Now I’m not normally one to defend a non locally owned mega giant corporation ski resort, but it is in my front yard, I do play there a lot, and I had just had a truly great day there. I had to put down my beer, throw my shoes on and run over to the street clothes couple who were just standing there looking at each other. Hi I just overheard you ask the obviously wrong wankers about their day. Yes they are charging full price, no they aren’t fully open and you have to stick to mainly to the groomed runs, but I have been up there the last two days and I don’t remember any more than a couple of scraped off patches of ice. The runs are actually really good considering there have been no storms! It almost looked like they started breathing again. “Hey thanks, we knew there wasn’t much snow here but we only get to do this once a year.” They are laying down a new layer of snow on several runs every night and if you can get to those runs it is amazingly good, and yeah that has got to be pretty expensive snow up there so I guess they are going to get their lift ticket price. Someone needs to give those two whiners over there a knuckle to the forehead but I have a cold beer to finish. Have a great time!

Back at my partially finished Racer Five beer, I start to drift off to the winter of ‘76/’77. It was a year very much like this one, so far. That year ended with a snow pack of 34 inches, 182 inches total snowfall! Definitely one for the record books. Heavenly’s snowmaking consisted of blowing a huge mound of hard nasty “snow” and then pushing it around where it was needed. I can so vividly remember crews shoveling snow back up onto Ridge Run from off the sides. Because of this the run was about half the width it is now. But we were up there playing on it.

It was a particularly brutal and dry year. Heavenly didn’t even open until the middle of January, they did some of what I would prefer to call, snow mining, and then had to close, I think it was in March. The toughest part about that season was that we didn’t even have mountain bikes to pick up the down times. Now that really makes it sound like it was a long time ago. But it really wasn’t, right?

The street clothes couple are gone, so is my beer. Back to the day today and just how perfect the snow they are making up there can really be. I am always amazed at how nice that new layer of snow is for the first 48 hours or so. The best is what we like to call skiing under the guns. This means the daytime temperatures are low enough that they are blowing snow while the mountain is open, it’s like skiing in a snowstorm with blue skies. Of course it sounds like you are skiing at an airport, but who cares, you’re skiing! Then past that we all know how quickly it can degrade into some pretty compacted, hard scraped off “yikes” kind of snow. But that is where the groomers come in to fluff things back up again.

When you think about this process of laying a few inches of fresh snow down, from getting the water up to the mountain, then to the individual guns (without freezing), some of the guns require compressed air, and some need electricity. As I understand it there are some that are on an automated system, they just kick on when temperature and humidity are right. Most though require the guys out there working them.

I find the whole thing to be an amazing piece of technology that I would love to learn more about, hint, hint, if any of you snowmakers are reading this. We could do another article about what really goes on up there all night long while Mother Nature is off on vacation somewhere else and the boys in black are out there doing her job for her. Don’t forget to thank them for that! And we can’t forget the project they did to open Skyline Trail. Making a huge mound of snow at the base of Sky Chair, shoveling it into buckets on the chairs, moving that all to the top where it was then pushed, what a mile or so out that trail to get it open! Just for us, awesome.

Meanwhile yes, we stare longingly into the barely snow covered forests and bowls and chutes. We check the Farmer’s Almanac, Tahoe Weather Discussion, The Storm king, latest radar images, the squirrels tails, Uncle Joe’s trick knee, anything and everything once twice daily, looking for a sign that the big blue H off the coast out there might move away and let some of those classic Sierra storms pound us some day! Please!

Enjoy Earth

GB

It was the end of January, I was in the parking lot at Heavenly’s California base taking my ski boots off when this couple in street clothes stops these two skiers who have obviously also just finished their day of skiing. “Hey we are going up tomorrow, how’s the snow up there?” Obviously a couple of whiners, they start going off. “Well they are charging full price and the place isn’t even all open and it’s just all icy, this place is such a rip off.”

Now I’m not normally one to defend a non locally owned mega giant corporation ski resort, but it is in my front yard, I do play there a lot, and I had just had a truly great day there. I had to put down my beer, throw my shoes on and run over to the street clothes couple who were just standing there looking at each other. Hi I just overheard you ask the obviously wrong wankers about their day. Yes they are charging full price, no they aren’t fully open and you have to stick to mainly to the groomed runs, but I have been up there the last two days and I don’t remember any more than a couple of scraped off patches of ice. The runs are actually really good considering there have been no storms! It almost looked like they started breathing again. “Hey thanks, we knew there wasn’t much snow here but we only get to do this once a year.” They are laying down a new layer of snow on several runs every night and if you can get to those runs it is amazingly good, and yeah that has got to be pretty expensive snow up there so I guess they are going to get their lift ticket price. Someone needs to give those two whiners over there a knuckle to the forehead but I have a cold beer to finish. Have a great time!

