Skis for a beginner

Cross country skiing used to be simple. In the interest of making it simpler, the industry has made it vastly more complicated. The rack has filled up with perfect tools for specific subsets.

When I got into the activity in 1984, all this complication was just over the horizon. With a fairly wide conventional touring ski, a kick wax that was not quite right but basically adequate, and a detailed vocabulary of profanity, I was able to decipher the basics. At every plateau on the climb to develop the skills that interested me, I was always able to curse my way to the next level.

In the early 1990s, Fischer introduced little bitty skis for adults. The first of these was a skating ski just 147 centimeters long. It allowed skiers to try out the V-stance of skating in trails that were not widened and groomed for it, as the skate technique gained acceptance. From that one ancestor sprang all the shorties that we see today.

The initial micro ski went extinct quickly because of its many shortcomings. The ski industry is famous -- or should be -- for solving one problem while creating several others. This is not just planned obsolescence marketing. It is a genuine lack of understanding in the ski community of how their stuff actually works. It may be the same in other activities, but, because skis have almost no moving parts, they seem to nurture a simple-mindedness that permeates the culture. It's even worse in lift-served skiing, because those skiers are only going in one direction.

Because cross-country skiers propel themselves over flat ground, and climb hills, the design of the ski is a little more complicated than for a ski designed only to steer under the influence of gravity. Thousands of years ago, when cross-country skiing emerged as a means of winter transportation in northern Eurasia, people were probably less demanding. They wanted to stay on top of deep snow, and be able to move themselves along. Various things attached to the bottom of ancient skis, like horsehide, and seal skin, and patterns cut into wooden bases, indicate that they didn't like to wax any more than modern skiers do. But they did use sticky natural substances as part of the general tool kit. It was all about getting from place to place.

The genius of the cross-country ski is the glide. You get something for nothing. It takes less energy to slide on snow than to walk on dry ground. It takes way less energy to slide your feet in the motion of skiing than it does to slog through deep snow in bare boots, or to trudge on racquet-type snowshoes. And with skis on, you can get the advantage of sliding even on snow so shallow that you don't really sink into it much with bare boots.

Ski length may have been determined by regional variations in snow type and depth, and perhaps a bit by superstition. "Reach up" provides a ski that is about 115 to 120 percent of your height. For general purposes, this is a good proportion for classical striding on a traditional ski. But flexible boots, and bindings that only hold the toe, make any ski tricky to steer on downhills. That situation inspired the development of patented bindings that have ridges on them to engage the bottom to the boot, and shorter skis that can steer more easily when gravity will not be denied. What's not to like?

Shorter skis do not stride as well. A skier who starts on traditional length skis and practices all the ways and wiles that have evolved for centuries will have a much better intuitive grasp of how to make a ski obey, and when to use one of the modern shorties instead. The skier who starts on a short ski and never questions it will be at the mercy of the industry to solve any dissatisfactions. A whole set of skills becomes unnecessary until you -- by chance -- get into a situation where you would have liked to know something you didn't even know existed.

With all this specialization at your disposal, you can pick a ski that suits you right now and enjoy it for years. That is the benefit of all that variety. If you are an athletic type who thinks that the skate technique is all you will ever want to do, you can buy that equipment and take those lessons and never bother to learn the traditional style. The techniques are quite different, for all their deceptive similarities. Likewise, if you know you're only going to shuffle around on a few weekends a winter, get the ski that makes it easiest.

When I'm standing with a beginner at the ski rack, we both have to gaze into a crystal ball. I don't want anyone to throw down a few hundred bucks for a package that is not going to serve them well for many years. Sometimes people just want to do it, bim bam boom. I'll take the money. But if a skier wants more detailed advice, I owe them that. Moreover, I owe cross-country skiing that. It's a great activity with many facets. Oversimplification does it no justice.

Skiing is full of unspecific terms. "Wax" refers to substances that span the range from liquid through paste, sticky solid, and brick-hard, applied to ski bases in whole or in part, by smearing, crayoning, or ironing, to provide glide or grip or both. "Back country" refers to anything from the local park to the far side of Denali. To the resort-oriented ski industry, it's anything they're not preparing with large machines for consumption by paying customers. Here's your ski. It says "BC." Have fun and don't break a leg.

