Hardwater Kiter

Okay this session isn't my usual search for speed but my schedule and the weather FINALLY worked together and I managed to get one more day of riding in on the summit of Mount Washington.  Highest peak in the northeast and home of the highest wind ever observed.  (well, up until recently anyway) Wikipedia has good info on it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Washington_(New_Hampshire ) Our winds were a lot easier. I've been waiting over a month to get a chance to hit Washington.  Everyday that the conditions were right I had to work and every day I had off the winds were blowing the wrong way or too hard.  Mike Elliott and I were going to head up a few weeks ago and backed out at the last minute because of a weather change only to find out our friend Mark Acitelli from Colorado bagged a session on the west side of the mountain. We usually have NW winds which works for the west side but the west side rarely has enough good snow to make it worth heading up....

I want to ride this. The obvious thing about writting a blog about snow kiting is that when you lack the key ingredient of snow there isn't much to write about.  For a while I was happy that I could take a break and decompress from the rapid fire flurry of activity that constitutes our snowkite season.  Even with the recent wrist fusion and uncooperative weather this season we still got a ton of riding in and as a result I had a lot to write about.   When the season "ended" for us I felt a little relieved.  No more kite pre-checks, no more ski tuning, no more driving all over, no more pressure (self imposed or otherwise) to stay on top of the regular blog entries. Well, now I'm starting to itch.  Bike season is upon us. Molly just had her wrist repaired by Dr. Kasparyan (same surgeon that did my fusion. The guy's a rock star). I've been buying new bikes that have allowed me to ride at some level though not the level I'm accustomed to. But I stil...

Man, this transitional part of the season is really flying by. I’ve been busy dealing with bike related stuff and haven’t had time to get this entry squared away and I feel like I’ve been slacking but trying to write this entry has been in the back of my mind constantly. I now finally have a spare moment so here we go. Welcome to part 2 of “Ski Massacres, Long miles and High Speeds” As I mentioned before I thought the season was going to be over about a month earlier than it usually is. This crazy winter was a roller coaster of temperatures and precipitation and towards the end we got record amounts of rainfall and warm weather that wiped out a lot of our local riding spots. But Umbagog held up and not only did it hold up it got really good. In the last blog entry we covered the warmer final days on Umbagog. Now I’ll try to describe the days after the cold snap that hit and gave us a few more days of riding. Jim's RV Saturday Molly and I got to the lake at about 11:00am and  J...

Well it looks like this is it for our local snow kite season. It’s been a crazy couple of weeks and I feel bad that I’ve slacked off on the blog but at the same time I’ve been scrambling to get as much kiting in as I can and get my best speed for the season up before the season finally hits the end. It’s been a weird season to say the least. The weather has been all over the place, the weather forecasts have been useless, and we thought we were going to be without ice almost 3 weeks ago and then it turns out we have conditions we usually only see in February. There’s been some discussion that we might make it until April but after the last few weeks and the day we had on Sunday I’d be happy calling it a season. It’s been pouring rain for the last three days and it’s supposed to get into the 70’s on Friday. Mike I don’t know where to begin to describe the sessions we’ve been getting the last few weeks. It’s been absolutely unbelievable really. We all thought we were going to lose a...

Stacked 15m and 19m Since I got into this kite thing this is always a weird time of year for me. The snow kite season is coming to and end, the weather is getting warmer and the days have gotten longer. While my co-workers are bubbling about the warm weather and up coming riding season (I work in the bike industry) I find myself getting depressed about the rapidly approaching end of the snow kite season. This is compounded by the fact that our season is ending about a month early and we’re already scrambling to find the last bastions of kite-able ice. We still have ice at Umbagog and we’ll probably make it until April but it will still be a short season. This entry is a bit long because I've added a story with some valuable information in regards to safety. I apologize in advance if this seems a bit too long. Last Friday Molly got the day off and she, Mike and myself went down to Squam Lake to check the conditions and see if we could “safely” squeeze out a few more sessions on i...