Practical skiing

 

Early winter has brought an awkward amount of snow to this part of New Hampshire. The temperature has kept undulating above and below freezing. The ground is barely frozen where it is frozen at all. But in some areas, notably the ones I have to cross on routine errands around the house, it's deep enough to make skiing on it more appealing than trudging through it. Not that it would slow me down much if I just stomped through it, but there's plenty to support a ski track, and a ski track ages better than a bunch of boot prints. It takes barely longer to lace up the ski boots and snap into skis than to put on ordinary boots and go make a stompy mess.

Skis are also useful for gathering kindling and emergency or supplemental firewood from the dead saplings and dried lower branches of the pines. A little bit of well-dried pine gets a fire going quickly.

Down in Wolfe City, the meager amount of snow was still enough to provide some sort of sliding conditions for skiers who had the time during the recent holiday week, as well as the usual determined locals who get their daily dose in the mornings before work. Grooming and heavier traffic both damage the snow, so there's barely enough for passage now, even on the best substrate, but it managed to survive, even with some warm drizzle soaked into it by storm systems at the end of the week. It's too thin to till up now that the temperature has dropped. Perhaps we will get a refreshing few inches on Friday.

Crunchiness is the defining sound of New England snow. The ungroomed snow around my house absorbed enough free water to freeze into a breakable crust over a variable few inches of frozen base. It's not full concrete, but it's not cooperative. With no particular hope or expectation, I set out to patrol my borders and read the news in footprints.

The deer herd has settled into its winter routine, which brings them to the woods near the house. They work this whole southwest-facing mountain slope. The extensive logging on the upper middle slopes has given them places to bask as the sun grows stronger. The uncut forest on my land provides cover in a storm. They also scuffle up fallen acorns and beech nuts, and bed down in the leaves. I saw lots of tracks as I crunched and clattered my way around the perimeter.

I wasn't planning to gain much elevation, but curiosity led me to start picking my way up the steeper rise at the back of the lot. This brought me to a line of boot prints. I seldom see human tracks. I don't post the land, because I like the tradition of zero-impact, exploratory trespassing. Once in a great while I see that someone has tried to enter on a motorized vehicle. That's when I pile brush and small saplings across the trails at entry points, just to give the hint. And the hint has always been taken. But any tracks alarm me a little bit, in case they're the first entry by someone who might not have that zero-impact ethic.

 New people bought a property with road frontage two lots away, but a back section that abuts my land. They have hosted ATV parties on the main part of their land, but have -- so far -- ignored the piece that would really bother me if they added trails to it for noisy, stinky, gratuitously Earth-raping toys. Between our properties lies another homestead, on a lot only subdivided in the last ten years. Those people have played from time to time with both ATVs and explosives, so I'm a bit on edge.

  When I first moved here, the forest was all well-grown, from the road edge to the far summit of Green Mountain, several miles away at the far end of the range. All of the houses were close enough to the road that I could go less than a thousand feet straight into the woods and then start a casually climbing traverse to the left, to make a broad, meandering climb to the nearest summit without seeing or bothering anyone. Now there's a house at the back of one lot, and a large cleared area on the next lot over. And something alarmed the nearest neighbor so that he put "no trespassing" signs around his entire perimeter, which I respect because I would want similar deference if I ever felt the need to bar entry to my land.

I don't own any camo, but I do dress in drab colors and try to stay near cover when possible. That's very difficult on the wide-open shaved areas of the upper middle slopes. The forest is uncut on the uppermost slopes, but you have to get there. I'm pretty sure that the neighbors on the other side are sympathetic to exploration. They have not posted their frontage. But they did build an impressive chalet up high. One of the most impressive things about it is how invisible it is. It's almost like a magic castle in the way that you can almost walk right into the side of it before you realize it's there. That's really nice, because it doesn't dominate the view the way the vanity mansions of many ridge-dwellers tend to do. But it means that I have to be extra-careful to find a climbing line that takes advantage of their uncut forest cover without letting them see me.

I didn't get into any of that yesterday, on the treacherous snow. I even took my skis off to track the boot prints, stepping into their tracks to obscure my own. I determined that the hiker had come from the side that I consider the safer bet that they will come and go quietly. Then I continued to carry my skis as I bushwhacked up along the stream to take a peek at the clear cut. Up there I saw a lot more deer tracks, but also bobcat, weasel, and possibly coyote. The possible canid tracks were mixed in with the deer tracks of similar size, and everything was a bit melted out. Two wild turkeys kept a wary eye on me from a hundred yards up the slope.

