hello it is i, your friendly cross country skiing friend, midway through an 8 day ski trip. i think I’ve spent $120 for three people to ski four days so far. I doubt I’ll spend more than $200. this doesn’t include the race entry fees that are expensive but unnecessary.
yes I’m aware this is quite a different sport
Yep. I grew up skiing at a cheap, tiny 500 vertical foot ski area in Pennsylvania. It closed around 1983 but it was so much fun for a little kid. Almost everyone skied in jeans. On weekends, the lifts would stop at 5pm, they’d groom the entire mountain, then restart at 6pm for night skiing. We would ski all day, eat our packed dinner while the lifts were closed, then ski from 6 to 8. It was great.
Edit: sorry to dump this in the middle of the capitalism discussion in the…MTB thread?!?.
There’s a park you can go ski at in Boulder when it snows. But relatively few xc opportunities here. Leadville and fraser have trails but they’re far away. The ski area i used to live by had very hilly xc trails but i couldn’t find skis during covid. Everything around me is really hilly so not ideal, but there’s some parks that would be great if they didn’t let people hike and posthole the trails.
There is one rec area with dedicated ski trails but it’s pretty far from me. Dogs, hikers, and snowshoes arent allowed on that one trail. I’ve skied it twice and it was pretty fun, but had to get rentals each time.
The way the system operates is to limit tgr knowledge of who the people are doing the bullshitting. Behind corporations and stockholders and pension funds and obligations and legally recognized entities.
Skiing is just winter golf ATMO
sir, this is Tarck.
What? No, that’s literally the opposite of what I’m saying. I’m saying that invoking “capitalism” pejoratively doesn’t identify a problem. However I understand that it is just a thing people say that represents dissatisfaction with any number of things. If you’re saying it and thinking that you’ve pointed at something tangible, that’s a problem. Just something I’ve been chewing on lately as I hear a lot of well-intentioned people phrase things that way (when amy said it I was just reminded, it clearly doesn’t matter here).
Anyway, Crass still slaps.
For downhill skiing yes that’s pretty accurate, it has many of the same land use capacity limits and semantics that force it to be coupled with wealth
XC skiing has more overlap with hiking/MTB like with trailhead parking and community-led trail maintenance
and a lot of the Nordic XC gear is somehow priced more like BMX?
This is hardly the thread for this (though we already did ideologies so whatever) but I think @frank_doktor makes a good point in that it doesn’t have to be expensive. However it seems really easy to take it upmarket and perhaps it deserves to cost a lot of money based on how it impacts the environment.
Yeah, i mean, we know that 1) it doesn’t have to be expensive, as it isn’t in Europe, 2) it doesn’t have to be super bad for the environment (golf is kind of bad no matter what).
Unlike golf, the snow falls naturally, so if ski areas didn’t make a ton of snow, they’d be pretty easy on the environment as far as water use goes. The land also isn’t used exclusively for skiing. Most ski areas here have hiking trails and biking trails. Some have full summer operations. Yeah, some trees are removed, but most remain. I’m sure there’s a wild life impact, but I have seen no shortage of moose, bears, etc in ski areas in the summer.
And if we still had small local areas and parks with small ski hills we wouldn’t have to drive 1-2 hours and sit in traffic. Not to mention if we had public transit infrastructure like euro-land, we’d take trains and then hop off and get on a gondola and be all set.
Certainly riding a lift/gondola is never gonna be a net zero, but the extreme drive for these companies to make more and more money by operating 7+ months out of the year and paired with the government’s lack of care to actually reduce the number of vehicles traveling to these places so they end up with 2+ hour traffic jams of skiers, it’s pretty bad. I feel pretty guilty skiing when I am just like, trying to get better at a sport and do something with my friends.
Sort of. But maybe only XC mtb. Really the sport is way more like road riding.
A couple of my friends xc ski on the local public golf course when it snows
The roadie/xc skier overlap is very high in boulder.
I found that classic skis on trails was a lot like mtbing, but very much so in the xc sense because it felt like i was doing a fitness exercise, but also because I am terrible at xc skiing so every downhill is terrifying because i dont know how to turn.
it is a proven fact that Nordic skiing is to cross county mountain biking, as downhill skiing is to downhill mountain biking
It’s almost like they have the same names…hmm.
I want to ditch the remote lockout on the Orbea. It’s spring-loaded to default to the closed position, which happens accidentally more often than I would like.
It looks like I can get a manual topcap for the fork for fairly cheap. The shock needs a whole new eyelet assembly to change the valve from remote to 3-pos.
Part of me is looking for an excuse to buy a new fork. I should probably just buy the $30 topcap and 
the shock valve open with a knarp.
Same. It adds a nice adrenaline spike to what’s otherwise a quiet walk in the woods.
Maybe decided to slightly air out the final drop because I was happy to stay upright on the whole run given the rain overnight.
Rain came overnight after we had some decently dry conditions to practice in (vs hell rain leading to race last year, so this was better).
tarcklebee for fucking sending it
making me miss bikes
god I want to send it
Ha. in opening clip of the Vital RAW. I got through the first s-turn, but had to stop because guy on white bike was down. Then proceeded to see two more consecutive crashes (actually show all of that). You’ll see the awkward steep drop in. Then see how easily and quickly the good folks take it.
