Pretty good skiing for May

Royal Gorge stayed open for one more weekend, so I felt obligated to go and make one last use of my season pass. Also, one last trip around some favorite trails and one last visit with the Wax Curmudgeon and Curmudgeonette before we decamp to Oregon.

There's still TONS of snow in the Sierras. There's one place where the ski trail goes under some telephone wires, and I could have easily snagged them with a ski pole. So, hopefully, I'll get some more skiing in this month, and maybe even in June. One of the highlights of this ski trip was trying out my new back-country skis. They're pure fun: waxless, metal edged, a nice amount of sidecut, and light. (A sharp contrast with my klister-y, rusty-edged, straight and HEAVY older back country skis). I'm unaccustomed to such skis, so I spent an hour on this hill here going up and down. Click on the picture to blow it up and you'll see my beautiful tracks. Telemarking is ridiculously easy on these skis, and I was able to make parallel turns for the first time in my life.

What a winter!

There was a ski race. It was Great

Today was the annual Great Ski Race--30 km from Lake Tahoe to Truckee. 12 km of up, up, up, up; 10 km of down, down, down; 7.9 km of rolling flat; 100 m of terrifying downhill. This is always a fun ski--it's kind of a ski equivalent of Bay to Breakers. This year there was a bevy of skiing leprechauns, the skiing Playboy bunnies, the leisure-suit guy, and other colorful characters (I've met a guy who did it with a friend on tandem skis). I'm afraid I wasn't much for costume this year:

(I guess that guy behind me was dressed as the devil.)

Anyway, conditions were better than I had feared--the forecast was for rain, but fortunately all the precipitation was in the form of snow. My technique was pretty good, thanks to the trip to Canada. However, I am just not in great shape this year--the guys in the first wave (shown here at the start) finished in an hour and a half; I rolled in an hour later.
Out of about 800 skiers, I was again smack in the middle of the pack. My time was ten minutes slower than the last time, but the wet snow slowed everybody down--the winning time was also ten minutes slower than in previous years. Anyway, I finished, I didn't bonk, I didn't biff on the final hill, and I had a fine day of skiing. I'll count it as a win.

Nice to know I'm doing it right

(Shouted, as a chorus in perfect unison, by a car-full of college students who stopped at an intersection, watching me rollerski along M street):

"DUDE! THAT IS F***ING AWESOME"

Sage skiing advice

A fine day of skiing. We all—Rad, the Real Doctor, and I—felt a bit like we were playing hooky, but on the other hand, sometimes you just gotta go. Especially after a week like the last, and especially if it seems like the snow is all about to go away because it’s been so warm. The warm conditions demand klister, and klister demands attention.

The Wax Curmudgeon is full of sage advice on how to deal with the challenge of wet, three-week old snow. So of course, I asked how he prepared for the day’s snow, and received an earful: “Avoid Swix klisters above KR40. I just haven’t gotten them to work. Now, Toko makes a silver klister—mind you, not Swix silver, which is entirely different—that they sell as a base layer, but that I use as a kick wax when the snow is old like this, but not really wet. With it wet like this, you want to try Start klister. They sell it as “OU” or “OY” or something, but I just grab the red box or the yellow box. That could work today, but it’s kind of a dry wind. Rode makes a klister they call “Gialla” that’s good for really wet snow like this, but only if it’s warmer. I saw G______ from Truckee put a base of Toko silver, with a layer of Star—not Start, Star—fluoro klister, and he could get grip on snow that was submerged in a puddle of meltwater, so if you feel like blending klisters, that would work. Right now I’m trying out a klister by a Canadian company—it’s outrageously expensive, $40 a tube, but it’s supposed to go all the way from plus 2 to plus 20. I tried it at 13 degrees and it was useless. I thought I would give it one more try, and today it seems to be working. What are you on?”

“Um, Swix KR70, stuff that was left on my skis from two weeks ago. It sorta works.”

Using klister necessitates removing klister. Which leads to V.’s comment, related by somebody who might be a cousin of the Wax Curmudgeon:

…when you set about trying to remove the klister from your skis, take a thin sheet of papery paper towel and stick it firmly to the klister on the bottom of your ski, ripping off any extra paper that overhangs the ski, then get yourself a sharp scraper, maybe even metal, but in any case, thin, and sharp, and begin scraping off the paper-toweled klister, et voila, eh? Normally klister when you try to scrape it will first begin to roll up, and then, suddenly, right before you were going to stop and wipe and reset, whammo, reverso-gobster, impossible to get off! Do not at this point get frustrated and swear and cuss and sweat and try to wipe off the klister by rubbing the whole ski up and down the front of your shirt and your face, no-non little grasshopper, with ze powerful and sleek paper towel method, klister comes off cleanly, and it is bound and corralled by the paper towel, so you can toss it away, knowing that you have captured all the klister in the paper towel and also not gotten boogers all over oneself nor anyone else! Hoo hah! ya hey dere, den...

So I tried this, and it worked, mostly. There was one big problem, and one lesson learned. When you have successfully removed the icky sticky klister from the ski, and a good blob of it is on your hand, do not swat the mosquito that just landed on your face…

Sunday Ski

Another fine day of California skiing...

