Welcome to Catamount Hardware, now home to the Nordic Skating Atlas. My short-term goal for this project is to collect and make easily accessible a range of useful information about places to skate in northern New England, including launch sites, parking, weather, bathymetry, and other commentary. I’m starting with places I’ve skated recently, and I’ll continue to expand from there.
I’ve been writing how-to articles for the northeastern Nordic skating email lists, which are collected here. Articles so far cover how to use free satellite imagery to scout ice conditions, and how to ensure that email list messages get past your spam filter. I’ve also included a plurr report from December.
I’m working on better understanding the science of ice, what we know about how it forms, what makes it safe, how it falls apart, how to assess it, etc. Technical papers on these topics are collected in the Ice Science: Papers section. As I add new papers, I’ll be writing up brief summaries of their contents and conclusions and posting them here, to this blog.
Resources to learn more about Nordic skating and wild ice are collected in the Nordic Skating section: for now, that consists of skating groups to join and both educational and entertaining videos to watch.
Last, but not least, my photo portfolio is still here.
Enjoy the new site, and please be sure to let me know if you have any feedback, suggestions, critiques, locations to add to the atlas, or Nordic skating information to share.
Happy skating!
— Christopher Boone