The Evolution of my Emergency Pack

In a previous post I listed out all the things I like to carry with me when I’m tethering sit skis. Some for mechanical issues like zip ties & alum keys. Some for comfort reasons like heat pads & space blankets. Once you start a list like that you tend to find things to add to it rather than things to take out. I just added an adapter than allows me to use wrench sockets with a screwdriver, I’m thinking of adding a USB battery pack.

All of these things are potentially very useful, but they do add up. My full Emergency Pack is now about the size and weight of a six-pack of beer cans. So the question comes, how do I carry it around?

I tried a back pack. It’s certainly big enough, but it has some drawbacks:

• I don’t like the feel of a backpack when I’m riding a chairlift, it pushes me forward.
• I have to take the back pack off to get anything out when I need it.
• It’s dark in there, it’s hard to find the thing I’m looking for.

I tried a big zip lock bag, which I kept in a large pocket inside my ski jacket. That was better. I can get to it easily. I can see the thing I need in the bag. But it’s still hard to fish the right thing out of the bag. This worked OK for a few seasons, but now I have a new ski jacket, and it doesn’t have a big pocket that you can dump something like this in.

So this year I’m trying a fishing vest. It’s a vest with over a dozen pockets. I can keep my screwdriver in one, zip ties in another, an edgy-wedgy in a third, etc. It’s not warm at all, just thin material, so I wear it under my jacket, but over everything else.

So far it’s working. I was able to fit everything I carry into it, and I still have some spare pockets (so now I can think of some more things to carry). It feels heavy when you pick it up, but not when you are wearing it, I guess that’s because everything is spread out & close to your body. My main fear is that I’ll forget which pocket has what, and end up having to check 10 pockets to find something. Hopefully I can avoid that if I’m consistent on where I put things.

Do you carry a bunch of “just in case” stuff around with you? How do you carry it?

Independence Day

We are always aiming to teach our athletes to ski independently. But what does that mean? For many of our students that means skiing without tethers, and making their own decisions on route & speed; in the same way an able-bodied skier would.

But for some of our students that just isn’t going to happen. Their disabilities are sufficiently profound that they will never be able to ski without a tetherer.. Does that mean they can’t be independent? Well, yes, but also no.  Maybe we just need to adjust what independence means for them.

For one of my skiers independence means picking their own turns. They choose when to turn, plan thee route down the hill, inherently this mean they also choose the overall speed of the run.  I blogged about this style of tethering recently as “Silent Running”. This requires an extra level of skill in the tetherer, to anticipate & react rather than plan and direct the turns. But it makes the skier’s experience much closer to independence. They are as actively engaged in skiing as any able bodied skier, and just using the tetherer as a safety device. I’ve done this with skiers in monoskis, bi-skis and even quad skis.

Another of my skiers is more profoundly disabled. He doesn’t have sufficient control over his arms and upper body to initiate turns. And particularly to finish a turn & transition to the other side. So his tetherer is calling & controlling the turns.  But he still has some level of autonomy. He chooses which runs he wants to do, and who he wants to tether for him.  I’ve blogged about this skier and his talking board.  He is non-verbal but can communicate his choices to us by pointing at the board.

You’ll notice that one of his choices is “Get me a Worse Tetherer” He uses that one often, from his perspective a clean simple run down middle of the hill is fine, but not memorable.  He loves beginner tetherers who might put him in the trees, or roll him with a poorly timed turn.  There is excitement in the danger and uncertainty.  He wants a poor tetherer for much the same reasons that teenagers love to ski black run they aren’t really competent for.

Ultimately we ski because it’s fun.  And part of that fun is making your own decisions,  and judging your own risks. That is equally true of skiers with or without disabilities.  For skiers who can’t ski without tethers we need to consider creative ways to give them some independence & autonomy.  Skiing off tethers is a great way to be independent, but it doesn’t have to be the only one.

Silent Running

On my home hill the usual sit skier progression starts with a tetherer bringing the sit skier down a green run, with the tetherer making all the decision and doing most of the work. The sitskier is almost a passenger. Then over time more and more control is handed over to the sitskier.

One key step is when the sitskier, rather than the tetherer, is choosing the turns and planning a route down the hill. This is usually done later in the sequence, when the sitskier is already doing most of the turning, and the tethers are slack most of the time. But this is an important step before letting the sitskier off tethers. They need to be able to turn and stop, but they also need to have a good sense of when to turn and stop.

This is a skill we expect able bodied skiers pick up without any explicit training, but in reality a lot of us have got ourselves into tricky situations as a beginner skier. Ending up on steep ice, or too close to a cliff, or just squeezed between a ski school class and the edge of the run. Places where the right answer isn’t to have the skill to get out of the situation, it’s to have the foresight to avoid getting into that situation.

I have had sitskiers top out at this step. These were usually sit skiers who had a mental impairment as well as a physical one. One skier I remember would always end up in the trees on the left of the run. I think it was that whenever there was someone to avoid, he would avoid them by turning left. So our path would wander leftwards over time, until there was no room left.  We had to keep him on tethers with the tetherer calling the shots, even though he could turn  and stop.

Let’s dig into what happens when we make this switch.  Mostly the tetherer stops shouting “Go Left”, “Go Right”. Or on steep pitches “Left, Left, Left, Left, Left. And Right, Right, Right….”. But what happens instead?  We need the sitskier and the tetherer to be on the same page. One going left while the other goes right isn’t going to end well.

One option is that the sitskier shouts out the turns as they initiate them. In my experience this doesn’t work well. The sitskier is in front and facing forward, 90% of their voice volume is going to go down the hill. They are also sitting down and strapped in.  Add in the noise of other skiers, and a bit of ice, and the tetherer is not going to be able to hear them.

Instead the tetherer needs to watch the sitskier, and both anticipate and react to their movements.

• Are we approaching the side of the run? If so, they are probably going to turn downhill soon.
• Are they turning in a rhythm? Maybe they will continue in rhythm. 
• Are we heading towards a fallen or stopped skier? If so, then they will probably turn away, but which way?
• Did they just move their head to look downhill? Or start moving an arm out and forward? Those are probably both the start of a turn.

The nice thing about tethering like this is that it’s quiet. When it works well it’s like the sitskier and tetherer are dancing down the hill, in harmony, but with the sitskier leading (In the dance sense as well as being further down the hill).

The bad thing about tethering like this is that it’s difficult. The tetherer needs to be able to change direction very quickly, and to be very alert to what the sitskier is doing. They also have to “keep their head on a swivel” and be just as aware of everyone else on the hill as when they are calling the turns . The tetherer needs to be able to execute an emergency stop, or call for an emergency turn at any time. If they can’t, what’s the point of them being there?

One thing that can help is keeping tethers loose and long.  This gives the tetherer more time to react to a sitskiers turn before the tethers snap tight. Maybe only a split second more time, but it definitely helps.

Another idea is talk to the sitskier (I know, it’s a radical idea 😊 )

Firstly, explain that this is a step towards their independence, and that they need to be looking & thinking beyond one turn.

Secondly, point out that they are planning a path for the two of you, not just them. 

• They might be able to cut through a 6 ft/2 metre gap between skiers in a ski school duckling line. But as a tetherer at the far end of a 10 ft/3 metre tethers you won’t be able to go through the same hole. 
• A fun thing to do for them might be to find a ridge, almost stop at the top and then turn straight downhill to accelerate off it.  You will be a second behind them and doing the almost stop when they are picking up speed, and snapping tethers tight.

Thirdly, practice the big picture planning verbally. Stop at a point whether you can both see a long way down the hill, and describe your thinking,  For example: “There is a set of snowboarders sitting in the middle there, but they are starting to get up and will probably be  gone by the time we get there. There’s a fallen skier with ski patrol  on the left, we should keep well away from them. That ski school group are zig-zagging down the hill, we should probably aim to cross behind them, not ahead or through them, etc.”. Next time ask them to do the same exercise.

One option at this point is to switch to a single tether, which Americans sometimes call a Speed Strap.  This allows you to still do emergency stops, but not emergency turns.  I would use this with a skier who is pretty good at the planning & turning but hasn’t mastered hockey stops yet.  (I find hockey stops one of the hardest things to teach, but I guess that’s a different blog).

This is a little deeper an more specific than a lot of my posts, but please, leave a comment and let me know if it was interesting or useful. Or I guess, even if it wasn’t.

Clean up on Aisle 3

When you take a sit ski out for a day it will come back with snow on it. Snow on the skis, snow in the mechanism, snow it the foot well, maybe snow in the seat. This can be due to falls, actual snow falling from the sky, or just carving action. Which is all good stuff at the time, but not so good when you want to put the sit ski away. If you put it away covered in snow you may get a wet seat the next day, rust in the mechanisms & ski edges, wet patches on the floor of the storage shack. Generally all sorts of badness.