For the descent, I made my way back to the stream and across it on foot before putting skis back on. I was tired of carrying my skis, because I'd forgotten the strap to fasten them together. Skiing down was delicate, but still smoother than just crunching along on foot. I did a lot of stemming and sideslipping, but those are important techniques for the New England back-country explorer, especially alone.

Skiing leaves tracks in the snow, but the natural deviations that a skier makes will help obscure the trail if anyone is trying to track me. And on yesterday's crust I didn't leave much of a mark in a lot of places. The deviations were very wide, because the snow was too hazardous to get anywhere close to the fall line. The part I came down through is still thick with saplings from earlier logging regrowth, so the track at best is quite serpentine.

If we ever get good snow, the clear cuts beg for a some turns, but the cover has to be very good to cover the rough ground churned by massive skidders, and the slash and stumps, sweet fern and brambles. Since I'm always alone, any injury would be serious. In addition, I can't miss work. So I ski like a wuss. It's a great excuse, since I would ski like a wuss anyway. I hate getting banged up.

Spring Preloaded

I hate it when spring skiing arrives in January. It's not really spring, it's just spring-like.

Real spring skiing is a compound of physical and emotional factors. Almost none of them are present in January.

In a winter that brings fairly consistent cold weather, a little January thaw is a nice respite. But when the average conditions are more like March throughout the winter the pieces don't come together for winter or spring. A cold winter will promote a deepening snow pack that then degrades gradually through the warming end of winter and early spring. At the same time, your own physiology as an outdoor explorer will have developed fitness and adapted to cold, so that you come into March feeling a deep sense of mastery.

New England is probably not the best place to look for this. What seemed so far north to me when I had experienced less of it seems more and more southerly the longer I study it. Most of us live south of the 45th Parallel. I can drive to it in a couple of hours, but I spend virtually all of my time below it. That means that we New Englanders live closer to the Equator than the North Pole. A good deal of Maine sticks up above the 45th, but it's the more sparsely settled part of the state. But somehow we got the reputation for being "snow country."

Elevation helps. None of our peaks have altitude, but they do have height above sea level, and above their surroundings. Mount Washington famously sticks up far enough to intercept some exciting weather, and lies in the path of common storm tracks. Other peaks a bit lower still exhibit some mountain weather. But, just as most of us live below the waistline of our hemisphere, so do most of us spend our time -- even ski time -- well below the peaks of our worn-down old mountains. Somehow we manage to cop a fair amount of snow in some winters. It shapes our feelings, positive and negative.

The changing climate doesn't help the New Englander hoping for a consistent winter. Cold tends to arrive less often now, and be less deep. This is not necessarily unwelcome, considering how deep and sustained cold can be, and how much that inhibits outdoor activities. Back when wool and fur were about as good as it got, people had a more practical attitude about going out. You did what you had to do, but the idea of going out and playing extensively in it arrived with the invention of winter tourism, around the early 20th Century. People would seek some diversions, but life in general in a rural area -- which most of the current play areas of New England were -- was strenuous enough to use up a lot of the energy that people of today might have to spare. A mild winter was easier on everyone who lived closer to a natural level of survival. You burn less fuel for warmth, and face less immediate hazard from cold-related injuries. It's just easier to live.

Because cross-country skiing has ancient practical roots, it feels -- to me -- closer to a natural winter activity. A couple of my best winters of skiing were between 1992 and 1994, when we had lots of snow and cold, and I had very little money. I would ski out into the woods around my house to gather wood to supplement my rapidly dwindling supply to heat what was a small house at the time. I got pretty good at skiing back to the house with a small dead pine tree balanced on my shoulder, or a bundle of smaller saplings under my arm. The snow base depth was at least a couple of feet. In the spring, the stumps I had cut right at the snow line stuck up to show how deep it had been. Those were years in which the sense of mastery and the relief at longer, warmer days were both well built by the hard work of the deep winter.

In other years with less desperate finances I made more recreational forays, still building that sense of strength and skill to get along with winter rather than fight it or hide from it.

A determined athletic person will do whatever works with the conditions as they come along. But any activity more geared to warmer conditions is just a tease when those conditions come along out of season. You know this isn't really the time. I used to ride my bike without much hesitation when thaws would ruin the skiing and, coincidentally, cleared the road sufficiently. Increasingly over time I began to notice how those rides failed to build lasting fitness for riding, while doing almost nothing to maintain the kind of fitness I needed for winter activities.

