Hand Drawn (and Hiked) by McCall

It’s 2024! Welcome back! I hope you’re all easing back into the work week with empty inboxes and full fridges — grocery stores are treacherous after New Years, eh?

Speaking of grocery stores, here’s your friendly reminder that Colorado banned single-use plastic bags at grocery stores and other large chains, effective 1/1. Let’s put those tote bags to work, team.

Avalanche Chronicles

We’re back! As promised, let’s chat ski basics. First up: what size ski should I buy?

The short answer: go see a ski tech, talk to them about your abilities and goals, get fitted, and let them take the reins.

The long answer: a good place to start is what kind of terrain you plan to ski or usually ski. A smart rule of thumb is if you’re a beginner, your skis should be around shoulder height; intermediate skiers should have skis around eyebrow height, and advanced skiers typically have skis taller than themselves — as demonstrated below.

For reference, I’m 5’10” and my skis are 172cm — right around my eyebrows.

From there, we can think about the kinds of snow you plan to ski on. Your underfoot is the width of the thinnest part of your ski, conveniently located right under your foot. Underfoot is important to pay attention to because it essentially controls how easily you can get onto your edges.

If you typically ski the east, you’ll likely want a thinner underfoot (mine was 75mm for my first pair of skis) because you’ll be skiing a bit more rugged terrain (see: icy) where you’ll be less focused on staying above an abyss of powder and more focused on keeping control.

Conversely, if you’re a West Coast skier, you’ll probably want something a little bigger to keep you afloat on powder days. My current underfoot is 105mm, but anything above 90 is great for snowier terrain.

Once you have your skis, you’ll need to set your dins. If you’re wondering “what are dins?” - super solid question. Your DIN setting is essentially your release force setting. DIN is short for Deutsches Institut für Normung (German Institute for Standardization — leave it to the Germans to keep us all safe). It’s the industry adopted scale of release force settings for ski bindings. Your dins will be set by a ski technician based on your ability, weight and height. It’s important to note: you can set your own dins, and it’s great to know how to do it, but I’d recommend at least getting yours tested by a ski tech to ensure they’re up to standard.

To boil it down, the lower the din setting (say, setting of 6) the lower the force required to release your boot from your binding. Have you ever had a day where you went out for an awesome mogul run, only to find that you couldn’t stop double-ejecting from your skis? Your dins proooobably need to be set to a higher setting.

Next time, we’ll chat ski wax — a surprisingly complex topic — before we dive back into avalanche education. In the meantime, I’ll be reading anything and everything I can about our moody little Colorado snowpack.

Artiste Break

I am SO unbelievably stoked about this current project. Looking into 2024, I had three goals for my art: do in-person art shows again, create collections/series of art instead of one-off pieces, and create a large scale (think 18×24+) piece. Enter: the first ever large scale piece!

The idea for this came to me when a ski brand I love (cough, Halfdays) posted custom matches they created for their new line launch. I loved the idea of drawing match boxes with ski brand logos, but figured there would be some copyright infringement issues. I pivoted a bit and decided to rework logos to look like 70’s style iterations of existing logos. The photo above is the culmination of ~4 hours of work, so lots more to come for this one.

To Go Snacks

⛷️ Now that I’m thinking more about the slope angle of ski runs in the backcountry, I’ve been wondering the same about some of my favorite resort runs. In short: how steep is steep?

⛰️ Five more wolves from Oregon were released in Colorado last week as part of the reintroduction effort. This is such a hot button topic in Colorado these days, so I’ve been reading as much as possible on the subject. I’m not quite sure where I land on the issue yet, but I do know there are extremely passionate people on both sides. Bonus book rec: check out Down River by Heather Hansman for more on how this all affects the Colorado River

🏨 Cool news alert: The Populus Hotel is set to open in Denver this summer and the design is modeled after - wait for it - an aspen tree! The hotel is looking to become the first carbon positive hotel in the country (!!) by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere

Here’s your friendly reminder that this newsletter is a constant work in progress, and feedback & replies are my best friends. Feel free to say hi anytime.

- McCall 🌻

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