Your skier of ancient times could take a variety of terrain in stride. Racing skis were skinnier, with a stiffer central section to pull the grip zone off the snow in the glide phase, but anyone not afflicted with the neurosis of racing would have a fine time on their mid-width touring ski, whether the trail was groomed to the primitive state of the art or an unbroken blanket of magical white. If things were icy, or gloppy, or chunky, everyone would have a uniformly crappy time, and laugh about it. But you had to be willing to work with your equipment. Now you can have an extensive quiver of near-perfect skis, if you can afford them. Your main challenge then is to pick the right one for the trip you intend to make that day.

I suppose that, in the time when skis were made by some local guy in the village, some skiers would have a couple or three different pairs if they could. Your supply chain was nice and short. You could ask the maker for exactly what you wanted. Now you have to shop around for brand and availability and take advice from people who might not even use the product. The 20th Century development of downhill-only skiing took over the public image of the sport so that cross-country skiing seemed like something invented by hippies in the 1970s as a goof. Cross-country product is manufactured and imported by companies whose accounting departments have the final say in what hits the stores. The stores and other retail outlets order based on what they think will sell. In the industrial world, your menu is provided by people who don't know you, taking their best guess.

The coming ski season

Cold winds and shortening days used to signal the approach of the winter fun season in New England. Whatever was lost of warmth and light was a positive step toward freezing the world to receive and retain the snow.

Into the steadily colder world we would go, training steadily to acclimate to winter conditions. You don't want wait until the snow arrives to start getting yourself in shape to get around on it.

Snow would accumulate all winter. The snowpack would consolidate. Thaws might reduce it, but almost never destroyed it completely.

Some people do an amazing job of maintaining their faith that this winter will be a good one. No matter how many times we get little or nothing, the true believers never falter. If it depended on belief alone we would never have a muddy winter. The Red Sox would always be in the World Series,  too.

I have always recommended versatility. If you have several winter activities that take advantage of different conditions you can shift among them as conditions require. But I have to say that raw, damp weather and mud provide the fewest opportunities.

When people try  to talk to me about the coming winter I change the subject or get out of the conversation as quickly as I can. That can be hard when I'm supposed to be selling skis. Since I no longer get to eat the steak it's hard enough already to sell the sizzle.

When I lived in Maryland,  I would watch a usable snowfall melt away in hours before I ever got to ski on it. Now the changing climate has brought the same kind of challenge to this place that seemed so far north when I arrived here. This picks off more potential time slots as more of them are icy or slushy. And that's if they're not open mud.

I am an alcoholic bartender

Write what you know. Sell what you're into. Share your buzz. People look for an informed perspective when they shop for a product.

Bicycling got me into the bike business. Cross-country skiing got me into the ski business. Like many participants, I fell into the commerce side in search of some deals on gear. And here we are.

My current shop job financed and equipped my descent into full-on addiction. I sold the gear, I taught lessons. I went on trips, though nothing worthy of bragging. No one needs to hear about my private tree-dodging exploits on frumpy little mountains no one's heard of. No one cares about my daily training runs on classic or skating skis on groomed trails I had the opportunity to use frequently enough to count as a regular program. Every one of those doses fed my need.

I reached my high or low point, depending on your view, when I operated the retail concession at Jackson Ski Touring. It was one shot after another of the pure stuff. It surged through me, impaired my judgment, lured me into a variety of social blunders, but I didn't care, as long as I could get onto the trails and feed the beast within me.

My addiction definitely affected my job performance, but not entirely badly. Since our target demographic was addicts and the addictable, looking like a happy participant made me a better host. Like any partyer, I had some people who liked to party with me or at least felt neutral, and others who found me offensive.

I tried to conceal the extent of my addiction by downplaying the amount I was using, sometimes using secretly. I was absent or tardy because of it. It was the most important part of my day, for sure.

