Moguls! It’s the Catch 22 terrain; it takes learning to gain experience and it takes experience to learn. Let’s start a conversation about skiing and riding moguls by first identifying the parts of the mogul as follows:
Archive for the ‘Terrain’ Category
You can’t shake your tracks; they’re going to follow you everywhere you go in the snow. They can tell you a lot about your turns if you let them: find a stretch of relatively untracked snow and make a series of turns. How do they look? Is each turn a steady C-shape like a half a ball (that’s good) or do you see a J-shape like a fish hook?
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Cheers and hello to fellow Sugarloafers Jano and Crusher who are vacationing out in British Columbia. These two hard-corps free-heelers are driving cross-country in their camper for an extended vacation now that the snow’s leaving us here in the Northeast. Here’s a telemark tip for all of us, with them in mind: Read the rest of this entry »
It’s the chicken or the egg question of skiing: do the hands time your turns or do your turns time the hands? In terrain and conditions such as moguls, steeps, trees, powder, and Spring snow, it really doesn’t matter which answer is right. Either way, a series of relatively short linked turns are best made by keeping the hands and legs working in concert. Key to those movements is the commitment to the turn that a good pole swing adds to your skiing.
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.
Many skiers and snowboarders hear instructors or fellow sliders talk about the fall line. Normally it comes up in conversations about what path to follow or where to start or stop a turn… if it is “in” or “out” of the fall line.
So what is the fall line? The fall line is a specific path down a slope where gravity will have the strongest impact. Does that help? We didn’t think so.
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Skiing and riding in the trees relies on both physical and mental aspects to successfully make it through a run. While the physcial aspects are most important, you can help set yourself up for success by developing mental concepts that support those moves. Since avoiding the trees is the goal, you can be more successful at that goal if you let yourself think different about what composes a turn in the trees. Instead of thinking of turning around them, you can create more room for yourself in the trees by thinking about skiing at an angle past them.
Moguls are a terrain feature that few folks can just conquer with little effort. It takes skill, mental toughness, athleticism, and experience to ski moguls with confidence. Great mogul skiing is built, not found, and there are some very effective exercises you can use to practice for moguls on groomed snow. One of those exercises focuses on making short turns that rely on quick and precise edging to get you in and out of a turn promptly: Hockey Stops.
Tree skiing and riding is surely for the adventurous; there’s a new set of rules when you choose to abandon open groomed trails for the limited space and variable conditions of a glade. You’re going to have several things to worry about in a short amount of time and you’re going to want to put as many factors in your favor as possible. Under these conditions, you can prepare and plan a number of small details that can add up to make your tree skiing and riding more successful and safer.
There’s no better terrain at a ski area to convince you to live in the moment than tree skiing. It’s an awesome parallel between moving along through the trees and moving along in your life. In both, you’re going to pass by many distinct points, which come with little prior notice and are gone in a blink of an eye. There’s no time to hold on to anything in the glades; you’ll need to create turns promptly and release them quickly.