The transition from Winter to Spring appears to take as long as you want it to around here. I’ve been on a few great mountain bike rides already this Spring -the trails in Squamish are dry and in great shape, and the temps have been comfortable. But there is plenty of skiing still to be had as well. The Callaghan Valley still has 154cm of snow on the ground and the crew up there is keeping things in great shape. This week the US Biathlon Team and the Norwegian XC Team are in town skiing at the venue. Coming up we’ve got USST and Canadian XC teams. The report is that they’ll continue to groom through May 25th. [Read more →]

Grind volume has tapered off since a very busy holiday rush in preparation for US Nationals and Canadian trials. I’ll be running structures as necessary, and mostly focusing on test skis and on-snow testing through the 16th. On the 17th I’ll head to Canmore for the World Cups, returning the 27th. Larry Poromaa (USST head technician) will be coming back to Squamish with me on te 27th. We’ll spend a couple of days checking out the Callaghan Valley venue and working on test grinds.

I’ve put my home address on the left sidebar. That’s the best thing to use for shipping.

Got that? I’m gone January 17-27. I’ll be cranking back up for normal work around Feb 1.

Click on the pictures for enlargement. These were taken today by Amy and Jesse Heckrodt.

Today and yesterday it didn’t really snow at the Callaghan - at least not much. Pretty much every day in memory before that it has snowed - much. A couple of days ago I went up with Amy and we got on the snow a little after 10 AM. They had finished grooming at about 8 AM, and you could have fooled me. We were skating through snow above our boots. They fired the groomers up again before noon, and by giving the snow-cats a ten minute head start and then chasing them we got some good skiing in. [Read more →]

The Callaghan Valley Olympic venue opened to the public today for the first time, hosting a BC Coast Cup competition. The photo is of Jesse Heckrodt (CVTC) en-route to what appeared to be an easy win. It was my second day of skiing up in the valley, and the first at the Olympic Venue. While snow has been plentiful up there, construction is ongoing, and the contractors were still working on the courses until December 1st. One of the last things they did was to plow the snow off much of the trail system in order to put out lights. Then, once the snow had started piling back up, there was a huge rain storm and apparently the contractors decided that nobody would be out grooming or skiing in that, so they drove lots of heavy equipment around on the trails, bringing up all kinds of gravel into the snowpack. [Read more →]

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!

The Canmore trip was good - I learned a great deal - and now I’m back for some shop work. I picked up a bunch of skis in Canmore, and have some here waiting for me. I’m about to head to the shop to get things resettled after the recent construction which should have been completed in my absence. This grinder will be back in action this week.

This is my first-ever trip to Canmore, but after the trip to Europe it felt like coming home. When we woke up this morning it was -29C. Canmore got almost a foot of snow a couple of days ago, but it was pretty well mixed with the manmade base by this morning. And it was dry - Canadian Rockies dry. None of this crazy wet-grinds-running-well-in-the-cold-crap. When I tested grinds mid-afternoon ZR1 and C40 were both running well. C44 was a bit off the mark, and Z40 was a little further back. And TF02 was bad - quite bad. Actually, it ran OK on a flat ski, but as soon as the ski rolled onto an edge it stopped short. Tomorrow is a skate sprint. It’s quite cold again tonight. Based on the way things looked today it wouldn’t surprise me to be on something hard and unfluorinated for qualifying in the morning. But we’ve got some good top-coats in the mix and we’ll see what happens for the heats in the afternoon…

Well, I just couldn’t sit still. My shop is still a construction zone, and the snow up at the Callaghan took a beating in recent rain storms. So Gunnar and I will catch a flight to Calgary this afternoon to meet Amy and the CVTC crew for this weekend’s Nor Am competitions in Canmore. I’ll be working with the USST service staff again in Canmore in January, and I’ve never even been there. So I’m calling this a work trip - scouting the venue, if you will. Heck - I needed some excuse. Actually, it was just going to too tough sitting still this weekend with racing going on all over the place. And the paper work just wasn’t calling to me loudly enough to keep me here.

Gunnar and I will drive back with Amy on Monday. Back at work Tuesday. On the phone and e-mail though the weekend.

The World Cup trip wrapped up very well from my point of view. Last weekend was a good one for the USST. Newell’s fourth place in the sprint and Kris’s 5th in the 15K classic were great to see. I’ve been frustrated often enough just hearing the reports back here on how things are going. Kris has always been able to tell me what he’s skiing on, and sometimes he’s even been able to mention some waxes that were in play. But often I’ve just been confused and out of the loop. Confused because the limited information that I’ve got doesn’t make sense, and out of the loop because I’m here, not there. This trip tied a lot of stuff together for me, and also provided a really good framework for working with the USST World Cup service staff. [Read more →]

I returned from Finland yesterday, and am back in BC. For the next week I’ll be getting caught up on desk work and phone calls, and hopefully getting on snow. My shop is getting finished up - new sheetrock on the ceiling, lights, a bathroom, etc. They did most of the work while I was gone, but have a little finishing up to do. I’ll be grinding skis again next week.

The learning curve is steep over here, and I’m starting to expect to be surprised. [Read more →]