As much as I love the piney scent of the great mountain outdoors, there’s another smell associated with skiing I like even more: The aroma of molten paraffin, mingling with molybdenum and fluorocarbon fumes.

It sounds weird, not to mention a little toxic, but laying down a coat of fresh wax on a pair of downhill or cross-country boards is a quasi-religious experience, usually accompanied by mysteriously mumbled incantations to Ullr, muttered to elicit copious quantities of powder.

There’s the ceremonial lighting of the P-Tex candle, held carefully between both hands in a prayer-like clasp. 

Then, the raspy penance of metal on metal, as the file is drawn over steel edges.

Finally it’s time to do the deed, holding a bar of wax ever-so-gently against a hot iron, and letting it drip, drip, drip down the base of your boards in a pattern that looks like a secret code. To spread the wax and impregnate the base, the iron is applied with small circular motions or smooth, long strokes — imagine you’re massaging the small of your lover’s back. 

The excess is scraped and peeled away in a ritual exfoliation, and finally, like a priest polishing a consecrated candelabra, you buff the final coat with a soft shred of cloth, optimally a corner of a shawl once owned by the Dalai Lama, although a piece of a favorite T-shirt will do just fine.

If you hit it just right, your boards become wings beneath your feet.

Alas, these days, most folks just bring their boards to a ski shop, where a tech runs them across a roller and calls it good. And you can’t really blame them. With out-of-control rents and home prices in most ski towns, who has room anymore for a ski-tuning spot, although many a great hot waxes have been carried out across the backs of two chairs in hotel rooms around the world.

It’s all about technology and high-tech ingredients, and like with many other products in our consumer-oriented world, it’s become partly about marketing. Even those of us with a deeply ingrained old-school mentality can succumb. My latest find is a brand called Green Saucer Wax, reverse-engineered from alien technology, according to inventor Chris Artemis.

I was skeptical at first, but will now vouch for this wax and would be willing to do an infomercial testimonial, especially after I saw how fast it is, not only in the snow, but also when I had to skid across the top of rocks and bushes during an early-season outing at Berthoud Pass. If you see a few green sticky blotches on some of the pointy boulders up there, that’s my telltale spoor.

My A-Basin buddies and I love this wax, and are starting to use it for many other things besides waxing tele boards. For instance, we were able to re-polish scratched CDs with just a little dab of saucer wax and a nice, soft chamois cloth. Then we shined up our belt buckles and even use it to keep our glasses from fogging up while sitting in the hot tub.

I discovered this stuff a few seasons ago sitting next to London’s coffee cart at the Basin. Out of the blue, the guy next to me pulls a few tubes out of his parka:

“Psssst! Got some good stuff here, Check it out.” 

Then he started to talk it up, telling me that it’s made by a bunch of aliens living in a secret cave on Mt. Evans. They come from a mountainous planet far, far away, where it’s always winter. The aliens are highly evolved, as evidenced by the fact that their feet have evolved to resemble a pair of skis.

The wax is made of crystals found only on this planet’s second moon, where a tribe of nomadic snowboarders gathers up the crystals from the frozen beaches at low tide, while telemarking goddesses sing from a chairlift that never stops running.

They’re selling wax here on Earth to finance an intergalactic “Save Our Snow (SOS)” campaign, in the face of not only global, but interplanetary warming. Lately, the aliens have been working on a line of saucer wax in a variety of colors and aromatherapy scents.

I thanked my newfound friend, realizing that his offering was made in the spirit of interplanetary brotherhood. The gesture was a far cry from the early days of waxing, when long-board racers jealously guarded their secret recipes for “dope,” trying to gain a split-second advantage over their competitors in the raucous races that helped pass the time during long mining-camp winters.

The whole concept of ski wax surely was born in the gleaming wasteland of some snow-covered Arctic tundra, when a native reindeer herder tried using a little whale blubber for added glide after watching a walrus trample one of his clan. For centuries, not much changed, as skiers experimented with various combinations of animal by-products and plant-based substances.

Then, humans figured out how to manipulate petrochemicals. It was the beginning of the end in so many ways.

For the art of waxing, it meant that plastic compounds replaced wooden ski bases, minimizing, and even eliminating, the need for slick coatings, at least for most average skiers.

Even the pros agree.

“If you really want to be an efficient waxer, you need a $1,000 wax kit,” says Olympic ski racer Jana Hlavaty, director of the Nordic center at Keystone, Colorado.

 “People put too much emphasis on waxing, explaining that no-wax skis are the way to go, for all but the most competitive racers.” 

“You spend a half hour waxing and trimming, but only 15 minutes skiing, so you might as well go home,” says Hlavaty, who helped a U.S. squad to a ninth-place finish in the four-by-five kilometer relay at the 1976 Games in Innsbruck, Austria.

If the art of waxing hasn’t quite been completely lost, it’s because of skiers like Hlavaty, who still maintains a bench for pine-tarring skis at the Nordic center lodge.

“I think I’m one of the only people in Summit County who still knows how to pine-tar a ski. Oh my God, it smells so se-exy,” she says with her sultry Czech accent.

Most people wouldn’t even know what she’s talking about, but a few old-schoolers who show up at the center each winter with wooden skis are pleased. Since wood is porous, the pine tar is used to keep water out. It has to be applied with a careful touch, simultaneously using a blowtorch and wiping away the excess carefully with a rag to create a smooth layer as a base for subsequent kick-and-glide waxes.

“It’s very much a science. It’s turned from an art to a science,” says Matt Dayton, another U.S. Olympian who was part of a combined cross-country and jumping team that finished fourth at the 2002 Salt Lake City Games.

In a cross-country race, if you get on that first downhill and everybody flies past you, you know that you’re in for 45 minutes of hell,” Dayton says, describing the feeling of choosing the wrong wax.

On the other hand, when you hit it just right, it can be magic, he says, recalling the 2003 Nordic World Championships in Italy, when Johnny Spillane won a first-ever gold for the U.S. in the Nordic combined sprint with a powerful performance in the cross-country leg.

“He had rockets on that day,” Dayton says, attributing Spillane’s win, at least partially, to getting the right wax.MG