This season, we've still had more days of skiing in Canada than in California. California skiing really is different from Canada skiing. As you can see in the photo, it's nice and sunny. What you can't see is the temperature--it's about 10 degrees C/50 F. We gave up on skating by noon; when the skis hit the snow, they went "sploosh," making skiing a steep hill similar to trying to run up a waterfall. So, we were striding. The Real Doctor chose to use waxless skis (a choice endorsed by the Wax Curmudgeon*), while I opted for klister to grip the snow. "Klister" is Swedish for "glue," which begins to describe the stuff. You can get klisters appropriate to different weather conditions and water contents, and I had to use the warmest klister in my box, KR70--sold for use in "extremely wet snow or slush." Once you open the tube of KR70, it acts like the demonic child of superfluid Helium II and epoxy--it oozes like it has a mind of its own, and it is unbelievably sticky. I have a love/hate relationship with klister: it let me have a happy day of skiing, but now have to clean my skis, my gloves, my jersey, my pants, one of my shoes...

Skiing in Canada is a whole different ball of (kick) wax.

In this picture, you can't see the sun. You also can't see that it's -9 degrees C. This is the perfect temperature for skis. No sticky, gunky klister. The perfect wax is VR40, better known as "blue." Blue grips wonderfully, and gives you a smooth glide, transforming skiing into a sensuous experience. It's easy to use--no goopy gunk all over the place, no sticky tubes and tacky skis, and the wax itself has the consistency of a crayon. You have to go through a whole series of waxes for progressively warmer conditions (blue, violet, purple, red, orange, yellow) before you start to need klister. Conditions are constant enough at Sovereign Lake that you can apparently put on some blue in December and you're set until March.

So, Canadian skiers are a little spoiled, as a conversation with one revealed. Shortly after I took this picture in Canada, I met another skier--a local. As it was the top of the mountain, we were both tired, so we didn't mind stopping to chat:

Local: "Nice day, eh?"

Me: "Lovely. This is so much nicer snow than home!"

Local: "Not from 'round here, eh? Where ya from, then?" (The man spoke like a stereotypical Canuck; he really did say "eh" at the end of most sentences.)

Me: "Sacramento, in California. We're here for a ski vacation, taking in your excellent snow. Are you a local?"

Local: "Yeah. What's the snow like there in California, eh?"

Me: "Not this nice. We practically never use blue. We usually end up using klister for a couple of months each year."

Local: "Oh, that's too bad. Round here, we just use blue all the time, eh? Every once in a while, we might have to use violet, but we look on that as a real hardship."

Monday Musical Offering

I haven't had much time to practice, mainly because I've spent most of my time last week skiing--a week at the excellent Sovereign Lake Nordic Center near Vernon, British Columbia, plus a fine day at Royal Gorge here in California. So, some appropriately wintry music I played last year and some pictures to go with it.

First ski of the year

Skiing has some similarities to playing the violin. It's really easy to do it badly. And, when you do it just right, it feels so amazingly good that you are instantly hooked. You're desperate for the next fix, so you struggle and try and spend and go to all sorts of lengths in search for that perfect instant.

Today was the first ski of the year for the Real Doctor and myself. California has had a series of cold, wet storms blow through, and last night it was cold enough that it snowed down to 3,000 ft in elevation. 7,000 feet up at Donner Pass, where we ski, there was eight feet of snow and the morning temperature was in the teens. We got to the ski area around 10 in the morning, and the temperature was about 25 degrees--absolutely perfect. "Blue wax" conditions like these are rare in California, where klister is the rule for most of the season, so it was a struggle to avoid the irrational exuberance that is normal for the first ski of the year. I am only a little sore.

As they say, if you can walk, you can ski. However, you'll ski very badly. Skiing well is nothing like walking, and my muscles have been forgetting all about how to ski for the last 8 months. So most of the day was spent just trying to remember...hip forward...open up like so...weight over there, then over there...don't look at your skis, look at the trees!...and so on.

Bracing for Winter

I was walking the dog the other night and I saw somebody, other than me or the Real Doctor, rollerskiing up M street. So, there's at least three of us in this town.

I mentioned that rollerskiing put me on the bleeding edge of the avant-garde; however, it appears that I've been outdone.


I will have to somehow work out a rollersnowboard. Maybe a skateboard with bindings and the wheels on pivots.

Trendiness, and a message for Val

So, according to Outside Magazine and Sunset Magazine--who should know--the trendy train that we must all hop on board right now is Stand-Up Paddleboarding. To be really with it, call it "SUP" as in "dude, 'sup dude?" We've seen people doing this down in Pacific Palisades, and up here on the American River.

But wait--if it's in such a lamestream magazine as Sunset, isn't it already passe? Why yes, it is. How is one to stay ahead of the curve? Simple--imitate the guy we saw on the bike trail the other day. He was riding a "longboard" skateboard, propelling himself with a carbon-fiber SUP paddle with the blade sawn off and replaced with a rubber wheel. He was on the bleeding edge of fashion, and by the looks of it, he could soon be just bleeding.

Of course, this trend-conscious young man could just have been trying to keep up with trendsetters such as myself...