Sad day. End of my XC skiing expeditions

[skuthorp]

For over 50 years I indulged in a multi night XC skiing trip, sometimes up to 10 days. Well covid stopped that and 2 years on I am unpacking my gear to give away or throw out most of it. Three sets of skis, snow shoes, stove and kit, clothing, gloves, thermals, socks…… I'll keep my excellent sleepig bag and navigation stuff.
But I cannot complain, 55 years in a country with very little of the white stuff at the best of times and before the place was smothered in regulations and money.

C'est la vie!

But I'm still sailing and paddling……….

[Hugh MacD]

I did the same a few years ago. Also my downhill skis. Always a sad day, but I figure I got my money's worth out of all of them over the many years I played with them Sounds like you did even more. Congratulations! I've kept my stove and camping gear, however. We still like to sneak out for an overnighter (short walks these days) when the weather's fine

[David G]

Mein Beileid

[wizbang 13]

I ain’t laced up my roller skates for a few years . (I skated differently than most in an atypical way ).
The mention of rules and regs have much to do with this decision or is it the march of time and fear of getting hurt?

[skuthorp]

Well an old friend said that I'd escaped without serious injury in both alpine and xc disciplines and he always reckoned my cousin and I were crazy in insisting on telemarking down treed gullies and steep slopes on skinny skis with rat trap bindings, so probably restarting at nearly 80 was pushing the odds. Likely he was right. That and I'm sure I'd be disappointed at the drop off in my own performance now.

(I am fed up to the back teeth with predictive text!!!!!!!!!)

[Todd Bradshaw]

I still have a closet in my attic packed with probably eight pairs of cross-country skis and several pairs of downhill skis. Having been a dealer, I always had a direct line to the really good stuff. Somehow though, it got used less and less as I got older.

00a6.jpg

[CWSmith]

I had to move to Delaware in 1987 and gave up cross-country skiing. I moved back to New Hampshire in 2003, but never picked it up again. It's a great winter activity, but I never had the ability to stay out for nights. That must be great!

[Todd D]

Right now we have the best snow in years for cross country skiing, but I had knee replacement surgery last week so all I can do is look at the fluffy white stuff. Maybe next year, although being on the wrong side of 70 makes that less likely every year.

[George Jung]

Over the years, I've 'given up' downhill skiing, and riding my motorcycle. But I still have the gear, and the bike - they're not worth much, and I like seeing them. Until they're gone, it's all still 'an option', right?

[Dan McCosh]

Hasn't been good snow for about a decade now. Used to love the sport in the winter--there are several great areas nearby.

[David G]

Used to love Nordic, and had a mob who was always game. And the route back to town went right by a hot spring where we could soak it out over a bottle of wine. When I moved from Eugene to Portland, in my 30's, I lost my mob. Tried some to recreate it... but it wasn't the same. Sold my gear a few years later. Some mighty fine memories, though <see my tagline>

[skuthorp]

I became bored with alpine skiing, speed beong it's only hook. And at that time I had a Norwegian former women's junior XC champion as my instructor…………………
Beautiful wooden Madchus skis, I was not good enough at that time to do them justice. Pine tar and waxes. For many years my touring ski of choice was a French army model……Dynamic. Tough and for me unbreakable.

[The Ranger]

Sorry to hear that. I've been cross country skiing for about 53 years. I've never been a fan of camping in the winter but really enjoy cross country skiing day trips. I've been out once this winter as our snow falls have alternated with rain so the snow is real icy and I'm not a fan of klister waxes. I used to live for ice skating, too, but tried a few years ago and looked like a deer on ice. We also love kayaking day trips but since a couple of minor heart attacks of my partner I may have to get use to solo trips. She said that there are the go-go years, the go-slow years, and then the no-go years.

[David G]

I became bored with alpine skiing, speed beong it's only hook. And at that time I had a Norwegian former women's junior XC champion as my instructor…………………
Beautiful wooden Madchus skis, I was not good enough at that time to do them justice. Pine tar and waxes. For many years my touring ski of choice was a French army model……Dynamic. Tough and for me unbreakable.

