Best Line

Guess who skied two days in a row? Ha, that snow is great, isn’t it? And this morning’s 15mm of fine-grained snow on top of all the re-groomed/re-tracked trail out there just made it all that much nicer and more forgiving. The only word I can think of is that my skis felt ‘sweet’ on the trail today.

Speaking of sweet, our new trail worker (who also set up and runs this webpage) really got to focus on setting ‘best line’ track on Saturday. It didn’t take him long to get the feel of it, because part of the sweetness of my two skis was skiing Montreal trails on a wonderful set of lines through all the curves and turns.

I don’t know when we invented best line tracking. It had to be twenty some years ago. I mean I’ve been tracking snow since my high school days in the late 60’s and our coach would ‘set the line’ as he called it and we’d have to ski v e r y c a r e f u l l y behind him to set the track for the next day’s events. I began to realize that, even on a narrow trail, there was a line the fastest skiers would take and then there were all the other possible lines.

As we began using machines and developing drags, that line, that narrow foot or so of snow that would cut the corner safely; but enough to shave some time or remove some effort off of your trip was still out there. Apparently old racers who set tracks look for that line. Our new Ranger found that line this weekend. Wow.

I call ski areas that groom a predominantly skating lane and then, sort of as an afterthought, set a track off on one side or the other ‘ugly duckling’ areas. The skaters dominate and the classic skiers are shunted off to the ‘worst line’ at least 50% of every trail. The classic skier is considered the ‘ugly duckling’.

Not on Montreal or Uller.

Most skiers probably don’t notice the sweetness of our lines when we get them right. I don’t blame them, it’s all in the ski experience; and if the experience was on the best line, well the experience was just that much better.

Best line. Best snow. Ski Freely. -CZ