Skiing in Sping conditions is a challenge because of the heavy effect of wetter snow on your skis. Keeping your balance can be tough when it feels like the mountain is pulling at your edges; you’re likely to fall backward and your stance will naturally splay outward. You’re in the “back seat” and have lost all athleticism; how can you keep from getting in this situation? While skiing in spring conditions, keep your balance by focusing on using a narrow stance.
Archive for the ‘Spring Corn’ Category
Sunscreen protection is a must for those spring skiing days when the sun is high and bright. After a full winter of limited exposure, the strong spring sun can really do a number on your pale skin if you don’t take some precautions. Sunscreen is the #1 preventative and a personal favorite for sunscreen protection are products from the Bullfrog brand. Read the rest of this entry »
Skiing moguls in spring conditions is one of skiing’s great pleasures. The more forgiving snow, the warmer temps, and the softer feel underfoot combine to let skiing moguls be more successful and fun!
The heaviness of the wetter snow can be a challenge in the narrower confines of a mogul field, however. You can adjust your skiing to match soft mogul terrain by changing your line to avoid the troughs and stay higher on the moguls. You can maintain balance better by focusing on where your feet would go if you were running down the hill.
Spring skiing is surely the Prime Time of the winter season. The weather’s warmer, the sun’s higher, the snow is softer, and you’ve been making turns all season so you’re probably feeling pretty comfortable on the slopes. By March, you should be set up for some amazing days of skiing and riding, provided you take care of an unintended consequence of those factors on your gear. Due to the warmer temperatures, your boots won’t have the same fit as they did earlier in the season. Materials such as plastic, foam, and suede all behave differently under various temperatures and you need to adjust your boot settings to compensate.
When the warmer temperatures bring warmer (and heavier) snow, snowboarding can get challenging. Sure, the softer snow feels great under foot and it doesn’t take much to get the board gripping the surface. The heaviness of the snow, however, can put you in a situation where the board seems to have a mind of its own. A snowboard seems very long when you’re trying to turn it against a whole mountain’s-worth weight of snow.
A natural reaction to this condition would be to steer your board more with the rear foot to compensate, but a little high school physics can teach us otherwise. If to every action there’s an opposite reaction, then the more you try to push the board around, the more the snow will be grabbing back at you. There’s a solution; resist the urge to over-steer your snowboard in heavier snow conditions by keeping the rear foot light and directing your balance along the path of the turn.
In the wetter snow of spring skiing, it takes a different set of skills to make an efficient skiing turn. As the snow gets softer, focus on putting nearly the same amount of weight on both feet. Yes, there still has to be a dominance of balance on the outside leg, but the heavier snow dictates that both skis need to work together and that takes modifying your movements to stay balanced and efficient. The focus is to ski with two feet!
My favorite piece of clothing for spring skiing in sunny weather is a fleece vest, for a bunch of reasons. It keeps your torso warm while giving your limbs freedom of movement. It’s not too warm on the chairlift ride up and keeps you warm on the way down. It gives you pockets for storing lip balm, keys, and the season pass. It has a collar to keep the sun off your neck. It’ll make you look like a skier and rider, on and off the slopes. And there’s lots of choices for how much you want to spend on one.
We can take a tip from the Aussies for sun protection in spring skiing conditions. Living on the hottest, driest, and flatest continent on earth, Australians are far more aware of the dangers being in the sun than most Americans. Teaching skiing Downunder was unique in many ways, perhaps most notably that you’re a lot closer to the sun in the Southern Hemisphere than when you’re in North America. The Aussies’ national motto for having fun outside is “Slip, Slap, and Slop!” and it’s a good mantra for spring-time skiing and riding as well.
Well, you’ll never see this event on a ski area website, but we’ve gotten some winter rain recently here in New England. It’s a bit early in the season to be adapting to wet snow conditions, but the skiing conditions can be very good when it’s raining. When the snow surface is wet and loose while the base is firm below, you need to change your skiing skills to match the conditions. For corn snow, a primary adaption is to use lower edge angles in your turns.