Always Wear A Backpack!

Backpacks are extremely useful items. They aren’t always the most fashionable or excessively chic, but they are the epitome of usefulness! You can pack your weekend gear in a backpack and go on a camping trip. If you’re hiking, you can throw in your lunch and your first aid gear. Flying with your backpack is the best for getting in all your books and the little tidbits you might want on the plane. And, as discovered on another trip this weekend, backpacks are the height of safety while skiing!

Saturday, we headed out for our first day of skiing on the cross country trails at the Trapp Lodge. The weather was perfect, in so many words. It was about 44 so it was fairly warm. The snow was still on the ground in the mountains, but it was getting a little granulated from weather and use. The tracks were pretty well worn, but it was smooth sailing to start. Dawn was wonderful and a good sport and followed me off the beginners trail even though I was teaching her as we went. She’s a quick learner and adventurous so we set off up one of the blue slopes which is for experienced skiers (but wasn’t the difficult level yet). It was almost straight up. We would ski a little and then we’d have to do the V walk up a ways or stamp or feet to walk up on our skis. The whole while we were saying “what goes up must come down!”

After about 45 minutes to an hour of going up, we had to take a turn and – there we were greeted with the path that went down… STRAIGHT down. We’re talking like a almost complete angle downwards. Here’s the deal with cross country ski trails as well – they aren’t the fairly open, broad tracks that down hill ski trails are. They’re usually narrow, about 5 feet wide, and they usually wrap in and out of trees, to the point where you really can’t see where you’re going.
The technique of snowplowing is a wonderful technique overall. Put your skis in a V and dig your heels downward in the back and kind of plow down. This works wonderfully when you’ve got a nice gradual, short slope down. But, when you’ve got a slope that goes on for about a mile and you’re on icy snow and the angle is straight down – snowplowing just becomes you screaming down the hill. On top of that, Nordic skis are much harder to control than downhill skis in that regard.

Quick lesson for those who don’t know – there are two types of “cross country” skiing. There’s Nordic skiing which uses long, straight, skinny skis (which mine are excessively straight and very skinny). Nordic is the traditional skiing you see in those old movies where the Germans are skiing and yodeling through the mountains – just going in straight lines. Skate skiing uses straight, shorter skis and more of a ski boot as this is a combo of skiing and, well, skating. This is what you see on the Olympics now for the sports that are the combined shooting and skiing and for a lot of the other cross country skiing sports. You keep you ski in a V with you tips pointed out and then you “skate” from one foot to the other. Tough on your ankles if you’re not good to begin with. Oh – I can’t forget my favorite cross country skiing – skijoring…. I would LOVE to do this – if I had an obedient dog… Skjoring is you, on skis, with a tether around your waist, connected to you faithful, obedient – dog. The whole point is for Fido to pull you while you ski. One must have a focused and controlled canine to do this – unfortunately, although Calvin can be extremely focused – on squirrels does not count as a safe ski for me.

What about the backpack, you may be asking at this point. Well, here’s my story. I like being the designated backpack carrier on my cross country expeditions in hilly country because when I’m swooping down the mountain and feel like I’m about to loose control and my skis are stuck on ice and I’m ready to just wipe out, I like to turn myself and just let myself go down – on my backpack. Its kind of like I’m a big skiing turtle. I don’t suffer injury because backpack protects me! Its so clever! The only time its proven faulty was when I was skiing with friends in Idaho (see the picture at the top for my blog title) and we packed snacky things for when we went out. When we stopped halfway through the day to take a break and eat something – I opened the backpack to discover the bananas we had packed were completely mush – which wouldn’t have been a problem if they had not just squeezed themselves out of their skins and were squishy mush all over.

Anyways – I’ve determined that I need to get better at the downhill part of cross country. The little hills we have around us, like at Kettle Moraine, are pretty easy to take and I can control and know what I’m doing there. But, put me on a mountain mountain with those long Nordic skis and I’m at a loss. I will conquer it yet!

In the meantime – it always good – and safe – to travel with a backpack!