Wax On, Wax Off

Until this year I had waxless skis. Oh, the simplicity of them! I had heard of people waxing their skis, and thought this was performed similarly to the way we put on deodorant. No. First you have to buy wax that I hear is very expensive. I haven't had to purchase any yet because so far we've been able to benefit off of others who were set up for this (I think this is called mooching). Then you take an iron that is hopefully dedicated to only this job, and you melt the wax onto the length of your skis in a wavy dribble.



The next step, which seemed unimaginable to me when I first saw it, is that you take that iron and you apply it to your $300 skis directly in order to evenly distribute the wax into the pores of your ski.



Now that you have the wax applied nicely upon your skis, you scrape it all off! After that, you use a steel pad and smooth it all down. Now you have to protect the waxed side so no one messes up your 1/2 hour of work by touching or scuffing. And I always just threw my waxless skis in the car to jostle around. All this work does pay off. The skis are fast and fun!