UAA Nordic Ski Team: Stating the Obvious

Nome, Alaska

Several years ago, during a work trip in Nome, on the northwest coast of Alaska, I saw a road sign that said "SLIPPERY WHEN ICY". I had never seen a road sign that said that before, and it seemed like such self-evident statement that I felt obliged to take a picture of it. I mean, if it's icy, then wouldn't everyone in Nome assume that it would also be slippery? It's icy a lot in Nome, which is located just south of the Arctic Circle, so people there are presumably familiar with the ice:slipperiness relationship.

My little home this week

Here at US Nationals in Vermont, I've been kept locked inside a little trailer beside the ski trails all week. You'd think it would be full of shovels and rakes, but in fact it's full of TV monitors. And I sit in there all day and talk about ski racing while everyone else gets to roam around free.

Inside my little silver box

Yesterday, though, Yuriy gave me some time off, so I drove north to visit my sister and her family who took me out for a little alpine skiing at the local hill. I consider myself a pretty decent alpine skier. But I haven't done much East Coast skiing since the 1980's when I was racing in high school on various sheets of ice around the northeast. Since moving out west, I guess I've gotten soft because I felt completely inadequate and humbled by what I faced at Jay Peak Saturday afternoon.

Aren't signs like these redundant in the northeast?

When we got off the lift at the top of the hill, we saw the warning signs above. I've skied on icy snow plenty of times so it didn't faze me, until my first, cautious turn. I went into a sideslip, but wasn't really getting any edge. And then I realized that I wasn't slowing down; I was speeding up! Immediately, I regretted not packing my helmet on this trip. Whether my head hit the ice or a tree, it seemed pretty apparent that I was bound to hit something before the day was out.

Our rat pack. (Thanks to Conor McDonald for the correct terminology)

Nobody on the hill seemed too bothered by the hard snow. One woman slipped and fell beside me. Before long, she'd picked up speed and was rocketing downhill toward people stopped on the slope. They calmly moved aside to let her pass thru. The woman didn't seem too concerned, once she'd stopped. Soon enough, she laughed and got back on her feet and continued on. Just another day of skiing.

Rock and ice at the upper tram station.

On our way up the lift after our first run, I said something to my sister about the treacherous conditions, but she didn't seem to know what I was talking about. When I explicitly stated that I thought it was pretty icy, she looked at me like I was from another planet and said it had been kind of icy a few weeks ago after a succession of rainstorms, but they'd had a bunch of new snow - a few inches at least - and that's why we had such good ski conditions now. There and then, I remembered what it is to ski in the east, and I remembered that New Englanders have a completely different scale than westerners for measuring iciness. When you ski in the east, it's going to be an ice sheet; that's a given. But when there's a sign at the top of the run that says, in essence, that today there's going to be more ice and rocks than usual, then you know you're in for a special treat. I remember my first day skiing outside of New England, at Squaw Valley, CA in 1987 . The locals were complaining that it was icy. But I had never seen such soft, fluffy snow in my life!

A Vermonter (my nephew Andrew) preparing to ski The Vermonter (a ski trail).

Jay Peak

Today was the first day with no races at Craftsbury. Marine had skied the 30 kilometers home from the racing trails earlier in the week and recommended it. JC and Quail wanted to ski home today, and they let me tag along. Here are some photos I took along the way: