Miracle Part 1

Driving in it, walking, shoveling it, brushing it off your windshield, hood, snow can be a real bother; it gets in the way.  It gets you soaked if you stay out in it long enough.

But there’s another side to snow, isn’t there?  It also covers the stark drearyness of late fall.  It provides a wonderful backdrop for holiday lights.  If you have the proper base on your runners, you somehow can glide on it.

Snow is a miracle.  

Of course, snow is just water, frozen.  Most other liquids, when they freeze contract and become more dense.  Water miraculously expands and becomes less dense.  Ice forms on top of a lake.  If water acted like most liquids, the ice would form and sink to the bottom, eventually  filling the whole body of water with ice and freezing all life forms there.

But snow, that’s a whole extra miracle.  Tiny water droplets in the air freeze and expand to form  billions of different six-sided crystals, always six-sided and always individually different.  “No two snowflakes are alike” is correct; but different atmospheric conditions (turbulence, humidity, temperature) produces certain, similar classes of snow crystals.  Needles, plates, stars, grains, columns, triangles, pyramids.  We can get them all living in our snow belt.

When we put our weight on a skate on ice or a ski on snow, a microscopic layer of frozen water melts for an instant.  Water on ice is very slick.  We slide, glide.  When we stop our ski, the microscopic water layer freezes again; sometimes very fast, sometimes slower depending on the temperature at the trail surface.  

Someone, probably somewhere in Scandinavia, a thousand or so years ago discovered that wax (probably bee’s wax) somehow allows the snow crystals to ‘stick’ or freeze to the waxed surface just long enough for a skier to step off and push him or herself off onto a glide with the other ski.  The miracle here is that different hardnesses of wax react to the sharpness of the snow crystals differently.  The ‘right’ wax allows momentary freezing for traction and then allows the snow to release as the ski returns to a glide.  Wax-less skis and ‘skins’ physically grab on to the track surface.  The wax-snow crystal interaction is somewhat of a miracle.

I’d love to meet and talk to the folks who kept at it, cooking up different wax combinations on their wood stove in some candle lit hutte while the wind blew even more snow down out of the Arctic.    

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We use this instantaneous thaw/freeze phenomenon when we set tracks and groom ski trails.  Snow geeks like me have a name for forming the snow into trails and tracks: sintering. The process involves agitating the snow crystals enough to cause some friction between them.  To agitate, we use one of our drags and the track sled.  The agitation causes a momentary thaw among the crystals.  Once we go by, the crystals re-freeze; only now they have been organized into corduroy or the set tracks.  After a short time (depending on the temperature) the tracks and corduroy set up hard.

It’s the same thing that happens when we shovel snow or mix it up and throw it from a snow-blower.  Come back out after you’ve shoveled or snow-blown.  Check the snow you moved.  It solidified and is harder than the Un-disturbed snow around it.  Same with our tracks.

Snow is just one of the miracles we live among.  Thankfully we get an ample amount to enjoy on our skis, even if we have to shovel it off our roofs.   Ski Freely.  Z