It looks like spring skiing weather in St. Albans this weekend! A week of freeze-thaws, a race-time temp in the mid-30s, and a natural snow base will mean softer and dirtier snow. Here is a simple wax recommendation that should help repel dirt as long as possible and keep skis moving through the wet snow.
Use a glide wax cleaner (note: this is NOT the same as a kick wax remover!) to remove as much dirt as possible: put some of the cleaner on a rag, wipe it down your ski base, let it dry for 20 minutes, and brush thoroughly with a metal brush.
If you don’t have a glide wax cleaner, do a “hot-scrape” of your skis. To do this, apply a mid-to-warm wax like CH8 or Toko Red. After ironing, wait only a couple seconds before scraping to brushing to try and pull dirt particles out of the base.
Actual race prep begins with a neutral NF layer of a semi-hard wax like Toko Blue or Swix CH7. Scrape and brush.
Race layer is a yellow warm glide wax like Toko Yellow or CH10. Scrape and brush well after letting cool fully
Bonus: Look for the MNC wax bench (possibly tent) on site, where we will have a bench set up with a structure tool and some Toko NF Yellow spray to add to your skis if you like.
A note from MNC alum and current Bowdoin skier Meredith Stetter.
In case you didn’t know, this week is National Eating Disorder Awareness Week (NEDA Week, for short). AKA, this is the perfect time to learn more about the mental illness that infiltrates our wonderful sport all too often. Whether you have struggled with a disorder yourself or know a friend/teammate that is struggling or in recovery, there is plenty to learn. With education comes understanding, and with understanding comes our ability to combat the darker components of our culture. In other words, this is a problem that should matter to everyone, not just to those who struggle.
I encourage each of you to reach out this week, leave your comfort zone behind, and learn as much as you can. I’ve attached some resources that can be a good place to start.
We realize that many of our members made big commitments to ski and train at Bolton this winter. We’re psyched to have helped put in lights and do some work to maintain the trails there…we’re frankly not sure what we would be doing without this resource and facility behind us!
That said, there have been reports of some MNC folk being less-than-friendly regarding the grooming and/or staff responsible for maintaining the trails.
Please know that as a ski coach who spends nearly every day outside on trails, I am keenly aware of conditions and grooming impacts. Have I been frustrated at times with how the grooming at Bolton has been handled this year? Yes. It has been a very snowy January and February, so I’ve had days of grumbling myself upon arriving to fluffy ungroomed powder, narrow trails that only received one pass with the machine, or snow that was tilled deep enough to bring up chunks of dirt when such deep work with the machine was not needed.
However, I’ve also been putting in some work grooming the trails too (particularly earlier in the season when the large machine could not be used due to low base) and nothing makes you appreciate and understand good grooming like trying to do it yourself.
Bolton is not Craftsbury right now, nor are they Sleepy Hollow. But prior to this year the trails at Bolton seemed to be groomed very little, if more than a handful of times in a season. What has happened this year is a massive step up, and it is just that: a step, with more steps to come.
In coaching athletes, I’ve come to learn that it’s usually not worth letting anger or judgement be directed at any single skier…often, I have learned too late that what was frustrating to me regarding an athlete(s) was often something completely unrelated to the skiing situation at hand. As some say, “everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle” and so kindness often goes a lot further toward solving situations of anger, as opposed to aggression.
As a grooming example related to this, on two separate occasions this winter when I was angry about the grooming (or lack thereof) that I saw at Bolton, I went inside or emailed ready to pound on a table (metaphorically). I started out with a polite inquiry about grooming and in both cases learned that the machine had broken down. Thankfully, we were in a position to use our sled to help out and create some more skiable terrain. In another instance, I again went inside ready to have “guns blazing” only to find that it had been a new groomer’s first day running the big machine on their own. Because our biggest group skis on Tuesday and Thursday, it wasn’t such a dealbreaker after all that this Wednesday was the day that this staff member was practicing on the machine.
I have a lot of suggestions for Bolton regarding how the grooming can be improved, and I am looking forward to putting these suggestions and thoughts down more concretely and sharing them with the folks at the mountain. These suggestions also still involve MNC contributing to the improvements, as a club, because we appreciate this partnership and want to see it continue and grow. This year we can be thankful to be skiing at all and although pandemic stress may have us a little more quick on the trigger, we all need to respect the work everyone is doing to make the sport something we can enjoy.
It has been a busy year of testing and racing on fluoro-free products.
Many days are testing days…regular training session? Put two different waxes on and try them! Race day? At VT Cup #3 in Woodstock I went back through the notes to calculate that we tested a total of 36 different NF topcoats and combinations.
Ski waxing is a game of narrowing choices. Think about how many kickwaxes skiers often own: usually enough tins to fit into a small shopping bag, and that’s not even putting klister into the mix. Over plenty of time we’ve gotten pretty darn good at narrowing down our choices on a given day.
