Auction finds - x country skis

[DrLogik]

Have you tried Pledge when it's zero or below? If not, give try it. Unless they totally changed their formula, it worked very well in those cold conditions back in my day. If it doesn't use it on your furniture. Spray it on when the skis are warm, let dry and buff in with cork.

[Brooks]

It’s obvious we’re all probably getting cabin fever, wishing we were fishing in January-- here we are debating nordic waxing on a bamboo fishing forum. Those pictures of wooden skis sure struck a romantic memory of ski touring for me.
If nothing else, maybe those that are reading will get out the old boards and try some of these different ideas on waxing and kickers and speed waxes and such. It’s got me getting out some of my older boards to play on, here in Idaho at 11 degrees above zero.

Gerard, with 40 years of coaching Nordic racing, you certainly have got waaay more experience than me in proficient waxing for cut and rolled track for ski racing.

As I mentioned, my experience is all about western nordic backcountry touring, telemarking, and such.
I never competed in organized Nordic racing on prepared track, but I’m aware of the brushed and ‘proper’ nordic techniques, but they never worked as well as my (so-called) western methods. And buffing out speed wax with those green Scotchbrite pads has been one of my favorite hacks (as they say) for the last 40 years. They work fantastic after the speed wax is scraped.
Again, my experience is for skiing where sometimes there is track, or someone has hopefully broken trail, but it involves lots of up and down, but efficiency on the flats is super important, with often the goal (for me) is telemark turn descents in powder, or packed, or corn.

As far as throwing down bona-fides (forums are nothing if a stuffed-shirt like myself can’t ‘throw-down’, right ;-)
I grew up as a kid alpine skiing and alpine jr. racing. Then moved to Utah fifty years ago and worked at Snowbird, which is where I first started backcountry Nordic skiing. I’ll never forget the day I saw a guy link telemark turns on Bonna skis with Alfa boots in waist deep power all the way down Alta’s High Rustler (very steep) on a waist deep powder day. It started my quest for the backcountry steep and deep. And for touring in general.

In later years I owned a fabulously unsuccessful Nordic and telemark ski shop in Idaho for six years. In those years I did many hundreds (thousands?) of miles of backcountry skiing and Nordic ski descents (a nordic telemark ski descent of Mt. Rainier on the Disappointment Cleaver route that was quite contrived and involved some rappels and sketchy crevasse bridge crossings).

My views about not using Polar as a tip-to-tail wax are formed from backcountry experience. Once on a week-long snow-camping ski tour of the Big Horn Crags in the middle of the Idaho Frank Church wilderness, a day that was 20 above, as the sun went down, and the moon came up, the temperature slammed down like a leaden curtain and went to 25 below zero. Our skis wouldn’t slide on the descending route home, even after scraping, because, as you know, those pesky bits of kicker wax (even polar) are hard to remove while out on the trail. 30 miles of plodding on skis that functioned like snow-shoes to get out to our car which luckily started after we abandoned it for a week in the backcountry(an old VW squareback). Never again for me: Polar as tip to tail wax.

I’ve spent a good portion of my life ski touring in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Canada, New Zealand, Colorado. . .
And the “fabulously unsuccessful” ski shop that I owned threw me so deep in debt that I worked as a mountain guide in Antarctica (for the NSF) for nine years, with occasional ski tours and descents on the flanks of Erebus, and around the area of the Royal Society Mountains, and on the Ross Ice Shelf. You haven’t experienced limitless Nordic skating, until you get one of those days where the entire Ross Ice Shelf is like perfect rolled track for skating, and you could go for hundreds of miles in perfect skating technique. That was the only time in my life when I owned skating skis. Man they were fun down there.

Memories of many tours haunt me, such as an attempt in 1977 to ski the entire Sierra’s John Muir trail in spring. After 23 days of fresh snow and avalanches, my partner and I had to bail out half-way, we only made 110 miles in those 23 days, and ski, hiked and wandered down into the Fresno area having to hitch-hike back to our car in Yosemite with our skis and expeditionary crap (imagine the funny looks we got with our thumbs out).

One of my buddies calls these stories “Brooks Fairy Tales”.
“You know the difference between a fairy tale and a Brooks ski story?”, he asked
“a fairy tale starts out, ‘Once upon a time’”
“And a Brooks ski story starts out, ‘no shit, there I was’.

As I get older, I tend to bloviate and bore people more and more. Romanticizing the past. . . fishing with bamboo.. . .

