Northwestern Cycling: Skiing and Art of Bicycle Maintenance (but mostly skiing)

I was unfortunately unable to race last weekend because I was doing some extreme skiing in Colorado with my brother (secret altitude training plan). But beyond the low oxygen exercise, I found an interesting parallel between cycling and ski equipment on which I will elaborate below. First, a bit of intro. My brother Jon works on classified weapons systems at Sandia National Lab in Albuquerque, NM, so I flew into ABQ on Friday night (I love Southwest, ski bag an suitcase checked for free!). Jon is an insane skier. We used to be relatively similar skill levels, but since I moved to the Chi and he’s out west he's gained a significant advantage. Nonetheless, when he needs a ski partner to go into the deep backcountry he still calls me. This time, our destination was Silverton Mountain, an expert only park where you have to reserve a guide and do avalanche training, then hike off a lift for 30min to 2hrs to access some of the most extreme terrain you can find without a helicopter. They mince no words with their logo:

In advance of our Sunday date with Silverton, we drove up to Durango early Saturday to do a bit of warm up skiing. I was looking forward to getting Jon into some terrain parks because I brought my twin tip freestyle skis, which, like my bikes, I set up and tune myself (relevant later). We had sunny and warm spring conditions, so there was great visibility at the top:

Jon vetoed the terrain parks as they were packed with some really unskilled teenagers, so we spent most of our time in the trees hitting semi-natural features like down trees, lean-tos, and drifts:

I have some really funny follow-cam video as well, but needless to say my brother and I are lacking in the cinematography department. Anyway, the day finished without incident and we drove 1.5hrs north to our hotel in Silverton.

Steep and deep runs call for special powder skis that are significantly fatter than my Rossi’s, so the first thing I had to do at Silverton was rent skis and have them fit to my boots (my brother and most of the other people had their own powder skis). We were divided up into 8 person groups and given a guide. Predictably, Jon elected for one of the more challenging groups, so we were going to be doing a lot of hiking. The conditions were wicked as we took the lift up to the start of our first hike. 40+ mph winds and heavy snow made for whiteout conditions. Our first hike was the longest, a 2 hour sufferfest to summit the mountain. Later in the day I was able to get a clear shot of the ascent:

Here’s Jon making it up a steep section after we shimmied around a rock outcropping:

I was somewhat nonplussed at the top:

We waited a little while for a break in the storm and started heading down the back side of the mountain where we encountered a steep bowl above a line of cliffs. There were several chutes to pass the rocks, so the guide went down first to show us the line. I was the first to follow and as I started down the bowl the wind kicked up and cut down the visibility. I continued to approach what I thought was one of the chutes, but as I was executing an unremarkable jump turn my right ski popped off for no apparent reason. I tried to stay up and stop my momentum, but the 50%+ grade was too much to for a single edge to hold. I pitched down the slope head first with my left ski still attached, and unfortunately found that I was approaching a rock outcrop instead of the chute. I lost my second ski as I slid onto the top section of the rocks, allowing me to rotate my legs out in front of me in advance of the drop. As I tried to stop myself I only succeeded in banging my knee against the top of the next section and falling about 10 or 15 feet into some mercifully deep snow. I was totally juiced on adrenaline and frantically crawled out of the person shaped depression that I had made. To add insult to injury, I knew that at least one of my skis was on the rocks above, so I wasn’t going to get any assistance retrieving it. As I scaled back up the rocks, Jon looked up at the cliff and got a picture of me crawling back up. It’s difficult to see in the photo, but free climbing in ski boots is not advisable:

Once I made it to the bottom, I quickly found out why my ski had released so unexpectedly. Apparently they had neglected to adjust the binding tension on the right ski, so instead of an 11/12, it was set to 7/12. While I was annoyed at this discovery, I admittedly should have checked the tension before heading up on the mountain. The whole episode was a teachable moment. Having a ski pop off is usually a harmless occurrence, but in this case, the location of this malfunction greatly magnified the impact of losing a ski. In that way, it was a lot like bike maintenance. If something goes wrong on a training ride and you crash, the consequences are usually mild. Conversely, going down in the middle of a pack during a race can have significantly more severe ramifications (as Tommy's broken seatstay and my chainring scar can attest). This is a great reason to get into doing a lot of your own mechanic work. Regardless of how much you trust a shop, there's no substitute for knowing that you tightened all the bolts yourself. Then, you can race without reservations and know that the bike can handle whatever you throw at it.

Anyway, the rest of the day saw better weather and I overcame the knee pain to do some pretty sweet skiing: