Thursday, February 19, 2009

Grooming / Trail Report 2/19/09

Well, it's not so much a grooming report as just a trail conditions report. Nothing has been regroomed since last Friday before President's Day weekend.

Anyway, things are holding up, if not getting crusty, glazed and rough around the edges again. The upper tree trails and the lower road are both still in pretty good condition, but there's a lot of hard pack, glaze and wind-strewn tree debris in the trail.

The classic tracks in the trees on both the lower road and the upper tree trails are still in pretty good shape, but with a lot of debris. I picked out the major stuff where I could. It drifted out in all of the meadow locations and really needs to be reset out there.

Speaking of drifting, it did snow a little bit. I discovered that on my ski today, but I was not the first one out there to discover it. I saw a couple of sets of skate tracks on it, so someone beat me to it. The tracks left by said skater indicated that the upper meadow sections were drifty in the skate lane too. It's amazing how much drifting was present after such a small amount of snow. The outer meadow trail had all of the new snow blown clean off it, so it's still crusty and hard, except at the very bottom where it's protected from the wind.

For classic skiing, I applied 3 layers of klister: one generous layer of ice klister, one layer of hard/course snow klister (both torched in and allowed to freeze outside), then a thin layer of "vario" klister (corn snow) on that, just corked in. It worked great and kick was as solid as can be expected in all sections except for around point K, where there's a weird moist drifty spot that iced up on me for a few meters. It cleared up pretty well once I got back on something crusty and hard. Even the icy section from the lower road out to the upper meadow skied well with that combination and I was able to stay in what was left of the track all the way up.

It's funny, but I get a little bummed out with the lack of snow down here in town and it's depressing walking up the mostly brown front hill now, but then once I get back into the trail system, it's amazing how well it is holding up and how good the skiing is. I would say keep gettin' out there once it gets groomed again.

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