Manning Park: What To Do When Your Ski Breaks In Two

Trip Date: April 27-28, 2024

By Christian

A busted ski

Towards the end of last season, with the snow transitioning to a firm spring snowpack, I decided to use my lightweight skimo skis on an overnight family ski trip to Manning Park. I'm not quite sure why I thought this was a good idea... maybe I thought that we'd start out carrying them and my pack was heavy enough as it was. My pack certainly was heavy, as it always is when carrying the overnight gear for a family of 5.
The family did great skinning up the road - F and N were under their own power skiing along with our friend's kids, and W was being towed on downhill gear. Skinning up the road one of my skis started feeling funny, like it had less "spring" to it. At lunch time I took a look at it, but it seemed fine. I thought I was imagining things and switched my skis to see if the sensation followed the foot or the ski. By the time we rolled into camp it was pretty obvious that there was a problem - the ski had a clear bend in it right in front of the bindings. Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised: I'd skied them a fair bit in the 9 seasons I'd owned them - including originally mounting them for NNN-BC cross-country bindings which I skied them with for a few seasons before later putting tele-tech bindings on them. Stomping out a tent platform didn't help.
When our friend Scott and his oldest kid proposed a few laps above camp maybe I shouldn't have come along, but it didn't look too bad when I started. It was fully done-for by the time I got back down, though, with the core of the ski fully separated and the halved just dangling together by the base.

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After a brief test to see if just post-holing with one foot was feasible for the hike out (it wasn't, especially not with a heavy pack, and double-especially not while also supervising out middle kids' ski out) it was time to "fix" my ski. I opted to "finish" the break by cutting through the edges/base just behind the break and re-mounting the toe piece on the tip-half of the ski. That drill bit and screwdriver I've been carrying around for years finally came in handy again! Although it allowed me to make it back to the car I realized later this was a mistake - I should have cut the base off a few inches past the break, such that I could wrap it around the "new" rear end of the ski and screw the base onto the topsheet. As it was, when I would inevitably slide backwards a bit the base could/would catch and peel away from the core, taking the valuable fibreglass layer with it and allowing the tip to bend/break even more and turn into a banana shape. Oh well, next time.
It was a rough year for my aging quiver - in addition to busting my WSP "skimo" skis I ripped the binding out of my Atomic Ultimate 78s (circa 2017), cracked the bellows on another pair of old F1s (circa early 2000s), and ripped the edges out of Line's old Hagan Red Dragons (circa 2008? and repaired them, only to rip more edge out somewhere else and repair again, like 4 times). All of this equipment is super-old, so I can't really complain. Life, as they say, is temporary. Maybe it's time for some new planks.