We are ready to shut this site down.

[Ihamilton]

I haven't visited the forum this year nearly as much as in past years. I have learned a lot here but somehow I just stopped tuning in. I got a message from an old camp friend through the forum and have spent some time this evening. getting acquainted with current topics. Another essential with a prize of new skis if guessed correctly! Let me see, what could it be? I've seen the guesses which are all good but no cigars so far. I'm going to guess proper breathing, exhaling and inhaling at the proper times as the skis arc and we make our movements. For example exhaling while counteracting can result in more range of motion. Diana first introduced breathing technique to me when I was in a camp,3 or 4 years ago. We were working on CA and and she coached us to make CA a movement through exhaling rather than an effort through holding our breath, gritting our teeth and grunting. Last year in the intensive bump camp she spent a lot of time on the flats and in the bumps teaching us exhaling as we CA and CB, deflating the air in our chest to give us more range of motion. She asked us to try making an audible sound as we exhaled, such as sighing, to help us coordinate our breathing with our movements. We inhale when we release. I've been practicing it a lot this year and it really helps. I'm sure the WC skiers must coordinate their breathing with their movements, so breathing is my guess.

[A.L.E]

Sounds good Irwin, but you're a couple of weeks late for me to try the breathing. Just finished a trip to park City. I'll try some of it on the new tipping board I've just built. Another USA trip in March is on the cards too, so I'll test it out then.

It was first time for me to Utah, family certainly enjoyed it, Park City a bit too crowded for my liking but we had good snow and any ski day I get is always a good day, regardless of where it is. The proximity of Salt Lake City being 25 minutes away is the obvious crowd problem. Good old Loveland CO is about as crowded as I like ski resorts to be! Actually Big Sky is the best for consistent no crowds at a great mountain that I've skied, except for the tram on a powder day.

Aussies are flocking to all the Vail Resorts Co ski areas this year after Vail bought an Australian ski resort (Perisher) last year, so we now get an EPIC pass giving skiing both in Oz & USA. Hopefully they buy some Canadian resorts too! The exchange rate to the Loonie C$ is much better!

We can now virtually ski 12 months of the year on the one pass!!! A Basin can be open by mid October and doesn't close until June. Oz ski season goes from mid/end of June to the first weekend in October. A couple of weeks in Hawaii on change over would make for a ski bum's paradise
The list of possible USA ski areas at Vail, Beaver Creek, Breck, Keystone, A Basin in CO, Heavenly, Northstar & Kirkwood in CA, Park City & Canyons in UT, a few in the east as well, is pretty impressive. Perisher in Oz is big in acreage but not very tall, (350m) 1150ft vertical.

My trip to PC was made even more enjoyable by coaching a fellow Aussie friend who'd only had about 20 days on snow, 7 of which were up at your hill Irwin at Whistler. Pity they weren't spent learning from you Irwin rather than CSIA. They'd produced another 10 day a year (crap) skier, hopefully happy to hand over a grand or two every year on lessons for next to no progress.

Despite my friend's intelligence with an engineering back ground, plus a Harvard business school MBA, he couldn't describe what he was doing to make his turns. Unfortunately the Whistler ski school L4 instructor had given the guy sweet FA after a whole week of lessons. Reminded me of my (pre PMTS) Yr2000 trip attending a Whistler camp with L4 instructor, all I took away from that week was the mantra to get my feet hip to shoulder width apart. Fortunately my friend suffered from my inability to keep my mouth shut. After a couple of days I told him he was on a skiing plateaux he'd likely never get off from. We made remarkable instant progress starting with PM, it was fantastic to see such immediate results. Within a day he was making better turns than 90%+ of all the skiers on the green/blue runs. The thing he appreciated the most was gaining the theoretical understanding of the basic movements of the turn. (Steering by comparison means what exactly?) As an engineer with analytical thought processes the PM and one foot balance, narrow stance etc, it all made sense.

Thanks too goes to Diana and her staring role in the new series of eVideos I downloaded to help base our teaching drills on. They are absolutely great learning tools. Given I didn't take books on the trip, the eBooks I also downloaded are great easy at hand references.

The other great learning tool for many of us of course is this forum and its vast quantity of information going back more than a decade. Harald, Jay, Max, HS, JB & Geoffda and others have written brilliantly over the years to create many classic threads. It can't possibly be lost!!!!!!!

My vote for another Essential was the same as a previous poster - boot fitting/alignment. Evidenced for me when just a half degree tweak Diana made on snow to my original alignment set up made an enormous difference to the balance on my left side. I don't think it can be overstated what a detrimental effect poor boot fit and alignment can have on one's skiing.

[Ihamilton]

ALE, great post! Some of us in Whistler thought the entire Aussie population was skiing here. Lots of "gidday mate" and "no worries" from it seems like almost everyone.
Based on what your friends experienced at the SS and what I've seen, I have another guess for a new essential. That is, take a mind management course that completely erases anything and everything you learned from TTS. That ought to make the pmts learning curve a lot shorter. I spend a week skiing with an acquaintance of HH from New England. He is working with a group to get pmts at his home mountain. It was a great week of skiing and he was very knowledgeable about pmts despite never having been to a camp. He learned from pmts materials and his parents were excellent skiers. We watched as the instructors taught imbalance through wedging, pivoting and rotation. My wife says watch what they teach and do the opposite.

[Bonz]

Checking in...
Glad to see the forum is still alive and kicking!!
this might be a little "rambling"

A.L.E. - i bet we were in PC at the same time, and i would ask you if you were the family i rode the Gondola with, but there were so many Aussies there the odds are against it. I love and envy Aussie skiers. The family i had a chance to chat with on the Gondola were so nice, and their middle school girls had skied many more resorts than I had. The kids were complaining that they were leaving PC after being there 10 days, but after asking a few questions i found out they were leaving PC and heading to Jackson...hah. They were fascinated and perplexed that I basically got 2 weeks of "vacation" a year. I told them i actually was able to carry 20 some odd days over annually, but i never used it all. The father understood how it was for us yanks, but the mom, was perplexed. I assured her they were doing it right!

