Crystal Lake Skiers Association

There Has to Be Snow Somewhere

I can only recall one Presidents' Day weekend without skiing at Crystal Lake.  So five desperate members of the Crystal Lake Skiers Association (the Smiths, the Barbours, and me) went up to the Tug Hill plateau for three days of skiing.  The snow cover there had been terrible, but lake effect snow covered the trails and then some over the weekend. We started in the small, groomed and (here) ungroomed Osceola Ski Touring center with windchill 20 below.  Here is our band:

The second day we went to Salmon Hills, a biggest, more groomed, but less Crystal Lake-y area.  But snow is snow, and it snowed all day.

Day three took us to Inman Gulf for what we thought would be an easy backcountry hour on a very beautiful trail along the rim of the gulf.  The photo shows the stream at the bottom.  The walls are both mostly cliffs!

But we we unprepared for the two feet of fresh powder, and found that the little hills turned into big ones, and the techniques needed are quite different from groomed trails.  But we all made it, and ended the day with the biggest hamburgers a sumo wrestler could imagine.

(And this desperate skier was introduced to the TV show Desperate Housewifes back at the hotel.  I prefer My DVD "The Joy of Telemark Skiing".)

Michael

Our Own Olympian

Congratulations to our local olympic skier, Prawat Nagvajara, for entering and completing the 15-K cross-country sprint in the Torino Olympics.  There was a column with some nice words about Prawat in last Saturday's NYTimes.  The website is restricted, so I'll quote:

...a pure competitor...part of a band of brothers bound by their singular representation of countries without mountains or snow or even the season called winter...
Prawat, a computer-engineering professor at Drexel University in Philadelphia, was inspired by [a Kenyan XC racer] eight years ago to lobby the Thai Olympic Committee to establish a federation to sponsor his participation at the Salt Lake City Games.  There, Nagvajara [did not qualify to complete the event] but he made it home yesterday, falling five times and breaking a pole...

We've all seen how fast and well Prawat skis, and can't imagine keeping this pace for 15K.  And we fall very, very often when pushing ourselves to our personal limits.  So our ski hats are off to you, Prawat, and we'll hope for a few recreational days at Crystal when it snows again and you are back from Italy.

Michael