Why is it that ski instructors look so much better than mere mortals on the hill? I’m not talking about their golden tans or their snappy uniforms. I’m talking about how they stand tall on their skis, the seeming effortlessness of their turns, the elegant, melon-round lines they draw on the snow.
Take Stephen Jentzen, one of Vail’s top instructors. When Jentzen led the way off the top of the mountain on a cottony Colorado day last March, he cut a slender, dashing figure in blue. But what really impressed me was the way he used simple foot and ankle movements to tilt his skis on edge, and how the tracks he left were perfect parallel grooves, like curving railroad tracks.
Stephen was carving. He was riding the designed-in shape of his skis – letting them turn him – rather than muscling his boards through a skidded turn.
“All skiing is letting go and holding on,” he said as we rode the chair to Blue Sky Basin. “Skidding, braking, what we used to call windshield-wiper turns – that’s holding on. Carving is letting go.”
Letting go without giving up control. Sounds like a contradiction, but it isn’t. It is quite simply the holy grail of snow skiing, the not-so-mythical key to becoming a true expert.
I knew about carving – or the dream of carving, anyway. I knew how it was supposed to work. But to really get it, to really feel it, I decided to visit two of Colorado’s Interstate 70 giants, Vail and Copper Mountain.
Vail, 100 miles west of Denver on the west side of its eponymous pass, and Copper, a little closer in on the east side of the same pass, both were having monster snow years. Base depths averaged 8 feet, and the heights of the surrounding Gore and Tenmile ranges – often rocky and exposed – glistened with thick coats of vanilla frosting.
Both areas are famous for their huge swaths of groomed-smooth, green and blue (beginner and intermediate) terrain – the kind of long, gently tilted spaces you need to practice carving. Both resorts have highly touted ski schools. It wasn’t to be a test or a competition. But I thought it would be fun to see how they compared.
Jentzen has been teaching skiing for 32 years. We met in front of the fireplace at the Golden Peak base, where he explained that carving has been an elusive and tantalizing goal since the invention of skis with curved sides. Picture a ski’s plan shape: wide fore body, narrow waist, wide tail. Place a ski on edge and it will trace an arc equal to this built-in radius.
The trouble was, the long, narrow skis that were standard the past 70 years came with built-in radii of 45 meters or more. Only the sport’s ham-thighed geniuses could ride these relatively straight sticks in pure-carve mode.
Comes the revolution
The rest of us had trouble handling arcs that big, and the speed that accompanied them. We learned to twist and skid; every turn was a compromise between letting go and holding on.
But the 1990s saw a design and materials revolution that now allows every skier to at least approximate the carves of the ski gods. It’s akin to the revolutions in tennis rackets (sweet spots as big as Rhode Island), in super-forgiving golf clubs, or mountain bikes with disc brakes and full suspensions.
Ski-makers combined shorter lengths with Mae West proportions to bring the intrinsic turn radius down to 25 meters, then 15, then (in a modern slalom shape) to a whippet-quick 8 meters. Now, in theory at least, we can carve at relatively slow speeds all over the mountain.
Jentzen showed me how to make railroad tracks on the catwalk across to Cloud 9.
“To start, you need a pitch so gentle you’d feel comfortable running it straight,” he said. Once we were coasting along, he had me tilt my right ski up on the little toe side. “Right edge to go right.” The left ski followed suit as if on its own.
Then we switched and tipped the left ski on its left (little toe) edge. Both skis curved to the left. We stopped and looked back at tracks that appeared to have been engraved, the tools on our feet slicing rather than scraping the snow.
Together we ranged across Vail’s vastness, from distant Blue Sky Basin (6 miles from the village) to the alabaster bathtub of Poppyfields in China Bowl. We never skied the same run twice and we didn’t come back down to the base until the day was done.
