Race Season

A local Nordic coach verbally abuses his young skiers.

It's ski race season here in Seeley. We manage to pack all of our races into a three week span which tends to make things a little hectic but the end result is that we get it over with quickly and then we can go back to grooming and skiing. Or in my case coaching and skiing. I'll groom when I have to, but it's not my favorite activity.

We didn't set out to hold all of our races on consecutive weekends, it just turned out that way. We learned early on with OSCR that once you've established a date for your race you've got to hang on to it regardless of what other races are happening in the region. Other area clubs recognize that OSCR is the last Saturday in January and if they schedule an overlapping race their turnout will be pretty slim. OSCR is in its 40th year, draws as many as 150 racers, and that date will have to be pried from our cold, dead fingers.

Biathlon immediately follows OSCR and we claimed the first Saturday in February as ours.

The biathlon race wasn't originally a club function. It was first begun by a local person who abandoned it after several years, despite its growing appeal. Holding a race is a lot of work, especially for an individual, and biathlon is a ski race on steroids when it comes to organization, managing the shooting aspect and numbers of volunteers. There's no glory in it and very little profit in the beginning, if ever. The Nordic club recognized how popular it had become so we resurrected it and it's now part of our annual race menu. We've gone so far as to establish a dedicated shooting range where we've pushed around a bunch of dirt to provide a level and raised shooting platform as well as a level area for targets. In addition, we placed a storage unit on site to house the small mountain of targets and other gear required for a successful biathlon.

The focus of Skiesta is on kids. It's not an official Nordic club race but we provide support through volunteers and grooming. Bridget Laird, the director of the SLE Outdoor Program, got it going 7 or 8 years ago and I told her at the time to hold on for dear life to that Saturday. It's the Saturday before OSCR, completing our trifecta of three race weekends in a row. It's another one that's grown immensely and this year upwards of 90 skiers from as far away as Sandpoint and Libby turned out to compete.

2022 will be Lynn's last year to run OSCR. Over 40 years the race has grown from a barely groomed point-to-point journey with only a handful of racers into the biggest and best known cross country ski race in western Montana. In the 30 years since Lynn took the helm it's become a well-oiled machine that on the surface seems to come off like magic year after year. The reality is that beneath that shiny exterior there is a considerable amount of volunteer work. And the other reality is that the volunteers who do that work aren't getting any younger and are starting to burn out, to the point that I'm hearing suggestions that maybe this should be the last OSCR.

Will this be the last OSCR? I don't know. But for now, anyway, the last Saturday in January belongs to us.

Lynn Carey's GAS Is Broke

Lynn Carey before his GAS malfunctioned

Spending the better part of 40 years working in a sawmill I've been exposed to some memorable turns of phrase and malapropisms in addition to a daily butchering of the English language. For example, I now know that the past tense of the verb "skin" is "skun". As in, "I skun out my buck and hung him in the shed."

If something is merely adequate it's "close enough for the girls I know." Changing software is "using a new floormat". A no-win situation is a "Catch-21".

One of my all-time favorites is the "give-a-shitter". When someone reaches the point of not caring his "give-a-shitter is broke".

Unfortunately, it's my solemn duty to announce to the Nordic world that Lynn Carey's give-a-shitter is broke. In all honesty, my own give-a-shitter is unreliable and fading, but Lynn makes no bones about the fact that his is totally beyond repair and he is not shy about telling anyone who will listen. Being a long-time sawmiller himself, lately Lynn freely makes use of the phrase with disturbing frequency.

He's announced this multiple times in the past month. So much so that our pal Bruce, true to his Forest Service background, has assigned an acronym to Lynn's condition: GAS. Lynn's GAS is broke. And he has no intention of repairing it.

When a couple of our regular groomers went way overboard with their assigned grooming, rather than being bent out of shape, Lynn's response was "I don't care. Don't forget, my GAS is broke."

A minor flap over the biathlon this week elicited this response: "Doesn't matter to me. My GAS is broke."

And so on.

Lynn post-GAS breakdown.

Suspenders with Carhartt jeans are never a good look for anyone, under any circumstance, but evidently when your GAS is shot so is your fashion sense. No one ever accused Lynn of having an overdeveloped sense of fashion, but these days Lynn's accessory of choice for holding up his pants is a worn out pair of greasy suspenders. Some things are unacceptable on the most basic of levels and suspenders that pull your pants up over your navel fall firmly in that category. It's incomprehensible that his wife lets him out of the house in that condition but I suppose Rose has to pick her battles.

