stalheim's demise
yesterday i went cross-country skiing at winter park with mom and dad and tried out my new backcountry skis that i got for christmas. i already have skate skis, but they are fairly useless out west where the cross-country trails are not groomed regularly if at all. for skating you need more than two little grooves, you need a 5-8 foot path of flattened snow, or it's not fun at all. and out west with the volume of snow they get it would be impractical to try and keep such a trail groomed, especially when 99% of the skiers are only into downhill skiing anyway.
i like cross-country because it's great excersize and it's a silent sport that gets you out into the woods without motors. no motorized ski-lift, no pricey lift ticket, and no clear cutting a large swath of a mountain for recreational purposes. and if you are really good, like the norwegians i know, you can ski up a mountain on your cross-country skiis and telemark turn down.
it was a beautiful day for skiing at winter park, with the sun shining on the light dusting of snow that had just fallen in the morning. lots of kids were out training with their high school teams and playing around and doing ski jumps on their skinny skis. and the trails were nicely groomed. but it was ridiculously icy, with the melting that went on the day before, and winter park has a lot of super steep downhills that curve at the bottom. i took a hard wipeout on the hard packed snow at the bottow of one of them, so my head was spinning for awhile and i've got a nice bruise developing on my right shoulder.
when i met up with dad at the end of the day he said he had wiped out, too, and then we figured out that it had been the exact same spot, which i am now going to call stalheim's demise. this was pretty funny, because at winter park there are dozens of different trails and different steep hills that one could fall on, and because the hill where we both took a digger was in a place where you had an option to go left or right. we both chose to go right to avoid the hill, not realizing that the right path actually took you down a much steeper hill than the left path.
as a result, dad has a slightly sprained upper ankle (which didn't stop him from skiing several more hours) and also a nice bruise developing there to match my shoulder. mom was the only one smart enough to avoid the steep hills all together in the icy conditions. she stayed on the gently rolling trails and didn't fall at all.
i like cross-country because it's great excersize and it's a silent sport that gets you out into the woods without motors. no motorized ski-lift, no pricey lift ticket, and no clear cutting a large swath of a mountain for recreational purposes. and if you are really good, like the norwegians i know, you can ski up a mountain on your cross-country skiis and telemark turn down.
it was a beautiful day for skiing at winter park, with the sun shining on the light dusting of snow that had just fallen in the morning. lots of kids were out training with their high school teams and playing around and doing ski jumps on their skinny skis. and the trails were nicely groomed. but it was ridiculously icy, with the melting that went on the day before, and winter park has a lot of super steep downhills that curve at the bottom. i took a hard wipeout on the hard packed snow at the bottow of one of them, so my head was spinning for awhile and i've got a nice bruise developing on my right shoulder.
when i met up with dad at the end of the day he said he had wiped out, too, and then we figured out that it had been the exact same spot, which i am now going to call stalheim's demise. this was pretty funny, because at winter park there are dozens of different trails and different steep hills that one could fall on, and because the hill where we both took a digger was in a place where you had an option to go left or right. we both chose to go right to avoid the hill, not realizing that the right path actually took you down a much steeper hill than the left path.
as a result, dad has a slightly sprained upper ankle (which didn't stop him from skiing several more hours) and also a nice bruise developing there to match my shoulder. mom was the only one smart enough to avoid the steep hills all together in the icy conditions. she stayed on the gently rolling trails and didn't fall at all.