Back on skis, 2013 edition
After going a few years without skiing, I have made it a practice to get back on my skis at least once a season. Today, I had planned to go snowboarding with a friend. Since she bailed out at the last minute, I decided to make today the day for this season.
These days always get me thinking. How do the two kinds of tools differ, and what are their comparative advantages? How will I adjust to being back on skis? Can my time on one tool somehow help me become better on the other?
One obvious difference is that skiing requires carrying more stuff to the car. How much more? I decided to take the scale out of the closet. Of course, boards do come in different weights, as do different skis, so as they say, your mileage may vary.
The biggest adjustment in packing for a day skiing is carrying the boots to the car, followed by taking the skis to the car. Though both ski and snowboard boots are a bit unwieldy, there’s a substantial weight difference.
My snowboard boots weigh less than 2 pounds. On the other hand, my ski boots weigh 7 times as much.
Skiing also requires poles, though their weight is so inconsequential I did not bother to weigh them. Still, they’re a hassle in packing. One more thing to carry. Or rather, two more things to carry.
The skis weighted almost as much as the boots, but not quite. Due to where I live, they could have weighed more. I bought these to use primarily on the local bump hills. Had I bought them expecting to log a lot of time in the mountains, they would have been longer, and heavier. As it is, though, they are 13 pounds.
To my surprise, the snowboard weighed almost as much, though it’s 8 centimeters shorter than the skis. Partial blame goes to the Flow NXT-AT bindings that I use. They’re heavy.
Going skiing does have one less hassle factor when it comes to equipment. I always wear knee pads when I go snowboarding. One reason is that it’s a piece of protection in case I crash, but the larger reason is that they serve as something I can put my weight on should I need to rest, adjust a binding, or otherwise stop.
Once I got to the ski hill, I decided to make two trips from the car. One trip might have worked, but given the short distance from the lot to the lodge, I decided to take it easy. Snowboarding, by contrast, could easily be a one-trip experience. It could, but it usually isn’t; instead, I carry in a large bin with boots, gloves, helmet, goggles, and sometimes, protective padding, in the first trip. The second trip is for the snowboard.
Booting up in skis was a modest hassle, but not nearly as much as I remembered it to be. It took 5.5 minutes to boot in. It would have been shorter had I been quicker to remember to check the settings on the back of each boot. It’s easier to get get my feet in when the settings are turned to “walk” rather than “ski.” Getting the buckles secured, though, was the most difficult part of the experience, and it required more bending over than I would have preferred.
There was no foot pain to speak of (unlike, say, the too-tight snowboard boots I rented while at Killington), so the biggest challenge of the boots was, you guessed it, walking around in them. I planned a couple of short descents and chair rides just to get to a building with a first-floor restroom. Had I been on a snowboard, I could have walked it without any trouble.
I love easy-entry snowboard bindings, and hate using traditional bindings that require threading ladders through ratchets. Well, there’s nothing more convenient in the world of bindings that stepping a ski boot into a ski binding. Not having to take one boot out of its binding at the end of a run is a pleasure, as is not having to fiddle with a binding at the top of the chairlift. The equivalent in skiing–removing the poles from your hands and then putting them back at the start of a descent–is trivial in comparison to the trouble of snowboard bindings, especially ratchet/strap bindings. On the plus side for snowboarding, you ride the chair lift with much less weight hanging in the air from your feet. (Adding skis and boots to my feet increases my weight by over 10 percent.)
As far as moving on skis, I picked it up a lot better than I did last time out, which in turn was easier than the time before that. So while practice does not make perfect, it does make for less time shaking off the rust. The right-hand turns have bedeviled me before came easily.
But snowboarders, if you take your skis back out for a day on the slopes, take a good hard look at them when leave them outside to enter the lodge, and remember where you leave them. I parked them outside to change from boots into shoes. When I went back outside, I thought that both skis and poles had been stolen. It’s possible that someone moved them, but more likely, I simply forgot what they looked like.
So there you have it, the 2013 edition of “snowboarder on skis.” If you have skis in the closet, take them out of the closet once in a while. At the worst, you’ll appreciate snowboarding even more, and you may end up being pleasantly surprised.