Back at my partially finished Racer Five beer, I start to drift off to the winter of ‘76/’77. It was a year very much like this one, so far. That year ended with a snow pack of 34 inches, 182 inches total snowfall! Definitely one for the record books. Heavenly’s snowmaking consisted of blowing a huge mound of hard nasty “snow” and then pushing it around where it was needed. I can so vividly remember crews shoveling snow back up onto Ridge Run from off the sides. Because of this the run was about half the width it is now. But we were up there playing on it.

It was a particularly brutal and dry year. Heavenly didn’t even open until the middle of January, they did some of what I would prefer to call, snow mining, and then had to close, I think it was in March. The toughest part about that season was that we didn’t even have mountain bikes to pick up the down times. Now that really makes it sound like it was a long time ago. But it really wasn’t, right?

The street clothes couple are gone, so is my beer. Back to the day today and just how perfect the snow they are making up there can really be. I am always amazed at how nice that new layer of snow is for the first 48 hours or so. The best is what we like to call skiing under the guns. This means the daytime temperatures are low enough that they are blowing snow while the mountain is open, it’s like skiing in a snowstorm with blue skies. Of course it sounds like you are skiing at an airport, but who cares, you’re skiing! Then past that we all know how quickly it can degrade into some pretty compacted, hard scraped off “yikes” kind of snow. But that is where the groomers come in to fluff things back up again.

When you think about this process of laying a few inches of fresh snow down, from getting the water up to the mountain, then to the individual guns (without freezing), some of the guns require compressed air, and some need electricity. As I understand it there are some that are on an automated system, they just kick on when temperature and humidity are right. Most though require the guys out there working them.

I find the whole thing to be an amazing piece of technology that I would love to learn more about, hint, hint, if any of you snowmakers are reading this. We could do another article about what really goes on up there all night long while Mother Nature is off on vacation somewhere else and the boys in black are out there doing her job for her. Don’t forget to thank them for that! And we can’t forget the project they did to open Skyline Trail. Making a huge mound of snow at the base of Sky Chair, shoveling it into buckets on the chairs, moving that all to the top where it was then pushed, what a mile or so out that trail to get it open! Just for us, awesome.

Meanwhile yes, we stare longingly into the barely snow covered forests and bowls and chutes. We check the Farmer’s Almanac, Tahoe Weather Discussion, The Storm king, latest radar images, the squirrels tails, Uncle Joe’s trick knee, anything and everything once twice daily, looking for a sign that the big blue H off the coast out there might move away and let some of those classic Sierra storms pound us some day! Please!

Enjoy Earth

GB

Well I fit into a couple of those categories. No impulse here, I have just spent the past three years dreaming about and looking for this bike. I work in the bike industry so I have a pretty limited budget to spend on my dream bike. I already have my two dream mountain bikes so this one is just a commuter. As far as commuter bikes go, single speeds and fixies (single speed bikes originally for indoor track racing where the rear cog doesn’t allow you to glide so the pedals are always “fixed” to the motion of the rear wheel, and usually have no brakes either) have been all the rage lately. Well my new commuter is one of those, sort of. It is also an educational commuter and a historical commuter. It also happens to be the most scary and most difficult bike I have ever learned to ride! You see this is all because my new commuter is a Penny Farthing or some would call it a high wheeler.

The high wheeler is a strange bike from right around 1870. It has a very very large front wheel and a very small rear wheel. This is why in Europe it was called a pennyfarthing; the two wheels resembled the large British penny sitting next to the small half penny.

The very first bicycle was invented in 1817. It was known as the Draisienne, named after its inventor Baron von Drais. This bicycle had two equal sized wheels, the front one steerable, but due to the lack of technology in metallurgy in those days there were no chains or gears suitable for this size machine. So the Draisienne or hobby horse as it was commonly known was simply pushed along with both feet on the ground almost like walking! It was made of all wood including the wheels and tires, it was really more of a scooter and really wasn’t very practical, but it was novel for a short while.

Then in 1865 pedals were added directly to the front wheel. Still no chain or gears, kind of like today’s little kid’s tricycles. The frames were still made of wood, but the tires started to be made of steel. These bikes were known as Velocipedes but they were affectionately called boneshakers, you can imagine the ride they gave with steel tires on dirt or cobblestone paths, ouch!

Then in 1870 the high wheeler was introduced. This was actually the first all metal bicycle and it even had solid rubber tires. But the pedals were still attached directly to the front wheel and there were still no brakes. You would buy your high wheeler according to your leg length. The longer your legs the taller your front wheel. There was an advantage to being tall because the larger the front wheel the faster you could go because the large wheel was essentially your gear. This was really the reason for the large front wheel since all previous bicycles couldn’t go faster than walking speed anyway, but the high wheelers could really get moving! But because the rider sat so high, imagine up to a 60 inch tall tire, and the fact that you sat almost right over the front axle, the high wheelers were downright dangerous to ride. If you hit a stone or a rut in the “road” it was a fast trip over the front end, usually with your legs trapped under the handlebars straight onto your head. This is actually where the term “taking a header” came from. This was not a bicycle that everyone could enjoy, yet it was the most widespread bike of that time.