Anyway, after my previous contribution to this thread, i thought i might be banned, but glad i wasnt. My comments about the forum not being "inviting" were not meant to be hostile. Far from it. I really wish all skiers could be exposed to PMTS, and id like to help find a way to make that happen. When i first found this site, and started posting here,I was very intrigued, I asked some questions and had some hostile responses from someone I will not name haha...it was ugly enough that it would probably have driven most people away to their local PSIA instructor. So what did I do? Signed up for a camp! Not going to be intimidated! What a great experience. Chris, Harald and Diana were awesome. Diana is one of the nicest people iver ever met and her skiing is beautiful. HH aint bad himself!

Ive only had one week of a green camp, and just one day with HH as my instructor, but I can honestly say, that one day changed my skiing life. I could probably break it down even further, to one or two runs with HH and probably one or two tips from Harald. I only wish I can go back one day, as i know Im a total mess by PMTS standards. But what I got out of that camp and that one day really got me to another level where I can actually have fun skiing, and people actually think I know what im doing ( and i feel i dont). I only get about 10+ days a year on snow, but I still run "Tip tip tip, and pull that inside foot back, counter act, counter balance, zipper down hill" through my head on most runs, which just those small things help me tremendously.

My wife is dying to go to a camp now. If thats not a testament i dont know what is!

Anyway, just having diarrhea of the mouth and glad the forum is still around.

ed: as an aside.. I posted something, on Epic mentioning PMTS, something completely non-inflammatory, non - proselytizing , that just mentioned PMTS, and i was asked to edit the mention of PMTS out. The person who asked me to edit happened to be from my home state, in the southeast US, and it really irked me. Really pissed me off.

[A.L.E]

Not me Bonz, I've only one daughter plus boys and unfortunately Jackson wasn't the next destination, Maui was. ...... +1 and daughter influencing everything as usual!!!

Don't worry Bonz many of my posts are a "ramble".

This site may well be suffering some slow patronage because most of what needs to be said about Epic and traditional teaching systems has been said. The wars on Epic went on for several years. A search referencing PMTS or Harald and you'll find plenty of arguments. This site's had some as well but fortunately they were shut down pretty quickly.

The recounting of anecdotes re ski school's teachings like my post, over the last 10 yrs, have been many. And the fact a while ago this main section of the forum was split up and "Social Chatting" became a separate section, as distinct from threads directly related to PMTS, has probably added to the slow forum traffic.

[cheesehead]

Since nobody has come up with a sixth essential, I will take a stab at it:

Have fun skiing!

(but I am guessing it is not in the touch/feely category)

[blackthorn]

I can't imagine that Harald left out any individual essential initially, and if he did he has taken an awfully long time to raise this as an issue. The essentials all relate to movements not other important aspects such as balance which has been discussed from the beginning anyway. Hence if there is another so called sixth essential, then I feel that they need to encompass the initial five essentials. ( I do note however that there are indeed six already mentioned in "essentials of Skiing" - but this aspect has already been raised).

So my vote goes for something that says in essence " learn and practice how to combine all the essentials"

NOTE:- I am assuming it is not a trick question and the answer sought is not "There is no sixth essential - you have them already". If it is a trick question then that is my answer. But then the longer I think about it, this is not necessarily a trick question, just one way of looking at the truth!!

and this may also be a clue to the title of the thread.

[Bolter]

The sixth essential . . . relaxation.

[A.L.E]

Sorry Harald 5800+ views of this thread in 40 days must mean shutting down forum is not an option!

When I posted in Max501's bumped thread re "balance over outside ski" I did a forum search using the word "pelvis". Lots of interesting posts around that word. Was fun reading some of those old threads with Ott Gangl and others. Ott would be into his 80s, hopefully he's still getting some ski days in.

[Bolter]

Sixth essential . . . Hold counter through the release.

I need skis!!!

[CO_Steve]

Sixth essential . . . Hold counter through the release.

I need skis!!!

Skis are essential.

What kind of skis?

[emakarios]

Ok, I will layer on Bolters sixth essential: establish balance on the LTE of the old free foot in transition before releasing the BTE of the old stance foot.

[sujo]

Would the 6th essential be pole use and foot to foot pressuring? I focused on the no swing pole plant with the phantom move which really helped in quick carved turns. Also focusing on the pole plant to time the release of the stance foot and get tip pressure on the downhill ski made speed control in icy moguls much easier.

[krazzy legs]

The essential that I find helps my skiing I will say is the 6th essential which is pole swing from the tip of the finger starting point for the kinetic chain. The index finger & the thumb stay pointed or slightly bent allowing the top of the handle to easily pivot. The 3 joints of the middle finger, ring finger & little finger are opened most likely a fib ratio of 61.8% of the total travel the fingers will open & closed a 38.2 % of the max range of motion of hand closing for allowing pole swing. The body is tapestry of Fibonacci relationships from the tip of the finger each joint in the hand is 61.8% longer then the previous. So using the fingers for the pole swing allows for the pole tip to travel the path of the golden spiral. The next joint up the kinetic chain is the wrist it should be used in a motion to assist the travel of the pole tip to form a tapestry of Fibonacci relationships. The elbow joint should have little travel perhaps even none for none stabilizing pole plants & is used to assist bringing the pole tip to & away from the snow & should be planted down hill. Thank you Harold I appreciate you having made me a better skier.

[krazzy legs]

The 6th essential would it be ski safely in control use the skiers code of conduct @ all times & smile.