LilCliffy's Nordic Backcountry Touring Waxing

[Nick BC]

Thanks for that Gareth, I wondered if you would chime in. The whole kerfuffle is somewhat similar to the brouhaha with Grim Surfer over the source of power to the ski tip. I’m content to grab my beer and bowl of peanuts and sit on the sidelines and watch. What else can I do until ski season starts

[lilcliffy]

You're welcome Nick-
great to hear from you!

The sun is getting lower and lower in the sky here-
and the nights are turiung very cool- with heavy dew at dawn-
it is coming!
I am already prepping for winter.
Best,
Gareth

[wabene]

[Manney]

It’s not just a nordic course thing, @wabene. Lots of ways to get grip and preserve glide in a BC setup…

1. There’s a low cambered ski… or a softly cambered ski (a double cambered, stiffly sprung ski isn’t going to work well in the backcountry anyway). Rossi BC 80 and up are pretty soft… bit soft for my liking but we all have different tastes. The goal isn’t to be married to a brand… buy the one that works.

2. There are skins. Short skins, long skins… waxed or unwaxed. Like on my Combat NATOs.

3. There’s extending the grip wax zone (for which there are no religious edicts).

4. There’s adding a few inches of grip wax just ahead of the patterned grip zone. Don’t do this myself, but hey…

5. There’s dropping down a size in skis (or not sizing up, as some people fashionably do these days). We all make our own choices in life… so try not to make two mistakes in a row with skis that are too long for weight.

Remember… when we look at a patterned grip zone on a BC ski, is the automatic assumption of the manufacturer likely to be grip wax on gliding surfaces? Unlikely, otherwise, they would have patterned the entire ski.

As for the effect on glide on the way down, glide wax is much different than any, any grip wax. Huge. This is why you almost never hear of grip wax being used for the entire length of an AT ski. It’s never, ever used by any sane person on an alpine ski.

Somehow this grip wax along the entire length of the ski got into ppl’s heads. The edge cases, which may have gone completely unexplained, got left at the wayside…. Leaving ppl with the impression that this was a normal practice. For ski manufacturers (whose employees ski… a lot btw), this is not something done as a matter of routine. For most, the issue is ski tuning… in which grip and glide zones, grip annd glide wax use, are very carefully balanced.

Besides, Swix Polar along the entire length of the ski isn’t going to grip as well as a properly selected grip wax on the middle half of the ski at 25F. It’s too damned hard. A wax that grips twice as hard only needs to be used on half the ski for it to have the same total grip. And if the “half ski” is around the pocket, you can turn that on or off any time you want with weighting. Basic ski control.

Waxing for the BC has never been a binary, one size fits all, thing. ~”Just use Polar tip to tail” is a binary, one size decision. Until the use case is tightly defined and exactly matches that of somebody else’s locale, it’s just an internet story. Not even useful advice. Personal pref maybe. Who knows?

[Telerock]

Quoting Manney “ double cambered, stiffly sprung ski isn’t going to work well in the backcountry anyway”
I cannot disagree more. The wax pocket formed by a double camber ski for back country, fresh virgin powder is specifically designed to allow the wax to stick as you step on that ski onthe way up hill, and glide when you equally balance skis on the downhill.
Manney also seems to have missed the idea of ironing polar the length of the ski, which is used as a base wax, with appropriate green, blue etc. wax under foot depending on conditions.
PS: most waxes now available have the “forever chemicals” which may be banned in the near future. Stock up.

[Manney]

You know you can buy base binder, right?

You know that the only waxes that contain C8 are marked accordingly, right?

You know that some countries discourage c8 wax use because it is terrible for ppl and the environment, right? Even parks services discourage their use.

You know that floro levels in blood are the highest in skiers who use such waxes, right? And that ironing in these waxes vaporizes C8, making it even easier to get into the bloodstream, right?

You do know that high PFOS and PFAS levels cause all kinds of nasty things like cancer, heart disease, and kidney damage, right?

Just like you should have already figured out that a stiff cambered works best on the flats and groomed surfaces. Doesn’t mean you can’t use them in the BC, just introduces challenges that need to be addressed in other ways. Like using more and more grip wax… the cost of which is glide.

If the ski is generously and stiffly cambered, it won’t make contact when equally weighted, will it? So you’re losing edge potential on the downhill. This is why alpine skis usually don’t have a great deal of camber… barely any compared to XC, BC and AT skis. Some even advertise negative camber.

Agreeing, disagreeing… doesn’t matter. What ppl think doesn’t change reality, just their interpretation of it.

[greatgt]

Listen and listen well. Double cambered skis have a WAX pocket. Use it! Rest of the ski is for speed so you CAN turn it. Speed is essential for the skis to come around. Polar wax on the entire ski is for beginners. Slow skis make it easier to control. Fast skis make for high level fun and turnability. Also, on long skinnies you go entirely across the fall line in any decent amount of powder, it will slow you down too much to make the TURN. TM

[Manney]

^^ Good post.

[MonomarkMark]

Listen and listen well. Double cambered skis have a WAX pocket. Use it! Rest of the ski is for speed so you CAN turn it. Speed is essential for the skis to come around. Polar wax on the entire ski is for beginners. Slow skis make it easier to control. Fast skis make for high level fun and turnability. Also, on long skinnies you go entirely across the fall line in any decent amount of powder, it will slow you down too much to make the TURN. TM

My experience is that slow, resistant skis are not easier to control at all, not in the context of smooth turns on the down. On the contrary, the faster ski, which has less tendency to sink into the abyss or be gripped with a lot of resistance (especially in deeper wetter or manky snow) skims the surface with speed and stays up more and therefore turns with significantly less effort than the grabby and slow but "more controlled" ski. In the context of Telemark or alpine ski turns, "slow" and "controlled" are certainly not equivalent. If you cannot harness the speed and float of a ski, you simply are a weak skier. But then you do say that "fast skis" are more easily turned, so it's really not clear what you really are asserting, however you cannot have it both ways.
Also, turning, in the usual sense of alpine skiing, (ideally) requires crossing the fall line and making smooth S-shaped tracks per/turn. You seem to be describing pivots as opposed to linked turns when you say that "skinnies" must not "entirely" cross the fall line. If a ski is not capable (assuming at least a stable intermediate rider) of crossing the fall line fully, it simply is incapable of arcing out smooth S-shaped and linked turns.
Mind you, I leave my skate skis and traditional XC skis in the garage where they are safe, happy and belong when I go out for REAL Telemark or xcD adventures.

[MonomarkMark]

I wrote a short response and posted it here.. I got the message that a mod would have to ok my reply? I have never seen that before. That's going to totally mess with the flow, i would think.