Spring skiing is a slow process of subtraction. It's done on decaying snow. If there isn't much snow to begin with, it doesn't last long in decay. The best skiing on warmer days is done on snow that arrived cold and hung around for a while. That never happens when every storm acts like one of the last before April. But January and February can never provide the bounty of dazzling sunlight that late March automatically receives. You have to keep some measure of your winter guard up as you use what you can of days that are still short.

Chore skiing

Before the next storm brings rain and snow I slithered around the woods to gather pine cones. They're great for starting the woodstove with less than enthusiastic firewood.

I slung a 5-gallon plastic bucket for the cones over my shoulder with an old piece of climbing webbing so I could have my hands free to hold my poles. A job like this is much easier than when I skied out with a bow saw and an axe to cut dead pine because I had run out of any kind of firewood. But it's far from the groomed trail experience.

I'm  bushwhacker at heart. Just as I used lift-served skiing to get concentrated turn practice so did I use groomed trail skiing to stay in shape for trudging forays on obscure trails or no trail at all. In both cases I spent as much time as possible in the woods, although I had to be forcibly weaned from groomed-trail cross-country skiing. I could get back into that habit. But even at the height of my addiction I would never spend the money and time to travel to a ski center on my day off.

Skiing around the woods looking for something stupid like pine cones or dry sticks gets to the roots of skiing much more than recreational sliding on machine-prepared surfaces does. Skiing was part of practical daily life. It was enjoyable even as it was utilitarian.

A friend of mine living in Seattle, who dated a Norwegian woman living there, noted that she had a very unadorned style of skiing that casually covered a lot of ground very efficiently. It was well practiced from childhood in its native environment rather than consciously studied in a place to which it had been transplanted centuries after its invention.

The skis I used today are at least 15 years old. They're very similar to the ones on which I started skiing almost 30 years ago. All the waves of innovation that have created products targeted at very specific types of skiing can't change the fact that a relatively traditional touring ski can go almost anywhere. Maybe I can't keep up with the gear addicts on their exquisitely designed perfect tools for the back country or the immaculately prepared track, but those aren't always the most comfortable people to hang out with anyway.

On old skis, with old boots and old poles on a sunny afternoon I wanted nothing I did not have right there.

Skiing is where you find it

The winter of 1993-94 was the classic, almost mythic, New England winter. The cold hit early and bit hard. Snow began in December. By the beginning of February, roofs were collapsing around the region.

The temperatures stayed low. My records show morning lows of 10 below, 15 below, 20 below, and one morning at minus 27 after a high of 5 the day before. We'd get very brief respites, when 20 felt balmy and 40 was torrid, but mostly it was just relentlessly cold.

New Hampshire's a tough economy. I found myself in one of those times when I had a surplus of time and a shortage of money.

We started to run out of firewood. This was serious, because that was the only source of heat. With one thing and another, and a series of lackluster winters, I hadn't cut the four cords I used to pile up for winter. I would get most of it from clearing trails on my property, but now I'd cleared about all I wanted. Come fall, the pile looked big, but the ceaseless cold shrank it with every armload I shoved into the stove. And this was for a tiny house.

Even before the snow I was trudging into the woods to cut dead pine trees to supplement the hardwood I knew would dwindle far too fast.

The snow got deep in a hurry. I went out on snowshoes, but that just added to the toil. So I started skiing in on some old beater Karhus, 55 millimeters wide, with 3-pin bindings. They were derelicts. The original owner had discarded them with a chunk broken out of the sidewall, but he'd included the chunk when he dropped them at the shop. I just epoxied it back in and figured the skis were good enough for chores. At 210 cm, they were longer than anything else I owned, but they were soft.

After juggling ski poles, a bow saw, an axe and dead wood a few times, I began to ski in carrying only the tools, skiing out with a dead tree balanced on each shoulder. It seemed like drudgery for all of a day or so, but then I saw a picture in the newspaper of a woman in Sarajevo, dodging sniper fire to drag a green tree limb home to burn in her apartment living room. And she didn't even have a fireplace. The citizens of Sarajevo were having a nasty winter camping trip that year.

Suddenly my life seemed extraordinarily privileged. I have viewed it that way ever since. I had hot water, plenty of food, dry, dead wood to cut and no one shooting at me.

For the rest of the winter, I honed my balance and strength, skiing to get trees. I don't want to return to those hard times, but they made my life better. You don't really plan to have experiences like that. You really shouldn't. It was just what life dealt at the time.