And Dr.Logik, in my old ski shop in 80’s, we used to spray Pledge on the fish-scale waxless bases. I detest waxless skis, but my wife loves them. She’s smarter than me.

I have a friend who owns a very successful mountaineering Nordic ski shop in Missoula. I asked him why there are no more metal edge Nordic waxable skis. They are all waxless.
He said to me,
“If the kids these days can’t wax their skis with their phones, they don’t want to know how to do it.”

[DrLogik]

Yeah, those fish scale bottoms weren't the best but for people just starting out, they made it a lot simpler. After a month or two many came back into the shop I worked in to see if they could "trade up".

“If the kids these days can’t wax their skis with their phones, they don’t want to know how to do it.”

Man, ain't that the truth!

[GerardH]

Gerard, with 40 years of coaching Nordic racing, you certainly have got waaay more experience than me in proficient waxing for cut and rolled track for ski racing.

The intent of my post was not to discount your experience, but I did disagree with the suggestion of using products such as Scotch-Brite for brushing out the base while waxing. I won't claim to having anything close to your global touring experience, so don't take my post as one-upmanship...that wasn't the purpose and I'm not interested in going there.

My views about not using Polar as a tip-to-tail wax are formed from backcountry experience. Once on a week-long snow-camping ski tour of the Big Horn Crags in the middle of the Idaho Frank Church wilderness, a day that was 20 above, as the sun went down, and the moon came up, the temperature slammed down like a leaden curtain and went to 25 below zero. Our skis wouldn’t slide on the descending route home, even after scraping, because, as you know, those pesky bits of kicker wax (even polar) are hard to remove while out on the trail. 30 miles of plodding on skis that functioned like snow-shoes to get out to our car which luckily started after we abandoned it for a week in the backcountry(an old VW squareback). Never again for me: Polar as tip to tail wax.

Agreed with above. My point regarding Polar kick wax is that once you hit a certain temperature, the coldest glide wax essentially becomes a kick wax...where skiing in those conditions can be fatal if you make a mistake. The coldest I've attempted skiing was -32 air temp for the high for that day, I may as well had sandpaper on my skis.

[Brooks]

Gerard, your waxing points are, I’m certain, more accurate than mine, and I didn’t think you were going for one-upmanship.
And if my wife was reading this, she would say to me, “oh for god’s sake will you please shut up with all your blah-blah stories you washed up old has-been .
Definitely cabin fever at my end.

[Doug K]

As I get older, I tend to bloviate and bore people more and more. Romanticizing the past. . . fishing with bamboo.. . .

my brother calls this, affable old gaffer syndrome.. my wife glares at me in company when I do it, tells me, "stop it, you have AOG again"

never mind, I enjoyed your ski stories ;-)

when we were boys we'd fish the local pond for carp, sitting behind our rods waiting for a bite. Here we were sitting targets for AOGs who had to tell us their fishing stories.. it was OK though, sometimes those old guys knew stuff.

Just finished reading Fridtjof Nansen's story of the Fram, went out and deliberately got the ship frozen in polar ice, theorizing that there was a drift from west to east so after several years they'd emerge into open water again. Luckily the theory was proven. Amundsen then borrowed the Fram for the South Pole expedition.
Nansen wrote about snowshoeing on the polar ice, but it became clear what a Norwegian calls a snowshoe is a cross-country ski. They made them out of whatever wood was laying around the ship, and wore them out. Before the Fram he'd led the first expedition to cross Greenland, on skis..
Never imagined you could skate on the polar ice, that's terrific.

I'm still riding waxless fishscales from the 90s. Last weekend borrowed a pair of Atomic Skintec, classic track skis that have permanent skins for the kicker section. They were excellent, quiet and fast, looking out for a secondhand pair now. That's if I don't find an old wooden pair first, ha.

[L Swearingen]

I tried multiple times when I was a lot younger in California to learn to Cross Country ski
efficiently but never got to go often enough to make it work for me.
I had a pair of Bonna Mountain skis with partial steel edges and they took wax.
Trying to ski in the Sierra with wax was a real problem for me at times with the
constantly changing conditions. Start off on frozen crust in the morning and then
the Sun comes out and you have wet top layer over very cold powder underneath.
I left those Bonna's in the rafters of my garage when I moved to Indiana and
bought some plastic fish scale bottom skis when I got here. No more waxing problems.
Larry Swearingen
http://planingforms.webs.com