I went skiing for the first time yesterday.

Winter had finally come to the Central Cascades so I drove up Salmon la Sac Road to the Pete Lake turnoff and did a little bit of tooling around on my new Altai Hok snowshoe-skis. There were only a few inches of snow with a hard thick crust so conditions weren’t ideal (or so I assume since I have no frame of reference) but since I was just doing loops around a parking lot I still had a good time.

I first read about the Hoks in Ultralight Winter Travel and was intrigued by not just their light weight but by their relatively low cost and the fact that I could use them with my winter hiking boots instead of having to plunk down even more money for ski boots and bindings. I’m also not terribly interested in the downhill performance as long as it’s better than snowshoes, which I hate due to their clumsy wide stance and relatively fixed speed.

Since there were inches of snow rather than feet the underbrush was still an issue so I wasn’t able to navigate through the trees which is supposedly the primary strength of the Hoks. Still, I went up and down the birm on the side of the road and discovered that

  1. You can’t just go straight up a steep hill like you can in snowshoes (or, maybe I don’t know how or the snow was lousy).
  2. You can definitely go straight down. I had applied Zardoz Base Boost (a PTFE aka Teflon-based wax alternative) to the bottoms of the skis and they took right off. I ended up doing the whole ski-poles-go-flying crash thing at the bottom of a ditch.

Gear

No LighterPack since this was an impromptu day trip, but as always here are my gear notes:

  • I was sloppy and wore my winter driving gloves (Manzella Ranger hunting gloves) since I was already wearing them in the car instead of using something more “outdoorsy”. At first I thought I’d pick up a pair of Montbell Chameece gloves but then realized that the Manzellas are 100% polyester with a textured grip and touchscreen thumb and index finger so why waste the money when I’ve already got something perfectly acceptable? They’re probably good for cold weather jogging as well.
  • Waterproof mittens would have been helpful. I’m pretty sure Person B got me a pair of Zpacks Vertice rain mitts last year, just need to find them…
  • My Columbia Bugaboot winter boots with the reflective insides were warm and toasty when paired with Oboz thermal insoles and some backpacking socks which are so old and worn I can’t tell what brand they are (were?). I briefly considered whether adding a dedicated liner sock would make sense but my feet were happy so I think I’ll keep this setup for now.
  • Instead of my usual Element Equipment carbon fiber trekking poles I picked up a pair of Cascade Mountain tech aluminum poles. Rumor has it that carbon fiber is brittle in cold weather and since I’m actually using them as ski poles I wanted something on the sturdier side. I set the length to 48 inches but reading online someone of my height should have been more around 49 or 50.
  • I wore a combination of a Stoic tank top and Wrangler Riata button-down shirt underneath a Massdrop Veil wind shirt but wondered whether a long-sleeve base layer might have made more sense. Since moisture management in cold weather is crucial a close-fitting piece would promote wicking and evaporation. Now, I wasn’t uncomfortble – my skin was never cold or clammy and adjusting the wind shirt was all I needed to do as my activity level varied – but I had a feeling that on a real trip my setup wasn’t exactly ideal.
  • I put a PayDay bar in one of the side pockets of my pack and boy was it chewy. I had forgotten that in winter you need to store snacks somewhere warm in order to keep them edible. Zippered thigh pockets, maybe? It wasn’t cold enough to wear a heavy jacket with inside pockets while moving around so that’s not really an option.
  • Person B kindly added a snap to the front pocket on the Wrangler shirt so now I can stash my inReach Mini in it. I like having the inReach on my person instead of in my pack so I don’t have to worry about not having it (in the Mountaineers they teach people to take off their packs and leave them by the trail when they wander off to go to the bathroom). I also like having it on my chest since it can be hard to hear otherwise.
  • Although the holster pockets on the Osprey Levity backpack are easy enough to operate bare-handed they’re a little less so with even thin gloves on – I had a heck of a time getting my snacks out. I may have to revisit the whole chest/hipbelt pocket thing or maybe even look into a fanny pack. Oof.
  • After my last trip to Red Mountain I decided that keeping my phone in a zipper bag while in my pants pocket was a smart move. On this trip I went with a snack-sized bag and although it technically fit it was a bit on the fiddly side, especially with gloves. I think I’m going to upgrade to a sandwich-sized bag instead.
  • The Altai-branded Voile ski straps were great, I was able to attach my skis to my pack using only a pair. The Levity is a bit lacking in heavy duty attachment points so I’m going to do a bit more research to see if there’s an optimal way to do this but for now a rear bottom daisy chain loop and the top hang loop did the trick.
  • Aluminum is cold!

Photography

As a parting gift, enjoy this nice shot of the Cle Elum River: