Friday Afternoon Birkie Update and Wax Recommendation


BirkieTestingI’ve been saying that I thought the course was likely to be soft and mealy, but that’s sure not what we saw today. We arrived at Birkie Ridge a little before 9:00 AM, and it was quite packy, hard snow. As we climbed up there was some finer and dryer stuff, but overall it was never at risk of breaking down over the course of the day, and for much of the day the premium in ski selection was on edging and stability as much as speed.

Our wax testing was good, and we were happy to see a wide range of conditions over the course of the day.

Paraffin testing was very similar to yesterday for us. We still like the Toko LF Moly as a base layer. We added some different base paraffins to the test today, including HF moly, and some softer stuff like Star Map 200. But the LF Moly still felt excellent. We will be putting that on race skis.

Race paraffin was won once again by the new prototype Star VF4. We’ve been running a bunch of versions of this all season and have had some really good success with it. Again today the Swix HF8 was quite good. For Vauhti paraffins I would recommend the HF Pink, which runs very similarly to the HF8.

Powder testing was interesting because it changed so dramatically when it started raining. We ran a lot of different powders, and early on the wettest products were not the best. But once it started raining that changed dramatically and the dedicated wet stuff got much better. There is no surprise there, but the forecast doesn’t include falling rain, and my confidence is much higher in the test results from the non-raining conditions we’ve seen in the past two days.

We’ve had a number of products producing really good feelings. The Vauhti mix of 125 and 330 that was good for us yesterday, was no longer doing as well today. Instead a new mix of 9.1 and C11 rose to the top for us. The C11 is an old snow powder for colder conditions, and it mixes well with the 9.1. We also had excellent results from one of our new Red Creek prototype powders, which we’ll have on ski options for our elite athletes.

We didn’t test any topcoats today or hand structures today. We’ll run those in the morning, and doctor up the race skis at the start. My strong bet is for the Red Creek Coarse structure. We DID confirm that it was making skis feel much better today in testing of single demo skis.

We will also be testing kick wax in the morning (for Izzy). Today we talked to some people who had good skis on Rode Multigrade mixed with Rossa. That’s a very solid starting point, and should provide really good skis. I recommend a base klister like Vauhti K-Base, or Start Base. If you dont’ have something like that, a Rode Special Violet is a very good bet.

OK – back to waxing!