Our program at Edelweiss has always had a policy that you have to brush the snow off the sit ski before bringing it into the shack. But it can be hard to brush the snow of the skis when it’s sitting in the snow. You end up brushing as much snow onto the skis as off them. Until the invention of the sit ski cleaning station:

This is essentially a bench that you can lift a sit ski onto. That gets it up off the snow and makes it easier to reach the skis & mechanism. On top it has a hard plastic surface, so that it doesn’t scratch the skis. But with holes so the snow falls away. It also comes with 2 car snow brushes/ice scrapers and places to hang them. We bring it out each afternoon and position it a couple of metres from the storage shack door.

Lifting a sit ski onto the bench is easy for 2 people, possible for one. Once the sit-ski is cleaned we generally carry it into the shack, so that we don’t get new snow on the skis.

(Note that this picture features Greg, who invented and built the cleaning station)

In our program it is usually the instructors/tetherers who get the sit skis out & put them away each day. And they are stand up skiers. It does occur to me that if a wheelchair user was planning to clean their own sit ski, they might want something closer to the ground.

Tetherer Positioning Video

I talk a lot about tethering & the positioning of the tetherer relative to the sitski. I’ve had a number of messages suggesting that it might be easier to understand my points if they were expressed in a video. So here it is, I hope you like it. This is aimed mostly at people who are just learning to tether. But I would be interested in feedback from experienced tetherers too.

Or follow this link: Video in Youtube

MacGyver & the Ski Pants

If you spend a lot of time around sit skis, especially sit skis with fixed outriggers (also called pontoons, also called quad skis), and especially Mountain Men sit skis, then your ski pants, like mine are probably covered in cuts & nicks

I’m pretty sure it happens when loading the sitski onto the chairlift. You have to have one foot inside the fixed outrigger to get the right leverage to lift the back of the sitski. Then when you (or the liftie) pulls the sitski back onto the chair the fixed outrigger crashes into the front of your leg, and the sharp edges can cut the material.

I’ve written in the past about wearing shin pads under my ski pants to protect my shins, but is there anything we can do to protect the ski pants, and avoid replacing them frequently? I considered buying tradesman work pants, but the reinforced panels tend to be on the knees, which is the wrong place.

So I decided to experiment with making my own reinforced patches with sticky leather. You can buy this stuff from Amazon for repairing leather sofas and the like. It’s leather on the outside, real leather according to the marketing. And the back is covered in glue, covered in a removable wax paper. You can cut pieces of any size you want:

And stick it to the sofa, or in my case the ski pants. I’ve chosen to add patches to both pant legs from the bottom cuff to the knee, and across the front half of the pants. Maybe they could be much smaller. Maybe this season’s wear and tear will show me where the reinforcement is truly needed.

I haven’t tried them out yet. I’ll probably start tethering around Christmas. Maybe they will add good protection, maybe they will fall off as soon at they get wet. I plan to update this blog with the outcome in a few months time. Watch this Space!

End of Season Update

Here is how they look after one season of tethering quad skis twice a week:

They have certainly taken a lot of punishment, and protected the ski pants. Can you guess which side I usually stand when loading the sit ski onto the chair? They peeled a little at the top corners, I guess that’s where the knees bend. I cut diagonal corners to fix this. Maybe it would be worth cutting each corner diagonally before gluing them on. Or maybe, looking at where they are and aren’t marked, I could cut them 20% shorter. They do show the wear, and I’ve decided to live with that and display it with pride. But even if I replaced these panels once a year the sticky back leather is cheap and well worth it to protect the pants and lengthen their life.

Overall I consider this idea a success, and I will be proactively adding leather patches to my ski pants from now on. Whether I will choose a leather colour that matches the pants, or contrasts with the pants, is a fashion choice.

Olly the Arctic Fox

One interesting person I met on my trip to Europe this spring was Oliver Vaughan-Jones (known as Olly). I would compare Olly’s story to Kevin Bramble (of KBG sit skis).  Olly is a skier, surfer and outdoor enthusiast who found himself in need of a sit ski. As an engineer he decided to design and build his own, and then decided to build a business out of it. And so Arctic Fox Adaptive and their Vixen sitski was born. 

Olly’s vision is a little different from Kevin’s. KBG sitskis seem to be aimed at the high end racer. Artic Fox is intended to be more of a program sitski. It’s a sitski  which can easily adjusted and configured to different skiers, and is designed to use off-the-shelf components to minimize the production cost.

Olly isn’t as far along in his business as Kevin, he is still working with his first prototype, testing and modifying it. He brought it with him to Pamprovo and spent a week skiing and tinkering with it. During the week he worked on a change in the geometry to make loading onto chairlifts easier, and was drawing up ideas for the ability to shift the seat forward or back relative to the skis. See my post on Dowel Testing for more on that.

