-
04 January 2006
Wed, 04 Jan 2006 16:41:00 GMTSkiing
It’s ambiguous to me whether skiing or soccer is better recreation, but they both definitely rock.
The family did three days of skiing at Blacktail the past week while we stayed with my grandparents, and it was great.
I don’t get enough chances to ski. Living in Minnesota, where there aren’t any mountains, the only decent skiing is up north, on what I’m willing to call slopes. Anything within a half an hour of my house doesn’t deserve the moniker hill, and it all ends up being prohibitively expensive. End result: it’s not worth it.
Luckily all my life the family has gone out to Montana around christmas, and since I was 4 my parents have taken me out skiing.
My first time the story goes that I went down the hill, didn’t stop, and flipped over a barricade into a parking lot. That dampened my spirits, and I didn’t ski the next year. But ever since I’ve managed 3 or 4 good days skiing real mountains per year, and that little bit of experience sticks surprisingly well, I wouldn’t hesitate to call myself an expert skier. At least compared to the skiers I’ve had to compare myself against out there.
The first two days this year were good, but not great. The weather had been 40 degrees the week before we came out, and so the mountain was mostly closed: the intermediate lift 0% open, advanced lift 50%, and the beginner lift not really worth mentioning. The mountain goes top down, so the best snow was on top. But all the runs were closed from the midway down.
It wasn’t all that bad, but for the fact that it jammed everyone onto the expert mountain, which had to be groomed to accommodate everyone. The lifts were crowded. Kids with their families routinely had trouble with getting on, resulting in an outrageous amount of stoppages. That got old real fast.
But overall things were still good. We skied every other day, staying back and visiting between. Between the second and third days, a new foot of power had dumped, and it was real good. Best skiing I’d ever done.
I’ve never managed to get lucky enough to ski in much more then two inches of new stuff. And boy, is powder nice. It kills your legs, but you get over that. The I really don’t like ice, and powder gives you so much volume to counteract your velocity down the hill. I had to learn real fast how to get through the stuff – it’s not so bad early on, but once it gets all chopped up and bumpy it is tough. But I managed, and it was great.
We were the first ones over onto the Crystal lift, which had opened the day before, and my first few runs I made the first tracks of the day. I cut a real nice set right down under the lift, and made sure to admire them each time the on the way up. It was really fun to be able to see my line.
Another thing I never really got was skiing the trees. Really, I was just intimidated by needing to keep between them, not hitting them. Once I forgot how easy it would be to slip and crack my head open I dropped in the top of a gladed run (so I wouldn’t be able to get out easy) and took it all the way down.
I was hooked. It wasn’t too hard, just stay between the trees, scan ahead, figure out a few routes so that if one doesn’t work you still have some hope of evading the trees.
You have to think a lot more in the glades. It’s lots quieter, more technical, and harder. I took one run the first day, about four at the end of the second, and ended up spending about half the third day in there. It’s nice to be able to make your own way as opposed to just taking a run all the way down.
That said, there was only one gladed area in which the trees weren’t dense lodgepole pine. The trees were spaced quite generously, making things really not that hard to deal with. So a good change of pace from hurtling down normally, but I’m not quite this guy (although that slope really isn’t steep, and at second glance, those trees don’t look to dense).
What I especially loved is how I could get myself into situations I’d never had to deal with before, and manage just fine. If you hopped into the woods near to the lift, as opposed to going above then and cutting in more centrally, you’d get to a real steep 25 foot section that was well hemmed on either side by trees. I managed the real cool looking style you see when a real pro is coming down some absurdly steep slope. Hopping and swiveling around your inside pole, turning yourself nearly 180 degrees in the air, landing your skis and coiling your knees just so you’re ready to do the whole thing in the opposite direction again.
The one thing I hate are the snowboarders. I’ll call it the 10-30-60 rule: 10 percent of snowbarders are great. Technically excellent, they get down the mountain with no problems and look good while they’re at it. 30 percent are entirely decent. They’re not experts, but they get down. Some may be annoying, but they do just fine.
The problems come with the remaining 60 percent. Snowboards are big. They’re as long as skis, and two or three times as thick. And being that they are hooked to your feet left/right, as opposed to the forward/backward of skis, the last 60 naturally grind the living hell out of any snow they touch.
The last 60 percent are the less skilled, still learning, who haven’t yet learned that the aim of snowboarding isn’t to just slip down the mountain, it’s to do it (a) quickly, or (b) gracefully, and© without raping every square foot of snow into a rocky mess.
Beginning skiers learn to stop with the snowplow, or pizza. Thats where you put the tips of your skis together and the tails far apart to form a wedge pointing down that will slow and then stop you. Snowboarders just point their shoulders up or down the hill, leaving their long edge perpendicular to the slope.
Now that’s perfectly reasonable. They need to stop somehow. We start having problems when these dumbass kids don’t learn that there is more to the art of snowboard then sliding down the hill on their back edge. Or they continually take on terrain they can’t handle, and all they can do is slide down it funny. Carve!
Boarders also tend to rove in packs, 2-5 at a time. The combination of that many of five foot long boards scraping down the hill really, really can mess up the snow.
And it’s inevitably on the steep sections of slope that the boarders decide they need to take their back edge down. Other places they sort of slide from gentle side, to back edge, to other gentle side, leaving the snow in tolerable condition. (Whereas, of course, a real carve would be going hard on the front edge, then rolling hard onto the back edge, all the while pointing your board down the hill and not your shoulders).
The steeper sections are where I find myself going faster, carving harder, and generally much less happily disposed to come across rocks. Not to mention where it really helps to have regularly spaced drifts to get a rhythm and be able to launch my turns better.
Ironically, one day the local paper carried an AP article to the effect of “4 old time ski resorts still backward enough to prohibit snowboarding”. Taos here I come.
-
02 December 2005
Fri, 02 Dec 2005 10:46:04 GMT SnowCamvia Kjell Olsen2259 days agoBlacktail is where my family goes skiing every year, it’s about a 30 minute drive from my grandparents house. On track to open in a week.
Last year they didn’t open until after we’d left (early january!), and we missed out and had to trek north to a way more expensive resort and could only ski a few days because of it.
-
28 September 2005
Wed, 28 Sep 2005 15:02:00 GMT Pancake Mountainvia Kjell Olsen2324 days agoMy new favorite tv show: as explained by Ted Leo in a recent kexp live performance (I can’t find it on the web, but got it as a podcast through iTunes) it’s a bunch of old punk rockers who make a show for their kids to watch and bring on bands they like for a quick rocking segment with three year olds.
-
18 February 2005
Fri, 18 Feb 2005 13:22:33 GMT SKI Magazine ~ Guru Dave and the Tao of Snowbirdvia Kjell Olsen2546 days agonspired by an airfoil introduced to Snowbird by French skiers decades ago, he set out to make a set of stubby wings that a skier could carry in lieu of poles.
Dave promises me the sensation of lift will be tangible. “It’s like skiing with handrails for support,” he says. “Your feet pendulum underneath you. And once your speed increases, you can bank into your turn and really dig in.”
I want to be like this when I grow up – its exciting just to think about it.
“Look at the slice of time we’re living in,” he tells me one day as we ascend the mountain. “How many people throughout history have had the leisure time we enjoy? In our lives, we have a 60- or 70-year window. Yet people take living for granted. Here we are in a gleaming tram with gleaming equipment. We get to ski. We are blessed.”
-
Also somewhat recently
