My tongue is permanently bitten as usual at this season. Many people assume everyone is happy to see the snow melting. I long to say, "You obviously do not go outside all winter anyway, why would you care?" There, now you can say it for me.
There follow some truths about grooming ski trails.
The DRXC snowmobiles rely on loose snow for engine cooling -- the moving drive track has to throw snow up onto a cooling panel in the top of the track box. The snowmobiles also rely on loose snow to lubricate the "sliders", two tough plastic (?) bars that carry most of the weight of the machine on the track under them. If you think of the track as a roadway that is laid down as the machine moves along, the sliders perform exactly like the runners on a snow sled.
As for the "snow", at -8 degrees this morning, the surface of the trails is glassy but rough. Grooming this stuff is like driving in broken glass. It is an extremely tough pull, which makes the machines use a lot of gas, which leads to a lot of waste heat and a lot of down force on the sliders. You can see where this is leading if I point out that icy snow does not fly about under the machine basically at all.
All of this applies to skate skiing. If you want grooves for classic skiing, you can't get there from here. As they reputedly say in New York, "fuggedaboudit". (Look it up on Google.)
As for the skiing, the crunched-up snow is not fun to ski on until the sun softens it and it gets water in it. So, as the sun goes down and the skiers leave (mostly!), lots of ruts are left to freeze overnight, and it all has to be repeated the next day, presuming the motors are not seized from over heating.
I think maybe the trails are toast for another year.
Some of us enjoy finding a large expanse of crust somewhere and skiing on that. Crust skiing, especially skating, can be exhilarating, but my crust testing says that the crust is still weak, especially in the sun. If it is not obvious, be warned that it smarts if you break through the crust at speed.
Happy spring, everyone.