This was when Columbia Bicycles built the first production bicycles in the U.S. with their high wheel model. Worldwide the only businesses capable of this type of manufacturing were small arms and sewing machine companies; they had the technology to work with lighter metal and rubber. As the manufacturing of bicycles progressed in the U.S. two new companies emerged, Ford and General Motors. They began to use bicycle technology to build the automobile. What a big mistake!

Enter my new commuter. This is a period of bicycle history that I have always been curious about. I loved the lines of the pennyfarthing and the way it changed the world of human powered travel. I have also been curious about what it must have been like to ride one of those machines. I have a new found respect for those early riders! My high wheeler is a replica built by Rideable Replicas of Alameda California. I bought it used from a gentleman who needed to fund his trip across the country on his actual antique high wheeler. He passed through here in June, some of you may have seen him. His bike had a slightly different configuration with the small wheel in the front. This was a change that came just after the original high wheelers to make them safer to ride. They became known as the “ordinary”.

So if you see me on my Pennyfarthing on my way to work, move out of the way and give me lots of room, it’s scary up there, but super fun!

Enjoy Earth

GB

Zap back in the day, the vision melts away, it goes to a slightly later period, 1866. I see the Buffalo Soldiers of the ninth and tenth cavalries. These were the black soldiers who were given some of the burliest jobs during the war. One of those jobs involved trying to find a new way for a cavalry to travel overland, well not just overland, over the Rockies, without roads or trails in many cases, and they had to do this on bikes with one gear and wooden rims and at the highest altitudes, in snow! Not only was the bike very basic and the terrain difficult and mostly untraveled, they had to carry all their own provisions and weapons. And the folks in Marin county thought they had the first mountain bikes, not by a long shot.

Oh here it goes again, zap back in the day, not quite a hundred years later, 1949, I can see a woman riding her brand new Schwinn, blue and white, balloon tires, rack on the back with a basket containing a few groceries, this is the deluxe model, you can tell because as her neighbor passes by in his Ford pickup belching out clouds of nasty smoke, he waves to her, she reaches down to the electric button on the side of the imitation gas tank and honks her horn back at him.

I own that bike today and it still has the same tires and seat and grips. The horn even works, I bet that Ford truck isn’t around to pollute anymore!

Suddenly I realize my young customer is looking at me kind of funny, oops I must have gone away for a second there. He is probably thinking, ”C’mon old man, where are you?” He points to the broken part. His bike is a cheap little bike, nothing fancy, just his bike that he loves and has taken him many places he needed to get to. And from the look of things has provided some fun times too. How great is that, something cool, fun and functional. There aren’t that many things in life that can be all those at once for a person. We are able to do a fix right away for his bike, this makes him rather happy. As he is headed out the door he says something about his dad telling him about the mountain bike he used to have back in the day. Zap. I can see three of us on our original mountain bikes riding over the Tahoe Mountain trail, clunkers they were called at the time. We had built these ourselves before production mountain bikes were around, and just a little later than the folks in Marin County. They were built on old beach cruiser frames with at the time a strange hodge podge of parts which allowed us to get to places we couldn’t before. A lot of people laughed at our weird bikes and a few people asked us to build them one. I still have one of the original clunkers from 1979. As I turned to go back inside the shop there next to the door sat my modern Santa Cruz VP Free, eight inches of travel, disc brakes, all those gears, and the ability to go up and down so well. It got me thinking about how much the mountain bikes have changed, I had a picture in my mind of those two bikes sitting side by side, then the picture expanded to include the velocipede, the buffalo soldiers bikes, the 49 schwinn with groceries, and my young customer’s bike since he was the one who sent me on this journey in the first place.

I’d better get back to work, enough daydreaming, and if you ever hear me say that phrase, you know which one, just pinch me on the arm or something, I’m pretty sure I will come right back.

One more quick note. Every year this “ride your bike to work week” comes along. I would like to propose that everybody around here rides their bike to work at least one day a week all summer long. What a nice difference that could make for our terrible summer traffic. And it could get to be a habit!

Enjoy earth

Fall is such an emotional season for anyone that likes to spend time off of their couch. For those who like summer, this is a sad time of year. Summer took forever to get here, waiting, waiting, making big plans for the summer, I’ve gotta’ do that trail and get that peak, oh and take the dog to swim up at that lake this year. There is the garden or the lawn, all the prep work to get the boat in the water, the top off the 4X4. Summer gets going and bam, it’s over!