For training, we can toss on something of a good guess and have skis suitable for our workout. On race days in stable conditions, we can pick a good starting point of 4 options out of the unfathomable possibilities.
As we go forward into 2021 and beyond, glide waxing is becoming more similar to kick waxing in terms of being a multi-step, multi-layer, multi-method process. Before fluoros were out, we were on a very simple system of applying a neutral, hard and wide-ranging LF layer. This was followed-up with the liquid HF layer in a representative temp and snowtype. Finally, fluoro topcoats were tested.
Now, each respective layer has much more impact. Below is a diagram I created to represent what we’re going for. Both pyramids reach the same height, but the NF pyramid requires a broader base and more steps to get to the same level of performance. Note that this pyramid is ONLY taking into account wax, and not ski selection, base material, grinds, or hand structure.
So…which waxes fit into these categories? Right now, opening the MNC wax box is akin to dumping out the tacklebox of a lifelong fisherman (thought slightly more organized, for sure). For paraffins and underlayers, things look similar to what we’ve seen in the past, although these are only NF options. You may recognize some familiar companies, as well as some “underground” manufacturers. We’ve been testing them all!
Iron-on paraffins that we like and have seen success with:Rode line in all conditions, as well as the Star and Briko lines in warmer conditions. The SkiGo Green has been great in cold, and we saw great success with the Swix Pro Marathon Clean Snow…so much so that we are currently out of it and you’ll only notice the “Dirty Snow” variant here.
When we refer to graphite as an “underlayer” this means it’s the first thing applied to all skis. We test this by making two skis…one ski has graphite, scraped and brushed, followed by a paraffin like Toko Red, scraped and brushed. The second ski has the paraffin like Toko Red, scraped and brushed, followed by another layer of Toko Red, scraped and brushed. This lets you know if the graphite is having an effect on the paraffin that follows it. There is an excellent write-up of graphite ski waxes at this link.
Now on to the part more people are probably curious about, and the biggest “unknown” right now that every team, international teams included, are trying to learn about…fluoro free “topcoats”.
We define topcoats as a race-day application, usually applied within an hour to the start of the race. While we try to test paraffin and underlayers the day before a race (if conditions are looking similar on consecutive days) we will test NF topcoats as much and as late into the game as possible. While some of these products, like CH10X Spray or Rex G41, are technically just paraffins in liquid form, their quickness of application means we treat them as a viable final layer.
Liquid Topcoats
The big difference in liquids from various brands are the drying times. You want a liquid that dries FAST because a dry liquid means it has evaporated all of the solvent and reached maximum effectiveness.
The liquids that dry fast are: Rode, Vauhti, Star, Rex, and Start
The liquids that dry slowly are: Toko, Swix, Holmenkol
Some liquids are best when dried and polished with nylon. Some prefer to be brushed with metal. Others can really see a speed boost when they’re “fluffed” (as we say) with the wool roto-fluffer…more on that below.
Successful liquids we really like: All Rode liquids. Swix CH10X in slushy snow. Rex G41 in manmade snow at all temps. Start RG Graphite in new-falling snow. Start RG Violet in general mid-range temps. Toko BP Blue in colder natural snow. Vauhti LDR in certain transforming natural snow.
Life-hack: store your liquids in a toolbox arranged UPRIGHT to avoid any leakage
Powder Topcoats
Powders aren’t the fastest to apply, but they generally cool down in less time than an ironed paraffin and they can be viable race-day solutions. They sort of walk the line between a paraffin layer and a topcoat layer.
Successful powders we really like: Star Med powder which runs in a wide range from the 20s to the mid-30s. Vauhti LDR powder in transformed natural snow. Solda S-20 in dry, grainy snow.
Wool Topcoats
Definitely the most intriguing and unique option of the topcoats. Wool topcoats are applied in a unique fashion with a fancy-and-funny-looking lambswool roto device which we colloquially refer to as a “fluffer”.
Wool products go on fast, you can layer them easily (our standard procedure is to do 2 layers as one “app”) and they seem to last a loooong time. We aren’t going to run out of any of our wool products anytime soon and they are extremely cost-effective per use.
All you do is run an almost imperceptible-thin layer onto the ski, or right onto the wool fur, and then buff the ski. Next, hit with a horsehair brush one time before a second application and a second quick brush. Done! These waxes are prime for layering and mixing given the way they behave.
Wool products we really like: Ulla Black for transforming cold snow. Ulla Grey and YES Green for new cold snow. Star Med and Warm for general mid-range conditions, with Warm handling new-falling snow very well. The secret of Ulla Red/Black got out last year, as it’s the real weapon in manmade and dirty snow.
Want to see a video from Zach Caldwell all about wool waxes? Look no further:
