Taos Ski Week, Day 3

Learning to Ski the Crud

By Carson Bennett, 2-28-08

	peeking over the ridge at Juarez in Taos

You would think that after a storm like that the snow would be up to my eyeballs. Well, it certainly did snow enough, but the wind came and messed it all up. Today I get to chair one early enough to a few runs before the ski week class starts. As I ride to the top of the mountain, I scope out Al’s Run below me. Snow drifts four and five feet high cut diagonally across the run, but in between the drifts – a shield of ice. The wind has scoured the slopes at Taos, picking up every flake from the front side and carrying it away to...somewhere else. Although the base depth is still more than eighty inches, it’s hard as a rock.

When my group and I meet up with Dano at the mid-mountain Whistlestop Cafe, he says as much. “Today, we learn how to ski the crud.”

The trick to skiing crud is to be prepared for anything. So, you’re in powder? Don’t get comfortable. Don’t sit too far back on your skis, because at any second you may make a turn and find your edges chattering across a sheet of ice, or the powder may turn to chunks like broken concrete blocks. Dano gives us two tips for skiing crud: 1. stay balanced. 2. think of your body as a spring (my words, not his.)

Staying balanced seems easy enough, but for me it is a constant fight to remain conscious of my form. Keep my shoulders over my knees, my knees over my ankles, lean forward in the boots, don’t let my hands out of my sight (if I can’t see my hands in my peripheral vision at least, it means they’re behind me, which means I’m off balance.) Thinking of my body as a spring was a little easier. Keep the knees slightly bent, ready to either absorb impact or extend to keep the skis on the snow in troughs. Look down the mountain, watch and feel for changes in the terrain. Etc. Simple.

Not that simple. As we come flying down Lower Stauffenberg, a long blue run in the West Basin, I learn my lesson. Near the trees I’m floating through powder. I get complacent. I stand up straight, lean back, let my uphill hand drift behind me…and suddenly I’m chattering across ice, flailing my arms to regain balance, digging my edges into the frozen, windblown slope, looking like some whirling helmeted Columbia-outerwear-clad dervish, before I hit powder once more, sideways, and flip down the hill.

In the afternoon, under brilliant sun and clear blue skies, the snow softens up a bit. When the lesson is over I ski another couple runs and retire to the Martini Tree for lunch and a beer with fellow snowblogger Bob Berwyn and his lovely girlfriend Leigh. (You can check out his take on Taos here.) Bob is ready to hike the ridges, and Leigh is ready to let him. Bob and I meet up with Ryder, a guy I met at the hostel, and we spend the rest of the afternoon, until the lifts close, hiking High Line Ridge and West Basin. On runs like St. Bernard in the West Basin, we seem to find the snow the storm scraped from the rest of the mountain. In this steep, narrow chute, the snow is up to our waists. We whoop and holler our way down, weaving in and out of the trees, eating a mouthful of snow with nearly every turn. It’s nice to know how to ski the crud, but I’ll take floating through knee-deep powder any day.

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