It turns out, the activity of skiing is centred most primarily around turning.
Going straight down the fall-line of a slope is a most distasteful practice, involving little in the way of skill and much in the way of uncontrollable speed. There is nothing wrong with speed. But it should always be controlled.
The way to do this is to turn.
The way to that, however, is tricky.
When you are slowing yourself down, your skiis are roughly perpendicular to the slope, parallel to one another; they are pointing across the slope. You want to make them point the other way. But how could you possibly acheive this, when the middle stage in the process surely necessarily involves pointing them straight down, picking up too much speed and no longer being able to shift them one way or the other at all?
The answer lies in your weight.
Your weight is on the downhill ski (the one of the two that is further down the slope) so that you can push right into the ground to slow down. What you are aiming to do, therefore, is gently to transfer your weight from one ski to another.
When you do this, what it feels like is that you become, for a magical moment, entirely weightless.
It is a piece of mental trickery. You lift your mind away from the ground and let your skiis slip neatly underneath you, until you make (mental) contact with the ground again. At this point you push them right out to the other side and dig them right into the ground again. Your body feels as though it has stayed in the middle. You're leaning totally inwards, facing right down the slope. It just your bent knees, locked together, that are pushing your feet and the skiis attached to them out to the side.
So then you can zoom, bouncing like this from side to side, down, down, down.
But this is only the case in a certain type of snow.
There are many types of snow.
Just now, here, the snow is prone to being rather icey. The above method of turning becomes untenable. You need to dig the edge of your ski in if you are going to control yourself. The very edge. The uphill edge of the downhill ski, to be precise. The uphill ski doesn't matter too much; just forget about it for now.
What we are doing now is called carving. They can be very wide, long turns when you're carving. In fact, right on the edge of that ski, knees bent, weight slightly further forward than in softer snow, you actually pick up speed. You feel it when you get it right. Normally turning slows you down, but when you get it just right, they suddenly start accelerating underneath you in a wonderful glide. You can use this if there's a gentle slope that normally slows people down; you can glide past them. But you can also use it in these icey conditions we're talking about, to carve out a graceful curve that lets you come down the piste in total control.
Of course, when you do the crucial point of the turn, you are still doing the weightless trick, but it's not nearly so pronounced as in the short, sharp turns above; it is much more gradual.
