The Magnificent Ski Season

:date: 2025-04-28 22:03 :tags:

I have a lot of goals but the one that was at the top of the list when winter came was to ski as much as possible. This year, I feel like I have truly accomplished that goal.

A few days ago I posted a video showing what the last few days of the 2024-2025 XC skiing season looked like in my corner of the world, the Western Hiawatha National Forest of the UP in Michigan. Hopefully that video evidence can help you understand how I was able to make this an almost unbelievable ski season. This report is a look back at this amazing season.

My main metric for how I judge a ski season is number of days I was able to ski on snow. This winter of 2024-2025 I was able to ski on snow 150 days. Not only that but these were all the contiguous days starting on November 25 and ending on April 23. I believe I skied every day it was possible to ski.

One of the ways I am able to ski so much is that I am doing cross country skiing, a.k.a. Nordic skiing. Nordic skiing is a kind of transportation where you actually travel, uh, across the countryside. Over these 150 days, my total distance skied is a pretty serious 1146.5km (712mi). This is like the distance separating Chicago from New York City. This is an average daily distance skied of 7.6km/day.

The total amount of time I spent skiing on snow this season was 141hrs 37min. This is an average daily time of about 57min/day. Each and every day for 150 days.

You might be noticing that this works out to an overall average speed of 8.1kph over the whole season, and thinking that's not that fast. That is quite true and this pace tells much more of the story. The reason this pace is so low is that 87% of the time I did not ski where grooming ever takes place, and half of the time I went to some place that sometimes is groomed, they had not yet started or stopped for the season.

This can be seen when looking at the disparity in my pace. My fastest two kms were tied at 18.4kph. My top 8 daily fastest extraordinary kms on snow over the entire season averaged 17.1kph, over double my average pace. Compare that with a quotidian outing on rollerskis, for example this morning, where I did 8 contiguous kms all of which averaged 21.0kph. (The fastest km was 24.3kph!) Clearly the slow speeds on snow is not so much about me but about the exceptionally strenuous snow conditions I regularly skied on.

Another hypothesis would be that I'm somehow good at rollerskiing and less effective on snow. I would challenge that by pointing out that I was incredibly lucky with mishaps. Sure, I had a couple of stumbles here and there getting my ski hooked around a beech tree or slightly overcooking icy descents or tripping over a layer of crust after it collapsed under me, but really I only had one bad fall in all of the 150 days. I had stopped at the driveway of a neighbor to chat with him and was standing there chatting for maybe 15 minutes when suddenly I fell to the ground. I did a pretty good job of landing on my butt in a damage minimizing way, but out of all the sketchy things I did on skis this year to have the biggest problem just simply standing still, well, I'll take it! (I think what happened there was I was on some snow that transformed from the pressure of me standing on it from pretty high friction to very low friction icy. I maybe melted down to an ice layer. Suddenly the very slight angle of the driveway became more relevant than I was expecting.)

You might assume that with all this extra hard skiing that I would be in fantastically good physical shape. You would be correct. Also consider how all that snow got cleared from my driveway and walkways.

I was blessed to avoid any serious illness this winter. The closest to ill I felt was later in the afternoon after skiing on day 150. Good timing.

There are not a lot of photos of me skiing but this, day 142, is roughly what I looked like most of the time.

As you can see, I was up for it but what is most astonishing is the weather. Last year in the UP, there was practically no snow at all the entire winter. But this year, wow. And it wasn't the kind of obnoxious lake effect snow where you get 2 meters in a weekend and then it goes back to raining (ahem South Towns of Buffalo). The snowfall was really well paced. And what I always stress is that it is never about the snowfall really — what makes a great ski season is the temperatures. You need to have consistently cool temps so that when precipitation comes, no matter how slight, it adds to the snowpack, not extirpates it in the form of rain. I thought early on in the season that surely there would be some skiable snow that would disappear and that would repeat a few times until the proper base came. But no, that first snow covered the ground and endured in many places for five months. It's also important for maximal skiing to be very attentive to weather reports and signs so that you can choose the optimal time of day to ski. Also important to be attentive to is tree shading, slope facing, drift catching, drainage, ice formation, etc.

