Well this is some crap

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.