We drove up for a long weekend to Tawas Michigan and ski-pulled our sleds in 2 miles to our friend Mike Woodruff’s family’s Silver Creek cabin, thru 20″ of snow.
I forgot my Sony minicam, which woulda been great for shooting the crazy things that happened underfoot, but our pal Ross had his $1 Chinese Special snapping away. For another $9 he got his roll processed and scanned. So I’m including a few of the gorgeous pics he took.
I have to say that I’m still so impressed with XC skiing! We got ski gear for family of 4 into ONE SMALL ski bag. All our equipment probably cost $400 total, some of it’s been in constant use for 15+ years now. Our luggage for this trip was only four 20-lb messenger bags—plus a few buckets of food. The whole trip only cost about $200. XC is so light, compact and cheap!
But we had hilarious disasters every which way on the snowy haul into our friend’s cabin. Never pack a sled over 12″ high—it will tip over. (The rest of the family had abandoned skis in child-induced malaise so I had the ski-bag on top of my sled, tipping it.) I ended up leaving all sled contents along trail and skiing in to cabin with 4-yr-old Lucy laying out exhausted (from tantrums) in sled. 7-yr-old Henry was a tromping trooper. I then skied back for bags. Lesson: little kids who aren’t good skiers yet need to be sledded into deep-snow wilderness cabins from the get-go. They ain’t going to walk or teeter on tall sleds very happily.
Note: A couple inner tubes between sled and skier allow for easy ski-hauling: no jerks are felt.
15 friends then partied for several days at cabin. One guy swam in the creek. It was amazing all the food and drink that got hauled in.
We skied 3 days at the Silver Creek Corsair trails. Perfect! Groomed double classic tracks for miles and miles. But…icy in morning then slushy. The trick was to catch it before too slushy or too icy. All told I went for five 3-hour skis! (Including sled-hauls.) After each outing I’d have white wine, bread, cheese, sausage out on the sunny picnic table. Then throw snowballs with boy. Apres’ ski! Then I’d watch the kids and Martha would go out. I never did get to see her ski!
Henry just LOVED to get bombed by snowballs. He had everyone outside throwing snow. I hollowed out a great igloo in a huge mound of snow near the cabin. It had holes here and there in it. Henry would be our “Wack-a-Mole” and pop out here and there. Everyone agreed that he looks like Alfred E. Newman, so that was his nickname on the trip. He was often drenched in his snowsuit, a real snow monster. Lucy played indoors mostly with a baby, but did go sledding a couple times.
Henry, the Wack-a-Mole
Tossed-Salad Henry, in drenched snowsuit
Lucy’s Sleddin’ Fever
*SKI LESSON SECTION*
Several friends asked for skiing tips. They used the ‘scootching’ touring style. I told them this was fine but if they wanted more efficiency, relaxation and speed potential to first ski behind and imitate a better skier, then to take off poles and swing arms fore/aft and to *stand up* on the ski and that it was OK for learning purposes to twist body over onto gliding foot—that 100% weight transfer was key to both kick and glide. They should just be able to hang out, relaxed, on the glide leg. Use leg that kicked as outrigger. I also mentioned that the pole plant should be firm and compact with bent-arm and that they should completely follow-thru with fully extended push: they used Frankenstein poling—arm straight out, poling finishing at leg. Some had quite a lot of up’n’down herky-jerky. I said that a steady forward pose was better. I said that kick-double-pole taught a good forward-falling position of fun abandon. I told them to slump the shoulder and to keep head neutrally tipped somewhat down, look up with eyes, and that it’s not the best way to sightsee. Quite a few of the skiers reported improvement and said that the no-poles skiing was the best tip.
***
On the way home I pulled a double train of sleds loaded low and that worked fine. Then I skied back and got a last sled-load and towed our boy skiing behind the sled.
Oh, and it was raining cats and dogs. So a couple of us ended up skiing for 3 hours in the 35F rain.
A wonderful thing was that my Swix VF60 silver hardwax worked great in the deep water on the icy trails!
I was sometimes skiing with boots under water.
The boy finally gave up towing and rode in sled thru deep water, like a boat.
Then we drove out on river-like 2-tracks for a couple miles then river-like small dirt roads for a couple miles. We had the 1985 Park Avenue OYB-mobile. The others had 4WD trucks. I needed SPEED to make it thru the 12″ deep stretches of flowing water and mud over ice.
The kids were great on way out and for emergency mud escape.
Nice getaway all around.