With so much skiing, ski care became quite an operation. I only started recording my ski waxing habits at the end of December when I realized this would become somewhat complicated if I didn't pay attention. I recorded 32 times where I waxed a pair of skis but it was surely well over 40. I did get better at it as the season went on. It now takes me about 6 minutes per ski to clean the ski, apply wax, iron the wax, scrape the excess wax, brush the ski (3 different brushes), polish, and do whatever else is necessary to get them ready to go again (e.g. lightly run a cabinet scraper to cut away base damage, paste wax on the tops and/or bindings to prevent sticking snow, etc). This means I spent well over the equivalent of an entire work day doing nothing but waxing skis all day long. I tried a bunch of waxing strategies, but with "garbage snow" or even great snow that's not groomed, you're really chasing your tail if you worry about the fine details too much. I mostly stuck with what I call "Toko Cheap Red". It roughly works, it's easy and, yup, it's cheap.

Here's my wax log showing when I waxed each pair of skis and how many kms they had on them.

BLUEVO - 1-27 22km, 2-10 23km, 2-19 20km, 2-24 23km, 2-28 24km, 3-10 20km, 3-18 25km,
         3-23 19km, 3-25 26km, 4-2 23km, 4-4 25km, 4-5 25km, 4-10 24km
MTLSOL - 1-27 40km, 2-19 22km, 2-28 24km, 3-18 7km, 3-23 22km, 4-2 22km, 4-10 29km
BLKEVO - 1-27 22km, 2-10 17km, 2-19 27km, 2-24 24km, 3-10 44km
GLDEVO - 1-27 24km, 2-10 22km
FSHSKN - 1-27 25km, 2-19 7km
FSHSK8 - 2024-12-24 46km, 2-24-20km
MADSK8 - 1-10 20km

Here is what such a long season of wax scrapings looks like.

As you can see, I have a lot of pairs of skis and they all have their merits. The wax log hints correctly at which skis are my favorite. Here is a breakdown of exactly what my ski collection is and how many times this year I used them (the half values mean I came back to the house and switched halfway through).

I think it's pretty weird that my best and fastest skis — which I protect from abuse — were only appropriate for the conditions twice. If there's an area for improvement, that is it.

Here's a photo of my well loved blue Evos after skiing through some very ragged snow on day 146. These skis have taken some serious abuse!

Here is a complete day by day representation of most of the interesting data I have about this season.

The blue bars show the duration of the outing in hours.
The green bars show the distance covered in km.
The black diamonds show the average speed of the outing in km/hr on the same scale (or close) as the distance bar. The numeric value of the average speed is shown as the first number on the right.
The black triangles on the right show the speed of the fastest km for that outing. It's interesting to compare this to the average. Some outings didn't get individual kms recorded and this mark is absent. The numeric value of the max km pace is shown as the second number on the far right (where extant).
The stars are a personal subjective rating of the outing where 1 star is skiing but as annoying as it can be and 10 is the best flawless skiing imaginable. I only started rating the outings in 2025 so early days just have a square.
The color of the stars (or square) show which skis I used, color coded the same as the pie chart above.
The codes after some of the dates show excursions to official ski trails which sometimes will be groomed. "mk" = McKeever Hills, "vs" = Valley Spur, et al.

The stars that show my subjective rating of a ski outing were an attempt to empirically analyze and optimize the good things about skiing. I find that rating the outing is very helpful for clarity. "Am I really enjoying this?" is a sane question that everyone who skis 150 days in a year will be asking at some point.

The interesting thing I have discovered with such a large data set is that for me something like the following is roughly true.

This means I'm reckoning that my assessment is correct about half of the time — good or bad. But when I'm wrong, I tend to overstate the lack of potential. The lesson one should take if this kind of pattern is observed, is that, sure, you should try things that seem like they will be suboptimal. By recalibrating my expectations to give opportunities the benefit of the doubt, I've definitely come out ahead skiing. I think it also applies to many other areas of life.

Finally, I must mention one other element of unreasonably good fortune this ski season, my wonderful wife. Imagine what a fantastic good sport you'd need to be to indulge my foolish quest to ski such an unreasonable amount — and she was that good sport. She didn't just tolerate my mad hobby but she herself skied 35 days on snow. She skied a very respectable 185km this year. Sometimes the date is shown twice in the data plot — that is generally where I'm going out multiple times in the day, usually a second time to ski with her. She did not grow up skiing and rightly avoids a lot of the sketchy conditions I will blithely ski on. She can have a hard time descending which is the part that's normally considered "easy". But her climbing is impressive and her endurance is better than mine — her average outing time was just under 59 minutes. Getting to ski with her was definitely the highlight of the season.