For the past 30 years Lynn has been the OSCR race director. He's been doing it for so long that he never breaks a sweat getting it organized and seems to pull it off effortlessly. Now that his GAS is out of order the question becomes how will that impact OSCR? Compounding this dilemma is his announcement that after this year someone else can do the work, he's retiring. With one foot out the door and his GAS six feet under ground what becomes of our signature event? We can only hope that he has enough pride and ego tied up in OSCR that he'll go out on a high note. On the other hand, the OSCR motto has always been "the only constant is change", so maybe his idea of "change" will be to let a few details slide. Like who needs aid stations or course markers?

I guess we'll find out January 29th.

Lynn after the 40th OSCR.

Bully

A fuzzy, stolen image of a Pisten Bully 100.

Seeley Lake skiing is off to one of the best starts in recent memory. Regular snowfall beginning in early December and continuing throughout the month got things rolling in earnest about the second week in the month. It's been coming in modest amounts, allowing us to keep up with the packing and grooming rather than the usual dance of being starved for snow and then being buried all at once and trying to manage the excess.

A primary factor in our current grooming management is access to a Pisten Bully 100. For several years we've engaged in an off and on debate about purchasing one of these gizmos. Pluses include the quality of grooming, ability to pack and groom at the same time, a world class classic track and less time spent grooming. On the negative side is the initial cost (a quick search yielded a used PB for $108,000. I don't want to speculate on the new cost.), maintenance, and training someone to operate the thing properly. It's not like a snowmobile where you can take a newbie, give them a 5 minute crash course and say, "follow me and whatever you do, don't get stuck".

We've operated for years with a fleet of four new or relatively new, snowmobiles, an arsenal of grooming equipment and a flock of willing volunteers. Lynn Carey (grooming guru and my straight man) has been doing this for 30 years, so he has a pretty good idea of how to optimize results with this system. We groom every day that conditions permit, resulting in rave reviews and a donation box stuffed with $20 bills that go a long way towards paying the overhead.

So, why is there a Pisten Bully parked by the grooming shed? Wellsir, it's like this. Last winter Doug Edgerton, longtime grooming contractor at West Yellowstone, alerted us that he'd had enough of living in the snowmobile capital of Montana, and was making the move to Seeley Lake, bringing with him not only his Pisten Bully, but his four decades of accumulated grooming wisdom. He volunteered both the Bully and the wisdom to the Nordic club and we humbly and gratefully accepted.

Most of us in the club have been at this grooming thing with positive results for a long time and the introduction of another strong point of view has resulted in some, shall we say, invigorating debate. For example, how far into the skating lane should the classic track be placed? If you've skied here in the past couple of weeks you've probably noticed the classic track moving to the right, then back toward the skating lane, then back to the right again. With the Pisten Bully the classic track can be altered on the fly so there is a fair amount of adjustment that can be made. The sweet spot is where there's a solid right-hand pole plant but we're not jamming the skaters against the left-hand bank. Yesterday it seemed like we'd found the perfect compromise between the two.

Doug can also make subtle adjustments to the width of the classic track that are so incremental you probably don't even notice. He'll do this on a long downhill like off the top of Whitetail Hill. In the past if I was skiing classic, I'd jump out of the track at the steep part of the run so I didn't get pitched out while reaching peak speed at the bottom turn. (Breaking bones gives one a new point of view.) What Doug does is slightly widen the track, giving more stability and consequently a better ability to handle the speed in the track going into the corner.

We're still using the sleds and volunteers to do the bulk of the grooming while getting the PB out about once a week to make everything perfect. If there's a big dump of snow the PB will be our first line of attack. When we'd get buried in the past we'd have to roll multiple times to pack the snow firmly enough that we could flatten, groom and set classic with the ginzus. It seems like inevitably after we had everything packed, we'd immediately get another mammoth shot of snow and have to start the process all over again. On days like that the PB will allow our aged and decrepit volunteers the chance to put their feet up by the fire and enjoy multiple cups of coffee along with reruns of Real Housewives and The Great British Baking Show.

If you like the new grooming, let us know, either here or on the grooming page. And if you REALLY like it, remember, nothing says "thank you" like money.