Uphill Skiing is Fun!

I have yet to get back on the bike due to my bike crash late last year but for the past couple of weeks I have felt good enough to ski and one thing I wanted to try this year was uphill skiing.  This is my second year on Telemark skis and it's a such a blast!  Every turn is a learning experience.

  

I have my son enrolled in an adaptive racing program at Windham Mountain through the Adaptive Sports Foundation.  Last year we were going to Jiminy Peak every week for their racing program but Elliot grew out of that program which has brought us here.  The big difference with ASF is that I can't shadow Elliot like I did last year so while he is off shredding the trails with his guide I have some time to kill.

So, I bought an Uphill Seasons Pass at Windham, which means for $25 I can ski up and down the mountain, I just can't use the lifts.  When you have skins, why would you even want to use lifts?  It sounds like cheating!

Similar to the scales you get with waxless cross country skis, skins let you walk up a slope without sliding backwards.  In fact, they are far better than scales!

My first outing was on a particularly warm Saturday afternoon on Martin Luther King, Jr's Birthday weekend.  My first skin was up Lower and Upper Whirlwind and it was basically straight up and I got really hot, really quick!

 

I went out wearing a t-shirt, turtleneck and a wool sweater and half way up I was sweating profusely. In my ruck sack I am carrying water, a parka shell and my helmet because I knew going downhill was going to be really cold.

But the beauty of this type of skiing is getting access to closed slopes!  After this climb, my down hill selection resulted in finding a slope that the upper part had snow making on it which seemed to be deterring the other skiers from this particular slope.

Thus giving me the entire lower section of the slope open to make some really good turns!

New Hucks on the Gussy

Since I still can't ride, I headed out to Upper Paugussett with my son Brodie to do some geocaching and check out some of the new hucks that have developed on the Upper Gussy Trail.  I think it's been 9 or 10 months since I have been in the state forest, and of course that was on my mountain bike.

The first thing I noticed was some new trees down at the top of Sandy's Re-Route.  It was an rotten tree and someone cut the tree with a chainsaw (thank you).  Also, pictured above, someone made a nice log ride, only you have to ride through some low hanging pine branches.  The tranny could be a little better but I suppose it works.

Looking down

Brodie and I were falling the compass on the GPS to geocache that was on the Blue Trail and I happened to notice a line that people appeared to have riding.  A first, I thought it was making the linkage over to the blue trail - there used to be a trail that connected these two areas but it's long gone after no use.  Still, the line seem to end and then I found it!  OMG, what a huck!  And there is a nice kicker, too!

Looking up

Looking up from the kicker

You will never catch me on this one!

Walking back from the geocache, Brodie and I were walking back on the Gussy I found another insane roller.

I think this one is bigger than the one at Sandy's Reroute.

This roller is closer to Sanford Road side of the trail

And it's pretty steep!

The last morsel is an up and over on the stone wall that we broke through to put the Gussy Trail in.  It's really nice and looks like it's getting a lot of use with all the chain ring scratches.

I think after my ribs have healed up I am going to have to get back on the mountain bike again.