And for those who love winter it is so emotional because the wait for snow has just gotten much shorter and not so hot! The predictions about what type of winter it will be, watching how much snow has melted out of the Cross on Mnt. Talac, watching the squirrels gathering their winter stockpile, watching the wood burners gathering their winter stockpile. Where did you get your pass? How fat are your new skis going to be? Excited anticipation!

Even if we look way back to the original “locals” here, the Washoe people. They would be like, “Oh we just finally got the teepee dialed and the fishing is so good. But I’m not ready for cold toes and I can’t wait to get over the hill and smell some sage, and see if that herd of deer has grown.” What a mixed bag of emotions!

What about the traditional side of Fall. It is the time of harvest, Halloween and Thanksgiving. These events are all about gathering. We would be gathering crops, friends and Family. And of course we would be gathering some money to send to Hallmark!

For me personally, this is the time of year to go outside and get it done in a totally different way. Try something new, look at a completely different side of the mountain. Go out and ride a trail you might normally walk. Walk a trail you might only ride. Go out on that trail by moonlight if you can catch one of the magnificent Harvest moons. In fact we just did one of those a few nights ago. Being up high or even out on the lake under a full moon is one of the most magical things ever! And yes that does include that period of the sixties which some of you may have some recollection of.

You are all dialed and in great shape from doing your “normal” thing, almost to a point of fault. It’s been done so much that you can go through the motions almost on automatic. This is a huge sign you need to do some mixup. This is when the person with the XC bike needs to go to Northstar and learn some new big bike skills. This is when the big bike downhiller needs to get on a road bike and try a lap around the lake. How about the hiker jumping on a bike and putting together what would normally be two or three hikes to make it just one wonderful day ride. I would like to see some of those fixie folks come over to the shop and try a ride on a real fixie, the Pennyfarthing! A really fun thing to try is an overnight trip in the backcountry by bike.

The other great thing about this time of year is that work starts to slow down a little. Those who were whining about it being too busy all summer will now be whining about it being too slow. This is the time to go farther. Do a road trip. I love picking up that map and ”tryin’ to get there!” Go harvest some new views somewhere.

Personally this is all just confusing to me. I love whatever season I’m in, but man that was a fun summer and there are of course a bunch of things I didn’t get done including some work on the TeePee and some big drops that we have been looking at through the binoculars. But snow season is just that much closer and I can’t wait.

The hardest part of this whole Fall season for me is that one minute of daylight we lose everyday at sunset, sorry but that is just wrong! Is that whining? I’ve got it, next full moon we will hike Freel peak naked and ride saucers down the sand chutes, that will be different! Anybody want to go?

Enjoy Earth

It must have been two autumns ago I did an article about the “Off season zombies.” This described a semi catatonic state brought on by the fact that we were in a rather prolonged period stuck between the two seasons where it became very difficult to do anything outside.

Well now we have a whole new set of zombie like faces wondering around town. I know you have seen them. Eyes kind of wide open, mouth open making sort of an ooh shape. They may be walking or driving, they may be at work or even in the parking lot of their favorite ski resort. Many are definitely spotted in their driveways; shovel in hand, that ooh look on their faces.

This zombie state has of course been brought on by the sheer volume of snow. For many of us, this is how winter should be. Snow going up past the windows, driveways just wide enough to get the cars in, no neighbor houses in view, ride anywhere on the mountain your little pounding heart desires! And of course another big red “L” off the coast on the weather map.

Many of the current crop of winter zombies are fairly new to the area, no doubt some are here for their first winter, some may even be in third fourth or fifth season. Experiencing the sheer volume of snow on the ground that we have right now will cause some people to have this reaction. I found myself making that very face as I pulled into the post office parking lot and realized the snow was piled up perhaps twelve to fifteen feet high. I have been here long enough to know, but my near zombie face was a reaction to such a beautiful thing, piles of snow that large everywhere, and it happened so quickly.

The true zombie face is more shock than elation combined with shoveling fatigue, but there can also be a large amount of “I just had the sickest powder day ever bliss/ fatigue mixed in there. The ooh face will be very noticeable. The difference will often show if you see this individual walking.

The winter zombie that you see walking along, legs moving normally but in a rather hunched over position has not been on the mountain, but has been doing large amounts of shoveling and or snow blowing. For this person there has been a large physical toll just in trying to keep up with snow removal at home. But if they haven’t been out to play in it, whether that was hucking huge cliffs or going out on snowshoes and throwing snowballs for fido, there will also be immense mental toll. When you add both of those together there is just shock at this amount of snow and the ooh face gets rather deeply set!

Then there is of course the one with the hunched over position, the ooh face and not walking very well either. This individual has been burning the candle at both ends. Shoveling or snow blowing frantically, often not quite finishing the job very well, and then running off to play in it! This will definitely take a huge physical toll. But mentally, oh yeah, mentally things are very different. This individual will often still display that winter zombie ooh face but there is a subtle difference. This ooh face is one we sometimes refer to as the blow up doll face. Behind this face there lies great physical toll, definitely to the point of discomfort. But mentally there is elation.

