Kongsberger Ski Club

Story by Miranda Taylor After a year of solitary/partner hiking, backpacking, kayaking, milking goats (!) and skiing, on Saturday I joined a friend at the KSC cabin. The cabin is looking pretty great. (But read the sign below the wine in photo).  We walked the trails, moose hoofed up Osbaldy extension to the end of its lasso-loop [ed. note, also known as Gunnar's Loop] , and talked.  As w e caught up, we cooled off on the last patch of snow on the Viking loop.  She asked great questions about my brief Covid marriage and about "Healing From Hidden Abuse" by Shannon Thomas. Email me if interested in our zoom book group starting in June. Recognizing common behaviors like gaslighting, smear campaigns, etc, will help you help yourself or your loved ones. It's great to be done with  those situations and back with friends. On Sunday Jim Slyfield and I chopped wood. Elizabeth identified some beautiful plants like the big flowering red currant in the I-90 interchange. We stac...

  A chilly gray morning in Seattle gave way, as it so often does, to brilliant blue skies and bright sunshine at the pass, perfect weather for tackling the grossness that people leave behind along the trails and roads.  It was a smaller group of Kongsbergers than in previous years -- evidently that chicken barbecue is a big draw! -- so many thanks to each one of you who sacrificed your Saturday and Sunday mornings in the interests of cleaning up our snow-park.  Another big thank you goes to the Momentum team and some of the parents, who showed up in force and provided an extra boost of muscle power.  Together, we tackled all the trails, the upper and lower parking lots and the road between, and the freeway on- and off-ramps and shoulders -- even, on Sunday, the median!  A special thank you to the brave soul who dodged the traffic to make that extra effort to find trash. We found the usual treasure chest of ski parts, paper trash, broken bits of freeway signs, le...

(Nick Whitman's photo) You know this and I know this: there were just about a bazillion more skiers at the Snoqualmie Pass snow-parks this winter than ever before.  And evidently a LOT of them don't respect our mother, the earth, as much as you and I do.  Skiers/sledders/snowshoers left enormous amounts of trash behind; witness Nick's pickup truck packed full of broken sled pieces from a clean-up he did at Crystal Springs earlier this month ... and he reports that was only a fraction of the total amount of garbage there.  So sad.  But that just means that we, you and I and all of us, must make up for these recalcitrant children and clean up the mess. And next weekend is the day!  All the snow-parks have their annual clean-ups scheduled for next Saturday, May 22, and Cabin Creek will be doing clean-up on both Saturday and Sunday.  At Cabin Creek, we'll have trash bags and a check-in sheet at the cabin by 9:00 both days; take a look at the check-in sheet to s...

Adventure Reporting by Joy Cordell What to do when the weekend approaches, there is still SO MUCH SNOW, and unlike those skiers trading tips on how to remove the special grooming pass from the windshield or planning new rollerski routes, we wanted the real thing and we weren't ready to trade it in. We'll scrape those stickers and oil the bearings when we can't ski on snow! So Jeff and I met Debbie at Summit West  on  Saturday and pulled our bumpers up to the edge of the wall of snow and put on the classics. Debbie donned her beloved (ancient) Fischer no-wax rock skis (but let the record show: there was not a single rock anywhere), while Jeff and I took our no-wax OuttaBounds and 3-pins. It was snowing when we got there ... and there was SO MUCH SNOW, everywhere we went. We tracked by all the quiet resort lifts and zigged and zagged our way up through the fresh snow to the saddle and Beaver Pond. Surrounded by mounds of snow, the pond was still frozen, with only a few quiet ...

Ancient Norwegian folklore: when the dandelions come out, the roller skis come out.  When you just hate to say goodbye to the last ski season and you're already excited for the next one, roller skiing is a great way to hang onto the ski fitness, proprioception, balance, and technique you gained over the previous year. So, technique.  No surprise; it turns out there are a couple of schools of thought about roller skiing.  The most widely accepted, followed by many skiers both local and international, focuses on long distance, miles and miles of easy double poling or skating.  The other school, espoused by some big names who know what they're talking about, is that long easy roller skiing messes with your technique; you're better off using hiking/trail running/biking as your long distance workout and using your roller skis for shorter, harder, more explosive workouts. Whichever method you prefer -- long slow distance, short hard intensity, or a combination -- Seattle a...