So, last place I skied before Big Sky Camp was Perfect North. They have a little black (that normally has 5 people at a time on weekends in either the state of falling down or the act of getting back up at any given moment in time) that gets bumpy and crudy pretty quick. This is the type of run that would normally drive me nuts at prior current level of ability.
At Big Sky Camp we drilled two days pretty much on the phantom move (ski lifted, tip down, tilt and turn) on groomers and lots in bumps. Before this camp I would totally revert to very wide stance, each ski with a mind of it's own railing in it's own unintended direction, when every I encountered bumps or crud.
So a regression. I have two sets of skis, Head I75M chips and Volkl 6 stars. I got a nice gravel gouge out of my Heads so dropped them off at shop at Perfect North to get repaired. I head out my first time since camp on my 6 stars to practice and see how my sking has been effected by the camp. Immediatly I notice I can turn on a dime. I begin to wonder if it's the skis. After lunch I switched skis back to the Heads and I can turn on a dime on these too!
So I started going down the bumped and cruded little Black they have here. What a difference. By balancing and doing short radius turns on one ski the crud has very little effect. What little up down disturbance is nothing compared to the Mogul drills Diana had us doing. I was able to pick a line and basically just ski down the fall line. WOW - this is fun!
Bottom line, though I cut camp off early, I still got a big benefit from it. I go to Mammoth later this week where I will seek out a true bump run and continue my practice.
(Diana also canted my right boot 1.5 degrees which really had a wonderful effect. I did not realize how much my right ski big toe was still trying to dig till I skied totally neutral today. That was very nice indeed!)
Now a technical observation and question. At the Big Sky camp I did not trust my turns left over the bumps. There were 2 reasons for this:
1. My canting was not correct on that foot so objectivly it was harder turning left for me as my big toe would tend to want to rail instead of allowing a proper release. I could do it but it was noticably harder than turning right.
2. My bigger reason in general - I'm a technical learner. I must understand with my brain before I implement with my body. I'm not a monkey see monkey do learner. I want/need an explanation. I did not see how the phantom move would allow a turn tight enough to turn on a dime at the top of a bump and carve down the side of the same bump. My confusion was because a carve that tight would be way tighter than the turning radius of the skis some sort of pivot/twisting action would also be required and that thought is anathama to PMTS methodology.
Yet, I would watch Diana do these turns, Harold does them in the book, Heck - even I was doing them sometimes. But, since I didn't understand how this could be, I did not trust that my skis would turn this tightly. Then I realized and actually found a paragraph where HH confirms this that inside leg tiping action causes rotation. Tipping, in fact, causes strong irresistable rotation. I had felt this. On the bumps when I did it right the skis rotated just fine and in time. Another example of tipping and the rotation effect happens is in hoverering turns. If you are going at speed doing GS turns and have a ski with good rebound, you sometimes are mid-air at the release yet when you tip, even with no contact with the snow (a hover turn?) the ski's turn too in mid air ready to engage upon landing. In Harold's explanation and caution on this, he states you should not turn the stance ski or think that way, but tip the inside ski. This will cause stance ski rotation. I realized - ah - that's why I can trust the phantom move in bumps or trees or steeps - turn on a dime save your life turn!
Any comments on my understanding of this technical point are appreciated. My observation is that strong tipping creates strong rotation such that the ski's will ski a much shorter radius than their natural carving turn radius. (Today I was sking short little linked phantom turns on a dime on a 5 foot wide snow path (as it's melting at Perfect North) where everyone else was wedging to control their speed.)
My mind would still like a bio-mechanical explanation of why this tipping correlates to rotation. I had thought that the tipping simply made the skis turn because the ski's are tipped and thus turn because of their shape and the bend that is created. But now I see that is true to a point, but even more tipping then creates a strong rotation where the body must be forcing the ski to come around as well for these very sharp turns.
The cool thing about these turns is they are still S turns and not Z turns. They are linked curves not jumped straight lines.
So it was kinda a fun eureka day for me today.