@François Pugh,
You just wrote: "So instead of folk being left with a stem habit and a don't go there attitude, we have the wedge progression that leaves too many folk with a permanent default pivot in every turn."
Nicely stated. We've traded the stem for the pivot entry. I've never thought of it that way. Thank you! That makes perfect sense. But it's not that clear-cut in real life.
Today I watched what seemed like a whole mountainful of novices and intermediates ski around on a rather difficult variable snow surface. It hasn't snowed in weeks, but it has rained and frozen and then thawed and frozen again several times, and it's been very warm for a while too. So we had glare ice covered loosely by two weeks of shaved and minced and re-shaved-and-minced glare ice that looks like snow but doesn't exactly act like it, along with a few ice balls. These skiers exhibited all kinds of non-expert ways of getting down the hill. Lots of stemming, lots of leaning in, lots of bracing, some pivoting, some lifting the new inside ski tip up in the air, some using upper body rotation, and almost every one of them is skiing at least a little aft. Because of the conditions du jour, not too many were intentionally scaring themselves silly for the thrill of it. Oh, and lots of yard sales.
I think I can say with confidence that almost all of them were having a ton of fun.
You just wrote: "So instead of folk being left with a stem habit and a don't go there attitude, we have the wedge progression that leaves too many folk with a permanent default pivot in every turn."
Nicely stated. We've traded the stem for the pivot entry. I've never thought of it that way. Thank you! That makes perfect sense. But it's not that clear-cut in real life.
Today I watched what seemed like a whole mountainful of novices and intermediates ski around on a rather difficult variable snow surface. It hasn't snowed in weeks, but it has rained and frozen and then thawed and frozen again several times, and it's been very warm for a while too. So we had glare ice covered loosely by two weeks of shaved and minced and re-shaved-and-minced glare ice that looks like snow but doesn't exactly act like it, along with a few ice balls. These skiers exhibited all kinds of non-expert ways of getting down the hill. Lots of stemming, lots of leaning in, lots of bracing, some pivoting, some lifting the new inside ski tip up in the air, some using upper body rotation, and almost every one of them is skiing at least a little aft. Because of the conditions du jour, not too many were intentionally scaring themselves silly for the thrill of it. Oh, and lots of yard sales.
I think I can say with confidence that almost all of them were having a ton of fun.