Ski season is over for me this year. It always seems to go too quickly. I have found an insanely addictive Flash-based ski game, courtesy of the Norwegian skiing industry, called Trysil Twintip. For the record, my high score is 540,986 608,132.
Archive for the 'Skiing' Category
09
Feb
07
The One Million Foot Club
Numbers and statistics in sports are meaningless, I keep telling myself. Focusing on quality is the key to happiness and success-worrying about numbers just leads to stress, distraction and feelings of inadequacy. On the other hand, I like to climb up things and that kind of activity lends itself to keeping track of how much you’ve climbed- or maybe it’s just me that needs to keep track.
I like ski mountaineering, though I do hardly any of it, and the basic idea there is to climb up mountains and ski back down- hence counting vertical feet lends itself readily to understanding the difficulty involved in various adventures. A while ago I climbed and skied Shastina in Northern California, a 5,400-odd foot effort that left me pretty much wrecked the next day.
I really like climbing mountains on my bike too. I rode all 17,000 or so feet of the Death Ride two years ago and I was pretty wiped out on the last long climbing stretch.
All of which lets me appreciate the amazing achievements of Greg Hill and Mark Weir that much more.
Greg (short bio by Andrew McLean here) lives in Revelstoke, BC and last year (05-06) skinned (and hiked, presumably) 1,000,000 vertical feet. That’s really a lot of climbing, and a whole lot of skiing. Best guess is he put in 150 or so days on skins. This year he is trying to up the ante by putting in one hundred 10,000+ foot days. Competing at the 24 Hours of Sunlight probably helped his total- I checked the results and he skied 32 laps of 1,502 feet each for a total of 48,064 official vertical feet. Wow.
The one thing I find amusing about it is that Hill is Canadian, hence metric-oriented, so using vertical feet is really a gimmick. Climbing 304,000 vertical meters doesn’t sound nearly as exciting.
Mark Weir has been described as one of the most well-rounded cyclists out there- a downhiller who discovered he likes to ride up just as much as down. Last year (2006) he climbed 1,000,000 vertical feet- technically he did it in 11 months. Like Hill, doing it once only seems to increase his desire to do it again better/differently (you see? this is the problem with being numbers-obsessed!). He says that in 2006 about 220,000 feet of the gain happened on his road bike and he thinks he can do it all on the mountain bike this year.
My accumulated vertical on skins is pretty easy to calculate most years – zero. <sigh> In an effort to be (more) like Mark, I have started keeping track of my cycling vertical much more closely. For the year to date I am at 17,800 feet in six weeks- I only have to put in 20,462.5 feet every week for the rest of the year to match him. Hmm . . . tracking numbers is definitely overrated.
21
Jan
07
Prince Charles Cancels Ski Trip to Skip Poor Snow Conditions . . . err, Shrink Carbon Footprint
On the heels of my most recent post, I found this article about Prince Charles canceling his annual ski trip to Klosters, Switzerland. The article says that he has “long taken initiatives to protect the environment”, but has been criticized for travelling by plane, presumably due to the carbon output from his plane. In order to reduce the number of plane trips he makes, the article says, he has canceled his 25-year tradition of spending time skiing in Switzerland. A cynic might look to Swiss snow condition reports and decide that this was an easy call given the low snowpack, but the statement is still thought-provoking.
I am reasonably certain that my carbon footprint is smaller than Prince Charles’s. In particular, I am confident that (i) the total number of hours I spend in airplanes annually is well below his, (ii) that the number of other occupants on the planes I fly is significantly higher, and (iii) that the number of times I fly by private plane is equal to the number of trips he spends on commercial aircraft – zero.
On the other hand, my actions probably influence fewer people as well, and Charles’s decision and announcement has added to my guilt load about skiing. Yet another data point in the seemingly inescapable conclusion that skiing is an unsustainable practice, at least as I practice it. [sigh]
Update: as if I needed more convincing- I just found this comparison of global surface temperatures in each of January and December 2006, compared with the average of the same periods between 1951-1980. Areas showing a difference of 8 degrees Celsius are marked in dark red- and they make up a lot of the map. Scary.
I have been skiing since I was very small and have many, many great memories of spending time with my family skiing. I also adore the activity itself- the challenge of trying to improve each run, the great feeling of being outdoors in the mountains, and coming home completely worked after a full day skiing.
