J2Ski Forum Posts and Replies by Gooseh

Definite kicker, here. I find pole-whacking to be unnecessarily awkward and often ineffective. Maybe I'm doing it wrong. Agree with the earlier mention, though, that it's much more of a scraping motion than a kick.

Trencher wrote:

Dids1 wrote:

dgou wrote:I nearly kebabed a kid with mine after he took me off the drag lift!! - and it was on the steep part - so I then used my poles to haul myself up!!

I can feel a thread coming on.
101 uses for a ski pole.
It would have to be clean tho ) so probably a non starter. :D

It's been done

I can positively taste the restraint your exercising to not jump in on this one, trencher!

rossyhead wrote:No offence but your story isn't really necessary and you contradict yourself during it and your answer!

The simple straight forward and obvious answer is yes, longer skis are harder to ski.


You clarify this by saying that he needed tips and help to be able to use them compared to his normal shorter skis.

I fully agree that longer skis are faster but not necessarily more fun. However i don't agree that longer makes you better? Gs skis are typically 191 and downhill 215ish but gs is still considered the most technical discipline

To address a small point: it's not completely straightforward. The modern designs with 'early rise' at the tip or tail will make a ski more maneuverable than its length suggests.

Trencher wrote:Although you can now carve a monoski, to me it is still looks very inefficient. As I said before, all the disadvantages of both skiing and snowboarding. As far as knees go on a single board you need both bindings to release simultaneously or not at all. That why there's never been a releasable binding for snowboards (that was safe anyway). That said, whatever it takes to have fun meets the "justifiable" standard, and it's a bit better than some other niche snow sports :wink:

Hahahahahahaahaha! That video is amazing. I will be sharing it.

I just got back (well, yesterday, but I've been sleeping fairly solidly since then) from an amazing 2 week trip to Golden, BC. I went with one friend, and we were staying with his brother who is working his fifth season out there as a ski instructor. Between him and his friends, we managed to ski with someone with excellent local knowledge almost every day of the time we were there.

Kicking horse is one hell of a mountain. Very different from the french super-resorts I've been to so many times, it has one main gondola which takes you from bottom to top. You then choose pretty much whatever route you like down, which might include any combination of narrow chutes, steep trees and bump runs with car-sized moguls. The N. American idea of "in bounds" allows one to stray off piste with a lot less worry about avalanche conditions. Consequently, a resort that looked very small by European standards actually felt more varied than many others I'd visited with 10 times as many lifts.

During the week, the resort is quiet enough that queueing just doesn't happen. The standard of the average skiier there is pretty impressive - I'm used to feeling like one of the better skiiers on the mountain, or at least above average. Here, I did not feel that way. It makes sense though, as it would be a horrible resort for beginner-intermediates - the top half of the mountain is steep, and besides one green motorway which runs down, the pistes are steep too. A majority of them remain unpisted for extended periods.

Skiing with a lot of instructors really brought to my attention how out of date my technique was, too. I was happy carving on nicely pisted runs, but whenever the going got at all tough my technique was bordering on stemming. A few tips to help me get my weight properly down the mountain and a little encouragement to ski more aggressive lines really helped, and allowed me to ski difficult terrain more fluidly.

Enough of an essay from me... I'll finish this up with the (pretty much) the only photo we stopped to take the entire 2 weeks.

Talisker if I'm feeling rich, a cheaper speyside if I'm not.

I've spent a week in L2A, and it's a really good resort when there's plenty of snow. There's a slightly annoying plateau in the middle of the mountain, but that doesn't really matter if you're skiing (as opposed to snowboarding). I would say go for it.

jastem wrote:Well it's several hours since you posted this - have you still got the girlfriend????? :D

Girlfriend is still here! May have missed most of the morning after staying up 'til 4 watching videos of skiing in BC, but I don't think anyone noticed...