Besides the common element of physical abuse there is of course shock. Nobody expected this. Some had even given up any hope of a real winter this year. This shock element will cause the ooh face by itself. This though usually happens only to those who are arriving in the basin and are just driving around for the first time since this storm cycle started. This is such an innocent and non abused ooh face. From a distance this look will resemble the other types but it hasn’t reached that true winter zombie state yet.

These faces can get very serious and could cause serious long lasting damage to the smile muscles. Intervention may be the only hope for the suffering muscles in the ooh faces. This is a type of intervention though that only Mother Nature can provide. This would be in the form of a short break in the storm cycle. Some blue skies for a few days. Let them get caught up with that shovel or snowblower.

But then again, this is how winter should be right? Those ooh faces might just have to wait until May to go away. Intervention? How about some more powder turns.

Enjoy Earth

GB

“Just wait, once it starts you will never forget it!” Right, we won’t forget this winter. Oh, I know, Miracle March three hundred inches, and then Marvelous May. Yeah right. I’m not going to say it’s over or anything like that, but as I write this, it sure feels like spring out there.

We have officially just hit a point in our snowpack that puts us above the ’76-’77 snowpack, barely, yahoo. But that last storm series also sent everyone runnin’ for the hills, to get a taste of what we have all been so starved for, sweet pow. For most the result was rewarding, that probably was the best skiing/riding so far this anemic season, but with so slim a base and such bad layers in the snow, the result was not so sweet for all. Everything from damaged equipment to “broke off bodies” to the two very sad avalanche fatalities here in the Tahoe area, and all from one little storm series. And I can’t believe how many people coming into the shop have asked how could there be avalanche burials with so little snow on the ground.

There are probably a thousand answers to that question. The first one is that we were all waiting for “that” storm, so when it hit we all kind of forgot what was underneath the fresh stuff and jumped on it. The storms dumped anywhere from two to four feet of snow, so first of all, that is enough snow to create dangerous avalanche hazards. But then several other elements added together to make it especially dangerous. Very light cold snow had fallen on hard in some places icy snow. This meant there was a poor bond at the bottom of all the new snow.

The storms were also very windy throughout the entire period. This means a huge amount of snow was blown over to the leeward side of peaks and ridges creating large areas of even deeper wind loaded snow. These are dangerous zones during and sometimes long periods after a storm, and they just happen to be where we tend to want to play because the best snow is usually there! This is exactly where these two accidents occurred with the crown (the point of origination of the avalanche) in the Carson Pass incident reaching five feet in depth.

Then just to make things even more interesting we had a shallow snowpack on the ground that went through some pretty cold temperatures causing some faceting down in the snow layers. To make a long and technical story short, this means there were (are and will be) some weak layers down in the older snow caused by snow crystals that don’t bond to each other which will tend to break loose and create slides on many different aspects.

I do understand how people are surprised by the difference between last year which was of course epic and huge with no local avalanche burials and this year with so little snowpack and already tragic results! Either way it is all a part of this passion we have for snow covered mountains. It is a beautiful, spiritual, exciting and dangerous place to spend time. We do know that any moment out there could be our last, but probably won’t. But then the same thing goes every time we climb into that metal box and drive down Highway 50, which is way more frightening to me.

All of this also brings up the subject of learning as much as we can about avalanche safety and carrying the proper avy safety gear. There are three levels of avalanche courses. Level one is a great class, always given out in the field and very good for raising awareness of the dangers, helping with the decision to travel through a zone or not and how to use beacon, probe and shovel. This is a class of basic knowledge that can save lives, plus it is pretty fun!

The level two and three classes spend much more classroom time and are more concerned with snow science. These levels are of course great for anyone who spends time out there, but are really aimed at those who will be working in some capacity on the snow, guides, patrollers, even Caltrans workers who deal with avy work.

One thing these classes always stress is the human factor. We can learn all sorts of information about the science of snow and avalanche prediction, control and avoidance, but when you are standing there at the top of some sick looking chute that you have worked hours to get to, you have seen some signs that say go home now while you are safe, but the ego says, “I just need to drop this line it will be just fine! We have all done it and been lucky.” It is hard for those classes to protect us from ourselves.

Another very useful tool for us is the Sierra Avalanche Center web site, updated every day it is full of great information that can keep us out of trouble.

I do love the Sierra. I was writing this yesterday looking out the window at a beautiful bright warm spring day. I wake up this morning to finish and there is a fresh coat of snow on the ground, and it is dumping!

We have lost two more of our brothers who travel on the snow. Our hearts and condolences go out to their friends and families.

Enjoy Earth, GB

What he was seeing was the tip and tail of my skis not touching the snow the way they should on a traditional ski. And to his credit they do look like they are broken or badly bent.

