Day 10 - Tuesday Dec. 12 - Back to SilverFork

5:30 at the mouth of Little once again. I pickup up Kai and we met up with CJ and a friend of his, James (AT Skier). CJ drove up and we listened to something I do not own, but have admired for some time: John Prine - John Prine. It is a classic album from a classic artist. Especially check out the tune "Sam Stone" - my favorite from the album. I had decided since our Pink Pine debacle that I was going to really start pushing myself on the ascent. I had taken it too easy and wasted a lot of my time that day. So I did my best to keep up with CJ today, but still to no avail. With this being Kai's second tour ever (see day 3 for his first) he was not exactly keeping up either so I had some sort of excuse for going slow. I have decided to buy Kai's bike for my birthday (anyone reading this that is wondering what to get me on March 29th - all I want is money to go towards the bike) so I can keep up my aerobic exercise during the summer months. I am just hammered everytime we go right now. I need to get to the point where I can really start hard charging these skin tracks and get more and more skiing in less and less time. We got to the summit of the East Bowl of SilverFork around 8:00 (like I said, we weren't moving at the speed I would like to). The turns were great back in there - much better than we had anticipated. When we got to the bottom we immediately began putting our skins back on (which I can do without taking my skis off now-a-days) for another lap. With it being finals week, none of us had class and I was the only one who needed to be at work (but not until 11:30 or so). We made a loop and a second lap. Then we climbed for the final time of the day in order to be able to descend the South side. This was not as pleasant as we would have liked. There were about 3 inches of new snow on top of absolute hard pack and ice. We were able to make a few turns down, but most of the time puncuated with the ear piercing sound to a skier where you are not totally sure if that was a rock you just uncovered or if it was simply ice. All in all it was a good day. I do need to start really focusing on my endurance and stamina. Perhaps I need to do some exercise outside of skiing as well - Bowie (my dog) always likes it when we go for a jog.
On a side note go ahead and check out: http://www.telemarktalk.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=29213
They are saying that I am the best thing to hit telemark skiing since plastic boots (or at least since the announcement of BD's Holy Grail binding last weekend).