Ski Test numero Uno

This past Tuesday at work required a planning meeting, one held at a local ski area. While other planning meetings are often 2 days ours was only one, but it was still better than your average day at work. I started the morning at 630 driving the company pickup truck to get my boss and another engineer before heading up to Snoqualmie. Up at the ski area we met up with 4 others to begin our day of testing. We initially strapped into AT setup skis with skins, and hiked up the mountain. Im not a huge hiker, nor am I in much aerobic shape, but this was actually pretty fun. I was wearing my usual ski boots, everyone else in their more forgiving flexible ski boots. I sported my "borrowed" rental ski poles everyone else with their expensive adjustable light trekking poles. I'm a little bit like a fish out of water when it comes to nordicish skiing, I didnt look much the part nor feel like I was good at it. It had been raining much of the week so the snow was more like solid ice, less ideal but still ok for hiking uphill on. We hiked to the top where the ski lift ends and took a brief break. From here we skied down to the parking lot where round 2 of skis to test was. The skiing was terrible. It reminded me of early morning spring skiing and I was on the worst skis for this type of snow, the K2 Shuksan. At the bottom we dawned our new skis for some serious product testing.

A short 100cm dorky looking hiking ski, supposed to be a sliding snowshoe. The skin on the bottom helps with uphill performance, and full metal edges help with the skiing... well or so they say. I couldnt get these to turn for the life of me. More like standing on 2 saucer sleds and going downhill fast. A wild and scary time but still pretty fun on these little skis. We are working on the new versions of these, we hope to improve on them greatly. After testing several pairs I have been working on in the lab and deciding what parts we like/dont we headed off to lunch and then to meetings. The meetings followed up with a dinner and finally my home afterwards. Not a bad day of work, I look forward to the alpine ski test days where we can ride lift accessible terrain without having to hike up.