It wasn’t more than 5 or 7 years ago that when someone walked into the shop with a pair of skis that holding them base to base if there was any space between the skis just down from the tip, we would have told that poor sad person their skis were bent and should probably be added to the ski fence in the backyard. There is a chance they could be bent back straight, (they even made special bending jigs for this purpose although we would just stick the tip under one of the benches and give it a good ole heave ho in the opposite direction, sometimes it worked!)

Along comes our recently departed friend Shane McConkey with his Volant Spatula. I can’t say for sure when that first happened, 7 or 8 years ago maybe, but he started something.

So what is this rocker stuff? When you look at a ski sitting on the snow, a traditional ski with no weight on it would only touch the snow at the tip and tail with a little space under the binding not touching at all. This is camber and along with side cut is what helps a ski turn more easily on packed snow. But according to Shane, when you put that ski in deep snow, it is that same camber making the ski want to nose dive because it couldn’t flatten or even reverse bend easily enough to push the tip up for more than a second or two so we have to do that porpoise thing to make them work. His idea was to build that arc into the ski.

At first this concept seemed weird, actually it still does, but now every ski company is building some sort of rockered or early tip rise ski and there are many variations. Everything from fully rockered skis that look like barrel staves almost, where there is no flat section at all, to the more common style with a flat section under foot but the tip and tail both arc up to some degree farther towards the center of the ski. This does two things. First the ski has a smooth and comfortable “float” to it no matter how deep or weird the snow is. Second the ski is already arcing for the turn and it just lets the ski do it, where ever, whenever you want. You can point the ski instantly where you need it, you can just put it sideways instantly in deep snow, they will smear and slash more like a water ski or surfboard. I have to say it feels pretty amazing.

Another variation on this theme is the early rise tip. This ski can have some amount of regular camber or it can just be flat, but the tip of the ski will sit up off the snow anywhere from 20 to 40 cm back from the tip. What this does is give you a ski with plenty of surface for powder and a tip that just wants to float, but when you are on packed snow it skis shorter and more like a regular ski. This is where most of the really rockered skis suffer, when you come out of the fluff and onto not so fluff, they can be a handful and not much fun. It is for that reason that this needs to be a second or even third ski in your quiver, they just aren’t the do everything ski, yet. There is no doubt that if this trend continues and the technology evolves and our technique continues to evolve, a ski like this could become the standard all mountain ski. Also it is working well enough that snowboards are doing the same stuff. But if you spend most of your days riding the groomers there is no reason for this broken bent weird ski for you.

I bet that guy in the lift line thought I was really into Sammy Hagar!

Enjoy Earth

NTN is something that has been talked about for a number of years now, but has just this past winter actually started to take shape. NTN is a boot and binding system. The current telemark boot has the protruding sort of squared off toe area that encompasses the three pin holes which used to engage the three pins of the binding. I say used to because you would be pretty hard pressed to find a telemark binding these days that still has the three pins. Most modern tele bindings have no pins and some sort of cable arrangement around the rear of the boot that gives the binding its ski turning power.

On the NTN boots the square toe area has been greatly reduced to resemble a randonee or AT boot toe and the pin holes are gone completely. Then they add an additional binding interface area right under the instep of the boot. This is just a small lip facing toward the rear of the boot. Everything else about the boot remains the same as any current tele boot out there. At this point only Crispi and Scarpa are going to produce boots. Black Diamond is secretly working on their own NTN boot and binding. I am skiing the Crispi boot and it is their best boot yet, new bellows and heat to fit liner, it is their lightest big boot ever.

The binding is where the real changes happen. The cable around the heel is gone. There is a toe attachment and the part that clamps under the instep of the boot. There is a ski brake, climbing bar for the heel and two levers at the toe area which serve to close/open the binding on one and lock /unlock the free pivot for climbing on the other. This is also a release binding.

I had looked at some photos of the boot and binding together earlier in the season and was very excited by the look of the setup in the pictures. But then when I first got to touch the binding I would have to say I was a little shocked. First by the weight of the system, and second by the very mechanical nature of the binding, it looked to me like a device that some bridge engineer had designed! There are many moving parts on this device and I weighed it out at ¾ of a pound heavier per single binding than a current binding like the Voile or G3 (without the free pivot ascent mode).

Next I headed for the resort for a ski test. My first run was just an intermediate cruiser on firm spring morning snow, not ideal for ski testing. Right away the system felt very different, maybe a little stiff and restrictive, (this was a brand new boot though). Again not the first impressions I had been hoping for. On the second run everything changed. I realized what the conditions were. I was on a very wide powder ski and firm snow, something you just don’t ski very comfortably on tele gear, or any ski gear for that matter, yet without even thinking about it this stuff was really skiing fast and effortlessly, hmmm! By the third run I felt like I was about to have an affair and betray my regular tele setup which I love very much!

The next morning we were out again on the NTN gear, now feeling more comfortable the pure power of this setup became very apparent. There is so much more edge power and with the binding attaching under the midsole of the boot, it really keeps the ball of the rear foot down on the ski better than our current setups. This makes it amazingly easy to pressure the rear ski during any part of the turn. This aspect of the binding means you have to ski a slightly taller stance, something that the modern boots and technique are teaching us anyway, so if you ski a much lower, rear knee to the ski, feet spread out kind of stance, it will be a big adjustment.

Day three, time to do a little tour test. We start at Carson Pass and head to Round Top. With the binding in the free pivot mode it tours like an AT binding, both in ease of stride and weight but it is still lighter than most AT bindings. We reach Round Top and take skis off to kick steps straight up the Moon Couloir. Here is another advantage of the boot toe. It kicks a much more comfortable step in firm snow than the old duckbill tele boots. Once at the top clicked into the binding and looking over the edge things get real serious. It is STEEP and NARROW and probably not the place to be getting used to a new setup, dropping! My first couple of turns were alpine turns (which this binding does very well) just to get set up in the chute. Then amazing tele turns to the bottom, “That was sick!” Skins back on and we climb to the Sisters for a Life on the Edge drop then over to Emigrant for California Chute, and finish at Kirkwood with the last chair 4 ride up and finish with Thunder Saddle, that’s what it’s about!

The next morning I had to call the rep and beg to keep this setup until the snow is gone instead of the week I was supposed to have it. About a week later it snows sixteen inches of good quality winter snow at Kirkwood. In the morning I ski the telemark setup, then at mid day swap to a ski with an AT binding. Here is just one more advantage to this NTN boot, it steps right into this binding and skis amazingly well. Just a quick note, this is a custom made carbon fiber ski called One Reality, designed and built locally by a friend of ours, Steve. I was also giving this ski a test ride, more on that in a different article.

So now I am in a situation where I don’t even want to go back to my standard setup, I need to thank Ricky Newberry, the BCA and Rotefella rep, and Arlo Bock the Crispi boot rep for letting me do the extended test program on this gear and completely changing my plans for next season! Is it here yet? Well it’s my Friday and we are going hiking to do some corn hunting.

Enjoy Earth

GB

This might have been a conversation in the winter of 1860 between two miners after one of their downhill ski races. There weren’t many skiers in the U.S. at this time, but up in the Gold country in California the miners used skis to get around in winter. Naturally it didn’t take long for them to start racing each other. This was about the time when they figured out they could get a little more speed out of their twelve foot long skis by doping them. This dope was usually some blend of vegetable or tree oils, animal fats, bees wax and even sperm, (I am thinking probably from whales since whale products were still big at the time), brewed up and applied to the wooden bases of their skis.

It didn’t take long for some of the enterprising ones to start selling their dope. Black Dope and Sierra Lightening were two blends that were available. Then they figured out that candle paraffin worked very well in colder snow. The rest is history. Waxing as we know it was born in the U.S. during this period.

It wasn’t until the early fifties that ski manufacturers started to use plastic bases, these are now all polyethylene and are of the extruded type which is cheaper and less dense or sintered which is very dense or hard. These days they also add five to ten percent carbon particles which gives less friction on cold dry snow and helps avoid dirt sticking on wet dirty snow. It was probably another ten to fifteen years after the advent of these poly or Ptex bases for waxing to become a real science, even though these materials are very high tech, they still need a lot of help to handle the full range of snow conditions effectively.

The very basic idea behind wax is this. When snow is cold and fresh, the crystals are very sharp. This is when we use a harder wax to prevent the sharp points of the crystals from sticking into the base or the wax and causing drag and removing wax too quickly. As the snow ages or warms up, whichever happens first, the crystals begin to loose their sharpness and round out. These more round crystals don’t dig in as much and tend to move more easily across a softer wax. As a ski glides on snow it actually creates friction, and therefore heat, this melts some of the snow leaving a very thin layer of water on the ski base. This wet layer causes suction between ski base and snow; this can only mean slower skis and more difficult control in turns and such. We actually rely on the texture of the base/wax to break up this suction much like the dimples on a golf ball reducing friction as it passes through air. This is why a good base texture is even more important in spring conditions when there is even more water present in the snow.

The miners usually heated their dope and brushed it on the ski base. Currently our best way to apply wax is with an iron. This melts the wax and heats the base so the wax can be absorbed into the material. The wax will soak into the ski base approximately 0.1 to 0.2 millimeters. It is this wax inside the base that really does the work. This is also the reason that rub on waxes are not really that effective, they work for a short period and then they tend to get skied off rather quickly. Even a good hot wax is only going to last two to four days or until the snow changes temperature.

