"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.

What's cross-country skiing worth to you?

A recent article in Cross Country Skier magazine reported (in a four-page valentine to the behemoth of New England cross-country skiing) that a day pass to Jackson Ski Touring costs $21 now. A quick check of the Ski NH listings of cross-country ski centers shows that Jackson sells the most expensive day pass of any area in New Hampshire, but only by a dollar over Waterville Valley and two dollars over Bretton Woods and Great Glen.

Great Glen? Really? Their website advertises 40 km of groomed and backcountry trails. Backcountry is a code word for ungroomed and possibly ungroomable, which in many common snow conditions means virtually unskiable. You decide if it's worth the drive to the top of Pinkham Notch and a $19 ticket.

A lot of areas offer a day pass for $12 or less. They may not offer 76 or 100 kilometers or a view up the skirts of Mount Washington, but how much can you really ski in a day? The old argument that cross-country is cheaper than downhill is still true, but that's mostly because downhill is now absurdly expensive with lift tickets commonly well above $70 on weekends at major mountains. The merely ridiculously expensive $21 trail pass looks downright economical. And according to the Cross Country Skier article, executive director of JSTF Thom Perkins says that the $21 ticket does not meet their expenses.

Ski areas depend on season pass revenues for the bulk of their income. Day skiers are unpredictable. They go with the weather. They decide on a whim. To guarantee some level of operating funds, ski areas have to convince a lot of people to throw down a bet before a flake hits the ground or a cold cloud even gathers in the sky.

Cross country skiing, especially in New England, depends on expensive grooming equipment run by skilled technicians. Some areas have experimented with snowmaking, which is another large expense. The downhill industry tells us it is one of the biggest drivers of their pricing. So the claim by cross-country ski areas that their sport is cheaper than downhill faces a growing challenge if they're going to invest in infrastructure to put down a guaranteed surface of manufactured snow on a significant amount of terrain. Will people love cross-country skiing enough to pay what it really costs to provide it? History hints that the answer is no.

The same issue of Cross Country Skier had an article titled "Beyond Grooming" in which the author put forth the radical notion that a skier could get some wide touring skis and heavy boots and ski the trails they use for activities such as mountain biking. Wow! Make your own tracks? That's the craziest idea since hippies invented cross country skiing in the late 1960s! The article was also an advertisement for Rottefella's widely licensed NNN-BC boot and binding system, since the war on 75 millimeter has never ended. Word to the wise: find yourself some good beefy 75 mm boots and bindings for your exploring skis if you plan to go far from the car and you might be trying to drive some turns. System bindings from Rottefella or Salomon are made with a lot of plastic and plenty of small parts just for the sake of skiing performance that is only debatably better. Old boring 75 mm bindings are simple, durable and readily repairable in the event that you actually get snow conditions that will permit you to venture away from groomed trails in this era of warming winters.

Tedium

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Commercial Expertise

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The Last Day

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

Shutting it down

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

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

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

OMG, what?

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

Jackson Ski Touring!

The Shop Grunt's Lament

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

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

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

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

The Jackson Ski Touring Foundation Retail Challenge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We wait to see what the next solution looks like.

Jackson Ski Touring was like Nordic Graduate School

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Great Trails. Difficult People.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Top-notch staff

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

Welcome to Big Time Nordic

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

What does this mean to you, the average skier?

Not much.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nordic Confidential

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jackson Ski Touring!

Precious and Few

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Assurance Experience Brings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shin-Deep Sugar or Death Cookies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anticipating Spring

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

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

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

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

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

Jackson Ski Touring!