Snow Craft
The expert cross-country ski-runner must not only be a fast and safe runner on all kinds of snow and ground, but he must also possess a thorough knowledge of snow craft. Unfortunately, there are nine ski-runners whose Telemarks are perfect for one whose knowledge of snow is even adequate, and the number of those whose understanding of snow in all seasons of the year is really expert is indeed small.
Snow craft in winter and in spring is even more complex than in summer, and requires a special study of its own. Even the most expert guides whose knowledge of summer snow leaves nothing to be desired require considerable winter experience before they are thoroughly competent to lead a party among the High Alps in winter. The same is true of spring; each season, in fact, requires a separate study.
The ski-runner needs to possess a more exact knowledge of snow than that which the foot-mountaineer requires. A mountaineer on foot is mainly interesting to discover whether the snow is hard enough to walk uphill without sinking in, and whether the snow is likely to avalanche. Hard snow, soft snow and avalanche snow are the three main categories in which the foot-mountaineer divides snow. He need not bother with all the delicate gradations of value that distinguish snow which is so hard that it will not take a Stemming turn, and snow which, though hard enough to bear a foot, will yet take a Christiania or even a Telemark.
The ski-runner who neglects snow craft is severely punished for his carelessness. He runs into fast and sticky snow and pitches heavily on his face, or from soft snow on to hard snow and falls heavily backwards. Even the least observant ski-runner soon realizes that an elementary knowledge of snow is essential to his comfort and his safety. His knowledge of snow needs to be instinctive. On foot a man has time to probe and to examine, but on ski he has to diagnose the snow while travelling at a high speed. He has to possess an accurate sense of direction so that he can foretell the changes of snow that occur when travelling from, say, a north-east slope on to an eastern slope, or an eastern slope on to a south-eastern slope.
Quite as many bad ski-ing falls are caused by deficient snow craft as by deficient balance.
Precisely because even the most casual ski-runner is bound to learn from the past experience of nasty falls, ski-ing inevitably teaches even the most unobservant some knowledge of snow craft. A ski-runner cannot hand over the whole strategy of the day’s campaign to a guide. He must think for himself and study for himself. In summer the real business of climbing usually begins when the glacier or the summer snowline is reached, but in winter a ski-runner can kill himself in an avalanche within an hour of the hotel. Snow craft begins in winter at the hotel door.
The careful study of snow is a fascinating branch of nature study. More can be learned from books than the reader might imagine. Once a ski-runner has grasped how snow is affected by altitude, orientation, wind and sun, he is in a better position to profit by his knowledge in practice than if he was forced painfully to unravel the laws of snow by personal observation. In the early days of ski-ing in the Alps the guides themselves were completely ignorant of the main laws of snow in winter. They are still, for the most part, ignorant of the subtleties of spring ski-ing, which is much more difficult to understand than winter ski-ing. In winter, if a snow slope holds good snow in the morning it will probably hold good snow throughout the day, but in spring the same slope goes through a regular cycle of changes. It may be unskiable at dawn, yield perfect ski-ing at midday, prove absolutely unsafe at three in the afternoon, and yield good running again in the evening.
To time a descent accurately, to forecast from a knowledge of the orientation and altitude of a given mountain that it will yield perfect ski-ing at a given hour, is to know one of the most satisfactory intellectual pleasures that the mountains afford.