SKI TIPS WITH DAN EGAN LEAN FORWARD

BY DAN EGAN BS CONTRIBUTOR

The most used overused saying in ski instruction is, “lean forward and pressure the front of your boots.” Even though this phrase is used by most ski instructors and coaches, many skiers ski sitting back with more pressure over the tails of their skis rather pressure on the tips of the skis.

First let’s look at the three major sections of a ski.

Tip: front end of the ski to 3 or 4 inches in front of the toe piece.

Mid-section: 3 to 4 inches in front of the toe binding toe piece to 3 to 4 inches behind the heel piece.

Tail: 3 to 4 inches in behind the tail piece to the end of the ski

When we pressure the tip of the ski, several things are accomplished. It flexes the front section of the ski, which flexes the tip and initiates the turn. This is critical part of controlling speed.

If you only pressure the mid-section of a ski without bending the tip, the result the ski is tends to scoot forward and instantly the pressure hits the tail. Pressuring the tail is pure acceleration, and the combination of these two things moves your foot in front of your hip... which causes you to lose control.

Skiers who “sit back” generally pivot their skis to turn, by twisting their feet, rather than carve turns. When your hips, hands and shoulders are aft of your feet you have few options for turning, you throw your hips into the turn and or pivot your feet.

Returning to the “Lean forward” concept, many people bend their knees by first sinking their hip down and pushing the knee forward, in other words they sit. This bends the knees but moves the hip back or aft of center resulting with very little pressure on the tongue of their boots and their hip aft of their feet.

The compensating body motion to counter this stance is shoulder forward, however this makes you bend at the waist and puts the hips further back. When we break at the waist, we lose core strength in our midsection. Once the core is broken, the strain is on the lower back and too much strain is put on the thigh. This is not only inefficient, but also exhausting.

So, what is the solution? It's simple: stand up and move your hips over your feet during the transition of the turn. While reaching forward into the new pole plant with the downhill hand, shift your shoulder forward and down the hill and tighten your core as you tip your skis into the new turn. This will load up the tip of the ski and initiate the new turn with tip pressure and the result will be a carving ski with an even flow of snow from tip to tail.

Now let’s talk about ski boots. Boots are designed with varying degrees of stiffness, referred to as the flex rating. Boots are constructed with a flex rating ranging from 60 to 140 and on average most boots fall within an 80 to 130.

There is no industry standard between brands, so a 130 flex in one brand could be 120 or less in another. And the other varying part of a boot design is cuff angle. Cuff angle is the forward lean of a boot and manufacturers have models of ski boots with different forward leans. The trend lately has been to straighten cuff angles, and if this is the case with your boots, it puts the knee not over the toes.

Because of the stiffness of boots, there is only so far the knee can actually move forward.

So, with this limitation how can we get further forward to create the desired tip pressure required for a turning ski? Simple! We create angles, starting with flexing the ankle and driving it to the inside of the turn, this is complemented by moving the hip forward while angling the knee into the hill.

The result in forward pressure at the top of the turn. As we move through the turn yes, the hips will sink low, the feet will move forward as the ski accelerates but by moving forward and standing up in the transition of the turn you can realign your body over your feet for the next turn. And just like that you will be leaning forward.

Extreme Skiing Pioneer, Dan Egan coaches and guides at Big Sky Resort during the winter. His 2022/23 steeps camps at Big Sky Resort run March 1-3, and March 8-10. His book, “Thirty Years in a White Haze” was released 2021 and his newest book, “All-Terrain Skiing II” was released this November and comes with a free app which you can download from Google and Apple App Stores. His books and worldwide ski camps are available at www.Dan-Egan.com

BY STEPHEN TRIMBLE WRITERS ON THE RANGE

Last November, the Great Salt Lake, iconic landmark of the Great Basin Desert, fell to its lowest surface elevation ever recorded. The lake had lost 73% of its water and 60% of its area. More than 800 square miles of lakebed sediments were laid bare to become dust sources laden with heavy metals.

Without emergency action to double the lake’s inflow, it could dry out in five years. “We’re seeing this system crash before our eyes,” warns Bonnie Baxter, director of the Great Salt Lake Institute at Salt Lake City’s Westminster College.

Settlers colonized the eastern shoreline 175 years ago, displacing Native peoples, and all of us who followed have mostly taken this desert lake and its fiery sunsets for granted. But the lake is an economic engine as well as an ecological treasure.

Its waters and wetlands yield thousands of jobs and an annual $2.5 billion for Utah from mineral extraction and brine shrimp eggs used worldwide as food for farmed fish and shrimp. The lake also suppresses windblown toxic dust, boosts precipitation of incoming storms through the “lake effect,” and supports 80% of Utah’s wetlands.

The Great Salt Lake has no outlet. It can hold its own against evaporation only if sufficient water arrives from three river systems, fed by snowmelt in the lake’s 21,000-square-mile mountain watershed. When that flow declines, the shallow lake recedes.

In each of the last three years the lake has received less than a third of its average streamflow, recorded since 1850. And as the lake shrinks, it grows saltier, currently measuring 19% salinity. This is six times as salty as the ocean and well past the 12% salinity that’s ideal for brine shrimp and brine flies.

More than 10 million birds depend on the lake’s tiny invertebrates for food. Half of the world’s population of Wilson’s phalaropes feasts on Great Salt Lake brine flies in summer, taking on fat reserves for their 3,400-mile, non-stop migration to South America. For phalaropes, the lake is “a lifeline,” says conservation biologist Maureen Frank.

All these wonders do best with a minimum healthy lake level of about 4,200 feet in elevation, which the Great Salt Lake hasn’t seen for 20 years.

You could say that the crisis snuck up on us.

Our big build-up of dams, canals and pipelines to harness incoming water throughout the lake’s watershed began soon after 1900. With a lake this big and with natural fluctuations in weather, “unsustainable behavior doesn't get noticed until you are really far down the line,” says Ben Abbott, ecologist at Brigham Young University.

By the 1960s, diversions had bled the lake to levels nearly as low as we see today. But then an extraordinary wet period masked the downward trend. In the mid-1980s, the lake hit an historic high, flooding wetlands and highways and threatening the Salt Lake City Airport.

When precipitation dropped to normal, lake levels declined again, aided by today’s drying and warming climate, which is reducing natural flows and increasing evaporation, a recent but growing impact.

But agriculture is the primary driver of the disappearing lake. Two-thirds of the diversions in the Great Salt Lake watershed go to farms and ranches. With climate change accelerating, experts say the only way to bring back the lake is to decrease diversions and crank open the spigots of incoming streams.

Because Utah manages its own water, it’s up to the state Legislature to save the lake. “We can’t talk water into the lake” through studies and task forces, as Salt Lake City Rep. Joel Briscoe puts it. The state Legislature can—and must—pass mandates and incentives to reduce water use, purchase water rights, pay farmers to fallow fields and increase streamflow.

To pass such legislation, lawmakers must withstand unremitting pressure from a chorus of high-paid and powerful water lobbyists.

The 2023 Utah legislative session ended on March 3. Members didn't take decisive and difficult action to save the Great Salt Lake from collapse, with some advocates describing the action taken as legislative Band-aids. As the Brigham Young University scientist Ben Abbott says, “Unlike politicians, hydrology doesn’t negotiate.”

Waiting another year may be too late. Utah—the second driest state in the nation—must come to grips with its arid heart.

Stephen Trimble is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring conversation about the West. A 35th anniversary update of his book, The Sagebrush Ocean: A Natural History of the Great Basin, will be published next year.