Our poly bases are very porous, and it is this porosity that allows the wax in. But it also lets water in and that is not good for the longevity of your ski. This is why it is always a good idea to put a good hot wax on a new ski and a softer wax is the best for this job because it will soak in much deeper and create a better seal for the base. Soft waxes are also better to use for summer storage of your skis and boards for the same reason. The harder your wax is the more difficult it is to work into the base material so they require a little more technique and diligence to get them right.

My original intention here was to get into the right way to hot wax your skis or board but I got so excited about why it all works that I ran out of space, so that will have to come at a later date. This means I can prattle on a bit more about wax types and why they work.

You hear about fluorinated waxes a lot these days. Fluorine is used in some waxes to replace some of the normal hydrogen atoms. Fluorine is one of the most electronegative elements known, it is essentially Teflon. This makes it extremely hydrophobic or water hating, this negative charge makes it repel water and dirt making fluorinated waxes very good for spring conditions.

Another popular wax these days is graphite based. These graphite waxes tend to be very hard and work particularly well on black bases which also have a bit of an electronegative charge which they will slowly loose. Graphite based waxes will actually help recharge those type of bases, not to mention how cool it sounds when you say “Yeah I did a graphite wax today dude, hope you can keep up.”

Now if all this sounds way too chemically to you, it does to me, we have found a small company in Canada making some organic waxes. We hope to have some in the shop soon. Maybe we are back to Cedar oil and sperm, uh maybe you better break out the rubber gloves instead of the iron.

Enjoy Earth

Then the only sounds you hear are your heart pounding and the snow hissing as it passes around your knees as you float effortlessly dropping a couple thousand feet of the most pure bliss that exists on this planet! Well that rain was ugly and worrisome for a bit, but we still got our bliss anyway, right!?!

Right in the middle of one of those storm sessions during the holiday I found myself at a resort, working the singles line and then of course sitting on the chairlift next to this couple that had suddenly appeared in my bliss. How’s it going she asks me. “WONDERFUL, how else could you be on a day like this?” I answer just as her male companion and I turn to look at each other, which is when I realize he is looking at me through his clear prescription glasses with one lens fogged so badly that I couldn’t actually see that one eye. He had that shoulder slumped forward I’m freezing posture, his hair white with the snow steadily building up on the top but not on the sides because he had his HEADBAND on just right! His jacket looked fast, you know nice and tight, form fitting, the bottom of it almost met up with the top of his ‘90s stretch race pants, yeah buddy. My jaw had probably dropped at that point but you couldn’t tell because my face gaitor was pulled up nice and warm. Now keep in mind that it had been snowing some of the day before, all night pretty much, and all morning so far so this weather was no surprise!

That was when she said they were hoping to find some nice powder runs and maybe I knew where they should go. What level skiers are you I ask. Expert he says, yeah we can ski black diamond runs she adds in. Right then one of those wind gust hits us, you know the type, the snow is going horizontally, the chair gives that swing that makes you reach to pull down the safety bar, and you are so happy you don’t have one bit of skin exposed anywhere. Suddenly that gust took me far away as I watched the snowflakes race from right to left across the field of vision through my goggles, the sound of the wind somehow went silent in my head and all I could hear was, “We are experts…experts…experts…”.

Wow, what a misused word in ski world. Yes perhaps you can ski or board down some black diamond or even survive some double black diamond “expert” runs. But doesn’t it mean something completely different to be an expert? It has always seemed to me that an expert skier/boarder would also have a very good understanding of their equipment, how it works, how it differs from other stuff out there, why they are riding that gear and not something else. Some knowledge of waxing, maybe not doing it yourself but understanding the importance of it and the difference between cold and warm waxes. An expert would be a good snow hunter which means they understand a great deal about snow, what affects it in the air and once it is on the ground, which means they can go find that snow condition they desire. Some knowledge of snow safety would be important as well. An expert would have a good understanding of weather and probably keeps an eye on it way too much. There are so many more aspects and so much knowledge that should combine to make one an “expert”. Oh did I mention being able to dress for the conditions?

Suddenly the sound of the wind returns to me, I had all but forgotten where I was for a minute or two there. Oh yeah my two chair mates, he is asking if maybe they could tag along for a run. It would be really fun to turn these two on to a nice little bit of bliss somewhere. But would old fog eye be able to see where we are going? I agree to let them follow for one drop. We start off down a run, where shortly I hook a left off and into the trees, knee deep and completely untracked, oh yeah blissfulness. I glance back just quickly enough to see the two of them standing there at the edge of the run looking down where my track went, oh well, I never even got their names anyway. Go get a hat and some goggles and maybe next time! Oh yeah, an expert should know better than to ride the trees on a storm day alone, hmmm.

Well if that start of the season was too much agony, you just might get a little break for the first couple of weeks of January, but after that, let’s get going again, blissfulness.

Enjoy Earth,

Gary Bell