Author Archives: Andrew Ziehl

About Andrew Ziehl

An avid outdoorsman.

Gear Prep: Climbing Skins and Gloves

I took today to do two mini-projects and ready myself for the rest of ski season that’s to come. The first was to cut my new climbing skins down to fit my Atomic 180 Helidaddys. The second was to waterproof and seal a pair of leather gloves I bought.

I did get some skiing in yesterday, however, up at Wildcat. They’d gotten 8″ inches Friday, so I headed up with my Dad before he went back overseas, and met up with Rob and an assortment of other skiers who came out of the woodwork.

Now, onto the projects:

Climbing Skin Trimming

Black diamond actually has a great how-to video on trimming, but I figured it might be useful do a brief write up since this is the first pair of skins I’ve trimmed. The video details almost everything I cover below. I bought the 125m Black Diamond Nylon STS skins. My basic reasoning for this was that I’ve been borrowing a used pair of Nylon STD skins with a clipfix tail clip from Sweeney, and it seemed like I just needed more coverage under my skis. The 125mm would totally cover my Atomics since their dimensions are 126-99-117. The STS skins also seemed to be the most utilitarian.

The basic process is, clip the skin to the tail, lay it onto the skin from tail to tip, and then start measuring. A quick note here, it seemed like it should be obvious how to attach the tail clip, but I had to pause and mess with it for a few minutes. I’d seen Rob use the clips, held a correctly attached one before, and had the diagrams on the skin instructions in front of me…but it wasn’t immediately clear. The images on the BD instructions don’t accurately display how to attach the metal clip to the strap. In lieu of this, here’s several photos.

STS tail clip attachment

Top view. You can secure the rubber strap to the metal clip.

You’ll notice that I have the clip in the 2nd position, rather than the 4th that Black Diamond recommends. Part of this is that I cut the skin a little long and had already attached the tip piece, but also I figure I want these skins to be able to potentially fit a ski with similar sidecut but with a length of 185.

After you lay out the skin, measure where the tip piece will meet the skin, mark it with a sharpie and ruler, and cut the skin. Then align the tip loop and screw it in. Use pliers to remove the screw that sticks through.

Removing excess screw from the tip piece attachment with a twist of the pliers

At this point, remove the skin and re-apply it from tip to tail. It should be under a bit of tension. BD recommends cutting excess skin at the tip, by marking angular lines from both sides of tip loop to where the skin would meet the snow, and removing the excess. Their included tool makes the cutting fairly easy.

Here’s where the “measure twice, cut once” part comes in. With the skin fairly centered on the ski, cut one side along the sidecut.

Removing the excess skin from the edges

Then remove the skin and re-align it so the side you just cut has 2mm of edge showing. This is so when you’re skinning you can still use your edges. Make the second cut.

Fully cut skin, with edges showing.

Ready for touring

Repeat for the second ski and that’s it! I’m hoping this will resolve the slipping problems I’ve had on steeps compared to skinning with properly cut skins.

Glove waterproofing

I’ve had a bit of trouble with gloves recently since it’s been so damn cold on the mountain. I just bought a super warm pair of mitts for cold days, but I want to make this all-leather pair my every day glove for the slopes. I wore these at Wildcat when it was ~25 degrees Fahrenheit without issue, but they got very damp on the outside by the end of the day.

The procedure was, heat the gloves in the oven on warm until they heat up. Then apply mink oil, and put them back in the oven to let them soak in. Take the gloves out after 5 minutes or so and let cool. Then apply Nikwax waterproofing.

Left glove, with no mink oil, vs. the right glove after oiling. I went back and oiled the few bits around the thumb and cuff that I'd missed.

Application products

The finished product

The mink oil darkened the leather and made it a bit softer. The Nikwax was spray on and seems to have soaked in without affecting the glove texture much.

Finally we get to play in some Pow!

Practically giddy from excitement during last Thursday’s storm, Rob, Sweeney, and I headed up to Jackson, NH where we crashed at Denaro’s. Rob and I had plans for a mini-ski vacation: 4 days up north. We were kindly greeted on Friday with ~10 inches of fresh at Wildcat.

Day 1: Wildcat / Attitash

We’d come prepared with coupons galore, ready to get the best deals wherever the snow was. Wildcat was empty when we showed up, and there was some serious graupel falling that switched back and forth to snow during the day. I’m going to have to agree with Sweeney’s TR here, in his words, it was debatable whether we were slaying gnar or pow, but we were finally slaying something.

