Ski’n in the rain

Took a ski waxing clinic on Tuesday from Bob at Deep Cove Outdoors, organized through the Nordic Racers Ski Club. Learned quite a bit and put it to use preparing our skis for this morning. Our nice early snow on the trails was forecast to take a beating by some high temps and a flood of rain, and unfortunately the darn weather guys got it right. We (Katja) got on the trails shortly after 9 and the weather was pretty nice for the first hour, very light mix of rain/snow, pretty comfortable conditions. The snow grooming was another story, they’d only groomed some of the trails, and those they had groomed were only done on 1 side, so the trails’ width was half usual, making 2 way traffic a bit dicey at times. I met up with Bob around the time the rain really started to make itself felt. Bob gave me a few pointers on how to offset ski uphill, I do a sort of hybrid offset/2-ski type of thingy to propel myself up hills. Mostly I just work hard, not much in the way of using good technique to actually ski up the hills. The stuff Bob showed my really makes sense, looking forward to getting out again to practice. My hands ended up getting too cold so I had to pack it in early, left the trails around 10:30. Katja stuck it out a bit longer, but her hands were also very cold. Apparently her skis worked great, lots of grip with the new soft snow and was even getting some nice glide. Not sure if the trails will be in any condition for skiing tomorrow, is still raining and quite warm. Might have to go paddling instead.

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