An expanse of “king’s cloth”
That’s a big part of Vail’s draw. It is huge – 33 lifts, 3,450 vertical feet, 5,289 acres – the single biggest ski mountain in North America. Snowcats groom an average of 1,200 to 1,600 acres every night, leaving in their wake what skiers call “corduroy,” the minutely ribbed, exquisitely carvable “king’s cloth.”
The expansiveness works inside you as well. Learning is easy when you have mile after uninterrupted mile to reinforce the movements. And, what’s more poetic, you feel as if you’re flying above the valleys as you glide from region to region, bowl to bowl.
The Euro scale is not surprising when you consider that Vail’s founders were 10th Mountain Division veterans who fought in Italy and saw the Alps firsthand. They brought a European sensibility to the village as well.
Things were quite different over the pass at Copper Mountain. Copper sprang full-blown along the banks of Tenmile Creek during the winter of 1972-73. The mountain was universally lauded, especially its natural terrain divisions – beginners and experts rarely get in one another’s way – but the high-rise condo village suffered the same slight as Gertrude Stein’s hometown of Oakland, Calif.: There was no there there.
Copper’s public spaces have no old skis on the walls, no black-and-white photos of skiing’s pioneers; there’s no history here, really. But now Intrawest, the Vancouver-based conglomerate (Whistler-Blackcomb, Mount Tremblant, Mammoth Mountain), owns the resort, and “there” has been transformed into a place of near-constant stimulation.
Coming off the mountain, I was greeted in The Burning Stones Plaza by U2’s “Beautiful Day” pumping from stadium-
sized speakers. Kids of all ages flipped their skis and snowboards out of the machine-
sculpted superpipe (think of salmon leaping) just up the hill.
A carving lesson
My adventure came the next day in the form of a carving lesson with Paul Cunningham, a 41-year-old Boston native who has been teaching at Copper for five years. If Stephen Jentzen and Vail follow an orderly, Mozartian progression, then Cunningham and Copper dance to a more free-form beat: Bobby McFerrin, perhaps, or – why not – the Street Boys of New York.
Cunningham is a big-picture guy. He thinks of carving “as offensive skiing versus defensive skiing. Skidding is defensive. In a carved turn, the tail follows the tip, the ski is always moving forward, cutting its groove in the snow.”
Mostly, Cunningham didn’t talk; he led, and I followed. On Soliloquy, the perfect rolling, dipping green trail on the area’s western edge, he brought out his bag of tricks. It included slow-speed railroad track exercises like Jentzen’s. But he also gave me more visceral challenges.
“Change edges early in the arc,” he said, “well before the fall line. Then lighten up through the bottom of the turn when the forces are greatest. Try not to ‘park-and-ride.’ In other words, don’t just assume the position and stand there. You want to be fluid, flowing.”
Cunningham took me up to Rendezvous, a timberline saddle between Copper and Union peaks with miles of open blue and green runs. (Like Vail, Copper is blessed with easy terrain up high, where anybody can feel the air at 11,000-plus feet and look the alpine snowfields straight in the eye.) Here Cunningham opened up the throttle and banked his body more severely to the inside.
“The higher the speed, the greater the centrifugal force,” he said, saving his comments for the lift rides, talking with his hands. “The greater the centrifugal force, the more edge angle you need.”
It made sense in a wonderfully circular way: A curved edge cuts a groove in the snow and is in turn deflected by that snow groove. Centrifugal force wants to straighten my curving line, wants to hurl me off the merry-
go-round. I resist by leaning in, by in effect placing the soles of my feet against the tiny wall my skis are carving in the snow.
Eureka! A pure-carved turn is a carnival ride of rock-solid stability. Cunningham grinned. He didn’t need to say more. He knew to let the dome of blue sky over Vail Pass preside over our delight as down and down we went, standing tall, leaning in, letting the skis etch precise semicircles in the beautifully manicured shapes of the mountain.
Peter Shelton is a former ski-school director and born-again carver who lives in Montrose. His latest book is “Climb to Conquer: The Untold Story of WWII’s 10th Mountain Division Ski Troops.”