One thing which particularly impressed me with the Artic Fox was that when we were heading to the airport it folded up on itself like origami, ending up the size of a small suitcase with no protruding fragile bits. This seems to be a side benefit to the idea of using mostly flat pieces of  plastic & metal rather than 3D curves, to keep  the production cost down. But it suggests a possible alternate market, the travelling sit skier.

How to Dowel Test a Sitski

I’ve just published a 10 minute training video on this. You can find it here. Or just search for it on Youtube.

Road Trip!

I do most of my skiing in Canada, with occasional trips to the USA. But this year I skipped out on the opportunity to attend the National Disabled Veterans Winter Sports Clinic in Colorado, and the CADS Festival in British Columbia, and instead spent 3 weeks in Bulgaria volunteering with Ski Inclusive. I’ve been intrigued for a while by adaptive skiing in Europe. Some things seem similar, but others are quite different.  I came across Ski Inclusive on Facebook a few years ago, and decided  to volunteer with them as a way of experiencing European adaptive skiing. Covid got in the way and delayed the opportunity for a while but this year we were able to do it.

So what’s did I find?

The biggest difference is that CADS essentially sees itself as a ski school. CADS mission is to teach disabled people to ski. Ski Inclusive is essentially a holiday company (albeit a not-for-profit one). The mission is to provide affordable ski vacations to people with disabilities. This switch from teaching to vacations leads to a number of subtle differences.

• Bucketing/chauffeuring/thumbing someone with major disabilities down the hill is OK. Because they are on vacation and the goal is for them to enjoy it. The fact that they aren’t learning to ski doesn’t matter.
• If skiers want to stop mid-morning for a drink at a slope side bar, that’s OK. Even if the drink is hot chocolate and rum. We’re not wasting time within a ski lesson; we are on vacation.
• Everybody pays their own way. The volunteer  instructors might get a discounted lift pass, but they pay their own air fares & hotel rooms. So the instructors are on vacation too. This leads to some negotiation over how much time they will spend with their disabled skiers, and how much free skiing.  This is actually quite similar to the CADS Festival, but noticeably different from the American NDVWSC or the Canadian  WSC.
• Some of the disabled skiers come with family members, some of whom help, and some ski, and some do neither. But it’s a family ski vacation, so that’s normal really.
• There is a core of qualified adaptive ski instructors. But much less than 1 per disabled skier. The gap is filled with a mixture of experienced but unqualified instructors, family members and buddies. We do use unqualified ski buddies in our weekly CADS program, but they are all trained at the start of the season. Ski Inclusive has a higher tolerance for “I’ve never done that but I’ll give it a shot” volunteers.

Some other observations about the organization:

• There is another organization Disability Snowsport UK, which also provides ski vacations for people with disabilities , but with less emphasis on the “affordable”. Apparently, they pay their instructors, but expect them to stay for a whole season, similarly to a standard ski school.
• To achieve their goal of “affordable” Ski Inclusive focuses on  trips to some of the  less prestigious ski resorts in Europe, and in early or late season. I joined them for 3 weeks in Pamporovo Bulgaria in March 2023. A core of instructors were there for the whole 3 weeks, but the skiers, and some other instructors came for a week at a time. They also ran a trip to Andorra earlier in the season.

But let’s get back to the skiing.

• The sit skis in use were much the same as we use in Canada. The workhorses were a Dynamique, a Monique and a couple of Bi-Unique’s. There was a Revolution mono, which I think was used for 1 week. And I did see a Tessier, but it was only used for a day before the skier switched to the Monique.
• One noticeable difference was that there was no use of fixed outriggers. Skiers with good arm strength & control used arm outriggers, those who didn’t were bucketed. We certainly were bucketing skiers that I would have tethered with fixed outriggers in Canada. Maybe they would have felt more involved, and less of a passenger. But the ones I bucketed didn’t speak English, so I couldn’t ask. They certainly seemed to enjoy the experience. Bucketing is a skill in itself, I haven’t done much of it before and don’t feel comfortable with my skis that close to the sit ski’s skis. But the Brits certainly looked comfortable and were flying down the hill at times.
• On the first morning  I was offered a single long tethering strap (maybe 8 metres), with a  carabiner at each end. Apparently, this is the British way. You hold the middle of the long tether in your hands, and it is attached to the sit ski at each end.  I couldn’t do it. After 20 years of tethering with one separate tether on each arm I find that I do a lot of odd things with my hands. Sometimes they are close together, sometimes far apart, sometimes they cross over. And I do it all without thinking, just reacting to the skier. The one long tether meant my hands were effectively tied together and there were limits to how far part they could move.  Luckily, I brought a pair of Canadian tethers with me, so I was able to give the long strap back, and revert to my usually technique.
• There were several VI skiers as well as the sit skiers.  One experienced blind skier was just following a guide with a boom box on their back, listening to the source of the music to judge speed, slope etc. without any instructions.
• On the other hand another VI team borrowed a set of helmet intercom radios that I brought and found them very useful. They eventually switched from the VI skier (who had some vision) following the guide,  to the VI skier leading and setting the speed & rhythm. With their guide following and giving advice on recommended route and traffic conditions.