Conditions here being SO changeable... I was ecstatic when plastic bottoms got good enough that I could toss the pine tar, klister, and such. There were days I had to stop and change things every 100 yards. Aggravating.

[Nicholas Carey]

Conditions here being SO changeable... I was ecstatic when plastic bottoms got good enough that I could toss the pine tar, klister, and such. There were days I had to stop and change things every 100 yards. Aggravating.

I love my Asnes Tur-Langrenns, but I stopped using them when I moved out to Seattle. The snow in the Cascades is just too crappy. All klister, all the time. And I hate klister. I should take them and my kids over to the Methow Valley some time, though I'd need to get new boots. My feet have gotten wider. And since the bindings are Solomon SNS, I'd probably need to put new bindings on (does anybody still make boots for SNS bindings?)

[Ralphie Boy]

Sorry to hear you’ll be giving up the sport you love. As someone else suggested, perhaps limiting yourself to day trips might work.

The SoCal mountains where I used to X-Country ski often require klister, which is never fun to deal with, still, I always preferred waxable skis.

My skis are long gone, but I found a box of my wax collection and several bars of my favorite soft wax: Jackrabbit Johannsen’s! These were made with Pine Tar, and I loved the smell! They were great to use, I would apply them by making lines across the bottom of the ski. It was so easy and quick to apply that you could fine tune the grip by stopping and adding more lines, this way they wouldn’t be too grippy.

Have some great memories of winter multi day ski trips into the Sierra.

[Splodge]

IMG_20230124_125224453.jpgIMG_20230124_103625995.jpgDid a hut tour in arctic Finland this winter. First time on skiis for ten years. The little building is the wood fired sauna. Arctic sunrise. We were only three hours away from Murmansk!

[Todd Bradshaw]

Ahhh... Jackrabbit Red for dry snow and Jackrabbit Green for wet snow. The green was softer and had somewhat more tar smell. Wonderful stuff. Some place up in the attic is my old wax box with full sets of Swix, Rex, Bratlie, a couple bars of Jackrabbit and an unopened can of Swix burn-in tar for wood ski bottoms. At one point I even managed to get about a dozen bottles of the original Birke Beiner pine tar finish, used at the Madchus factory on the tops of their Birke Beiner skis. One of the best times of the year in the cross country business was early fall when the new shipment of Birke Beiners would arrive from Norway and that smell would fill the ski room.

[SaltyD from BC]

I did a lot of down hill skiing in my teens and early 20s but very little x country. I did have a pair of cheaper xc skis though, the ol fish scale jobbies no waxing required that I used once in a while. I brought them to work one time when we were surveying cross sections every 100 feet along a rail road track in the middle of winter probably a 5-6 foot snow pack at the ime. It was treed but just open enough for skis as the underbrush was pretty much burried.

The guys laughed at me at first. They smugly stomped through the trees in their misery slippers (snow shoes) having a bit better go of it than me with skis. But not much. But between stations I was waiting for them to catch up for the next one. And at the end of the day I skied back to the truck in about a half hour less time than it took them. One of the guys asks... so how much is a pair of them skis worth?

[skuthorp]

I still have my wax box too, and a pair of ski's to suit. I'm sure there's some JackRabbit in there. We used to have a 'vintage' day trip once a season with hopefully no klister!. But it's 4-6 hours from here to snow in a good year and they are getting rarer. I think I will rest on my laurels and stick to paddling my kayak and sailing where the wind does most of the work.

[SaltyD from BC]

Nothing wrong with that plan skuthorp

[Ron Williamson]

Jackrabbit was the only wax we knew as kids in the '70s.
It was easy and we could go uphill or down with no issues.


I've never been happy with Swix(It was never just right) and figured that it just nostalgia that made Jackrabbit seem better.
R

[skuthorp]

We mostly used Swix if I remember rightly.

[timber_cruiser]

Cross country skiing brings such a long and wonderful memory for my wife and I. Over the years we have transitioned to easier forms, I have abandoned skate skiing which was a many year quest to master, but alas it is not a sport for old folks!

The most important thing is just to keep on moving, at what ever pace or format that fits your life style.

