Weekend Skiers Awake!
It's a wonderful thing to watch a hibernating mountain awake. That's what happened at Canaan Valley, W. Va., last weekend when the first signifcant snowfall of the year settled over the parched slopes of the valley's four ski areas -- Canaan Valley State Park, Blackwater Falls State Park, Timberline Resort and White Grass Crosscountry Center.
It's finally time for frosty snowmen. (AP)
After the driest and warmest start to winter in memory, the ski-dependent econonmy has been gasping for relief, so the local mood was giddy as 10 inches of the Missing Ingredient fell over the weekend. "We've been like a bunch of liittle kids all day," is how the guy renting sleds at Blackwater Falls described the sudden transformation from brown mountain to white wonderland. (Of the four Washginton-based cars in the group I arrived with, three had to make emergency snow-chain purchases, so great was our suprise at the winter storm and so tricky was the driveway up to our rental house.)
Suddenly, all 50 kilometers of White Grass's cross-country trails are open, and more snow is expected through the week. (See the White Grass website for the most frank and entertaining take on ski conditions, forcasts and the overall wacky zeitgeist of Canaan Valley).
For the groundskeepers at Timberline Resort, even better than the snow was the arrival of consistant freezing temperatures. That allows them to run the snowmaking machines around the clock, building up their anemic base on more runs and giving hope for the rest of the season. They were pumping manmade snow all weekend, much to the annoyance of the skiiers. Each blasting nozzle created a stinging, goggle-frosting coating cloud to pass through. "If it's below freezing, they're going to be running them," warned a woman in the buisness office when I called to see if we might get a reprieve from the winter warfare. "They've been waiting too long for this."
By Steve Hendrix |
January 24, 2007; 10:04 AM ET
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Posted by: Beginner | January 24, 2007 1:04 PM
You can learn enough to have fun (albeit in a tiring fashion) in an hour or so. It's really just a modified kind of walking: shift your weight to your forward foot and slide on it; shift your weight to your other foot and repeat. The difficulty for an experienced down hill skier is learning to balance on one ski at a time; downhill skiers of course are used to using both skis at the same time, and it feels awkward for someone used to doing that to commit all his/her weight to one foot.
Notwithstanding that you can learn enough to have fun in an hour, it has been said that it takes a lifetime to become really good at nordic skiing, in the sense of being efficient and fast. Really good skiiers can go faster than twenty miles an hour. I find that, unlike downhill skiing, there is less of a "plateau" effect: you keep getting better the more you do it rather than reaching a certain level of achievement and staying there.
Posted by: intermediate skiier | January 24, 2007 2:22 PM
Good work, Steve! Anemic base best describes a snowless winter. I still think about the tents of gumdrops scattered across the tundra. Keep the stories coming!
Posted by: Kathryn Hannay | January 27, 2007 10:32 PM
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Posted by: hscnolamf gmbytiruv | February 15, 2007 2:42 PM
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How hard is cross-country skiing for someone who doesn't know how to downhill ski, but is generally in good shape? Is it something a beginner can enjoy, or does it take a lot of time to learn?