Skiing is not something that you can just jump into. It is the middle of January in a ski season that has been extra-ordinary right from the get-go. The Friday before the MLK weekend was sunny and with soft snow, it felt like my skiing was just beginning to kick in.
Carving turns requires a quiet body with no vibration in the feet. Skis are harmonic vibration amplifiers. If you have tension or any vibration in the body, the skis will chatter and vibrate. There is often chatter snow, frozen, refrozen man-made with swirled-in layers of wet natural snow mixed in.
Race skis do not chatter. That chuh-chuh-chatter that your skis do when turning on hard snow, that chuh-chuh-chatter to which you are accustomed? Yeah, that doesn’t happen to racers on race skis.
Race skis dig in and arc cleanly and smoothly no matter the surface. The race skis sing. No, actually the feeling is “Zing!” The skis accelerate along the edge that is connected or “hooked-up” as Dave Ski-More likes to say. If you are skiing on race skis and they chatter, the racer who passes you is not chattering. So, you adapt, and you find that now your skis are not chattering. The American Dental Association approves.
It is easier to accelerate from a higher speed than from a lower speed, it must have something to do with that formula, F=MA. The undisputed Queen of Fall Line, “MA,” is, on snow, by the way, doing great. She has recovered from a broken leg and a bout of the flu.
Flow is the physiological and psychological concept that describes good skiing. Flow applies broadly in life, as well. In a chairlift conversation, I heard skiers describe flow in cooking, painting, and a number of other pursuits that follow the winding path that is flow.
Ten thousand things apply in skiing. At 40 mph or better, many things come into play and decisions must be made in flow.
While skiing with a fast pack of Powder Pigs, I noticed that at one point that I was making use of every aspect of terrain. If a fall line fell off to the left, I dove left. If a pile of snow looked like it would offer too much resistance, I skied high and around it. If a large sheaf of wind deposited new snow presented a 20-meter turn, I obliged, high and early into the very top of it and luxuriated in the full length of the snow. How does a skier deal with all these myriad situations and decisions? There are too many decisions to make individually, so flow with the Tao and every decision follows. You are picking out differences in white, textured snow from white, differently textured ice on a pure white mountain of snow, in flat light, at 40 or more miles per hour. The Tao is the necessary determinant.
Powder skiing requires exceptional fore-aft balance and an ability to rise and fall with gently bending skis. Skiing on ice requires a total commitment to high edge angles, a quiet, non-vibrating body, and calm feet. We have had every condition in between those two this season, requiring all of these skills. Since hill time is limited (maybe not for the retired folks), how is one to obtain these skills? Obviously, you chase the good skiers.
There is a whole treatise on skiing with locals. The best way is to be out there…skiing and being. On one trip to Whistler-Blackcomb, my friend Greg Joseph and I were dragging behind the group on the first day. Maybe it was the travel, or the whisky or both, but we were late and out on the cornice line, moving slowly, 20 or more feet from the edge when a clutch of five or six 6 skiers came zinging up right to the edge. They hacked away at the fragile edge of the cornice, scoped the line, and disappeared, dropping into the untracked, steep powder below the cornice. Greg and I looked wide-eyed at each other and instantly skated up to the hacked away edge, dropped in, and ripped the untracked piste. We caught up to the poachers as they stopped on a ridge a few hundred yards later. They were laughing, excited, and happy to share some BC kindness with us. We then skied the local stashes with them for the rest of the day.
Because we are not dumb, we asked if they were skiing tomorrow? They said, “Sure, meet us at the mid-station light bar at 10 o’clock.” The next morning, we rose early and skied upper mountain trails – expert trails, bumped but buried under thigh-deep powder. We were thrilled at the skiing. At 10 a.m., we waited at the light bar. When they arrived, they asked what we had been skiing and we described the inbounds, thigh-deep trails. One of them looked at us askance and said caustically: “You skied ...bumps?” We knew right then that this was going to be a good day.
Skiing is so different from everyday life. “It is like life, with all the boring parts removed” as Steve Parrish said in his book “Home before Daylight,” about touring with the Grateful Dead.
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