Six inches of new snow (finally) and it's still falling. We skied Chimney Park again today with the snow coming down. Bumped into Carlos and Teal in the parking lot. The video shows Carlos breaking trail. He passed us and disappeared into the falling snow. We only saw two other people besides him, Abby and her dog and an another woman we didn't recognize. After a while living here you start to get the feeling that you should know everyone you see.
We skied the Jelm loop, about 4 miles. Made a mistake at one point (forgetting the map seems to be standard procedure) and ended up coming back on our own tracks and missing what promises to be the best part of the loop. Next time.
The air temperature was, I guess, around 22°F. I waxed up about the middle half of the Tuas with Swix Extra Blue which proved to be too soft a wax and too much wax, I guess. I was OK to start, but as we skied farther along the trail they performed worse and worse. Little or no glide at all and occasional sticking. This can be pretty frustrating. We stopped and I scraped the bottom down and re-corked which made them a bit better, for a while. Then the sun came out for a while and the skis started picking up even more. I don't really know what was going on, seemed like the Blue should have been just the ticket, but I do not have a thermometer to measure snow temps, just looked at the outside thermometer before we left. The snow buildup on the bottom of the ski continued so I stopped again and scraped a bit more off and rubbed some glide wax on, things worked much better after that. Pen's skis were picking up some snow too. The moral of the story is that there may be an advantage to the waxless fish scale skis like the Rossignol Randonees Pen is skiing on, but the mystery of alchemy is not there with a waxless ski. For now, I'll stick with wax and play alchemist. Lesson learned: when in doubt, go with the harder kick wax.
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