Sad day. End of my XC skiing expeditions

[Ralphie Boy]

Re: Sad day. End of my XC skiing expeditions

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]

Re: Sad day. End of my XC skiing expeditions

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]

Re: Sad day. End of my XC skiing expeditions

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]

Re: Sad day. End of my XC skiing expeditions

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]

Re: Sad day. End of my XC skiing expeditions

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]

Re: Sad day. End of my XC skiing expeditions

Nothing wrong with that plan skuthorp

[Ron Williamson]

Re: Sad day. End of my XC skiing expeditions

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]

Re: Sad day. End of my XC skiing expeditions

We mostly used Swix if I remember rightly.

[timber_cruiser]

Re: Sad day. End of my XC skiing expeditions

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]

Re: Sad day. End of my XC skiing expeditions

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]

Re: Sad day. End of my XC skiing expeditions

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

IMG_3559.jpg

[Ralphie Boy]

Re: Sad day. End of my XC skiing expeditions

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]

Re: Sad day. End of my XC skiing expeditions

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]

Re: Sad day. End of my XC skiing expeditions

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

[George Jung]

Re: Sad day. End of my XC skiing expeditions

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

Good times!