OK – it’s past time to finalize a Birkie recommendation, with apologies for being a bit late. We’ve just finished the pre-race team meeting for the pursuit races here in Falun, and for those events we’ll make the final call about 45 minutes before the start of the race. We don’t have that luxury for […]

It’s a little early to be publicizing this as a real “Birkie test”, but it’s a test on the Birkie trail. So we’re going with it. Jeff Tumbleson got out on some matched skis this morning to test some paraffin and powder combinations. He focused primarily on our recommended candidates – LF Green, HF Blue, […]

We’ve put together a “do it yourself” Birkie wax package for 2015. You can buy it at our online store at http://shop.caldwellsport.com/2015-birkie-race-wax-kit/. It’s a tricky thing to do considering how notoriously unreliable the long and medium term forecasting has been this year. So we’ve made this package as flexible as we can, focusing on limiting potential […]

by Amy Caldwell I spent the morning skiing intervals on 4 different ski models in order to see how they stacked up against one another at threshold plus. I would like to say that the testing was really aimed at some higher knowledge and in the interest of our customers, but the reality is that […]

In the past month we’ve had lots of opportunity to wax classic skis in cold new snow, and we’ve seen some interesting and sometimes confusing results. Over the past two weekends with Super Tour races in Craftsbury, we’ve started making a bit of sense out of the situation. In large part this is thanks to […]

Erik Mundahl worked with Amy on ski service at US Nationals last month in Houghton Michigan. At my request he dutifully filed a full report in elegant prose, promptly on January 14th. I thought that I would create a full edited write-up with excerpts from both Erik and Amy’s reports on the week in Houghton, […]

The Craftsbury Outdoor Center is about to host a remarkable series of races over the next two weekends, including Masters Nationals, The Craftsbury Marathon, two Super Tour weekends, Dartmouth Carnival, and an Eastern Cup weekend. We’ll be floating around the place in one capacity or another for most of the racing. Aside from doing race […]

Amy and Erik Mundahl have set up shop and started testing out in Houghton for US nationals. In this first round of testing they’re just trying to get the lay of the land, and get a handle on some of the basics. There will be more testing tomorrow, and then weather turning colder for the […]

Today was the first NENSA Eastern Cup of the season, and it’s impossible to imagine a better kick-off. The crew at Rikert did a phenomenal job putting the course into shape. It’s a really challenging and fun five K loop supported by really good snowmaking capacity, and what looked like a healthy amount of shoveling. […]

You can always learn new things when you put the time and effort into ski testing and wax testing. This week in West Yellowstone was a good case in point. This week we only focused on skate skis because the races in West Yellowstone were skate races. Even given relatively similar conditions for the few […]