Terry Hertel Speaks — The Science of Snow: What Every Skier Needs to Understand
The following is Terry Hertel speaking directly — in his own words, in his own voice. This is WAXFAX the way it was meant to be heard.
Let me tell you something about snow that most skiers never think about.
Snow is not a static surface. It is not a fixed thing you slide across. Snow is a constantly changing medium — changing by the hour, by the altitude, by the direction the slope faces, by whether the sun has hit it yet this morning. And every one of those changes affects how your ski base interacts with it.
Most people think of snow as just frozen water. And technically, yes, that is what it is. But the way it behaves under a ski — the way it creates friction, the way it generates that thin film of water between your base and the surface, the way it responds to pressure and temperature — that is a much more complicated story.
Here is the part that matters most for wax.
When your ski moves across snow, the pressure and friction of that movement generates heat. That heat melts a microscopic layer of snow directly under your base — creating a thin film of water. That water film is your lubricating layer. It is what makes glide possible. Without it, you are not skiing. You are dragging.
Now here is where it gets interesting.
At cold temperatures — say, 10 degrees Fahrenheit — that water film is very thin. The snow crystals are sharp and hard. The friction is high. To ski well in those conditions, you need a wax that is soft enough to penetrate the base pores and manage that high-friction environment.
At warm temperatures — say, 40 degrees Fahrenheit — the water film is much thicker. The snow is wet and soft. The friction is lower, but now you have a different problem: too much water. A wax that is too soft will absorb that excess water and slow you down. You need a harder wax that repels the water film rather than absorbing it.
That is the fundamental challenge of ski wax chemistry. You are not just picking a wax for a temperature. You are picking a wax that manages a water film that changes constantly as conditions change throughout the day.
And here is the thing the industry does not want you to think about too hard: those conditions change every single day on every single mountain. The temperature at 8am is not the temperature at 2pm. The snow on the north-facing run is not the snow on the south-facing run. The groomed corduroy at first chair is not the same surface as the afternoon slush.
A temperature-specific wax system — the color-coded kit the industry has been selling for decades — assumes you can predict those conditions and select the right product in advance. You cannot. Nobody can.
That is why I built the All Temperature® system in 1972. Not because I was lazy. Because I understood the science well enough to know that the color-coded system was solving the wrong problem.
The right problem is not “what temperature is the snow right now?” The right problem is “what formula manages the water film across all the temperatures this snow will be today?”
That is what All Temperature® means. Not a wax that works adequately across a range. A wax engineered to manage the water film across the full range — from the sharp, cold crystals of a 6-degree morning to the wet, soft slush of a 52-degree afternoon.
One formula. All conditions. All day.
That is the science. And it took me years to get it right.
— Terry Hertel, Founder, Hertel Ski Wax — Made in USA since 1972
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Next episode: Terry Hertel Speaks — How to Wax Skis the Right Way →