Selective Amnesia

I was talking to a friend of mine last night, and I realized that I had completely blocked out my other trip to Ray Benson Sno Park. I mentioned the other two in my blog below, but as I tried to remember what I had done on the weekend before that, it came flooding back to me in a rush of remembered pain and cursing.

That weekend the downhill area (known as HooDoo) was having a Try Telemark day, where you could try out gear for telemark skiing for free with a lift ticket. I went along, knowing that there were back country trails nearby (my knees don't take downhill very well).

It turns out that it had dumped about 2ft of new snow on the trials just a few days prior to that, and the Rangers were just digging out the parking lot shelter. No one had been on the trails yet.

Furthermore, I was alone, since everyone else who drove out wanted to do the downhill stuff.

I don't know if you've ever tried breaking a back country trail on skis, but I assure you it is made more difficult when you sink up to mid-calf on every step.

Normally, the snow is packed down well enough that even when breaking trail you only sink a few inches. After all, you're on skis that cover a lot of surface area. This, I found, it not the case when there is a lot of new powder.

So, I had to push my skis forward and rely on the bent tips to bring them back towards the surface. Of course, as soon as I put weight on the now emerging ski, it would sink back into the depths.

While this was rather slow going and strenuous, it was not all that bad on level ground. "Ah, but Tony", you ask, "weren't you in the woods? With hills and curves and evil nasty invisible snow worms, similar to those Kevin Bacon dodged in the sandy desert, that tried their hardest to make you fall down into the most awkward positions possible so they could come and eat your cold dead body???".

Unfortunately, yes.

Understand that this was probably my fifth trip skiing, and that the uphill parts were hard for me on a broken trail under good conditions. In these conditions, a very small incline would do its best to simulate the kind of hill that you normally drag roller-coasters up with chains.

You see, all of the traction on xc skis is in the middle. Little fish scales that let the ski slide forward, but tend to grip when moving back. If you cannot get weight on the middle, you get no traction at all and slide backwards.

Now, take an incline where you are sinking nearly up to your knees. As you put weight on the ski, where does the weight go first? The tips, which have been bent upwards as you have slid them forward. The spring of the ski then tends to lift the middle (where the traction is) off of the ground. So, as I would try to make progress up a hill, I would find myself suddenly sliding backwards.

The other techniques to get up hills are to walk with your legs wide, skis pointed outwards, or to turn completely sideways and sidestep up the hill. Unfortunately, the skis are not attached to your heels, so either of these techniques is very difficult in deep new snow, because you have to pick up the ski to move it forward. If you are side-stepping, this means the front of the ski comes up, but not the back. This, in turn, means that you are trying to drag a large, flat-faced object uphill through heavy, deep snow. This is not so bad to do for one iteration, but rapidly turns into a task with all of the charm and none of the cuteness of walking up a long flight of stairs with two four-year-old children attached to your legs.

Needless to say, there was much cursing. But the fun doesn't stop there! I haven't even mentioned falling!

Falling on cross country skis rarely hurts (I would say never, but my keyboard isn't made of a wood-like substance worthy of knocking on). The hassle is getting up. Your legs are attached to long objects, and you have to use your poles to hoist your weight around. You get the hang of it after a while, but it is very tiring.

Now, with skis sinking nearly a foot into the snow, you can imagine that the poles were sinking a lot more than usual. Probably two feet. This is not normal, and requires a lot of extra effort to lift them out as you make forward progress.

When you fall in these kinds of conditions, you start to think that hypothermia wouldn't be so bad.

Remember, you need the poles to move your weight around; however, every time I put more weight on them, they just sank deeper. Oftentimes you need to pull a pole out rapidly to balance yourself as you stand up. Not happening.

I went a total of about 1.5 miles in a little over 2 hours. I was trying to reach a snow shelter, but when I saw a big uphill section .25 miles from the shelter, I decided I'd rather ski through burning sulfurous pools in hell.

I tell you, the trip almost put me off skiing for good.

One might wonder: "and you went again the next weekend for what reason?"

Um....peer pressure?

On the plus side, I found that I was much better at it. I guess all of that struggling was good for something.