Tips, Tricks, and Advice
Get up in super-deep snow, how to find a free, and warm, place to sleep in a ski town, and 17 other skiing tips.
Cold hands? This method works way better than the well-known hand-swinging technique. Do this exactly right and you’ll feel a sudden rush of blood to your hands. If you don’t feel it, start again at step 1. It’s not about the number of reps but their quality. Count to one Mississippi after each.
1. Stand tall, like a soldier, with your arms stiffly straightened at your sides. Point your hands out at right angles.
2. Shrug your shoulders up as high as you can, near your ears, and hold them there for a beat.
3. In a sharp, violent motion, force your shoulders down.
Keeping a PB&J in a jacket pocket will deform it horribly and make you look like you have a chest goiter. Instead, store your sandwich in the calf area inside your ski pants. First, you’ll need pants with built-in boot gaiters and thigh vents that don’t have mesh lining. Unzip the outer thigh vent and slip your sandwich behind your knee so it drops down to your calf. Gravity will keep it in place and the gaiter will prevent it from slipping out at your ankle. You won’t feel it when you’re skiing and you won't smush it either.
Remember that commercial with the old lady shouting, “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!”? Well, take a digger in bottomless powder and you’ll know what she was yelling about. But unlike Granny, you don’t have an emergency button to press for help. Instead, take your poles and lay them in an X on the snow surface. If you’re wearing a pack, lay it on top of the X. Then push off the center of the cross (or the pack) and stand up.
So you’ve run over a rock. You pop off your board and check. A hunk of your base sticks up—the worst possible combination of hangnail and engorged boil. Terrific. But there’s no need to go to the shop. Take off your other ski, and put it base-to-base with the damaged one underneath. Tilt the top ski to a 30-degree angle. Plane the edge of the healthy ski against the hangnail. Scrape from front to back only, and scrape it until it’s smooth. Resume shredding.
1. First, make a baseball-size snowball, packed as tightly as possible.
2. Using a twig, burrow out a small opening about the size of your fingertip. This is where your fine pipe tobacco will go.
3. Next, take your twig and bore a hole through the bowl you just created to the center of the snowball; it shouldn’t be much wider than the twig.
4. Bore another hole about 90 degrees away from your first one to the center. This will be your mouthpiece. Give a test suck to ensure air flows between the two holes, and voilà!
It’s happened to everyone in the backcountry: You get snow and ice on your skins’ glue and they won’t stick to your skis. Next time that happens, stick your ski tail-first into the snow. Then grab your iced-up skin, one end in each hand. Wrap it around your upright ski and rake the glue side back and forth across your plank (1). You can also de-ice without the ski. Take a knee, grab your skin as above, and drag the glue back and forth across your shin (2). Make sure you’re wearing waterproof pants and not jeans.
It’s Saturday and it’s busy. You’re doing your thing when suddenly someone behind you swears and yells, “Hey!” You whip your head around to see a thug—big, angry, and ready to punch you so hard your parents will die. Your move? Take your skinny ass and run for it. Here’s how to escape.
1. He’s less likely to duck a rope than you are. But know where you’re going.* Namely, make sure you aren’t heading into a sketchy avalanche zone. Then gun it and get into the trees as soon as you can.
2. Look over your shoulder. Is Hitler still behind you? If so, make a turn uphill, behind a tree or rock, out of sight. He’ll ski right by. Now lie low for a while.
3. If you’ve got a balaclava or a gangsta napkin around your neck, pull it up over your face. Scan for patrol (and the thug) before popping back onto a groomer.
4. If patrol approaches, be polite and respectful. You were just relieving yourself in the woods. After all, you’re diabetic, can’t afford insulin, and, more than anything, sir, you’re deeply sorry about it.
5. Tuck it to the lodge as fast as you can. Take off your jacket, hat, and goggles. Mix and match them with your friend’s gear, and carry on with your day. You’re as M.I.A. as Hoffa.
—We don’t recommend breaking the rules—ever—but desperate times call
for desperate measures.
1. Always carry a warm sleeping bag in your car.
2. If you can’t pick up a date and stay at his or her house, you need to find a heated underground parking garage.
3. Scope it. Find the corner that is darkest, but don’t set up shop yet, stoner. Wait for the right time.
4. Park your car elsewhere. Hotels and condos sometimes check tags.
5. Show up to your dark corner no earlier than midnight. And leave early the next morning. You may be dusty.
Ice on the inside of the lens: Press your hand flat on the surface to melt it and then gently wipe the water away. Many goggles contain an anti-fog coating on the inside lens surface. The harder you wipe, the more your lens will fog in the future.
After a digger: Suck the snow out of the front lens vents before it can melt and drip between the lenses. Do this first or you’re screwed. Put your lips right on the lens vents and suck out the snow (see illustration). Once the vents are clear, dab the lens dry with a chamois or Kleenex, inside and out.
It comes from hard work. You need to figure out new ways to do things. I present my sponsors with alternatives that go beyond the status quo—you need to be more than the guy who did some contests, got sponsored, and moved on to photo and film shoots. That’s what all the top pros do but it can be a short career. To succeed long-term, you need to make yourself a personality and a brand. In 2005, I was bored and jaded and thought about retiring. I was sick of doing whatever other skiers were doing. I thought about how I could separate myself from the pack and came up with skiing the fourteeners. I turned to ski mountaineering because I love it but also because few people are exposed to it. Now my career is going better than I ever imagined. —Chris Davenport
One More Thing from Chris Davenport:
“I keep a case of Red Bull in my car. When resorts want to charge me $20 to park, I flip the guy four cans and he lets me park free.” [Editor’s note: Another secret to Dav’s longevity: plugging his sponsors whenever possible.]
