Snow Skills

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.

In tree skiing, try applying your edging in a pulse fashion whereby you build your edge angles up quickly and then release and change them in the same way. Strive for light, controlled movements of the knees and ankles to apply only as much edging as you need while you steer your skis with both feet into the turn. Start releasing the edges the moment once your edges reach their highest angle; your goal is to set just enough grip to allow you to redirect toward an open area. If you set your edges such that you hang onto a turn past more than one tree, you’ll probably run out of room. Use your pole swings to help time your turns in such a way that both your hands and your legs are continually moving.

Glade terrain is the ultimate ‘carpe diem’ of skiing; get into a turn, get out of it, and get on with your run by starting another one.

Poles can be thought of as whiskers in a dark room. That dark room obviously being trees. If you keep your poles moving it gives you a better sense of whats going on around in a two fold manner. One, it does not allow your body to fall behind your feet and helps keep you balanced and, two, it gives you more options in terms of how many directions you can move. Much like a short radius turn on a groomed run, the ability to seperate upper body from lower body with good pole plants allows you to steer your feet much quicker giving you more options.