Inspiredcapers wrote: ↑Mon Mar 20, 2023 11:16 am
My Xplore and NNN-BC boots are both Fischer Transnordics. It’s the most comfortable boot I’ve ever worn (wider volume foot). I’ve been intending on skiing Gamme with NNN-BC one foot and Xplore the other but haven’t had the opportunity to do so yet.
Would be great to hear about that experiment!
Inspiredcapers wrote: ↑Mon Mar 20, 2023 11:16 am
This thread has me contemplating buying a lift pass next season to focus on Tele. The jaunts I take now don’t allow for extended practice…I think my current abilities would be better expressed as Telefake vs. Telemark.
In sea kayaking, I have practiced Greenland rolls even at a swimming hall. So, why not learn XCD at a resort
Last two weeks, I had the opportunity to ski Gammes in their natural habitat, the fjells. My XCD was mainly on BC fjell slopes, but on four days, I also skied a groomed (blue) piste down. In the photo below, there are tracks from three ski days, twelve laps down.
On the slope, a wind packed layer in the middle of powder created a challenge. In such open landscape, it is difficult to find spots that would not have been touched by wind.
Sami languages have a few different words for crust. (Sami are the aboriginal people of the fjell ranges.) Many Sami crust words are characterized by what animal the type of crust can carry: a capercaillie, a reindeer, "steel crust"... The windpacked snow was hardish capercaillie crust, maybe
Best way to ski the snowpack was long, carved turns. When skidding, you would occasionally break through the wind packed layer, and end up on your butt. The carved turns meant higher speeds than normally, up to 35 km / h.
When skiing down a resort piste at another fjell in the same range, there was some loose powder on top of consolidated. It was quite a different game to ski the natural slope and the resort piste. On the resort snow, you could skid, side slip and lean in turns.
Before my last ski day on the above BC slope, moderate winds had created another windpacked layer, and shallow new powder was fallen on top of it. Then the slope had become a lot easier to ski. The structure had become stiffer, and it carried a skier consistently.
Yet the biggest challenge here was a total lack of contrasts, when there was even light snowfall. One day forecast showed cloudy, but it was light snowfall up there.
In the snowcloud, I fell a couple of times on my butt already at the flat top of the fjell, before starting to go down. I needed to look at my skis to estimate, whether I was sliding forwards, backwards or standing still (I was standing still).
A fjell landscape is open tundra without trees. That view gives your brain no clues of depth, when visibility is low, which makes you lose your sense of balance. When there were even a few trees, skiing became easier.
One day I met fresh wolverine tracks, with nail scratches in snow (photo above). The small valley had been in the lee of a fjell, which means snow deposition zone. I was there two days after a ten inches snowfall. I could hear whooshes and cracks, when skiing, and then see waves in snow, going away from me. I was happy to know that my 200 cm Gammes keep my away from any avalanche gradients.
On windward slopes, wind and snowfall had created beautiful shapes, sastrugis, in the snow. Yet the sastrugis are not be so nice for XCD.
In the meanwhile, another side of the fjell had nice and mostly soft snow. In the photo above, there are 10 inches of dry powder on top of consolidated snow. There were some hardened spots already, but it was easy and beautiful to navigate your way down around the hardened spots. Here you could also lean in turns. No crust on the soft spots.
EDIT: A few notes on gear. I used 45 mm mohair x-skins for skinning this time. They gave a good balance between XC speed and climbing help, when I had quite long approaches of ~5 km in hilly landscape. For any longer and flatter approaches, I took off the skins and used Swix V30 blue wax.
With the 45 mm mohairs, I needed to herringbone at steepest slopes. Without many km's of approaches, nylon 45 mm's might be good, when climbing ~100 m altitude meters or more at a time.
My new, snug fit Alfa Guard Advances and red flexors worked alright both on flats and in the turns. For the first time, I got chafes at shins during the journey
from pressing shins to boots.
