Liam,
Are you just making things up as you post? If you're truly in a no-fall zone, the stupidest thing an intermediate skier can do is hop, giving them a chance to lose balance, break the snow, or gain speed. Everything you're suggesting in this thread is replacing knowledge of how to make the skis turn, with a large unecessary muscular effort to force the skis to turn. This not skiing or turning, but hacking your way through terrain that you do not possess the skill to actually ski. You consider this necessary because your skiing reality is such that you can't understand how to do it any other way. Just because you can't make your skis work on this kind of terrain does not make muscling them the right choice. Frankly it is a little disappointing to me when intermediate skiers pose as experts on topics of technique and in doing so mislead other skiers who are trying to open up their repertoire of available terrain.
...and btw, Tobins bump skiing isn't that good. The fact that you're even looking for a non-pro skier to compare to it demonstrates that it is attainable. Tobin is not a good skier.
[/quote]
Quite the contrary-I can imagine all manner of ways to ski all manner of terrain. Aside from the barbs pointed towards me personally, I'll add a few more things:
I'm hardly on unorthodox grounds suggesting a few well-placed hop turns (plus a solid side slip) are skills someone might want to use as the venture into the steep and narrow (especially if the snow is truly a difficult crud/ crust) variety. Those moves come in handy and they help the advancing skier experience more and more exciting terrain, which is why I, and many others, ski in the first place.
It's why Deslaurier and others like him who run 'steep and deep' style camps teach it to their clients. It has utility, and, unlike the modern ski
**** dudes who's 'laying them over' in the steeps is filling coffins, these utilitarian moves have kept them alive.
I'd expect that someone who skied as a child, ski raced all their lives and now worked a portion of their adulthood as a ski race coach could probably carve (brushed variety) much steeper and narrower terrain than most...but there would still be a limit, unless you hit the Hoji level (but as I said, that puts you on the date with death calendar).
I actually went through a pretty standard ski evolution: Spent a long time as a very athletic intermediate (I could hop like a
**** kangaroo) and then spent almost 5 years eschewing all hopping, and pivoting if possible-I was hot on the Harb stuff (still am) and I liked Clendenin (actually he's the one who derided hop turns as an 'air stem'-that stuck with me). I absolutely refused to hop or make any moves that didn't fit this paradigm
Until a few years ago... I was skiing some tight new england trees in some deep, manky snow with a guy named Tom-now try as I might, every once in a while I'd get bogged down and could not move my skis quick enough to avoid hitting logs or getting tripped up (you know, that sort of terrain where there are areas you have to turn, and you don't always get to turn where you want to turn!). I watched him, he mostly skied similar to a pmts standard, except in sticky tight spots he'd bust out this quick 'crud-hop' (he called it)-sometimes no more than a hopping edge change, sometime a hop and pivot (or double pivot)-and he easily kept his trajectory and sailed right through some impressive terrain, looked good doing it, and he was on 68mm K2 Crossfires in a 167cm!
Afterwards I asked him to teach me that move, I worked on it for two days (a few hours each day) and you know what--it was liberating. Both in terms of what I could ski and handle AND paradigmatically-I realized my slavish adherence to a single movement pattern which had helped build my overall turn mechanics, was stultifying my growth, and more importantly, my enjoyment of skiing in other areas.
Like I said, go 98% with HH (or some other facsimile)-2% in acquiring 'bacon saving skills'--sooner or later we ALL need them.
That said, do I doubt another set of moves would work in similar terrain?? Nope-but I know what actually did work (and continues to work for me)...and a lot of other far better skiers than either of us.
I make no bones about liking the Section 8 stuff (and most of the other top CSIA LvL 4's as well-which Tobin comes out of).-Heck, I'm a fan of Josh Foster as well. I like Berger, too-and I like Reilly--none of those guys are affiliated with PMTS (HH has chipped at Berger in his forum and Reilly rather publicly distanced himself from pmts).
None of that matters to me, however, as I'm not stuck with an allegiance to one guy's set of high priced ski lessons.
Home
Login
Register