Ski Touring - Requirements and Reasons

Requirements and Reasons

Ski touring requires cardiovascular fitness, mental toughness, and a firm understanding of mountain craft. Touring involves navigating and route finding through potential avalanche terrain, and often requires familiarity with meteorology along with skiing skills. For advocates who possess the skills to safely enter the backcountry in the winter, the rewards of touring can be exceptional. Ski tourers can access mountain ranges and experience solitude, even in areas that would typically be quite crowded in the summer.

Competent ski tourers also get to experience the self reliance that few others ever get to experience in the modern world. In many mountain areas, cell phones are worthless and the ski party must rely on self-rescue should something go awry.

Ski touring—or hiking for turns—is also popular with people looking for powder snow since these conditions do not last long after storms inside ski area boundaries due to intense use.

Spring touring can also access corn snow which some consider to be equal to powder snow. Corn snow forms when the snowpack freezes solid at night and then partially melts during the warmth of spring days. In this process, larger snow grains gradually grow at the expense of smaller ones until the surface of the snowpack takes on the consistency of a snowcone. The tourer tries to descend just as the sun softens about an inch of slushy snow on top of the firmly frozen snowpack. Descend too soon, the snow surface will be icy & difficult for skis to grip. Descend too late & too much snow softens, leading to mushy, collapsing snow & rising avalanche danger.

Whether a tourer is looking for winter powder or spring corn, the emphasis is on being self reliant in the mountains and skiing wild snow.

The greater surface area of a ski prevents "postholing" which renders hiking in snow very energy-consuming, slow & inefficient. While snowshoes can also address the hiker's tendency to sink in snow, the fit ski tourer can cover far longer distances because the downhill sections are skied much faster than they could be hiked or snowshoed. Even traveling on flat sections is made more efficient by the ski's ability to glide, which extends the stride but does not require expenditure of additional energy.

Ski touring can also be faster and easier than summer hiking in some terrain and some conditions (like on talus slopes, for instance), allowing for traverses and ascents that in some ways would be harder in the summer. In this way, skis can ameliorate access to backcountry alpine climbing routes during the spring & early summer when snow is off the technical route, but still covers the hiking trail.