Randonee ski questions

if I still had some Zardoz

Is the Zardoz Notwax hard to find or no longer made?  If so I'll clean out the stock at my local shop (which is not much of a ski shop anymore).  I love that stuff for a quicky glide fix. 

saxybrian: I train for skiing with a pack by keeping an older, smaller sack packed with weight, and I do a lot of my exercise walks with it on. Going up & down trails, hills and stairs, often using poles, makes it pretty specific.
On the 40-lb. issue, there are often ways to cut pounds or ounces. Coordinate group gear?
Pre-hydrate and carry 1 pint less H2O? Fewer/lighter layers? Yukon Jack instead of Lone Star?
Or you could use the "rusty knees" method and carry 50-60 pounds for a day tour. I think his pack includes a sleeping bag, 2-burner Coleman, hyperbaric chamber, and possibly a folding massage table. : 40lbs will seem ultra-light by comparison!

Also any hints on how to train for skiing with a huge pack on? It's not easy to ski with 40lbs on your back

Tips above all make sense. There's nothing like practice, and starting at a ski area with a somewhat lighter load and working your way up seems like a good approach to getting the feel in a relatively short time period. Try out different turn radii - short versus long radius turns, and see whether one or the other works better for you with the pack on. If you haven't done a lot of skiing, have an instructor (or reasonable facsimile) watch you and help you get the "quiet upper body" that people speak of. The less you bounce the pack around, the better.

Where you put the weight in the pack matters, as does the pack, of course. You want the weight tight in toward your torso, not up high or way hanging out behind you.

Get the straps, including load lifters, adjusted properly for descents. 

Seeing if you can get the weight down would of course help too. I assume, though, that you're doing overnight with tent or perhaps a longer hut trip with lots of food and that's what will lead to a 40 lb pack?

Re: How to put them on. A good tip given to me by Jonathan S is to leave the heel in the lowest tour mode, place your boot heel and then step in the toe. After that, rotate the heel to the ski mode and stomp your heel in. All after stomping your platform of course.

The pack weight doesn't bug me really, it's the pack weight WITH skiing that's the problem. I can go down moderate blues w/ skis on at resorts, i can climb rainier with a pack on no problem. However, adding the pack + ski's on blues = problem

Re: How to put them on. A good tip given to me by Jonathan S is to leave the heel in the lowest tour mode, place your boot heel and then step in the toe. After that, rotate the heel to the ski mode and stomp your heel in.  All after stomping your platform of course.

That's what I was doing, however it was so powdery when we went (if I wasn't on ski's i'd punch to my waist) that stepping out a platform, my downhill ski would start sliding after putting weight on it. causing me to lose balance and get snow in the toe piece of my unhooked boot and having to repop the snow out of the ski.

I guess it's just going to take practice and learning. Maybe a few times at the resorts first to get the hang of it on groomers stuff then a few side country trips. I may just take them to Rainier with me and ski the Muir snow field this year when I come.

Is the Zardoz Notwax hard to find or no longer made?  If so I'll clean out the stock at my local shop (which is not much of a ski shop anymore).  I love that stuff for a quicky glide fix. 

...

It is still available, just not locally for me and I haven't bothered to mail order any since I ran out (I can get MaxiGlide locally); haven't used Zardoz to prevent snow buildup on bindings, I'm not sure it would work any better than MaxiGlide or silicon sprays--if someone has found it really useful for that, I'd like to hear it). I use M-G or Z on my plastic based skis but I used a rub on flouride paste wax on my p-tex base skis; some claim that M-G and Z can prevent absorption of hot wax (I hot wax my p-tex regularly, except on my Fisher S-Bounds--prefer just frequent applications of F-4 to avoid clogging the waxless pattern with wax).