What in your opinion is the genesis of the emphasis on carving you mention? Is it in ski schools that you feel this skill is over-emphasized to the detriment of other important skills?
Excellent point that clean skiing doesn't need to mean carving. Even World Cup skiers aren't carving all the time. We've spent some time developing a definition for Dirty Skiing, but is clean skiing just carving? I don't think so. To me it's starting to sound like Clean skiing is skiing that is fluid, balanced, and intentional. Dirty skiing, by contrast is making more instinctual recovery moves when you get thrown off balance or in a tight spot that may not always be pretty, but they are effective? Am I zeroing in any?
Warning: rambling is my thinking process!
I have blamed ski instructors for it in the past, and been yelled at about it. Certainly there are plenty of instructors who do not emphasize carving per se. But when I look in the PSIA technical manual, when it comes to advanced lessons, there's one sentence (I believe - don't have it in front of me) mentioning there are a variety of types of skiing at the advanced level - but the only one they go into in detail is carving, implicitly leaving the rest as an exercise for the reader. So I do think that implies some bias, or conversely may instill bias unintentionally due to the emphasis on carving.
Please note that I became aware last season that I don't carve even when that's what I intend, although I can produce lovely brushed turns. When I was skiing with the level 6/7 group last season as rehab, others in the class wanted to follow me down the hill because they loved my rhythm. But again - I wasn't carving. And I'm not saying that proudly. I want it to be a choice not to carve, rather than a lack of skill dictating my actions. So maybe you could argue there hasn't been *enough* emphasis on carving in my lessons.
But aside from the control that carving demonstrates, carving hasn't been useful in the places I ski, which seem to be similar to the places where @KingGrump skis, except he does it better and may ski gnarlier stuff than I do. But man, show me a gap in the trees or a "warning: early/late season conditions exist" sign, and I am drawn like a moth to a flame. As someone mentioned upthread, the best snow is in between the stuff that necessitates the warning.
I don't think World Cup skiers are clean skiers, not when they're racing. You can't get the best time with perfect technique. Maybe dirty skiing is not so much "Mr. Right" as "Mr. Right Now."
My favorite instructor - actually, several instructors - anyway, they tell me that you never remove a technique from your arsenal. You had it for a reason, and sometimes you need it. Usually in trees, I'd say ... There was a time when I skied with a new-to-me instructor in some new-to-us trees. They got pretty tight; if there was a better line, we didn't take it. Afterward, I groused that I'd had to do a backseat tail push maneuver to keep myself from hitting a tree, and I ought to be able to do better. This PSIA level 3 instructor assured me that he had to do the same thing, and that's just how it is sometimes in tight trees. I guess that's fundamentally dirty skiing.
There's also this fun technique if you're in a relatively wide slalom path in the trees, where your direction of travel does not match the direction of the skis. Someone above mentioned it for slush bumps, I think. I'm pretty sure that's not clean skiing, but OMG fun.
And another instructor, in my top 3 for sure, he was most excited for me when I came through some other trees bashing and thrashing rather than carefully choosing each turn. I realized that I was out of balance and in recovery mode pretty much constantly, getting knocked off course and then correcting, but it felt like skiing done right. He didn't want me to look like a textbook. I would say he wanted me to look more like an extreme skier.
In fact, I think that's another assertion. The pictures in the PSIA manuals are pretty skiing. The skiers in the movies? That's dirty.
Perhaps this is why I'm having so much trouble wrapping my head around the concept of "dirty" skiing. If deliberate, practiced techniques are being brought to bear to ski the slope effectively, can we really call it dirty?
Hmm. I'm watching So You Think You Can Dance now. Maybe a good analogy is ballet vs krunk. Dirty skiing is a stank face and someone saying "Nasty!" like it's a good thing ...
Of course, all of this is just my interpretation.
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