Writer Simon Akam’s new lightweight skis are seen at far left, with Switzlerland’s frozen La de Moiry in the background. When ski mountaineering, you need skis and boots that are as light as possible for human-powered ascent, but rigid and stiff for downhill.Illustration by Photo illustration by The Globe and Mail. Source photos courtesy of Simon Akam.
More from this series • A journalist returns to the mountains after a near-death ski experience
When it comes to buying sporting goods as an adult there is one golden rule to abide by. You need to consider this, as you finger your potential purchase – be that a fishing rod or, in my case, mountain clothing spun from microporous fibres or skis hewn from Paulownia wood. What would a group of 16-year-olds who are deeply involved in the same activity as you, with ample passion but limited financial resources, think of you as you buy and later use this equipment? Their responses may be multifaceted, varied even. But you need to consider just one thing. Would they hate you? Would they consider you overkitted and underprepared – the embodiment of that savage rhyme – all gear, no idea? Might they even hate you?
That question is a remarkable tool for retail clarification in the outdoor pursuits arena. But engaging with it requires a brutal process of self-inventory. That takes in your age, your competence at your sporting discipline and yes, perhaps, your body mass index.
This Akam Retail Rule has been on my mind this week, as I have been procuring equipment for the second half of a project in which I try to master ski mountaineering after I nearly died undertaking that activity in Russia in 2017. I will now be moving beyond technical downhill skiing training to, I hope, full on ski alpinism.
As in previous columns, I will try to explore the technical and psychological aspects here. Ski mountaineering equipment is an attempt to solve an impossible conundrum. You want skis and boots that are as light as possible for human-powered ascent, but rigid and stiff for downhill. Those opposing requirements are unfeasible to completely reconcile, but the advancement in recent years is astonishing.
When I first went ski touring in the German Alps in 2004, touring skis were flimsy and chattery, boots limp and hard to ski downhill and yet still, by modern standard, heavy. Most bindings had a bar under the boot to hinge up on the ascent. An enormous advancement has happened since then, driven by exotic materials and the expanded use of pin bindings – in which boots are held at the toes just by narrow metal pins that insert into sockets on modern boots, meaning the overall contraption is much lighter.
I bought all of my kit in France, to avoid more punishment than necessary at the hands of the formidably strong Swiss franc. I’m writing this in Chamonix, at the foot of Mont Blanc. I came here in early January, to get the skis and boots for the first part of this project. Returning eight weeks later to acquire the gear for the second portion felt odd. It seemed like an enormous amount had happened in between. In some areas, notably the fundamentals of my ski technique, it felt like I’d made enormous progress. But, I also had a much clearer – and intimidating – sense of the scale of the challenge if I am to undertake the race next year.
For the initial downhill training I was first recommended by the Chandolin ski school to use narrow-waisted piste skis. Given these have limited utility beyond groomed runs, I negotiated instead to a 94mm underfoot freeride ski, a more versatile tool. I equipped them with a Shift binding, a relatively new device that effectively behaves like an alpine binding downhill, but can tour uphill if needed (albeit weighing more than a pin system). For a boot I took a model rated with 130 flex – toward the top of that not-very-scientific scale of boot stiffness – that effectively skied like a downhill boot, but which still had mounts for pin bindings. Once I’d identified the category I wanted, the specific model of boot I bought was a reflection of the shape of my foot. “The feet chose the boots,” ski instructor Christophe Hagin quipped to me later.
This week, following orders from the mountaineering school I’ll be working with next, I bought lighter-weight, touring-specific boots and skis. In the same specialized outfitter in Chamonix, the boot liners were heat-moulded to my feet and their plastic outers manipulated. Once submitted to these indignities, the shells were plunged to cool into a trough of water that also held beers. This process seemed part workshop inspection, part spa visit. There is nothing more pampering than having something built bespoke for your body.
The new boots are astonishingly light, as are my new touring skis, which are 85mm underfoot. Again, I’m following orders here, but not just from the mountaineering school. “A multipurpose ski will have a width at the waist between 75 and 90mm,” sternly warns the beautiful, red-covered book on ski touring published by French house Guérin, and titled Ski de rando – Des premières traces à l’autonomie (or Ski Touring – From First Tracks to Autonomy). “Do not yield to the fashion for wide skis and invest in equipment where the waist is above 90mm.”
This avoidance of fat skis is partly about European snow conditions, where deep powder, on which broad planks can float, is rarer than in some North American locations. But it’s also, as the French quote alludes to, about the interface of fashion and utility. Fat skis, above 100mm underfoot, are considered cool by a certain cohort. They feature in radical ski videos and on Instagram. Given their real utility is deep, soft snow they flatteringly suggest that is your regular environment, even if you actually stay on groomed runs. Chamonix is full of them; you see them stacked outside bars. Yet the instructors I worked with in my more old-school valley in Switzerland scorned them, suggesting that they were only justified a few days a year, that they were useless on piste where many people mainly deployed them, and they were prohibitively heavy to climb with. In Chandolin the instructors gamely went off-piste on slim 88mm models. It’s hard to know who is right – there is affectation at both ends of the opinion spectrum.
With the kit came injunctions as to how to care for it, husbandry advice. Do not leave the boots in the unheated boot room, the plastic will get cold and inflexible. Do not leave them by a radiator, the heat-moulded liner will deform. Do not let the liner get kinked inside the outer. I like this element. I like looking after my things. It makes me feel that I am looking after myself.
But there remain sociological Alpine pitfalls. Not only, per the Akam Rule, do you not want to be that overkitted, underskilled adult whom youngsters despise. Likewise, if you want to look competent, neither do you want your materiel to look too new. I was quietly glad when my ski poles, box fresh in January, acquired scratches to so bare aluminum showed through the paintwork. I must confess, too, I deliberately sought out esoteric continental clothing that would be unfamiliar at home. There is endless pretense here. The right thing to do is to know when to indulge and when to resist.
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