We ran laps on a few trails we basically had to ourselves, skiing fresh lines every run. My Atomic Helidaddy’s did pretty well in the steeps, but wanted to sink a bit more on the flats which resulted in skiing the tails a bit.

Rob on his DPS 138s

Sweeney on his Drifters

Me getting into a turn

Rob kindly lent me his DPS 138’s to try–which were pretty much the best thing ever. They are basically shaped like two water skis, which makes them butter turns in pow, no matter how far forward you get. I’m sold that rocker and reverse/reverse camber is the way to go in Pow. We didn’t snap any more photos after the swap–we were too busy having fun ripping it up.

We headed over to check out Attitash for the afternoon, which was maybe not the best idea in retrospect since they got less snow and more sleet than Wildcat, but overall I can’t complain. By around 3 pm we’d pretty much skied everything worth skiing, so we packed up and headed to our next stop at Alex’s place in Lincoln to meet up with Alex, Denaro, Shane, and Hannah.

Day 2: Jay Peak

We rolled out of bed Saturday at the ungodly hour of 5:15, but as soon as we looked at Jay reporting 14-16″ of new snow overnight we knew it was going to be an epic day. We got to Jay just in time to stand outside in the 0 degree temps and high winds which was well worth it to get first chair. Some of the runs we took might have been the first tracks of the season.

Sweeney got some sick POV footage of the woods, see for yourself:

Eventually the winds beat us down and we headed in for the final time to warm up and recuperate. Sweeney had some nasty looking frostbite that sent him in around lunch, but seems to be making a quick recovery. My own previous frostbite injuries were acting up as well, unfortunately. We headed back to Lincoln where Rob and I schemed up plans for the rest of the weekend.

Day 3: Smuggs

While everyone else seemed to have had enough of the cold, Rob and I woke bleary eyed at 5:15 again to make the drive up to Smuggler’s Notch. Not really knowing the mountain, we met up with a group of Rob’s friends off the TGR forums, and headed over to the resort, which had gotten about as much snow as Jay. The wind was mercifully mostly still, but the summit temp was a frigid -20 which kept us from doing too many laps. We skied some trees with the TGR guys, and the ducked off a trail into what looked like a nice open line, but dead ended. We ended up having to backtrack, bootpacking a few hundred yards in dense woods where we’d unknowingly made the classic mistake of going right where we should have gone left. Oh well, it was a fun adventure.

At this point I tried to take a few photos, but my camera batteries were literally frozen, so I gave up and we skied a few more runs instead.

Day 4: Touring the Notch

We crashed near the Notch Sunday night and awoke to temps nearing -20 in town. This was not very pleasant follow-up to the previous days of freezing our extremities, but I think we made the best of it. Rob’s friend directly us to an undisclosed location, where we headed to do a mini tour around 11 when it was finally warming up. After getting a few turns in, we hiked and then skied out to meet up with another group for an afternoon exploratory tour. My camera was still complaining of the cold, and in the interest of not giving away any local secrets, again, no photos.

We parked below the ridge we were planning to ski, quickly threw our skins on and got moving. Soon I was wearing just a baselayer. I presume it must have warmed up a bit, but it was the first time I can say I was warm while outside during the weekend. We skinned for about two hours until we found some decent looking steeps and transitioned to hit some untracked lines on mostly low angle woods. After a bit of traversing we found a logging road where we got up some speed and got to throw the skis around a bit.

Finally, my first non-resort touring! The skiing was well worth the effort. My new pack seemed to fit the bill, but my borrowed skins were still struggling even on the natural snow. There was just too much glide due to the skins being ~80mm underfoot on my 99mm waist skis. Not a good combo. These seem like they’ll do the trick though:

It was a shame to leave even after freezing our toes off all weekend. This was certainly a memorable weekend.

Edit: In case you didn’t believe the temperatures I was citing, here’s a pic of the thermostat in Rob’s car:

-8.5...the ambient temp outside while at Smuggs on Sunday

Bike Repair: Wheel Replacement

Last Tuesday I did a complete swap of the rear wheel on my Trek SU 100. It took me a little while to throw this short post together because I’ve been distracted meticulously following the upcoming snow storm.

Sometime before the holidays I noticed my rear brakes were rubbing, and it turned out to be a crack on the side of my rear rim. I blame Boston’s potholes. I did a little reading and determined I didn’t want to wait for the wheel to “fail catastrophically” despite the fact the crack seemed innocuous enough. Many bikers had probably had this happen to them, or done this repair, but this is the first time I’ve encountered a cracked rim.

The offending crack.