[Todd Bradshaw]

We eventually adopted zone waxing for both fiberglass and wooden skis. The polyethylene bottoms on fiberglass skis were hot-waxed like downhill skis on the tips and tails for maximum glide, and then used XC waxes in the center for grip. You can't hot-wax a wooden sole, so on wooden skis you can use a very hard cold weather XC wax like polar or special green as glide wax on the tips and tails and then use whatever the wax of the day's conditions is under the foot for grip. The grip wax zone started from 18"-24" ahead of the binding and ran aft to about halfway between the binding and the heel plate. The reason that it stopped mid-foot was that the area under your heel is in play for glide, and you want glide wax there for speed. Zone waxing also made for much faster clean-up when you were done or when switching grip waxes. I think I still have a pair of Fischer Supercomp skate skis up in the pile in the attic. I could skate OK, but never really warmed up to that rather awkward looking motion. The old diagonal stride just seems a lot more elegant.

[Jack Loudon]

I no longer have XC skis but have this on my shop wall:

IMG_3559.jpg

[Ralphie Boy]

I forgot about having to pine tar the wooden skis each year! I had a pair of fiberglass Rossignols but remember the wooden Bonnas fondly. When I was a junior/senior in high school I trained for X-Country racing, which, with our usual lack of snow meant running and running and running. This was the pre-skating era of Diagonal Stride and ‘Kick-Double Pole’!

My all time favorite winter camping trip was hiking out of Yosemite valley and skiing into Tuolomne Meadows in January. What a great trip! Always wanted to go to Northern Europe and try the hut system, maybe some day, if I get back into it.

[skuthorp]

My favourite place in the victorian mountains in winter was a ridge above a big curve of a river and you could spend almost a week moving along the ridge skiing down to the river on new snow, and moving along for the next run. And you didn't need to change your campsite. I did many of the trips alone, touring companions were hard to find. A very good friend and sometime employer would come out some afternoon on a snowmobile to ski with me.
XC skiers seemed to be in 2 camps, the travellers who determinedly covered as much ground as possible, and the skiers who never let a good slope go to waste. Many a time I never got past a realy good slope and stayed there all day. Of course I had started as an alpine skier and was reasonable at it, and carried that into my XC attitudes.

[mizzenman]

My short stint as a downward skier resulted in more hours on the surgical table than hours in the snow

[George Jung]

Ah.... got a tree named after ya?

Good times!

[timber_cruiser]

We have had an excellent snow year. My wife and I have been able to go out cross country skiing often taking advantage of fresh snow. Last fall I purchased Rossignol Evo XT 60 waxless touring skis. These skis have given me excellent performance under a wide variety of snow conditions. I like the grip they provide for climbing. I am not going back to my old wax skis!

IMG_0110.jpg

IMG_0616.jpg

IMG_0126.jpg

[skuthorp]

Only once in all my skiing in Aus. have I seen snow as anywhere near deep as that, and that was a very long time ago. Late 60s-early 70's.

[Rigadog]

I pitched my skis into a dumpster when I moved to Pittsburgh from California 24 years ago. It was a bit sad I admit, I was a pretty good skier and it was my favorite sport. There is nothing much I like about winter now. I got back into SCUBA diving at about the same time, a lot easier on the knees and I couldn't afford to do both.

[Hugh MacD]

We have had an excellent snow year. My wife and I have been able to go out cross country skiing often taking advantage of fresh snow. Last fall I purchased Rossignol Evo XT 60 waxless touring skis. These skis have given me excellent performance under a wide variety of snow conditions. I like the grip they provide for climbing. I am not going back to my old wax skis!

IMG_0110.jpg

IMG_0616.jpg

IMG_0126.jpg

Looks like the warming huts on the "Swampy Lakes" trail north of Bend, Oregon. We used to take the kids out there with a jar of peanut butter and feed the scrub jays.

[timber_cruiser]

Looks like the warming huts on the "Swampy Lakes" trail north of Bend, Oregon. We used to take the kids out there with a jar of peanut butter and feed the scrub jays.

This is a historic log pavilion built in the '30s by the Civilian Conservation Corp (CCC). It is in amazing shape considering the vintage and weather conditions it endures.