Another whiteout day at Crystal

Day two on the teles and another whiteout day at Crystal Mountain, so again no lines, lots of runs and lots of moguls everywhere. The less than perfect training conditions were more enjoyable this time around. I had an easier time with my balance even turning through the piles of consolidated powder and didn't have to fall back to alpine turns as much.

My goals for day two were to weight my back foot more consistently and to get more of my foot down on the ski. My visualization was one-legged down-dog in yoga and stretching the down heel toward the floor.

After the first run it was clear to me that weight wasn't the problem in back. I simply wasn't edging he ski enough. I was putting plenty of weight on it, but without good edging it was still eratic and I would react by unweighting it. So I quickly changed my game plan and concentrated on edging the rear ski. That worked pretty well but it's still being a bit skittish until I'm well into the turn. Next time out I work on edging the back foot earlier in the turn. I think I'm flattening it to start the turn and then leaving it flat until I feel the turn pressure build.

My other big problem is hip movement. I'm having a hard time balancing consistently toward the finish of my turns, and I think it's because I'm holding my hips two far forward (warrior 1) instead of letting them move with the skis (into warrior 2). I think the side-to-side alpine hip movement is probably still pretty well coded into my brain that it's just how a feel my way through linked turns. Only it doesn't work, and after six or seven turns my balance is way off and I restore it with a parallel turn or two. I suspect that if I get my hips around better on the turns that most of this problem will go away.

The most enjoyable runs on day two were the natural-radius turns I was making down the blues in old-school tele position. At first they were mostly skidded turns, but by later in the day I was carving them pretty well. Since you're still riding turn to turn with these huge radius turns, you can get moving pretty darned fast and stay in control. I could do the same with tiny short radius alpine turns, but it wouldn't be as much fun as the wide radius carved teles. The big teles use more of the slope and the allow you to weave around everyone else at a very high rate of speed. That's quite fun, especially when the someone elses are the newbie snowboarders sitting all over the slopes.

My pet peeve is quickly becoming snow boarders who sit down and take a break in really dangerous stupid places. If you are not moving you should either be getting up from a fall or off to the side of the trail. The snow patrol should warn and then pull passes of boarders who rest seated in the middle of a run. Typicaly they do this right after the lip of a hill so that you come up on them all of a sudden, usually in moguled terrain where you expect to find maybe a fallen skier or boarder or two, but not an entire mogul field of boarder wannabes using the moguls as chairs and chatting.

Next week it's blues and maybe a black or two, working on early edging and turn initiation with the back foot, and then working for half a day or so on getting my hips around more.

nordic Xmas

I went out Xmas morning for a short out-and-back to Windy Pass. The outbound trip was a gradual but climb (never had to leave the tracks) up 1100 feet along the E side of Mt Catherine to Windy Pass. We could have continued around the mountain at that point, but decided to double back to take advantage of the obviously cruisable downhill most of the way back. There were a few blind corners where I had to leave the tracks, but otherwise you can ski the tracks all the way back down too. It was a pretty good workout but the skiing was easy.

But the best thing about the trip was the view we had of the Olallie Meadows/Nordic Pass area. I've definitely got to drag my telemarks up there sometime next month. There is plenty of easy to intermediate telemark terrain up there, and although there a couple of avalanche slopes, they probably aren't too bad if there's been no sun for weeks and it's early in the day, etc. But I'll have to follow the avalanche condition reports for a while to make sure I guess.

So this weekend it's going to be working on solid technique on the blues, and then I guess a couple of weekends inbounds skiing black and working on mixing up tele and alpine turns. Then I think I head out into the backcountry for some honest telemarking (not to mention cheaper).

I have to admit though that slogging up 4 miles of nearly glidable nordic uphill is probably a pretty good workout for skinning. It's the same basic idea: get as perpendicular to the slope as you can. That plus the edgeless downhill made this quite a bit more fun that my last nordic outing.

so much for ideal conditions

My first day on telemarks started out slowly. I had planned to spend the first half of the day just doing drills on greens, but the weather didn't cooperate. It was dropping tons of freezing sand-snow that made the green runs too slow to be usefull, so I had to head to the blue runs, and they were too heavily moguled for the most part do do the drills. So I just decided to start with turns and to take advantage of any flatter terrain to work on mechanics. my right turns were ok right from the start, but it took me a couple of hours to bet my left turns to stop shifting to a paralell finish.

My one big problem that I am going to have to work on next outing is to get the weight more into the ball of my feet on the rear leg. I'm getting good weight onto the leg, but straight forward into the toe for the most part. So next outing I think downward-dog feet and flex my ankles hard through the turn.

No surprises or let downs on the part of the telemark style. It's just about as subtle as I expected it to be. It's also got a very nice solid feel to it and a little more continuity. Parallell turns always felt much more like very sharp curve in terms of turning force. Telemark turns feel more parabolic. The effort still builds through the turn but the build is more even. I suspect that this is simply because in single-ski turns powering through the finish causes the skis to camber out even more and increases the turning power. the two-ski turn probably has a more consistent turn radius witout so much power-flex-radius-narrowing feedback.

Out with the old blogs - in with the new

I've cleared out all of my old blogs and am starting from scratch with this blog (which means "attack of skiing fever" in case you can't figure it out based on cognates).

The reason: I'm back on skis for the first time in years. This weekend I went up to Manning Park Canada on a Skibuddies trip, and although I only did a bit of nordic skiing and snowshoeing, I'm already hooked again (Seattle's LGBT wintersports club). So I went out today and bought a telemark outfit (K2 World Piste, Black Diamond O1 active touring bindings, and Scarpa T2X boots), and I'm starting this blog.

On the way up to Manning park, we were eating at Subway and I told one of the guys I was with that I would likely only ski through February because I had to get back on the bike. But By the end of the weekend I realized that I would likely ski through the spring, and maybe through June if there was snow worth skiing up in the mountains somewhere. So since I will probably be doing little not related to skiing between now and May, I might as well just stick to a skiing blog.

All weekend long I explained to people that it had been 9 years since I had been on skis, but when I got back I did some thinking and mapped out my timeline to when I did my last skiing. It was in 1993, so it's been more like 15 years. It's long enough that I remember few details of any of my skiing. I do remember that I stopped when I entered graduate school because I simply could not afford it anymore.

I do remember that the last season I skied I had decided to take up telemarking next. I don't know why exactly, probably just because I was tired of doing the same old thing over and over again and was looking for something different. So now that I've decided to start skiing again I figured I might as well start where I left off and take up telemarking next.

I have no idea whether telemark skiing will live up to my obviously naive expectations, so I'm laying them out here as a point of reference later in the season to see how expctations and reality compare. I'm hoping that the free heel will allow for a bit more room for adapting turns to terrain and conditions. I always felt like paralell turning mas modulated only by degree. In steeper stuff turns would become a bit more stem-ish through the fall line, but beyond that there wasn't much variety. That might have been a result of my own limitations though. Downhill on free heel skis seems to give a much wider range of options because you can also modulate the effective turning radius of the skis, have some control of your center of gravity independent of edge pressure, and the ability to shift back and forth between more or less parralell turns and telemark turns. What I'm hoping to find from all of this is that telemarking is an ongoing learning experience where you figure out the best combinations of all fo the above for skiing down a particular line in particular conditions.

In short I'm hoping that telemark is to alpine skiing as violin playing is to piano playing. Obviously both the piano and the violin require developping technique, but the range of technique on the piano is smaller. It's a matter of applying a few basic principles in increasingly complex ways. The piano is basically two dimensional, with only a small amount of projection into a third dimension. On the violin every interval, every bit of passagework (movement between basic hand positions), every new style of attack requires developping new technique. It's an instrument of a dizzying amount of technical detail. You have two hands moving in three dimensions. It requires more precision and the precision is harder to come by because of the inherent lack of conatraint (no frets, and a bow that can cross the strings at any arbitrary angle). But in the long run (at least for me) learning the violin is satisfying in a way that learning the piano can't match. You feel yourself adapting to the instrument in very subtle ways. It grows on you. I'm hoping that telemark skiing works something like this, where your neuro-muscular system gradually grows into the skis, developping the myriad detailed bits of modulating the skis degrees of freedom much like you develop the myriad detailed bits of modulating bow and fingerwork in passagework.

We'll see. For now I just can't wait to get the skis back from the shop and head out to the slopes, which is why I'm doing the next best thing - writing about it.

One final bit: this is my first season skiing after all of my work in 20th century French philosophy. We'll have to see if any Merleau-Ponty rings true as I work on skiing this season. It's also my first ski season after taking up yoga and working through Buddhist philosophy, so all of that baggage is there to mull over too. At least I have something to think about on those long slogs up the mountain.