When I was back in my apartment after the holidays, I went out to REI and bought a new rear wheel, already set-up with a hub and spokes to save the hassle. I asked the shop to give me a wheel “just to get the job done” since this is mainly a commuter bike. I figured I could improvise / borrow some tools, but I ended up needing a Cassette Lockring, and a Chain Whip. Due to my impatience to finish the repair, this involved a second trip to REI for tools.

Derailleur and gears

Some pre-repair pics.

Pretty grimy cassette

The lockring is the black piece that screws into the hub, holding the cassette on the bike. After watching some videos on youTube for cassette removal, I learned it is fairly easy to strip the lockring, and it makes a loud clicking noise while loosening/tightening it. When replacing the lockring, it appears you want it a little more than hand-tight, so that there is no play in the gears (they can’t shift at all).

The right tools for the job, complete with degreaser and grease. I also recommend a big wrench.

Since I was about to disassemble the rear gears, I decided to degrease everything, including the derailleur. The degreasing was by far the messiest part, and I spent most of the time dealing with the derailleur pieces.

Cassette off the wheel

Tire with tube removed, everything is ready to be put on the new wheel.

The clean gears and cassette on the new wheel.

Fully assembled.

The one issue I had with with the repair was the rim I replaced was double-walled, so the spokes were recessed. The new wheel is only single walled, so it is weaker, and will probably need some truing down the road. So far it rides fine, and I don’t really notice a difference.

New Years Day on Mt Washington

Tuckerman Ravine. Left Gully is far left, the Chute is next to it on the right.

Decidedly fed up with the snow conditions in the East, Rob, Sweeney and I headed to Pinkham Notch on New Years Day to see if there was anything skiable in Tucks. I’d spent the previous two days skiing, first at Cannon and then we’d been at Mad River Glen, where there was probably more moss and rocks than snow on some of the trails.

We did some beacon practice at MRG, since I’d never used one before. It took a bit of getting used to, but I feel a lot more confident if I ever had to do a single burial search–though I still feel like I’m just starting to get the hang of it.

Instead of partying hard, we crashed early in North Conway to get a reasonable start. We’d heard there may be some skiable lines, but with the variable weather, we weren’t sure what we’d find. I’d recently acquired the necessary mountaineering, and avalanche safety gear, so either way, this would be a good chance get used to it.

Sweeney lent me an old pair of his climbing skins–that we never got to use. The trail coverage was bad because of the recent rain. Sweeney and Rob hiked up to Hojos in their AT boots. Since I only have race boots (far more uncomfortable for hiking in), I put on my Brooks Trailrunners, and threw on MICROspikes over them, which proved to be a winning combination for the blue ice we encountered on the way up.

The bowl looked pretty gnarly, but Left Gully and the Chute were a bit filled in, so we made our way over. Sweeney was behind the camera that day, so all photos are courtesy him. His TR is here along with a goPro video of the expedition up through his first run.

Rob and I.

Some cool scenery.

Ice Axes out, on the ascent.

Rob and Sweeney, being more experience than me, stopped several times to evaluate the snow conditions. They didn’t find anything very worrying so we continued up.

Me, contemplating my line.

Left Gulley was a little firm, though Rob said Sweeney and I softened it up a bit for him–after he kindly ‘let’ us go first. Unfortunately, Sweeney only got photos of me standing on my edges, which I did a lot of the first run, due to the narrow trail we had to work with, and the ice crust on skiers left.

The Chute, our short second run.

Rob, laying it over on the Chute.

The Chute, although short, was MUCH better. The steeps at the top had a bit of an ice crust, but the middle, where it narrows down by the rocks, was a blast.

Heading out of the bowl.

You may have noticed in the photos that my gear was strewn everywhere, and that I carried race poles up. Bringing race poles was a mistake on my part–I’d left my 3 section trekking poles at home. However, I didn’t really have a winter pack either, I was using my old, trusty North Face Borealis, which clocks in somewhere around 23 L, and certainly isn’t meant for tossing almost 40 lbs of gear on. It did the job, but the pack looked and felt like it was about to burst–my skis were barely hanging on and there was nowhere to put things. Luckily I’ve now resolved this problem. Knowing the features my old pack lacked for winter use, I went and bought the REI Double Diamond pack, which so far looks pretty sweet.

We skied down through the bushes as far as we could, then we packed up and reconvened briefly at Hermit Lake. Sweeney and Rob attempted to ski the Sherburne as far as possible. I didn’t like the prospect of hiking any more in my ski boots, so I put my shoes back on and hiked down, ending up in Pinkham just behind them.

Overall it was a stellar day, and probably the best skiing to be had in the East on Sunday.

Certainly a memorable weekend.