The Canmore trip wrapped up well. We made decent skis for Saturday’s sprints, and I think good skis for Sunday’s classic race. Saturday stayed incredibly cold and dry but there were some advantages to be had from pure fluoro topcoats. Vauhti, Solda and Swix (to my knowledge) were all represented on visibly fast skis. On the whole I would say that skis themselves were the biggest factor. Grind and wax were less important. The best pair for us was a C40 grind, but Dan Roycroft had a C40 and a ZR1 on two pairs of my test skis (which are pretty well matched) and chose the ZR1.

On Sunday it was a bit warmer - about -12 C when I arrived as opposed to -26C the day before. But we still had really cold underlayers running best. Amy tested the parrafin that I had put on race skis the night before (BD4/LF3) compared to something a bit warmer (LF6) just to cover my butt on the warm temps, and found that the colder combo remained the best. We didn’t go much further than that, aside from confirming that FC1 improved everything and was the best of the cold fluoro blocks at hand. From there it was all about picking kick waxes and refining individual wax jobs.

On Friday it seemed that high camber, relatively stiff classic skis were feeling best. On Saturday I went out skiing with Jesse Heckrodt between spring qualifying and heats, and lower skis were both faster and better kick. Sunday Amy was back to picking higher camber skis, and in spite of the cold conditions we found ourselves marching up the wax hardness scale in short order. Based on the previous couple of days I fully expected one of the Ski*Go racing special hardwaxes that had been testing well. I have a huge amount of faith in those waxes, but both the -1 - -20 and the -2 - -15 were a bit slick. From there we made a jump up into the super blue / extra blue range, and had better luck with no real liability on kick wax. Rode multigrade blue offered no speed boost, and in fact seemed to drag a little more than the super blue. Amy asked for a VR45 ski based on what she was seeing, and sure enough that seemed to do the trick. But things were still moving, and by the time the race started the girls were on VR50. For the guys it had progressed to VR55. Both of these were a good deal warmer than I would have guessed at the start of the day, but the skis were quite good.

The most gratifying part of the day for me was that the couple of pairs of skis I had identified as good “Canmore” classic skis turned out to be quite good skis in Canmore. The venue held true to its reputation, and my ski assessment and grind choice (C40Z) appeared to be at least ballpark. I’ve had plenty of descriptions of Canmore conditions over time, but hadn’t actually been there, so it was good to have that confirmed.

The racing itself was quite good - I’m impressed with the strength of the Canadian men’s field, which is saying something coming from two weekends of World Cup racing. Ivan Babikov was quite impressive, but equally impressive was the depth of the field behind him. The CVTC kids had a better weekend than they did in Silver Star. Emily Nishikawa was the top Junior on Sunday which was exciting for everybody. Hannah Perry looked better this weekend than last, and had some really good moments in the sprint. Jesse has been sick, and is having a hard time shaking it, and Bryn has a screwed-up shoulder at the moment and decided not to race with just one pole. My buddy Chris wasn’t at his best this weekend by a long-shot, but I got this pretty good picture of him, and he’ll rally to do the picture justice soon enough!