Your car is stuck and your tires spin in the snow every time you step on the gas. Your floor mats will help. Remove them from your car (you’ll need all four if you’re really wedged). Place the mats just in front of your tires if you’re going forward or behind them if you’re reversing. Then hop in and mash it. The carpeting should provide the traction you’re missing. Hose the mats off later
As if traveling to ski weren’t expensive enough, now you have to fork over an additional $15 to $20 just to check a bag on most airlines. And if that bag is over 50 pounds—very likely if you’re packing ski boots or two pairs of skis—you’ll have to pay another $50 to $100. But here’s how to scam the system, from honest to downright illegal.
Option 1 (honest)
Send your bags to your destination beforehand. Shipping to a business address is cheaper than shipping to a residence. Send it in advance via FedEx or UPS Ground and it’ll be cheaper than overweight-bag fees.
Option 2 (arguable)
When your ski bag is on the scale, slyly rest the end closest to you on top of your ski boots or pinch the bag between your knees (see illustration at right). This should take at least 10 pounds off the scale. If the airline employee catches you, play dumb.
Option 3 (dishonest)
This method works only if you need to deliver your bag to an oversize-luggage carousel after you check in. If that’s the case, pull some heavy stuff (like boots) out of your ski bag before you get to the counter and stuff it in your carry-on bag or sling it over your shoulder. After the bag has been weighed, the clerk will ask you to take it over to a separate area for odd-size luggage. On your way there, put the heavy stuff back into the ski bag.
So Joey Douchebag insists on stepping on the backs of your skis because, naturally, this will get him on the lift faster. Stop it by whipping your head around and holding the gaze. That should do it. If it happens again, and you can’t be bothered to ask him to stop, break out the T.N.T.—the Tippy No Touchy.
1. Wait until there’s a gap to move into. As you shuffle forward—and without looking back—slightly raise the tail of your ski.
2. Plant the tail on top of Joey’s tip. Put all your weight on it. This is an “accident.” So pretend you don’t notice him flailing as he attempts to yank his ski tip out from under your foot.
3. Count four long, luxurious seconds. You’ve sent your message, tiger.
Torn between your 6 a.m. breakfast shift and the foot that dumped overnight? Don’t be. Call in sick. You’ve prepared for this by visiting a thrift store and buying a dark one-piece suit. Nobody will recognize you in Bogner.
We have it on good authority from Radio Ron Gasber, star of Meatheads Films' Wanderlust, that spraying your bases with WD-40 will make you feel as if you’ve been “shot out of a fucking cannon.” Full disclosure: Radio Ron drives from Cleveland to New York every weekend to ski, spends every on-slope minute shredding bumps in a Nevica one-piece and AM/FM headphones, and counts “downhill Rollerblading, balance training, crossbow hunting, and river-boulder running” among his other hobbies. So we're not sure about this.
Stick a neoprene beer cozy between your shin and the front of your boot and crank down your power strap. The added cushioning will help prevent bruising, and you can pull it out later at the bar.
Few things are more rancid-smelling than cold, wet ski boots. But ski photographer Grant Gunderson, who spends most winters on the road, has a fix. “To keep the level of funk manageable, I put dryer sheets in after skiing. The wicking action of the dryer sheets causes them to dry out faster, and the sheets keep them smelling spring fresh.”
Other fetid locations you might
consider blessing with dryer sheets:
1. Your hockey bag.
2. The bottom of your trash can.
3. Your post-–Taco Bell underwear.
T.J. Schiller gets it done. He won this year’s Winter X Games slopestyle, and he stomped the first-ever switch mute 1440 (that’s four full rotations backward) in a competition to win the 2006 U.S. Freeskiing Open Big Air. If you've got world-class park skills, making money comes down to spotting the marquee feature.
My routine at the event is to do at least two course checks to have a good understanding of the features. Then I do two runs to get my speed down. Then it’s go time.
You want to stand out from everyone else. So if you see everyone hitting a certain feature and no one is touching the one beside it, think of something tech you can do on the neglected one, and that will help.
During my off-season I spend a lot of time at my gym and physiotherapist. I even go to physio when I’m not hurt. My body takes a serious beating throughout the winter, so I’ve got to make sure I’m on point.
There is always a “wow” feature in a course. At this year’s X Games it was the transfer gap. I did my most difficult trick over it and I’m pretty sure that’s what got me the high score.
Set up eight industrial fog lamps and two generators at your local elementary school on a Friday night and you’ll definitely get hassled. Instead, opt for the Day of Rest. East Coast ski photographer Chris James says, “Sunday morning is the best time to hit urban. Cops are slackin’ and everyone is at church.” And the early-morning light is ideal.
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Regarding "Secrets", yes we've all broken the rules, but seriously, you cut someone off not knowing if in your wake you've actually hurt someone and you write of how to get away? The secrets and tips are interesting, but you couldn't come up with anything better on "secret #6". Your editor needs to take a little closer look at your articles.
This is hilarous!!!! Good times :-)