Day 43 - Finally some decent sastrugi!

Today on the menu, we had the last quarter of the 87th degree, and finally, this degree lived up to its reputation: now there was a slightly more demanding sastrugi and quite a few climbs. The weather was favorable with the lack of wind, so skiing was delicious despite the challenging terrain.

During the day, especially when moving around the sastrugi field, our binding situation was the most pressing: also, Tero's second binding broke in half today. In other words, out of the five bindings that we came here with, two are fine, one is completely unusable, and two are in a so-called "sensitive state" because one side of each of them is cut off from the locking mechanism.

We prepared for the inevitable binding disaster tonight by building the flexible loop [translator’s note: please see Wiktionary for more info] shown in today's photo. The idea is that its strap gets caught between the binding and the ski, and it presses the ski shoe into the groove of the binding, but the rubber band allows the shoe to rise in the ski kick. Does it work? Don’t know yet, as it was just engineered and done. However, it can be installed quickly during the day and should be comfortable to use if it works. If that doesn't work, we’ll need to play our last card, the included pair of plastic flap bindings.