It is all about weight, either inside the pack or on the feet. Light is Right.

On a recent day ski tour in the French Alps with circa 1100m of ascent, starting at 1600m ASL, when I live at pretty much sea level! It was a hard workout indeed. At the end of the day, I compared the weight of my pack to others in the group, some were way lighter, and I mean by perhaps 3Kg!, others were about 2kg lighter. This got me thinking about what I had got in my pack and its weight.

I have in the past packed lighter weight shovels, but for the past few years I have been using the G3 Avitech shovel, because it is robust and will dig through the hardest avalanche debris with efficiency, with just the right surface area for optimum movement of snow in all its types.

For some reason I got fixated on 2 bits of kit that I thought were way-too heavy: The shovel and the climbing skins.

So grab the trusty kitchen scales and start weighing stuff.

avalanche snow shovels

    a selection of snow shovels for ski touring

I have had all these shovels for a few years, some of them are no longer made or have had a name change. But one thing became clear, my initial choice of shovel was pretty similar in weight to some of the latest offerings from Ortovox or Voile. However Ortovox does have some very light shovels with telescopic handle, notably the ‘Shovel Pro Light’ at 440gr VS my current lightest shovel, BCA Tour at 494gr and non telescopic.

The second item was my Black Diamond Glidelite STS skins, these are the black/white Zebra type ones, they are robust, mixed mohair, they feel heavy without weighing them!
The other set I have are Coltex and they do feel so much lighter, bring out the kitchen scales again:

Coltex climbing skins black diamond climbing skinns

The Colltex skins weighing in at 455g a pair VS the Black Diamond Glidelite STS at 762g a pair.

Summary of my choice of shovel and skins VS the kit I could have used would result in a shovel weight saving of 259g and skin weight saving of 307g, or basically 1/2kg lighter! (566g).
If I bought the new Ortovox Pro Lite Shovel, this would increase the weight saving to 620g,  this is considerable weight saving.

Ah, yes choice of ski and bindings

If I had used a different pair of skis, and swapped out the big DPS Wailer Alchemy 106 with Dynafit St rotation bindings (2505g per ski for my Scott Superguide 95 with Fritschi Vipec Evo bindings (2032g per ski) there would have been an additional weight saving of 473g per ski!

My choice of ski and skin on that day meant each leg was moving 2.886Kg of ski and skin. And that could have been reduced to 2.259Kg a difference of 626g per ski!

The upside would be the very big weight saving and impact on the uphill workout, but the downside of using the much lighter ski would have meant the heavier snow and the crusty conditions and rock hard iced up sections would have been much harder on the legs as the light skis got bounced around.

Physical solutions are getting far fitter before heading to altitude for ski tours, but the effects of altitude need acclimatisation, and certainly for me, I have noticed it takes a minimum of 2 weeks before feeling like the uphill skinning is easier.