The resort itself, Pamporovo, was fun, and certainly cheap. Although it does have a big concrete tower at the top of the hill which has a strange “Big Brother is watching you” vibe. We were well treated by Steve’s Ski Shop / School, the Panorama Restaurant and the Kamelia Hotel. Many Kamenitsas were drunk and there was a good vacation vibe.  

It’s not a big mountain, maybe more similar to those in Vermont or New Hampshire than Colorado. They number their runs rather than name them, and the numbers go up to 12a. We were there near  the end of their season, so the weather can be variable. We got a lot of warm sunny days, with slushy afternoons. So we did a lot of long mornings, with late lunches,  and afternoons off.

Overall it was a fun experience. It turns out that skiing is skiing, and adaptive ski instructing is adaptive ski instructing wherever you go. Ski Inclusive may be a bit less structured than CADS (and much less structured than the NDVWSC) but their heart is certainly in the right place, and they are succeeding in giving people with disabilities a chance to experience skiing on snow, on a real mountain

Do we need Special Boots for Tethering?

My ski boots are about 10 years and covered in scars. I’ve even had a repair which involved a non-matching clip. But they are very comfortable.

Nevertheless last summer I decided it was time for some new boots. I was feeling like I deserved a good pair, so off I went to our local ski shop and asked to speak with their boot fitting specialist, called Eric.  His main tactic seemed to be to remove the boot liners and socks and fit the boot based on how the naked foot fit in it with no liner.  I’ve always had wide feet and suspected that my current boots were really too long, and chosen more because of their fit across the foot. So I wasn’t too surprised when he recommended a pair of significantly shorter boots.

I put them on and immediately felt my big toe hitting the end of the boot. So much so that I wouldn’t buy a shoe like that. But Eric pointed out that I was standing straight up. If I assumed the correct ski position with my weight forward then that moved my foot back in the boot a little, and eased the pressure on my toes.  The boots still felt uncomfortably tight, but all the web sites say that new ski boots should be uncomfortably tight, they will “pack out” and adjust to the foot shape over time.

A week ago I got to try them out for the first time on snow.  They were tight but bearable on my warm up run, but as soon as I started tethering the pain level shot up.  Tethering a sit ski inevitably requires moving the weight further back on the skis, which forced my toes against the front of the boot.

I made it to lunch time, wondering every run if it was going to get better or worse. I took them off for lunch and maybe should have quit at that point. But I thought that if I made it through the morning, I could make it through the afternoon. It turns out that I couldn’t, half an our later the pain was so strong that it was distracting me from watching for other skiers and creating a safety problem.

I gave up. I went back to the car to get my old boots, adjusted the bindings on my skis and put them back on. It felt like bliss.

A week  later one of my big toes is purple and I suspect I might lose the toenail.

I have skied again a couple of times, but I haven’t used the new boots.  Which leaves me with a conundrum. Do I keep the tight new boots for free skiing and the comfortable old boots  just for tethering. And if so, which skis should be set for which boot length?  Or do I just declare that the new boots are too tight, and were a bad purchase, and try to sell them second hand ☹

Anybody want to but a pair of almost new ski boots? Dalbello Sport 65 MX, Size 265, length 308 mm?

Update, a year later

I never wore those new boots again. Both of my big toe nails went black. One toenail eventually fell off. The other just took about 6 months for the black area to grow out. I ended up selling the new boots at a ski swap event for about 1/3rd of what I paid for them. I went back to my old boots for the rest of the season, and most of the next season. But then another buckle fell off and they were letting in water. I went back to the same local ski shop but didn’t ask for the specialist boot fitter. They sold me a pair of boots somewhere between my original boots and the tight ones in length, but with a wide last/large volume design. I’m very happy with them.

Update, another year on

I decided to revitalize the old boots, with another new buckle and new boot liners. The new boots are now for free skiing and the old boots for tethering. The two pairs of boots are different lengths, so I have adjusted the bindings on my newer (185) skis for the free skiing boots, and my older (175) skis for tethering. So now I do have specific boots and skis just for tethering. The tethering boots are longer, but the tethering skis are shorter.