Jerry of the Week

The past weekend I was trying to build my first course for mogul skiing.

🇨🇭 #savognin ⛷️ #snowsports #training #instructor #moguls

In theory, it should be fairly simple. In practice, however, you need to consider the changes in elevation and orientation of the hill which can change slightly during the course. You will rarely find a perfect terrain that has the same elevation and alignment for 20-30m.

You start by setting the poles in the snow. The vertical distance in the fall lines between the poles is 7m. The horizontal distance between the fall lines is approximately 1.7m. Here, again, this can change depending on the terrain that is not always perfectly even.

On my first attempt to space the moguls, I pretty much followed the theoretical distance guidance (7m, 1.7m) by measuring the distance between the moguls with my skis (my ski is 1.68m long).

Once you spaced out the poles, you start doing short stop turns against the poles to pile up some snow. This is illustrated by the red and grey curved arrows in the picture above.

The green lines are the skidding lines. Once enough snow is piled up for the moguls, the course should be skidded/prepared regularly.

I only noticed that it was pretty hard to ski after I started to do the first short turns against to moguls to pile up more snow. In the deep snow, I did not realize that to make the course actually work, I would need to keep the fall lines closer together.

So this is what I changed today. I moved the outer lines and one of the inner lines by a almost 0.5m to improve the flow on the course.

I'm very curious to see how the course develops over time once different skiers went over the course. You can't do everything right, but at least we can try.

I still have a pretty decent example from the course from last year in Nendaz.

I'm pretty happy for the current state after one weekend. Let's see if this will actually be fun to ski 😃. Stay tuned for footage 📹.