Spring Conditions Are Here!!
With a sigh of relief we can now look forward to warmer conditions which make for what a lot of people consider, the best riding conditions of the year…aptly called SLUSH! That being said, your gear may not work as great as it did when the temperatures were negative “I shouldn’t be outside right now”. Personally this past weekend I found my board sticking quite a lot and couldn’t keep speed.. as if my favourite slush was sucking me down!
WHY SLUSH!? WHY?!
The quickest and easiest solution if your gear is already in great shape, is a wax and sharpen. Our techs can put a warmer wax on to allow for it glide along the warmer snow.
For those who want a little bit longer but simple answer to the above explanation here we go.
It’s a combination of the temperature of wax that has been put on, the grooves that have been put into your base along with the temperature outside.
Now wax and grooves can become complicated quite quickly. For our interest we will as my mother always says:
“Keep it simple, Emjay there’s no need to complicate it!”
Wax; it’s an added layer to protect your base from all that the aptly named “Rocky Mountains” have to throw at you. Our head technician Rob explained it the best to me at the beginning of my first season here:
Your base is like the layers of your skin, when you put moisturizer onto your hands it sinks down and fills the layers up accordingly. Now when you overload your hands with half the bottle of moisturizer your skins layers fill up and then you’ve got a huge amount of extra moisturizer just hanging out on your hands (has anyone else done this or is it just me?!! I end up having to put moisturizer all over my exposed skin and still find someone to share it with!) Once the layers towards the surface lose their moisture, the deeper layers move the moisturizer up to them helping to keep everything smooth. This same idea is like your gear, your base will absorb only so much wax before it can’t anymore.
Did You Know??!
Technically we slide on the actual base of our gear not the wax used on it?! The wax actually acts as a lubricant (see our moisturizer example above). It slowly leaks out to lubricate the surface you are riding on; snow may feel all light and fluffy but our gear sees it as super sharp snow crystals that will grab onto any excess wax and slow us down!
Enough of the cheesy factoids back to our gear!
Okay, okay back to our gear and making it faster in the slush…geeze one little factoid and you’re already yelling!
Now that our bases are perfectly moisturized (I give mine to our techs and they do a beautiful job), oops I really meant waxed…see what I mean perfect analogy, Rob knows what he’s talking about!
Let’s move onto those grooves or striations that a stone grind finish does (as Rob has informed me) to our bases. These little striations our techs put onto our gear after tuning it act like little roads for water and snow to move along, this coupled with the wax smoothing out the snow beneath our gear makes for warp speed and sharp edges to slow down, now that we can actually move on the ski hill!
WHOA slow down! Now that we’ve got the basics of how our gear works in conjunction with wax and snow let’s really figure out why we need different waxes.
Don’t stress mum we’re going to keep it simple. When it’s cold outside the snow is very hard with super sharp edges. This is when it’s our favourite light and fluffy snow, we call this “POW”. This is everyone’s favourite day to call in sick and go ride the hill (shhh we won’t tell your bosses 
).
You’ve got to get your base to match the snow. The wax you put into the layers of your base will help with that. Essentially a cold wax will harden your base to allow it to deal with all the sharp snow it’s sliding on thus the lubrication and stronger density of your base, making it glide better on the cold snow. Of course right now in the SLUSH a hard base isn’t going to slide all that well hence why we’re all feeling a little sluggish. What we need is something thats soft and a bit more like a surf board’s base. Easy, a warmer wax does the same thing as the cold wax but softens your base to allow the water and slushy rounded snow to move easily underneath it thus allowing you to glide on top of the water instead of trying to power through it!
So in a nut shell, your base is like your skin, it needs to be moisturized but it needs the right moisturizer for the temperature outside otherwise it’ll just fight against the elements and you’ll be stuck halfway down the mountain thinking about breaking up with your gear.
Best thing to do? Give your gear a spa day! Bring it in and let our techs work their magic on it so that you can get out there and enjoy the best part of our season!!!
~Emjay