on telemarking
Nathan and I drove up to Taos Ski Area early Sunday morning to go to the weekly telemark clinic that Taos offers. Right now everything at Taos is half price (except the season pass!), so lift tickets are 20 apiece and the two-hour clinic is 21 apiece. Not a bad deal.
The two other people who were in our group last week were here again, so we all kept the same group and same teacher, Liz. After a few practice runs on the bunny hill, we headed up to the top of the mountain.
The key in telemark skiing is to keep most of your weight on your rear leg. Liz had us working on various exercises to get us to steer with that rear leg.
In telemark skiing, your heels are free. A telemark turns works like this.
First: Turn Uphill to Stop
if you are skiing across the slope, to start a turn you move your uphill leg backwards, like you are wiping something off the ball of your foot. You start to get into a lunge-like position. As you put more weight on that foot, the ski starts to turn into the mountain uphill, which slows you down.
Second: a full turn
The next step is to switch which leg is in the rear. To actually turn downhill, you slip your skis slightly down hill, and then push the front leg backwards. You then put your weight on that foot, and turn down the hill and around, until slow yourself down enough by turning into the hill as described earlier.
When a person is good at this, it looks very graceful and leaves elegant swoops in the snow.
Liz had us doing tele turns with one foot only - always keeping one foot in the rear, and not switching to turn. That was damn hard. I still need to practice this one.
After that lesson, I was more consistently keeping my upper body facing the fall line at all times. When I forget, I end up spinning 90 degrees and face up the hill, skis V'd apart. The trick of keeping your upper body facing downhill solves this problem.
We've been given all sorts of tricks to help us with our turns, including:
- imagine you are wearing a tight mini skirt, and you have to bend over to pick something up.
- imagine you are wiping off dog s**t from your shoe.
- "bow" to the downhill
The lessons have been great - Nathan and I are thinking about signing up for the Sunday Local's Clinic in January. Every time I take a lesson, I feel like I am worse than ever, but at the end I seem to have vastly improved nonetheless. I want to be cruising those black diamonds by the end of the season!
After the long grueling lesson, we called it a day even though we could have fit in a few more runs. My sunglasses were making it too dark for 3 pm skiing on the north side of the mountain, and Nathan was close to bonking from lack of blood sugar. We decided to leave a little early. We celebrated our hard work with a trip to Pizza Emergency, which I have always shouted out as we pass every time we go through Taos. "Piiiiiiizzzzza Emergency!" The Pizza in Pizza Emergency was pretty good - the crust was chewy and crusty. Nathan thought it was too saucy. Anyway, it made us feel a lot better - that and a huge Coke, and two advil.
The other cool thing was that some local EMTs were eating dinner at Pizza Emergency, with their ambulance parked outside. How appropriate.
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