Here in Wolfe City I have no hope of skiing as much as I did in Jackson, or even as much as I used to in Wolfeboro before 2000. I have almost no chance to go at all. Forced to detox, I don't want to use again at all, lest I awaken the longing. I'll talk it up and change the subject if anyone asks how much I get out.

"Been skiing today?"

"No."

The word lies there, a cold brick. I say nothing more. The conversation moves on.

Two students have signed up for a group lesson on Saturday morning. Neither of our two casual part-time instructors are available. The last time this happened, only one staff member here had ski gear. He lives in town, on the other end of the trail system, so he skis to work and home again. We scraped the lesson off on him. I told The Management that was my plan again.

"What about you? Why don't you do it?" he asked.

I can't. I just can't. When a tiny bit is nowhere near enough, it's way too much.

Deinventing Cross-Country

As our little corner of New Hampshire faces the second horrible winter in a row, we have plenty of time to think about how we can go forward into an uncertain future. Undetermined it may be, but probability favors more wet and warm winters than bountifully snowy and crisply cold ones.

When cross-country skiing reached its height in the early 1980s, skis were all sized the same way, by traditional lengths. Grip patterns were becoming more popular than kick wax for traction. Materials were evolving rapidly to make skis easier to maintain than traditional wooden models had been. Trails only needed to be six or eight feet wide except perhaps on downhill turns. Many touring centers didn't even add leeway there.

Grooming was rudimentary. Because touring centers in snowy regions still expected to get at least a couple of heavy storms, grooming centered more on packing loose snow than grinding up frozen stuff. Tilling equipment for those frozen conditions represented the major investment for touring centers trying to expand their offerings.

The emergence and explosive growth of skate skiing from about the mid 1980s ushered in big changes in trail and equipment design and in grooming needs. As overhead costs for touring centers increased it was harder to run a commercially competitive center without investing in trail widening and grooming machinery. But people still had the money to spend on winter fun and winter still seemed to be delivering its part of the bargain most of the time. Cross-country could still say, "We're a lot cheaper than downhill!"

Cross-country is still cheaper than downhill, but only because downhill is ridiculously expensive. And the industry has done such a good job discrediting traditional size touring skis that consumers are more confused than ever about what to get and where to use it.

Because Fischer started the compact ski craze with the Revolution one-size-fits-all micro skating ski, the compact ski genre started with something ridiculously short. If the compact ski had developed from the other end of the spectrum, slightly shortening awkwardly long skis rather than creating a whole class of awkwardly short ones, skiers might have drifted to a new norm on downsized long skis rather than being fed the attractive but less workable notion that they could get around perfectly well on some dinky waddling board.

The short fat ski is a creature of soft ungroomed snow. It requires a substantial boot and binding to make it work to its full potential.

The short skinny ski is a creature of groomed trails. Skinny is relative. A traditional or near-traditional length touring ski at 60, 62 or 65 millimeters is wide enough to provide flotation in ungroomed snow. A compact ski of those widths is not. Also, the longer ski has more length between tip and grip in which to make the transition from a good turn-initiating front end to a properly supportive kick zone.

The more skis require groomed trails the harder they are for people to use in the casual way they liked when cross-country was popular.

We could save cross-country skiing in this country by rolling back the options to a few simple choices that will really do what the advertising says they will. Make them versatile and make them cheap. People are more likely to buy something on the off chance they get to use it if they don't have to worry about where they'll find the money.

By scaling back the skis, touring center operators can scale back on the costs. Someone could operate a center with smaller trails if they could get grooming equipment that would fit them. Smaller centers could operate on land that might have gone unused in the winter -- certain kinds of cropland, woodlots not currently being harvested, golf courses, parks. With a little imagination, anyone interested in skiing could learn to exploit short-lived snowfalls in many places.

Skating screws up the balance. It's great fun, but it needs that wide, smooth, expensively-prepared trail. There will still be a place for centers that cater to skating, as long as the climate doesn't warm so much that no one can count on operating enough days to cover the overhead.

Ironic that cross-country faces collapse because they tried to broaden their appeal. I'm saying that they just chose the wrong way to do it.

Asterisk

Frank Zappa was wrong. The crux of the biscuit is not the apostrophe. It's the asterisk.

When it comes to human-powered equipment the answer to almost any question  is "it depends." In addition to cross-country skis I could say this about bicycles, kayaks, hiking and climbing boots, snowshoes and a host of other equipment that's simple to use when properly chosen and correctly applied.

Many a ski sale starts with a long explanation about all the different kinds of ski and skiing. You can streamline it to some extent, but customers ask questions. Before you know it you've spent 45 minutes you would have preferred to spend with the lunch they interrupted, giving someone who came in with no idea at all a general picture of what their opportunities are. It is never meant to confuse them or bore them to death or make the salesman look smart. It is only intended to put a new skier or a skier making a change of equipment onto the most enjoyable ski for them. It's intended to build the sport, one satisfied skier at a time.

In Jackson the touring center management was looking for something more along the lines of a prostitute turning as many tricks as possible with no backtalk. Show some respect for your betters! Get 'em in, get their money and get 'em out! Quit wasting people's time with long-winded explanations and big words! It was amazing how much advice we were expected to take from a bunch of people who had never been in specialty retail -- perhaps not in retail at all.

As much as I may sympathize with people's wish for the simple pleasures of the world to remain simple, even something as basic as food or sex becomes extremely complicated in a hurry.

If I could sell someone the perfect set of skis time after time with just six well-chosen words it would certainly free up the rest of my time for a long list of other things I enjoy. Indeed, the opprobrium leveled at me at Jackson Ski Touring has made me gun shy about approaching anyone with my previous good faith and optimism. If not for the fact that the vast majority of customers compliment us on our thorough and informative presentation I might quit bothering at all. Given the quality of equipment the industry is putting out these days and the unreliable winters I already have enough challenges to my enthusiasm.

Skiing is a nutrient

Exercise is not a luxury. I wonder how the political climate in this country might change if the majority of people got out for a nice walk or bike ride every day. The feelings of frustration and irritation so common between factions might disappear almost entirely. They creep up so insidiously that a person's outlook can shift drastically toward greater darkness and anger by nearly unnoticeable steps.

For a cross-country skier that activity forms a critical part of metabolism. Because cross-country skiing is the most complete exercise you can perform on land, it activates every system of the body. You burn food more efficiently. You hydrate more thoroughly. You tone every muscle. A body accustomed to that suffers from the loss of it. A mind accustomed to it notices the difference. Everything slumps.

Snow has arrived as winter enters its final phase. The season begins as it ends. It's too late for most of us to get the confident, calm feeling that develops over many weeks of skiing. But the wretched season has crystallized the concept for me that skiing needs to happen. Everyone who works in this business needs to get out there and do it every day there's snow. It's not an indulgence any more than being properly fed is an indulgence. It makes us better at our jobs. We serve our customers better. We run the business better.

In the economy in general, a more humane attitude toward the work day would go a long way to making life much sweeter and the population healthier. How about this: everyone gets two hours in the best part of the day to take a jog, a walk, a bike ride, a ski or an indoor exercise class, and get lunch. It doesn't come out of your pay as long as you do something active. Self-propelled commuters can substitute somthing else for the exercise hour, like an art class, chess games, writing or a music lesson. You can't take a double lunch or just go smoke somewhere. You can, but you don't get paid.

We have to live by the experience, not by the numbers.

Cross-country skiing in New England

Did New England ever really have the winters depicted in popular myth? If they ever occurred, they don't anymore. We can't even seem to get an average winter most years, let alone an epic one.

Whether the decline in cross-country skiing is really due to changing climate or to a long-overdue acknowledgment that snow conditions are normally inadequate south of the mountains, the sport is clearly dwindling. The people who love it love it, but fewer and fewer people are falling in love with it. It's too unreliable.

Resorts in the mountains will still be able to provide skiing for something like a full season. Skiing belongs in the mountains. We may revise our standard of what a full season means, but mountain weather will probably produce snow for many years after it has become rare around the middle and southern part of New Hampshire and all of southern New England. One or two big storms every couple of years won't be enough to support sophisticated grooming equipment at a touring center if the rest of the time they get meager slush, rain and mud. Sliding around on cross-country skis will be a novelty, not a lifestyle.

Every time we get a storm, calls come in. People want to believe. Personally I feel more and more like I don't have time to waste encouraging people to pursue an activity they won't be able to keep doing regularly even if they want to.  With all the uncertainty about the nation's and the world's economic future, should people really be wasting money on a mere sport, and a dying one at that?

The ski industry says, "The heck with that! You just need to buy more stuff! If your stuff isn't working, it's the wrong stuff! Buy different stuff! You'll get to use it eventually!" Bless their little hearts. Everyone wants to keep their thing going as long as possible. I'd like to believe the climate could settle down again and that people could prosper enough to play out in it. I'm just afraid that for most of the past four decades we've already been on stolen time.

Verbal Skiing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forget everything you knew about brushing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Snow, Lies and Ski Reports

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nordic Skiing Caught in a Bind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The crux of the biscuit is the binding.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some Improvements, Some Boring Consistencies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That has become extremely tiresome.

It's a cliche, but

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

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

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

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

Peace

Nothing compares to the feeling of peace that comes after a cross-country ski outing. The full-body workout seems to flush all the nastiness out of every place it can accumulate. The smooth flow through space calms the mind, even if certain uphills can be daunting and downhills can inspire terror.

Find terrain that lets you enjoy yourself.

Even after the first couple of times at the beginning of the season, when last year's familiar skills seem reluctant to report for duty, the aftermath is peace. Peace and energy. If we were looking at brown ground and tepid temperatures, I would probably still be trying to fashion a mood out of tiny scraps of euphoria adrift on a vast sea of anhedonia. During the worst of the wait in late November and much of December most years, only these little life rings and bits of wreckage painted with the name of my former ship serve to keep me swimming until I can find the bottom with my feet. Hopefully that will happen with my head above water and I can crawl ashore to take stock of what washed up with me that I can use.

This early snow seems to have rescued me from the absolute worst of midlife bleakness piled onto seasonal funk. Stuck in a car, driving to a job at which I sell things no one can use seems like a complete waste of life. Without the snow I'm just marking time until next biking season, but even then I'm struggling to survive the darkness just so I can piss away the light. The bright season will flash past in a blur of under-appreciated labor, sling-shotting me into the next cycle of darkness. And so it goes.

Hard to believe a little sliding around on snow has pulled me out of the depths of such dark rumination, but it's true. Exercise is the best anti-depressant, but it's hard to convince yourself to take the cure when all you have are indoor machines in a world dominated by night. Then the ground turns white. Its light spreads through the woods and fields, making the short day dazzling and the night luminous. It invites you out to play. And from that play comes new strength.

Does Cross-Country Skiing Have a Future?

From Salomon's introduction of the Profil binding system for lightweight Nordic skis in the early 1990s, cross-country skiing equipment fell into a fairly organized continuum from light skis with system bindings like Rottefella's NNN and Salomon's Profil, to exploring skis with the so-called back country versions of those systems, to real exploring skis and Telemark-specific skis with 75 millimeter bindings.

Clearly the Salomon product was a little better designed, simpler and more solidly built. NNN bindings were put together like a cheap model kit. In the back country versions, Salomon added a few touches to create a better product as well, although neither Salomon nor Rottefella's binding was anything one would really want to take deep into the bush for any length of time.

In the mid 1990s, Salomon introduced the Pilot skating binding. Skating had evolved to the point where a binding that played to its specific needs met a receptive audience. No one missed single-bar skate bindings with elastomer springs once they'd skied Pilot.

For a decade, all was well. NNN bindings got weirder and weirder, while Salomon bindings remained solid and reliable.

All that is over now. As if Nordic skiing in the United States didn't have enough challenges with the warming climate and the sedentary public, now old reliable Salomon has felt compelled to fix things that weren't broken by applying the Pilot concept to all their bindings.

Did Shimano buy them while we weren't looking?

Last year it was Equipe Classic Pilot, a racing classic binding that carried the same hefty price tag as the Pilot skate binding, but without the utterly undeniable advantages the skate binding had brought to the sport. It does provide some improvement over the flexor-type binding it replaces. As racer gear the market could accept it, since racers were already paying the same price for skate bindings and it brought some functional improvement.

