Scouting Your Line

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Reading Time: 3 minutes How to navigate a mountain like the pros. My friend Paul and I first spied the inviting, untracked face from the lift. It would take a bit of hiking but […]

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Ski Canada @ 50 From Snowplow to Slarve

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Reading Time: 3 minutes It’s hard to believe it’s been five decades of stories and photos, people and places…recording our ski world as it’s grown, morphed and thrived. We hope you enjoy this random […]

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Plugging the Leaks

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Reading Time: 6 minutes The battle to develop and keep life-long skiers rests on the shoulders of Canadian ski areas. Every year, tens of thousands of Canadians from many backgrounds take a few introductory […]

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Topple Like There’s No Tomorrow

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Reading Time: 2 minutes A ski is a simple machine: put it on edge, apply a little pressure and it will turn. The tricky part in skiing is transitioning from one edge to the […]

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What’s Your Angle?

Reading Time: 2 minutes Without “angulation,” all ski instructors have to our credit is pretty skiing, honed buttocks and livers that look like old leather saddlebags. Webster’s may have added it to the dusty […]

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Ski Better With a Pack

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Reading Time: 2 minutes When heading into the wilds, make sure you carry first aid along with your snow safety equipment, and know how to use it all. Leave your plans with someone not […]

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Hands: Save ‘Em For Après

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Reading Time: 2 minutes Instructors are often asked, “Where should my arms be?” Back in the day, ski instructors could make an entire season out of endlessly and minutely adjusting the arms of their […]

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One Thing to Remember in Powder

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Reading Time: < 1 minutes Okay, you’ve put the miles in on the groomers, you’ve tasted them with fresh snow and even forayed into the trees beside the slope once in a while. Every instructional […]

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Skill School – Fast Track Your Awesome

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Reading Time: 2 minutes Where’s the Middle of My Skis? Now that the ski season is underway, you need to return to last season’s level of performance as quickly as possible. Like any sport, […]

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Rotational Angulation

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Reading Time: 3 minutes In skiing, often our main goal is to link a series of turns to create a sequence. While generally round, these turns can take many shapes, depending on our speed […]

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Let’s Talk About Feelings

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Reading Time: 4 minutes Becoming a great skier is about learning from experience, considering past performance, thinking about what went right but, equally important, what went wrong. Most skiers base their attempts at analysis […]

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Get a Grip

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Reading Time: 4 minutes Understanding angulation and inclination is key to controlling your skidding. One of the main reasons people sign up for a ski lesson is because they have trouble gripping on hard […]

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Adapt – or faceplant

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Reading Time: 4 minutes Let’s be honest. We all faceplant from time to time. While it’s tempting to blame the snow, the root cause is really our failure to anticipate changes in the snow […]

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Do You Downstem?

Reading Time: 2 minutes   You’re skiing along and suddenly the tail of your downhill ski slips out. Or perhaps it happens on a micro level at the end of every turn. In the […]

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Perfect in Powder 4 – Don’t Sit Back

Reading Time: < 1 minutes In this photo Todd demonstrates well a key trick of the best powder pros—don’t sit back! Notice how his hips are well up over his feet. He could be skiing […]

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Perfect in Powder 3 – Speed Will Set You Free

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Reading Time: < 1 minutes Have you noticed how fast many of the powder pros ski? It’s not just because they are pros, it’s also because turns are more effortless with speed. Increasing speed is […]

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Perfect in Powder 2 – Suck, Don’t Blow

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Reading Time: < 1 minutes Real powder doesn’t have a solid base underfoot, which means that trying to push off or hop is an ineffective waste of energy. Novices try to bounce, while experts bend […]

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Perfect in Powder 1 – Use Wide Skis

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Reading Time: < 1 minutes It may seem too obvious, but powder snow is where wide skis actually make sense. The float provided by skis that are more than 100mm wide underfoot really do make […]

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It’s All About the Feet … or is it? pt. 2

Reading Time: 2 minutes In the steeps by MATT BARNES  * photos: ADAM STEIN  *  snow: Laax, Switzerland The analogy of “holding a tray of drinks downhill” is an easy one to visualize because […]

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It’s All About the Feet .. or is it? pt.1

Reading Time: 2 minutes The analogy of “holding a tray of drinks downhill” is an easy one to visualize because let’s face it, most of us can relate to drinking. But once you’re able […]

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Terrain and Turn Shape

Reading Time: 2 minutes Tip and Photos by John Schwirtlich Often when skiers drop into the deep, they make the same old turn regardless of the terrain steepness or snow conditions. But the pitch of […]

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Why Skis Turn

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Reading Time: < 1 minutes You may find that I constantly harp on the idea of edging the ski to turn when it seems more intuitive to “turn” the skis to turn, but there is […]

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Bend the Inside Leg

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Reading Time: < 1 minutes Think of applying weight to your working ski by bending the other leg. The secret to getting expert levels of edging is to flex the uphill leg to shift weight […]

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Anatomy of an Expert Turn

Reading Time: < 1 minutes Expert or “performance” turns are not for everyone, but if your goal is to ski like the world’s best (including Silver Star’s Rodger Poole), start with these reference points.   […]

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