Wirth

On a scale of one to awesome, definitely closer to awesome.

We set out to ski a bunch of 30-second intervals and were just going to go around and ski each hill, until I jumped out of the stadium and carved a couple of beautiful tele turns down the hill. This gave me an idea: we'd go to the big hill on the Judy trail (just before returning to Hap and the lights) and ski up and down and up and down. And we did.

With the clear sky it was pretty dark but the trail was in excellent shape. It was rolled but not yet groomed but had been skated in to a fine, if soft, surface. We marked a 30-second-or-so interval and then turned in to the three-inches-of-new-snow-over-a-firm-crust. If you've been following along you know what happens next. We dropped our knees for a nice ride down. And repeated at least a dozen times. A few other folks jumped off the grooming and whooped and hollered their way down. If you fell—well, I should say, when you fell—it was a soft skid which usually entailed a pile of powder.

I pushed my heart rate up pretty well and by the end we'd get to the top of our hill and slump over our poles catching our breath, before taking to the off-trail to slide down to the bottom. Telemark skiing, apparently, does not let you recover, I was starting intervals a bit too high. Oh well.

I bid the Macalester skiers adieu and went to cool down on the Par 3 and in to the woods. It's funny, when we were doing the intervals I could have sworn that I could have charged up that hill forever, but once I slowed down and dressed up I just wanted to tool along nice and slow. Which was probably good. It had also gotten a bit colder with the clear skies and fresh snow, so I was content. The trail is in very excellent shape all around, and even without new snow should hold for great Loppet conditions. On the way out, the lakes looked good, and supposedly had several inches of snow plowed in to a nice base. Wirth is a gem, and it's as good as ever.