This year, Salomon has introduced an automatic step-in version of Pilot, aimed at touring skiers. They have put a Pilot-only sole on their best-fitting boot, which has been our biggest seller for years, marrying it inextricably to this untried binding.

The touring Pilot binding is harder to get out of than the original Profil. Some people already had trouble escaping from that. Pilot has a definite learning curve. A skier can damage the binding if they lose their balance while trying to get out of it. They can also damage their ski more easily in a foot-tangling crash. The manual release is stiff and awkward. If it had been well designed and carefully built it would provide a better escape for a skier who has fallen. However, combined with Pilot's second bar engaged in the rear lever of the binding, it will not improve things.

It's time for an open-source Nordic binding. For all its limitations, 75 millimeter was available to any boot or binding maker. I don't want to see it come back. Nor do I want anything as cheesy as NNN. Someone, somehow has to tweak the basic concept of the old Profil binding and turn it loose on the market so touring skiers can get used to one true norm and find a variety of competitively-priced products so they can get into the sport without having to make so many decisions up front about which binding company they want to put in charge of their skiing enjoyment.

Nordic skiing has no primary, influential publication, so I have no idea how this concept can ever gain any publicity and traction, but here it is. At least this way someone might stumble on it.

Ski for Light

Several hundred skiers have been here all week. They found unacceptable conditions at their intended venue, so they shifted here to Jackson at the last minute. After the last minute, in fact, because they made the decision when they drove by and saw the trail conditions en route to their original destination.

The Ski for Light program serves skiers with visual and mobility impairments. The group includes skiers on sit-skis, double poling ferociously, and skiers who can't see, skiing with guides.

Right away one has to be impressed with the mere idea of managing these challenges to ski cross-country. But yesterday I really started to think about the relationship between a blind skier and a guide.

The temperature was zero (Fahrenheit). There was a breeze, though not the hard winds we'd been told to expect. Trail conditions varied between grabby, cold, granular snow and occasional patches of sheer ice. With overnight temperatures below zero and a high that never surpassed four degrees, nothing was soft.

Because of the thin snow cover, lots of little hazards stuck up through it. As I skied I was constantly making the little automatic adjustments you learn to make in response to each little micro-change in conditions. At that point I realized that the guides for the blind were skiing this stuff and describing it quickly and clearly enough to allow a person who cannot see to negotiate the same terrain right near them. The guide can never ski too far in front for the other skier to hear the description.

Granted a partnership like that probably won't ski those conditions as fast as I was. But I couldn't have described it in real time at half the speed I was doing.

Later in the day we did some glide waxing for sit-skiers. I noticed that some of the skis had two sets of bindings on each ski, while others had only one. I asked one of the skiers about this. He told me that the experienced sit-skiers can have what is effectively a free heel, so they can lunge forward harder onto their poles at speed without ploughing the tips into the track. It makes the skis trickier to control on descents, which are already tricky enough, but it's the choice they make for more speed and power when they are propelling themselves.

Wherever you sit or stand, keep pushing to see if the limits are where you thought they were.

Go, National Weather Service, Go!

According to the latest National Weather Service forecast for Jackson, NH, the aproaching storm could deliver as much as six inches, followed by almost seasonable cold for a couple of days.

If we get the 2 from "1-2" and the 4 from "2-4", that's 6. If we only get the 1 and the 2, we end up with 3 of snow and more in rain. But even the chance of a storm total of 6 is better than what we've seen so far.

Just 30 miles to the south, the predicted totals are more like an inch or less from each part of the storm.

Left alone here, I have to provide public relations for both the shop and the touring center. This amuses me, and the few people who know why it should be particularly amusing, to be left as the public face of this prestigious facility.

I don't mind being the spinmeister. My own inclination when things aren't going well is to find a dark, quiet room or a remote, wild place in which to meditate on the cosmos and my place in it. But if people will pierce my reverie, I will find something nice to say about the chances that things could improve. They really could. Leave it at that.

You Know You Want It

You can't always ski what you want. But we know what you want. Call us. We're skiers like you, and we'd love to do whatever you'd love to do.

