the trend was downward. But lots of people had schedule flexibility, and strong incentives to find something fun to do outdoors. 

This winter has not seen anything close to the same level of interest. A fair number of people seem to be looking for new or used gear to purchase, but rental business has pulled back to a moderate level on weekends and holidays. I say holidays, but we've only had the one so far. Christmas Week saw some pretty heavy rental business at the start of the week, but nothing like the frenzies that formed when we had skiable conditions last year.

Weather is a minor factor. The snow has been thin when we have it at all. It's sufficient to keep a few kilometers going for anyone who is really interested, but it's not a big white canvas on which the prospective skier can paint fantasy landscapes of the tour they hope to have.

Last weekend, we laid on extra help to deal with anticipated crowds and let them head home by 11 a.m. because no one had showed up.

We could have sold more ski sets this season if we could have gotten more product. The same goes for snowshoes, although in both categories the inquiries have tapered off.

Just as weather is not climate, so we might get what looks like "normal" weather during an overall shifting trend, so might we have busy days in rental or retail. But the boom has busted, as we knew it would. At least I hope that whoever is in charge of production knows it, because otherwise they will pump out product two seasons too late. On the plus side, it will mean closeouts and discounts like we haven't seen since the last century. On the minus side, the suppliers can't afford to take a hit like that, and it will create in the public's mind the impression that we really could be selling our wares for far less all the time.

We'll cross that snow bridge when we come to it. But remember that I said it.

If you don't care about others, at least think of yourself

 In one significant way, the winter of 2020-2021 was much better than the one we're in now. We had stringent pandemic precautions in place, and people abided by them or they didn't get to come in. We had enough people on staff to deal with the huge volume of rental business. The snow cover wasn't great, which is a new trend in the changing climate, but it was good enough for us to operate. The main issue was crowd control, and we had that well organized.

Last winter, there was no vaccine yet. The consequences of infection could be severe enough that we could make a case and make it stick. No doubt we lost some business, and invited some ridicule, but we're all still here. 

Over the summer, we relaxed our protocols as everyone else did. For a few months we even went maskless, until the Delta surge. When I had a close call with exposure through my position on the zoning board I serve on, we all started covering up again. We didn't go to the full system of baffles we'd used during the uncontrolled phase of the illness. We did not re-institute our mask mandate for incoming customers. But I really appreciated any customers who wore one anyway, and I appreciate them vastly more now.

The omicron variant has created a new realm of anxiety, aggravated by the fact that we now have fewer employees to run the business. Ideally, the staff should be no less than three. Most days we only have two. Because of that, I can't do service work as efficiently during business hours, because I have to drop it to deal with direct customer service needs on the retail floor and in rental, as well as covering the front while the other guy tries to shove down some food.

The other guy -- who actually owns the place -- is also the groomer. Get him sick, and we not only have to close the shop, you also don't get any groomed trails until he's off the disabled list. So, even if you aren't afraid of the illness, think it's trivial, and believe that we should all just snuffle each other's snot and get it over with, remember that your good time at our ski area depends on us being there to serve you. If you get us sick, we may not be dead or dying, but we're not at work.

Mask up, keep your distance, and don't be a jerk. It's called enlightened self interest.