Is Light Right?

Alex says you don’t want to bring a sausage to a knife fight.

We’ve all seen it. There’s the unsuspecting boomer couple who walk out of the bike shop with a “his-and-hers” special on the latest carbon e-bike with 170mm front and back, convinced that the nice young salesperson has sold them the perfect bikes for the flat white ride along Wanaka’s lakeside track. There’s the kid who brings their “I angle-grind my edges to 45 so I can do sweet rail slides” twin tips to the local high school race day (OK, I’ll admit this was me in the early 2000s at Rainbow…) and is surprised when they can’t hold an edge on course. There’s the Aussie hiking Summit Rocks at Treble Cone with their snow scooter in tow.

But you aren’t a punter, right? You know what’s up: “mate, there’s no chance you’re getting up the road without chains on all four this morning”. You’ve got your big skis for when the Saddle opens. There’re no sausages for you.

As a proud gear geek, having the right tool for the job—bringing the knife to the knife fight—is something I pay attention to. But I’m increasingly of the view that it’s a challenging ambition. There’s a huge number of tools – both specialist and multi-purpose—for a wide range of jobs: are you resort skiing, or skiing the piste, then the park, then the pow? Or are you hitting the resort then the sidecountry, or are you a scrog-dog backcountry fizzer?

Then there’s the matter of what’s the popular “right” tool. Armed with a pack of Rothmans and a pioneering attitude, you get your 98 Impreza up the Mt Olympus road in all conditions, but Instagram and a glance around the carpark would have you believe the “right” vehicle has massive mud tyres, a three-inch lift and a roof tent.
I’d suggest we’ve also come to expect that competence isn’t possible without the right tool, but we all know that local shredder who’s been wearing the same oil-stained jacket for 30 years and absolutely slays the show-pony line on skis that are so old, no-one knows what they are.

I’ll get this rant off my chest. Why is resort gear is getting lighter and lighter? I accept that if you’re a whipper-snapper jib kid, then light might be helpful in the air, but for most of us, skis and boots are best in all conditions when they are heavy and damp. Cutting weight requires compromise, and despite all the marketing hype, I’m yet to find lightweight skis and boots that ski as well as their heavier counterparts. Obviously there’s a use case for lightweight gear, but in my opinion it’s not on the resort.

I can see where this trend has come from. Fat and rockered skis made powder skiing—once the domain of the expert—easier and fun for intermediates. As a result, the resorts start getting tracked out, then the untouched backcountry powder beckons and backcountry skiing becomes a thing. Suddenly, you need more equipment, but most skiers don’t want—or can’t afford—to own a quiver of specialist equipment for specific conditions. The end result is the hybrid “no compromise on the
resort or the skin track” category.

What is the “right” tool? Go into a high-traffic backcountry area like Cheesman’s Tarn Basin and do some people-watching. What do you notice? I notice that the snow is often challenging, and lots of skiers, many of whom are using lightweight equipment, are having a tough time on the downhills. It doesn’t look fun, and I would argue that their descent burns more energy than their ascent.

For this cohort, the right equipment isn’t lightweight touring gear; a better choice is heavy and damp, which makes the skiing a whole lot easier.

And this is where the hybrid category makes sense for a lot of backcountry skiers—it strikes a sensible middle ground that enables enjoyable skiing with a reduced weight penalty. It’s just a shame that this category is often aimed at the ‘freeriders’ and the ‘bringing the park to the backcountry’ crowd, because the people who would probably benefit the most are just normal, everyday skiers.

Despite my soap-boxing, there are undoubtably times when light is right—the marketing tells you that you need it, and it’s clearly the correct tool for the job at hand.

The first trick is finding where light results in the least compromise—for instance if you’re running low-tech pin bindings, there’s very little downhill performance difference between a 500-gram-per-side and 200-gram-per-side option. And you get an extra 300 grams per side to deploy into skis, which will result in increased downhill performance—increased net performance for no net weight gain.

Light might be right, but is it economical?
This is the second trick. To manage this issue, I’ve developed a spreadsheet.

Introducing the ‘efficiency weighted grams per $’ model. Suppose you have an existing item of gear you’re looking to replace with something lighter—say your glacier rope. You weigh your current rope and find it to be 1110 grams for 30 metres.

The option that’s caught your eye weighs 660 grams for 30 metres and costs $250. So you have a 450-gram weight saving for $250— $0.56 per gram. Is that a good place to invest your hard-earned pesos?

Well, you could spend $0.58 per gram and replace your alloy ski poles with the very
lightest carbon ones, or you could buy a new pair of tech bindings (fancy, lightweight Italian ones) for $5.00 per gram.

Of course, both these items are a little different to the rope. According to the US military, because they add mass to your arms or feet, the energy required to move their mass is around four times greater than if it was on your torso in a pack. So, adjusting for efficiency, the pole investment is $0.15 per efficiency-weighted gram, and the bindings investment is $1.25 per efficiency-weighted gram.

Spend your money on ski poles first, then a new rope, then the lighter bindings. This isn’t a perfectly scientific approach, but it helps me make sense of what can be difficult decisions. Note: real-world testing confirms the pole hypothesis; they were my best purchase in years.

At the end of the day, though, the right decision comes down to what works for you. I once met a guy on the Stairway to Heaven boot pack. It’s a long and hot climb, especially on a spring day. I was wearing technical layers, because what else would you wear? He was sporting a mohawk, jeans and a leather jacket with nothing under it.

I was confused. He wasn’t. After he’d ripped Ardies at Mach 10, his shit-eating grin told me everything I needed to know—he’d brought the heavy artillery to that fight.