It's a powder day whenever you call us! We have on Blue Extra wax. What do you have on? Together we can make a fantasy come true!

Come stride with us! The sun is bright, the air is 25 degrees! The snow is perfect and the trail goes right where you want it to!

Call 1-900-HOT2SKI right now! We can't wait for you! We're going to ski NOW!

Life's Little Ironies

After its initial popularity in the 1970s cross-country skiing got the reputation of being hard work on skis that were difficult to control. This was the result of so many people actually trying it. Skis were long. Boots were floppy. Grooming was sketchy at best.

Downhill had all the advantages. You could ride up the hills. The snow was groomed. The boots were stiff. Skis were wide. You could spend a whole day within sight of a huge, heated building full of food.

By the late 1980s, the cross-country ski industry was working hard to create an image of fun. Engineers tried to improve bindings and skis. Grooming got better, because even the dedicated Nordic skiers appreciated a nice trail. By the mid 1990s, trail conditions and equipment had become far more accommodating to all levels of cross-country skier.

Coincidentally, as Nordic skis and trail preparation improved, winter deteriorated. Right now we could lay down a twelve-foot swath of immaculate corduroy in one pass with the big machine and launch a regiment of skiers of all abilities on equipment perfectly matched to their tastes. All we need is snow.

Winter used to dominate the year here. The weather would turn cold by November, after the stronger and stronger frosts that followed Labor Day. September was solidly part of fall, even though the first 20 days of it officially belong to summer. We worried about having the wood stacked and the chimney clean by late October at the latest.

Snow might not actually get deep until the end of December, or even early January, but ponds and lakes froze. Snowpack built up in the higher mountains. Ice climbs came in. It was winter. Except for a January thaw, it remained winter through the end of March. Snow receded from all but the heights through April, but one might find a patch in early May in a shaded hollow after a snowy winter.

A warm day was a gift, when winter ruled. Warmth was relative. After days of single-digit cold, the teens feel pleasant, the twenties tropical. Strong sun after mid January invites the cold, itchy hut-dweller to strip off a few layers and bask on a windless day.

As the climate warms, not only do we miss the fun that winter precipitation used to bring, we also look around uneasily, not trusting this change. We know it can snap back in short order, though only briefly. In that time all pleasure and all danger rise to their former levels. But we lack the period of adaptation we used to get, and the steady strain of what had been a normal winter. It's like jumping into a hard weight-lifting workout with no chance to warm up, then sitting down again, unable to warm down.

Meanwhile, people come in because they've heard that cross-country equipment is a lot better than it used to be.

"We're downhill skiers. We want to try some of this new equipment."

Cocooned in their world of manufactured snow, with just enough white spray paint on the ground beside the trail to make it look like a real winter, they've overlooked the fact that great gear is no help on an inch of rime over snaggly rocks and dirt. We, unfortunately, have to tell them.

Looks Like Snow,Only Smaller

A few inches of unexpected bounty have actually packed down to something skiable.

Yesterday I floundered around on some Fischer Superlights. The snow squalls probably obscured the view from the lodge windows. I hope so, anyway. It was my first formal exercise in two weeks, except for a few moments of stretching or a quick set of tele dips.

Today was more like the real thing. I skated off on verifiable packed powder. Other skiers had been out, so I had marks to show me where the rocks lurked. I actually got my heart rate up from the hibernating amphibian cadence I'd exhibited while buried in the mud for two weeks.

Honestly, working a sedentary job and driving everywhere, I should just wear a bib to catch the drool. Lower jaw and eyelids hang at the same slack droop. Periodically I raise the back of one hand to rub away the saliva headed for my chin. Can't ride? Can't ski? While not ready to seek death, I might not get out of the way of the speeding train if I happened to be oozing, sluglike, across the tracks when it bore down. I might work up the energy to grunt quizzically before impact.

The weather forecast quivers indecisively between a possibly fruitful wintry mix and buckets of warm phlegm. We won't know for sure until it's on the ground.

Meanwhile, we have skied. People look straighter, springier, smilier. Enjoy it while it lasts.