I think a lot about my “footprint” on the planet as well. I drive very little at home in San Francisco- in fact I gave up a job in part because it involved a long single-occupant car commute. I am far from perfect, nor am I a zealot, but awareness of my personal carbon output, waste produced, energy costs and other environmental factors weigh heavily in my day-to-day life decisions.
Lately I have had a harder and harder time reconciling these two facets of my personality. It started with thinking about the 400 miles I drive in a weekend just to get to the mountains, but the more I thought about it the more I realized that is the tip of the iceberg. Once I get to the mountains I need a place to stay. Assuming I stay in a hotel I am keeping two spaces warm- one where I am staying and one at home, even if that one is only heated to 55 degrees.
Then I get on the moutain, and this is the part that kills me, environmental conscience-wise. The place where I ski has about 25 lifts, all of which run from 8:30 or 9AM to 4PM. Each lift has a huge run of cable, 100 or more chairs weighing a couple hundred pounds each, and (the resort hopes) a full load of humans on each upward chair. The amount of energy it must take to run even one lift boggles my mind.
I did some quick research to find out exactly how much, but couldn’t find anything very precise. I did see that Aspen installed a snowmaking system-based hydro power system at Snowmass that was supposed to provide 250,000 kilowatt hours of energy, enough to power 40 homes for a year. They didn’t mention what percentage of total mountain operations this power would support, so I will assume it was not enough to make a worthwhile public announcement. If it was 5%, then Snowmass uses as much power as 800 homes, but I bet the real number is not even 5%. Another article long on promise and short on facts discusses green initiatives at several US resorts.
This doesn’t even touch on the energy required to heat and light all the on-mountain buildings, run snowcats & snowmobiles, make snow as needed and do everything else that runs off the grid at a typical resort.
Putting numbers around things helps me put them in context. My bad math says that without considering energy costs for anyone to get to the resort (for work or pleasure) or to stay near it, a decent-sized ski resort uses as much energy annually as several thousand homes. Yikes! (for an example of good math, here is a marginally related, highly informative and very wonkish comparison of how energy units are used across oil, coal & renewable fuel sources).
I don’t really know what to do with this information, of course. The environmentalist in me says that I should just give up skiing. Even if no one else did my eco-footprint would shrink by the gas & car mileage saved, and the amount of ski gear I would no longer need to buy and eventually discard. The lifelong skier in me has a really hard time with this.
This is probably not surprising to most people who have used an altimeter to hear that the data is not very accurate, but I have been somewhat amazed by how bad the data can get.
San Francisco is really hilly (wow- more amazing revelations!), which create “micro-climates”, which causes big variations in barometric pressure. I used to think it was funny to leave my house (altimeter calibrated properly), then go downtown and up to work on the 9th floor of an office building, only to have my altimeter watch tell me I was 50 feet below sea level.
My Garmin Edge 305 has a barometric altimeter that seemed to basically agree with the altimeter on my watch until I lost the watch. Now I just have the Garmin to go by, but I have noticed big differences in the data recorded on the device and data processed by MotionBased.com. A regular bike ride I do has something just under 6,000 feet of climbing. The Garmin’s screen will report 5,800 or so, but when I upload the file to MB it records it as 6,500.
Even worse is MB’s altitude correction feature. Apparently some altimeters are even worse than the Garmin, because MB’s help files say the Edge is more accurate than the correction feature. Still, I tested it out with some interesting results:
*The same ride described above consistently gets reported as 11,000+ feet of climbing.
*I do a regular workout around a basically flat track early in the mornings. The Edge reports the altitude pretty accurately, but when I turned on the correction it showed a gradual upward trend over the course of the laps. I eventually figured out that was because I do the workout early in the AM, so MB’s correction actually reflected the air warming up as the sun rose.
Too bad there doesn’t seem to be any remedy for this. I imagine this is why Trainingpeaks.com doesn’t record altitude data- they are super-analytical about their data and maybe they just feel that altitude isn’t reported accurately enough to work well with the rest of their data.
28
Nov
06
Ski Gliding the Eiger
This is a pretty amazing video of people ski-paragliding off the Eiger in Switzerland.
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22
Nov
06
Line Rider
I saw one of the Line Rider videos a few weeks ago, but didn’t really understand what is was. Apparently there is a little program that provides the physics, so anyone can draw lines and watch the sledder guy try to make it through. Here are a couple of my favorites:
Line Rider Die at the Slopes
Line Rider Jump the Sharks
